John McNab by John Buchan (1925)

‘Could you have me at Crask this autumn?’ [Lamancha] asked…
‘I should jolly well think so,’ cried Archie. ‘There’s heaps of room in the old house, and I promise you I’ll make you comfortable. Look here, you fellows! Why shouldn’t all three of you come? I can get in a couple of extra maids from Inverlarrig.’
(Early exchange from John McNab by John Buchan, page 17)

‘Of course we’re all blazing idiots – the whole thing is insanity – but we’ve done the best we can in the way of preparation. The great thing is for each of us to keep his wits about him and use them, for everything may go the opposite way to what we think.’
(The Earl of Lamancha admitting the absurdity of their prank, page 163)

This is the second of Buchan’s series of books featuring the fictional character, Scottish barrister and Conservative MP, Sir Edward Leithen.

Executive summary

Three posh Scots, eminent figures in the British Establishment, discover they are all bored to tears. They concoct a plan to go stay on the Highland estate of a fourth member of their group and send a challenge to the owners of his three neighbouring estates, to the effect that they will poach game off their estates. They won’t steal the game, they’ll place it on the respective front doorsteps. It’s a bet made in a gentleman’s club like at the start of ‘Around The World in 80 Days’.

Who should these letters of challenge come from? They invent a name, ‘John McNab’. What none of them anticipate is that the very lairds they set out to defeat will themselves come in on their side, that the population around the estates will hear about John McNab’s brave exploits, that they will even be reported in the local and then the national press and even that, in some conversations, some of the characters see in John McNab’s pluck and daring a solution to the widespread malaise afflicting post-First World War Britain.

This atmosphere of comedy reefed with sometimes serious themes, and the way all members of a highly stratified society are brought together in a common endeavour, reminded me of the Powell and Pressburger movie I Know Where I’m Going and, on a lighter tone, the Scotland-based Ealing comedy, Whiskey Galore.

Longer version

Three middle-aged posh Scots meet up at their London club. They were at school and then ‘the University’ together, have prospered in their careers and now discover they are bored and restless, suffering from taedium vitae, ennui. They are:

  • Sir Edward ‘Ned’ Leithen (lawyer, Member of Parliament and ex-Attorney General)
  • John Palliser-Yeates (banker)
  • Charles, the Right Hon. the Earl of Lamancha, M.P., His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Dominions, possessor of ‘insatiable ambition’

They are joined for dinner by Captain Sir Archibald Roylance, D.S.O., prospective Conservative candidate for Wester Ross and Laird of Crask, an estate in the Highlands, an irritatingly boisterous and good-humoured war veteran (game left leg giving him a pronounced limp).

Over dinner and cigars they tell yarns about figures back in Scotland and one mentions Jim Tarras, the fellow who played a prank by poaching game on other people’s estates (this class of character only knows people who own estates) but warning them in advance that he was coming.

The idea catches fire and the bored threesome agree to travel incognito to the estate of Archie Roylance. It is August, fine hunting weather. They arrange to send out letters to the owners of neighbouring estates announcing that they will poach game off their land between set dates. It is an ironic point of gentlemanly etiquette that they will not remove the game from the estate owner’s land, in fact they will deliver the shot stag or caught salmon to their doors, thus not being guilty of anything as common as theft. Lamancha’s letter template reads:

‘Sir, I have the honour to inform you that I propose to kill a stag [or a salmon as the case may be] on your ground between midnight on – and midnight –. [We can leave the dates open for the present.] The animal, of course, remains your property and will be duly delivered to you. It is a condition that it must be removed wholly outside your bounds. In the event of the undersigned failing to achieve his purpose he will pay as forfeit one hundred pounds, and if successful fifty pounds to any charity you may appoint. I have the honour to be, your obedient humble servant.’

Obviously they can’t sign the letters with any of their real names and so cook up the nom de guerre i.e. fictional name, John McNab, hence the title.

The point of poaching is that it is not only technically challenging in itself i.e. stalking game or catching salmon, but also dangerous in that it is illegal and so getting caught, taken to court, named in the papers, would potentially end all their careers.

For example Roylance, whose mansion they hide in and make their base of operations, is planning to stand as Conservative candidate for his constituency; getting caught poaching would ruin him.

‘You’re an ass, John,’ said Leithen. ‘It’s only a couple of pounds for John Macnab. But if these infernal Edinburgh lawyers get on the job, it will be a case of producing the person of John Macnab, and then we’re all in the cart. Don’t you realise that in this fool’s game we simply cannot afford to lose – none of us?’

The thing is that, unlike the other Buchan books I’ve read, John McNab is a comedy, written in high good humour. Here’s an example of Buchan’s dry, understated humour:

Sir Edward Leithen sighed deeply as he turned from the doorstep down the long hot street. He did not look behind him, or he would have seen another gentleman approach cautiously round the corner of a side-street, and, when the coast was clear, ring the doctor’s bell. He was so completely fatigued with life that he neglected to be cautious at crossings, as was his habit, and was all but slain by a motor-omnibus.

Boisterous young Sir Archie in particular is an upper-class noodle with the same posh mannerisms as Bertie Wooster et al, dropping their gs etc. Here’s an example of some of the replies they get to their letter, this is probably the funniest.

‘Sir, I have received your insolent letter. I do not know what kind of rascal you may be, except that you have the morals of a bandit and the assurance of a halfpenny journalist. But since you seem in your perverted way to be a sportsman, I am not the man to refuse your challenge. My reply is, sir, damn your eyes and have a try. I defy you to kill a stag in my forest between midnight on the 28th of August and midnight of the 30th. I will give instructions to my men to guard my marches, and if you should be roughly handled by them you have only to blame yourself. Yours faithfully, Alastair Raden.’

It’s all done in this kind of joshing, posh tone. The three men draw straws to decide who will poach what on which of Lord Archie’s neighbouring estates.

  • Lamancha is set to poach in the Haripol forest
  • Palliser-Yeates draws the straw to shoot a stag on the Glenraden estate
  • Leithen is set to poach salmon on the estate of Strathlarrig

Highland setting

It’s all set in the Highlands with a regular bombardment of Scots place names which might have well been in Ecuador or ancient Greece for all they meant to me. Here’s Lord Archie explaining that:

‘Haripol is about the steepest and most sportin’ forest in the Highlands, and Glenraden is nearly as good. There’s no forest at Strathlarrig, but, as I’ve told you, amazin’ good salmon fishin’. For a west coast river, I should put the Larrig only second to the Laxford.’

There’s miles of description like this, detailed word portraits of places with venerable Scottish names. In his introduction and notes, Buchan scholar David Daniell makes the elementary point that Buchan grew up in rural Fife with regular family holidays in Tweeddale, many hours spent yomping across the heather, through woods etc. He was a keen and expert fisherman from boyhood, publishing a book on the subject when he was barely 21 and continued fishing throughout his life.

So the point being that the descriptions of the landscape encountered by the three bored poachers, and especially the technical details of Leithen’s fly fishing, are painted from life, deep experience and love. It’s a love poem to the land.

However, it’s also a pretty basic fact that all the placenames in the book are fictional. They combine aspects of the various regions Buchan knew well to create a kind of perfect huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ paradise. There’s a map but all the place names and the entire layout are invented. On reflection, the map is a bit too simple and conveniently arranged around the narrative to be true.

Complications

It’s a comedy so there are comic complications, mainly in the shape of new characters. The poaching forays are set for consecutive 2-day periods, so we are introduced to the owners of each of the targeted estates in order.

The Raden family

First up is Glenraden castle where John Palliser-Yeates is slated to shoot a stag and deposit it at the castle door. We are introduced to father of the house, Colonel Radel. More importantly he has two marrying-age daughters.

The Bandicotts

The eldest Radel girl, Agatha, is falling moonily in love with Junius Bandicott, the grown-up son of an elderly American archaeologist, Mr Acheson Bandicott, who has the Colonel’s permission to excavate an ancient barrow on his land, because he is convinced it’s the burial mound of the renowned Viking Harald Blacktooth.

The Bandicotts have rented the second of the neighbouring estates, Strathlarrig House, whose magnificent but very exposed salmon streams Leithen is set to poach.

Janet Raden

Colonel Radel’s youngest daughter is Janet or ‘Nettie’ for short. She’s small and shrewd. In an early comic encounter she watches Lord Archie jumping over stepping stones in order to test his gammy leg, but when he realises he is being watched he slips off a stone and plunges into three foot of water, further emphasising his character as an upper class twit.

Janet sits in on the meetings convened by her father with their groundsmen and gamekeepers as they plan how to prevent this phantom ‘John McNab’ stalking a deer on their land and it’s she who makes the shrewdest suggestions. In the event, she goes out walking over the heather on the second day McNab has promised to strike and catches him, in this case John Palliser-Yeates.

Mission 1. Palliser-Yeates against Glenraden

Our guys had got wind that the American archaeologist was going to use dynamite (!) to blow out the heavy stones concealing the barrow and so the man tasked with the Glenraden estate, Palliser-Yeates, makes his shot in between this series of small explosions. But unlucky for him, Janet was sitting on hilltop not far away, comes running and confronts him just as he’s bending over to hoist the stag up. Being a gentleman, Palliser-Yeates tips his hat, says it’s a fair catch and he’s lost, but then turns and runs.

Fish Benjie

At this point I need to introduce Fish Benjie. Chapter 4 opens with a long and beguiling description of a certain type of all-purpose tinker and hobo you see on the roads of Scotland, then zeroes in on the life story of the young tinker, hustler and survivor, Benjamin Bogle. He’s acquired his nickname because, with his father in prison and his mother unwell, he’s independently travelling the roads of the area where the novel is set and among other hustles, collects fresh fish from the coast and sells it at the big houses.

The point is that Benjie becomes aware of the three posh strangers hiding at Lord Archie’s house and catches one of them, Leithen, sneaking around. Faced with having their whole scam blown, Leithen makes a snap decision to let Benjie in on the secret and take him on the team. He becomes a spy, recording the comings and goings at each of the estates and in the early evening reporting all to our guys at Crask Lodge.

When Palliser-Yeates shoots his stag the plan had been for him to lug it a hundred yards or so to where Benjie was waiting with his cart, towed by a knackered old horse. But Janet came running up before he could hook up with Benjie and, after Palliser-Yeates took to his heels and Janet came across Benjie a 100 yards down the track, she mistakenly thought he just happened to be passing. In the event, she gets Benjie to help her load the dead stag onto the cart telling him to take it to the castle. In fact being the hustler he is, Benjie instead trots in the opposite direction and finds Palliser-Yeates, offering him the stag. Palliser-Yeates is touched by his loyalty (and cunning) but explains that he (Palliser-Yeates) is a gentleman and has given his word to a lady – so Benjie must turn round and deliver the stag to the castle. Here he is richly rewarded by the Radens for his help, thus getting paid twice, by the attackers and defenders. Benjie is that kind of character and deeply enjoyable for it.

Harald Blacktooth

Incidentally the day of dynamiting turns up trumps for the American archaeologist who does indeed discover impressive relics – two massive torques, several bowls and flagons, spear-heads from which the hafts had long since rotted, a sword-blade, and a quantity of brooches, armlets, and rings – but most strikingly, a necklace of shells which could only have come from North America!

On the basis of which Bandicott Senior makes the wild claim that this Harald Blacktooth must have sailed to and back from America (compare The Saga of Eirik the Red) and the even wilder and comic suggestion that, as a result, the Radel family include among their ancestors the discoverers of America! A trope which is repeated with droll humour by other characters for the rest of the story.

But more than that, Bandicott, being American, is all about press and publicity and so he rings up the local and national press, the British Museum, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, telling them about his amazing discovery.

The practical results of this are that a dozen or more journalists descend on Glenraden Castle and the neighbourhood, snooping round, trespassing and generally making the self-appointed mission of the three toffs significantly more difficult.

Mission 2. Leithen against Strathlarrig

Long story short the next night Leithen manages to catch his salmon but is spotted by one of the Strathlarrig gillies, Jimsie who, with two assistants, quickly captures him. Now Leithen had disguised himself as a tramp with a dirty face, ragged clothes and dishevelled hair and so he tries to pretend the salmon had been caught by an otter, which had taken a chunk out of it and he had come across it half eaten. Jimsie hands him over to the Strathlarrig head-keeper, Angus (‘a morose old man near six-foot-four in height, clean-shaven, with eyebrows like a penthouse’) who doesn’t buy Leithen’s story and has him thrown in the estate garage and the door locked pending arrest and charge for trespassing and poaching the next day.

Now it gets a bit complicated. The Americans who have rented Strathlarrig, the Bandicotts, are hosting a fine dinner for their neighbours and persuaded Sir Archie to go along. Now, Angus’s men not only captured Leithen but one of the many journalists brought to the area by the discovery, who recognised Leithen and Leithen was forced to let in on his secret. In fact Leithen had recruited this man, Crossby, to create a distraction by trespassing up near the house.

Now when Junius Bandicott learns that his zealous head-keeper has imprisoned these men, he thinks he’s over-reacted. Also it’s clear that neither of them are the famous John McNab everyone’s het up about. And so he orders them released.

It’s Agatha who goes to the garages and orders the servants to set the men free. Leithen is so discombobulated at the sight of her that he forgets to put on a yokel accent and speaks with his posh educated accent. Agatha realises he is indeed of her class. Leithen quickly improvises a story about being down on his luck having made many bad life decisions.

It’s only the next morning, when the salmon, complete with the bit Leithen cut out to make it look like it had been caught by an otter, restored, and deposited on the doorstep of Strathlarrig House along with a message from ‘John McNab’ saying here is the poached animal he promised, that Agatha, Junius, Archie and Jimsie all realise the rough old tramp they locked up – then released – was McNab himself!

Lord Archie at the hustings

Another complication is that Lord Archie had forgotten that slap bang in the middle of the McNab campaign he has a pre-arranged appointment to give a political speech, part of his campaign to elected Conservative candidate for Wester Ross (arranged by his enthusiastic agent, Brodie, ‘a lean, red-haired man’) a short train ride from Crask Lodge. Buchan gives a vivid description of what it’s like to stand up in front of an audience of thousands and your mind to go completely blank, completely forgetting the tissue of bromides and clichés he had spent days memorising.

But more than that, he finds himself inspired to use the story of ‘John McNab’ who, of course, his entire audience knows about, taking him up as an example of how we must ‘challenge’ ourselves in order to become fully awake, to test the old values which he, as a Tory, believes in but also believes just be renewed in every generation. To his surprise he gets a standing ovation. McNab has become a figure who lights up political campaigns!

Mission 3. Lamancha against Haripol

The owner of Haripol House is a different kettle of fish. He’s not Scots. He’s an Englander, Lord Claybody, who made his pile from business in the Midlands. He’s bought Haripol House and adorned it in horrendous taste. He reacts worst of the three addressees of the John McNab letters, getting his lawyers to send a formal reply threatening arrest and conviction. Now, while the campaigns against Glenraden Castle and Strathlarrig House have garnered a lot of support among the local population and even among the owners of those houses (!) Claybody’s attitude has hardened. He sees McNab’s prank as an assault on property everywhere. To this end, our heroes learn that Claybody has imported 100 navvies from a major dam building project he is responsible for in the vicinity. These men will guard his property making the McNab assault almost impossible.

But that is precisely why Lamancha is determined to see it through. On the eve of the campaign, there comes a night so dark and stormy night that none of the conspirators, poring over maps and exchanging battle plans, notice the front door open and Colonel Raden and his two daughters cross the threshold to escape the weather. At just the moment that Leithen and Palliser-Yeates enter the hall from different rooms. the two daughters, Agatha and Janet both exclaim ‘John McNab!’ for each man is the John McNab who they’ve encountered.

Lord Archie enters, greets his guests, gets them to take off their wet things, come into the study by a fire, and proceeds to come clean, telling them they see before them the collaborators on the great John McNab scam. To everyone’s merriment, the Colonel accepts the situation and goes so far as to say he and his daughters will help the conspirators poach a deer off Claybody, so much do the old lairds of the locality despise the jumped-up new English owner.

But what with all those navvies the situation seems impossible until Janet and Benjie pull off a masterstroke. They kidnap Lady Claybody’s adored little doggie, Roguie. Janet had paid her a visit and noticed a) how she doted on the little critter and b) how she let it off the leash to run wild. So she got Benjie to kidnap it, the idea being that she will insist on a large number of navvies being sent out to find it. Genius!

Long vivid description of Lamancha being led a-stalking by top Crask gillie Wattie Lithgow. He gets a shot at the oldest biggest legendary stag in the region, doesn’t kill him in one but fatally wounds him. They follow the blood trail and find the stag dead in a burn. Wattie lugs him across country to where Lord Archie and Janet are waiting. They load it up and drive it back to Crask without incident.

(While they waited, Janet and Archie had built a bridge across the river Doran (from old planks) during which they’d both gotten wet and messy and as he watched her wash herself in the stream Archie suddenly realised this slender young women was one with the heather and the hills and he proposes to her. ‘Yes,’ she turned a laughing face, ‘of course I will.’ It’s a festive comedy.)

To cut a long story short:

  • Lamancha bags his stag, which is dragged away by Wattie, down to the car where Lord Archie and Janet drive it back to Crask.
  • Lord Archie and Janet wash and change and drive over to Haripol House to return Lady Claybody’s kidnapped dog. En route Palliser-Yeates emerges from the heather and they invite him to come along.
  • Meanwhile Leithen had been given the task of distracting the gillies and navvies and does a very good job of it, his tortuous journeys and then flight from the navvies described in immense detail. It has a comic denouement when he stumbles down towards Haripol House and is astounded to see Lord Archie and Janet there being politely entertained.

Lamancha, the man who shot the stag, is not, however, so lucky. He is cornered by a tough navvy who he can’t dodge, they get into a clumsy wrestling match, fall into a hollow and the navvy’s leg is broken, only at this point does Lamancha realise the fellow is Stokes, his old orderly in the army. Suddenly (when he no longer poses any threat) Lamancha is all aristocratic concern. When a bunch of other navvies and gillies surround him, Lamancha is only concerned that Stokes gets the best treatment, has his leg splinted, and is carried by the gillies down to Johnson Claybody’s car.

In all this Lamancha displays natural, unforced compassion and gentlemanliness, which is strongly contrasted with Johnson Claybody’s selfishness, ill manners and bad grace. Johnson really hates the way Lamancha makes all the right moral decisions and effortlessly commands Johnson’s own keeper and gillies. He has class, dontcha know, whereas Johnson is forced to resort to caddish bluster: ‘Damn your impudence! What business is that of yours?’ etc.

When Lamancha approaches Haripol House, under guard by the head-keeper etc, he is astonished to find waiting for him, not just Lord and Lady Claybody, but his partners in crime, Palliser-Yeates, Leithen, Lord Archie and the lovely Janet!

Happy ending

And there’s a happy ending worthy of a stage comedy. Lamancha admits they he and his friends as ‘John McNab’, something the other two had not, in fact, let on. After their initial astonishment, Lord and Lady Claybody react well, if perplexed. Claybody says he would have given them free range of his estate if they’d wanted it; or organised a real challenge to poaching on it, if only they’d asked.

As they all discuss it, Ned, John and Lamancha come round to feeling they’ve misunderstood the whole enterprise. They were never in any real danger, it was never a real challenge, they feel silly and heartily apologise. Janet apologises for kidnapping Lady Claypole, which momentarily introduces an ill note into proceedings which is glossed over when Lady C learns that young Archie and Janet are engaged, at which point she gives them a big-bosomed hug. Even Johnson Claybody who has behaved so ill-manneredly to Lamancha, now changes his tune and apologises. Everyone shakes hands and Lord and Lady C say they will hold a big dinner tonight, and invited Lord Radel and the Bandicotts, to celebrate the triumph but also the death of the fictional character of ‘John McNab’. If it was a Jacobean or restoration comedy they would have all joined hands, come forward and bowed to the applauding audience.

Snobbery, class, body shape and clothes

Snobbery

The final part of the third mission exists solely, as far as I can see, to express Buchan’s Tory snobbery. The Right Honourable the Earl of Lamancha, MP, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Dominions, is caught by one of the navvies deployed by Claybody. Their bodies reflect their class: Lamancha tall and erect, the navvy bent by labour.

He was a tall fellow in navvy’s clothes, with a shock head of black hair, and a week’s beard—an uncouth figure with a truculent eye.

But the working class navvies are really an extension of Lord Claybody who is depicted as a gauche arriviste, a ghastly industrialist who has earned his wealth instead of inheriting it, as all right-minded aristocrats do. He is depicted as lacking all the depth and class, as faking a tartan kilt, doing up his mansion with hideous modern extension while his wife is depicted as foolishly trying to recreate an English country garden in the Highlands which, Janet waspishly observes, won’t last long.

The correct response to this beastly nouveau rich is expressed by Colonel Radel: ‘He and his damned navvies are an insult to every gentleman in the Highlands.’ When Lamancha has his extended argument with Claybody’s son, he comes within an ace of using the ultimate insult and calling him an ‘infernal little haberdasher.’ This is plain snobbery.

The argument is a dramatised contrast between the true class and gentlemanly attitude and behaviour of Lamancha vividly contrasted with the selfish, ill mannered and unchivalrous behaviour of Johnson Claybody towards his own injured employee. Lamancha insists that Stoke is carried down off the moors and then insists that he is placed in the car and driven to the nearest house which a doctor can be called from, Claybody furiously bridling at being ordered about on his own property.

Buchan vividly describes and explains the nature of aristocratic confidence:

The truth is, that if you belong to a family which for a good many centuries has been accustomed to command and to take risks, and if you yourself, in the forty-odd years of your life, have rather courted trouble than otherwise, and have put discipline into Arab caravans, Central African natives, and Australian mounted brigades – well, when you talk about wringing necks your words might carry weight. If, too, you have never had occasion to think of your position, because no one has ever questioned it, and you promise to break down somebody else’s, your threat may convince others, because you yourself are so wholly convinced of your power in that direction. (p.222)

And draws the Conservative conclusion:

It is a melancholy fact which exponents of democracy must face that, while all men may be on a level in the eyes of the State, they will continue in fact to be preposterously unequal.

Class

Alongside it goes the Tory notion of duty. This is vividly depicted in Lamancha’s fight with the navvie. When he’s just an anonymous navvie, he is depicted as foul-mouthed and bent, leaning over i.e. not straight and erect like a gentleman. But after he’s fallen badly and broken his leg it isn’t the fall as such but Lamancha suddenly recognising who he is which transforms him in Lamancha’s eyes.

He recalled now the man who had once been his orderly, and whom he had last known as a smart troop sergeant…’You remember me – Lord Lamancha?’ He had it all now – the fellow who had been a son of one of Tommy Deloraine’s keepers –a decent fellow and a humorous, and a good soldier.

So long as he is an anonymous working class man, he is just a brute antagonist. As soon as he enters into the network of contacts, via gamekeepers and the army, he acquires an identity, a name, and becomes of value. To the Tory ruling class, the great mass of the population have no identity or worth unless they enter into the aristocrats’ networks of privilege. At that point they cease to be a blundering swearing drunken threat and suddenly swim into focus as a gamekeeper’s son or someone’s servant or orderly etc. Only then do they count as human beings.

Body shape and class

All this, believe it or not, is correlated with body shape. Aristocratic men are tall and thin, like Sir Archie:

No other country, she thought, produced this kind of slim, graceful, yet weathered and hard-bitten youth.

Or Colonel Alastair Raden:

A lean old gentleman dressed in an ancient loud-patterned tweed jacket and a very faded kilt. Still erect as a post, he had a barrack-square voice, and high-boned, aquiline face, and a kindly but irritable blue eye.

Or John Palliser-Yeates:

A tall man, apparently young, with a very ruddy face, a thatch of sandy hair, and ancient, disreputable clothes.

Or Edward Leithen:

A tallish man, they said, lean and clean-shaven, rather pale, and with his skin very tight over his cheek-bones. He had looked like a gentleman and had behaved as such.

And:

Before it became the fashion he had been a pioneer in guideless climbing in the Alps, and the red-letter days in his memory were for the most part solitary days. He was always in hard condition, and his lean figure rarely knew fatigue… (p.198)

By sharp contrast, ghastly nouveau riche types like Lord Claybody and his son, are short and squat:

Lord Claybody entered, magnificent in a kilt of fawn-coloured tweed and a ferocious sporran made of the mask of a dog-otter. The garments, which were aggressively new, did not become his short, square figure…(p.196)

 A stout gentleman in a kilt…(p.227)

Same goes for what this class calls the memsahibs. The most salient aspect of lovely Janet who Lord Archie falls in love with is that she is slender and boyish.

A slight girl with what seemed to him astonishingly bright hair and very blue and candid eyes

Compare and contrast Lady Claybody, whose ghastly taste, whose foolish plan to plant an English country garden in the Highlands, and whose tacky obsession with her little yapping dog, are all summed up by the fact that she has an extensive bosom:

Lady Claybody was a heavily handsome woman still in her early fifties. The purchase of Haripol had been her doing, for romance lurked in her ample breast, and she dreamed of a new life in which she should be an unquestioned great lady far from the compromising environment where the Claybody millions had been won.

The contrast between busty vulgarity and slender classiness is explicitly made:

For swelling bosoms and pouting lips and soft curves and languishing eyes Archie had only the most distant regard. He saluted them respectfully and passed by the other side of the road – they did not belong to his world. But that slender figure splashing in the tawny eddies made a different appeal. Most women in such a posture would have looked tousled and flimsy, creatures ill at ease, with their careful allure beaten out of them by weather. But this girl was an authentic creature of the hills and winds – her young slimness bent tensely against the current, her exquisite head and figure made more fine and delicate by the conflict.

Bosoms bad, boyish slimness good.

And clothes

Johnson Claybody is pernickety about being properly dressed, clean and trim. Lamancha is a true gentleman because he doesn’t care. He knows his class will shine through no matter what he’s wearing:

Now Johnson was the type of man who is miserable if he feels himself ill-clad or dirty, and discovers in a sense of tidiness a moral superiority. He rejoiced to have found his enemy, and an enemy over whom he felt at a notable advantage. But, unfortunately for him, no Merkland had ever been conscious of the appearance he represented or cared a straw about it. Lamancha in rags would have cheerfully disputed with an emperor in scarlet, and suffered no loss of confidence because of his garb, since he would not have given it a thought.

So hopefully you agree with me that this novel, harmless entertainment though it appears at first sight, is in fact a kind of primer of snobbish, class consciousness.

Disguises

In my review of Buchan’s novel Prester John, I noted how the baddie, the leader of the black rebellion John Laputa, was a man of many disguises, now a Christian minister, now leader of a pagan ritual, a suited and tied westerner among London MPs, a leopard-clad war leader in Africa, and so on. I’ve just watched a kids TV programme where a class went from uniformed, dull and bored, to being allowed to dress up in garish costumes and dance around, and the change in mood and engagement was startling. Maybe dressing up is just a basic element of play.

Intellectuals, historians, theologians, all lard their descriptions of the religious ceremonies of Catholics, the Byzantine Church, Islamic centres or the African ceremonies Chinua Achebe describes, with serious interpretations of symbolism and deep meanings and so on. But maybe, at the same time, it’s just fun, it’s a release and an escape from everyday routine and it’s also, as women know better than men, a very community and team-building and bonding activity to dress up and fuss and fret over costumes and make-up and presentation.

Comedy has always overflowed with disguise and dressing-up. I think of the comic plays of ancient Rome I read last year where at least one of the characters dressed up as someone else, with comic consequences. Or the cross-dressing in most of Shakespeare’s comedies, or in almost all the Restoration comedies.

In a sense reading fiction is a sort of dressing up, an imaginative dressing-up: it allows our imaginations to assume the persona of other people, narrators and characters, for the duration of the reading. Apart from all the heavyweight moralising which fiction often does, and the arousal of serious or intense emotions, maybe its most primal function is to take us out of ourselves. Maybe we need regular holidays from ourselves.

So a little light dressing up and disguising is the least you’d expect in a humorous novel like this. At least some of the comedy derives from supposedly strict and stern, upright and proper Establishment figures like a top lawyer and banker behaving like children. I imagine this had more impact in 1925 than in 2024.

But dressing up and disguise can, of course, have a serious darker side and this is gestured towards in the fertile imagination of Janet Radel, who over-worries about who John McNab is and what he’s going to do.

Horrible stories which she had read of impersonation and the shifts of desperate characters recurred to her mind. Was John Macnab perhaps old Mr Bandicott disguised as an archaeologist? Or was he one of the Strathlarrig workmen? (p.69)

Visions of John Macnab filled her mind, now a tall bravo with a colonial accent, now a gnarled Caliban of infinite cunning and gnome-like agility. Where in this haunted land was he ensconced—in some hazel covert, or in some clachan but-and-ben, or miles distant in a populous hotel, ready to speed in a swift car to the scene of action?

In this excerpt we can clearly see that disguise allows a large element of indeterminism to enter a narrative. Our everyday lives may contain large amounts of uncertainty – will we be given a mortgage, will the man we fancy agree to a date, will you get the pay rise you’ve asked for etc – but generally within finite and boring limits. You can see how, as soon as you allow disguise into a fictitious narrative, the possibilities hugely expand, whether for comic or tragic purposes.

Making fictions

The book is ostensibly about the poaching, but at its centre it is about making fictions and telling stories. John McNab is a completely invented person, but all four conspirators find themselves drawn, despite themselves, into feeling somehow committed to the idea he represents. Arrived at Crask, on the first evening all express overt reluctance to get drawn into this silly prank, but at the same time find it difficult to let the non-existent figure of John McNab down. This makes no logical sense but a lot of emotional sense. It explains how the thing grows into being described as the ‘John Macnab proposition.’ And once they’ve reconnoitred the ground and weighed up the obstacles and begun to commit to the prank, the entirely non-existent persona of ‘John McNab’ begins to assume greater and greater power.

In a different way, all three of the households which receive the John McNab letter are plunged into speculation about who he is, what he looks like – big and bluff or small and cunning – especially in the vivid imagination of young Miss Janet Raden, with her ‘taste for the dramatic’ (p.83).

So the figure of McNab turns into a kind of symbol of the power of creating a fictional character; he comes to demonstrate the uncanny power of fictional characters. It’s one thing that he imposes himself on the three households he has announced he will ‘attack’, that’s understandable, they know no better. But that he comes to dominate the lives and feelings of the three men who invented him says something fascinating about the power of fiction and invention.

Fictions make news

The newspapermen gathered to report on the Harald Blacktooth find that all their editors give ancient archaeology perfunctory attention before switching their interest to the glamorous mystery of ‘John McNab’. Millions of readers read about his failure to get his stag at Castle Raden, his

Nature painting

There are numerous descriptions of this, Buchan’s idealised Scottish landscape.

Darkness gave place to the translucence of early dawn: the badger trotted home from his wanderings: the hill-fox barked in the cairns to summon his household: sleepy pipits awoke: the peregrine who lived above the Grey Beallach drifted down into the glens to look for breakfast: hinds and calves moved up from the hazel shows to the high fresh pastures: the tiny rustling noises of night disappeared in that hush which precedes the awakening of life: and then came the flood of morning gold from behind the dim eastern mountains, and in an instant the earth had wheeled into a new day. (p.67)

Since the war

‘What about yourself?’ she asked. ‘In the words of Mr Bandicott, are you going to make good?’ She asked the question with such an air of frank comradeship that Sir Archie was in no way embarrassed. Indeed he was immensely delighted. ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know…I’m a bit of a slacker. There doesn’t seem much worth doing since the war.’ (p.127)

Various characters express the feeling that the war knocked the stuffing out of the generation who went through it. It’s dramatised in the dinner party Colonel Raden gives:

‘I suppose,’ said old Mr Bandicott reflectively, ‘that the war was bound to leave a good deal of unsettlement. Junius missed it through being too young – never got out of a training camp – but I have noticed that those who fought in France find it difficult to discover a groove. They are energetic enough, but they won’t ‘stay put’, as we say. Perhaps this Macnab is one of the unrooted. In your country, where everybody was soldiering, the case must be far more common.’
Mr Claybody announced that he was sick of hearing the war blamed for the average man’s deficiencies. ‘Every waster,’ he said, ‘makes an excuse of being shell-shocked. I’m very clear that the war twisted nothing in a man that wasn’t twisted before.’
Sir Archie demurred. ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen some pretty bad cases of fellows who used to be as sane as a judge, and came home all shot to bits in their mind.’
‘There are exceptions, of course. I’m speaking of the general rule. I turn away unemployables every day – good soldiers, maybe, but unemployable – and I doubt if they were ever anything else.’
Something in his tone annoyed Janet. ‘You saw a lot of service, didn’t you?’ she asked meekly.
‘No, worse luck! They made me stick at home and slave fourteen hours a day controlling cotton. It would have been a holiday for me to get into the trenches. But what I say is, a sane man usually remained sane. Look at Sir Archibald. We all know what a hectic time he had, and he hasn’t turned a hair.’
‘I’d like you to give me that in writing,’ Sir Archie grinned. ‘I’ve known people who thought I was rather cracked.’

It’s given a comic turn at the end but there are clearly four points of view here. Bandicott Senior, as a foreigner, makes a valid generalisation about young men of Britain, traumatised by the war. Claybody is revealed as a loudmouth reactionary who is down on the young but did not himself serve in the war, classic example of the reactionary armchair expert. Archie himself did serve and was injured, but takes the thing lightest of all. And Janet, type of the zealous young woman who would have been a suffragette 20 years before and would be a woman’s libber 40 years later, takes up the cudgels on his behalf.

In Chapter 8 Janet and Lord Archie go for a walk across the moors, hills and whatnot, and she reveals herself to be quite a radical, not in a doctrinaire socialist way (she herself and various other characters refer to the ‘Bolsheviks’ who were, of course a relatively recent phenomenon in 1924), but in saying that her family are fading out, their time is up and the land should be held by newcomers.

‘I’m quite serious about politics,’ said Lord Archie. ‘I wonder,’ said Janet, smiling. ‘I don’t mean scraping into Parliament, but real politics – putting the broken pieces together, you know. Papa and the rest of our class want to treat politics like another kind of property in which they have a vested interest. But it won’t do – not in the world we live in to-day. If you’re going to do any good you must feel the challenge and be ready to meet it.’

Basically, she believes in force and energy. In the confused landscape after the war, describing her like that makes her sound more like a proto-fascist. Her emphasis on primal values reminds me of D.H. Lawrence.

Janet had got off her perch, and was standing a yard from Sir Archie, her hat in her hand and the light wind ruffling her hair. The young man, who had no skill in analysing his feelings, felt obscurely that she fitted most exquisitely into the picture of rock and wood and water, that she was, in very truth, a part of his clean elemental world of the hill-tops. (p.127)

Later, in his election speech, Lord Archie articulates sentiments which reminded me of Ernest Hemingway’s rejection of the old words and the old values which the war had destroyed, albeit clothed in posh pukka phraseology:

He began by confessing that the war had left the world in a muddle, a muddle which affected his own mind. The only cure was to be honest with oneself, and to refuse to accept specious nonsense and conventional jargon. (p.145)

McNab started as a prank by three bored toffs but it is instructive to discover just how many other people it gives a sense of purpose. Janet reports that her father has never been so energised as in the few days he got his staff together to repel the advertised attack, and the various groundsmen and gillies reflect this excitement. Beginning as a small personal gag the turns out to shine a light on an entire civilisation, revealing how bored and directionless it is.

For 20 years this generation looked for and hoped for something new but, like Janet, struggled to express it in any meaningful way. In the event, all their hopes for new worlds and new values were sunk by the rise of horrifying evil on the Continent and the advent of the Second World War.

(Incidentally, it’s interesting to see the words ‘waster’ and ‘slacker’ which I thought were of contemporary coinage, being freely used a hundred years ago.)

The active narrator

Breaching protocol, the narrator from time to time refers to himself in the first person:

I am at a loss to know how to describe the first shattering impact of youth and beauty on a susceptible mind. The old plan was to borrow the language of the world’s poetry, the new seems to be to have recourse to the difficult jargon of psychologists and physicians; but neither, I fear, would suit Sir Archie’s case. (p.46)

Colonel Raden plucked feebly at his moustache, and Janet, I regret to say, laughed. (p.87)

He even claims to have visited the scene of one of the hunts and of the book’s triumphant conclusion:

If you go to Haripol, as I did last week, you will see above the hall chimney a noble thirteen-pointer, and a legend beneath proclaiming that the stag was shot on the Sgurr Dearg beat of the forest by the Earl of Lamancha on a certain day of September in a certain year.

This makes the story feel very chummy, like a yarn being told you over dinner. At the same time it places that narrator very much among the charmed circle of this blithe and happy circle of aristocrats, lawyers and bankers. A sound member of the British ruling class.

Tory irony

The well-off can afford to enjoy life little’s ironies.

Sir Edward Leithen was a philosopher, with an acute sense of the ironies of life, and as he reflected that here was a laird, a Tory, and a strict preserver of game working himself into a passion over the moral rights of the poacher, he suddenly relapsed into helpless mirth. (p.155)

An awful joy fell upon Sir Archie’s soul. He realised anew the unplumbed preposterousness of life.


Credit

John McNab by John Buchan was published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1925. References are to the 1994 World Classic’s paperback edition, edited and introduced by David Daniell.

Related links

John Buchan reviews

I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation by Michela Wrong (2005)

Michela Wrong has had a long career as a journalist, working for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times, specialising in Africa. She came to the attention of the book-buying public with the publication in 2001 of ‘In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo’, which I read and reviewed.

This is the follow-up, a long and thorough (432 pages, including chronology, glossary, notes and index) account of the modern history of Eritrea, the country to the north of Ethiopia, which was bundled in with Ethiopia at independence and which fought a 30 year war to be free.

The milky haze of amnesia

I’m afraid Wrong alienated me right at the start, in her introduction, by claiming that the ex-colonial and imperial powers (Britain, Italy, America) have made a conscious effort to erase their involvement in such places in order to conceal all the wrongs we did around the world

History is written – or, more accurately, written out – by the conquerors. If Eritrea has been lost in the milky haze of amnesia, it surely cannot be unconnected to the fact that so many former masters and intervening powers – from Italy to Britain, the US to the Soviet Union, Israel and the United Nations, not forgetting, of course, Ethiopia, the most formidable occupier of them all – behaved so very badly there. Better to forget than to dwell on episodes which reveal the victors at their most racist and small-minded, cold-bloodedly manipulative or simply brutal beyond belief. To act so ruthlessly, yet emerge with so little to show for all the grim opportunism; well, which nation really wants to remember that? (Foreword, page xi)

This is an example of conspiracy theory – that everything that happens in the world is the result of dark and threatening conspiracies by shady forces in high places. It may sound trivial to highlight it so early in my review, but it is the conceptual basis of the entire book, and an accusation she returns to again and again and again: that there are so few histories of Eritrea because the imperial powers want to suppress the record of their behaviour there, to display ‘the conquerors’ lazy capacity for forgetfulness’ (p.xxii). I’m afraid I take issue with this for quite a few reasons.

1. First, I tend towards the cock-up theory of history. Obviously there are and have been countless actual conspiracies but, in geopolitics at any rate, events are more often the result of sheer incompetence. Read any of the accounts of the US invasion of Iraq or Britain’s military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The idea that the establishments of three or four countries have placed an embargo on discussion of imperial interventions in Eritrea is obviously doubtful.

2. Second, there has been no embargo on accounts of Britain’s involvement in plenty of other and far worse colonial debacles: the concentration camps we set up during the Boer War or during the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya are common knowledge or, at least, there are loads of books and articles about them. Or take India. Nowadays there’s a growing pile of books about how we looted and ruined the subcontinent; Britain’s responsibility for the catastrophic partition featured in an episode of Dr Who, about as mainstream as you can get.

Books about the evils of the British Empire are pouring off the press, so these are hardly ‘forgotten’ or ‘erased’ subjects. Quite, the reverse, they’re extremely fashionable subjects – among angry students, at middle class dinner tables, in all the literary magazines here and in the States, among BBC and Channel 4 commissioning editors falling over themselves to show how woke, aware and anti-colonial they are.

Or check out the steady flow of anti-Empire, anti-slavery exhibitions (like the current installation in Tate’s Turbine Hall about empire and slavery, or Kara Walker’s installation in the same location about empire and slavery, or the upcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy about empire and slavery) and, in the bookshops the same twenty or so books about the crimes of the British Empire or the evils of the slave trade trotted out time after time. Anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-slavery sentiments are the received opinion of our time, one of its central ideological underpinnings.

Eight reasons why nobody’s much interested in Eritrean history

Wrong makes a big deal of the fact that so many Italians, Brits and Americans she spoke to during her research had no awareness of their nations’ involvements in Eritrean history, but this has at least seven possible explanations, all more plausible than it being due to some kind of conspiracy. Let’s consider just Britain:

1. British imperial history is huge

First, the history of the British Empire is a vast and complicated subject. Hardly anyone, even specialists, even professional historians, knows everything about every period of every colony which the British ruled at one point or another. Understandably, most people tend to only know about the big ones, probably starting with India, the slave trade, not least because this is being hammered home via every channel.

2. Second World War history is huge

Second, the British took over the running of Eritrea from the Italians when we fought and defeated them in the spring of 1941, in a campaign which was wedged in between the bigger, more important and better known Desert War in Libya. So the same principle applies as in the point about the empire as a whole, which is: even professional historians would probably struggle to remember every detail of every campaign in every theatre of the Second World War.

Here’s Wikipedia’s list of the main theatres and campaigns of the Second World War. Did you know them all?

It was only reading up the background to Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy that I realised there was a whole theatre of war in West Africa, which I’d never heard about before. Was this due to what Wrong calls the ‘milky haze of amnesia’ deriving from some government-wide conspiracy to forget? I doubt it. The reality is people only have so much time and attention to spare.

3. Limited attention of ordinary people

What percentage of the British population do you think gives a monkeys that Britain was, for ten years or so, in the late 1930s and through the Second World War, responsible for administering Eritrea? Weren’t we also running about 50 other countries at the time? I suspect my parents’ experience of being bombed during the Blitz and watching Battle of Britain dogfights over their London suburb were quite a bit more relevant to their lives than the details of British administration of the faraway Horn of Africa.

4. General historical awareness is dire, anyway

Most people don’t care about ‘history’, anyway. If you did a quick basic history quiz to the entire British population of 67 million, I wonder how many would pass. Auberon Waugh once joked that the fact that Henry VIII had six wives is probably the only fact from history which all Britons know, but I suspect this is way out of date. I live in the most multi-ethnic constituency in Britain. Most of the people I interact with (doctor, dentist, shopkeepers, postman, electrician, council leafblowers) were not born in this country and many of them barely speak English. I struggle to explain that I want to buy a stamp at the shop round the corner because they don’t speak English so don’t know what ‘stamp’ is until I point to a pack. I can’t believe many of the non-English-speaking people who now live here give much of a damn about the minutiae of Britain’s imperial history unless, of course, it’s the bit that affected their country.

5. Busy

And this is because people are busy. The difference between Wrong and me is that she thinks it’s of burning importance that the British ‘confront’ every aspect of their ‘colonial past’, whereas I take what I regard as the more realistic view, that a) most people don’t know b) most people don’t care c) most people are stressed just coping with the challenges of life.

By this I mean trying to find the money to pay their rent or mortgage, to buy food, to pay for the extras their kids need at school, or to find money to pay for their parents’ ruinously expensive social care. Most people are too busy and too stressed to care about what happened in a remote country in Africa 80 years ago. Most people are too busy and worried about the day-to-day to care about any of the big global issues that newspapers and magazines are always trying to scare us about, whether it’s the alleged impact of AI or the war in Ukraine or the threat from China. Most don’t know or care about ‘history’ and, I’d argue, they’re right to do so, and to live in the present.

I’m a bookish intellectual who’s interested in literature and history but I’ve had to learn the hard way (i.e. via my children and their friends) that there are lots of people who really aren’t. They’re not ‘erasing’ anything, they just live lives which don’t include much interest in history, be it imperialist, early modern, medieval or whatever. They’re too busy going to music festivals or shopping at Camden market, and sharing everything they do on TikTok and Instagram, getting on with their (exciting and interesting) lives, to know or care about the minutiae of the historical record of every single one of the hundred or so nations Britain had some kind of imperial involvement in.

Wrong thinks it’s some kind of conspiracy on the part of the British authorities not to give Eritrea a more prominent part in our history. I think it’s a realistic sense of perspective.

6. Commercial priorities

Books tend to be published, and documentaries commissioned, if the editors think there is a commercially viable audience for them. Last time I visited the Imperial War Museum I spent some time in the bookshop chatting to the manager because I was struck by the very, very narrow range of subjects they stocked books about. There were entire bookcases about the First and Second World War, a big section about the Holocaust, one about Women in War, and that was about it. I couldn’t even find a single book about Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland, for God’s sake! When I quizzed him, the bookshop manager explained that they’re a commercial operation and need to maximise their revenue, and so only stock books on the subjects people want to buy.

Living in a commercial/consumer capitalist society as we do, maybe the lack of awareness, books and articles about the modern history of Eritrea is not due to a government conspiracy to suppress it but simply because it is a niche subject which interests hardly anyone, and so – there’s no money in it.

7. News agendas

When this book was published (in 2005) the population of Eritrea was 2.8 million i.e. it was one of the smallest countries in the world. Britain’s involvement in Eritrea was a tiny subset of the enormous, world-encompassing commitments of the Second World War, and one among many, many imperial entanglements which lingered on after the end of the war, of which India and Palestine were the headliners.

Even now, the current conflicts between Eritrea, Tigray and Ethiopia barely reach the news because they are, in fact, minor conflicts, they are far away, they have been going on for decades with no particularly dramatic changes to report on and, crucially, no signs of a conclusion – so they just never make the news agenda. Why would they, when Russia is threatening to start world war three?

8. Predictable

And I suppose there’s an eighth reason which is that, for anybody who is interested in modern history, it is utterly predictable that today’s historians or historical commentators will take a feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperial line. Nothing could be more predictable than a modern historian ‘revealing’ the racist repressive truth about British imperial behaviour. This is the stock, standard modern attitude. To reveal that European imperial behaviour in Africa was ‘racist and small-minded, cold-bloodedly manipulative or simply brutal beyond belief’ is the opposite of news – it is the utterly predictable compliance with modern ideology, as expressed through all available channels of print, TV, social media, films and documentaries.

So, those are my eight reasons for not buying into the central premise of Michela Wrong’s book which is that there has been some kind of conspiracy of silence among the ex-imperial powers, that they have deliberately let the history of their involvement in Eritrea sink into ‘the milky haze of amnesia’ in order to conceal from a public eager for every scrap of information about Italy, Britain and America’s involvement in one of the world’s smallest countries.

Presumable origin of the book

Wrong first visited Eritrea in 1996 in order to do a country profile for the Financial Times. She was surprised to discover that there was very little published about the place. She saw an opportunity. She approached her publisher, who agreed there was an opportunity to fill a gap and sell to the kind of niche audience which is interested in the history of tiny African countries. Obviously she would be building on the success of her first book to extend her brand.

But, to make the book more marketable it would have to incorporate several features: 1) elements of touristic travelogue, passages dwelling on, for example, Asmara’s surprising Art Deco heritage or the vintage railway that snakes up into the high plateau of the interior, the kind of thing that appears in ‘Train Journeys of The World’-type TV documentaries. Tick.

Second way to sex it up would be to adopt the modern woke, progressive, anti-imperial ideology so much in vogue, and make sure to criticise all the western powers for their racism, sexism, massacres and exploitation. Tick.

And so we’ve ended up with the book we have. It is a history of Eritrea in relatively modern times i.e. since the Italians began annexing it in the 1890s, up to the time of writing in about 2004, written in a superior, judgemental, often sarcastic and sneering tone, regularly facetious and dismissive about every action of the colonial powers, hugely reluctant to point out that the relevant African powers (i.e. Ethiopia) were ten times worse than anything the imperialists did.

I’m not saying Wrong is wrong to point out that the Italians were racist exploiters who carried out appalling, semi-genocidal massacres and installed apartheid-style laws; or that the British, to their shame, maintained many of Italy’s racist discriminatory laws and practices while dismantling and carting off much of the country’s infrastructure; or that the UN screwed up big time when it assigned Eritrea to be part of Ethiopia against the wishes of its people; or that the Americans should have done more to foster statehood and encourage Eritrean independence when they used the place as a listening post during the Cold War.

I’m sure all her facts are completely correct and they certainly build up into a damning portrait of how successive western powers abused a small African nation. No, what put me off the book was a) Wrong’s assumption that the lack of knowledge about Eritrea was the result of some kind of cover-up among the imperial powers, and b) her tone of sneering, sarcastic superiority over everyone that came before her. Her snarky asides about this or that imperial administrator or British general quickly become very tiresome.

It is possible to write history in a plain factual way and let the facts speak for themselves. Nobody writes a history of the Holocaust full of sneering asides that the Nazis were ‘racist’ and ‘discriminatory’ – ‘Hitler, in another typically racist speech…’. You don’t need to say something so obvious. The facts speak for themselves. Constantly poking the reader in the ribs with sarcastic asides about the awful colonialists gets really boring.

Travel writing

Wrong strikes a note of travel writer-style indulgence right from the start of her book. The opening pages give a lyrical description of what you see as you fly over the desert and come into land at Eritrea’s main airport. From her text you can tell she regards flying from one African capital to another, jetting round the world, as an everyday activity. It isn’t though, is it, not for most people, only for a privileged kind of international reporter.

She then goes on to explain that Eritrea’s capital, Asmara, has one of the finest collections of Art Deco buildings anywhere in the world. In other words, the opening of her book reads just like a Sunday supplement feature or upscale travel magazine article. Although she will go on to get everso cross about Eritrea’s agonies, the opening of the book strikes a note of pampered, first world tourism which lingers on, which sets a tone of leisured touristic privilege. I know it’s unintended but that’s how it reads.

Anti-western bias

Like lots of posh people who have enjoyed the most privileged upbringing Britain has to offer and then become rebels and radicals against their own heritage, Wrong is quick to criticise her own country and very slow to criticise all the other bad players in the story.

In particular, she downplays the elephant in the room which is that most of Eritrea’s woes stem from its 30-year-long war to be independent of Ethiopia, the imperialist nation to its south. She downplays the extent to which this was two African nations, led by black African leaders, who insisted on fighting a ruinous 30-year war in which millions of civilians died… and then started up another war in 1998, conflicts which devastated their economies so that, as usual, they needed extensive food aid to be supplied by…guess who?.. the evil West.

Gaps and absences

Imperial benefits, after all

There’s a particular moment in the text which brought me up short. In the chapter describing the machinations of various UN commissions trying to decide whether to grant Eritrea its independence or bundle it in with Ethiopia (Chapter 7, ‘What do the baboons want?’), Wrong describes the experiences of several commissioners who toured the two countries and immediately saw that Eritrea was light years ahead of Ethiopia: Ethiopia was a backward, almost primitive country ruled by a medieval court whereas Eritrea had industry and education and a viable economy which were established by the Italians. And the British had given Eritrea an independent press, trade unions and freedom of religion (p.171).

Hang on hang on hang on. Back up a moment. Wrong has dedicated entire chapters to excoriating Italian and British administrators for their racism, their exploitation of the natives, Italian massacres and British hypocrisy. Entire chapters. And now, here, in a brief throwaway remark, she concedes that the Italians also gave the country a modern infrastructure, harbours and railway while the British introduced modern political reforms, freedom of the press and religion, and that these, combined, meant Eritrea was head and shoulders more advanced than the decrepit empire to its south.

When I read this I realised that this really is a very biased account. It reminded me of Jeffrey Massons’s extended diatribe against therapy. Nothing Wrong says is wrong, and she has obviously done piles of research, especially about the Italian period, and added to scholarly knowledge. But she is only telling part of the story, the part which suits her pursuit of unremitting criticism of the West.

And she is glossing over the fact that the Italians, and the British, did quite a lot of good for the people of Eritrea. This doesn’t fit Wrong’s thesis, or her tone of modern enlightened superiority to the old male, misogynist, racist imperial administrators, and so she barely mentions it in her book. At a stroke I realised that this is an unreliable and deeply biased account.

Magazine feature rather than history

Same sort of thing happens with chapter 10, ‘Blow jobs, bugging and beer’. You can see from the title the kind of larky, sarky attitude Wrong takes to her subject matter. Dry, scholarly and authoritative her book is not.

The blowjobs chapter describes, in surprising detail, the lifestyle of the young Americans who staffed the set of radio listening posts America established in the Eritrean plateau in the 1950s and 60s. The plateau is 1.5 miles high in some places and this means big radio receivers could receive with pinprick accuracy radio broadcasts from all across the Soviet Union, Middle East and rest of Africa. The signals received and decoded at what came to be called Kagnew Station played a key role in America’s Cold War intelligence efforts.

As her larky chapter title suggests, Wrong focuses her chapter almost entirely around interviews she carried out with ageing Yanks who were young 20-somethings during the station’s heyday in the late 60s. One old boy described it as like the movie ‘Animal House’ and Wrong proceeds to go into great detail about the Americans’ drinking and sexual exploits, especially with prostitutes at local bars. She sinks to a kind of magazine feature-style level of sweeping, superficial cultural generalisation:

This was the 1960s, after all, the decade of free love, the Rolling Stones and LSD, the time of Jack Kerouac, Jimi Hendrix and Hunter Thompson. (p.223)

This is typical of a lot of the easy, throwaway references Wrong makes, the kind of sweeping and often superficial generalisations which undermine her diatribes against the British and Italian empires.

Anyway, we learn more than we need to about service men being ‘initiated in the delights of fellatio’ by Mama Kathy, the hotel in Massawa nicknamed ‘four floors of whores’, about a woman called Rosie Big Tits (or RBT) who would service any man or group of men who paid, about the disgusting behaviour of the gang who called themselves The Gross Guys (pages 225 to 226).

This is all good knockabout stuff, and you can see how it came about when Wrong explains that she got in touch with the surviving members of The Gross Guys via their website, and then was given more names and contacts, and so it snowballed into what is effectively a diverting magazine article. She includes photos, including a corker of no fewer than seven GIs bending over and exposing their bums at a place they referred to as Moon River Bridge.

I have several comments on this. 1) Interwoven into the chapter are facts and stats about the amount of money the US government gave Haile Selassie in order to lease this land, money the Emperor mostly spent on building up the largest army in Africa instead of investing in infrastructure, agriculture and industry, with the result that he ended up having loads of shiny airplanes which could fly over provinces of starving peasants. So there is ‘serious’ content among the blowjobs.

Nonetheless 2) the blowjob chapter crystallises your feeling that this book is not really a history of Eritrea, but more a series of magazine-style chapters about colourful topics or individuals (such as the chapter about the Italian administrator Martini and the English activist Sylvia Pankhurst), which don’t quite gel into a coherent narrative.

3) Most serious is the feeling that this approach of writing about glossy, magazine, feature-style subjects – interviews with badly behaved Yanks or Sylvia Pankhurst’s son – distracts her, and the narrative, from giving a basic, reliable account of the facts.

It’s only after the chapter about blow jobs and drinking games that we discover, almost in passing, that the same period, the late 1960s, saw the rise and rise of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) which waged a steadily mounting campaign of attacks against centre of Ethiopian power e.g. police stations. And that the Ethiopian police and army, in response, embarked on a savage campaign to quell the insurgents / guerrillas / freedom fighters in the time-old fashion of massacring entire villages thought to be supporting them, gathering all the men into the local church and setting it on fire, raping all the women, killing all their livestock, burning all their crops, the usual stuff.

For me, this is the important stuff I’d like to know more about, not the ‘four floors of whores’ popular with American GIs.

Religious division

And it was round about here that I became aware of another massive gap in Wrong’s account, which is a full explanation of Eritrea’s ethnic and in particular religious diversity. Apparently, the low-lying coastal area, and the main port, Massawa, was and is mostly Muslim in make-up, with mosques etc, whereas the plateau, and the capital, Asmara, are mostly Christian, churches etc.

Wrong’s account for some reason underplays and barely mentions either religion or ethnicity whereas, in the countries I’ve been reading about recently (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Rwanda, Congo), ethnic and religious divides are absolutely crucial to understanding their histories and, especially, their civil wars.

She only mentions very briefly, in passing, that it was ethnic difference which led to there being two Eritrean independence militias, the ELF and the ELPF. It was only from Wikipedia that I gathered the former was more Arab and Muslim, the latter more Christian or secular, and socialist. She nowhere explains the ideological or tactical differences between them. She nowhere names their leaders, gives histories of the movements or any manifestos or programs they published. All this Wrong herself has consigned to the ‘milky haze of amnesia’. Is she involved in an imperialist conspiracy to suppress the truth, I wonder? Aha. Thought so. It’s all an elaborate front.

Similarly, when the ELPF eventually eclipse the ELF to emerge as the main Eritrean independence militia, Wrong doesn’t explain how or why. Her description of this presumably important moment in rebel politics is described thus:

The EPLF, which emerged as the only viable rebel movement after a final clash with the ELF, built its society on defeat. (p.283)

That’s your lot. A bit more explanation and analysis would have been useful, don’t you think?

Key learnings

Each chapter focuses on a particular period of Eritrea’s modern (post-1890) history and Wrong often does this by looking in detail at key individuals who she investigates (if dead) or interviews (if living) in considerable detail.

Ferdinando Martini

Thus the early period of Italian colonisation is examined through the figure of Ferdinando Martini, governor of Eritrea from 1897 to 1907, who made heroic activities to modernise the country even as he endorsed Italy’s fundamentally racist laws. Wrong draws heavily on his 1920 literary masterpiece about his years as governor, ‘Il Diario Eritre’ which, of course, I’d never heard of before. Maybe Wrong thinks that almost all foreign literature has been sunk in ‘the milky haze of amnesia’ whereas I take the practical view that most publishers find most foreign publications commercially unviable and so not worth translating or publishing.

It was, apparently, Martini who gave the country its name, deriving it from the ancient Greek name for the Red Sea, Erythra Thalassa, based on the adjective ‘erythros’ meaning ‘red’.

It was Martini who commissioned the Massawa to Asmara train line, a heroic feat of engineering from the coast up into the steep central plateau, which Wrong describes in fascinating details and wasn’t completed during his time as governor.

Italian emigration

The Italian government hoped to export its ‘surplus population’ i.e. the rural poor from the South, to its African colonies but Wrong shows how this never panned out. Only about 1% of the Italian population travelled to its colonies compared to a whopping 40% who emigrated to America, creating one of America’s largest ethnic communities.

The Battle of Keren

Wrong’s account of the British defeat of the Italians in Eritrea focuses on a gritty description of the awful Battle of Keren, in March 1941, where British troops had to assault a steep escarpment of bare jagged rocks against well dug-in Italian (and native) troops, in relentless heat, with much loss of life. Once in control the British embarked on a scandalous policy of asset stripping and selling off huge amounts of the infrastructure which the Italians had so expensively and laboriously installed, including factories, schools, hospitals, post facilities and even railways tracks and sleepers.

Sylvia Pankhurst

Surprisingly, one of the most vocal critics of this shameful policy was Sylvia Pankhurst, daughter of the redoubtable Emmeline Pankhurst, the leading suffragette. Sylvia fell in love with Ethiopia and ran a high-profile campaign against Mussolini’s brutal invasion of 1936, demanding the British government intervene. After the war, her relentless pestering of her political contacts and the Foreign Office earned her the gratitude of the emperor Haile Selassie himself. Wrong estimates that the British stole, sold off, or shipped to her full colonies (Kenya, Uganda) getting on for £2 billion of assets (p.136). When she died, in 1960, aged 78, she was given a state funeral and buried in Addis Ababa cathedral. A lot of the material comes via her son, Richard Pankhurst, who was raised in Ethiopia, founder of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University, and who Wrong meets and interviews on several occasions.

John Spencer

Meetings with Spencer, an American who was international legal adviser to Haile Selassie. In the early 1950s the UN was worried (among many other pressing issues) with the future of Eritrea. There were three options: full independence; full integration into Ethiopia; federal status within Ethiopia. There were strong views on all sides. Independent commentators wondered whether Eritrea could ever be an economically viable state (good question since, 73 years later, it is still one of the poorest countries on earth). Ethiopians wanted complete assimilation in order to give them access to the Red Sea. As a canny, aggressive American lawyer, Spencer lobbied hard for the Ethiopian option with the result that he is remembered with hatred to this day in Eritrea.

Kagnew Listening Station

The Americans discovered the high Eritrean plateau was uniquely located to receive clear radio signals from all over the hemisphere. From the 1950s onwards they paid Selassie a hefty premium, plus military and development aid, for the right to build what ended up being some 19 separate listening stations. Ethiopia became the largest recipient of American aid in Africa. Wrong tells its story via interviews with half a dozen of the thousands of GIs who staffed it in the 1960s. She (repeatedly) blames them for ignoring and erasing the reality of the violent insurgency and brutal repression spreading throughout Eritrea. What does she expect a bunch of 20-something GIs to have done? Launched an independent peace mission?

Wrong works through interviews with Melles Seyoum and Asmerom to tell the story of the widely supported EPLF insurgency against the Ethiopian occupying forces.

Keith Wauchope

Similarly, she tells the story of the brutal Ethiopian crackdown of the 1970s through the eyes of Keith Wauchope, deputy principal officer at Asmara’s US consulate from 1975 to 1977. In particular the ‘Red Terror’ when the Ethiopian revolutionaries, like the French revolutionaries, Russian revolutionaries and Chinese revolutionaries before them, moved to eliminate all political opponents and even fellow revolutionaries who deviated even slightly from the party line. By this stage I’ve realised that the book doesn’t proceed through events and analysis but by moving from interviewee to interviewee.

Nafka

Bombed out of their towns and villages by the Soviet-backed Ethiopian regime’s brutal campaign, the EPLF withdrew to the high Eritrean plateau where they holed up for a decade. they developed a cult of total war, total commitment, even down to the details of combat wear (basic, functional), disapproval of romantic relationships between fighters. They built an entire underground town including hospitals and schools, the famous Zero school, around the highland town of Nafka, to evade Ethiopia’s Russian-supplied MIG jets.

Wrong has met and interviewed a number of ex-fighters. It comes over very clearly that she venerates them as, she says, did most of the other western journalists who made their way to the EPLF’s remote bases and were impressed by their discipline and commitment, not least to education, holding seminars and workshops about Marxism, Maoism, the Irish struggle, the Palestinian struggle and so on. Western journalists called them ‘the barefoot guerrilla army’. She calls these western devotees True Believers.

But she is candid enough to admit that the hidden redoubts of Nafka also nursed a fanatical sense of commitment and rectitude. This was the Marxist practice of self criticism and self control, which would translate into the overbearing authoritarianism the Eritrean government displayed once it won independence in 1993.

‘Eritrea is a militarized authoritarian state that has not held a national election since independence from Ethiopia in 1993. The People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), headed by President Isaias Afwerki, is the sole political party. Arbitrary detention is commonplace, and citizens are required to perform national service, often for their entire working lives. The government shut down all independent media in 2001.’ (Freedom House website, 2023)

Ah, not so cool and fashionable once they actually come to power.

John Berakis

In line with the rest of the book, the chapter about the EPLF’s long years in its secret underground bases and highland redoubts, is told / brought to life via the biography of John Berakis, real name Tilahun (p.299) who was, improbably enough, both a committed fighter but also a qualified chef. Wrong interviews him and hears all about improbable banquets and feasts and recipes which he cooked up for the Fighters.

Asmara tank graveyard

The huge graveyard of tanks and other military equipment on the outskirts of Asmara is the peg for describing the astonishing amount of hardware the Soviet Union gave to Ethiopia: at one point in 1978 Soviet aircraft bearing equipment were arriving every 20 minutes in Ethiopia. By the end of the Soviets’ support for the Derg, the Russians had sent nearly $9 billion in military hardware into Ethiopia , about $5,400 for every man, woman and child in the population (p.314).

She makes the point that the USSR’s influence was on the rise. In 1975 Angola and Mozambique both became independent under Marxist governments. Across Africa one-party rule was ripe for Soviet influence. Ethiopia, Yemen and Somalia all had Marxist governments. It felt like the tide of history was flowing Russia’s way. By contrast America, had been weakened and humiliated by its defeat in Vietnam which had promptly turned communist, as did Laos and Cambodia.

Mengistu Haile Mariam

Wrong profiles Mengistu, his personal grievances for being looked down on by Ethiopia’s racial elite, his slavish devotion to the USSR (he declared Brezhnev was like a father to him), busts of Marx on the table, erected the first statue of Lenin anywhere in Africa etc.

But, of course, over the years Mengistu slowly morphed into another African strongman, driving in his open-topped Cadillac through the hovels of Addis Ababa, eliminating all possible opponents, living in a miasma of paranoia, surrounded by courtiers and flunkeys, turning into Haile Selassie. During the catastrophic famine of 1983/84 Ethiopia continued to spend a fortune on its military, which had ballooned to almost 500,000 troops, and spent $50 million on the tenth anniversary of the overthrow of Selassie and their coming to power. Over a million Ethiopians died in the famine.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The arrival of Gorbachev in 1985 worried all the communist regimes and his coterie slowly changed the tone of political commentary, starting to question the huge amount of aid the USSR was giving to supposedly Marxist African regimes. Even so between 1987 and 1991 Moscow still sent Addis $2.9 billion in weaponry (p.327).

Yevgeny Sokurov

Wrong appears to have interviewed quite a few Russian diplomats and military men. Former major Yevgeny Sokurov has some savagely candid words about the USSR’s entire African policy:

‘Helping Mengistu, that arrogant monkey, was pointless…In Moscow there was a pathological desire to support these thieving, savage, African dictatorships. It was a waste of time.’ (quoted p.340)

Anatoly Adamashin

A really profound comment is made by Anatoly Adamashin, deputy foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev, who points out that the Cold War led both America and the USSR and the African countries themselves to believe they were engaged in a historic struggle between reactionary capitalism and revolutionary communism, but it was never really that: it was always wars between ethnically-based factions, or ambitious individuals, simply for power.

As with Mobutu (Zaire) or Mugabe (Zimbabwe) or Jonas Savimbi (Mozambique) or Eduardo dos Passos (Angola) or here, with Mengistu in Ethiopia, when the Cold War evaporated it revealed that most of those conflicts had been the crudest struggles to achieve and maintain power.

It’s such a powerful view because it comes from a former Soviet official i.e. not from what Wrong regards as the racist imperialist West.

Mengistu flees

As the EPLF closed in on the capital, Mengistu took a plane to Zimbabwe, where he was granted asylum by another bogus Marxist dictator, Robert Mugabe, given a farm (probably confiscated from the ghastly white colonists) and lived an allegedly pampered life for decades. During his rule over a million Ethiopians died in the famine, and over 500,000 in the wars and/or the Red Terror, or the forced relocation of millions of peasants which, of course, led to famine and starvation.

The Organisation of African Unity

Wrong delivers an entertainingly withering verdict on the Organisation of African Unity:

One of the most cynicism-inducing of events: the summit of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), that yearly get-together where insincere handshakes were exchanged, 29-year-old coup leaders got their first chance to play the international statesman, and the patriarchs of African politics politely glossed over the rigged elections, financial scandals and bloody atrocities perpetrated by their peers across the table. (p.357)

Even better, she describes it as ‘a complacent club of sclerotic dictators and psychopathic warlords’ (p.358).

Eritrean independence

In 1993 the population voted for independence and Eritrea became an independent country with its own political system, flag, army and so on. Five years of reconstruction and hundreds of thousands of exiles returned home. When war broke out again, Wrong characteristically doesn’t blame it on the new Ethiopian or Eritrean governments, the parties that actually went to war, but on the wicked imperialists:

The national character traits forged during a century of colonial and superpower exploitation were about to blow up in Eritrea’s face. (p.361)

It’s because of our legacy, apparently, that the Eritreans and Ethiopians went back to war, bombing and napalming and strafing each other’s citizens, killing 80,000 in the 2 years of war, 1998 to 2000. Two of the poorest countries in the world spent tens of millions of dollars trying to bomb each other into submission. Surely the leaders of those two countries have to shoulder at least some of the responsibility themselves?

The result of this second war was impoverishment for Eritrea which was rightly or wrongly seen as the main aggressor. Foreign investment dried up. Ethiopia imposed a trade blockade.

Afwerki Isaias

The man who rose to become secretary general of the ELPF, and then president of independent Eritrea in 1993. The trouble is that, 30 years later, he is still president, in the time-honoured African tradition. To quote Wikipedia:

Isaias has been the chairman of Eritrea’s sole legal political party, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice. As Eritrea has never had a functioning constitution, no elections, no legislature and no published budget, Isaias has been the sole power in the country, controlling its judiciary and military for over 30 years. Hence, scholars and historians have long considered him to be a dictator, described his regime as totalitarian, by way of forced conscription. The United Nations and Amnesty International cited him for human rights violations. In 2022, Reporters Without Borders ranked Eritrea, under the government of Isaias, second-to-last out of 180 countries in its Press Freedom Index, only scoring higher than North Korea.

Tens of thousands have fled one of the most repressive regimes in the world and the jaundiced reader is inclined to say: you fought for independence; you made huge sacrifices for independence; you won independence; at which point you handed all your rights over to a psychopathic dictator. You had the choice. You had the power. Don’t blame Italy. Don’t blame Britain. Don’t blame America. Blame yourselves.

Paul Collier’s view

Compare and contrast Wrong’s fleering, sarcastic, anti-western tone with Paul Collier’s discussion of Eritrea. Collier is an eminent development economist who is concerned to improve the lives of people in Africa here and now. He gives short shrift to third world rebel movements. In very stark contrast to Wrong’s 400 pages of grievance and complaint against the West, Collier’s account of Eritrea’s plight is brisk and no-nonsense:

The best organised diaspora movement of all was the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. The diaspora financed the war for thirty years and in 1992 they won. Eritrea is now an independent country. But did the war really achieve a liberation of the Eritrean people? In September 2001, after an unnecessary international war with Ethiopia, half the Eritrean cabinet wrote to the president, Isaias Afwerki, asking him to think again about his autocratic style of government. He thought about it and imprisoned them all. He then instituted mass conscription of Eritrean youth. Ethiopia demobilised, but not Eritrea. Eritrean youth may be in the army as much to protect the president from protest as to protect the country from Ethiopia. Many young Eritreans have left the country…Was such a liberation really worth thirty years of civil war?
(The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier, 2008 Oxford University Press paperback edition, page 23)

Or compare Wrong with the chapter describing the horrific punishments, prisons and reign of terror run by Afwerki, in Paul Kenyon’s 2018 book, ‘Dictatorland’. The horror of Afwerki’s rule is glossed over in Wrong’s account because of her relentless concern to blame the West for everything. These two other accounts provide a necessary balance, or just simple reminder that sometime African nations’ dire plights are less to do with colonial oppression 80 years ago, and more the result of gross mismanagement and terrible leadership in the much more recent past.

Eritrea timeline

16th century – Ottoman Empire extends its control over the Red Sea/Ethiopian/Eritrean coast.

1800s – The Ottoman Turks establish an imperial garrison at Massawa on the Red Sea coast.

1869 – An Italian priest buys the Red Sea port of Assab for Italy from the local sultan.

1870 – Italy becomes a unified nation.

1885 – The British rulers of Egypt help Italian forces capture the Red Sea port of Massawa. This was to prevent the French getting their hands on it.

1887 to 1911 – Italians construct the Massawa to Asmara railway.

1890 – Italy proclaims the colony of Eritrea.

1894 – revolt of the previously loyal chief, Bahta Hagos, crushed.

1896 – 1 March, Italian army trounced by the Emperor Menelik at the Battle of Adwa; the borders of Eritrea are agreed.

1912 – After defeating Ottoman forces Italy seizes the two provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, which it joins under the name Libya (a division which reopened after the ousting of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011, and last to this day).

1915 – Italy is persuaded by France and Britain to join their side in the First World War, with the promise of Trieste, southern Tyrol, northern Dalmatia and expansion of her territories in Africa

1922 – Mussolini seizes power, campaigning on many grievances one of which is the Allies never gave Italy the empire they promised

1930 – coronation of Ras Tafari as emperor of Ethiopia; he takes the regnal name Haile Selassie. The coronation is attended by Evelyn Waugh who writes a hilarious satirical account, which is also full of accurate details about the country, Remote People (1931). (As a side note Waugh’s book is extensively quoted in Giles Foden’s humorous account of First World War naval campaigns in Africa, ‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth’.)

1935 – Mussolini launches a campaign to conquer Ethiopia. The Emperor Haile Selassie addresses the League of Nations to complain about the invasion, the use of poison gas and atrocities, but is ignored.

1936 – Italian troops enter Addis Ababa and Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia are all incorporated into ‘Italian East Africa’. Italy institutes apartheid-style race laws stipulating segregation. Evelyn Waugh was sent to cover the war and turned his despatches into a book, which includes a surprising amount of straight history of Ethiopia, Waugh In Abyssinia (1936).

1941 – During the Second World War, British advance from Sudan into Eritrea, fighting the brutal Battle of Keren (February to March 1941), which Wrong describes in detail, featuring a map.

1941 to 1942 – Britain crudely strips Eritrea of all the facilities the Italians had spent their 5-year-imperial rule installing, removing factories, ports, even railways sleepers and tracks, stripping the place clean. Britain also keeps in place many of Italy’s race laws.

1945 to 1952 Britain administers Eritrea, latterly as a United Nations trust territory.

1948 – The UN Four Powers Commission fails to agree the future of Eritrea.

1950s – former suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst devoted her final decade (she died in 1960) to denouncing the asset stripping of both Eritrea and Ethiopia carried out by the British.

1950 – A fractious UN commission settles on the idea of making Eritrea a federal component of Ethiopia, which is ratified by the General Assembly in 1952 in Resolution 390 A (V). The US signals that it favours the integrated model because it needs a quiescent Ethiopia as location for its huge radio listening station.

1950s – Ethiopia slowly but steadily undermines Eritrea’s identity: closing its one independent newspaper; having its sky-blue flag replaced by the Ethiopian one; having its languages of Tigrinya and Arabic replaced by Amharic; downgrading the Eritrean parliament, the Baito, to a rubber stamp for the Emperor’s decisions.

1953 – The US and Ethiopia sign a 25-year lease on the Kagnew radio listening station.

1958 – The Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) is formed with a largely Muslim membership, looking to brothers in the Arab world.

The Eritrean war of Independence

1961 – First shots fired by ELF guerrillas, against a police station.

1962 – On 14 November 1962 members of the Baito were browbeaten and bribed into accepting full union and abolishing themselves i.e. Ethiopia annexed Eritrea without a shot being fired. A day of shame, a day of mourning, many of the Baito fled abroad. For the next few years the UN refused to acknowledge or reply to petitions, letters, legal requests from independence activists. The UN washed its hands and walked away.

1963 – Organisation of African Unity set up in Addis Ababa, largely at the Emperor’s initiative, and freezes African nations’ borders in place.

1967 – Full-scale guerrilla war. The Ethiopian army carries out numerous atrocities.

1970 – ELF splits and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) is formed, a secular socialist predominantly Christian highlanders. By the early 70s the liberation movements had secured some 95% of Eritrean territory.

1974 – Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie is overthrown in a slow-motion military coup (see ‘The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat’ by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński). A military junta calling itself the Dergue or Derg comes to power. After squabbling (and killing) among themselves, a forceful lieutenant, Mengistu Haile Mariam, emerges as its leader and driving force. The Derg declares Ethiopia a socialist state committed to Marxism-Leninism. It rejects Selassie’s alliance with the US and turns instead to the Soviet Union.

1975 – In response to increasing insurgent attacks, the Ethiopian army goes on the rampage in Asmara, slaughtering up to 3,000 civilians, then destroys over 100 villages, killing, burning, raping wherever they go.

1977 to 1978 – Massive Soviet support enable Ethiopian forces to reverse the EPLF’s hard-won gains, thus ensuring the war would double in length, continuing for another 14 years.

1978 – Somalia launches a campaign to seize the Ogaden region of Ethiopia which is now fighting two wars, in the north and east. Soviet ships and artillery mow down EPLF fighters, airplanes carpet bomb Eritrean villages.

1982 – Ethiopia launches a massive military assault named the Red Star Campaign in an effort to crush the rebels, but itself suffers heavy casualties.

1985 – Mikhael Gorbachev comes to power in the Soviet Union.

1988 – March: Battle of Afabet is the turning point of the war, when the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front smashes an armoured convoy and then takes the town with barely a shot fired. Wrong describes the surreal way the Ethiopian commanders destroyed their own armoured column, once it had been trapped in a steep valley, burning hundreds of their own troops to death. Basil Davidson on the BBC described it as the equivalent of the Viet Minh’s historic victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu (p.337). It is described in an article by Peter Worthington.

1989 – May: senior Ethiopian generals try to stage a coup the day after Mengistu flew to East Germany to plea for more arms. The coup was foiled, several key generals, 27 other senior staff and some 3,500 soldiers were executed in the month that followed, further weakening the demoralised Ethiopian army. The Soviets, fed up with supplying Ethiopia (and their other African ‘allies’) huge amounts of munitions, withdraw their ‘special advisers’. The last one leaves in autumn 1989.

1990 – February: The EPLF takes Massawa in a daring land and speedboat operation.

1991 – Spring: the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front captures the entire coast and moves on the Eritrean capital, Asmara. In the last few years disaffected Amharas and Omoros in central and southern Ethiopia had formed the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPDRF). Running parallel to Eritrea’s history, the equally rebellious province of Tigray had spawned the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in 1975. Now the three groups worked together to topple Mengistu.

Eritrean independence

1993 – In a UN-supervised referendum, 99.8% of Eritreans vote for independence.

1994 – Having won independence, the EPLF reconstituted itself as the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) and went onto establish one of the most autocratic, dictatorial regimes in the world.

1998 to 2000 – Eritrean-Ethiopian border clashes turn into a full-scale war which leaves some 70,000 people dead.

2001 – September: Eritrea’s president, Isaias Afwerki, closes the national press and arrests a group of opposition leaders who had called on him to implement a democratic constitution and hold elections.

END OF WRONG’S NARRATIVE

That’s as far as Wrong’s narrative covers. What follows is from the internet. There are loads of websites providing timelines.

2007 – Eritrea pulls out of regional body IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development) as IGAD member states back Ethiopian intervention in Somalia.

2008 June – Fighting breaks out between Djiboutian and Eritrean troops in the disputed Ras Doumeira border area. At least nine Djiboutian soldiers killed. The US condemns Eritrea, but Eritrea denies launching an attack.

2009 December – The UN imposes sanctions on Eritrea for its alleged support for Islamist insurgents in Somalia.

2010 June – Eritrea and Djibouti agree to resolve their border dispute peacefully.

2014 June – The UN Human Rights Council says about 6% of the population has fled the country due to repression and poverty.

2016 July – The UN Human Rights Council calls on the African Union to investigate Eritrean leaders for alleged crimes against humanity.

2017 July – UNESCO adds Asmara to its list of World Heritage sites, describing it as a well-preserved example of a colonial planned city.

Peace with Ethiopia

2018 July – Ethiopia and Eritrea end their state of war after Ethiopian diplomatic overtures.

2018 November – The UN Security Council ends nine years of sanctions on Eritrea, which had been imposed over allegations of support for al-Shabab jihadists in Somalia.


Credit

I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation by Michela Wrong was published in 2005 by Fourth Estate. References are to the 2005 Harper Perennial paperback edition.

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The Age of Empire: 1875 to 1914 by Eric Hobsbawm (1987)

Summary

This is a very mixed bag of a book. The first quarter or so is a thrilling global overview of the main trends and developments in industrial capitalism during the period 1875 to 1914, containing a vast array of fascinating and often thrilling facts and figures. But then it mutates into a series of long, turgid, repetitive, portentous, banal and ultimately uninformative chapters about social change, the arts, sciences, social sciences and so on, which are dreadful.

And underlying it all is Hobsbawm’s unconcealed contempt for the nineteenth century ‘bourgeoisie’ and their ‘bourgeois society’, terms he uses so freely and with so little precision that they eventually degenerate into just being terms of abuse.

And in his goal of insulting the 19th century ‘bourgeoisie’ as much as possible, Hobsbawm glosses over a huge range of crucial differences – between nations and regions, between political and cultural and religious traditions, between parties and politicians, between classes and even periods, yoking a fact from 1880 to one from 1900, cherry-picking from a vast range of information in order to make his sweeping Marxist generalisations and support the tendentious argument that ‘bourgeois society’ was fated to collapse because of its numerous ‘contradictions’.

But when you really look hard at the ‘contradictions’ he’s talking about they become a lot less persuasive than he wants them to be, and his insistence that ‘bourgeois society’ was doomed to collapse in a welter of war and revolution comes to seem like the partisan, biased reporting of a man who is selective in his facts and slippery in his interpretations.

Eventually you feel like you are drowning in a sea of spiteful and tendentious generalisations. I would recommend literally any other book on the period as a better guide, for example:

It is symptomatic of Hobsbawm’s ignoring specificity, detail and precision in preference for sweeping generalisations about his hated ‘bourgeois society’, that in this book supposedly ‘about’ imperialism, he mentions the leading imperialist politician in the world’s leading imperialist nation, Joseph Chamberlain, precisely once, and the leading British cultural propagandist of imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, also only once. These feel like glaring omissions.

When I read this book as a student I was thrilled by its huge perspectives and confident generalisations and breezily Marxist approach. It was only decades later, when I read detailed books about the scramble for Africa, or late-imperial China, or really engaged with Kipling’s works, that I realised how little I actually understood about this period and how much I had been seriously misled by Hobsbawm’s fine-sounding but, in the end, inadequate, superficial and tendentiously misleading account.

Introduction

The Age of Empire is the third and final volume in Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s trilogy of books covering what he termed ‘the long nineteenth century’, from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1798 to the start of the Great War in 1914. This third instalment covers the final 40 years, from 1875 to 1914.

In the previous book, The Age of Capital, Hobsbawm had amply demonstrated that he regards the third quarter of the nineteenth century as marking the triumph of the liberal ‘bourgeoisie’, of the ‘capitalist’ middle classes, in industry and technology and finance and politics and the arts.

Having seen off the attempt to overthrow existing regimes across continental Europe in the failed revolutions of 1848, the continent’s ruling classes experienced from 1850 onwards, a period of spectacular economic, technological, business and trade growth which continued on into the 1860s. This boom period was overseen by laissez-faire liberal governments in most countries and reflected in the widespread, optimistic belief that the steady stream of scientific, technological and industrial innovations would produce an endless progress upwards towards peace and prosperity. It was 25 years of what Hobsbawm insists on calling ‘liberal bourgeois triumph’.

It led to the confident conquest of the globe by the capitalist economy, carried by its characteristic class, the bourgeoisie, and under the banner of its characteristic intellectual expression, the ideology of liberalism. (p.9)

At the end of The Age of Capital he gave a short preview of what was coming up in the next era, and it is a major change in tone and subject. Whereas the pace of scientific and technological innovation accelerated, economically, politically and culturally the period which began around 1875 felt like a very different period, witnessing the collapse of much of the mid-century optimism.

Main features of the period

The Long Depression

The period witnessed a long depression, particularly in agriculture, which lasted from 1873 to 1896. A glut of agricultural produce led to a collapse in prices, rural poverty and loss of revenue for the landowning aristocracies. Cheaper food made life better for all those who lived in cities, so the overall impact was very mixed. Commentators at the time didn’t understand what had led to an apparent stalling in expansion and profits and historians have debated its precise causes ever since.

Protectionism

The Long Depression was the main trigger for many western governments to move rapidly from the mid-century free trade model associated with Liberalism towards protectionism, the imposition of protective tariffs on imports etc, especially by America.

New industries

The textile base of the first industrial revolution continued to be important (witness Britain’s huge exports of cotton to its captive markets in India) but the main industrial economies entered a new era driven by new sources of power (electricity and oil, turbines and the internal combustion engine), exploiting new, science-based materials (steel [which became a general index for industrialisation and modernisation, p.35], alloys, non-ferrous metals), accompanied by numerous discoveries in organic chemistry (for example, new dyes and ways of colouring which affected everything from army uniforms to high art).

Monopoly-capitalism

The depression and the consumer explosion led to small and medium-sized companies being replaced by large industrial corporations, cartels, trusts, monopolies (p.44).

New managerial class

The age of small factories run by their founders and family was eclipsed by the creation of huge industrial complexes themselves gathered into regions linked by communications and transport. Hobsbawm mentions the vast industrial conurbation taking shape in the Ruhr region of Germany or the growth of the steel industry around Pittsburgh in America. The point is that these operations became far too large for one man and his son to run; they required managers experienced at managing industrial operations at scale, and so this gave rise to a new class of high level managers and executives. And to the beginnings of management ‘theory’, epitomised by the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor (born 1865 in Pennsylvania) which introduced concepts like, to quote Wikipedia:

analysis; synthesis; logic; rationality; empiricism; work ethic; efficiency and elimination of waste; standardization of best practices; disdain for tradition preserved merely for its own sake or to protect the social status of particular workers with particular skill sets; the transformation of craft production into mass production; and knowledge transfer between workers and from workers into tools, processes, and documentation.

Population growth

Europe’s population rose from 290 million in 1870 to 435 million in 1910, America’s from 38.5 million to 92 million. (All told, America’s population multiplied over five times from 30 million in 1800 to 160 million by 1900.)

Consumer capitalism

This huge population explosion led to a rapid expansion of domestic consumer markets (p.53). There was still much widespread poverty in the cities, but there was also an ever-growing middle and lower-middle-class keen to assert its status through its possessions. This led to an fast-expanding market for cheap products, often produced by the new techniques of mass production, epitomised by the radical industrial organising of Henry Ford who launched his Model T automobile in 1907.

Department stores and chain stores

Another symbol of this explosion of consumer culture was the arrival of the department store and the chain store in the UK (p.29). For example, Thomas Lipton opened his first small grocery shop in Glasgow in 1871 and by 1899 had over 500 branches, selling the characteristic late-Victorian product, tea, imported from Ceylon (p.53; British tea consumption p.64).

Or take Whiteleys, which began as a fancy goods shop opened in 1863 at 31 Westbourne Grove by William Whiteley, employing two girls to serve and a boy to run errands. By 1867 it had expanded to a row of shops containing 17 separate departments. Whiteley continued to diversify into food and estate agency, building and decorating and by 1890 employed over 6,000 staff. Whiteleys awed contemporaries by its scale and regimentation: most of the staff lived in company-owned male and female dormitories, having to obey 176 rules and working 7 am to 11 pm, six days a week.

Mass advertising

The arrival of a mass consumer market for many goods and services led to an explosion in the new sector of advertising. Many writers and diarists of the time lament the explosion of ads in newspapers, magazines and, most egregious of all, on the new billboards and hoardings which started going up around cities.

The poster

Hoardings required posters. The modern poster was brought to a first pitch of perfection during what critics consider ‘the golden age of the poster’ in the 1890s (p.223) (something I learned a lot about at the current exhibition of the poster art of John Hassell at the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner).

Hire purchase and modern finance

New ways for the financially squeezed lower middle classes to pay for all this were invented, notably hire-purchase or instalment payments (p.49).

New popular technologies

Entirely new technologies were invented during the 1880s and 1890s, the most notable being the internal combustion engine and the car, the bicycle, cinema, telephone, wireless and light bulb (pages 19 and 28 and 53).

Competition for resources

New discoveries in industrial chemistry and processes required more recherché raw materials – oil, rubber, rare metals such as manganese, tin and nickel (p.63). The booming consumer market also developed a taste for more exotic foodstuffs, specifically fruits, bananas, cocoa. (Apparently it was only during the 1880s that the banana became widely available and popular in the West.) Where was all this stuff found? In the non-European world.

Imperialism

Growing need for all these resources and crops led to increasing competition to seize territories which contained them. Hence the 1880s and 1890s are generally seen as the high point of Western imperialism, leading up to the so-called Scramble for Africa in the 1880s.

(Interestingly, Hobsbawm notes that the word ‘imperialism’, used in its modern sense, occurs nowhere in Karl Marx’s writings, and only became widely used in the 1890s, many commentators remarking [and complaining] about its sudden ubiquity, p.60.)

Globalisation

During the 1860s and 70s the world became for the first time fully ‘globalised’, via the power of trade and commerce, but also the physical ties of the Railway and the Telegraph (p.13).

The major fact about the nineteenth century is the creation of a single global economy, progressively reaching into the most remote corners of the world, an increasingly dense web of economic transactions, communications and movements of goods, money and people linking the developed countries with each other and with the undeveloped world. (p.62)

During the 1880s and 1890s this process was intensified due to the growth of direct competition between the powers for colonies and their raw materials. Until the 1870s Britain ruled the waves. During this decade international competition for territories to exploit for their raw resources and markets became more intense (p.51). Imperialism.

A world divided

The final mapping of the world, its naming and definitions, led inevitably to the division of the world into ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped’ parts, into ‘the advanced and the backward’.

For contemporaries, the industrialised West had a duty to bring the benefits of civilisation and Christianity to the poor benighted peoples who lived in all the ‘undeveloped’ regions. Hobsbawm, with the benefit of hindsight, says that the representatives of the developed part almost always came as ‘conquerors’ to the undeveloped part whose populations thus became, in Hobsbawm’s phrase, ‘victims’ of international capitalism.

On this Marxist reading, the imperial conquerors always distorted local markets to suit themselves, reducing many populations to plantation labour reorganised to produce the raw materials the West required, and eagerly helped by the tiny minorities in each undeveloped country which were able to exploit the process and rise to the top as, generally, repressive local rulers (pages 31, 56, 59).

In the second half of the twentieth century, many nations which had finally thrown off the shackles of colonialism found themselves still ruled by the descendants of these collaborationist elites, who modelled themselves on their former western rulers and still ran their countries for the benefit of themselves and their foreign sponsors. Further, truly nationalist revolutions were required, of which the most significant, in my lifetime, was probably the overthrow of the American-backed Shah of Iran by Islamic revolutionaries in 1978.

New working class militancy

Working class militancy went into abeyance in the decades 1850 to 1875, politically defeated in 1848 and then made irrelevant by a general raising of living standards in the mid-century boom years, much to Marx and Engels’ disappointment.

But in the 1880s it came back with a vengeance. Across the developed world a new generation of educated workers led a resurgence in working class politics, fomented industrial unrest, and a significant increase in strikes. There was much optimistic theorising about the potential of a complete or ‘general’ strike to bring the entire system to a halt, preliminary to ushering in the joyful socialist paradise.

New socialist political parties, some established in the 1860s or 1870s, now found themselves accumulating mass membership and becoming real powers in the land, most notably the left-wing German Social Democratic Party, which was the biggest party in the Reichstag by 1912 (chapter 5 ‘Workers of the World’).

Incorporation of working class demands and parties into politics

The capitalist class and ‘its’ governments found themselves forced to accede to working class demands, intervening in industries to regulate pay and conditions, and to sketch out welfare state policies such as pensions and unemployment benefit.

Again, Germany led the way, with its Chancellor, Bismarck, implementing a surprisingly liberal series of laws designed to support workers, including a Health Insurance Bill (1883), an Accident Insurance Bill (1884), an Old Age and Disability Insurance Bill (1889) – although, as everyone knew, he did this chiefly to steal the thunder from the German socialist parties.

Whatever the motives, the increasing intervention by governments across Europe into the working hours, unemployment and pension arrangements of their working classes were all a world away from the laissez-faire policies of the 1850s and 60s. Classical liberalism thought the forces of the market should be left entirely to themselves and would ineluctably resolve all social problems. By the 1880s it was clear to everyone that this was not the case and had instead produced widespread immiseration and poverty which states needed to address, if only to ensure social stability, and to neutralise the growing threat from workers’ parties.

Populism and blood and soil nationalism

But the rise of newly class-conscious workers’ parties, often with explicit agendas to overthrow the existing ‘bourgeois’ arrangements of society, and often with an internationalist worldview, triggered an equal and opposite reaction: the birth of demagogic, anti-liberal and anti-socialist, populist parties.

These harnessed the tremendous late-century spread of a new kind of aggressive nationalism which emphasised blood and soil and national language and defined itself by excluding ‘outsiders. (Chapter 6 ‘Waving Flags: Nations and Nationalism’).

Some of these were harmless enough, like Cymru Fydd, founded in Wales in 1886. Some would lead to armed resistance, like the Basque National Party founded 1886. Some became embroiled in wider liberation struggles, such as the Irish Gaelic League founded 1893. When Theodor Herzl founded Zionism with a series of articles about a Jewish homeland in 1896 he can little have dreamed what a seismic affect his movement would have in the second half of the twentieth century.

But the point is that, from the time of the French Revolution through to the 1848 revolutions, nationalism had been associated with the political left, from La Patrie of the Jacobins through the ‘springtime of the peoples’ of the 1848 revolutionaries.

Somehow, during the 1870s and 80s, a new type of patriotism, more nationalistic and more aggressive to outsiders and entirely associated with the political Right, spread all across Europe.

Its most baleful legacy was the crystallisation of centuries-old European antisemitism into a new and more vicious form. Hobsbawm makes the interesting point that the Dreyfus Affair, 1894 to 1906, shocked liberals across Europe precisely because the way it split France down the middle revealed the ongoing presence of a stupid prejudice which bien-pensant liberals thought had been consigned to the Middle Ages, eclipsed during the Enlightenment, long buried.

Instead, here it was, back with a vengeance. Herzl wrote his Zionist articles partly in response to the Dreyfus Affair and to the advent of new right-wing parties such as Action Francaise, set up in 1898 in response to the issues of identity and nationhood thrown up by the affair. (In a way, maybe the Dreyfus Affair was comparable to the election of Donald Trump, which dismayed liberals right around the world by revealing the racist, know-nothing bigotry at the heart of what many people fondly and naively like to think of as a ‘progressive’ nation.)

But it wasn’t just the Jews who were affected. All sorts of minorities in countries and regions all across Europe found themselves victimised, their languages and dialects and cultural traditions under pressure or banned by (often newly founded) states keen to create their own versions of this new, late-century, blood and soil nationalism.

The National Question

In fact this late-nineteenth century, super-charged nationalism was such a powerful force that socialist parties all across Europe had to deal with the uncomfortable fact that it caught the imagination of many more members of the working classes than the socialism which the left-wing parties thought ought to be appealing to them.

Hobsbawm’s heroes Lenin and ‘the young Stalin’ (Stalin – yes, definitely a man to admire and emulate, Eric) were much concerned with the issue. In fact Stalin was asked by Lenin in 1913 to write a pamphlet clarifying the Bolsheviks’ position on the subject, Marxism and the National Question. Lenin’s concern reflected the fact that all across Europe the effort to unify the working class into a revolutionary whole was jeopardised by the way the masses were much more easily rallied in the name of nationalistic ambitions than the comprehensive and radical communist overthrow of society which the socialists dreamed of.

In the few years before Stalin wrote, the Social Democratic Party of Austria had disintegrated into autonomous German, Czech, Polish, Ruthenian, Italian and Slovene groupings, exemplifying the way what ought to be working class, socialist solidarity was increasingly undermined by the new nationalism.

Racism

Related to all these topics was widespread racism or, as Hobsbawm puts it:

  • Racism, whose central role in the nineteenth century cannot be overemphasised. (p.252)

This is the kind of sweeping generalisation which is both useful but questionable, at the same time. Presumably Hobsbawm means that racism was one of the dominant ideologies of the period, but where, exactly? In China? Paraguay? Samoa?

Obviously he means that racist beliefs grew increasingly dominant through all strands of ‘bourgeois’ Western ideology as the century progressed, but even this milder formulation is questionable. In Britain the Liberals consistently opposed imperialism. Many Christian denominations in all nations very powerfully opposed racism. For example, it was the incredibly dedicated work of the Quakers which underpinned Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807.The missionaries who played such a vital role in funding expeditions into Africa did so to abolish the slave trade there and because they thought Africans were children of God, like us.

A key point of the Dreyfus Affair was not that it was a storming victory for antisemites but the reverse: it proved that a very large part of the French political and commenting classes, as well as the wider population, supported Dreyfus and condemned antisemitism.

It is one thing to make sweeping generalisations about the racism which underpinned and long outlasted the slave system in the American South, which Hobsbawm doesn’t hesitate to do. But surely, in the name of accuracy and real historical understanding, you have to point out the equal and opposite force of anti-racism among the well organised, well-funded and widely popular anti-slavery organisations, newspapers and politicians in the North.

I can see what Hobsbawm’s driving at: as the nineteenth century progressed two types of racism emerged ever more powerfully:

1. In Europe, accompanying the growth of late-century nationalism went an increasingly bitter and toxic animosity against, and contempt for, people identified as ‘outsiders’ to the key tenets nationalists included in their ideology (that members of the nation must speak the same language, practice the same religion, look the same etc), most obviously the Jews, but plenty of other ‘minorities’, especially in central and eastern Europe, suffered miserably. And the Armenians in Turkey, right at the end of Hobsbawm’s period.

2. In European colonies, the belief in the intrinsic racial superiority of white Europeans became increasingly widespread and was bolstered in the later period by the spread of various bastardised forms of Darwinism. (I’ve read in numerous accounts that the Indian Revolt of 1857 marked a watershed in British attitudes, with the new men put in charge maintaining a greater distance from their subjects than previously and how, over time, they came to rationalise this into an ideology of racial superiority.)

I don’t for a minute deny any of this. I’m just pointing out that Hobsbawm’s formulation is long on rousing rhetoric and short on any of the specifics about how racist ideology arose, was defined and played out in actual policies of particular western nations, in specific times and places – the kind of details which would be useful, which would aid our understanding.

And I couldn’t help reflecting that if he thinks racism was central to the 19th century, then what about the twentieth century? Surely the twentieth century eclipses the nineteenth on the scale of its racist ideologies and the terrible massacres it prompted, from the Armenian genocide, the Jewish Holocaust, the Nazi Ostplan to wipe out all the Slavs in Europe, the Japanese massacres in China, the anti-black racism which dominated much of American life, the Rwandan genocide, and so on.

Hobsbawm confidently writes about ‘the universal racism of the bourgeois world’ (p.289) but the claim, although containing lots of truth a) like lots of his other sweeping generalisations, tends to break down on closer investigation and b) elides the way that there were a lot of other things going on as well, just as there were in the twentieth century.

The New Woman

In 1894 Irish writer Sarah Grand used the term ‘new woman’ in an influential article, to refer to independent women seeking radical change and, in response, the English writer Ouida (Maria Louisa Rame) used the term as the title of a follow-up article (Wikipedia).

Hobsbawm devotes a chapter to the rise of women during the period 1875 to 1914. He makes a number of points:

Feminism

The number of feminists and suffragettes was always tiny, not least because they stood for issues which only interested middle-class women, then as now. The majority of British women were poor to very poor indeed, and most simply wanted better working and living conditions and pay. It was mostly upper-middle-class women who wanted the right to vote and access to the professions and universities like their fathers and brothers.

The more visible aspects of women’s emancipation were still largely confined to women of the middle class… In countries like Britain, where suffragism became a significant phenomenon, it measured the public strength of organised feminism, but in doing so it also revealed its major limitation, an appeal primarily confined to the middle class. (p.201)

Upper class feminism

It is indicative of the essentially upper-class nature of suffragism and feminism that the first woman to be elected to the UK House of Commons was Constance Georgine Gore-Booth, daughter of Sir Henry Gore-Booth, 5th Baronet, and Georgina, Lady Gore-Booth.

Nancy Astor

In fact, as an Irish Republican, Constance refused to attend Westminster, with the result that the first woman MP to actually sit in the House of Commons, was the American millionairess, Nancy Astor, who took her seat after winning a by-election for the Conservative Party in 1919. Formally titled Viscountess Astor, she lived with her American husband, Waldorf Astor, in a grand London house, No. 4 St. James’s Square, or spent time at the vast Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire which Waldorf’s father bought the couple as a wedding present. Hardly the stuff of social revolutions, is it? The exact opposite, in fact. Reinforcing wealth and privilege.

Rentier feminism

In the same way, a number of the most eminent women of the day lived off inherited money and allowances. They were rentiers, trustafarians aka parasites. When Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman writer needed ‘a room of her own’ what she actually meant was an income of about £500 a year, ideally provided by ‘the family’ i.e. Daddy. The long-running partnership of the founders of the left-wing Fabian Society, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, was based on the £1,000 a year settled on her by her father at her marriage i.e. derived from the labour of others, mostly working class men (p.185).

New secretarial jobs for women

Alongside the rise of a new managerial class, mentioned above, the 1880s and 1890s saw the rise of new secretarial and administrative roles, what Hobsbawm neatly calls ‘a tribute to the typewriter’ (p.201). In 1881 central and local government in Britain employed 7,000 women; by 1911 that number was 76,000. Many women went into these kinds of secretarial jobs, and also filled the jobs created by the spread of the new department and chain stores. So these years saw a broad social change as many middle-class and lower middle-class single women and wives were able to secure reasonable white collar jobs in ever-increasing numbers (p.200).

Women and education

Education began to be offered to the masses across Europe during the 1870s and 80s, with Britain’s patchy 1870 Education Act followed by an act making junior school education compulsory in 1890. Obviously this created a huge new demand for schoolteachers and this, also, was to become a profession which women dominated, a situation which continues to this day. (In the UK in 2019, 98% of all early years teachers are women, 86% of nursery and primary teachers are women, 65% of secondary teachers are women. Overall, 75.8% of all grades of school teacher in the UK are female).

Secretarial and admin, shop staff, and schoolteachers – the pattern of women dominating in these areas was set in the 1880s and 1890s and continues to this day (p.201).

Women and religion

Hobsbawm makes one last point about women during this period which is that many, many more women were actively involved in the Christian church than in feminist or left-wing politics: women were nuns, officiants in churches, and supporters of Christian parties.

Statistically the women who opted for the defence of their sex through piety enormously outnumbered those who opted for liberation. (p.210)

I was surprised to learn that many women in France were actively against the vote being given to women, because they already had a great deal of ‘soft’ social and cultural power under the existing system, and actively didn’t want to get drawn into the worlds of squabbling men, politics and the professions.

Even within the bourgeois liberal society, middle class and petty-bourgeois French women, far from foolish and not often given to gentle passivity, did not bother to support the cause of women’s suffrage in large numbers. (p.209)

Feminism, then as now, claimed to speak for all women, a claim which is very misleading. Many women were not feminists, and many women were actively anti-feminist in the sense that they devoutly believed in Christian, and specifically Catholic, values, which allotted women clear duties and responsibilities as wives and mothers in the home, but also gave them cultural capital, privileges and social power.

These anti-feminists were far from stupid. They realised that a shift to more secular or socialist models would actually deprive them of much of this soft power. Or they just opposed secular, socialist values. Just as more than 50% of white American women voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and did so again in 2020.

Sport

Hobsbawm mentions sport throughout the book. I knew that a lot of sports were given formal rules and their governing bodies founded during this era – the Football League founded in 1888, Rugby Football Union founded 1871, Lawn Tennis Association founded 1888. I knew that tennis and golf in particular quickly became associated with the comfortably off middle classes, as they still are to this day.

But I hadn’t realised that these sports were so very liberating for women. Hobsbawm includes posters of women playing golf and tennis and explains that clubs for these sports became acceptable meeting places for young women whose families could be confident they would be meeting ‘the right sort’ of middle class ‘people like them’. As to this day. The spread of these middle class sports significantly opened up the number of spaces where women had freedom and autonomy.

The bicycle

Another new device which was an important vehicle for women’s freedom was the bicycle, which spread very quickly after its initial development in the 1880s, creating bicycle clubs and competitions and magazines and shops across the industrialised world, particularly liberating for many middle class women whom it allowed to travel independently for the first time.

Victorian Women's Cyclewear: The Ingenious Fight Against Conventions - We Love Cycling magazine

The arts and sciences

I haven’t summarised Hobsbawm’s lengthy sections about the arts and literature because, as a literature graduate, I found them boring and obvious and clichéd (Wagner was a great composer but a bad man; the impressionists revolutionised art by painting out of doors etc).

Ditto the chapters about the hard and social sciences, which I found long-winded, boring and dated. In both Age of Capital and this volume, the first hundred pages describing the main technological and industrial developments of the period are by far the most interesting and exciting bits, and the texts go steadily downhill after that.


Credit

The Age of Empire: 1875 to 1914 by Eric Hobsbawm was published in 1975 by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. All references are to the 1985 Abacus paperback edition.

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  • The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor (2006) Comprehensive account of the Spanish civil war with much detail on how the Stalin-backed Spanish communist party put more energy into eliminating its opponents on the Left than fighting the fascists, with the result that Franco won the civil war.
  • Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938) Orwell’s eye-witness account of how the Stalin-backed 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 during the communist purges.

Communism in England

The Square Egg and Other Sketches by Saki (1924)

Eight amusing short pieces by Hector Hugh Munro (pen name Saki) who was shot dead by a sniper while serving on the Western Front during the First World War. These last few pieces were collected and published posthumously in 1924.

The Square Egg: a badger’s eye view of the mud war in the trenches

The first few pages are a humorous description of life in the First World War trenches, whose main points can be summarised as:

  • snuffling around in the mud is like being a badger
  • though engaged in a titanic struggle against one of the greatest armies in the world, the average soldier thinks about the enemy relatively little
  • the subject which does consume the soldier’s every waking minute is the mud and how to avoid it; now the narrator knows what it’s like to be one of those animals you see at the zoo wallowing in muddy enclosures
  • he describes the nature of the many estaminets just behind the front lines, a cross between coffee houses and bars, and the way they always manage to have small children running round and getting in the way

At which point the text morphs into an anecdote about a chap he met in such an estaminet, a shifty French bloke who talked to him about eggs, specifically the way he’s noticed one of the many hens kept by his aunt lays eggs with the hint of angles. Consider how, through a programme of selective breeding, one could eventually create hens which produce only square eggs! Well, this guy claims to have done just that!! (Saki’s narrator makes wry, sardonic references under his breath).

The shifty Frenchie then explains how he had set up a thriving square-egg business but then came the war, he has been sent to the Front and his aunt is now selling his square eggs without any special consideration about keeping the breeding line secure and keeping the money she owes him. Therefore he has decided to take her to court to stop her, but the law is so expensive, monsieur. So, could Saki please lend him a small sum towards his legal fees, 80 francs should do it! The whole thing is, in other words, a scam.

This was a mildly amusing story which confirmed my sense of how many Saki’ stories are set on farms or involve farmyard animals.

Birds of the Western Front

These texts written at the Front highlight, almost exaggerate, Saki’s characteristic upper class nonchalance; everything is cast into an ironical manner which, for example, amuses itself by making elaborate and ironic comparisons. Thus, since the war began:

Rats and mice have mobilized and swarmed into the fighting line, and there has been a partial mobilization of owls, particularly barn owls, following in the wake of the mice, and making laudable efforts to thin out their numbers. What success attends their hunting one cannot estimate; there are always sufficient mice left over to populate one’s dug-out and make a parade-ground and race-course of one’s face at night.

Crows and rooks have become habituated to shellfire and machine guns. Drolly, Saki describes observing a pair of crows fighting a pair of sparrowhawks while above them the same number of English and German airplanes were fighting. Nature red in tooth and claw. He observes that magpies have been bereft of the poplar trees they used to love to nest in, and so on with further observations about buzzards, kestrels, larks and a hen-chaffinch which he noticed unaccountably hanging around a wrecked woodland, even during the most intense bombardment.

He ends with the sardonic observation that English gamekeepers as a breed believe their precious gamebirds and pheasants and whatnot must be protected from the slightest disturbance. They should come to the Western Front and learn how hardy birds are in face of even the most ruinous disruption.

The Gala Programme: an unrecorded episode in Roman history

The scene shifts abruptly from the present war, jumping back in time 2,000 years to ancient Rome.

It is the birthday of the Roman Emperor Placidus Superbus who has arrived at the Circus Maximus to enjoy the games, but just as the first entertainment is about to begin – a thrilling chariot race – hundreds of shouting women are lowered by ropes into the track and completely prevent the race taking place.

‘Who are these furies?’ the emperor demands. ‘The dreaded Suffragetae,’ his miserable Master of Ceremonies explains. The emperor has a brainwave. ‘Skip the chariot race,’ he tells the MC, ‘let’s go straight to part two, the combat of wild animals.’ And so a horde of beasts are let loose among the protesting women, to really very entertaining effect :).

Takes its place with the other 3 or 4 Saki stories entirely dedicated to commenting on / ridiculing the suffragettes.

The Infernal Parliament

Bavton Bidderdale (a typically Sakian preposterous name) dies, but the medical authorities contest the exact cause of death etc and so, although his soul has gone down to hell, the officials there keep it in a kind of limbo until the paperwork is sorted out.

While he’s waiting, the officials offer to show him round and suggest taking a tour of the infernal Parliament, a relatively new innovation. As he arrives the infernal Parliament is having a debate to lodge a formal complaint with the human race for describing events or activities as ‘devilish’ or ‘fiendish’ when they are, in fact, nothing of the sort, but entirely human.

Other details obviously mock contemporary parliamentary debates (and, in the final passage, mock a living playwright, possibly George Bernard Shaw) but these references are lost without some kind of annotation. You can see the comic intention but it would have more bite if included in my dream idea of an ‘Annotated Saki’.

The Achievement of the Cat

A wonderfully suave and ironical tribute to the qualities of the domestic cat:

It is, indeed, no small triumph to have combined the untrammelled liberty of primeval savagery with the luxury which only a highly developed civilization can command; to be lapped in the soft stuffs that commerce has gathered from the far ends of the world; to bask in the warmth that labour and industry have dragged from the bowels of the earth; to banquet on the dainties that wealth has bespoken for its table, and withal to be a free son of nature, a mighty hunter, a spiller of life-blood. This is the victory of the cat.

The Old Town of Pskoff

Not a story at all, but a straightforward description of how this city in west Russia, now referred to as Pskov, represents a kinder, quainter, more colourful and older Russia than the unpleasantly nouveau riche style of Petersburg. Sounds like it’s based on a real visit and the real views of Hector Munro who had been a foreign correspondent in Russia and, indeed, wrote a history of it.

Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Business

The last appearance of Clovis Sangrail, the witty, ironic, ‘languidly malicious’ young man who embodies key aspects of Saki’s droll, langorous, ironic humour.

This one is a short squib, a return to the format of his early Reginald ‘stories’, and amounts simply to a 2-page speech by Clovis, declaiming, fairly predictably, against the so-called Romance of business. In his view, business is deadly dull, which is why all the best adventures have been written about the young men who ran away from it:

The romance has all been the other way, with the idle apprentice, the truant, the runaway, the individual who couldn’t be bothered with figures and book-keeping and left business to look after itself.

The Comments of Moung Ka

Moung Ka is a wise man who lives by the banks of the River Irrawaddy (whichm, upon looking it up, I discover is the longest river in modern Burma).

The opening description of the landscape and birds where Moung Ka lives is a final reminder that, although people routinely describe Saki as a deliciously malicious critic of Edwardian upper class society, he was also obsessed with animals, and wrote a lot of vivid descriptions of landscapes and the wild animals living in them. A collection of excerpts titled ‘Saki’s nature and animal writing’ would be surprisingly extensive.

In the tall reed growth by the riverside grazing buffaloes showed in patches of dark slaty blue, like plums fallen amid long grass, and in the tamarind trees that shaded Moung Ka’s house the crows, restless, raucous-throated, and much-too-many, kept up their incessant afternoon din, saying over and over again all the things that crows have said since there were crows to say them.

Anyway, the story, such as it is, is another political satire. Old Moung Ka reads the paper which is brought up the river and then interprets its contents for his village followers. He comments on two related pieces of news. The recently announced division of Bengal by the (British-run) government of India has been cancelled. In 1905 Lord Curzon divided Bengal along sectarian lines, into a Hindu and Muslim province. The policy was a disaster, leading to an outburst of terrorism and sectarian violence and so was reversed in 1911. This is the news Moung Ka reads out to his followers.

And contrasts with the fact that the newspaper tells him that the United Kingdom itself is about to be partitioned. It isn’t explained what he means so it took me a moment to realise he must have been referring to the granting to Ireland of home rule, which led to vehement protests from Protestant Ulster and a serious crisis which dominated Edwardian politics from 1911 up to the outbreak of the Great War.

The very last joke in this, Saki’s very last published story, is a satirical and political one. Earlier Moung Ka had explained to his followers that Britain is what is called a Democracy. One of the followers doesn’t understand how come, if Britain is a Democracy, it can enact such a big and impactful decision  (the partitioning of Ireland) without consulting its people.

Moung Ka clarifies – and this, one imagines, is the point of the whole ‘story’ – that he didn’t say Britain was a democracy; he said Britain is what is called a democracy. The implication being that its alleged democracy is in fact a sham. The implication being that Saki is a Unionist and considers the prolonged political haggling about granting Ireland independence to be squalid and destructive.

There’s plenty of meat in this short text to chew over, it confirmed my sense of Saki as an unrepentant Unionist and conservative and anti-suffragette reactionary, and review in my mind the reactionary views which crop up periodically through the short stories and underpin the entire novel When William Came.

Then again, the world is more full than ever before of division, dispute and angry argument. For my part, I like to take leave of this long journey through Saki’s complete works by remembering the grazing water buffalo like plums fallen amid long grass, and the eternal crows in the tamarind trees.


Saki’s works

The Toys of Peace by Saki (1919)

Beryl, Mrs. Gaspilton, had always looked indulgently on the country as a place where people of irreproachable income and hospitable instincts cultivated tennis-lawns and rose-gardens and Jacobean pleasaunces, wherein selected gatherings of interested week-end guests might disport themselves.
(For the Duration of the War)

‘I’m afraid there is nowhere for you to sit,’ I said coldly; ‘the verandah is full of goats.’
(The Guests)

Biographical sketch

Saki, or to give him his proper name, Hector Hugh Munro, volunteered for the army as soon as the Great War broke out in August 1914. Born in December 1870, he was 43 at the time and so, officially, over-age to enlist. It took a lot of effort and pulling strings before he managed to secure a place in the Second King Edward’s Horse. Finding a cavalry regiment too demanding for his age, Hector later transferred to an infantry regiment, the the 22nd Royal Fusiliers, and finally made his way to the Western Front in 1916.

The most striking fact about Saki’s war service was that although, because of his class and education, he was repeatedly offered the chance of a commission or a cushy job at the rear, he turned all these offers down and preferred serving as a common private, and then lance sergeant, among the men he grew to love. He was shot through the head at Beaumont-Hamel on the morning of 14 November 1916.

All this and more is detailed in a biographical note by Rothay Reynolds which stands at the head of this collection of 31 of Saki’s short stories which was published posthumously in 1919. And it adds considerable bite to the first story in the set, which gives its name to the entire volume and is about the pointlessness of denying men and boys’ natural instinct for war.


The stories

For each of the stories I give the briefest possible summary and sometimes add a quote which exemplifies Saki’s dry and macabre humour, often, especially when casually dealing with exotic animals, bordering on the surreal.

The Toys of Peace

The title is quite literal. Eleanor Bope complains to her brother, Harvey, that her sons (‘Eric, not eleven yet, and Bertie, only nine-and-a-half’) only ever play at war, with soldier toys. Next time he visits can he please bring some toys which emphasise the virtues of peace? So, in a comic scene, on his next visit, Harvey unveils to the two boys such delights as models of the Manchester branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association, of a school of art and a public library, and little figures of John Stuart Mill, Robert Raikes (the founder of Sunday schools), a sanitary inspector, a district councillor and an official of the Local Government Board. He leaves the boys with their perplexing toys of peace, to take a break in the library. Half an hour later Harvey returns to find the boys have converted the models into forts and castles, repainted the figures as soldiers with lashings of red paint for blood, and are acting out gruesome battle scenes.

Louise (Clovis)

Jane Thropplestance is the most forgetful woman in the world. When she returns from a shopping expedition her sister, the elderly Dowager Lady Beanford, asks her what she has done with her niece, Louise. ‘Good gracious,’ Miss Thropplestance replies, ‘I must have mislaid her!’ and then proceeds to review all the shops and social calls she made during the afternoon, where she might, possibly, have mislaid, poor inoffensive Louise.

It’s an inadvertently hilarious list, bringing out Jane’s flaky superficiality, with plenty of humorous phrases where mislaying a niece is placed on the same level as losing your keys.

The comic punchline comes when the butler informs the two ladies that Louise, in fact, never went out with Miss Thropplestance in the first place and has spent the afternoon reading an improving book to a sick servant upstairs. Silly billies.

Tea

James Cushat-Prinkly is a dim 34-year-old and his extended family of females think it really is time he settled down and proposed to someone. His female family and friends settle on Joan Sebastable as being the perfect match. So one afternoon he sets off to walk across Hyde Park to the Mayfair residence of Miss Sebastaple to propose.

But when he glances at his watch he notices it is 4.30 which means the dreaded hour of afternoon tea is approaching. James hates afternoon tea with its rituals of tinkling tea glasses and endless stupid questions about whether you’d prefer milk or cream and how many lumps and so on. In order to avoid confronting his beloved crouching behind the wretched tea things, he drops in on an acquaintance who happens to live en route, ‘Rhoda Ellam, a sort of remote cousin, who made a living by creating hats out of costly materials.’ Rhoda is serving up tea (this is England, after all) but is much more relaxed about the whole thing, asking James to grab a mug if he can see one and quickly knocking up some bread and butter.

Result: James strolls home and informs his astonished womenfolk that the proposal went well and now he is engaged to be married to…Rhoda Ellam! In fact that isn’t the end of the story. The very end comes when, after getting married and going on honeymoon etc, the couple return to London and at their first tiffin, James discovers to his dismay, that Rhoda has arranged best quality tea things in exactly the way all other women do, has become completely conventional. You can’t beat tiffin!

The Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh

Two English chaps, a Journalist and a Wine Merchant, are in a train heading from Hohenzollern into Hapsburg territory i.e. from Germany into Hungary. News of a picture being stolen from the Louvre leads the Wine Merchant to tell the story of the mysterious disappearance of his fearsome aunt, Mrs Crispina Umberleigh, ‘born to legislate, codify, administrate, censor, license, ban, execute, and sit in judgement generally.’

‘As a nephew on a footing of only occasional visits she affected me merely as an epidemic, disagreeable while it lasted, but without any permanent effect.’

Her unexplained disappearance leaves a large hole in family life. After a while a ransom demand appears stating that the aunt has been kidnapped and is being held in Norway and will be returned unless a ransom payment of £2,000 is made, this, of course, being a comic inversion of the usual definition of a ransom which is where you pay to have someone returned. The uncle coughs up and this goes on for eight years.

Then one day the aunt reappears. Turns out she had never been kidnapped at all but suffered a complete loss of memory, wandered for a while and ended up working in domestic service in Birmingham. Then one day, eight years later, her memory returned and she came storming back into the lives of her astonished husband and family.

And the ransom demands? Had been made by an enterprising servant of the family :).

The Wolves of Cernogratz

All the starved, cold misery of a frozen world, all the relentless hunger-fury of the wild, blended with other forlorn and haunting melodies to which one could give no name, seemed concentrated in that wailing cry.

A quietly moving and/or vitriolic story. Nouveau riche Baroness Gruebel and her husband have bought and live in the ancient castle somewhere in central Europe. She is telling her brother Conrad, a banker from Hamburg, about some of the romantic old stories attached to the castle, for example how the local wolves are supposed to start howling when anyone dies in the castle, when she is unexpectedly interrupted by the governess, Fraulein Schmidt, who reveals the real legend is that the wolves howl only when a member of the Cernogratz family is dying.

She then astonishes everyone by revealing that she is herself a member of the Cernogratz family. The family fell on hard times, was forced to sell the castle, she went into domestic service and ended up with the Gruebel family. It is a cruel irony which has brought her back here to the home of her ancestors.

That night, while the Baroness’s over-dressed, flashy rich guests are enjoying dinner, they are disturbed by the howling of wolves. They go to the governess’s bedroom and find the window flung open even though it is the depths of winter. The governess knows she is dying but wants to hear ‘the death-music of my family’.

Despite its society satire surface this is a strangely powerful story, like a fairytale. It is clearly linked to The Interlopers (see below) by being a) set in Eastern Europe b) featuring wolves c) being about authenticity and identity, contrasting the shallowness of human concerns with something deeper and more primeval.

Louis

Lena Strudwarden refuses to go abroad on holiday with her husband this year, insisting they go (yet again) to Brighton or Worthing. Her real reason is that their circle of acquaintances in Brighton and Worthing, though boring, show an admirable instinct to fawn on Mrs Strudwarden. In these sorts of arguments Lena always relies on excuses concerning her little dog, Louis, ‘the diminutive brown Pomeranian that lay, snug and irresponsive, beneath a shawl on her lap’, Louis couldn’t possibly go abroad, he couldn’t possibly be quarantined, he couldn’t survive without me, etc etc.

When Strudwarden complains to his sister, she, with unladylike brutality, suggests they just kill Louis. (The text acknowledges this fact: ‘“Novels have been written about women like you,” said Strudwarden; “you have a perfectly criminal mind.”)

So the next time Lena is out of the house, Strudwarden and her brother place the dog in a box and fix the only hole in it over the gas bracket. In other words, they set out to gas the dog to death. But in doing so they make an ironic discovery: Louis isn’t a real dog at all, he is a mechanical toy. All this time Lena has been using the little toy as an emotional lever to get her way with her husband.

The Guests

Annabel thinks the view from the room she’s sharing with her sister, Matilda, is English and pastoral but rather boring. Matilda has recently returned from India and tells her sister she loves boring, it’s a great relief from extravagant adventures abroad. Take the time when she was living in remote India and the Bishop of Bequar paid a surprise visit just as the river Gwadlipichee overflowed its banks, forcing the servants and all the livestock into the main house. It was chaos and socially embarrassing.

‘I’m afraid there is nowhere for you to sit,’ I said coldly; ‘the verandah is full of goats.’

The Penance

Octavian Ruttle thinks his neighbours’ cat is stealing his chickens, so he nerves himself to do away with it. Unfortunately, the neighbours’ three young children, lined up along the wall, witness the act, and in unison call him ‘Beast!’ They send, via servants, a sheet with BEAST childishly scrawled on it. This pricks Octavian’s already guilty conscience and he sets out to appease them by buying luxury chocolates, sends them next door, but later in the day finds them scornfully thrown back over the wall.

One day when Octavian is meant to be minding his two-year-old daughter, Olivia, the three children kidnap her. He sees them trundling her pushcart at top speed across a meadow and gives chase. He catches up just as they deposit the toddler into the muck of a massive pigsty and she starts sinking. Octavian can’t make it over to her in time and so begs the children to save her, he’ll do anything.

So they order him to do penance: to stand by the grave of their dead cat dressed only in a white sheet  holding a candle and repeating: ‘I’m a miserable Beast’. Only when he actually does this, do the three children pin another piece of paper up with the message ‘Un-Beast.’

The Phantom Luncheon

Member of Parliament Sir James Drakmanton informs his wife that she must take for lunch the rather beastly Smithly-Dubbs whose family come in handy at election times. Exasperated at this tedious chore, Lady Drakmanton decides to pull a practical joke. She contacts the three Smithly-Dubbs ladies to invite them for lunch,  then does her hair in an unusual style and dresses in not her usual manner before going to meet them in their hotel foyer and whisking them off to the Carlton where she encourages them to choose all the most expensive dishes on the menu.

Then she drops a bombshell by claiming not to be Lady Drakmanton at all, but another woman altogether who keeps having fits of memory loss, then it comes to her: she is in fact Ellen Niggle, of the Ladies’ Brasspolishing Guild.

At that precise moment (as she had arranged) another woman enters the Carlton dining room who looks and is dressed exactly like Lady Drakmanton, who she points out to the three appalled young women as the real Lady Drakmanton, thus confirming her story.

And before they can recover their composure, Lady D thanks them for a lovely meal and sweeps out, leaving the discombobulated Smithly-Dubbs to pay the (very large) bill.

A Bread and Butter Miss

A story about horse-racing. The guests at a country-house party are eagerly discussing the upcoming Derby when it is discovered that one of them, young Lola, has dreams which come true and last night dreamed of a horse race and dreamed that the crowd cheered when ‘Bread and Butter’ wins.

There is no horse named Bread and Butter in this year’s Derby so a furious debate ensues about which actual horse she could be referring to. They desperately want her to fall asleep and dream a bit of clarification but, it turns out, with comic frustration, when she’s not dreaming dreams which come true, Lola has bad insomnia and, sure enough, despite the comical welter of suggestions to help her get off to sleep, she passes a sleepless night and morning.

Next day, as the race is underway, she lets slip one more vital detail in her dream which helps the guests guess correctly the name of the winning horse which does, indeed, win, but by then it is too late for any of them to place a bet.

Bertie’s Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve in the household of Luke Steffink, Esq. complete with posh guests. When a couple frivolously recall the Eastern tradition that on Christmas Eve, animals in their stalls can talk, the guests all troop down to the cow house to see if it’s true.

However, Luke’s disgruntled nephew (‘Bertie Steffink had early in life adopted the profession of ne’er-do-well’) is angry at everyone because the family has decided it is going to pack him off to Africa in an effort to find him gainful employment. So, out of spite, Bertie locks them all in the cow house, and invites some passing revellers into Luke’s house to drink all his champagne and raucously sing out of tune Christmas carols. It’s a kind of sketch or scene rather than an actual story.

For someone interested in social history, the most interesting part comes at the beginning where Bertie’s loser status is established by describing the family’s attempts to set him up with jobs in various colonies, a passage which vividly conveys the way the Commonwealth and Empire were conceived as a sort of dumping ground for the useless upper-middle-classes.

At the age of eighteen Bertie had commenced that round of visits to our Colonial possessions, so seemly and desirable in the case of a Prince of the Blood, so suggestive of insincerity in a young man of the middle-class. He had gone to grow tea in Ceylon and fruit in British Columbia, and to help sheep to grow wool in Australia. At the age of twenty he had just returned from some similar errand in Canada, from which it may be gathered that the trial he gave to these various experiments was of the summary drum-head nature. Luke Steffink, who fulfilled the troubled role of guardian and deputy-parent to Bertie, deplored the persistent manifestation of the homing instinct on his nephew’s part, and his solemn thanks earlier in the day for the blessing of reporting a united family had no reference to Bertie’s return. Arrangements had been promptly made for packing the youth off to a distant corner of Rhodesia, whence return would be a difficult matter…

Forewarned

Alethia Debchance has spent her entire 28 years at the remote rural house of her aunt near Webblehinton. She is as naive and unworldly as it is possible to be. Thus when she goes to visit a distant relation, Robert Bludward, who is standing for election, she is astonished at the extreme criticism directed at him by two gentlemen she overhears in a train and by an article she reads in the paper. She makes up her mind to tell his opponent, Sir John Chobham. But as she sets out to do so, she hears the same kinds of comments made, and reads an equally damning article, about him, too.

Bewildered and appalled at the terrible men abroad in the world, she retreats back to her aunt’s rural hideaway and immerses herself in the breathless women’s novels that she consumes like smarties.

It is both a satire on a certain kind of unworldly English spinster, but also on the casually vituperative discourse surrounding English politics, a subject Saki was an expert on after years of being a parliamentary correspondent for the newspapers.

The Interlopers

Somewhere on the eastern spurs of the Karpathians, a patch of forest land has been disputed between three successive generations of two families of neighbouring landowners. The current rivals are Ulrich von Gradwitz and Georg Znaeym.

One day they both happen to be out with parties of their own men, wander away from them, and encounter each other in the depths of the forest. As they go to raise their rifles to shoot each other there is a loud crack and half a beech tree plummets down, pinning them both helplessly to the ground.

Over the next hour or so, as they come to acknowledge their plight, both injured and cold and pinned by the fallen tree to the ground with various broken bones, they slowly come to reassess the stupid rivalry which has dominated their lives. Eventually Ulrich offers his wine flask to Znaeym which the other grudgingly accepts and they decide to put the feud behind them and become friends. They agree to shout for help from their respective men, but the calling only attracts… a pack of wolves!

A gruesome parable about…what? The stupid pettiness of human concerns, petty rivalries and feuds which don’t, placed in the larger perspective of the human condition, matter a damn. Or the vanity of human presumption, showing that both men’s claims to ‘own’ the woods are ridiculous. The true owners of the forest are the wolves; both humans are merely the ‘interlopers’ of the title.

Quail Seed

Mr Scarrick rents out the rooms over his suburban grocery store to an artist and his sister. He complains that business has fallen off woefully because shoppers are attracted by the sales gimmicks of big stores in town, which include music played on gramophones and tickertape news about sports.

So the artist comes up with the idea of staging what would nowadays be called performance art, namely he, his sister and a local boy they hire will play the parts of strange and exotic figures, mysterious strangers who seem to be leaving codes messages for each other, about grand plans and feverish rivalries. Intrigue and gossip. Maybe spies!

It works a treat. Word spreads and soon Mr Scarrick’s shop is full of local housewives waiting to witness the next bizarre episode in the fictional drama.

Canossa

A nonsensical satire on the trivial silliness of political life, indicated by the initial setup which is that Demosthenes Platterbaff, the eminent Unrest Inducer, is on trial for blowing up the Albert Hall on the eve of the great Liberal Federation Tango Tea, the occasion on which the Chancellor of the Exchequer was expected to propound his new theory: ‘Do partridges spread infectious diseases?’

The point is that there is a by-election set for the constituency of Nemesis-on-Hand the day after the jury are scheduled to deliver their verdict and the view is that a guilty verdict will lead to the government losing the seat in a protest vote by working men supporters of Platterbaff. Therefore the story is about the contortions the government ties itself up in, in order to find him guilty but not let him go to gaol.

More precisely, he is allowed to go to gaol for precisely one night after the guilty verdict is brought in but then (the Prime Minister and Home Secretary feverishly decide) will be released early enough the next morning for his release to be telegraphed to the by-election constituency and broadcast to his supporters who will then, hopefully, support the government.

This already ridiculous story turns into farce when Platterbaff announces that he will not physically leave the prison unless there’s a brass band to play him out. He always has a brass band.

We are then witness to the comic panic of the Prime Minister and senior cabinet members as they try to arrange this at very short notice, hampered by the fact that there is a musicians’ strike on (strikes were a surprisingly ubiquitous element of Edwardian life which Saki is here satirising).

In the farcical climax of the story, the Prime Minister and colleagues are forced to borrow knackered old instruments from the prison recreation room and themselves batter out an out-of-tune rendering of the pop hit of the moment ‘I didn’t want to do it’ (which, incidentally, dates this story to the second half of 1913).

And the comic punchline of the entire story? The government loses the by-election anyway, because the trade unions ordered their members to vote against the cabinet for acting as strike-breakers (for playing musical instruments during a musicians’ strike).

So it is a satire on the extreme contortions to which modern politicians are forced to go in the name of democracy, of bending over backwards to accommodate even terrorists in order to win their supporters’ votes, but how even the most humiliating obeisance won’t be enough to satisfy the sky-high demands of the new militant working class electorate.

As to the title, Canossa is the site where the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV did penance in 1077, standing three days bare-headed in the snow, in order to reverse his excommunication by Pope Gregory VII. It’s the kind of factual element which would benefit from a note of explanation.

The Threat

One of Saki’s anti-suffragette satires. Sir Lulworth Quayne (a recurring character in these stories), sat in the lounge of his favourite restaurant, the Gallus Bankiva, describes to his nephew, recently returned from abroad, an evermore absurd list of (fictional) strategies adopted by the suffragettes (for example, enlivening the state opening of Parliament by releasing thousands of parrots, which had been carefully trained to scream ‘Votes for women’).

The joke in the story is that the leading suffragettes come up with a plan which outdoes all the others, converting their hitherto negative strategies into a positive one. They threaten to erect exact replicas of the Victoria Memorial at key locations all around the capital. ‘No, no, anything but that!’ The government gives in to their demands.

Excepting Mrs. Pentherby

Reggie Bruttle has inherited a big but not particularly practical mansion named ‘The Limes’. He has the brainwave of converting it into the venue for a kind of continuous, rolling country-house party. However, Major Dagworth points out that the womenfolk will give trouble, within days they’ll be bitching and arguing.

On the whole, the major is proven wrong, except for Mrs Pentherby. Within days all the other women have come to loathe her casual condescension and come to Reggie with their complaints.

Reggie listened with the attenuated regret that one bestows on an earthquake disaster in Bolivia or a crop failure in Eastern Turkestan.

But then the comic reveal: It turns out Reggie has invited Mrs Pentherby precisely to be the official quarreler, to act as a lightning rod, attracting to herself all the bitching energy of the other women, in order to unify the others in their dislike and make them pleasant to everyone else. Cue feminist outrage.

Mark

Augustus Mellowkent is an up-and-coming novelist. His agent suggests he changes his name to ‘Mark’ which sounds more manly.

But the story itself concerns the visit, one morning in December, of a tiresome encyclopedia salesman, one Caiaphas Dwelf. At first Mark puts up with Dwelf’s tiresome sales pitch, but then has a brainwave. He takes down one of his own novels and starts reading an excerpt to the salesman, telling him what an excellent resource a Mark Mellowkent novel is if one is trapped at a boring country-house party. The salesman replies with a dithyramb on the useful geographical knowledge contained in his encyclopedia. Mark replies with the opening of his classic work, The Cageless Linnet and so it goes on, a duel of bores.

Eventually the salesman is forced to abandon his spiel, closes his sample volume and leaves Mark’s house, and ‘a look of respectful hatred flickered in the cold grey eyes.’

The Hedgehog

Every year a mixed doubles tennis match is held at the rectory garden party hosted by Mrs Norbury and every year a quartet of old ladies sit in judgement on the players, not least the bitchy Mrs. Dole and Mrs. Hatch-Mallard. They argue and contradict each other about everything.

When it is announced that a young lady, Ada Bleek, who happens to be a clairvoyante, is coming down to the house party, they even argue about whose ghost she will see, Mrs Dole insisting she will see the ghost of Lady Cullompton, murdered by one of her ancestors, Mrs Hatch-Mallard insisting she will see the ghost of her uncle, who committed suicide in the house in the most tragical of circumstances.

In the event Miss Bleek does see a ghost but not one belonging to either of the rivals, instead a giant white hedgehog which slithers across her bedroom floor! Social satire gives way to the genuinely weird.

The Mappined Life

The Mappin Terraces at London Zoo were opened in 1914, so they were very recent when Saki made them the subject of a story. Mrs. James Gurtleberry and her niece start off by discussing whether the animals penned in this slightly larger caged area have any illusory sense of freedom. But the story evolves into an impassioned and deeply depressing diatribe from the niece about how we are, all of us, trapped in the Mappin Terraces of our own narrow, blinkered and utterly unfree little lives.

Of course there ought to be jungle-cats and birds of prey and other agencies of sudden death to add to the illusion of liberty…

Surprisingly serious and surprisingly pessimistic.

Fate (Clovis Sangrail)

Rex Dillot is nearly twenty-four and almost continually penniless. He scrapes a living by betting shrewdly on the little sporting competitions at the country-house parties he frequents, but he is ambitious to make one really big killing wager.

His opportunity comes when cadaverous old Major Latton is scheduled to spend an evening playing billiards against cocky young Mr. Strinnit. Dillot bets more than he actually has on the major to win but the game goes against expectations and Strinnit is advancing his score in leaps and bounds.

Too distraught to watch the climax of the game and his own ruination, Dillon wanders off upstairs to the guest bedrooms. Here he overhears the snores of Mrs Thundleford who had retired to her room in a huff when all the other houseguests declared themselves more interested in watching two men knock about ivory balls than listen to her simply fascinating slideshow and lecture about the architecture of Venice.

Dillot opens her bedroom door. Sure enough Mrs. Thundleford has nodded off sitting very close to the reading lamp. If only a kind fate had had her nudge or knock it over, thus starting a fire, thus causing an outcry, thus interrupting the game, thus saving Dillon from ruinous losses. Well… sometimes one has to make one’s own fate…

And thus it is that a few moments later Dillot comes thundering into the games room carrying a startled Mrs. Thundleford whose dress is (slightly) on fire, dumps her on the billiard table and announces the house is on fire, leading to screams and shouts and the dousing of the flames with soda water and rugs and cushions. And the game? Oh called off, of course. Oh dear, what a shame!

But then, as Clovis remarked, when one is rushing about with a blazing woman in one’s arms one can’t stop to think out exactly where one is going to put her.

The Bull

Tom Yorkfield is a small farmer with a small herd of cows serviced by his pride and joy, a bull named Clover Fairy. The bull is probably worth £80 though Tom tells himself he’d hold out for at least £100.

Tom has never gotten on with his half-brother, Laurence. When the latter pays a visit he is tactless enough to be a) underwhelmed when Tom takes him to see his pride and joy, b) and then to boast about a painting of a bull which he recently sold for £400. And, he assures his angry brother, will continue to climb in value while Clover Fairy slowly loses all value till she’s sold for the price of his pelt and hooves.

Tom snaps, loses his temper, makes to hit Laurence who backs then runs away, and all this commotion excites the bull who promptly tosses Laurence then goes to trample him. Luckily Tom pulls him off and spends the next few weeks tending him back to health among many apologies.

A recovered Laurence duly returns to work as an artist and grows in popularity of a painter of animals ‘but his subjects are always kittens or fawns or lambkins—never bulls’.

Morlvera

Two impoverished cockney kids, Emmeline, aged ten, and Bert, aged seven, stop in front of a posh toy emporium and are attracted by an overdressed doll (an ’embodiment of overdressed depravity’) which they immediately start attributing all kinds of bloodthirsty crimes to. The children’s malevolent imaginations and cockney accents are very enjoyable.

Then along comes a chauffeur-driven car out of which emerge spoiled little Victor in his sailor suit and his commanding mother. Our two backstreet kids overhear their conversation. The mother is nagging Victor that they need to buy something for his friend, Bertha, as she bought him a beautiful box of soldiers on his birthday.

Once inside the shop, with infinite reluctance Victor allows himself to be persuaded by the sales assistant into selecting the malevolent-looking doll Emmeline and Bert had been surveying. The cockney kids watch as Victor emerges clutching the thing, gets into his car with his mother, and very carefully throws the doll out the back window just as the vehicle is reversing. The car’s back wheel gently crushes the doll to smithereens. Emmeline and Bert are thrilled and delighted.

A delicious story about children’s utter lack of innocence, their wild violent imaginations, but which also captures the class divisions of Saki’s day.

Shock Tactics (Clovis Sangrail)

‘People yield more consideration to a mutilated mealtime or a broken night’s rest, than ever they would to a broken heart.’

A Clovis story. The mother of Clovis’s friend Bertie, 19 years old, insists on opening all his letters and reading them, much to his chagrin. Clovis conceives a hilarious prank. He gets delivered to Bertie’s house a series of letters in which he poses as an utterly fictitious young lady named Clotilde and hints that she and Bertie are involved in unspeakable goings-on which involve the suicide of a serving girl and some jewels.

Astounded and enraged, Bertie’s mother rushes upstairs, banging on Bertie’s (locked) bedroom door and insisting he explain each of the successively more scandalous revelations until… a final letter arrives from Clovis explaining that, since Bertie told him that someone nosy in the household was opening his letters, Clovis has conceived the idea of sending deliberately fake letters in order to sniff the shameful culprit out.

Bertie’s mother is mortified and humiliated and from that moment onwards never opens another of Bertie’s letter.

The Seven Cream Jugs

Anything that was smaller and more portable than a sideboard, and above the value of ninepence, had an irresistible attraction for him, provided that it fulfilled the necessary condition of belonging to someone else.

Mr and Mrs Peter Pigeoncote are paid a visit by their relative Wilfred. Wilfred is a common name in their extended family and so they imagine this Wilfred is the one known widely in the family as ‘Wilfred the Snatcher’ because he is a kleptomaniac.

This stresses the couple because it just so happens to be the date of their silver wedding anniversary and friends and family far and near have bombarded them with silver gifts. Reluctantly, they show ‘Wilfred the Snatcher’ their gifts, including no fewer than seven silver cream jugs.

Wilfred is polite and complimentary, then it is time for bed. After he’s gone upstairs, Mrs and Mrs count up all the silver presents and become convinced that one of the cream jugs is missing and convinced that Wilfred must have stolen it. Next morning when he’s in the bathroom, they sneak into his bedroom and rifle through his suitcase and find… the missing silver cream jug! They take it back but decide to say nothing about it.

Half an hour later, when he comes down for breakfast, Wilfred immediately announces that one of the servants must be a thief because someone has stolen the silver cream jug from his suitcase. He goes on to explain that he and his mother had carefully selected the silver jug as a silver wedding anniversary for the pair but he forgot to give it earlier in the evening and when the couple showed him the presents they’d received to date and laughed at the fact that they’d already received seven cream jugs, he felt too embarrassed to proceed.

During this explanation several facts tumbled out which made the horrified couple realise that this Wilfred Pigeoncote is not the famous Wilfred the Snatcher but a much more remote relative, a Wilfred who is very high up in the Foreign Office! My God! They’ve made a disastrous mistake! Mrs Pigeoncote feels faint and dispatches husband Peter to fetch her smelling salts.

The situation is retrieved when, while her husband is out of the room, Mrs P confides in a low tone that the culprit is none other than her husband! ‘My God,’ says Wilfred the Foreign Office; ‘What, you mean like Wilfred the Snatcher!? My God, it must run in the family.’ ‘Yes,’ says the wife, ‘It is most tragic,’ handing him back the stolen cream jug, ‘and we’d be most grateful if you could keep it to yourself!’

The Occasional Garden

Elinor Rapsley is moaning that her back garden is too big to be ignored but not big enough to make a statement and she’s stressed because Gwenda Pottingdon has invited herself to lunch, and is ‘only coming to gloat over my bedraggled and flowerless borders and to sing the praises of her own detestably over-cultivated garden.’

The Baroness (a recurring character we’ve met in previous stories) advises her to subscribe to the OOSA, the Occasional-Oasis Supply Association. If you’re having a social event and have a scrappy back space, the OOSA will supply the garden of your dreams for the day, and tailor it to your guests, as well. Or you can pay extra and get the EON or Envy of the Neighbourhood service.

So Elinor pays for a de luxe garden to be installed ahead of Gwenda Pottingdon’s lunch visit and the latter is suitably overawed and silenced. Unfortunately, a few days later, when the OOSA has been back to remove the temporarily hired garden, Gwenda Pottingdon pays a surprise visit, barges her way into the living room and is immediately startled to see the previously luxurious garden completely absent. What happened?

‘Suffragettes,’ is Elinor’s brilliant, one-word reply, the one-word explanation for any kind of vandalism and hooliganism.

The Sheep

The Sheep is in fact the nickname of a very bad bridge player: ‘Being awfully and uselessly sorry formed a large part of his occupation in life.’ His bridge partner and prospective brother-in-law, Richard, thinks of him as one of the world’s many sheep, bumbling foolishly through life while all the time imagining himself a big, brave fellah. What makes it so galling is that, having lost his son, Robbie, fighting in India, Richard has no heir so, when the Sheep marries his sister, Kathleen, it’ll be only a matter of time before the inept bumbler inherits the family home and raises more ‘sheep’.

When the Sheep and Richard are on the way back from a day’s shooting during which he has pitifully failed to bag anything, the Sheep is suddenly confronted by a large bird lifting off the ground and flying slowly towards them and hits it with both barrels. Unfortunately, it is a very rare honey-buzzard which Richard’s family have been going to great lengths to protect for the last four years.

The local MP has died and Richard throws himself into a round of canvassing for votes which leads up to a packed meeting to be addressed by their candidate the night before the vote. Richard is due to give thanks to the Chairman but has a sore throat and (foolishly) asks the Sheep to do it. He makes the required customary sentence or two but then decides to give the meeting the benefit of his own opinions which turn out to be wildly destructive and unpopular. His remarks travel all round the constituency and lose the election.

Then Richard and Kathleen and the Sheep go for a winter holiday in the Alps. The Sheep insists on going too near to the thin ice on the lake which all the skaters have been amply warned against. No surprise when there’s a cry and he disappears into an ice hole. Richard immediately skates to the land where he’d seen a ladder which can be used to reach across the dodgy ice to save him. But as he reaches for it a huge guard dog leaps on him and keeps him pinned down during the vital moments when the Sheep might have been rescued, but in fact drowns.

As a result, Richard buys the guard dog and it becomes his loyal and much-loved companion :).

The Oversight (Clovis Sangrail)

Lady Prowche goes to enormous lengths to ensure that the guests to her prospective country-house party cannot possibly disagree about anything (after a run of parties which each ended in appalling rows). With her friend Lena Luddleford she goes carefully through a list of the many issues which divided Edwardian society, eliminating anyone who would be liable to fall out about any of them, and eventually whittles her list down to the only two possible men she can invite.

But first she tasks Lena with the all-important job of ascertaining the two men’s views align on the hot topic of the day, vivisection. A day or two later back comes the signal that they do agree on this issue and so Lady Prowche goes ahead and invites them.

With lamentable consequences. Despite all her efforts the two men do, in fact, fall out, and the party ends in a big row. Why? Because they support opposite sides in the recent Balkan Wars: ‘One of them was Pro-Greek and the other Pro-Bulgar.’ Damn! So close!

Hyacinth

Hyacinth is the name of an intelligently malicious boy. He is the son of Matilda who insists on taking him along for the election campaign of her husband who is up against the newly appointed Colonial Secretary (who has also brought his three little children along for the campaign) much against the advice of her good friend Mrs. Panstreppon who knows just what Hyacinth is like.

After the polls have closed, Hyacinth phones his mother to explain that he has kidnapped the three charming little children and locked them in a local pigsty with a very angry huge sow locked outside. If their father wins the poll, he will unlock the door and the big angry sow will devour the children. If his (Hyacinth’s) father wins, he’ll let the children go.

This results in the kids’ father, Jutterly the Colonial Secretary, rushing round to the town hall begging them to query and invalidate as many of his votes as possible in order to save his children’s lives. It works. He manages to lose, his defeat is communicated to Hyacinth, who lets down a ladder into the stye which allows the three terrified toddlers to climb to safety.

‘Told you so’, says Mrs. Panstreppon. Hyacinth wouldn’t be out of place in a modern Mexican election, she points out drolly; but maybe leave him at home for the next domestic one.

This story contains both animals and children, vectors of Saki’s satire on the absurd pretensions of the adult world, continual revealers of the spite and violence at the heart of nature.

The Purple of the Balkan Kings

The first of two ‘stories’ about the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913.

Luitpold Wolkenstein, financier and diplomat on a small, obtrusive, self-important scale, sat in his favoured cafe in the world-wise Habsburg capital, confronted with the Neue Freie Presse and the cup of cream-topped coffee and attendant glass of water that a sleek-headed piccolo had just brought him.

Austrian cafe expert, podgy inexperienced and smug, Wolkenstein is horrified at news of the Balkan War which heralds the rise of new nations on his border, new nations who’ll want to teach the old Great Powers a thing or two! The Ottoman Empire has lost almost all its possessions in Europe, while a significantly enlarged Serbia has begun agitating for a union of all the Slavs in south-east Europe.

As you can see, this is more of a character profile heavy with political interpretation i.e. condemnation of Austria’s smug bourgeoisie, than a ‘story’.

The Cupboard of the Yesterdays

The second of two ‘stories’ about the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 is a dialogue between the abstract figures of the Wanderer and the Merchant.

The Merchant holds the conventional liberal view that the Balkan Wars are a tragedy, all that death and waste etc. Whereas the Wanderer holds a completely different view: he thinks the tragedy is that, with the expulsion of the Ottomans from Europe and the establishment of modern nation-states with clearly defined borders, a lot of the old glamour and mystique of the murky Balkans will disappear.

‘The old atmosphere will have changed, the glamour will have gone; the dust of formality and bureaucratic neatness will slowly settle down over the time-honoured landmarks; the Sanjak of Novi Bazar, the Muersteg Agreement, the Komitadje bands, the Vilayet of Adrianople, all those familiar outlandish names and things and places, that we have known so long as part and parcel of the Balkan Question, will have passed away into the cupboard of yesterdays, as completely as the Hansa League and the wars of the Guises.’

He uses words like magic and charm:

  • ‘It seemed a magical region, with its mountain passes and frozen rivers and grim battlefields, its drifting snows, and prowling wolves; there was a great stretch of water that bore the sinister but engaging name of the Black Sea—nothing that I ever learned before or after in a geography lesson made the same impression on me as that strange-named inland sea, and I don’t think its magic has ever faded out of my imagination…’
  • ‘There is a charm about those countries that you find nowhere else in Europe, the charm of uncertainty and landslide…’

But now that many of these nations have gained nationhood, in fifteen years the whole region will be about as glamorous as Bexhill! As the Wanderer himself admits, his version of the Balkans exists primarily to ‘to thrill and enliven’ our humdrum existences, to fire our slothful imaginations.

So it’s not really a story at all, it’s more the exposition of a worldview, the late-Victorian worldview which found glamour and excitement in tales of derring-do in far-off, exotic places. In this respect, it’s not unlike the opening passage of Bertie’s Christmas which gave the impression that the entire British Empire and Commonwealth existed solely for the entertainment and gainful employment of the English upper middle-classes. Maybe it did.

For the Duration of the War

The Reverend Wilfrid Gaspilton finds himself removed from the fashionable parish of St. Luke’s Kensingate to the immoderately rural parish of St. Chuddocks, somewhere in Yondershire. His wife finds it dire and buries herself in translating an obscure French novel.

Wilfrid also finds it unbearably boring until he has an idea: to concoct a literary hoax. He makes up:

Ghurab, a hunter, or, according to other accounts, warden of the royal fishponds, who lived, in some unspecified century, in the neighbourhood of Karmanshah

and attributes to him fragments of poetry allegedly discovered by the Reverend’s own son, currently serving in Mesopotamia.

The reverend then sends these fictional fragments of Persian poetry to the Bi-Monthly Review in London which publishes them and they quickly become popular, taken up and quoted, and a Ghurab-of-Karmanshah Club is founded whose members refer to each other as Brother Ghurabians.

War brings many unintended consequences.


Themes

The role of animals in Saki’s short stories

The previous collection of short stories, Beasts and Super-Beasts, was aptly titled, since rogue animals play a key role in many of them, the more bizarre or encountered in bizarre circumstances, the more savage and violent, the better.

Like the werewolf in Gabriel-Ernest or the hyena which eats a gypsy child in Esmé or the polecat which kills Conradin’s aunt in Sredni Vishtar. Violent, beast-related and gruesome, it’s no accident that those three stories are among Saki’s most celebrated.

In this collection, there are some exotic beasts, but not so many:

  • The Wolves of Cernogratz
  • Louis centres on a mechanical lapdog
  • The Guests describes an overflow of goats and a leopard! during a flood in India
  • The Penance involves a domestic cat and a big pig
  • The Mappined Life contrasts the lives of zoo animals with humans
  • Bertie’s Christmas Eve involves farmyard cows
  • The Interlopers features the forest wolves at the end
  • The Hedgehog in which a young woman has a vision of a giant white hedgehog
  • The Bull is about a prize bull which tosses and tramples the artist
  • Hyacinth which features a potentially murderous sow

It is no accident that the two most haunting stories in the set, The Interlopers and The Wolves of Cernogratz, both feature animals at their most intense and symbolic, symbolic counterpoints to the superficialities of human wealth and culture.

The other stories mostly feature domestic or pretty plain farm animals (cat, cows, pig) in relatively humdrum settings but nonetheless, The Animal plays a role in Saki’s fiction as a kind of wild card, thrown into otherwise banal social settings to create an element which punctures the polite pretensions of human society and its timid conventions (satirised in the story about afternoon tea).

The role of ‘abroad’

Another thing about the two wolf stories is that they are not set in England.

It is a critical platitude about Saki that his stories mock the Edwardian English upper classes and, indeed, many of them are set in London drawing rooms or at country-house parties. But it’s arguable that the best of them (obviously the two wolf stories, but also the two at the end ‘about’ the Balkan wars, or the three animal stories from earlier collections) do not.

There is a consistent strand of Saki stories which are not set in England at all, and he has a penchant for Eastern Europe or Russia where he himself spent some years as a correspondent. The appeal of these, at the time, fairly remote destinations is made explicit in The Cupboards of Yesterday: they are remote and untamed, full of casual violence and risk which thrills the bourgeois imagination in a way life in Bexhill emphatically can’t.

The notion that animals speak on Christmas Eve in Bertie’s Christmas Eve derives from Russia, precisely the kind of peasant superstition you’d expect from what the Edwardian readers thought of as a charmingly backward peasant society.

The tension between the two – tame England and exotic abroad – comes out a little in the story Louis, where Mr Strudwarden wants to holiday in (exotic) Vienna while his wife insists on going, yet again, to Brighton, precisely because that is where she will find the dull, unimaginative people who find her interesting.

In this respect ‘abroad’ provides another dichotomy or pole against which to set ‘the normal’ existence of the Edwardian middle classes, to bring it into more vivid focus and to critique it, just as ‘animals’ do, and…

Children

…just as children do. In Saki’s world children are emphatically not the innocent angels of conventional thinking. For me the funniest story is Morlvera with its brilliantly funny depiction of the two backstreet London kids, their heads full of lurid, bloodthirsty imagining, but there are also:

  • the two boys in Toys of Peace who can turn even the blandest present into a vehicle for violence and blood
  • the three children in Penance who are prepared to let Octavian Ruttle’s 2-year-old daughter drown in pig poo
  • the ghastly Hyacinth, prepared to let other children be eaten alive

So animals, abroad, and children, are all perspectives or devices which Saki uses to highlight and mock the shallow, silly world of his contemporary society.

Not limited to Edwardian upper classes but told in an upper class tone of voice

Saki’s stories are not really set among the upper classes. I’ve just read Bull, which is about a farmer and his struggling artist brother. Not set in London and very much not among aristocrats. Or take Quail Seed, which concerns a shopkeeper and an impecunious artist he’s rented rooms to in some suburb or small town.

Maybe I’m making the simple point that Saki’s stories are more varied, in setting, class, character and subject matter, than is ordinarily accepted.

At which point, I realised a fairly obvious truth. The characters, settings and subject matter of the stories may not be narrowly upper class – but the tone is. The tone of the narrator, and the character it implies in pretty much all of the stories, is that of the exaggeratedly playful, carelessly privileged, upper class idler, a tone of calculated indifference, sophisticated insouciance, a lofty, mocking detachment from anything serious.

This tone is embodied from time to time in the recurring figure of the useless son or nephew who is failing to get a job or a career or a focus in life, such as Bertie Steffink (Bertie’s Last Christmas) or the useless young Bertie Heasant in Shock Tactics.

And from time to time crystallises in the character of the youthful, playful, witty prankster and bon mot artist, Clovis Sangrail (although Clovis appears in only four of these 31 stories). Clovis has the same playfully amoral wittiness of Oscar Wilde’s protagonists, and many of the snappy one-liners to match:

  • Susan Lady Beanford was a vigorous old woman who had coquetted with imaginary ill-health for the greater part of a lifetime; Clovis Sangrail irreverently declared that she had caught a chill at the Coronation of Queen Victoria and had never let it go again.
  • ‘When you wear a look of tragic gloom in a swimming-bath,’ said Clovis, ‘it’s especially noticeable from the fact that you’re wearing very little else.’
  • But then, as Clovis remarked, when one is rushing about with a blazing woman in one’s arms one can’t stop to think out exactly where one is going to put her.

So it’s not Clovis himself who predominates, it’s his tone, the tone of amused, ironic malice which pervades the stories at every level, no matter where their setting or what their subject matter:

As long as the garden produced asparagus and carnations at pleasingly frequent intervals Mrs. Gaspilton was content to approve of its expense and otherwise ignore its existence. She would fold herself up, so to speak, in an elegant, indolent little world of her own, enjoying the minor recreations of being gently rude to the doctor’s wife and continuing the leisurely production of her one literary effort, The Forbidden Horsepond.

‘Being gently rude to the doctor’s wife’. An understated tone which glosses over ironical comparisons and unexpected juxtapositions which are always amusing and sometimes very funny.

The Rev. Wilfrid found himself as bored and ill at ease in his new surroundings as Charles II would have been at a modern Wesleyan Conference… With the inhabitants of his parish he was no better off; to know them was merely to know their ailments, and the ailments were almost invariably rheumatism. Some, of course, had other bodily infirmities, but they always had rheumatism as well. The Rector had not yet grasped the fact that in rural cottage life, not to have rheumatism is as glaring an omission as not to have been presented at Court would be in more ambitious circles.

Political stories

The Edwardian period was one of surprising political stresses and crises and a number of the stories  directly invoke the world of politics. Except that, true to form, what interests Saki is not the issues themselves but the  way the issues, and the political process itself, can be mocked and ridiculed. To my daughter the feminist, the suffragettes are the subject of burning zeal. To Saki, they are the punchline of a joke.

It may be worth listing the stories which contain at least some politics:

  • The Disappearance: in the world of politics Edward Umberleigh is considered a strong man
  • The Phantom Lunch: MP Sir James Drakmanton insists that his wife lunches with the ghastly Smithly-Dubbs women because they and their uncle help him at election time
  • Forewarned is entirely about how the standard level of abuse and vitriol thrown about in a local election strikes an utterly innocent outsider
  • Canossa is a satire on Parliamentary politics
  • The Threat is an anti-suffragette satire pitched at the highest level where upper class suffragettes hobnob with the Prime Minister, leading up to the passage of an Act of Parliament
  • Hyacinth is another satire on the ridiculousness of local elections
  • The Sheep the final part of which is about the nuts and bolts of canvassing for a local election
  • Hyacinth is about a local Parliamentary election

The political stories confirm the impression derived from reading his polemical, alarmist novel, When William Came, that after 15 years as a political correspondent Saki was heartily sickened and disillusioned by British politics. Who isn’t? His disillusion comes from a solidly patrician, right-wing perspective. But his withering satire on the business of politics is just as destructive.

Suffragettes

Saki was clearly against the suffragettes who he associates with unreasonable demands and violent, vandalistic behaviour. Sometimes he mounts a direct attack, as in The Threat, which features a suffragette who comes up with a cunning new strategy. Other times it is a throwaway remark which, in its own way, is more revealing of the way the suffragettes were regarded by some in Edwardian England.

Thus when, in the comic story, The Occasional Garden, Gwenda Pottingdon pops in unexpectedly on her ‘friend’ Elinor Rapsley and is startled to discover that the sumptuous back garden she had displayed just four days earlier has vanished, Elinor has the presence of mind to explain with one word: Suffragettes, which says enough, and the way it says enough speaks volumes about its place in the respectable, middle-class discourse of the day.

In Louis the brother and sister conspiring to kill Lena’s insufferable dog for a moment consider making up a story that suffragettes had invaded the house and killed it by throwing a brick at it. No act of wanton violence was too outrageous not to be assigned to the violent suffragettes.

And in The Oversight one example of many guests who’ve got into frightful rows is Laura Henniseed, by implication one of the votes for women women. As remarks: ‘Of course the Suffragette question is a burning one, and lets loose the most dreadful ill-feeling.’ Maybe it was as divisive as Brexit has been in our own day.

Real alienation

The least humorous of the stories is the most bitter and may be, in some sense, the most psychologically ‘true’. In The Mappined Life, after they’ve visited London Zoo’s pathetic attempt to give its caged, constricted animals the illusion of wildness and freedom by building a pathetic little concrete area named the Mappin Gardens, her niece reduces Aunt Gurtleberry to tears by saying that they, too, are cabin’d, cribb’d and confined into narrow little lives of utter predictability and emptiness.

Its tone borders on suicidal despair and (this is pure speculation) makes you wonder whether, after fifteen years of chronicling the political scene and upper class life in Edwardian England, Saki, like so many others, welcomed the Great War as a chance to cleanse and redeem themselves from the sordid littleness and petty compromises of English life.

An annotated Saki

Probably the expense would never be justified, but it would be lovely to have an annotated edition of Saki’s stories because some of them contain a veritable blizzard of what are obviously references to contemporary events which it would be entertaining and informative to have properly explained.

For example, The Oversight is a story all about the subjects people find to argue about at country-house parties: religion (Church of England or non-conformist), politics (for or against Lloyd George), votes for women (for or against), vivisection, the Derby decision (‘the Stewards’ decision about Craganour’), the Falconer Report (into the Marconi scandal), and taking sides during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913.

I was able to look up Mappin Terraces at London Zoo, which were brand new when Saki wrote his story about them, but there are many more fleeting references to contemporary people or events which flash by with the mention of just a name or fleeting reference which you know is important but cannot identify. When, in The Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh, he casually refers to ‘the feminine cycling craze’ it would be nice to learn more.

And it is a minor but interesting note that the troubled situation in Mexico (then experiencing the start of its long drawn-out revolution) is referred to in no fewer than three stories (The Threat, The Mappined Life and Hyacinth) so was obviously having an impact on educated opinion, but what impact, exactly?

Ignoring this steady stream of contemporary issues has the net effect of making Saki’s stories seem more timeless and ahistorical than they actually are. It’s true that half or more of the stories are set in the timeless world of upper-middle-class twits which to some extent anticipates P.G. Wodehouse’s. But even these sometimes contain sharp references to very recent, headline-making political and social events, which indicate the depth of Saki’s engagement and commitment.

Comic similes

He brought her a large yellow dahlia, which she grasped tightly in one hand and regarded with a stare of benevolent boredom, such as one might bestow on amateur classical dancing performed in aid of a deserving charity.

[The Salvation Army] used to go about then unkempt and dishevelled, in a sort of smiling rage with the world, and now they’re spruce and jaunty and flamboyantly decorative, like a geranium bed with religious convictions.


Related links

Saki’s works

When William Came by Saki (1913)

Invasion literature

According to Wikipedia:

Invasion literature (also The Invasion Novel) is a literary genre that was popular in the period between 1871 and the outbreak of the First World War 1914. The invasion novel was first recognised as a literary genre in the UK, and is generally said to have started with George Tomkyns Chesney’s novella The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer, published in 1871, an account of a German invasion of England prompted by the recent Franco-Prussian War. Invasion literature played to national anxieties about hypothetical invasions by foreign powers and was very popular, not only in the UK. By 1914 the invasion literature genre included more than 400 novels and stories.

Examples of classic invasion literature which I’ve reviewed include:

H.G. Wells’s classic The War of the Worlds is, arguably, the high point of one aspect of the genre, playing to anxieties of terrestrial invasion but adding an entirely new layer of alien invasion onto it, an idea which has, obviously, spawned tens of thousands of copycat alien invasion fictions.

When William Came

When William Came is a relatively late example of invasion literature, being published as it was only a year before the outbreak of real war with Germany, in August 1914. The novel starts when the Germans, under Kaiser Wilhelm, have already invaded and conquered Britain, sometime in 1915 (see below for how the date is calculated).

The entire brief conflict is over by the time the main male protagonist , Murrey Yeovil, arrives back in his defeated homeland to observe the atmosphere of a London and England superficially unchanged but now under the control of the Kaiser, his German army and police.

Plot summary

At the age of 24, handsome youngish Murrey Yeovil inherited a fortune and has spent it journeying and adventuring to the back of beyond. Somewhere in Siberia he came down with marsh fever and was nursed by local tribesmen for weeks before he finally staggered to the nearest settlement, and eventually made it to a Finnish town where he rested & recovered, read the papers, and heard the news that Britain had been conquered in a lightning naval strike by Germany.

Chapter 1 The singing bird and the barometer

The novel opens with pretty Cicely Yeovil in her house in Berkshire Street, in fashionable West London, sitting in a swing chair and observing herself in a mirror. She is, we are to take it, an emblem of precisely the sort of self-centred narcissism rampant among England’s upper classes, which allowed Britain to be defeated.

Cicely is in the company of Ronnie Storr, a handsome man about town. They discuss the fact that she is expecting her husband, Murrey Yeovil, to arrive home today. He was in Russia when Germany invaded: ‘Somewhere in the wilds of Eastern Siberia, shooting and bird collecting, miles away from a railway or telegraph line’.

They speculate how Murrey will take to the German domination of things, and review the attitudes which their friends have taken to England having been invaded: from the tragical tone of many of London’s High Society who have either taken themselves off to their country retreats or left the country altogether, either for exile in Continental capitals such as Paris, or have fled to Britain’s colonies abroad which, a trifle illogically, have remained British. The most notable of these is the king, who has set up a new court in Delhi, jewel of the British Empire. Everyone (in the high society Saki is concerned with) refers to the German invasion by the euphemism ‘the fait accompli‘.

A servant announces the arrival of Tony Luton.

Tony Luton was a young man who had sprung from the people, and had taken care that there should be no recoil. He was scarcely twenty years of age, but a tightly packed chronicle of vicissitudes lay behind his sprightly insouciant appearance.

Tony has made a career as a singer of popular songs. He is one of a number of anticipations of the slim, clever form of Noel Coward (who was to become famous during the 1920s) which crop up throughout Saki’s fiction.

The threesome discuss the impending first night of a performer they all support, the daughter of a landed family, Gorla Mustelford, who has taken up ‘expressive dance’. When Tony announces that the Kaiser himself is going to attend the first night, Ronnie tells Cicely she simply must hold a first-night party for Gorla and she willingly agrees. They all agree she must invite Lady Shalem.

Grace, Lady Shalem, was a woman who had blossomed into sudden importance by constituting herself a sort of foster-mother to the fait accompli. At a moment when London was denuded of most of its aforetime social leaders she had seen her opportunity, and made the most of it… Lady Shalem, without being a beauty or a wit, or a grand lady in the traditional sense of the word, was in a fair way to becoming a power in the land.

Chapter 2 The homecoming

Murrey Yeovil arrives at Victoria station and is irked when the taxi driver speaks to him in German. He arrives home and Cicely is full of sympathy as she listens to more details of how he got fever in the back of beyond, was tended by tribesmen, eventually made it across Russia to a health resort in Finland where he stayed for weeks to recover his strength.

Murrey is still only three-quarters well again, his face is grey and sallow. He is upset by the post-conquest changes: ‘the alterations on stamps and coinage, the intrusive Teuton element, the alien uniforms cropping up everywhere, the new orientation of social life.’

Chapter 3 The Metskie Tsar

Yeovil goes to see his doctor, Dr Holham, and this is an opportunity for Saki to describe in detail what happened to him in Russia, from the marsh fever he came down with to the slow and shocking realisation of Britain’s defeat.

It’s also an opportunity for the doctor to fill him (and the reader) in on a more precise description of the sequence of events, namely: the war was triggered by a frontier incident in East Africa, then next thing we knew the Germans attacked on all fronts. Their ships combined with aircraft defeated ours. They had numerical superiority so could defeat us in several places simultaneously. The Germans hadn’t initially planned annexation, but, once they realised it was a possibility, Warum nicht? and so Britain has become a sort of Alsace-Lorraine. (The king has fled to Delhi and set up an alternative court. Not the first time, as the narrator dryly points out, there has been a king ‘across the water’.)

Dr Holham says the Liberal Party had been in power for ‘nearly a decade’ and so were widely blamed for the defeat. (Since the Liberals won a landslide victory in the 1906 election this places the fictional invasion in about 1915, two years into the book’s future.) Yeovil expresses his bluff, manly patriotism:

‘But, surely—a nation such as ours, a virile, highly-civilised nation with an age-long tradition of mastery behind it, cannot be held under for ever by a few thousand bayonets and machine guns. We must surely rise up one day and drive them out.’

But Dr Holham crushes him by describing how quickly the British abandoned thoughts of resistance: for everyday life must go on, people must eat, work, earn money, business must trade. The golf links are filling up again, sport is resuming.

The doctor then goes on to make a special case of London, explaining that London is to an unusual extent a cosmopolitan city, and its art world is intrinsically cosmopolitan and less patriotic than the rest of the country:

You must remember that many things in modern life, especially in the big cities, are not national but international. In the world of music and art and the drama, for instance, the foreign names are legion, they confront you at every turn, and some of our British devotees of such arts are more acclimatised to the ways of Munich or Moscow than they are familiar with the life, say, of Stirling or York. For years they have lived and thought and spoken in an atmosphere and jargon of denationalised culture—even those of them who have never left our shores. They would take pains to be intimately familiar with the domestic affairs and views of life of some Galician gipsy dramatist, and gravely quote and discuss his opinions on debts and mistresses and cookery, while they would shudder at ‘D’ye ken John Peel?’ as a piece of uncouth barbarity. You cannot expect a world of that sort to be permanently concerned or downcast because the Crown of Charlemagne takes its place now on the top of the Royal box in the theatres, or at the head of programmes at State concerts.

So, in this view, London’s art world and High Society is, by its nature, less patriotic than the rest of the country, or even unpatriotic. It’s quite a vicious claim for Saki to be making and all the more surprising because he made his entire career out of detailed depictions of precisely this class.

Saki’s antisemitism

So far, so cutting. But then, to my surprise, the two characters step over a line and transition from being anti-London to becoming overtly antisemitic.

‘And then there are the Jews.’
‘There are many in the land, or at least in London,’ said Yeovil.
‘There are even more of them now than there used to be,’ said Holham. ‘I am to a great extent a disliker of Jews myself, but I will be fair to them, and admit that those of them who were in any genuine sense British have remained British and have stuck by us loyally in our misfortune; all honour to them. But of the others, the men who by temperament and everything else were far more Teuton or Polish or Latin than they were British, it was not to be expected that they would be heartbroken because London had suddenly lost its place among the political capitals of the world, and became a cosmopolitan city. They had appreciated the free and easy liberty of the old days, under British rule, but there was a stiff insularity in the ruling race that they chafed against. Now, putting aside some petty Government restrictions that Teutonic bureaucracy has brought in, there is really, in their eyes, more licence and social adaptability in London than before.’

This speech combines a number of antisemitic tropes:

Antisemitic trope 1: Jews everywhere

That the Jews were somehow everywhere, ‘many in the land’. Certainly the 1880s and 1890s had seen large-scale immigration of Jews to Britain fleeing from pogroms in Russia. Between 1880 and 1900 an estimated 150,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in London, mostly settling in the East End where competition for housing and work caused much ill feeling and gave rise to the nativist, anti-immigration party, the British Brothers League. It was lobbying by the League and a shrewd alliance with sympathetic MPs which led to the 1905 Aliens Act, which was the first attempt in British law to limit immigration.

But the rhetoric around Jewish immigration (astonishingly, hair-raisingly racist as it appears to modern sensibilities) exaggerated the impact that 150,000 people made on a filthy, over-crowded London whose population was already five million. If there was competition for sweatshop jobs and appalling housing conditions, these were present before the Jews arrived. These were English problems created by decades of English exploitation and neglect.

Antisemitic trope 2: Jews cosmopolitan

The second antisemitic trope is that the Jews are essentially ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘rootless’ and therefore intrinsically less patriotic or incapable of patriotism in the way that other ‘races’ are (the French ‘race’, the British ‘race’, the German ‘race’ etc); that they actively prefer London under enemy occupation as it is more like the continental capitals they are used to.

This is just a slur, a libel, which the doctor himself goes on to qualify as being untrue for most if not all British Jews. But that doesn’t stop him expressing it and Yeovil nodding sagely as if they’ve both made a penetratingly wise analysis of Edwardian society’s many ills.

Edwardian anxieties

Because that’s what’s at the root of the problem: Edwardian society’s profound anxiety about itself.

The Boer War and poverty The ruling classes and their cronies in the Press had been shocked by Britain’s poor showing in the Boer War, which should have been over in a few months but dragged on for two and a half painful years (1899 to 1902). They were shocked to discover the terrible state of the working class men rounded up from the slums of London, Birmingham and Glasgow and packed off to the distant Veldt where they were easily outclassed by the fit guerrilla fighters of the Boers. (The most quoted statistic is that, of the young men recruited for the war from the slums of Britain’s cities, as many as 40% were unfit for military service and suffered from medical problems such as rickets and other poverty-related illnesses.)

The decadence At the other end of the social scale there was an ongoing moral panic about the moral decline of the sons of the super-rich upper classes, what the antisemitic polemicist Arnold White called ‘bad smart society’ in his 1901 diatribe Empire and Efficiency. The worry that the British Empire would go the way of the Roman Empire, which everyone agreed had collapsed due to its moral decadence and self-indulgence. To every decent chap’s horror there were even artistic and literary movements which prided themselves on their ‘decadence.’

The Oscar Wilde trial (1895) gave the enemies of decadence a focal point and symbol with which to whip all these decadent tendencies, and try to enforce more martial virtues, the old Roman Republican virtues of heroism and self-sacrifice. But, as Saki’s own stories amply demonstrate, set as they are among fantastically decadent, orchidaceous young men and catty Society women, this campaign had a very limited impact. While the Germans were aggressively building up their fleet of Dreadnoughts, Imperialists of the Kipling brand warned of the dangers of attack, and called for a physical and moral revolution across the land, but Kipling’s tone is one of a prophet in the wilderness who becomes all the more anxious the more he is ignored.

Military rivalry In addition to the threat of moral collapse from within and armed threat from Europe, Edwardian England was faced with other seemingly intractable problems. Civil war was threatening in Ireland and the entire political class was taking sides over the conflict. An evermore militant trade union movement supported a Labour Party which was threatening to gain more MPs and overturn the duopoly of power between Conservatives and Liberals which had lasted over a century. Women of all classes were united in the surprisingly disruptive and divisive Suffragette Movement. And various colonies threatened rebellion and revolt, not least the jewel in the Crown, India, with its growing Indian National Congress  party, founded 1885.

Jews as scapegoats

The great advantage of having a scapegoat is that everything can be blamed on them. All the anxieties and resentments and furies of all the different classes and parties in Edwardian society could be focused on just one convenient figure – the ‘Jew’. Society becoming too luxurious and decadent? Blame it on the corrupt spirit of the Oriental Jew. Society too greedy and money-minded? Blame it on the Jewish banker. Society aflame with Socialist agitation? Blame it on the Jewish Socialists. The East End packed with filthy hovels? Blame it on Jewish immigration or rackrenting Jewish landords. Good, solid British culture being borne down in a welter of cosmopolitan art and radical theatre? Blame it on Jewish intellectuals and Jewish impresarios (later on, Saki goes to lengths to point out that the Caravansery Theatre of Varieties which features in the story is managed by Messrs. Isaac Grosvenor and Leon Hebhardt, continuing his theme that cosmopolitan Jews run everything).

There was no social, political or cultural problem too large or too small which couldn’t be laid at the door of the scapegoat figure of ‘the Jew’, stereotypically seen as rootless, cosmopolitan, with no fixed homeland, and therefore the enemy of all the good, solid, traditional British blah blah blah values.

Against this backdrop Saki creates a fine, upstanding, huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ Aryan hero who is associated with clean, healthy living, either in the wild, among wolves on the distant steppes of Russia, or fox hunting across unspoilt Wessex. Murrey Yeovil’s structural role in the narrative is to act as a clean, upstanding contrast to cosmopolitan London and its moral corruption and idle, upper-class chatter, as described by his sidekick Dr Holham:

‘People of the world that I am speaking of, our dominant world at the present moment, herd together as closely packed to the square yard as possible, doing nothing worth doing, and saying nothing worth saying, but doing it and saying it over and over again, listening to the same melodies, watching the same artistes, echoing the same catchwords, ordering the same dishes in the same restaurants, suffering each other’s cigarette smoke and perfumes and conversation, feverishly, anxiously making arrangements to meet each other again to-morrow, next week, and the week after next, and repeat the same gregarious experience.’

It was psychologically easy for people like Saki or his characters to channel their ill-focused dislike of modern life, with all its rapid changes and stresses and anxieties, first onto The City, the embodiment of alienating Modernity, and then onto the figure which generations of antisemitic prejudice had created as somehow the embodiment of everything which was corrupting about modern urban life, ‘the Jew’.

Antisemitism as problem avoidance

Like all racist stereotypes, antisemitism allows the believer to avoid having to confront the intractably complex and difficult issues about his own society and his own relationship to it. Just possibly it was not foreigners who were responsible for the corruption and superficiality of London life, for mass poverty and slums, for high crime rates and the growth of radical socialist politics: maybe it was the British ruling class themselves who were responsible for creating this anxious and divided society. But you can see how an entire class would prefer not to look its own failure in the face, and much prefer to blame them, the others, the outsiders, the rich Jews, the poor Jews, the bankers, the Socialists, they’re all in it together, it’s a great Jewish conspiracy!

Antisemitism as a bonding force for antisemites

And like all socially shared stereotypes, antisemitism also allows its exponents to bond together, to cement friendships, to assert shared values, exactly as Yeovil and the doctor do in this chapter. There’s a particularly unpleasant and telling way in which the antisemites use periphrases to refer to Jews: referring to ‘Hebraic-looking gentlemen’, or people whose ancestors hale from ‘the Jordan valley’, or use cod Biblical phrases like the alleged fact that they are ‘many in the land’. The antisemites think they’re being so clever, so civilisé, using their fancy codes and crossword-clue style allusions to Jews. But they’re not; they’re being thick and racist. Antisemitism is a stupid person’s idea of ‘clever’.

Summary of discussion of antisemitism

To sum up: antisemitism is not actually the central theme of this book, it is ‘merely’ an unpleasantly recurring leitmotif, a subset of the bigger issue the text sets out to investigate, namely Britain’s moral, political, cultural and military collapse. But it has an impact on the modern reader out of proportion to its relatively minor presence in the text, because of the calamitous history which was to come later and which we, now, know so much about.

Considered as a fiction, it is fascinating to see how Saki shows that antisemitism has arisen in Murrey Yeovil’s character, how it derives from this simplistic city-country dichotomy, and how it has become horribly intertwined with notions of patriotism versus ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’, corrupt town versus noble country and so on. Saki the novelist gives Murrey’s antisemitism a great psychological plausibility.

And it is always possible that Saki is pulling the basic fictional trick on us of fooling us into sympathising with, or taking seriously, a character who he himself despises. But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like Murrey Yeovil really is the ‘hero’, albeit flawed, of this slender novel, and that his bitter resentment of Jews is included in the novel because Saki himself, at least in part, shared it.

And so I’m afraid the broad vein of antisemitism which runs through this novel has permanently tainted my enjoyment of all Saki’s other works. Anyway. Back to the plot summary:

Chapter 4 ‘Es ist verboten’

The morning after Yeovil’s long chat with the doctor, he comes downstairs to a scumptious breakfast prepared by servants (when did servants stop being a thing in England? The 1940s?). Cicely explains to Yeovil how many of their upper-class friends have either retreated to their country estates, or have moved to one of the colonies. (It is, on the face of it, an anomaly that the colonies continue to remain British, though this is directly addressed later on by a German character who says the Germans simply have no interest in winning or running them. All they want is the freedom to develop their own colonies, which they have now won.)

Yeovil goes for a walk through Hyde Park where he notices Teutonic changes: for example, the tea rooms have changed to a continental bar serving lager and coffee, a troop of shiny German cavaliers rides by, and a policeman gives him an on-the-spot fine for walking on the grass (as they do in Switzerland), warning him that walking on the grass is, under the new regime, ‘verboten’.

Chapter 5 L’art d’etre cousine

Cicely holds a lunch party to which come her sort-of boyfriend Ronnie Storr, as well as the insufferable chatterbox Joan Mardle. After idle chat, Joan moves on to discuss the law about the House of Lords. All titles will lapse unless the holder takes an oath of allegiance to the Kaiser.

Then to the issue of Gorla Mustelford and her first night of ‘suggestive dancing’ at the Caravansery Theatre. Interestingly, ‘suggestive’ doesn’t seem to have the meaning it has for us now i.e. sexual suggestiveness, for Gorla is doing a dance ‘suggestive of the life of a fern’, so it seems to mean something more like imitative or mimicking.

Joan Mardle has realised the Yeovils are poles apart on the great question of the day, which is whether to acquiesce in the German conquest or resist. Cicely insists she will throw a party for Gorla’s first night though, out of consideration for Murrey’s views, not at their home but at a restaurant.

Chapter 6 Herr von Kwarl

Portrait of an adviser to the government, Herr Von Kwarl, sat at his favourite table in the Brandenburg Café at the bottom of Regentstrasse (i.e. in Berlin), and discussing the Occupation with Herr Rebinok, the plump little Pomeranian banker. They play chess (with comically aggressive comments) then discuss the future of the Occupation. Von Kwarl dismisses the notion of Delhi assembling a coalition against them. No, the pressure point is the young generation of Brits: will they acquiesce or revolt? In particular, over German plans to introduce national service which Britain has never had before.

Chapter 7 The Lure

Cicely and Murrey have diametrically opposed reactions to the Occupation. She is given very persuasive arguments that the old values and ways must be maintained despite everything. She is a ‘gradualist’. She believes British values may come to infiltrate the German Empire, a kind of reverse takeover which may end up dictating the whole drift of German policy. Alternatively, there may come a moment in the future which is propitious to an armed uprising. But not now: for the moment, normal British life and values must be preserved. In particular she holds out to Murrey ‘the lure’ of the chapter’s title, which is that he should resume his place with the East Wessex Hunt, maintaining the best traditions of an independent England.

Among the small squires and yeoman farmers, doctors, country tradesmen, auctioneers and so forth who would gather at the covert-side and at the hunt breakfasts, there might be a local nucleus of revolt against the enslavement of the land, a discouraged and leaderless band waiting for some one to mould their resistance into effective shape and keep their loyalty to the old dynasty and the old national cause steadily burning.

Chapter 8 The First Night

The first night of Gorla Mustelford’s dance show, included on a mixed bill at the Caravansery Theatre of Varieties. ‘Everyone’ is there but the chapter is mainly a vehicle for Yeovil’s jaded reflections on London’s sell-out society with its ‘babble of tongues and shrill mechanical repartee.’ There is an unpleasantly antisemitic passage about the prevalence of Jews from many countries in the audience.

At first sight and first hearing the bulk of the audience seemed to comprise representatives of the chief European races in well-distributed proportions, but if one gave it closer consideration it could be seen that the distribution was geographically rather than ethnographically diversified. Men and women there were from Paris, Munich, Rome, Moscow and Vienna, from Sweden and Holland and divers other cities and countries, but in the majority of cases the Jordan Valley had supplied their forefathers with a common cradle-ground. The lack of a fire burning on a national altar seemed to have drawn them by universal impulse to the congenial flare of the footlights, whether as artists, producers, impresarios, critics, agents, go-betweens, or merely as highly intelligent and fearsomely well-informed spectators. They were prominent in the chief seats, they were represented, more sparsely but still in fair numbers, in the cheaper places, and everywhere they were voluble, emphatic, sanguine or sceptical, prodigal of word and gesture, with eyes that seemed to miss nothing and acknowledge nothing, and a general restless dread of not being seen and noticed.

This soon segues into Yeovil’s equally bitter meditations on other classes who have too-readily accepted occupation, but nonetheless, its rank antisemitism leaves a very bad taste in the mouth. Yeovil contrasts the English high society sellouts with the Bulgarian people who put up a fight against their oppressor and so are now (1913) independent (of the Ottoman Empire).

Thoughts about those who have sold out or accepted ‘the fait accompli’ focus on the figure of ambitious social climber Lady Shalem, who has kept London society going and whose husband will soon be rewarded with a Barony by a grateful Kaiser.

There is also a loud tiresome American. Saki clearly hates Americans cf. the honeymoon chapter in The Unbearable Bassington. They’re one more symptom of the ghastly modern world which he hates, along with motor cars and continental cafés and cosmopolitan Jews.

The ‘redoubtable von Kwarl’ makes a ‘visit of ceremony’ to Cicely’s box. Yes, she is very well in with the new ruling class, her husband observes, bitterly.

Chapter 9 An evening ‘to be remembered’

The narrator fiercely criticises Gorla Mustelford’s graceless, restless dancing and lambasts the superficiality of the audience. By contrast with the fine balance of his short stories, in this novel Saki’s contempt and almost hatred of the English upper classes is revealed in all its bile and anger.

The Kaiser arrives, slipping into his box with no fuss except that the entire theatre stops to stare. Yeovil is disgusted at their sycophancy.

And then the performance is over and everyone goes to the party Cicely has arranged at a restaurant where the narrator lets rip his contempt for the pretentious loudmouth prattle of ghastly London High Society, awful people shouting their banal opinions at the tops of their voices.

The narrative pans over various groups until arriving at the popular singer Tony Luton, who had himself performed at the evening’s gala, sweet-talking the elderly and very rich Gräfin von Tolb, who has taken up residence in Berkeley Square.

Chapter 10 Some reflections and a Te Deum

It is the day after the Mustelford first night and Cicely’s wildly successful party. The chapter shares with us Cicely’s strategic analysis of how the success of the party has positioned her within London’s new, post-conquest world. The friendship of Lady Shalem was important, but the patronage of the Gräfin is vital. She tries to be polite to Murrey over breakfast but he gets bitter when she asks if he has read about her supper-party. He makes another antisemitic remark.

‘There is a notice of it in two of the morning papers, with a list of those present,’ said Yeovil; ‘The conquering race seems to have been very well represented.’
‘Several races were represented,’ said Cicely; ‘a function of that sort, celebrating a dramatic first-night, was bound to be cosmopolitan. In fact, blending of races and nationalities is the tendency of the age we live in.’
‘The blending of races seems to have been consummated already in one of the individuals at your party,’ said Yeovil drily; ‘the name Mentieth-Mendlesohnn struck me as a particularly happy obliteration of racial landmarks.’
Cicely laughed.

It shows you how, for people of Yeovil and Saki’s ilk, the nations of the world were composed of clearly defined races, the Teuton, the Anglo-Saxon, the Latin, the Muslim, the Arab and so on. More controversially, they have a primitive feeling that miscegenation, or the marrying across racial lines, is unfortunate, and hence the joke about Mrs Mentieth-Mendlesohnn, whose name shows she is a ‘cross’ between Scottish and Jewish ‘blood’. For some reason the very rootlessness of Jews, the way they have no fixed nation but crop up as citizens of many other nations, offends Yeovil and brings out these unpleasant cracks.

On a separate subject, considered as a fiction, it is a simple but effective idea to position a husband and wife with polar opposite views about the novel’s central issue, i.e. how to respond to the catastrophe of being conquered and humiliated; to have the differing attitudes to being conquered dramatised within a marriage, with the wife, in particular, worried that her plans to become force in London High Society, might be derailed by her begrudging husband.

Chapter 11 The tea shop

Yeovil goes for a walk down Piccadilly and into Burlington Arcade, whose entire west side of shops has been removed to make way for German-style café tables at which a very cosmopolitan mix of peoples and languages are drinking their coffees and syrups and listening to a band playing the latest transatlantic jingles.

From around the tightly-packed tables arose a babble of tongues, made up chiefly of German, a South American rendering of Spanish, and a North American rendering of English, with here and there the sharp shaken-out staccato of Japanese. A sleepy-looking boy, in a nondescript uniform, was wandering to and fro among the customers, offering for sale the Matin, New York Herald, Berliner Tageblatt, and a host of crudely coloured illustrated papers, embodying the hard-worked wit of a world-legion of comic artists. Yeovil hurried through the Arcade; it was not here, in this atmosphere of staring alien eyes and jangling tongues, that he wanted to read the news of the Imperial Aufklärung.

So, as I stated earlier, Yeovil’s animus against Jews is only a part of his broader revulsion against the entire mixed-up, multiracial, polyglot, cosmopolitan world which he hates.

Yeovil hurries through the Arcade, on through Hanover Square and then drops into a tea shop off Oxford Street. Here he gets talking to a pastor, a man with ‘a keen, clever, hard-lined face, the face of a man who, in an earlier stage of European history, might have been a warlike prior’, who explains that the working classes blame the defeat on the politicians and ruling classes, despite the fact it was they themselves who voted for peace-making politicians (i.e. the pacifist Liberal Party).

All morning Yeovil and everyone else has been expecting a Royal Proclamation announcing that the British will be compelled to perform the same military service as the Germans. It is a brutal humiliation, then, when the newsboys shout a special edition of the papers is hitting the streets, and the pastor grabs a copy and shares it with Yeovil to discover that: the Imperial Aufklärung is precisely the opposite. From now on no Britons will do military service, training, wear a uniform or be able to bear arms.

The martial trappings, the swaggering joy of life, the comradeship of camp and barracks, the hard discipline of drill yard and fatigue duty, the long sentry watches, the trench digging, forced marches, wounds, cold, hunger, makeshift hospitals, and the blood-wet laurels—these were not for them. Such things they might only guess at, or see on a cinema film, darkly; they belonged to the civilian nation.

In other words the Germans consider the British have proved themselves unworthy of bearing arms. It is the extreme of national humiliation.

Chapter 12 The travelling companions

Yeovil takes a train down through an idealised countryside to ‘Torywood’. It was plain from The Unbearable Bassington and becomes plainer still here, that Saki loathed the city and fetishised the idealised English countryside.

Tall grasses and meadow-weeds stood in deep shocks, field after field, between the leafy boundaries of hedge or coppice, thrusting themselves higher and higher till they touched the low sweeping branches of the trees that here and there overshadowed them. Broad streams, bordered with a heavy fringe of reed and sedge, went winding away into a green distance where woodland and meadowland seemed indefinitely prolonged; narrow streamlets, lost to view in the growth that they fostered, disclosed their presence merely by the water-weed that showed in a riband of rank verdure threading the mellower green of the fields.

On the stream banks moorhens walked with jerky confident steps, in the easy boldness of those who had a couple of other elements at their disposal in an emergency; more timorous partridges raced away from the apparition of the train, looking all leg and neck, like little forest elves fleeing from human encounter. And in the distance, over the tree line, a heron or two flapped with slow measured wing-beats and an air of being bent on an immeasurably longer journey than the train that hurtled so frantically along the rails.

Now and then the meadowland changed itself suddenly into orchard, with close-growing trees already showing the measure of their coming harvest, and then strawyard and farm buildings would slide into view; heavy dairy cattle, roan and skewbald and dappled, stood near the gates, drowsily resentful of insect stings, and bunched-up companies of ducks halted in seeming irresolution between the charms of the horse-pond and the alluring neighbourhood of the farm kitchen. Away by the banks of some rushing mill-stream, in a setting of copse and cornfield, a village might be guessed at, just a hint of red roof, grey wreathed chimney and old church tower as seen from the windows of the passing train, and over it all brooded a happy, settled calm, like the dreaming murmur of a trout-stream and the far-away cawing of rooks.

It was a land where it seemed as if it must be always summer and generally afternoon, a land where bees hummed among the wild thyme and in the flower beds of cottage gardens, where the harvest-mice rustled amid the corn and nettles, and the mill-race flowed cool and silent through water-weeds and dark tunnelled sluices, and made soft droning music with the wooden mill-wheel. And the music carried with it the wording of old undying rhymes, and sang of the jolly, uncaring, uncared-for miller, of the farmer who went riding upon his grey mare, of the mouse who lived beneath the merry mill-pin, of the sweet music on yonder green hill and the dancers all in yellow—the songs and fancies of a lingering olden time, when men took life as children take a long summer day, and went to bed at last with a simple trust in something they could not have explained.

On the train journey, very schematically Yeovil meets two ‘types’. The first is a visiting Hungarian who tuts about Britain’s fate, saying Britain grew soft: ‘great world-commerce brings great luxury, and luxury brings softness.’ The British lost faith in their Christian religion but were not virile enough to restore Paganism.

A word on paganism

Paganism and its embodiment in the great Greek nature god Pan, are threads which occasionally surface in Saki’s stories, notably the one specifically about Pan, The Music on the Hill, from The Chronicles of Clovis (1911). But a very strong feel for the countryside is present in many of his stories and both of the novels and this sometimes rises to the level of almost visionary or religious intensity, which is where the spirit of Pan comes in.

This blog post by John Coulthart gives a useful background to Pan in the art and literary world of the 1890s. At least five different things were involved. 1. The rejection by legions of sensitive artists and writers of the urban world of commerce and industry in preference for the unspoilt pagan countryside. 2. The sense that Christianity had become completely hollowed out as the vehicle for any kind of religious raptures or ecstatic visions. 3. Whereas many of these artists were the product of a century or more of the Classical literature which was taught in all private schools, giving rise to the cult of evermore exquisite classicism. 4. It was strongly tinged with homosexuality. Pan is a beautiful, svelte but wickedly immoral young man; in other words a fantasy object for many gay writers and artists, of which Oscar Wilde was one and Saki clearly another. The two occurrences of the word ‘pagan’ in this novel associate it with young, manly virility. The first one is here, in this passage, where the Hungarian train traveller tells Yeovil that true paganism is associated with a level of virile manliness which the English have lost:

‘I know many English of the country parts, and always they tell me they go to church once in each week to set the good example to the servants. They were tired of their faith, but they were not virile enough to become real Pagans; their dancing fauns were good young men who tripped Morris dances and ate health foods and believed in a sort of Socialism which made for the greatest dullness of the greatest number.’

And the second is when Yeovil witnesses some young German soldiers marching by, exciting and glamorous in their uniforms and virile young manliness:

A sudden roll of drums and crash of brass music filled the air. A company of Bavarian infantry went by, in all the pomp and circumstance of martial array and the joyous swing of rapid rhythmic movement. The street echoed and throbbed in the Englishman’s ears with the exultant pulse of youth and mastery set to loud Pagan music. (Chapter 11)

OK, there’s nothing overtly gay about either passage, but we know it is there. In fact ‘pagan’ could, in the right context, virtually be a codeword for gay.

5. Lastly, alas, I think there is also an antisemitic element to Saki’s paganism, too. In the sense that Saki appears to find the organised Christianity, the Church of England, of his day, risible, as, admittedly, many other writers of the time did too, and states his preference for full-blooded and virile paganism. But it’s only a small step from this position to identifying the really repressive part of Christianity as the Old Testament with its forbidding God Jehovah and his long list of prohibitions and his repressive attitude towards the clean, young, healthy male body worshipped by the Greeks – and from there it’s only a small further step to blame the Old Testament on ‘the Jews’ and – bang! – you can, once again, blame ‘the Jews’ for everything bad and repressive about society, and the antisemite is back on his familiar stomping ground.

Back to the plot

Back on the train, the Hungarian asks Murrey to compare and contrast the pusillanimous Brits with his own people, the Hungarians, who ‘live too much cheek by jowl with our racial neighbours to have many illusions about them.’ Interestingly, by ‘race’ he doesn’t mean the modern notion of skin colour, but is clearly referring to Austrians, Roumanians, Serbs, Italians, Czechs, what we would think of as ‘nationalities’. These terms have changed their meaning over the last century. Anyway, his point is you always have to have your guard up and Britain let hers lapse.

The Hungarian gets out at the next station and is replaced by a big, red-faced English angler. This is a classic type of the pub bore and Yeovil gets angry when the bore booms on about Britain’s intrinsic superiority, a nation such as ours is bound to kick out the sausage-eaters, and so on. Not, replies Yeovil, without great effort and self-sacrifice. By the end of their short conversation Yeovil is filled with Kiplingesque contempt for the jingoist who is full of words with no understanding of the hard work and sacrificed involved.

And with that parting shot he [the jingoist] left the carriage and lounged heavily down the platform, a patriot who had never handled a rifle or mounted a horse or pulled an oar, but who had never flinched from demolishing his country’s enemies with his tongue. ‘England has never had any lack of patriots of that type,’ thought Yeovil sadly; ‘so many patriots and so little patriotism.’

Chapter 13 Torywood

Murrey has been taking the train down to the hilariously named ‘Torywood’, whose train station is, of course, the epitome of bucolic England. Yeovil is picked up by a dogcart, which gives him opportunity to vent his grumpy spleen about the horrid new invention of the motor car, which, of course, began its ruinous ascent in the Edwardian decade (see Wind In The Willows).

Torywood is the country seat of Eleanor, Dowager Lady Greymarten. She has devoted her life to the maintenance of the county and the country which is described in woolly, Kiplingesque rhetoric.

In her town house or down at Torywood, with her writing-pad on her knee and the telephone at her elbow, or in personal counsel with some trusted colleague or persuasive argument with a halting adherent or half-convinced opponent, she had laboured on behalf of the poor and the ill-equipped, had fought for her idea of the Right, and above all, for the safety and sanity of her Fatherland. Spadework when necessary and leadership when called for, came alike within the scope of her activities, and not least of her achievements, though perhaps she hardly realised it, was the force of her example, a lone, indomitable fighter calling to the half-caring and the half-discouraged, to the laggard and the slow-moving.

This is a laughable portrait of the Tory fantasy of the benevolent aristocrat, conveniently eliding the centuries of oppression of rural workers which had brought her family to this happy state. Lady Greymarten is old and frail now, but she enjoins Yeovil to fight on. The contrast between old and fading but still unbowed gentility and the preening exuberance of ‘cosmopolitan’ London couldn’t be more clearly expressed:

Yeovil said good-bye to her as she stood there, a wan, shrunken shadow, yet with a greater strength and reality in her flickering life than those parrot men and women that fluttered and chattered through London drawing-rooms and theatre foyers.

It is clearly designed to bring tears of patriotism to your eyes, although it may bring tears of mocking laughter to the modern reader’s eye. If things are defined by contrast with what they are not, then the clean and healthy countryside needs there to be a corrupt and dirty city, to set itself against.

His own country had never seemed in his eyes so comfort-yielding and to-be-desired as it did now when it had passed into alien keeping and become a prison land as much as a homeland. London with its thin mockery of a Season, and its chattering horde of empty-hearted self-seekers, held no attraction for him, but the spell of English country life was weaving itself round him, now that the charm of the desert was receding into a mist of memories. The waning of pleasant autumn days in an English woodland, the whir of game birds in the clean harvested fields, the grey moist mornings in the saddle, with the magical cry of hounds coming up from some misty hollow, and then the delicious abandon of physical weariness in bathroom and bedroom after a long run, and the heavenly snatched hour of luxurious sleep, before stirring back to life and hunger, the coming of the dinner hour and the jollity of a well-chosen house-party.

Fantasy of English upper class, ‘timeless’, country life conveniently emptied of the its actual inhabitants, the farm workers and small town merchants and lawyers and increasing number of commuters. Fantasy.

Chapter 14 A perfectly glorious afternoon

We are plunged back into the subtle corruptions of London life, with Yeovil’s wife, Cicely, ensconced in the fashionable Anchorage restaurant, along with fashionable young Ronnie Storr, the musician who she refers to as her ‘lover’ and ‘boyfriend’. She has, apparently, had many during her marriage to Murrey.

They discuss in a languid Noel Coward sort of way how Tony is becoming too famous as a musician to remain her lover much longer. ‘You’ve got a charming young body and you’ve no soul, and that’s such a fascinating combination.’ He is giving a piano recital that afternoon and they go through a typical Saki list of London High Society who will be attending which, of course, includes some well-placed Germans.

Storr performs magnificently to the loud applause of the gentry and nobles present. But when the Duchess of Dreyshire asks Yeovil (now back in London) what he thinks, he replies by quoting a fierce piece of verse about patriotism, Boadicea, an Ode by William Cowper. To Murrey’s surprise, young working class Tony Luton takes up the refrain before himself storming out.

The flow of polite chatter resumes and Saki describes at length the chitter-chatter of the privileged, including Canon Mousepace, Mrs. Menteith-Mendlesohnn, the popular novelist Rhapsodie Pantril, the Gräfin von Tolb, Leutnant von Gabelroth, Joan Mardle, the Landgraf.

Later, it was reported in the newspapers that the popular singer Tony Luton had turned down an offer by Messrs. Isaac Grosvenor and Leon Hebhardt to renew his contract and had signed on instead with the Canadian merchant marine. The point being that he has quit the shallow world of ‘art’, the theatre and endless London gossip for a real job in the ‘real’ world. Which Saki approves with editorial heavy-handedness:

Perhaps after all there had been some shred of glory amid the trumpet triumph of that July afternoon.

Chapter 15 The intelligent anticipator of wants

Both of Yeovil’s old clubs have disappeared, one off the face of the earth, the other off to Delhi. He tries its replacement, the Cartwheel, which turns out to be as busy as Piccadilly Circus and with a distinct presence of ‘Hebraic-looking gentlemen, wearing tartan waistcoats of the clans of their adoption, flitted restlessly between the tape machines and telephone boxes’. Another one of the many throwaway antisemitic remarks which litter the book.

Yeovil is about to turn round and leave when he is buttonholed by Hubert Herlton who has become a ‘fixer’, a putter together of buyer and seller, a sort of early version of the World War Two spiv. Hubert predicts that German immigration will slowly increase and more cities and towns develop a majority German population. Herlton is sharp enough to remember Yeovil is a hunting man and used to hunt in East Wessex, so briskly announces that he has a fine horse lined up for him, and a ‘hunting box’ or country base, complete with paddock and garden.

Yeovil points out a chap named Pitherby crossing the vestibule. Herlton reveals the Pitherby is set fair to acquire a barony and so has been laying a goodly stock of game to be hunted, in accord with his new status, and is buying off Herlton some Hereford cows, a swannery, a heronry, and a carp pond!

Chapter 16 Sunrise

A strange chapter, standing completely alone from the rest of the text, in which a Frenchman in what we take to be remote India, comes across an English woman bringing up her children in a remote isolated farmstead, where they can swim in the lake and shoot among the reeds. Her husband is dead and she is in exile from occupied England.

The chapter title is explained because, as the sun rises on the Frenchman talking to this woman, her children unfurl the Union Jack on a flagpole on a hill and everyone stops to salute it. Presumably this interlude exists to show the patriotic sacrifice that some people are prepared to make for good old England, and to compare and contrast this with the London society which is carrying on as if nothing has happened, even sucking up to their German conquerors.

Chapter 17 The event of the season

In a Turkish bath in Cork Street W1 a vapid young man Cornelian Valpy regales his fellow bathers with details of the frightfully clever ball held at Shalem House last night, where guests went as a character from history and their partners had to be their prevailing characteristics, such as George Washington and Truth.

It is a long roll call of the hypocritical Quisling high society we have been meeting throughout the novel: the Duchess of Dreyshire as Aholibah, Billy Carnset for her shadow, Unspeakable Depravity; Leutnant von Gabelroth as George Washington, Joan Mardle as his shadow, typifying Inconvenient Candour; the loud-voiced Bessimer woman as the Goddess Juno, with Ronnie Storre to represent Green-eyed Jealousy; the author Pitherby dressed as Frederick the Great to promote his sycophantic biography of the German ruler, accompanied by an uninspiring-looking woman, supposed to represent Military Genius; Cornelian Valpy dressed as the Emperor Nero and Miss Kate Lerra, typifying Insensate Vanity.

Valpy has time to explain that Cicely Yeovil has found herself a new boyfriend, much prettier than her old one, Ronnie Storre. What he doesn’t realise is that Ronnie is in the Turkish bath, overhears this comment, and stalks out. The point of the chapter is to demonstrate London’s cesspit of narcissistic partying and vapid gossip.

Chapter 18 The dead who do not understand

November in the country, country wives putting up shutters and the fox which has been hunted but not caught, retreats into the depths of a spinney as the hunters return to their kennels and stables. We are in the country so, of course, it is Yeovil we find riding home exhausted by a good day’s hunting.

So far, so stereotypes, but there is a smidgeon of interesting psychology in the way that, having been vaunted as the man who hates the fait accompli and loathes the facile acceptance of the new conquerors by his wife and her smart set, and was told by Eleanor, Dowager Lady Greymarten to ‘fight on’… actually, he rather likes the life of a country squire, he likes the hunting:

The pleasures of the chase, well-provided for in every detail, and dovetailed in with the assured luxury of a well-ordered, well-staffed establishment, were exactly what he wanted and exactly what his life down here afforded him. He was experiencing, too, that passionate recurring devotion to an old loved scene that comes at times to men who have travelled far and willingly up and down the world. He was very much at home… Horse and hound-craft, harvest, game broods, the planting and felling of timber, the rearing and selling of stock, the letting of grasslands, the care of fisheries, the up-keep of markets and fairs, they were the things that immediately mattered.

In other words he is tempted to forget all about the ‘good fight’ and relapse into a life of rural contentment. He is tempted.

Except that it’s gotten late, night is drawing on and when Yeovil stops at a pub to enquire directions he discovers he’s a long way from home. The publican tells him there’s a young man with a motor car in the bar heading in his direction, why not stable his horse here for the night and get a lift? Yeovil says yes, then is mortified to discover the motorist is one of ‘them’, Leutnant von Gabelroth, who had, by a wild coincidence, been present at the musical afternoon at Berkshire Street.

The drive takes them past a village church where Yeovil’s ancestors are buried and he is so ashamed that he turns his head in the opposite direction. That is the meaning of the chapter’s title. In Yeovil’s mind, his dead, his ancestors, will not understand his betrayal of their country.

Thus, after being dropped at his spacious and comfortable country house, having had a lovely bath and a fine dinner in the company of the local doctor, at the end of a perfect day, Yeovil is alone with his thoughts and the guilty self-accusation that he is somehow betraying his country, his race and his ancestors.

Here, installed under his own roof-tree, with as good horseflesh in his stable as man could desire, with sport lying almost at his door, with his wife ready to come down and help him to entertain his neighbours, Murrey Yeovil had found the life that he wanted—and was accursed in his own eyes. He argued with himself, and palliated and explained, but he knew why he had turned his eyes away that evening from the little graveyard under the trees; one cannot explain things to the dead.

Chapter 19 The little foxes

It is May, ten months after Yeovil’s return from Siberia, and his wife Cicely is enjoying luncheon in the Park in company of her latest toyboy, Larry Meadowfield. They are there because there is to be a Grand Parade of boy scouts. This organisation has been given all manner of privileges by the Kaiser. Via the usual selection of Quislings and collaborators – Cicely Yeovil, Gräfin von Tolb, Joan Mardle, Sir Leonard Pitherby, Lady Bailquist, Herr Rebinok, the little Pomeranian banker – we learn that there is trouble brewing in the Balkans and so it is all the more important that the grand parade of boy scouts pledges its allegiance to the Kaiser who is waiting, with his son and foreign dignitaries, on a specially erected stage.

But the boy scouts do not come, the crowd starts whistling and booing in mockery and an unnamed young man with a worn grey face (Murrey Yeovil) realises that although he himself might have made a shameful peace with the new regime, hundreds of thousands of the younger generation have not, and will fight on.

In thousands of English homes throughout the land there were young hearts that had not forgotten, had not compounded, would not yield.

So the novel ends on this rousing patriotic note of defiance.


Thoughts

1. Is it even a novel?

When you first read that the subject matter of When William Came is a fictional German invasion of Edwardian England, you wonder whether it will be action-packed, whether there will be fighting, that it might be a ‘thriller’. In the event, it is none of these things. It is a study in the psychology of defeat and one which, in its mannered superficiality, and in comparison with accounts of the disasters which were to follow in the rest of the twentieth century, would be easy to overlook or dismiss as trivial.

In terms of structure, it was a simple but effective idea to divide the psychology of defeat into two broad streams or strategies and to allot one to a husband and one to a wife, so that the different paths of acquiescence can interplay with domestic psychology, and with ‘gender identity’: the woman’s approach, the man’s approach. Makes it more rich and complicated, or, perhaps, less simple-minded.

Even less original is the notion of dividing the responses to enemy occupation into a broadly Town and a ‘Country’ response, given that this is one of the oldest dichotomies in world literature. But Saki’s intimate knowledge of High Society and his malicious wit make the London scenes deliciously satirical; and his less well-known but deep love of the English countryside gives the rural scenes a sumptuously sensual depth.

Above all, he really can write, creating long, luscious sentences ripe with description, which build into huge paragraphs which, especially in the rural scenes, have an almost physical impact on the senses.

The pale light of a November afternoon faded rapidly into the dusk of a November evening. Far over the countryside housewives put up their cottage shutters, lit their lamps, and made the customary remark that the days were drawing in. In barn yards and poultry-runs the greediest pullets made a final tour of inspection, picking up the stray remaining morsels of the evening meal, and then, with much scrambling and squawking, sought the places on the roosting-pole that they thought should belong to them. Labourers working in yard and field began to turn their thoughts homeward or tavernward as the case might be. And through the cold squelching slush of a water-logged meadow a weary, bedraggled, but unbeaten fox stiffly picked his way, climbed a high bramble-grown bank, and flung himself into the sheltering labyrinth of a stretching tangle of woods.

2. Nationhood and patriotism

From a historical point of view, the book is an interesting stroll round the different ways notions of patriotism, race and identity were discussed in 1913 England. One of the most striking things, for me, was philological: Saki uses the word ‘race’ not in our modern sense of ethnicity and skin colour but more as we nowadays say ‘nation’. Thus he talks about the French race, the Italian race, the British race, ‘our’ race, and so on. It seems to have been a much more specific and much more clearly defined idea.

For Saki, or for his characters Yeovil and Dr Holham, each race must remain, in some sense, pure and undefiled by mixing with foreigners (hence the running joke about a character named Mrs Mentieth-Mendlesohnn who exists solely to demonstrate the perceived incongruity of a Jew marrying a Scot; it’s worth remembering that Saki, real name Hector Munro, was himself of Scottish descent).

This is more than what we mean today by racism, because it isn’t defined by skin colour; it’s a deeper sense that every nation has its unique culture, language and traditions and that these are weakened when they are blended into a mongrel mix. Hence Yeovil and Holham’s shared dislike of London’s cosmopolitanism, as evidenced in the ‘Munich or Moscow’ speech I quoted earlier.

On this interpretation, cosmopolitanism creates a fake metropolitan culture which neglects national traditions in preference for the magpie highlights of international art and culture. (Interesting to reflect how this negative view of London as an international city cut off from the rest of the country, hotbed of a cosmopolitan liberal elite, has persisted through the past 110 years, and is generally agreed to have been an issue in the drawn-out Brexit debate and then to have played a part in Labour’s shattering defeat in the 2019 general election.)

London is seen as being in some sense unfaithful to its own native traditions; its cosmopolitanism is a form of betrayal.

3. Jaundiced view of London High Society

One of the things that comes over most strongly throughout the book is Saki’s real hatred of the vapid, pleasure-seeking, shallow, unpatriotic and narcissistic London upper classes.

‘People of the world that I am speaking of, our dominant world at the present moment, herd together as closely packed to the square yard as possible, doing nothing worth doing, and saying nothing worth saying, but doing it and saying it over and over again, listening to the same melodies, watching the same artistes, echoing the same catchwords, ordering the same dishes in the same restaurants, suffering each other’s cigarette smoke and perfumes and conversation, feverishly, anxiously making arrangements to meet each other again to-morrow, next week, and the week after next, and repeat the same gregarious experience. If they were not herded together in a corner of western London, watching each other with restless intelligent eyes, they would be herded together at Brighton or Dieppe, doing the same thing.’

Again and again he criticises this class’s smallness, its incestuousness, and its smug, narcissistic self-congratulation. In a sense the entire premise of the plot, that the Germans will easily defeat us if it comes to a fight, can be seen as an extended slap in the face for these people and this culture which utterly failed to appreciate that there is a Real World of never-ending conflict and competition out there, and you need to be armed and ready to defend yourself against it. It was Kipling’s warning, rephrased in Saki’s very different, mordant and ironic style, but with the same sense of urgency.

4. Antisemitism

I’ve said enough earlier, but Munro’s antisemitism is a blot or stain on this book which also casts a long shadow over all his other works. It is interesting to see how antisemitism can be derived so simply from the postulates listed above, almost like a mathematical formula:

  • each nation or race should remain pure and true to its traditions
  • big cities are places where cosmopolitan elites deny and mock their national traditions, go soft, and indulge in evermore luxury and decadence
  • this is not only ‘immoral’ but leads to the fatal neglect of army and navy, leading to military defeat, France in 1870, England in this novel
  • ‘Jews’ are the most ‘cosmopolitan’ ‘rootless’ elements in modern urban society
  • ‘therefore’ these ‘rootless’ ‘cosmopolitan’ Jews are the greatest threats to the nation

A twisted logic whereby all these anxieties about national safety and resentments at the heedlessness of the rich and fury at everything you don’t like about the modern world can be focused onto the convenient and defenceless figure of the ‘Jew’, stereotypically seen as rootless, cosmopolitan, with no fixed homeland, and therefore the enemy of all the values listed above.

And how narrowing the focus onto this convenient scapegoat lets the antisemite off the hook of having to confront the real causes of England’s unease: the centuries of exploitation of her own deeply immiserated working classes, the Victorian century of ever-wider conquest and exploitation of peoples right around the world. Edwardian England was racked with social and political issues:

  • the rise of militant trade unions and the new Labour Party
  • the suffragettes
  • rebellion in Ireland
  • revolt across much of the Empire, not least the jewel in the Crown, India

But none of this is mentioned in the novel. Instead, and standing in for them, we have his sick obsession with ‘Hebraic-looking gentlemen’ and their untoward prominence in show business. How stupid. How entirely inadequate to the complexities of the time.

When William Came made me realise that antisemitism is a way for people to refuse to face up to the uncomfortable facts about their own country and society and social failings. It is a stupid ‘solution’ for stupid people who aren’t capable of grasping, defining or analysing the genuinely difficult questions  their society needs to address. It is a cop-out. Antisemitism is an explanation for idiots.

A note on spelling antisemitism

I checked online to find out whether to use a capital S in antisemitism and discovered that I shouldn’t be using the hyphenated form of either the thing or the person. The advice of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance is to use the forms ‘antisemitism’ and ‘antisemite’, so that’s what I’ve done here and will do in future.


Related links

Saki’s works

The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki (1911)

The spirit of mirthfulness which one associates with the name certainly ran riot in the boy, but it was a twisted wayward sort of mirth… (The Unbearable Bassington)

In 1908, Hector Hugh Munro gave up foreign reporting and returned to London. Throughout his career as a foreign correspondent he had also been publishing short fictional squibs under the pen-name Saki, sometimes rising to the level of ‘short stories’, often little more than humorous anecdotes or dialogues set among London’s upper classes. From time to time they were brought together in book form.

The Chronicles of Clovis was Saki’s third such collection of very short stories and scenes. As the title suggests, most (though not all) of the stories feature the character of Clovis Sangrail, a world-weary, spoiled, selfish and cynical upper-class young man with a malicious sense of humour.

Clovis rearranged several cushions to his personal solace and satisfaction; he knew that the Baroness liked her guests to be comfortable, and he thought it right to respect her wishes in that particular.

Clovis, and his friend Reginald, who we know from Saki’s previous stories, are young men-about-town who take mischievous delight in shocking their conventional, stuffy elders. In fact the pair are interchangeable and Clovis performs precisely the same role of sardonic chorus or witty interlocutor to an older, conventional lady, easily shocked by his cynical quips, that Reginald did in the earlier texts. Clovis’s favourite interlocutor is named ‘the Baroness’. Another recurring character is a minor foil or confidante named Bertie van Tahn.

Clovis and Reginald take the upper-class arrogance, privilege and entitlement which has drummed into them at expensive public schools and to turn it against the older generation which had put them through the ordeal, delighting in shocking them not so much with deeds – for our heroes rarely lower themselves to actually doing anything – but with outré and unconventional attitudes, with their extreme cynicism or modish insouciance.

The stories portray a society which put a premium on decorum and good manners, on ‘good breeding’, but which bridled at too much intelligence or cleverness – all of whose boundaries and borders Saki relished driving a coach and horses through.

Mind you, it is inaccurate to say that it’s only Clovis and Reginald who bait their straightlaced peers, because the narrator does too. In fact Clovis appears in fewer than half the stories and it is the narrator who most of the time makes the cruellest jibes and weaves the most extended insults:

Lady Isobel was seen everywhere with a fawn-coloured collie at a time when everyone else kept nothing but Pekinese, and she had once eaten four green apples at an afternoon tea in the Botanical Gardens, so she was widely credited with a rather unpleasant wit. The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats’s poems, but her family denied both stories.

The joke is not so much at Lady Isobel’s expense but at that of her family and, more generally, at the kind of society she moves in. It is partly the implication that ‘understanding’ Yeats’s poems is as eccentric as sleeping in a hammock. It is partly the comic notion that it is so exceptional that a denial has to be issued by the family. There are multiple levels of mockery in just that one sentence.

(In the story The Quest Clovis himself is portrayed as lazing in a hammock and it’s worth pausing a moment to reflect what an utterly suitable piece of household furniture a hammock is for Clovis and his character of drawling, ironic inactivity.)

Some people think that satire changes things, in which case you might say that Saki’s stories were designed to ‘satirise’ and ‘scandalise’ Edwardian high society. But I think it’s nearer the mark to start from the opposite premise – that satire changes nothing but merely amuses those being satirised. Compare and contrast the immensely popular Alex cartoon strip which started in 1987 and mocks the greed and heartlessness of City bankers and is… immensely popular with City bankers. In the same way Saki’s stories have been immensely popular from his day to ours because people enjoy recognising themselves, or a part of themselves, or a part of themselves they wish they had. Everyone always thinks it’s someone else who is being mocked.

Saki’s attitude as revealed in ‘Wratislaw’

In the story Wratislaw, two very upper-class European ladies, the shrewd Gräfin and the rather dim Baroness Sophie, are in conversation, exchanging the expected bon mots and cynical witticisms:

‘Haven’t you noticed that women with a really perfect profile like mine are seldom even moderately agreeable?’

The Gräfin is trying to marry off her objectionable son, Wratlislav, to the Baroness’s dim daughter, Elsa, a proposal to which the Baroness says:

‘I don’t want Wratislav. My poor Elsa would be miserable with him.’
‘A little misery wouldn’t matter very much with her; it would go so well with the way she does her hair, and if she couldn’t get on with Wratislav she could always go and do good among the poor.’

From this little exchange we can extract several of the premises which underlie Saki’s humour:

1. Nobody in this pampered upper class is ‘miserable’; or if they are, nobody else understands the concept because everyone is basically sorted for all their earthly needs. Extremes of want or emotion are unheard of and so are little more than conversational toys, empty words.

2. In any case, one of the key markers of being an aristocrat is not to take anything seriously: remember the general sitting astride a horse close to the Duke of Wellington during the Battle of Waterloo? There was an approaching rumble, a loud bang and the general remarked: ‘By Jove, Sir, I believe they’ve shot my leg orf.’ The Duke of Wellington looks over and remarks: ‘By Jove, Sir, so they have.’ This was the attitude of sublime and lofty nonchalance which characterised the English upper classes from the 18th century through to the public schoolboys I met at university.

3. And the extremest way of demonstrating one’s aristocratic nonchalance (like insouciance, a French word) is to take what servants and earnest middle-class types think of as ‘serious’ emotions, conditions and attitudes and to pointedly equate them with the lightest, most frivolous subjects imaginable, generally ‘female’ subjects such as fashion, clothes and, in this instance, hairdo. The utter inability to take anything seriously is demonstrated by the deliberately casual, mocking equation of lifelong emotional misery with someone’s hair colour. Exactly the same attitude recurs in The Story of St. Vespaluus:

Vespaluus…was the best looking, and the best horseman and javelin- thrower, and had that priceless princely gift of being able to walk past a supplicant with an air of not having seen him, but would certainly have given something if he had. My mother has that gift to a certain extent; she can go smilingly and financially unscathed through a charity bazaar, and meet the organisers next day with a solicitous ‘had I but known you were in need of funds’ air that is really rather a triumph in audacity.

‘The poor? Oh, I didn’t notice them.’

4. So the central aspect of the lofty insouciance which Saki both epitomises and satirises is to mock anyone who is ever serious about anything. This attitude had been brought to a pitch of perfection by Oscar Wilde a generation earlier:

  • ‘Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.’ (Lord Darlington in The Importance of Being Earnest)
  • ‘We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.’ (Letter to Robert Ross)

Therefore, the notion that an unhappy Elsa might compensate for her unhappy marriage by ‘doing good among the poor’ is a) designed to show how absurd the very notion of someone from her class ‘doing good among the poor’ is; and therefore b) how charity can can only possibly be explained as a harmless diversion for unhappy, upper-class women.

Camp and homosexuality

This extravagantly, ostentatiously, teasingly and mockingly anti-serious attitude, the valorising of the trivial, the mocking dismissal of anything earnest or serious, would evolve, by the 1960s, into the quality known as ‘camp’, heavily associated with a certain type of homosexuality. (See Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp).

In this regard, it might be worth noting, here, the series of descriptions of improbably beautiful young men, all svelte and soignés, who trail through these stories. Here’s Vespaluus:

‘He was quite the best-looking boy at Court; he had an elegant, well-knit figure, a healthy complexion, eyes the colour of very ripe mulberries, and dark hair, smooth and very well cared for.’
‘It sounds like a description of what you imagine yourself to have been like at the age of sixteen,’ said the Baroness.

And Pan:

Across a thick tangle of undergrowth a boy’s face was scowling at her, brown and beautiful, with unutterably evil eyes.

Here’s the werewolf in Gabriel-Ernest:

On a shelf of smooth stone overhanging a deep pool in the hollow of an oak coppice a boy of about sixteen lay asprawl, drying his wet brown limbs luxuriously in the sun. His wet hair, parted by a recent dive, lay close to his head, and his light-brown eyes, so light that there was an almost tigerish gleam in them, were turned towards Van Cheele with a certain lazy watchfulness.

Naked and wet, asprawl in the sun. Pretty sexy, eh? Critics from Saki’s day to ours have wondered whether not only the male sensuality but also the extra element of malice, and the occasional turn to the macabre in Saki’s stories, in some way derives from Munro’s (necessarily repressed) homosexuality.

All that said, this stylised mockery of anything serious was also, of course, celebrated by many entirely ‘straight’ authors, from P.G. Wodehouse to Evelyn Waugh, in the name alone of Lord Peter Wimsy, in the tone of detached ironic humour which characterises the books of Jerome K Jerome. Is it, I wonder, a particularly English quality?

Childhood unhappiness

Personally, I don’t think Saki’s sexuality is that important. Personally, I think the key fact in Munro’s biography is that he was sent away from his parents at a young age, sent from a warm and loving home in British Burma all the way back to cold and miserable England where he was looked after by strict and stern guardians while he attended a series of miserable boarding schools.

Kipling underwent a similarly miserable childhood and the result was a lifetime of works marked by often very unpleasant sadism. (On one level, Kipling’s notorious ‘racism’ is merely a sub-set of his larger, more out-of-control anger against all kinds of people.)

Same here. I think the grimmer and more macabre Saki stories are Munro’s revenge on the cruel world which gave him such a miserable childhood. Hence the air of malice around ‘aunts’, all of them avatars of the strict, Bible-thumping governess who looked after young Hector. The same repressed anger, arguably comes out, in a displaced kind of way, in the misfortunes of the children in so many of the stories, who are routinely eaten or blown up.

The atmosphere of lonely, solitary childhood tyrannised by a punitive guardian portrayed in the story Sredni Vashtar seems to me the clue to all his works (that is, if you look for clues, if you are interested in biographical keys). Or you could just enjoy the stories’ sly elegance and outrageous storylines.


The stories

1. Esmé (features Clovis)

The Baroness tells Clovis about the time she was out hunting to hounds with Constance Broddle when they got lost but, hearing some hounds barking, discovered they’d got separated from the main pack and were now surrounding a creature at bay which, when the women held the hounds back, turned out to be a hyena! A hyena? Yes, it has escaped from the menagerie of Lord Pabham, whose grounds are nearby.

The Baroness liberates it from the hounds and they ride off to try and find the road home, with the hyena trotting faithfully behind. On an upper-class whim the Baroness names the hyena Esmé. They come across a gypsy waif playing in the path, pass by, the hyena drops back, then they hear a cry and see the hyena has the child in its jaws. They scold and shout and try to whip it and the Baroness throws her sandwich box, to no avail. The hyena drops behind the trotting women, there’s a crescendo and screaming and then an ominous silence and the hyena reappears with a satisfied smile on its face. The Baroness’s companion is horrified as they emerge into a road and make their way home.

It is dark and there is the sound of a motor car roaring up, a thud and a yell and when they catch up, a motorist has hit and killed the hyena. He is a jolly pukka young chap and he apologises most sincerely to the ladies and calls his chauffeur to fetch a spade and they bury the beast, under the impression it is a dog. With admirable sang-froid, the Baroness claims it is indeed a prize pedigree hound. She gives the driver her address. Some time later he sends her a brooch with the name of the ‘dog’ engraved on it.

What then clinches the utter heartlessness and amoral insouciance of the character, is that she sells the brooch for a tidy profit. Nothing means anything to these people except the game of ‘appearances’ and ‘manners’.

2. The Match-Maker (Clovis)

Not a story, more a meandering scene with Clovis arriving at the supper table, polishing off some oysters while waxing lyrical about their selflessness to his host, then segueing into a discussion of his mother’s two previous marriages and how he rustled up an old Empire Johnny to be her third husband.

3. Tobermory (C)

At Lady Blemley’s house-party at ‘the Towers’, rather boring Mr. Cornelius Appin turns out to have made the stupefying achievement of teaching the house cat, Tobermory, how to talk. Not only that but Tobermory drawls, with the exaggerated languid tones of the effete upper classes. That’s satire 1.

Satire 2 is that the cat immediately starts spilling the beans about the ‘goings on’ among the humans and, more viciously, repeating exactly what they say about each other behind each others’ backs which is, of course, often malicious and wounding. General panic.

Tobermory spots the neighbours’ cat out the window and scarpers after it. Sir Wilfred and Lady Blemley agree the cat must immediately be put down. Dinner is a tense affair, as is breakfast, but spirits lift when Tobermory’s corpse is found in a flowerbed. As to Mr Cornelius Appin, some weeks later he is reported gored to death by an elephant at Dresden Zoo which he had been teaching German irregular verbs.

4. Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger (C)

Mrs Packletide’s life is dominated by rivalry with Loona Bimberton. Loona Bimberton had recently been carried eleven miles in an aeroplane by an Algerian aviator, so Mrs Packletide decides she is going to bag herself a tiger!

I think she must already be in India because she pays the headman of a local village to tether a goat in order to lure a rather elderly and ailing tiger for her to shoot. Mrs P hides in a tree with her paid companion, Miss Mebbin, and soon enough the tiger shows up. A single gunshot rings out and the tiger rolls over dead but, on closer inspection, it appears it was the harmless the goat which was shot and the tiger simply died of a heart attack at the loud noise!

The natives take their 1,000 rupees and swear to silence and thus Mrs Packletide returns to London in triumph, makes the tigerskin the centre of her Curzon Street apartment, gives endless parties where it is the centre of conversation, sends a tiger claw brooch to her rival, Loona Bimberton, even has a wild animal fancy dress party, where Clovis makes a fleeting appearance.

Until, that is, her ‘companion’, penny-conscious Miss Mebbin, blackmails her, threatening to reveal the truth (the old tiger died of a heart attack) unless Mrs Packletide buys her a nice little cottage near Dorking.

Mrs. Packletide indulges in no more big-game shooting. ‘The incidental expenses are so heavy,’ she confides to inquiring friends.

Saki is full of sly details. The thing that made me smile most in this story was that Miss Mebbin names her country cottage ‘Les Fauves’, a jokey reference to the recent French art movement which was given that name in 1905, so quite a modish reference at that.

5. The Stampeding of Lady Bastable (C)

Clovis and his mother, Mrs Sangrail, are staying with Lady Bastaple. Mrs S asks Lady Bastaple if she can keep Clovis on for a further 6 days while she, Mrs S, travels north to stay with the MacGregors. She offers to let Mrs Bastaple off her bridge debt of 49 shillings.

6. The Background (C)

A delirious and bizarre story about a modest commercial traveller, Henri Deplis, who comes into a legacy and decides to spend 600 francs on having a massive picture of the Fall of Icarus tattooed on his back by the premier tattooist in Italy, Andreas Pincini. Pincini dies and Deplis thinks he is let off payment but Pincini’s widow pursues him by which point Deplis no longer has 600 francs left to pay her. After some bad-tempered haggling, the widow donates the picture to the municipality of Bergamo, thus making Deplis’ back into state property. The result is that he is unable, as a state property, to leave Italy, an unusual legal situation which is worked through in delirious detail.

7. Hermann the Irascible — A Story of the Great Weep

A satire on the Suffragettes. It is set in a hypothetical future, in the second decade of the twentieth century after a Great Plague has devastated England, and Hermann the Irascible, nicknamed the Wise, sits on the British throne. One of the recurrent problems he faces is the vociferous and violent Votes For Women movement. Hermann comes up with a comic solution. He suggests a bill to make voting for women compulsory with a £10 fine for failing to vote, and then adds a long list of elections and elected officials which women are now compelled to vote in:

Every woman between the ages of twenty-one and seventy will be obliged to vote, not only at elections for Parliament, county councils, district boards, parish councils, and municipalities, but for coroners, school inspectors, churchwardens, curators of museums, sanitary authorities, police-court interpreters, swimming-bath instructors, contractors, choir-masters, market superintendents, art-school teachers, cathedral vergers, and other local functionaries whose names I will add as they occur to me. All these offices will become elective, and failure to vote at any election falling within her area of residence will involve the female elector in a penalty of £10. Absence, unsupported by an adequate medical certificate, will not be accepted as an excuse.

Of course this transforms voting into an intolerable burden for most women: working women are spending half the week traipsing to and from voting booths, while rich women find their holiday plans wrecked as they are continually being called back to vote for their local cathedral verger or what not, and quickly run up fines of multiples of £10.

Eventually the burden of voting becomes so extreme that it gives rise to a No-Votes-For-Women League  to which Saki maliciously and hilariously attributes all the self-righteousness, inflammatory rhetoric and violence of the original Suffragette Movement. The No-Votes-For-Women League goes one better and invents ‘the Great Weep’ being the systematic crying by women at gatherings large and small.

Eventually, making a great show of making a great concession, Hermann the Wise signs into law a bill depriving women of the right to vote and everyone is happy. And greatly amused.

8. The Unrest-Cure (C)

This is one of Saki’s most famous stories because it is so compact and fluent and beautifully designed. On the train down to be guest at a house party, Clovis overhears two friends chatting, one lamenting that he has got very set in his ways, the other recommending that he shake his life up a bit and have what he calls ‘an unrest-cure’. Clovis’s ears prick up, he makes a note of the conventional man’s name and address (J. P. Huddle, The Warren, Tilfield, near Slowborough.”

He then sends this man a telegram saying ‘the bishop’ is coming to stay, preceded by his private secretary – this is of course Clovis, who proceeds to shock and amaze timid Mr Huffle by announcing that the bishop and a general who will be joining him are planning to round up all the Jews in the neighbourhood and massacre them! Mr Huddle is speechless, his sister responds with a migraine:

It was not her day for having a headache, but she felt that the circumstances excused her, and retired to her room to have as much headache as was possible before the Bishop’s arrival.

The ‘plan’ which Clovis unfolds becomes steadily more outrageous. He explains they are going to invite all the Jews from the neighbourhood and murder them one by one. He explains the house is now surrounded by a hidden ring of boy scouts who will shoot anyone who leaves! Indeed an eminent Jew arrives soon after in his motor car and is hustled quickly upstairs by the terrified brother and sister. Things go on like this for a bit while Clovis lounges in Huddle’s library smoking one of his excellent cigars, before quietly slipping away. None of it was true. It was an entire fiction.

9. The Jesting of Arlington Stringham (C)

Stringham is a politician. He makes a joke in Parliament which enlivens a boring debate. His wife disapproves. He’s never made a joke before. She comments to her mother. Stringham makes another joke, which his wife doesn’t get. Over the next few weeks Stringham makes several more. Then a catty ‘friend’, Gertrude Upton, points out that these are all well-known quips by Lady Isobel, the implication being that Stringham is seeing quite a lot of Lady Isobel.

So far so gently mocking the boringness of politicians, the straightlacedness of their families and so on. So it comes as a shock when the last few lines tell us that Eleanor Stringham killed herself with an overdose of chloral. Does he… does Saki mean that she killed herself because the jokes implied her husband was having an affair?

10. Sredni Vashtar

Conradin is a sickly boy looked after by his disapproving cousin and guardian in a strict and tedious house which has driven him mad with resentment and frustration, which makes him sick ‘under her pestering and domineering and superior wisdom’.

Mrs. de Ropp was the ground-plan on which he based and detested all respectability.

One day the local butcher boy brings him a large polecat-ferret in return for all the silver Conradin has saved up and he hides his cage in the garden shed and develops a private religion based round the fierce animal which he gives the made-up name of Sredni Vashtar.

More and more mystified by Conradin’s regular visits to the shed, Mrs de Ropp one day ransacks his bedroom for the key, orders Conradin to stay in his bedroom, from whose window he watches her go to the shed, unlock it, and enter in. He fervently prays to his god, prays for death and destruction. The minutes pass and the dread witch doesn’t return. Then, with wonder, he sees his god slink out of the shed with dark red strains round its jaws, undulate down to the stream, take a drink, and disappear into the undergrowth. Conradin’s dream has come true. His god has answered his prayers. No more repressive aunt.

11. Adrian (C)

Adrian is a working class lad from Bethnal Green where his mum is a laundress.

One can discourage too much history in one’s family, but one cannot always prevent geography.

He is taken up by the hugely posh Lucas who treats him to dinner at places like the Ritz or Carlton. His aunt Mrs Mebberley hears about this protege and decides to take him off on a tour of Europe.

‘I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.’

She takes him to an Alpine resort. Here he flourishes but not in the way expected. He turns out to be quite a wild youth. Where he grew up breaking any cutlery was a crime. Among posh people he discovers that, done at the right time and place, it wins kudos.

Lucas hears about Adrian’s increasingly outrageous exploits via the pen of Clovis who is ‘moving as a satellite in the Mebberley constellation.’ One is that Adrian abducts the ugly Grobmayer child and dressed it as a pig in an evening’s drama performance till it wailed, revealed its identity and the parents were furious. But his masterpiece was swapping all the room numbers on an entire landing and especially affixing the ‘Bathroom’ sign to the door of old Frau Hofrath Schilling who was thereupon terrified out of her wits by a succession of half-dressed visitors.

12. The Chaplet (C)

It was a gala evening at the Grand Sybaris Hotel, and a special dinner was being served in the Amethyst dining-hall. The great chef Monsieur Aristide Saucourt has slaved over his masterpiece dish, Canetons à la mode d’Amblève. But just as it is served to the foreign philistine guests, the very average orchestra strikes up the strains of the dull and obvious tune, The Chaplet and, in their relief at recognising a tune amid a lot of other rather more ‘modern’ music, many of the diners stop to listen, to applaud, tinkering with the famous dish or letting it grow cold! So M. Saucourt in a fury seizes the conductor and plunges him head first into a large tureen of boiling soup!

13. The Quest (C)

Clovis is staying at the Villa Elsinore when there is a disaster: Mrs Momeby misplaces little diddums baby Erik. The household is in an uproar. Only Clovis lazing in a hammock is more concerned about which sauce cook is preparing to accompany the asparagus while outraging everyone with his calm suggestion that maybe the little darling has been eaten by an escaped hyena.

A neighbour calls, Rose-Marie Gilpet who is a devout Christian Scientist and therefore believes there is no such thing as illness and also that we all think positively the lost child will appear. She goes to search the road again and lo and behold finds an abandoned baby there who she restores to the bosom of her family amid tears and celebrations. Which makes it embarrassing when the real Erik is discovered hiding in the garden roller. So who is the imposter? Then arrives the nursemaid from the Villa Charlottenburg across the way to reclaim darling little Percy who had gone missing. Mystery solved and Clovis is off to see the cook about the asparagus sauce.

14. Wratislav (C)

(Described above.)

15. The Easter Egg

What you might call a ‘grim’ story, like the apparent suicide of Eleanor Stringham. In this one Lady Barbara has a son who is a pusillanimous coward, Lester Slaggby. They go to say in a small Germanic resort, learn from the local Burgomeister that the Prince is paying a visit, a local couple suggest that a touching gesture would be for their little 4-year-old to be dressed up and give the Prince the gift of an Easter egg filled with his favourite food, plovers’ eggs. Lester helps to train the little mite and on the big day is gesturing the child towards the Prince sat on his dais when, looking round for the proud parents, he sees them stepping hastily into a cab and, in a flash, realises the egg is filled with a bomb. Lester does the one great brave deed of his life and runs to catch up with the child, grabs the egg planning to throw it far, yells to everyone the one word ‘Bomb!’ but is astonished when the little brat holds onto it with obsessive grip. Then it blows up. The story cuts to some time later and makes the simple point that Lady Barbara is now blind.

So it had been sort of funny up till that point and then becomes bitterly tragic. The note of languid insouciance I mentioned earlier, the Oscar Wilde tone of whimsical detachment, doesn’t apply here. Possibly a conductor being drowned in a tureen of soup is sort of funny. But a woman committing suicide from profound misery or being blinded… not so funny.

16. Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse that Helped (C)

Mark Spayley is a commercial artist, he creates advertising posters and is on a piddling £200 per annum. He nervously asks for the hand in marriage of Leonore, the daughter of the vastly successful businessman, Duncan Dullamy, ‘the great company inflator’. What neither he nor anyone else knows is Dullamy’s business empire is about to crash, which is why he accepts Spayley’s offer and suggests a surprisingly quick wedding. Dullamy doesn’t reveal about the looming crash but does lament that his new product, Pipenta, has been a failure. Now he’s his son-in-law to be, Mark offers to help out. In short order he has changed the product’s name to Filboid Studge and created a vast poster showing lost souls in hell clamouring for an opportunity to eat the delicious food, with a big strapline: a single grim statement ran in bold letters along its base: “They cannot buy it now.”

This campaign is surprisingly successful and Filboid Studge becomes a runaway success, which the narrator describes with a few waspish asides about the power of advertising (this was 1908). Dullamy’s fortune is restored and he, of course, breaks off his daughter’s engagement to Spayley and sells her to a much more appropriate beau.

17. The Music on the Hill

Clever Sylvia Seltoun has not only inveigled Mortimer Seltoun into marriage, but to abandon ‘Town’ with its delights and friends, a relocate to his country seat, Yessney.

She looked on the country as something excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt to become troublesome if you encouraged it overmuch

Here she becomes aware of some kind of presence in the woods, a fleeting golden thing, and is oppressed by a feeling of being watched in among the desolate farm buildings. Boring Mortimer astonishes her by revealing that he believes in the great god Pan and for warning her when she takes some grapes which had been left to a beautiful statuette of the god in a remote clearing. In revenge, the laughing, malicious youth diverts a hunted stag so that it gores Sylvia to death. Maybe a life in Town wouldn’t have been so bad after all.

The title refers to the several occasions on which Sylvia heard remote and eerie music, ‘a low, fitful piping, as of some reedy flute’, coming from somewhere on the hills around her husband’s manor house.

This story takes its place alongside other Edwardian invocations of Pan, to be found in Peter Pan, the Piper at the gates of dawn chapter in Wind In The Willows and The Story of a Panic by E.M. Foster to name only the most obvious. (Pan in popular culture.) Why? The end of the 19th century saw a kind of rarefied, aestheticised classicism, the paintings of the Olympians, and this seems to have overlapped with the florescence of the children’s story during the Edwardian decade. Pan represents a melding of the two.

18. The Story of St. Vespaluus (C)

Clovis tells ‘the Baroness’ a long cock and bull story set in the early Middle Ages when ‘when a third of the people were Pagan, and a third Christian, and the biggest third of all just followed whichever religion the Court happened to profess’.

Bad-tempered King Hkrikros has no children but a number of nephews among whom his favourite is elegant, sporty young Vespaluus. The king wants to nominate him as his heir but then discovers that Vespaluus is a Christian. Damn. The king is a fervent pagan who devotedly maintains ‘the sacred serpents, who lived in a hallowed grove on a hill near the royal palace.’

The king hires the Royal Librarian, who has time on his hands, to go cut branches and switches from the woods and give young Vespaluus a sound thrashing. Doesn’t change his mind. Then he has the boy locked up in a tower without food and water though the guards take pity on him and sneak in grub.

But when he’s released in time for the great summer games Vespaluus refuses to take part in the ritual worship of the sacred snakes and the king’s patience snaps. He arranges him to be stung to death by the royal bees. However, the bee-keeper loves Vespaluus (everyone does) and so spends a laboursome night before the scheduled punishment pulling out all the bee stings. So that when crowds of pagans assemble to watch the ritual stinging-to-death of Vespaluus everyone is astonished to see him covered in bees and writhing yet emerging unscathed. It is a miracle! He must be a saint!

The furious king berates his librarian but before he can do any more harm himself dies of an apoplectic fit. At which point Vespaluus is crowned king and, assuming his Christian faith, the entire Court sets about getting itself baptised, neighbouring Christian powers make approaches, the pagan rites begin to be deprecated.

But the punchline is that Vespaluus isn’t a Christian at all. He is a devout pagan and worships the same sacred snakes as the king. Then why on earth, the Chamberlain asks him, did he pose as a Christian and cause himself and everyone else so much bother?

‘I used to pretend to be a Christian convert just to annoy Hkrikros. He used to fly into such delicious tempers. And it was rather fun being whipped and scolded and shut up in a tower all for nothing.’

He is a classic Wildean fop, loving pranks and mocking the earnest.

19. The Way to the Dairy (C)

The Baroness and Clovis again. As usual Clovis tells her a bitchy or spiteful or droll anecdote. This time it’s about an aunt who unexpectedly comes into some money, at which point she is drooled over by her nieces, the Brimley Bomefields, namely Christine, Veronique and another. The nieces are horrified when they learn that the aunt, getting on in years, proposes to leave her fortune to a nephew of hers, named Roger. So Veronique comes up with a cunning plan which is to catch Roger out, gambling or somehow frittering his money away. Every year he goes on holiday to northern France so the nieces persuade the aunt to go on holiday to Dieppe. But, in a comic reversal, while they’re waiting to catch Roger at the tables it is the aunt who has a casual flutter (on the old mechanical game named Les Petits Chevaux) gets bitten by the gambling bug, and turns into a gambling addict, while Roger bumps into them from time to time says, knowingly, that he realises the aunt is just a front for the nieces, who are running a gambling syndicate. Infuriatingly, they eventually give up and straggle home with a reputation for headaches and a permanently depressed look. Which is how Clovis and the Baroness saw them in ‘the Park’ and which prompted the anecdote in the first place.

20. The Peace Offering (C)

Clovis and the Baroness again. She asks him to help with a theatrical production to soothe her local county society who have been rather ruptured by a bitterly contested election. As satire, Clovis suggests they write a Greek tragedy on the theme of the Return of Agamemnon and then proceeds to explain who all the characters are to the Baroness who is cheerfully ignorant and philistine.

They then cast the play with local worthies, each stupider than the next. But the crux is the rivalry which breaks out between the Baroness, playing Clytemnestra and Clovis, who gives himself the minor but beautifully costumed role of the charioteer. When the Baroness pinches some of his best lines, Clovis plots his revenge. He coaches the dimwit playing Cassandra in a special speech and, on the grand night, with all of local county society assembled, when Clytemnestra goes off to make a costume change, Cassandra steps forward and delivers the speech Clovis has written for her… denouncing the great and the good in the audience as ‘corrupt, self-seeking, unscrupulous, unprincipled politicians[who] continue to infest and poison our local council…’ By the time the Baroness returns onstage it is to find everyone calling for their coach and leaving.

In a way the Baroness did succeed in healing local divisions… by uniting everyone who was anyone in condemning her ‘outrageously bad taste and tactlessness’.

21. The Peace of Mowsle Barton

Crefton Lockyer has gone for a rest cure and break from hectic city life by renting a room in an isolated farm. Little does he expect to discover that is the epicentre of a bitter rival between two local witches who cast spells on each other. These aren’t the florid witches of Hollywood, but uncanny and ancient crones and the spells in question amount to little more than preventing the kettle in the farm from boiling and rendering the ducks which in the hated rival’s little pool from being able to swim.

So, small stakes but this is one of the longer of the stories in the collection and the interest is in the spooky and threatening atmosphere which Saki conjures. It’s interesting because Rudyard Kipling, in his Sussex phase, wrote similar stories about village crones.

22. The Talking-Out of Tarrington (C)

Clovis is with his aunt when the latter spots a tiresome young man approaching who she is at pains to avoid because he’s probably heard she’s arranging a luncheon with ‘the Princess’ and will cling leechlike till he’s invited. The aunt makes a run for it leaving Clovis to deal with the young man who introduces himself as Tarrington. Unfortunately Clovis has determined to reply to every question and conversation gambit with irrelevancies and supercilious twitting, until the poor young man, defeated, beats a hasty retreat.

23. The Hounds of Fate

A tragedy, something like a ghost story or a rural tragedy slightly in the manner of Thomas Hardy. Martin Stoner has failed in everything and is down to his last few coins, tramping through muddy country lanes towards the sea with the vague purpose of throwing himself in, as night draws in and it starts to rain and he sees the lights of a farmhouse, he finds himself walking up the path and knocking on the door.

To his amazement the door opens and he is welcomed in by the old retained as ‘Master Tom’, back from Australia. He is given food and then shelter for the night, and given his old room, and his horse is saddled for him, all the time Stoner carries on the masquerade of impersonating this ‘Master Tom’. Slowly it emerges that Tom fled to Australia after some local scandal but try as he might, he can’t get the old retainer (named George) to spell it out.

Then one day old George hurries to find him and tells Stoner that Michael Ley is back in the village and bound on taking his revenge. At a guess, I speculate that Tom ravished Ley’s sister, who killed herself and that’s why he fled and Ley is now determined to take revenge. Old George gives Stoner three sovereigns and tells him to go hide out in the nearest town till Ley has gone away, when he’ll be able to return.

Three sovereigns is a lot of money for a former beggar, and Stoner goes his way rejoicing to have brass in pocket, reconciling himself to moving on from the Tom persona as easily as he adopted it. Easy come, easy go. But at that point Michael Ley steps out from the shadow of an old oak tree, a shotgun in his hand and implacable hatred in his eyes.

24. The Recessional (C)

Clovis is in a Turkish bath with his buddy, Bertie van Tahn, but equipped with a fountain pen and notebook. What is he doing? Well, Mrs. Packletide’s great enemy and rival Loona Bimberton has just had a Coronation Ode accepted by the ‘New Infancy’ magazine and Mrs P is spitting blood. Since she has helped him out so many times, financially, Clovis offers to compose a rival poem, and here he is, composing away like mad. The result is dire:

‘The tawny tigress ‘mid the tangled teak
Drags to her purring cubs’ enraptured ears
The harsh death-rattle in the pea-fowl’s beak,
A jungle lullaby of blood and tears.'”

25. A Matter of Sentiment (C)

Lady Susan is holding a house party and the guests are betting on the big race. Trouble is Lady Susan sternly disapproves of everything, especially horse racing. The guests have to retreat to the far end of the garden where they discovery that Motkin, Lady Susan’s butler, has a second cousin who was head stable-lad at a neighbouring racing establishment, and usually gifted with much inside information as to private form and possibilities. The butler goes off to see this relation and that evening, over dinner, secretively passes on the name of the top tip to each of the guests as he circulates with the sherry.

However, the hot favourite loses, as all the guests assembled in the hall the next morning discover when a telegram arrives, and Lady Susan is delighted because, for the first time in her life she has bet on a race, and her bet won!

26. The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope (C)

Mrs Riversedge is hosting guests including Clovis and his aunt, Mrs Troyle. Mrs Troyle announces that another guest, meek and shy Septimus Brope, appears to be wooing her maid, Florinda. She has overheard him chanting her name (‘I love you Florrie’) and the other day picked up a piece of paper he had dropped with a note to meet him down by the old yew tree. Mrs Troyle wouldn’t mind but her maid is the only person on earth who understands her hair.

The other ladies are scandalised and also surprised, as mild-mannered Mr Brope scratches a living editing the ‘Cathedral Monthly and being enormously learned about memorial brasses and transepts and the influence of Byzantine worship on modern liturgy.

Clovis is the one who solves the mystery when the two men are left alone in the smoking room after dinner. He discovers that Brope makes money on the side by writing the lyrics for trashy popular songs, and is struggling to write one for a hypothetical subject named Florrie. Nothing whatsoever to do with Mrs Troyle’s maid (who is actually named Florinda).

Clovis promises to not only keep his secret but help him writing his ditties. In fact he proposes a characteristically Clovisian twist: why not try lyrics which slam the woman in question. And sure enough a month later a new song is taking the music halls by storm in which the singer threatens to throw his Florrie into a quarry!

All Clovis requires in return is to accompany Brope on an all-expenses-paid trip to the Continent.

27. ‘Ministers of Grace’

The Duke of Scaw is religious but not quite in the traditional sense. He is discussing politics and social reform with his friend, Belturbet, speculating how easy it would be to replace the existing bunch of disappointing politicians with something more malleable. Why not with angels? Don’t be silly, says his friend. Piqued, the Duke replies:

‘I shall summon angelic forces to take over some of the more troublesome personalities of our public life, and I shall send the ousted originals into temporary retirement in suitable animal organisms.’

And this he does. The rest of the story describes how he converts various leading politicians, the archbishop of Canterbury and top industrialists into various animals and creates their doppelgangers from angels. Suddenly politicians agree and businessmen adopt caring policies. Imagine the confusion of the country, but that is as nothing to the confusion of their wives!

The conceit is developed at some length with very thinly veiled, jokey references to contemporary politicians including David Lloyd-George, Lord Rosebery and so on. Eventually one of the animals the Duke of Scaw has consigned the soul of one of these politicians to, a bad-tempered black swan, grabs Scaw as he is walking through St James Park, drags him into the lake and drowns him. Whereupon the angel-politicians disappear, replaced by their human counterparts, and business resumes as usual.

28. The Remoulding of Groby Lington

This is an eerie story about a man whose personality changes to reflect that of his pets. It opens with him being beaky-nosed and repetitive as his parrot. His brother brings him a pet monkey and he swiftly becomes as malicious and disruptive as his pet. When that dies, his brother buys him a tortoise and now Groby Lington potters slowly around his garden in slow motion. It has many comic details but the overall impression is of the tale’s strangeness.


Themes

Mocking the British Empire

Remember that Hector Hugh Munro was born in Akyab (now Sittwe), British Burma, which was then part of British India, and that Saki was the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an Inspector General for the Indian Imperial Police, and his wife, Mary Frances Mercer (1843–1872), the daughter of a Rear Admiral  – and that he then himself went on to serve in the Indian Police Force. He was steeped, in other words, in the traditions and discourse of the British Empire. So what must his parents have made of his determined ridiculing of it and its stiff-upper-lipped maintainers?

He’d spent most of his life on the Indian frontier, building roads and relieving famines and minimising earthquakes, and all that sort of thing that one does do on frontiers. He could talk sense to a peevish cobra in fifteen native languages, and probably knew what to do if you found a rogue elephant on your croquet-lawn; but he was shy and diffident with women.

The Recessional sounds as if it’s going to be a parody or skit on Kipling’s famous poem of the same name but is nothing of the sort. Saki cannot write verse. Still, the thought was there.

Studied heartlessness

Specially regarding children who are either revealed as heartless brutes (The Strategist) or discussed with utter heartlessness by their parents (The Baker’s Dozen) or are eaten (Ernest-Gabriel and Esmé) or blown to smithereens (The Easter Egg).

Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often.

It is not the attitudes as such which are reprehensible, they are fictional, they can be taken in the reader’s stride. It is the shallowness and lack of feeling which Saki is mocking.

Christianity

It almost goes without saying that everyone in these stories has been brought up to treat Christianity as the accepted ‘thing’. Saki’s satire aims at the way none of these conventional Christians show any understanding or putting into practice of its moral teachings. Wherever possible members of the cloth are mocked (as they were in so many 18th century novels, through Trollope, Waugh, every chaplain in every public school in fiction).

More than that, Christianity offers a massive opportunity for satire whereby the manners of the gentleman can be contrasted with Christian morality, with the satirical intention that, in Victorian and Edwardian society, manners and appearance were more important than conventional Christian morality. It is a central part of the macabre comedy of The Unrest Cure that the person said to be panning the massacre of the Jews is the local bishop, whose character Saki then delights in twisting into his own style of gruesome amorality.

‘The Bishop is sorry to hear that Miss Huddle has a headache. He is issuing orders that as far as possible no firearms shall be used near the house; any killing that is necessary on the premises will be done with cold steel. The Bishop does not see why a man should not be a gentleman as well as a Christian.’ (The Unrest Cure)

Culture

Rather like Christianity, most of these upper-class types profess an interest in culture without actually understanding it at all. Painting and music are the two areas Saki picks on, with Reginald making the standard joke that the purpose of the Royal Academy is not to look at the pictures but to look at, and mingle with, other high society types. It is a recurring joke that the English understand a work of art so long as there is a good descriptive title to aid their understanding.

In the same spirit the British upper classes are portrayed as nervously philistine when it comes to music.

Thither [to the Amethyst dining-hall] came in shoals the intensely musical and the almost intensely musical, who are very many, and in still greater numbers the merely musical, who know how Tchaikowsky’s name is pronounced and can recognise several of Chopin’s nocturnes if you give them due warning; these eat in the nervous, detached manner of roebuck feeding in the open, and keep anxious ears cocked towards the orchestra for the first hint of a recognisable melody.

‘Ah, yes, Pagliacci,’ they murmur, as the opening strains follow hot upon the soup, and if no contradiction is forthcoming from any better-informed quarter they break forth into subdued humming by way of supplementing the efforts of the musicians. Sometimes the melody starts on level terms with the soup, in which case the banqueters contrive somehow to hum between the spoonfuls; the facial expression of enthusiasts who are punctuating potage St. Germain with Pagliacci is not beautiful, but it should be seen by those who are bent on observing all sides of life. One cannot discount the unpleasant things of this world merely by looking the other way.

And:

‘Hark!’ said most of the diners, ‘he is playing “The Chaplet.”‘ They knew it was “The Chaplet” because they had heard it played at luncheon and afternoon tea, and at supper the night before, and had not had time to forget.

Money / greed

Saki is funny about the miserly such as Laploshka or the paid companion, Miss Mebbin, in Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger, who resents even centimes unnecessarily spent, or Lady Bastaple (‘Lady Bastable loved shillings with a great, strong love.’)

Aunts

Tell me about the Brimley Bomefields.’
‘Well,’ said Clovis, ‘the beginning of their tragedy was that they found an aunt.’


Related links

Saki’s works

Mimesis: African Soldier @ the Imperial War Museum

Making a new world

For the past year or so, Imperial War Museum London has given over its third floor to four related but very different exhibitions marking the end of the First World War a hundred years ago.

They come under the overarching title of Making A New World, and have been accompanied by a programme of live music, performance and public debates, all addressing aspects of the aftermath of the conflict. Here’s the promotional video.

I’ve reviewed three of the four already:

Across the corridor from these two spaces is a door opening onto a darkened corridor leading to a blacked-out screening room in which is being shown a new art film by John Akomfrah, titled Mimesis: African Soldier.

John Akomfrah

Akomfrah was born in Accra, Ghana in 1957. His mother and father were both anti-colonialist activists. His father served in the cabinet of Ghana’s first post-independence Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah. When the latter was overthrown in a coup in 1966, his mother fled the country with young John. Surprisingly, maybe, they fled to the epicentre of the colonial oppressor, to the home of racism and imperialism, to Britain, where John became a British citizen, trained as an artist and went on to become a famous and award-winning maker of art films.

John Akomfrah in front of Mimesis: African Soldier, co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW, New Art Exchange, Nottingham and Smoking Dogs Films, with additional support from Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo © IWM / Film © Smoking Dogs Films

John Akomfrah standing in front of a screen showing Mimesis: African Soldier, co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW, New Art Exchange, Nottingham and Smoking Dogs Films, with additional support from Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo © IWM / Film © Smoking Dogs Films

So prestigious has Akomfrah’s career been that in 2008 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and in 2017 appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). Also in 2017, Akomfrah won the biennial Artes Mundi prize, the UK’s biggest award for international art, having been chosen for the award for his ‘substantial body of outstanding work dealing with issues of migration, racism and religious persecution.’

It is a story in itself, and one not without irony – how the son of vehemently anti-British anti-colonial activists went on to become a lion of the British art establishment.

Purple

I first heard Akomfrah’s name when I came across the massive multi-screen installation of his film Purple at the Barbican a few years ago.

In the long darkened space of the Barbican’s Curve gallery, Purple projected onto a series of massive screens a combination of historic archive footage of industrial life in the West – coal mines, car factories, shopping centres and street scenes from the 1940s, 50s and 60s – and stunningly beautiful modern footage shot at remote and picturesque locations around the planet with pin-prick digital clarity.

The purpose of Purple was to inform its viewers that humanity’s industrial activity is polluting the planet.

As a theme I thought this was so bleeding obvious that it made no impact on my thinking one way or the other: I just sat entranced by the old footage, which had its own historic interest, the 1960s footage in particular, tuggingly evocative of my own distant childhood – and enjoying the aesthetic contrast between the historic footage and the stunning landscapes of, for example, Iceland – which made me desperately jealous of the lucky researchers, camera crews and prize-winning directors who get to fly to such breath-taking destinations.

Mimesis: African Soldier

Visually, Mimesis: African Soldier does something very similar.

There are three big screens instead of the six used by Purple (the screening room at the IWM is a lot smaller than the long sweeping Curve space at the Barbican where Purple was screened).

Once again the screens intercut creaky old archive footage with slow-moving, almost static ‘modern’ sequences shot in super-bright digital clarity at a number of remote locations – both of which are fascinating and/or entrancing in their different ways.

The vintage black-and-white footage shows black African and Indian soldiers, labourers and carriers at work during the First World War. There’s a lot of footage at docks where all manner of goods are being unloaded by black labourers and heaped up into enormous piles of munitions and rations. Other footage shows Indian troops on parade, marching – and then footage of what appear to be black soldiers going into battle.

Installation view of Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum, London

Installation view of an ‘archive’ segment of Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum, London

The modern sequences are completely different in every way. For a start they are in colour. They are shot with stunning digital clarity. But most of all they are very, very slow.

For, as with Purple, the visual contrast is not just between the black and white and modern colour footage – there’s a rhythm thing going on, too, in that the old footage has that speeded-up, frenetic quality (due to the discrepancy between the speed of the cameras it was shot on and the different speed of the projectors we now play it on) which brings out even more the hauntingly slow, almost static nature of the modern sequences.

In the colour sequences which I saw, a black soldier is walking through a jungle, very, very, very slowly, until he comes upon a skeleton hanging from a tree, and stops dead. Different screens show the static scene from different angles. Pregnant with ominousness and meaning.

Installation view of Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum, London

Installation view of a ‘modern’ segment of Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum, London

In another ‘modern’ sequence a handful of black men in uniform are on a wet muddy beach. The beach is dotted with flags of many nations, and also random crates. The men stare out at sea. They turn. One picks up a crate. Another takes off his helmet and wipes his forehead. All very slow.

In another sequence an Asian man in army uniform and wearing a turban is standing in a landscape of dead and fallen trees, and slowly chopping a piece of wood with an axe. Very slowly. The ‘bock’ sound of each blow of the axe is amplified on the soundtrack which, from amid a collage of sounds, sounds of docks, works, men, soldiers, guns going off.

By and large the loudness and business of the audio track contrasts eerily with the Zen slow motion movements of the black and Asian actors.

Installation view of a 'modern' segment of Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum, London

Installation view of a ‘modern’ segment of Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum, London

Mimesis: African Soldier is 75 minutes long – long enough to really sink back and become absorbed and entranced by this audio-visual experience.

The message

So much so that it’s easy to forget Akomfrah’s message. This is that some three million African and Asian men served on the Allied side during the Great War, as labourers, carriers and soldiers, and their story – indeed their existence – is rarely if ever acknowledged.

This is spelled out in the wall label outside the gallery, in the wall label in the corridor leading to the screening room, in the ten-page handout to the exhibition, and in the extended prose descriptions about the film on the museum’s website:

And in the interviews Akomfrah has given about the work:

But having read all these sources and listened to all the interviews, none of them get me much further than the basic idea. All these texts just repackage the same basic fact:

Between 1914 and 1918, millions of African and colonial soldiers served in long campaigns that spanned the whole of the African and European continents, contributing to victories throughout the First World War. These soldiers from British and French African territories were brought to Europe’s western front, where hundreds and thousands lost their lives alongside unknown, unheralded and undocumented African labourers and carriers. Mimesis: African Soldier seeks to commemorate these Africans and colonial soldiers who fought, served and died during the First World War.

This information takes less than a minute to process and understand – in much the same way as I have in the past processed all manner of obscure or (to me) unknown aspects of this war, of the other world war, and of countless other historical episodes.

It was, after all, a world war. It had a global reach and consequences which are almost impossible for one person to grasp. A few months ago I was reading about the Mexican Revolution and the role played in it by the notorious Zimmerman Telegram in which the Germans promised to give Mexico back large chunks of Texas and other neighbouring states, if only Mexico would come in on the side of the Allies.

You could argue that Mexico thus played a key role in the First World War. Who knew?

To take another example, not so long ago I made a conscious effort to break out of the straitjacket of always viewing the war through the experiences of the British on the Western Front, and read two books to try and understand more about the war in the East.

Who in this country knows anything about the course of the First World War in Galicia or Bulgaria or Romania, let alone the vast battles which took place on the huge eastern Front? Who is familiar with the ebb and flow of fighting in little Serbia, which caused the whole damn thing in the first place?

Or take the example of another First World War-related exhibition I visited recently: I knew nothing about the role played by the Canadian army, which not only supplied cavalry on the Western Front, but also proved invaluable in setting up lumber mills behind the Front which supplied the millions of yards of planking from which the trenches and all the Allied defences were built. I had never heard about this until I went to the Army Museum’s exhibition about the painter Alfred Munnings who documented their contribution.

For me, then, the message that some three million Asians and Africans fought and supplied invaluable manual labour to the Allied side is just one more among a kaleidoscope of aspects of the war about which I freely admit to being shamefully ignorant.

Not being black, and not coming from one of the colonies in question, it doesn’t have a salience or importance greater than all these other areas of which I know I am so ignorant. Why should the black dockers have more importance than the Canadian lumberjacks? And why do their stories have any more importance or relevance than the millions of Russians, and Poles, and Romanians and Hungarians and Ukrainians and Jews who died in fighting or were massacred in the ugly pogroms and racial violence which characterised the war in the East?

Surely all human lives are of equal value, in which case all deaths in massacre and conflict are equally to be lamented and commemorated.

Art film as a medium for education

As it stands, the mere presence of Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum as part of this year-long commemoration means that all visitors to this part of the building will read the wall labels explaining the importance of the millions of Africans and Asians who aided the Allied war effort.

And since the IWM gets around two and a half million visitors, that’s potentially a lot of people who might have their minds opened to this overlooked aspect of the war.

But I’m not sure the film itself does very much to educate and inform. It’s an art film. It moves very, very slowly. The soundtrack is a disorientating mash-up of what is presumably the sounds of ships and docks and workmen with what seem to be African tribal music, chanting and so on. I get that this is the aural equivalent of the mash-up we’re seeing on-screen, but I’m not sure it really adds anything to anyone’s understanding.

In a nutshell, I’m not sure art films are an effective way to convey information about anything, apart from the film-maker’s own aesthetic decisions.

Comparison with Bridgit 2016

I had much the same response to Charlotte Prodger’s film, Bridgit 2016 which won the 2018 Turner Prize. It was intended to be a lecture about LBGTQ+ rights and gender and identity, but I found all the information-giving parts of it boring and sanctimonious (where they weren’t factually incorrect).

Instead, what I responded to in Bridgit 2016 was not the right-on, politically correct sentiments but the haunting nature of some of the shots, especially the sequence I saw (like every other visitor, I didn’t stay to watch the whole thing) where the camera was pointed at the wake being made in the grey sea by a large ferry, presumably off the Scottish coast somewhere.

The way the camera didn’t make any kind of point, and the way that, for at least this part of the film, Prodger wasn’t lecturing me about LGBTQ+ rights, meant that, for that sequence at least, the film did what art films can sometimes do – which is make you see in a new way, make you realise the world can be seen in other ways, make you pay attention enough to something humdrum in order to let the imagination transform it.

Which has a liberating effect, far far from all political ideologies, whether conservative or socialist or politically correct or politically repressive. Just that long shot of the churning foaming wake created by a big ship ploughing through a cold northern sea spoke to me, at some level I can’t define.

Which is better at conveying information – art film or conventional display?

Similarly, like Bridgit 2016Mimesis: African Soldier comes heavily freighted with the moral earnestness of a Victorian sermon (and it’s as long as a Victorian sermon, too, at a hefty 75 minutes).

Akomfrah wants ‘Britain’ to ‘acknowledge’ the contribution of these millions of colonial subjects who fought and died for their imperial masters.

OK. I accept it immediately without a quibble and I can’t imagine anyone anywhere would disagree. Isn’t this precisely what visiting museums is all about? That visitors are bombarded with all kinds of information and facts about the subjects of exhibitions they have chosen to visit? That people visit museums to learn.

And if the aim of the film is to educate, you can’t help wondering whether the point wouldn’t have been better made, more impactful, if it had been replaced – or maybe accompanied – by a more traditional display of hundreds of photos of the time accompanied by wall labels giving us facts and figures and, maybe, the stories and experiences of half a dozen African and Asian soldiers.

The rise and rise of the ‘forgotten voices’ trope

But as I reread the text around the film asserting that its aim was to restore an overlooked aspect of the history of the war, to rediscover ‘lost voices’, and restore people to their rightful place in history, I found myself more intrigued by this aspect of the display – the claim to be rediscovering, reclaiming and restoring – rather than its actual content.

Each era gets the history it requires

History is written for its times, responding to the cultural and economic needs of its day.

Machiavelli wrote his histories of Rome as warnings to Renaissance princes. Carlyle wrote a history of the French Revolution to thrill Victorian society with a vision of how Great Men direct the course of events.

The often-ridiculed ‘Whig’ historians reassured their liberal-minded readers by writing British history as if the whole thing, from Magna Carta to the reform acts of the 1800s, demonstrated the inevitable rise of the best and fairest possible liberal democracy.

Tougher minded Edwardian historians set out to show their readers that the British Empire was a force for peace and the enlightened development of the colonies.

The historians I read as a student (Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill) were Marxists who showed in their particular areas (the long nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution, the British Civil War, respectively) that history consisted of class struggles which confirmed Marx’s underlying theory of a dynamic and the forward march of history which would inevitably lead to a proletarian revolution.

And so they were very popular among students as the Cold War 1950s turned into the heady student revolutions of the 1960s and on into the strike- and violence-soaked 1970s and 1980s.

But, as I understand it, during the 1970s and 80s there was also a reaction against these grand, high-level (and very left-wing) narratives among a younger generation of historians who decided instead to specialise in provincial studies of particular localities (I’m thinking of John Morrill’s studies of Chester or David Underdown’s studies of the West Country during the Civil War). These tended to show that events at a local level were much more complicated than the lofty, and dogmatic, Christopher Hill-type versions suggested.

And it’s possible to see these reactions against the Marxist historians as a symptom of the way that, throughout society, the old communist/socialist narratives came to be seen as tired and old fashioned, as Mrs Thatcher’s social revolution changed British society and attitudes in the 1980s.

But another trend, when I was a student in the 1980s, was a growing move towards apolitical oral history, with a rash of books telling the ‘untold stories’ of this, that or the other constituency – generally the working classes, the class that didn’t make policies and diplomacy and big speeches in the House of Commons, the ordinary man or woman throughout history.

I’m thinking of Lyn MacDonald’s accounts of the key battles of the First World War in which she relied heavily on letters and diaries with the result that her books were marketed as telling ‘the untold stories of…’, ‘giving a voice to…’ the previously ignored common squaddie.

This ‘popular’ approach prompts pity and sympathy for ‘ordinary people’ of the past without being overtly left or right-wing, and it is an approach which hasn’t gone away, as these recent book titles indicate:

  • ‘Forgotten Voices of the Somme’ by Joshua Levine
  • ‘Forgotten Voices of D-Day’ by Roderick Bailey
  • ‘Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust’ by Lyn Smith
  • ‘Forgotten Voices of the Second World War’ by Max Arthur
  • ‘Forgotten Voices of Burma’ by Julian Thompson
  • ‘Forgotten Voices of the Falklands’ by Hugh McManners
  • ‘Forgotten Voices of Mao’s Great Famine’ by Xun Zhou

To bring us up to date, the end of the Thatcher era coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of communism as a viable political theory. I’ve watched as over this period, the past 30 years, increasing numbers of progressive thinkers, writers, historians, artists and so on have become steadily more in thrall to questions of identity – especially the twin issues of race and gender – which have spread out from academia to become two of the broader, defining issues of our time.

And watched as a new generation of historians, including many women and black and Asian historians, has arisen which has packed bookshelves, magazines, radio and TV programmes with new interpretations of history which ‘restore’ the place of women and non-white figures in British and world history.

Combining all this, we arrive at the present moment, 2019, where there is:

  1. more cultural production than ever before in human history, with an unprecedented number of poems, plays, radio programmes, TV documentaries, films and art works ranging over all of recorded history in search of subjects and people from the past to restore, revive and reclaim
  2. and this unprecedented output is taking place in an age obsessed by identity politics, and so is ever-more relentlessly conceived, produced and delivered in terms of identity, specifically the two great pillars of modern progressive ideology, race and gender

Adding the ‘forgotten stories’ trope to the inexorable rise of identity politics helps to explain the explosive proliferation of books, plays, movies, documentaries and radio programmes which use the same rhetorical device of reclaiming the stories of unjustly forgotten women and unjustly forgotten people of colour from pretty much any period of the last 3,000 years. Thus, to give just a few examples of each:

Forgotten Women

  • 52 Forgotten Women Who Changed the World
  • The Forgotten Tudor Women: Anne Seymour, Jane Dudley & Elisabeth Parr
  • Ladies of Lascaris: Christina Ratcliffe and The Forgotten Heroes of Malta’s War
  • Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music
  • The Forgotten Tudor Women: Margaret Douglas, Mary Howard & Mary Shelton
  • Daughters of Chivalry: The Forgotten Children of Edward I
  • Roaring Girls: The forgotten feminists of British history
  • Charlie Company’s Journey Home: The Forgotten Impact on the Wives of Vietnam Veterans
  • Invisible Women. Forgotten Artists of Florence
  • War’s Forgotten Women
  • Forgotten Desert Mothers, The: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women
  • When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt

Forgotten people of colour

  • Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Black Heroes
  • Black and British: A Forgotten History
  • The Forgotten Black Cowboys
  • Forgotten black TV and film history
  • 5 Forgotten Black and Asian Figures Who Made British History
  • Black on the battlefield: Canada’s forgotten First World War battalion
  • The Forgotten Black Heroes of Empire
  • Black servicemen: Unsung heroes of the First World War
  • Forgotten? : Black Soldiers in the Battle of Waterloo
  • The Forgotten Black Soldiers in White Regiments During the Civil War
  • Black Athena: The Afro-asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization

My point is that the whole notion of listening to ‘forgotten voices’ and restoring ‘forgotten histories’ has become a central trope of our times, and moreover it is, a moment’s thought suggests, a potentially bottomless well of material.

Once you have accepted the premise that we need to hear the voices of everyone who has ever lived, then there is potentially no end to the number of forgotten women whose voices we need to hear and whose stories we need to be told, just as there is no end to the number of forgotten black slaves, entrepreneurs, soldiers, heroes, scientists, writers, pioneers, cowboys, immigrants, poets and artists whose voices need to be heard and whose stories need to be told.

A flood of forgotten voices

To return to Akomfrah’s film, what I’m trying to do is understand the times I live in, and understand how a politically-committed work of art like Mimesis: African Soldier fits into it. My view is that the Imperial War Museum commissioning this piece, and John Akomfrah making it, are very much not ground-breaking or innovative.

The opposite. Mimesis: African Soldier is smack bang in the centre of the cultural mood of our times. We are in the middle of an absolute flood of such productions:

I’m not saying any of this ‘forgotten history’ is untrue or unworthy. I’m just pointing out that each era gets the ‘history’ it asks for and, on some level, needs. That societies write history not to reveal any ‘truth’ (there is no fixed historical ‘truth’) but to manufacture the stories they need to sustain their current social and cultural concerns.

For reasons which are a little too deep to be tackled in this blog post, our culture at the moment is undergoing an obsessive interest in identity politics, focusing in particular on the twin issues of race and gender. ‘Diversity’, already a major concern and ubiquitous buzzword, will only become more and more dominating for the foreseeable future.

And so history retold from the perspectives of race and gender, history which perfectly reflects the concerns of our day and age – is what we’re getting.

And, of course, it’s popular and fashionable. And lucrative.

History retold from the perspectives of race and gender is the kind of history which historians know will get them academic posts and high student approval marks from their evermore ‘woke’ pupils, the kind of history TV companies know will get them viewers, which publishers know will get them readers, and which artists know will get them museum commissions and gallery exhibitions.

Summary of the argument

All of this is intended to show that, if I have a relaxed approach to the political content of Akomfrah’s film, if I read that millions of Blacks and Asians laboured and fought for the European empires and accept it without hesitation, filing it next to what I’ve also recently learned about Canadian lumberjacks, or about the troops who fought and died in Palestine or East Africa – it is not out of indifference to the ‘issue’. It is:

1. Because, on a personal level, there are hundreds of aspects of the First World War which I don’t fully understand or comprehend, and all kinds of fronts and campaigns which I am pitifully ignorant of – and I am pretty relaxed about living with that ignorance because life is short and I have umpteen other calls on my time.

2. Because, on a cultural level, Mimesis: African Soldier can be seen as just one more artifact in the tsunami of cultural products in our time which all claim to be unearthing ‘the untold story’ and restoring ‘the forgotten voices’ and putting the record straight on behalf of neglected women, ignored people of colour and any number of other overlooked and oppressed minorities.

I am trying to understand my complete lack of surprise at finding the film on show here, or at its subject matter, and the complete lack of factual or historical illumination I felt when watching it.

Summary on the film

The political motivation behind Akomfrah’s piece is worthy, if entirely uncontroversial.

And because it has no voiceover or captions and because it relies for understanding and meaning on the introductory wall labels, the film is not that effective as purely factual information. A conventional display would have been infinitely more informative. In fact, in his interviews, Akomfrah emphasises the enormous amount of research which went into the making of the film. Well, following that line of thought, I couldn’t help thinking the whole project would make significantly more impact if it was accompanied by a book which dug really deeply into the subject, with maps and figures and deeper explanations, explaining just how many people came from each colony, willingly or unwillingly, how they were deployed, the special conditions they worked under, and so on, all liberally illustrated with – that favourite trope of our times – the actual stories of African and Indian soldiers in their own words. Ironically, there are no voices in the film: just silent and slow moving actors.

But quibbles about its meaning and purpose and its place in broader cultural movements aside, there is no denying that, as a spectacle, Mimesis: African Soldier is wonderfully hypnotic and tranquilising. The archive footage is artfully selected, the contemporary sequences are shot in stunning digital clarity, the two are edited together to make entrancing viewing.

And, just as with Purple, Mimesis allows the viewer’s mind to take the archive footage and modern scenery (its foggy jungles and muddy beaches and lonely Asian chopping wood) as starting points from which to drift off into reveries of our own devising, making our own connections and finding our own meanings.

Installation view of the 'beach' sequence of Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum, London

Installation view of the ‘beach’ sequence of Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum, London


Related links

More Imperial War Museum reviews

World War One-related art reviews

World War One-related book reviews

People Power: Fighting for Peace @ Imperial War Museum London

O silly and unlucky are the brave,
Who tilt against the world’s enormous wrong.
Their serious little efforts will not save
Themselves or us. The enemy is strong.
O silly and unlucky are the brave. (W.H. Auden, 1937)

It’s the centenary of the Imperial War Museum, set up in the same year as the Battle of Passchendaele and the Russian Revolution. 100 years of terrifying conflict, warfare, worldwide destruction and incomprehensible hecatombs of violent death. To mark the hundred years since its founding IWM London is mounting an exhibition chronicling the history of protest against war and its mad destruction.

People Power: Fighting for Peace presents a panorama of British protest across the past decades, bringing together about three hundred items – paintings, works of literature, posters, banners, badges and music v along with film and TV news footage, and audio clips from contemporaries, to review the growth and evolution of protest against war.

The exhibition very much focuses on the common people, with lots of diaries, letters and photos from ordinary men and women who protested against war or refused to go to war, alongside some, deliberately limited, examples from better-known writers and artists.

The show is in four sections:

First World War and 1920s

Having finished reading most of Kipling recently, I have a sense of how tremendously popular the Boer War (1899 to 1902) was in Britain. If there was an outburst of creativity it was in the name of raising money for the soldiers and their families, and commemorating ‘victories’ like Mafeking on mugs and tea towels. I am still struck by the vast success of Kipling’s charity poem, the Absent-Minded Beggar (1899).

12 years later the Great War prompted the same outpourings of patriotic fervour in the first year or so. But then the lack of progress and the appalling levels of casualties began to take their toll. From the first there had been pacifists and conscientious objectors, Fabian socialists like H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, or the Bloomsbury Circle with its attendant vegetarians, naturists and exponents of free love (as documented in the current exhibition of art by Vanessa Bell at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and hilariously satirised by John Buchan in his gung-ho adventure story, Mr Standfast). 

The exhibition features personal items and letters revealing the harrowing experiences of Conscientious Objectors who faced non-combatant service, forced labour, imprisonment and hostility from wider society. (Conscription of all unmarried men between 18 and 41 was only brought in in March 1916 when the supply of volunteers dried up.)

In fact the first half of the show very much focuses on the ordeals and changing treatment of Conscientious Objectors, because both the First and Second Wars featured conscription, forcing some men to make very difficult choices. In the Great War there were 16,000 COs; in the Second War 60,000.

The show brings out the principled stand of Quakers, religious non-conformists with absolute pacifist principles, who had been persecuted ever since their foundation in the turmoil of the Civil Wars. The Quakers set up the Friends Ambulance Unit, and there is a display case showing photos, letters from the founders and so on.

One of the Great War artists, CRW Nevinson, served with the unit from October 1914 to January 1915 and two of his oil paintings are here. Neither is as good as the full flood of his Futurist style as exemplified in La Mitrailleuse (1915) – like many of the violent modernists his aggression was tempered and softened by the reality of slaughter. His later war paintings are spirited works of propaganda, but not so thrilling as works of art:

The exhibition displays here, and throughout, the special tone that women anti-war protestors brought to their activities. Many suffragettes became ardent supporters of the war and there is on display the kind of hand-written abuse and a white feather which women handed out to able-bodied men in the street who weren’t in uniform. There is fascinating footage of a rally of Edwardian women demanding to be able to work – and of course tens of thousands ended up working in munitions factories and in countless other capacities.

The millions of voiceless common soldiers were joined by growing numbers of disillusioned soldiers and especially their officers, who had the contacts and connections to make their views known. Siegfried Sassoon is probably the most famous example of a serving officer who declared his disgust at the monstrous loss of life, the mismanagement of the war, and revulsion at the fortunes being made in the arms industry by profiteers.

There’s a copy of the letter of protest Sassoon wrote to his commanding officer in 1917 and which ended up being read out in the House of Commons, a photo of him hobnobbing with grand Lady Garsington and a manuscript of one of the no-nonsense poems Sassoon published while the war was still massacring the youth of Europe (in Counter-Attack 1918):

‘Good-morning, good-morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Fascinatingly, the hand-written text here has Sassoon’s original, much blunter, angrier version.

‘Good-morning, good-morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he murdered them both by his plan of attack.

The recent exhibition of Paul Nash at Tate Britain explored how the blasphemous ruination of the natural landscape by ceaseless bombardment affected this sensitive painter. This exhibition shows some of the Nash works that IWM owns. Nash went on to have a nervous breakdown in the early 1920s.

Wire (1918) by Paul Nash © IWM

Wire (1918) by Paul Nash © IWM

1930s and Second World War

Throughout what W.H. Auden famously called the ‘low dishonest decade’ of the 1930s the memory of the Great War made pacifism and anti-war views much more widespread and intellectually and socially acceptable. Even the most jingoistic of soldiers remembered the horror of the trenches. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had been directly involved in the Great War government and this experience was part of his motivation in going the extra mile to try and appease Hitler at the infamous Munich Agreement of 1938.

All sorts of organisations organised and lobbied against the looming menace of war. In 1935 the Peace Pledge Union was founded. The exhibition shows black and white film footage of self-consciously working class, Labour and communist marches against war. Nevinson is represented by a (very poor) pacifist painting – The Unending Cult of Human Sacrifice (1934). There is the fascinating titbit that Winnie the Pooh novelist A.A. Milne published a 1934 pacifist pamphlet titled Peace With Honour. But like many others he later changed his mind, a change recorded in letters here: the rise of fascist Germany was just too evil to be wished away.

The exhibition includes diaries, letters and photography which shed light on the personal struggles faced by these anti-war campaigners – but nothing any of these high-minded spirits did prevented the worst cataclysm in human history breaking out. The thread of conscientious objectors is picked up again – there were some 62,000 COs in the second war, compared to 16,000 in the first, and letters, diaries, photographs of individuals and CO Tribunals give a thorough sense of the process involved, the forms of alternative work available, as well as punishments for ‘absolutists’ – those who refused to work on anything even remotely connected with the war.

A march of 2,000 anti-conscription protesters in London, 1939 © IWM

A march of 2,000 anti-conscription protesters in London, 1939 © IWM

The single most inspiring story in the exhibition, for me, was that of John Bridge, a convinced pacifist and physics teacher, who nonetheless volunteered to train as a bomb disposal expert. He has a display case to himself which shows photos, letters and so on, and gives a detailed account of his war time service in a succession of conflict zones, along with the actual fuses of several of the bombs he defused, and the rack of medals he won for outstanding bravery. In serving his country but in such a clear-cut non-aggressive, life-saving role, I was shaken by both his integrity and tremendous bravery.

Cold War

The largest section of the exhibition explores the 45-year stand-off between the two superpowers which emerged from the rubble of the Second World War – the USA and the USSR – which was quickly dubbed ‘the Cold War’. Having recently read John Lewis Gaddis’s History of the Cold War, I tend to think of the period diving into three parts:

1. The early years recorded in black-and-white TV footage characterised by both sides testing their atom and then hydrogen bombs, and leading to the near apocalypse of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The exhibition commemorates the many mass marches from the centre of London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at RAF Aldermaston in Berkshire about thirty miles away. Interestingly, it includes some of the early designs for a logo for the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament (founded in 1958). These various drafts were made by artist and designer Gerald Holtom, before he settled on the logo familiar to all of us now. This, it turns out, is a combination of the semaphore signals for the letters ‘N’ and ‘D’.

© Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) Badges courtesy of Ernest Rodker

© Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) Badges courtesy of Ernest Rodker

Although Holtom is also quoted as saying it draws something from the spread arms of the peasant about to be executed in the Spanish painter Goya’s masterpiece, The Third of May 1808.

2. The Cuban crisis shook the leadership of both nuclear powers and led to a range of failsafe arrangements, not least the connection of a hotline between the US President and the Russian Premier. I always wondered what happened to the whole Aldermaston March culture with its earnest young men and women in black-and-white footage carrying banners against the bomb. The exhibition explains that a 1963 Test Ban treaty between the superpowers took a lot of the threat out of nuclear weapons. It also coincides (in my mind anyway) with Bob Dylan abandoning folk music and going electric in 1965. Suddenly everything seems to be in colour and about the Vietnam War.

This was because the Cold War, doused in Europe, morphed into a host of proxy wars fought in Third World countries, the most notable being the Vietnam War (additionally complicated by the fact that communist China was the main superpower opponent).

The same year Dylan went electric, and TV news is all suddenly in colour, the U.S. massively increased its military presence in Vietnam and began ‘Operation Thunder’, the strategy of bombing North Vietnam. Both these led in just a few years to the explosion of the ‘counter-culture’ and there’s a section here which includes a mass of ephemera from 1960s pop culture – flyers, badges, t-shirts etc emblazoned with the CND symbol amid hundreds of other slogans and logos, and references to the concerts for peace and tunes by the likes of Joan Baez and John Lennon.

Reviled though he usually is, it was actually Republican President Nixon who was elected on a promise to bring the Vietnam War to an end. Nixon also instituted the policy of détente, basically seeking ways for the superpowers to work together, find common interests and avoid conflicts. This policy was taken up by his successor Gerald Ford and continued by the Democrat Jimmy Carter, and led to a series of treaties designed to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on both sides and ease tensions.

3. Détente was running out of steam when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 and a year later the tough-talking Republican President Ronald Reagan was elected US President. Reagan’s more confrontational anti-communist line was accompanied by the development of a new generation of long-range missiles. When the British government of Mrs Thatcher agreed to the deployment of these cruise missiles at RAF Greenham in Berkshire, it inaugurated a new generation of direct protest which grew into a cultural phenomenon – a permanent camp of entirely female protesters who undertook a range of anti-nuke protests amid wide publicity.

The Greenham camp began in September 1981 after a Welsh group, Women for Life on Earth, arrived to protest the arrival of the cruise missiles, and continued for an impressive 19 years until it was disbanded in 2000.

The exhibition includes lots of memorabilia from the camp including a recreation of part of the perimeter fence of the base – and provides ribbons for us to tie onto the metal wire, like the Greenham women did, but with our own modern-day messages. And this impressive banner made by Thalia Campbell, one of the original 36 women to protest at Greenham Common.

Banner by Thalia Campbell © Thalia Campbell courtesy of The Peace Museum

Banner by Thalia Campbell © Thalia Campbell courtesy of The Peace Museum

Peter Kennard is very much the visual artist of this era, with his angry, vivid, innovative photo-montages. I remembered the IWM exhibition devoted entirely to his shocking striking powerful black-and-white posters and pamphlets.

Modern Era

When the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 (and Ronald Reagan and Mrs Thatcher left power, 1989 and 1990 respectively), many pundits and commentators promised that the world would benefit from a huge ‘peace dividend’. Frances Fukuyama published his influential essay The End of History – which just go to show how stupid clever people can be.

In fact, the fall of communism was followed in short order by the first Gulf War (1990 to 1991), the Balkan Wars (1991 to 1995), civil war in Somalia, the war in Afghanistan (2001 to 2014), the war in Iraq (2003 to 2011), and then the Arab Spring, which has led to ongoing civil wars in Syria and Libya. In all of these conflicts Western forces played a role.

Obviously the 9/11 attacks on New York ushered in a new era in which radical Islam has emerged as the self-declared enemy of the West. It is an age which feels somehow more hopeless and depressed than before. The Aldermaston marchers, the peaceniks of the 1960s, the Greenham grannies (as they were nicknamed) clung to an optimistic and apparently viable vision of a peaceful world.

9/11 and then the ruinous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined with the financial crash of 2008 and the never-ending conflict in the Middle East, along with the permanent sense of threat from Islamic terrorism, somehow make this an era without realistic alternatives. Financial institutions rule the world and are above the law. Appalling terrorist acts can happen anywhere, at any moment.

Protest has had more channels than ever before to vent itself, with the advent of the internet in the 1990s and social media in the 2000s and yet, somehow… never has the will of the bienpensant, liberal, cosmopolitan part of the population seemed so powerless. A sense that the tide is somehow against the high-minded idealism of the educated bourgeoisie was crystalised by the Brexit vote of June 2016 and then the (unbelievable) election of Donald Trump as U.S. President.

This final section of the exhibition includes a world of artefacts from this last 28 years or so – the era of Post-Communism.

In terms of anti-war protest it overwhelmingly showcases the numerous protests which have taken place against Western interference in and invasions of Arab countries. It includes a big display case on Brian Haw’s protest camp in Parliament Square (2001 to 2011).

There’s a wall of the original ‘blood splat’ artwork and posters created by David Gentleman for the Stop the War Coalition, including his ‘No More Lies’ and ‘Bliar’ designs, as well as his original designs for the largest protest in British history, when up to 2 million people protested in London on 15 February 2003 against the Iraq War.

Photo-Op by kennardphillipps (2005) © kennardphillipps

Photo-Op by kennardphillipps (2005) © kennardphillipps

The exhibition also features a kind of continual aural soundscape in that there are well-amplified sounds of chants and protests from the different eras and installations washing & overlapping over each other, as you progress through it. In addition, there are also headphone posts where you can slip headphones on and listen to a selection of voices from the respective era (1930s, 1950s, 1980s).

Effectiveness

Did it work? Any of it? Did Sassoon’s poems stop the Great War a day earlier? Did all the political activism of the 1930s prevent the Second World War? Did the Greenham Women force the cruise missiles to be removed? Did anything anyone painted, carried, did or said, stop Bush and Blair from invading Iraq?

On the face of it – No.

This uncomfortable question is addressed in the final room (more accurately an alcove or bay) where a large TV screen shows a series of interviews with current luminaries of protest such as Mark Rylance (actor), Kate Hudson (General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), Vanessa Redgrave (actor), Lindsey German (convenor of the Stop the War Coalition), David Gentleman (artist associated with Stop the War).

From these fascinating interviews there emerge, I think, three points:

1. To the Big Question the answer is No – All the marches, banners, posters and activism never prevented or stopped a single war.

2. But, on the plus side, very large protests can influence the culture. There is now probably a widespread feeling across most of British society that British troops must not be sent to invade another foreign country, certainly not another Middle Eastern country, ever again. This helped decide the vote in August 2013 in which MPs voted against David Cameron’s proposal to allow RAF planes to join other NATO allies in attacking ISIS forces inside Syria. But was this due to any of the protests, or simply due to the long drawn-out mismanagement of the war which so obviously led to bloody chaos in Iraq, and the loss of lots of British troops and – for what?

And the protests didn’t create a culture of total pacifism, far from it – In December 2015, MPs voted in favour of allowing RAF Typhoons to join in attacks on ISIS in Syria i.e. for Britain to be involved in military operations in the Middle East. Again.

So none of the interviewees can give any concrete evidence of any government decisions or military activity being at all influenced by any mass protest of the past 100 years.

3. Community

But instead, they all testified to the psychological and sociological benefits of protest – of the act of joining others, sometimes a lot of others, and coming together in a virtuous cause.

For Mark Rylance joining protests helped him lance ‘toxic’ feelings of impotent anger. One of the other interviewees mentioned that marching and protesting is a kind of therapy. It makes you feel part of a wider community, a big family. It helps you not to feel alone and powerless. Lindsey German said it was exciting, empowering and liberating to transform London for one day, when the largest protest in British history took place on 15 February 2003 against the prospect of the invasion of Iraq.

This made me reflect on the huge numbers of women who took part in the marches against Donald Trump in January 2017, not just in Washington DC but across the USA and in other countries too. Obviously, they didn’t remove him from power. But:

  • they made their views felt, they let legislators know there is sizeable active opposition to his policies
  • many if not most will have experienced that sense of community and togetherness which the interviewees mention, personally rewarding and healing
  • and they will have made contacts, exchanged ideas and maybe returned to their communities empowered to organise at a grass-roots level, to resist and counter the policies they oppose

Vietnam

The one war in the past century which you can argue was ended by protests in a Western country was the Vietnam War. By 1968 the U.S. government – and President Lyndon Johnson in particular – realised he couldn’t continue the war in face of the nationwide scale of the protests against it. In March 1968 Johnson announced he wouldn’t be standing for re-election and declared a winding-down of U.S. troop involvement, a policy followed through by his successor, Nixon.

But:

a) Handing over the people of South Vietnam to a generation of tyranny under the North Vietnamese communist party was hardly a noble and uplifting thing to do.

b) In the longer term, the debacle of the Vietnam War showed American and NATO leaders how all future conflicts needed to be handled for domestic consumption i.e very carefully. Wars in future:

  • would need to be quick and focused, employing overwhelming force, the so-called ‘shock and awe’ tactic
  • the number of troops required should never get anywhere near requiring the introduction of conscription or the draft, with the concomitant widespread opposition
  • the media must be kept under tight control

This latter is certainly a take-home message from the three books by war photographer Don McCullin, which I’ve read recently. During the Vietnam War he and the hundreds of other reporters and photographers could hitch lifts on helicopters more or less at will, go anywhere, interview everyone, capture the chaos, confusion, demoralisation and butchery of war with complete freedom. Many generals think the unlimited reporting of the media lost them the war in Vietnam (as opposed to the more obvious conclusion that the North Vietnamese won it).

The result was that after Vietnam, Western war ministries clamped down on media coverage of their wars. In McCullin’s case this meant that he was actively prevented from going to the Falklands War (April to June 1982), something which has caused him great personal regret but which typifies, on a wider level, the way that that War was reported in a very controlled way, so that there’s been an enduring deficit in records about it.

From the First Gulf War (1990 to 1991) onwards, war ministries in all NATO countries have insisted on ’embedding’ journalists with specific units where they have to stay and can be controlled.

Like the twentieth century itself, this exhibition is sprawling, wide-ranging, and perplexing – sparking all sorts of ideas, feelings and emotions which are difficult to reconcile and assimilate, since its central questions – Is war ever morally justified? If so, why and when and how should it be fought? – remain as difficult to answer as they were a hundred years ago, as they always have been.

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The short stories of Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 to 1930) wrote some hundred and twenty short stories, excluding the 56 Sherlock Holmes stories and the 17 or so Brigadier Gerard stories. The excellent Société Sherlock Holmes de France website estimates the total number of all Conan Doyle’s fictions as 239, for he also wrote some 20 short novels. His first story was published when he was 20, the last when he was 70.

For boys

The overall affect is rip-roaring adventures for boys. None of them are really for adults, none of them have much psychology, much interiority, and the plots – though superficially gripping – are all wound up in a brisk few final paras. They anticipate hundreds of adventure movies and comics and graphic novels. They are short and punchy and great fun.

Reassuring

Even the horror and science fiction stories, though they ostensibly deal with the bizarre and grotesque, are ultimately reassuring because there is never any doubt as to the good sense and decency of the narrator(s). It is always a man and he is always soundly for the Empire and the natural fair play of the British, innately superior to all other nations and divinely ordained to rule vast tracts of the world and over their occasionally troublesome natives (and, quite often, over the great unwashed back here in Blighty).

Many of the stories exemplify that specially British sense of justice and fairmindedness which, in the mind of Imperialists, justified, indeed demanded, our Imperial role and which, similarly, justified the existence of a landed aristocracy with its Justices of the Peace, Lord Lieutenants and whatnot.

(For a thorough depiction of this deeply conservative worldview see my review of Andrew Young’s biography of Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister 1886 to 1892 and 1895 to 1902.)

G.M. Young, historian of the Victorian era, writes about ‘the most precious element in Victorian civilisation, its robust and masculine sanity’, and Conan Doyle is a kind of quintessence of this, a charmingly unreflective, unquestioning, untroubled supporter of everything British.

Conan Doyle comes over as everyone’s favourite uncle, full of rattling good stories and anecdotes – but nobody for a minute takes any of his opinions seriously. He is Mr Chips.

Magazines

The stories were written for money to be published in the impressively wide variety of magazines which flourished in the 1890s. They were reprinted in numerous subsequent collections. One of the collections was titled Round the Fire Stories and that perfectly captures the Boy Scout ambience of so many of them.

The 1880s and 90s were a golden age of little magazines, created to feed the appetite of the middle and lower classes who had been taught to read as a result of the 1870 Education Act and its sequels, who, due to the wealth-creating effect of the Second Industrial Revolution, increasingly had the means to buy cheap titles.

Conan Doyle’s most effective outlet was the Strand magazine (established 1891), packed with articles, news and stories by leading writers of the day, all for the bargain price of one shilling in which he continued to publish to the end of his career.

These magazines demanded sensational storylines, glamorous protagonists, short, sharp doses of the mysterious, the macabre, the haunting or the humorous, and this well-defined format and sensation-seeking audience should be kept in mind when reading Conan Doyle’s stories.

Themes

Patriotism

‘I do not go so far as to say that the English are more honest than any other nation, but I have found them more expensive to buy.’ (The Lost Special)

‘He was a villain, but he was a Briton!’ said the captain, at last. ‘He lived like a dog, but, by God, he died like a man!’ (The Slapping Sal)

No more striking example could be given of the long arm and steel hand of the British law than that within a few months this mixed crew, Sclavonian, negro, Manila men, Norwegian, Turk and Frenchman, gathered on the shore of the distant Argentine, were all brought face to face at the Central Criminal Court in the heart of London town. (The Tragedy of Flowery Land)

The British Empire

The colonies, especially Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, are the playground of white men – the justification of the Empire goes without saying i.e. that native peoples should have their land taken and their goods stolen doesn’t occur. See Doyle’s good-humoured and open-handed pamphlets justifying the Second Boer War, which simply don’t consider the possibility that the British might have been motivated solely by power politics and greed. In The Green Flag even mutinous Irish republicans, when faced with the fuzzy wuzzies, turn out to be the stoutest defenders of the British Empire.

London

‘…now gradually overtaken and surrounded by the red brick tentacles of the London octopus.’

London is always growing, throwing out ever-expanding avenues of redbrick terraces. The ones so many of us still live in to this day.

Women

Chivalry is the way the patriarchy, men, reassured themselves that they deserved to be in charge, that it was OK to keep women in powerless subjugation. Chivalry was men’s reply to women demanding the vote or control of their own lives: look, we defer to you in everything sweet ladies, why on earth would you need the vote?

‘Ladies are in danger of losing their privileges when they usurp the place of the other sex. They cannot claim both.’ (Doctors of Hoyland)

Women in Conan Doyle are tall, stately, and the most beautiful woman in England. Defending their ‘honour’ is the motivation for quite a few of the stories.

Diamonds

Diamonds seem to be the treasure and currency of choice, the bigger the better, and feature in his very first story, The Mystery of Sasassa Valley as well as The Stone of Boxman’s Drift, Our Midnight Visitor, The Club-Footed Grocer.

Comedy

A constant throughout is Conan Doyle’s bluff good humour. Rising to overt comedy in the GP reminiscences and Brigadier Gerard stories, or just lying low, purring in the background. Constantly, pervasively there is his confidence and solidity, as ubiquitous as his splendid Edwardian moustache.

Crime

Crime of the most sensational and puzzling sort, of course, for example, The Story of the Lost Special or The Story of the Lost Watches.

Sensation

The stories were published in popular magazines which often contained sensational news or features. The stories take this tone from their surroundings. Nothing is subtle or underplayed. Everything is the most sensational scandal in London or England or the world.

Stanniford, the banker! I remembered the name at once. His flight from the country some seven years before had been one of the scandals and sensations of the time. (The Sealed Room)

Such was the position of affairs when, upon the evening of Monday, June 21st, there came a fresh development which changed what had been a mere village scandal into a tragedy which arrested the attention of the whole nation. (The Black Doctor)

It’s the same breathless sensationalism which characterises the Holmes stories and give them their delightful, thrilling sense of (utterly spurious) importance.

Scandal

Scandal and the fear of scandal is a motivation in these and the Holmes stories to a degree which is hard for us to understand. The reputation of upper middle class people was so important that they were willing to kill or die to preserve it. Just the hint that some misbehaviour in a former life abroad might revisit someone in respectable England causes numerous Conan Doyle protagonists to drop dead of horror. The Jew’s Breastplate is a particularly preposterous example of a story driven by this ludicrous sentiment.

Secret societies

Secret societies flourished in the 1880s and 1890s. They merged in the public mind with terrorist groups such as nihilists, anarchists, Fenians, even the violent suffragettes. They are routinely offered as explanations when some crime, especially a murder, goes unsolved and were so familiar a subject that Conan Doyle can make a comic story about a chemist who is mistakenly invited to give a lecture about dynamite to a group of nihilists.

Murder

Plenty of people get murdered and the murders are horrible and yet, in some difficult-to-define way, romantic and exciting. They upset the characters – but they don’t upset us, because they are so transparently the engines of a rattling good yarn.

Horror

The great horror trope of the pale ghastly face at the window occurs in scores of the stories – Uncle Jeremy’s Household, A Pastoral Horror – and melodramatic horror is one of the commonest emotions: ‘… and she realized, with a thrill of horror, that what she had taken to be a glove was the hand of a man, who was prostrate upon the floor.’

And now I come to that portion of my story which fills me even now with a shuddering horror when I think of it (The Striped Chest)

This could be the epigraph to many of the collected stories.

The 1880s

The Mystery of Sasassa Valley (September 1879)

‘Tell it? Oh, certainly; but it is a longish story and a very strange one; so fill up your glass again, and light another cigar, while I try to reel it off.’

The opening words sets the tone for the entire oeuvre. Jack Turnbull as an old man recalls how he and Lucky Tom Donahue, two young lawyers who packed in study to emigrate to South Africa, took their cue from a native tale of a haunted valley and discovered the weird glowing was given off not by demons but by diamonds!

The American’s Tale (December 1880)

“Deuced rum yarn!” said young Sinclair. Hard core Western redneck Jefferson Adams regales a posh English literary club with a tall tale about a feud in 1870s Arizona between cool Brit called Scott and short-fused Alabama Joe which ends with Joe being eaten alive by a giant Venus flytrap plant!

A Night Among the Nihilists (April 1881)

‘By the way,’ he remarked, as we smoked a cigar over our wine, ‘we should never have known you but for the English labels on your luggage.’

Robinson, a clerk in a corn merchant’s, is sent to Russia to open up trade with a major landowner. There is a mix-up and he is introduced into a secret society of Nihilists and saved just as he is rumbled, when the police burst in!

That Little Square Box (December 1881)

‘Dick was just the man I wanted; kindly and shrewd in his nature, and prompt in his actions, I should have no difficulty in telling him my suspicions, and could rely upon his sound sense to point out the best course to pursue. Since I was a little lad in the second form at Harrow, Dick had been my adviser and protector.’

The narrator is a nervous, solitary, literary type who, when he boards the ship from Boston to London, overhears two foreign men whispering about a secret box and when to set it off, thinks he is hearing anarchist/terrorists. In fact, they are releasing racing pigeons!

The Gully of Bluemansdyke: A True Colonial Story (December 1881)

‘The two men lapsed into silence for some time, moodily staring into the glow of the fire, and pulling at their short clays.’

New Zealand in the 1850s. A posse is formed to hunt down seven men who bushwhacked the young sons of two old-timers. A paean to the rugged spirit of the emigrant colonial trooper. Trooper Braxton and his capture of the Bluemansdyke murderers. The Australia stories are linked.

Bones, The April Fool of Harvey’s Sluice (April 1882)

Comic tale. ‘

Boss, with the keen power of calculation which had made him the finest cricketer at Rugby in his day, had caught the rein immediately below the bit, and clung to it with silent concentration.’

Another tale of derring-do in the New Zealand outback, but lightened with romance and humour, as two English miners, posh John ‘Boss’ Morgan and herculean Abe ‘Bones’ Durton save the life of pretty young Miss Carrie Sinclair who transforms the life of mining shanty Harvey’s Sluice.

‘With these few broken words the strangely assorted friends shook hands and looked lovingly into each other’s eyes.’

Reminiscent of Paint Your Wagon. Climaxes with a big shootout as the pals save Miss Sinclair from bushrangers.

Our Derby Sweepstakes (May 1882)

Two men compete for the hand of the fair Miss Eleanor Montague and decide the winner of the Derby will win her hand. Told in 1st person by Eleanor in an impersonation of a Victorian airhead.

That Veteran (September 1882)

Very amusing. A gentleman on a walking holiday in Wales pulls into an inn where he is regaled with stories of the Crimean War and a soldier’s career by one sergeant Turnbull until his head is swimming and he passes out. The soldier is a fake, a criminal, who has drugged him and stolen his watch.

My Friend the Murderer (December 1882)

A further New Zealand story: the prison doctor narrator (Conan Doyle/Watson) hears the life story of Maloney, the Bluemansdyke murderer who escaped the rope by turning queen’s evidence and had sundry adventures trying to escape revengers as he fled to Australia, England, France and then back to Oz where he finally dies in a bar brawl.

The Captain of the Polestar (January 1883)

‘Being an extract from the singular journal of John McAlister Ray, student of medicine’. He is the doctor on the Polestar which travels unwisely far into the northern, Arctic ice fields, supposedly in search of whales, but in fact driven by the haunted captain Nicholas Craigie who is pursuing the phantom of his murdered sweetheart which flees across the ice.

See an interesting article about the story’s origins in Conan Doyle’s actual Arctic voyage aboard the whaler Hope.

Gentlemanly Joe (March 1883)

The narrator is a young man working at a bank along with four other blue-bloods and the vulgar, jumped-up son of a bookie who they ironically name Gentlemanly Joe. They mercilessly rib him, especially when he falls in love with little Miss Cissy who is in fact engaged to one of them. Then comes the night of the great fire when the Newsome house burns down and it is big strong Gentlemanly Joe who breaks down the door and rescues Miss Cissy. Though she marries her fiancée she and the others will never forget Gentlemanly Joe!

The Winning Shot (July 1883)

A genuinely eerie supernatural story. One Octavius Gaster arrives at a charming upper class household in Dartmoor where Lottie Underwood is due to marry her sweetheart. He casts clouds over the gathering, defends spiritualism, has a newspaper cutting implicating him in black magic, falls in love with Lottie, which leads to a fight with Charley and he is evicted. Then the great shooting match between soldiers at locals where Gaster turns up and, at the climax of the match, appears to make Charley shoot through a phantasm of himself, killing himself. The spookiest thing is that after weeks of delirium Lottie is seen getting into a train with him.

Selecting a Ghost (December 1883)

Comic story told by a preposterously pretentious narrator Mr d’Odd, a successful grocer who has bought a big old house and now wants a ghost to go with it so he asks his brother-in-law in London to find one, resulting in a crook from London coming down and pretending to be a purveyor of ghosts who audition for him as he drinks some magic potion. When he awakes, he has of course been robbed.

The Silver Hatchet (December 1883)

‘On the 3rd of December 1861, Dr. Otto von Hopstein, Regius Professor of Comparative Anatomy of the University of Budapest, and Curator of the Academical Museum, was foully and brutally murdered within a stone-throw of the entrance to the college quadrangle.’

Then another victim is found. Then the friendship of two medical students who stumble across a silver-handled ax and, as he holds it, one goes homicidally mad. They are arrested it and the police inspector handling it also becomes homicidal. It is cursed:

‘Ever evil, never good, Reddened with a loved one’s blood.’

The inclusion of the students makes it seem like the short melodramatic plot of an Austrian operetta.

An Exciting Christmas Eve or, My Lecture on Dynamite (December 1883)

Odd tone of tale about a short bespectacled Herr Doctor Otto von Spee to whom lots of accidents occur, the final one being kidnapped on Christmas Eve to deliver a lecture on gunpowder to a secret, presumably revolutionary, society which climaxes with some sample guncotton being detonated and Dr von Spee escaping.

J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement (January 1884)

Remarkably powerful fiction which claims to be a true account of what happened on the Marie Celeste (discovered drifting December 1873): the boat is slowly taken over by an evil half-caste – Mr. Septimius Goring – who along with two black sailors murders all the white crew and passengers, steering to a remote African settlement where he lords it over the natives instead of to Portugal. When the natives see the lucky charm an old slave gave him in America their superstitious reverence forces Goring to set Jephson adrift and so be picked up by a passing ship.

The Heiress of Glenmahowley (January 1884)

First person narrative. Bob Elliott and John Vereker are two unsuccessful lawyers marooned in a pub in the west of Ireland, passing the time being unpleasantly racist about the locals when the publican tells them of a local widow who is fabulously wealthy and her beautiful young daughter the heiress. Comedy as both men pretend not to be interested but next day climb over the big spiked wall, tumbling into the ditch and scrambling through briars to try to woo and win the beauty. It is made plain he English narrator is a pompous preening twerp.

The Blood-Stone Tragedy: A Druidical Story (February 1884)

The narrator begins to discuss the recent case of Williams the druid when the other man in the railway carriage says, Hush, don’t mention the word, it might wake my sleeping wife. And then proceeds to tell the story of how his then fiancée got lost in the mountains and fell into the clutches of a maniac who thinks he is a druid and plans to sacrifice her at midnight.

John Barrington Cowles (April 1884)

Longer and more psychologically penetrating than usual: the narrator’s friend falls for an ice cold beauty who is associated with two men who went mad, with cruelty to her dog, with tyranny over her mother, the daughter of a soldier in India who indulged in black magic. She beats a mesmerist at a public lecture and then, at the height of their engagement, she reveals something hideous to John Barrington Cowles. He raves that she is a werewolf. He goes down with brain fever and then is taken by the narrator to the Isle of May to recover. One night with a storm approaching, JBC hears her calling and runs to his death over a cliff.

The Cabman’s Story: the Mysteries of a London ‘Growler’ (May 1884)

A London cabbie tells a few of his colourful experiences like carrying a corpse, and carrying a forger. Nice ventriloquism of the cabbie, similar to My Friend The Murderer.

The Tragedians (August 1884)

Young Mr Barker the narrator enters the happy life of the Latour family in Paris, the widowed Madame, young Rose and brother Henry the would-be actor. In another part of town the famous actor and seducer of women, Lablas, wins at cards and plans the abduction of Rose. Barker and the brothers are walking home late when they encounter Lablas and accomplices abducting Rose. Fight. Broken up with the promise of a duel. And, as Henry had just got the role of Laertes opposite Hamlet, the duel is fought for real onstage in a scene which rises to real intensity and power.

Crabbe’s Practice (December 1884)

Pure comedy as two medical students cook up a fake drowning and electrical resuscitation to boost Crabbe’s practice.

The Man from Archangel (January 1885)

1st person narrator. Lonely young scientist John M’Vittie inherits money and a barren stretch of property in Scotland to which he moves to carry out his obscure experiments. One stormy night a schooner is shipwrecked on the shore and, out of character, he rows out and saves a beautiful young damsel who doesn’t speak English. Days later a tall, brown-faced, red-shirted, leather-booted pirate-type comes snooping claiming the woman is his bride. But she hates him. He and his crew kidnapped her from her wedding.

The Lonely Hampshire Cottage (May 1885)

3rd person. Very moody landlord John Ranter is advised by his doctor to retire and moves to a remote cottage where he beats his wife and is a byword. Then a strange sailor appears, walking to Southampton, in need of a bed for the night. Ranter offers it and slowly unravels that the stranger has struck it rich in California and bears dollars and gold. In the middle of the night he creeps up the stairs to murder him but is caught by the stranger who reveals himself as Ranter’s runaway son.

The Great Keinplatz Experiment (July 1885)

Professor von Baumgarten is an expert on mesmerism and spiritualism and carries out an experiment with his daughter’s fiancé and his student, Fritz von Hartmann, to see if souls leave the body during hypnosis. They do, but re-enter the wrong bodies, the professor’s soul entering the student’s body and vice versa, with hilarious consequences. Played for laughs, this reminded me of a Laurel and Hardy short.

The Parson of Jackman’s Gulch (December 1885)

1853 in this rough mining settlement 150 miles from Ballarat when a pastor arrives and wins over the miners by reading the Bible whenever they blaspheme. His campaign climaxes with the first ever sermon in the back of the pub where he proceeds to lock them in and reveal himself to be the noted bushranger Conky Jim while his partners rob the assay office of its entire haul of gold.

The Fate of the Evangeline (December 1885)

1st person. John Vincent Gibbs reveals the true story behind the loss of the ‘Evangeline’, namely that, rejected in love he had become an anchorite on a remote Scottish island when who should turn up but his erstwhile fiancée, mercenary father and calculating suitor, all of whom he overhears, before swimming out to the yacht Miss Lucy is sleeping aboard, cutting the painter and absconding with her. The schooner is run down in the Irish Sea by a freighter bound for Australia where they make a new life and, ultimately, write this ‘true account’. Quotes the Scotsman quoting Edgar Allen Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin, on the necessity of eliminating the impossible etc.

Touch and Go: A Midshipman’s Story (April 1886)

1st person. It is 1868 and the narrator was a lad of 14 back on the banks of the river Clyde from his first journey as a seaman. He, his sister and cousin fool old Jock their minder and take a sailing boat out for a pleasure run alone and on impulse decide to sail to the mouth of the river where a storm pushes them out into the Irish Sea. Caught in heavy waters they are like to drown when they are rescued by a steam launch, dried and slept and dropped on the beach of the Isle of Man.

Cyprian Overbeck Wells : A Literary Mosaic (December 1886)

1st person. Humorous: the narrator Smith fancies himself a writer and after 10 years a clerk leaves his job to write a masterpiece, decides to read all English literature to give himself a boost: then one night hallucinates a tableful of the great novelists who proceed to tell a story in tag.

Uncle Jeremy’s Household (February 1887)

1st person. Long one. Student Hugh Lawrence goes to Dunklethwaite House in Yorkshire to stay with his friend John Thurston who is staying with old eccentric, poetry-obsessed Uncle Jeremy and the nanny, Miss Warrender, an attractive Indian young woman, orphan of a famous Indian chief, and Uncle J’s amanuensis, the tall creepy Copperthorne. Hugh becomes curious about the troubled relationship between secretary and nanny and puzzled by her sometimes savage demeanour until one night, he overhears their conversation in the greenhouse and discovers she is the daughter of a Thuggee leader, worships a goddess of murder, killed her adopted father’s daughter and the little girl Uncle J had adopted; and now they both plan to murder old Uncle J as the secretary has got himself named in the will. In the end a) Miss Warrender escapes having b) tasked a wandering Indian stranger in the village to murder Copperthorne.

The Stone of Boxman’s Drift (December 1887)

3rd person. The early 1870s in the Vaal valley near Kimberley, South Africa, barren land except for the diamonds and therefore wild prospectors from all over the world.

Headley Dean, with his crisp, neatly-trimmed hair and beard, his quick, glancing eyes, and his nervous, impulsive ways, had something of the Celt, both in his appearance and in his manner. Eager, active, energetic, he gave the impression of a man who must succeed in the world, but who might be a little unscrupulous in his methods of doing so. Big Bill, on the other hand, quiet, unimpressionable, and easy-going, with a sweeping yellow beard and open Saxon countenance, may have had a stronger and deeper nature than his partner, but was inferior to him in fertility of resource, and in decision of character in all the minor matters of life.

A morality tale whereby the Celt comes over selfish and greedy when they find a huge carbuncle. In their struggle it bounces into a bottomless pit. The dim Saxon reveals he had found it earlier and placed it for the Celt to discover, who is then covered in guilt and shame.

John Huxford’s Hiatus (June 1888)

John works in a cork factory in Brisport which is forced to close down by competition from south America. He is offered a job in Canada and leaves his weeping fiancée, promising to write. Within days of arriving he is attacked and beaten over the head in a low dive. He recovers but has amnesia. He rises by hard work to be a rich man and, upon hearing Devon voices down at the docks, suddenly remembers everything. He sails over the sea and is reunited with his sweetheart who has stayed true to him these past seventy years.

The 1890s

The Ring of Thoth (January 1890)

Third person. An Egyptologist in the Louvre stumbles upon a 4,000 year old Egyptian who discovered the secret of eternal life and now is going to end his life in the arms of his mummified love.

A Physiologist’s Wife (September 1890)

3rd person. Social comedy/satire in which cold-hearted rationalist and scientist Professor Ainslie Grey marries one Mrs. O’James. A younger colleague is due to marry his daughter, until he meets the new Mrs Grey and is stunned to realise she is his first wife from Australia who ran off and left him and was drowned in a shipwreck. In fact she didn’t take the boat but came to England to start a new life. Cold rationalist Professor tells them to go be happy and reunited. He dies of a broken heart.

A Pastoral Horror (December 1890)

1st person. Murder in a beautiful Alpine valley. An Englishman awaiting the outcome of a bankruptcy case in England has moved to the isolated village of Laden where he is witness to several gruesome murders of peasants. The one other educated man in the village is the curé, Father Verhagen. So imagine everyone’s horror when it turns out to be him, going insane.

The Surgeon of Gaster Fell (December 1890)

1st person. 1885. James Upperton moves to an isolated cottage on the Yorkshire Moors to study but becomes embroiled with several mysterious people, Miss Cameron, the Italianate beautiful young woman staying in the boarding house he puts up in, and the self-styled surgeon of Gaster Fell who is the only neighbour, who warns him to bolt his door at night and who he sees cruelly mistreating a wizened old man. One stormy night his front door creaks open and a ghastly evil figure is revealed by lightning. Chased off by another man. In the cold light of day it turns out the old man is clinically and violently insane and being ‘cared’ for by his son and daughter, the surgeon and mysterious young lady.

Our Midnight Visitor (February 1891)

1st person. A long atmospheric story set on the small isle of Uffan near Arran. The scenery and mood painted very well in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson. A stranger appears, a wealthy American calling himself Digby, dropped by his yacht who comes to stay with young MacDonald and his bad-tempered father. The narrator’s suspicions mount until a newspaper cutting reveals that Digby is Frenchman who has stolen a fabulous diamond and is on the run.

A Straggler of ’15 (March 1891)

A patriotic portrait of Corporal Gregory Brewster, last survivor of the battle of Waterloo. Superpatriotic and vivid description of working class Chatham. This was turned into a play, as describe in Andrew Lycett’s biography of Doyle.

The Voice of Science (March 1891)

3rd person. Drawing room comedy as Mrs Esdaile’s son Rupert takes advantage of the new ‘phonograph’ to record a message listing the conquests and cheating of his sister Rose’s fiancé, Captain Beesley, who mysteriously runs out the French windows and down the drive never to be seen again.

The Colonel’s Choice (July 1891)

Colonel Bolsover marries young Miss Hilda Thornton despite rumours and the attempt of friends to dissuade him. Several years of happiness follow but then Captain Tresillian appears from India and, in a confrontation scene, he reveals that he and Hilda were engaged but he was penniless. A fire breaks out at Melrose Lodge and the colonel saves his wife then nobly steps into the flames to give her a better life.

A Sordid Affair (November 1891)

A hymn to honest working women. Mrs Raby is trying hard to support her ex-drunk husband by dressmaking. She makes a beautiful dress for a posh client but her husband steals it, pawns it and gets blind drunk, forcing Mrs Raby to spend all her savings buying the original dress from its Bond Street shop in order to keep her promise to her client. Then she recovers her husband from the gutter and takes him home.

Oh, blind, angelic, foolish love of woman! Why should men demand a miracle while you remain upon earth?

A False Start (December 1891)

3rd person. Comedy about young Dr Horace Wilkinson who has several false starts of first patients including the gas man and an impoverished gypsy before he called quite by mistake to the house of the local millionaire. Turns out to be a comedy case of mistaken identity in which Wilkinson shines nobly.

Out of the Running (January 1892)

Pretty young Dolly, farmer’s daughter, has two suitors Adam and Elias and in a number of scenes we meet them and hear her mother’s opinion about which one to take. Dolly thinks it is Adam leaves a dog rose on her window sill every morning and so accepts him. There is an accident with the hayrick which crushes the orphan inarticulate farmhand Bill. Next morning, unable to walk, he crawls to her window to leave another rose sprig and is found there dead. Dolly distraught. Hardy territory.

The Great Brown-Pericord Motor (March 1892)

3rd person. Short, grotesque story of two inventors who fall out over a flying machine they’ve created. They fight and one is killed in the struggle. Pericord attaches Brown’s body to the machine and sends it off out to sea, then goes mad. ‘He walked swiftly down the stair and was quickly reabsorbed into the flood of comfortless clammy humanity which ebbed and flowed along the Strand.’

De Profundis (March 1892)

Strange and gruesome. Starts with a hymn to the British Empire and its insatiable need for British men. Then the tale of John Vansittart a planter from Ceylon who visits the narrator, goes staying with his friends, marries suddenly but just before departing comes down with smallpox. He sails early and is due to be met by his wife and friend at Falmouth; the ship goes on to Madeira and JV appears in a vision to the narrator out of the calm Atlantic waves…

A Regimental Scandal (May 1892)

A tale of our fine men in the Army, specifically rich Major Errington who tries to help Colonel Lovell when his shares crash by cheating against himself at cards – until it is revealed. Far from being a scandal this is a hymn to how jolly decent the British Army is.

A Question of Diplomacy (summer 1892)

Comedy. The Foreign Secretary, laid up with gout, is outwitted by his wife who arranges for his daughter’s fiancé to get a position in Tangiers and for the daughter to accompany him and for them to get married asap, all against the FS’s wishes.

Lot No.249 (September 1892)

At an old Oxford college a fat evil undergraduate has been conducting experiments, bringing a 4,000 year old mummy back to life, and increasingly using it to terrorise his enemies – before a steady young sporting chap steps in and stops it.

Jelland’s Voyage (November 1892)

Henry Jelland and Willy McEvoy get into serious debt in a trading port in Japan, and steal the money from their employer who’s on a long trip. When he unexpectedly returns they steal more money to buy a yacht, which is then pursued by the irate employer until the men shoot themselves but their empty yacht is then carried by storm into the wastes of the Pacific.

The Los Amigos Fiasco (December 1892)

A very short light-hearted comic-horror piece about a town which tries to execute a man with electricity by increasing the voltage, but only succeed in giving him superhuman life.

The Green Flag (June 1893)

The Irish Question:

For Irish regiments have before now been disaffected, and have at a distance looked upon the foe as though he might, in truth, be the friend; but when they have been put face on to him, and when their officers have dashed to the front with a wave and halloo, those rebel hearts have softened and their gallant Celtic blood has boiled with the mad Joy of the fight, until the slower Britons have marvelled that they ever could have doubted the loyalty of their Irish comrades.

In faraway Sudan a British force is overcome by attacking dervishes, the square collapses, things are going badly, when the Republican leader Dennis Connolly unexpectedly rallies the Irish contingent and dies saving the day. Propaganda how even dissidents within rally to the Empire when faced with opponents from without.

The Slapping Sal (August 1893)

An 18th century yarn.

‘He was a villain, but he was a Briton!” said the captain, at last. “He lived like a dog, but, by God, he died like a man!’

A British man o’war is struggling against a more powerful French ship but is saved by the mutineers of another British boat, the Slapping Sal and their fierce leader Hairy Hudson who turned out to be a true Brit.

The Case of Lady Sannox (November 1893)

A dashing surgeon is having an affair with a high society lady, is called late at night to operate on the wife of a Turkish merchant; he horribly disfigures the woman, then it is revealed it is his high-born lover and the merchant her husband who has taken a horrific revenge.

The Lord of Château Noir (July 1894)

During the Franco-Prussian War a French aristocrat terrorises a Prussian officer in vengeance for his dead son.

Round The Red Lamp (1894)

A collection 15 stories themed around medicine, the red lamp being the sign of a GP.

A Medical Document (October 1894)

Three old doctors – a GP, a surgeon and an alienist – sit around discussing eerie cases. There’s passing reference to the way popular fiction uses very rare or vague conditions (‘brain fever’) but rarely actually common diseases (typhoid). And how fiction rarely uses those outbreaks of vice which are so common. I think he’s talking about sex.

Behind the Times (October 1894)

Comic, warm-hearted memoir of an old-fashioned doctor way behind modern scientific times, but with a magical healing touch and bedside manner.

His First Operation (October 1894)

Comic, warm-hearted memoir of a young student attending his first operation and fainting.

The Third Generation (October 1894)

Seasoned Dr Horace Selby is visited by Sir Francis Norton who, it quickly transpires, is infected with syphilis. He explains the taint comes from his hard-living Regency grandfather. He is due to marry the following week. The doctor suggests creating a sudden reason to go abroad and cancel the nuptials. But next morning Dr Selby reads that the noble aristocrat has thrown himself under the wheels of a heavy dray and died, in order to spare the damsel and kill the hereditary taint. True Brit.

Sweethearts (October 1894)

The doctor in a seaside town meets an old man on a bench who wastes and declines over three consecutive days. Finally he reveals it is because he is waiting for his wife, his childhood sweetheart, to return. I wonder whether Conan Doyle’s readers found this sickly sweet, or lapped it up.

The Curse of Eve (October 1894)

The nondescript life of Robert Johnson, gentleman’s outfitter, is turned upside down when his wife begins her labour. He chase all over town for one doctor, and then again for a second opinion. After an all-night vigil, his son is delivered.

Lives had come and lives had gone, but the great machine was still working out its dim and tragic destiny.

The Doctors of Hoyland (October 1894)

Dr James Ripley of Hoyland in Hampshire is astonished when a lady doctor moves to the town. Quickly she establishes herself a practice and ends up treating Ripley himself after he fractures his leg falling from a carriage. His initial sexist resistance to a female doctor is completely overcome by close experience of her ability and he inevitably falls in love with her. Thankfully, Conan Doyle foresees the utter hopelessness of such a resolution and has her remaining devoted to Science, departing for further education in Paris, leaving the country doctor sadder and wiser.

The Surgeon Talks (October 1894)

Like A Medical Document this consists of paragraph-long anecdotes: how they removed the ear from the wrong patient; how most people receive the diagnosis of impending death nobly etc. The woman who hides her cancer form her husband.

‘…Besides, [a doctor] is forced to be a good man. It is impossible for him to be anything else. How can a man spend his whole life in seeing suffering bravely borne and yet remain a hard or a vicious man? It is a noble, generous, kindly profession, and you youngsters have got to see that it remains so.’

The Parasite (December 1894)

‘He has to thank his phlegmatic Saxon temperament for it. I am black and Celtic, and this hag’s clutch is deep in my nerves.’

A Foreign Office Romance (December 1894)

Introduces the figure of the comically garrulous old Frenchman who would mutate into Brigadier Gerard. Here he is named Alphonse Lacour, assistant to the French ambassador who is finalising a treaty with the English Foreign Secretary when a messenger arrives to say the French have handed over Egypt i.e. lost their bargaining power; at which Alphonse kidnaps the messenger and drives him up and down in a carriage reciting the Koran until it is too late, the treaty is signed, and Alphonse flees back to France a national hero.

The Recollections of Captain Wilkie (January 1895)

On a train an experienced doctor carries out some Holmesian analysis of the man sitting opposite. He reveals himself to be a reformed professional thief and recounts a number of his adventures. The collection-of-anecdotes story.

The Three Correspondents (1896)

Incredibly Kiplingey. Three newspaper correspondents riding through the heat of Egypt to join the army. Racial stereotypes:

‘Mortimer was Saxon—slow, conscientious, and deliberate; Scott was Celtic—quick, happy-go-lucky, and brilliant. Mortimer was the more solid, Scott the more attractive. Mortimer was the deeper thinker, Scott the brighter talker.’

And Anerley the nube. They are attacked by four Arabs who they shoot, Anerley is wounded. But it is he who finds the Arabs’ camel and beats his colleagues back to the telegraph station to send a famous despatch to his paper.

Tales of the High Seas: I. The Governor of St. Kitt’s (January 1897)

Set in the early 18th century, time of pirates in the Caribbean and among all the pirates the most feared and savage is Captain Sharkey. Captain Scarrow of the ship Morning Star is told that: a) Sharkey is captured and due to hang next morning, b) ordered to take the governor of St Kitts back to London.

The governor is duly rowed out the next morning and off they set and he proves a jovial guest who can hold his liquor and tell a good yarn. Having crossed the Atlantic to Beachy Head he rips off his disguise to realise that he is Captain Sharkey, who had cut the governor’s throat and stolen his clothes! With his loyal mate he departs on the only seaworthy boat left and Scarrow watches them commandeer a fishing barque and disappear.

Tales of the High Seas: II. The Two Barques (March 1897)

Stephen Craddock, an American Puritan gone bad, volunteers to the governor of Kingston to lead an expedition to trap Sharkey when his boat is reported as drydocked on a remote island, with a similar boat painted to look the same. Doubles. Craddock and crew go hunting for him ashore for several days, then return to their own ship, only to find it is Sharkey’s own Happy Delivery. They imprison him and sail to Kingston where they are greeted as victorious heroes and are about to capture the governor and leading citizens, when heroic Craddock breaks free of his bonds, dives into the sea, and raises the alarm before being shot and drowned by Sharkey.

Tales of the High Seas: III. The Voyage of Copley Banks (May 1897)

Captain Sharkey murdered Copley Banks’s wife and two children. He plans his revenge, hiring a crew of wrong ‘uns and himself becoming a pirate then fast friends with Sharkey before tricking him aboard his ship, tying him to the muzzle of a gun and booby trapping it all with gunpowder. Boom! End of Captain Sharkey.

The Striped Chest (July 1897)

Captain Barclay and mate Allardyce go aboard a Portuguese barque which has foundered in a storm. It is abandoned except for a corpse they find. They carry to portable cargo aboard their ship, including an enormously heavy chest which has a note on saying, Don’t open. The second mate, overcome by greed, is discovered dead with his head cloven in like the corpse on the wreck. As the first mate goes to open it Captain Allardyce pulls him back just as a mechanism springs out to crush his head. This is a genuinely atmospheric and powerful story.

The Fiend of the Cooperage (October 1897)

Mr Meldrum, skipper of the private yacht The Cooperage, puts into an island off Sierra Leone where two Brits are maintaining a trading outpost (compare with Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands). The nautical terms and atmosphere of the island very well described. But something evil is haunting the island, scaring the negro servants, and stealing away a man every third day… Meldrum and Dr Spelling stay up all night in a tropical thunderstorm to find out what…

The New Catacomb (1898)

Two archaeologists in Rome, one of them a dashing bounder just returned from a failed elopement with an English girl. His colleague takes him at night to a new catacomb then traps him there; for he had loved the girl he had ‘ruined’.

The Confession (January 1898)

She looked down at the grating, and shrank in terror from the sight. A convulsed face was looking out at her, framed in that little square of oak. Two terrible eyes looked out of it—two eyes so full of hungry longing and hopeless despair that all the secret miseries of thirty years flashed into that one glance.

Very short. A Jesuit priest accidentally reunited with his long-lost love who has herself taken the veil, and they bemoan the doomed love affair which separated them.

The Story of the Beetle-Hunter (June 1898)

This and the following stories make a set in the Strand of longish, factual stories about mysterious crimes, Holmes stories without Holmes. An unemployed doctor answers an advert in the Standard and goes for an interview with Lord Linchfield who requires a strong man with a good knowledge of beetles. They go by train to Pangbourne to Delamere Court, home of tall eccentric beetle expert Sir Thomas Rossiter. In the middle of the night Rossiter sneaks into their bedroom and attacks the dummy figure in the bed. They are able to accost him and show that he is subject to mad fits, as his wife had claimed.

The Story of The Man with the Watches (July 1898)

A long puzzle concerning that could almost be a Holmes mystery. A man and lady enter a train to Manchester, having refused to enter a carriage with a bearded man smoking. At Manchester all three are gone, and a young man no-one can account for is found shot dead. The article describes the various theories of police detectives before quoting a long letter form one of the protagonists which explains what happened. It is one of Doyle’s favourite tropes, the ‘revenge from overseas’. A Holmes story without Holmes.

The King of the Foxes (July 1898)

The setting is a crew of old fox hunters telling yarns and one tells the story of Wat Danbury, whose doctor had told him to lay off alcohol before he began hallucinating, who goes an epic hunt, finally being the only rider left as he enters spooky woods to find himself confronted by a monster giant fox, the king of foxes, killing the hounds. He flees home and never touches a drop again.

The Story of The Lost Special (August 1898)

‘It is one of the elementary principles of practical reasoning, that when the impossible has been eliminated the residuum, however improbable, must contain the truth.’

A foreigner hires a special train from Liverpool to Manchester. it never arrives but vanishes into thin air. As in The Man with the Watches the story takes the form of an official report, collating the puzzling crime and then revealing the unriddling solution.

The Story of the Sealed Room (September 1898)

‘It was in the course of one of these aimless rambles that I first met Felix Stanniford, and so led up to what has been the most extraordinary adventure of my lifetime.’

Lawyer sees a young man nearly run over by a cab and helps him into his decayed big house. Discovers his father was the banker who ruined lots of people and disappeared. There is one room sealed shut which the absconded father wrote the son not to open till he was 21. A few months later the young man arrives at that age and the lawyer is present at the unsealing of the door where they find the father’s body, dead these seven years. He committed suicide in shame but didn’t want his poorly wife to know.

The Story of the Black Doctor (October 1898)

Another very detailed and forensic crime mystery which the narrator examines in detail, weighing all the evidence in the mysterious murder of the dark-skinned doctor of Bishop’s Crossing near Liverpool. A Holmes story without Holmes.

The Story of The Club-Footed Grocer (November 1898)

‘With every fresh incident I felt that I was moving in an atmosphere of mystery and peril…’

Stephen is invited by letter to visit his disreputable uncle who used to be a ship’s chandler in Stepney but was attacked and beaten and, when the attacker was gaoled, moved to a remote cottage in the Lake District. Thence Stephen goes to discover the pirate has been released from gaol, gathered his crew and is besieging the uncle. There’s a showdown in which the uncle leaps to his death and the stolen diamonds are – cunningly – discovered to be hidden in his club foot boot heel.

The Brazilian Cat (December 1898)

The protagonist visits his cousin, Everard King, at his country pile where he has housed his large collection of Brazilian flora and fauna, especially the prize exhibit, a huge black puma. Despite warnings from the collector’s wife, the protagonist allows himself to be locked in to the animal’s cage. He manages to survive and when evil Everard returns in the morning it is he and not the protagonist who is killed. And as a result, the protagonist inherits the land, house and title.

The Retirement of Signor Lambert (December 1898)

A grim and sadistic story in which, like The Case of Lady Sannox, a jealous husband arranges the disfigurement of a lover; in this case the strong-minded self-made man Sir William Sparter discovers a letter from his wife to a celebrated tenor, Signor Lambert. He teaches himself about neck anatomy, goes to the tenor’s house, chloroforms him and permanently damages his vocal cords.

A Shadow Before (December 1898)

‘Before’ meaning before the Franco-Prussian War. We are in Ireland, 1870, and City financier (i.e. gambler) John Worlington Doddshorse, ordered by his doctor to treat the stress of incipient bankruptcy, stumbles across the biggest horse fair in the land. He sees two different men in the hotel opening lengthy telegrams which appear to be in code. Then witnesses them paying way over the odds for the horses brought to sale. He telegrams his colleague in the City – sells all French and German stocks – there’s going to be a war.

The Story of The Japanned Box (January 1899)

The old crumbling Thorpe Place in the Malverns in the heart of England, where the narrator goes as tutor to the children of old weathered Sir John Bollamore. He was a hellraiser in his youth but reformed by his sweet wife who died. But the narrator hears a woman’s voice coming from his rooms, and so do the servants. He thinks Sir John a reprobate and hypocrite until he falls asleep in an alcove of the room (ah, that old ruse, like the narrator of The Ring of Thoth) and accidentally sees Sir John open and play a phonograph of his dying wife’s voice.

The Story of The Jew’s Breastplate (February 1899)

Preposterous chauvinist tosh in which a young curator is given responsibility for a museum of antiquities only to receive an anonymous letter warning that it might be burgled. Which it duly is the the urim and thurim breastplate of the ancient Hebrews tampered with. The narrator lies in wait with the young curator and they are astonished to discover it is the eminent archaeologist and former curator, Professor Andreas, who is damaging the breastplate. Why? Because his daughter is in love with a cad who had already stolen the jewels and the former curator is ham-fistedly tying to replace them in order to prevent a ‘scandal’, shame and disgrace.

The Story of B.24 (March 1899)

Cast entirely as a written submission to a court of appeal, it is from a burglar who is tempted to burgle the grand house of Lord Mannering but discovers Lady Mannering waiting to aid and abet him so furious is her hatred of her husband and she then proceeds to stab him to death and blame the burglar.

A True Story of the Tragedy of Flowery Land (March 1899)

Grim unrelenting account of the mutiny of rebellious Malays aboard a British barque, they murder the captain and captain’s brother and first mate and Chinaman, pilot the ship to South America, scuttle it and go ashore. Nonetheless they are betrayed and end up standing in a London court and are hanged.

The Story of the Latin Tutor aka The Usher of Lea House School (April 1899)

The narrator gets a job at a dodgy sounding school in Hampstead and is astonished at the rudeness with which the only other master treats the Head. Things come to a head when he hears them fighting and intrudes, only to discover the repellent master is the Head’s son!

The Story of The Brown Hand (May 1899)

After a successful career in India a surgeon retires to England where he is haunted by the ghost of an Indian whose hand he promised to keep safe after having to amputate it. the hand was lost in a fire. the ghostly Indian searches for it every night. The protagonist goes to a surgeon in the East End and obtains a hand recently amputated from an Indian sailor and returns with it to the country house where the ghostly Indian finds it, politely bows to the surgeon, and departs for ever. Which is why the protagonist is made the surgeon’s heir.

The Croxley Master (October to December 1899)

A long and very persuasive account of a poor but educated doctor’s assistant, starved of funds, who is persuaded to take part in a boxing match against the local champion. If the plot is contrived the writing conveys real atmosphere. Depiction of the mining community reminds me of DH Lawrence whose first novel, The White Peacock, was published only 12 years later.

‘Work was struck at one o’clock at the coal-pits and the iron-works, and the fight was arranged for three. From the Croxley Furnaces, from Wilson’s Coal-pits, from the Heartsease Mine, from the Dodd Mills, from the Leverworth Smelters the workmen came trooping, each with his fox-terrier or his lurcher at his heels. Warped with labour and twisted by toil, bent double by week-long work in the cramped coal galleries or half-blinded with years spent in front of white-hot fluid metal, these men still gilded their harsh and hopeless lives by their devotion to sport. It was their one relief, the only thing which could distract their minds from sordid surroundings, and give them an interest beyond the blackened circle which enclosed them. Literature, art, science, all these things were beyond their horizon; but the race, the football match, the cricket, the fight, these were things which they could understand, which they could speculate upon in advance and comment upon afterwards. Sometimes brutal, sometimes grotesque, the love of sport is still one of the great agencies which make for the happiness of our people. It lies very deeply in the springs of our nature, and when it has been educated out, a higher, more refined nature may be left, but it will not be of that robust British type which has left its mark so deeply on the world. Every one of these raddled workers, slouching with his dog at his heels to see something of the fight, was a true unit of his race.’

The 1900s

The Debut of Bimbashi Joyce (January 1900)

Sent out to command one of the front line garrisons in south Egypt against incursions by the Mahdists, young Joyce is taken in by a wandering Arab who they nearly torture to get him to speak and turns out to be the senior head of intelligence in disguise. They all joke about it over a fine meal then cigars. No irony when Doyle writes that, in riposte to the successes of fanatical Islam, ‘ten years of silent work in Cairo, and then all was ready, and it was time for civilisation to take a trip south once more, travelling as her wont is in an armoured train.’

Playing with Fire (March 1900)

Account of a séance including an artist who had been painting a unicorn. At the height of the séance the ectoplasm forms a unicorn which goes rampaging through the house!

An Impression of the Regency (August 1900)

A brief powerful vignette of the Prince Regent and his gross companions larking about when the mad George III bursts in, lowing like an animal, to appal them all.

The Leather Funnel (1902)

The narrator visits a friend in Paris who suggests objects which have witnessed powerful scenes affect our dreams. As an experiment the narrator sleeps with a battered leather funnel by his bed and has a nightmare of a woman being tried and then beginning a course of water torture. Screaming himself awake, his friend shows the historical documents proving he has witnessed the torture of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, a real historical woman, a poisoner and murder!

There’s a hiatus in my list of Conan Doyle’s short stories between 1902 and 1908, as this is a period when he wrote and published six Brigadier Gerard stories as well as 13 Holmes stories (which I’ve reviewed elsewhere) and two novels, Waterloo and Sir Nigel. Then:

The Pot of Caviare (1908)

Set during the Boxer Rebellion (overlapped with the Boer War 1899 to 1901) in the absurd little legation of Ichau where a handful of white men and woman hold out against the encroaching fanatics. The American professor tells the German colonel about the last time he survived a siege because he was a doctor but he was forced to witness rape and torture. Never again. They both realise the relief column is delayed three days. Almost certainly they will be overrun. The colonel bids the professor put arsenic in the prized caviar. The others think it is a celebration dinner. They all eat it and die but, in is dying moments the professor hears the shots of the relief column which does arrive to save them!

The Silver Mirror (August 1908)

Classic diary format. A boring accountant is set a demanding task of combing 20 big ledgers to find evidence against a forger but, as the work intensifies he begins to feel he is going mad because he starts to see visions in the big old mirror he keeps on his side table. Each night the same scene emerges from a mist, assuming steadily clearer shape and showing some atrocity from remote history…

The Home-Coming (December 1909)

The first of the historical stories. 528 AD in Constantinople. 10 year old Leon is the daughter of the Empress Theodora, her love child who she abandoned at a monastery before rising to become consort to the great Emperor Justinian. When the old Abbot brings Leon to Constantinople the wicked eunuch sees his chance to control the Empress, and she must make a cruel choice…

The Lord of Falconbridge (August 1909)

1818. Tom Cribb has retired from prize fighting to become a publican but his son is in the fancy. A strange woman enters and offers the son £50 to train for a fight. Despite misgivings Tom Spring trains, then is instructed by the woman to catch a stagecoach to Tonbridge where he is taken to a remote country house. Here walks the brutish husband of the mystery woman and it is he she wishes Tom to fight, and so they fight, Tom eventually overcoming the brute. He is abandoned by the fair lady but rescued by the landlord of the pub he change coaches in, a devoted fan of the fancy.

The 1910s

The Terror of Blue John Gap (August 1910)

Dr John Hardcastle is on a rest cure in Derbyshire, and finds out the hard way that local lore about a monster inhabiting a deep ancient cavern is in fact true.

In 1911 Conan Doyle published a collection bringing together a number of historical tales, The Last Galley: Impressions and Tales. His interest in history is stimulating, even if he used the different settings for more or less the same tales of derring-do and romance. In the preface he wrote:

It has seemed to me that there is a region between actual story and actual history which has never been adequately exploited. I could imagine, for example, a work dealing with some great historical epoch, and finding its interest not in the happenings to particular individuals, their adventures and their loves, but in the fascination of the actual facts of history themselves. These facts might be coloured with the glamour which the writer of fiction can give, and fictitious characters and conversations might illustrate them; but none the less the actual drama of history and not the drama of invention should claim the attention of the reader. I have been tempted sometimes to try the effect upon a larger scale; but meanwhile these short sketches, portraying various crises in the story of the human race, are to be judged as experiments in that direction.

Fine words, but what they mean in practice is Doyle selects tableaux from the past which form an improving picture, in which noble sentiments may be vapoured forth. His ‘history’ stories are the equivalent of the luxuriously smug, hyper-realistic paintings of the late Victorian Olympians such as Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir Frederick Leighton and Albert Moore. They are pre-Modern in that there is no threat to the narrator’s psyche, to his sturdy Edwardian values. No matter how gruesome or bloody the events described, they are profoundly unthreatening. This is their main selling point and appeal, as it is of the Holmes stories.

The link with contemporary art is also pointed by the way the stories are, mostly, illustrated by fine late-Victorian and Edwardian illustrators who depict a world of tall, manly men and lovely chaste Victorian women, threatened by stunted foreign or working class villains.

The Last Galley (November 1910)

146 BC. Boy scout tableau of the final Phoenician galley returning to Carthage after the fleet has been destroyed by Rome. Watched by Carthaginians from their terrace, one of them has met a strange prophetess in the Land of Tin (Cornwall) who predicted that the Romans would succeed Carthage as Queen of the Sea but that people form her own island would, in time, become rulers of a great empire. It ends with the Romans destroying and sowing salt into the ruins of Carthage, and with the same message as Kipling’s Islanders:

And they understood too late that it is the law of heaven that the world is given to the hardy and to the self-denying, whilst he who would escape the duties of manhood will soon be stripped of the pride, the wealth, and the power, which are the prizes which manhood brings.

Through the Mists I: The Coming of the Huns (November 1910)

Unusually detailed impression of the Christian heresies of the mid-fourth century, the Donatists, Arians and Trinitarians, is the backdrop to a Greek leaving his city to go be a hermit in the mountains beyond the river Dniester where, one day, he witnesses the arrival of the Huns. He kills a Hun who enters his cave then rides in a frenzy to the nearest Roman outpost to warn them.

Through the Mists II: The First Cargo (1910)

A Roman who’s remained behind in Britain writes to one who’s returned to Italy to describe his first meeting with the Saxons who British king Vortigern has invited to come and defend them. There is strong racial stereotyping as the narrator contrasts the strong, practical, democratic Saxons with the weak-minded, impetuous, unwarlike Britons (who will go on to become the Welsh and Cornish).

The Last of the Legions (December 1910)

The last Roman governor receives the order to leave (410) and then, ironically receives a deputation of Britons calling for independence. When they learn that they suddenly are going to become independent the beg the Romans to stay but it is too late. A parable on the various movements demanding independence from the British empire i.e. Ireland, India.

Through the Mists III: The Red Star (January 1911)

630 in Constantinople, three successful merchants reminisce, and one remembers being on a long caravan trail through Arabia when they meet the caravan of Mohammed and his followers and how he stays up all night listening to the charismatic leader. Interesting insight into how 1911 saw the Prophet.

The Contest (March 1911)

A comic story of Nero who set sail to Greece with an army of supporters to compete in singing competitions and is bested by a peasant goatherd who, however, is hustled off by his friends. A canny courtier tells Nero it was none other than the great god Pan in disguise which pleases the megalomaniac.

An Iconoclast (March 1911)

The year 92 in the reign of the Emperor Domitian in Rome. Senator Emilius Flaccus returns from boozing with the emperor to find his priceless statue has been damaged by a fanatical Christian. When the emperor arrives Flaccus decides to show him mercy and release Datus from his chains if he will only pray to the statue. But once again he attacks it, to the emperor’s amusement.

The Blighting of Sharkey (April 1911)

1720. Return to the antihero wicked pirate Jack Sharkey from the three Tales of the High Seas from 1897. The crew are mutinying when a rich merchantman is seen and boarded. They kill all the passengers except a fine Spanish maiden but back in Sharkey’s cabin she strokes them all with her leprous hand. This clinches the crew’s decision to mutiny and they set Sharkey and the girl adrift in an open boat.

Through the Veil (April 1911)

A decent married Scottish man and wife are shown round he recent excavations of a Roman fort and later that night they both dream powerfully that they are participants in the storming of the fort by Picts some 1800 years previously.

Giant Maximin (July 1911)

210 AD. The fate of the eight-foot giant Theckla told in three scenes: who sees the Roman Army marching by and runs down to join it, becoming the bodyguard of the Emperor; 25 years later who is there when the Army mutinies against the emperor Alexander and is unexpectedly proclaimed emperor himself; who fails to cultivate Rome and the politicians and loses the love of the army as it starves, and so is killed by the very legionaries who raised him to the purple.

One Crowded Hour (A Pirate Of The Land) (August 1911)

A light dash of social history. On the Eastbourne-Tunbridge road one Sunday night a masked man holds up three cars, taking the slim pickings of a don’t-you-know posh young chap, of two screechy actresses, and then he assaults a rich man in a big Daimler beating him insensible before stealing everything of value. Next morning the dashed young chap walks into the morning room of Sir Henry Hailworthy, of Walcot Old Place, Deputy-Lieutenant of the county and accuses him of being the highway robber. He admits it. The first two robberies were to disguise the third one, of a loathsome City spiv who diddled him out of his savings. The dashed young chap shakes his hand and agrees to forget about it. The title refers to the poem and the usually staid, respectable Deputy Lord Lieutenant and JP quotes it to express his excitement at pretending to be a highway robber.

Most of 1912 was taken up with the serialisation in the Strand of the great adventure novel, The Lost World.

The Fall of Lord Barrymore (December 1912)

Very entertaining story about London man about town Sir Charles Tregellis during the Regency. His sophisticated nephew appears and promises to do down his rival about town, the thuggish Lord Barrymore. And proceeds to do it. Told with great wit and gusto!

The spring of 1913 was taken up with the serialisation of the novella The Poison Belt.

How It Happened (September 1913)

Haunting short account of a man who is in an early car crash, recalling the lead-up to it and then, in the final sentences, realising he is dead!

Borrowed Scenes (September 1913)

A peculiar squib which seems to be satirising the style and the character of the contemporary author George Borrow.

The Horror of the Heights (November 1913)

Brilliantly gripping account of Captain Joyce-Armstrong, an airman who flies higher than any man before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters.

Danger! being the Log of Captain Sirius (July 1914)

A strange and disturbing story. The Captain Sirius works for a ‘small country’ which offends Britain which issues an ultimatum. He persuades his king to let him take his eight submarines and destroy British merchant navy, thus starving her. Predicts German tactics in both World Wars – but why was it published within days of the Great War breaking out?

As the Great War began, for September 1914 to May 1915, Conan Doyle was serialising the last of the four Sherlock Holmes novellas, the Valley of Fear.

The Prisoner’s Defence (January 1916)

An intense melodrama set in the present day, during the War. An officer is charged with murdering a beautiful woman but refuses to defend himself. Only a month later does he read out a prepared statement. He was in love with tall French blonde. On leave she pushed him so hard, he was indiscreet and mentioned an Allied offensive. Later he discovers she has written it all up and is posting it to her control: she is a German spy! They lock her in a room and he goes to alert the cops but on his return she tears past him on her motorbike (!). He shoots his revolver and kills her. The prisoner’s defence rests.

In 1917 Doyle published only one story, the Holmes spy tale His Last Bow.

Three of Them (April 1918)

After 3 and a half years of war, Conan Doyle could only bring himself to write five ‘stories’ which are really just chats between a kindly middle aged dad and his three adorable middle class children, Laddie, Dimples and Baby. If you were in a cynical mood the tweeness of these little sketches might make you puke. They certainly capture a fantasy of professional upper middle class living. The titles sum them up. I. A Chat About Children, Snakes and Zebus (April). II. About cricket (April) III. Speculations [about God and the Devil] (July). IV. The Leatherskin Tribe (August). V. About Naughtiness and Frogs and Historical Pictures (December).

‘Oh, Daddy, come and talk about cricket!’ Daddy was pulled on the side of the bed, and the white figure dived between the sheets. ‘Yes; tell us about cwicket!’ came a cooing voice from the corner. Dimples was sitting up in his cot.

A Point of View (December 1918)

An odd short squib wherein an American journalist, staying at an English country house, writes a piece wondering why any self-respecting man would be a servant. At a later stay the valet this was based on takes exception and makes it very plain that servants have self-respect and deserve respect: ‘I wish you would make them understand that an English servant can give good and proper service and yet that he’s a human bein’ after all.’

The 1920s

The Bully of Brocas Court (November 1921)

1878. Bareknuckle fighting has been outlawed but special rings and gloves not come in. Sir Fred Milburn is despatched to London to find someone who can stand up to Farrier-Sergeant Burton. He chooses the London fighter Alf Stevens. They are returning to Luton when their coach is stopped by an oddly-dressed pair of men in a dark dell who challenge them to a fight. So they fight and it’s honours even when they hear a howling from the woods and clear off. Later, at an inn, the landlord says they were fighting the ghosts of Tom Hickman and Joe Rowe, both killed in a carriage accident in the 1820s.

The Nightmare Room (December 1921)

A room is all Victorian sumptuous rugs and curtains at one end, completely bare at the other, with a divan upon which a beautiful but immoral woman is lounging. In bursts her husband declaring he knows about her affair with young Douglas; she must choose one of them. In bursts Douglas and the husband produces poison: Let’s play cards for her, old man. All written in the highest pitch of melodrama with everyone gasping or turning white. In the final line the director steps forward and shouts, Cut! It was all a scene from a movie 🙂

The Lift (June 1922)

Flight-Commander Stangate with his sweetheart has a premonition of evil. They ascend the big funfair lift with a motley crew of civilians. It jams 500 feet up. The wild-eyed bearded engineer reveals, from the girders, that he has arranged for it to plummet to their deaths as a sign to this wicked generation. At the last minute Stangate kicks down the wooden walls of the lift and helps the passengers onto the girders just as the madmen jumps into it and the cable snaps!

The Centurion (October 1922)

[Being the fragment of a letter from Sulpicius Balbus, Legate of the Tenth Legion, to his uncle, Lucius Piso, in his villa near Baiæ, dated The Kalends of the month of Augustus in the year 824 of Rome.] wherein he witnesses the siege and fall of Jerusalem, 70AD, and then talks to a centurion who was there when Jesus was crucified.

A Point of Contact (October 1922)

Tyre. 1100BC. In the noble stereotypes to which we are accustomed, Doyle paints a tableau, the moment when King David of the Israelites, come to buy building material for Jerusalem, meets Odysseus, refitting his ship before sailing on to Troy.

One of these men was clearly by his face and demeanour a great chieftain. His strongly-marked features were those of a man who had led an adventurous life, and were suggestive of every virile quality from brave resolve to desperate execution. His broad, high brow and contemplative eyes showed that he was a man of wisdom as well as of valour.

Billy Bones (December 1922)

One more in the twee three of Them series about Daddy and his three adorable children, Laddie, Dimples and Baby. Written as practical advice to daddies about how to create a Treasure Hunt.

The years 1923 to 1928 were taken up with a reduced turnover of 11 Sherlock Holmes stories and a couple of Professor Challenger novellas.

Spedegue’s Dropper (October 1928)

The Death Voyage (September 1929)

A long and detailed counterfactual in which Doyle envisions the Kaiser not abdicating but travelling to Kiel to inspire his Navy to set out for a final epic battle against the joint British and American fleets. What a strange story. And, like so many Great War fictions, it had to wait 11 years to be born.

The Last Resource (August 1930)

Kid Wilson is an American gangster in hiding in Soho. Late one night he tells his English crook hosts about an American town whose citizens form a committee, tell the chief of police to go away for a few days, round up all the crooks in town and machine gun them to death in a dance hall. It was only a dream 🙂 Interesting though, that that’s the kind of solution which people invoked to the out-of-control gangster violence of the Prohibition era.

The End of Devil Hawker (August 1930)

Back to the Regency period and another boxing story.

It was in these very rooms of Cribb that this little sketch of those days opens, where, as on a marionette stage, I would try to show you what manner of place it was and what manner of people walked London in those full-blooded, brutal and virile old days.

The Parish Magazine (1930)

Very funny light-hearted story set in the present day of a printer who is persuaded to publish an addendum to the parish magazine. Only when he receives letters from outraged local worthies and their lawyers does he actually read it and realise it is full of scandalous allegations and innuendoes about half the parish. After a sleepless night he is called to a mysterious meeting which turns out to be of the ‘Rotherheath Society of Bright Young People’ who have, in fact, not sent it out, fabricated the outraged letters to him, and did it all as a practical joke.

It is very fitting that his last published story should be one which continued to show the jovial good-humour which makes Conan Doyle such a good companion.


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