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Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield – 3

‘I feel as though I were living in a world of strange beings—do you?’
(Edna speaking for all of us, in ‘Something Childish but Very Natural’)

And years passed. Perhaps the war is long since over—there is no village outside at all—the streets are quiet under the grass. I have an idea this is the sort of thing one will do on the very last day of all—sit in an empty café and listen to a clock ticking until—.
(Vision of the end)

This is the third of three blog posts dealing with the Oxford University Press volume, ‘Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield’. In posts one and two I summarised the stories (stories 1 to 15 in post one, 16 to 33 in post 2). In this third blog post I look at some themes and images which recur throughout the stories.

Skies

Mansfield likes skies. No matter where they’re set (New Zealand, London, Paris), and whether she’s among the posh upper classes or farm hands or the shabby genteel, all her stories include some reference to, some description of, the sky. After a while I looked out for the sky description in each story and came to wonder why they were so ubiquitous. Maybe Mansfield was always looking up to the sky and wishing to escape the dreary human scene. Or it’s a symbol of wishing to escape the fragility of her increasingly ill body into something eternal and transcendent.

All that day the heat was terrible. The wind blew close to the ground; it rooted among the tussock grass, slithered along the road, so that the white pumice dust swirled in our faces, settled and sifted over us and was like a dry-skin itching for growth on our bodies… Hundreds of larks shrilled; the sky was slate colour, and the sound of the larks reminded me of slate pencils scraping over its surface.

It was half-past two in the afternoon. The sun hung in the faded blue sky like a burning mirror, and away beyond the paddocks the blue mountains quivered and leapt like sea.
(Millie)

Although it was so brilliantly fine – the blue sky powdered with gold and great spots of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins Publiques – Miss Brill was glad that she had decided on her fur. The air was motionless, but when you opened your mouth there was just a faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip, and now and again a leaf came drifting–from nowhere, from the sky…
(Miss Brill)

The train had flung behind the roofs and chimneys. They were swinging into the country, past little black woods and fading fields and pools of water shining under an apricot evening sky.

Behind the rotunda the slender trees with yellow leaves down drooping, and through them just a line of sea, and beyond the blue sky with gold-veined clouds.
(Miss Brill)

Out of the smudgy little window you could see an immense expanse of sad-looking sky, and whenever there were clouds they looked very worn, old clouds, frayed at the edges, with holes in them, or dark stains like tea.
(Ma Parker)

It had been raining all the morning, late summer rain, warm, heavy, quick, and now the sky was clear, except for a long tail of little clouds, like duckings, sailing over the forest.
(Mr and Mrs Dove)

When he looked up again there were fields, and beasts standing for shelter under the dark trees. A wide river, with naked children splashing in the shallows, glided into sight and was gone again. The sky shone pale, and one bird drifted high like a dark fleck in a jewel.
(Marriage à la Mode)

Posh people

Katherine was born into a socially prominent, upper-middle class New Zealand family. Distant relatives included novelists and painters. She was sent to an elite school. All this explains the confidently upper middle-class tone, settings and characters of many of her stories.

‘My word, Laura, you do look stunning!’ said Laurie. ‘What an absolutely topping hat!’
(The Garden Party)

But at the same time, this privileged world is subject to all kinds of underminings, velleities and subtleties. Although the incidents described appear, on the face of it, very straightforward, they are always subtly undermined by, inflected by… by what exactly? By the hidden depths of life, of sensibility, of meanings which are sometimes only hinted at or, in some of the most delirious stories, often don’t make sense.

Working class people

But in other stories she just as confidently captures the speech rhythms of the servant class. Something that interested me was how a servant in 1890s New Zealand (in, say, ‘Prelude’) sounds just like a servant sounds in Virginia Woolf 30 years later, or in Noel Coward’s plays which include working class characters (like Cavalcade or This Happy Breed). Did the working classes all across the white Empire have the same stock phraseology and rhythm? Did they all sound the same?

Here’s Mansfield impersonating the voice of Alice the serving girl. I’ve highlighted in bold the working class locutions.

Oh, Alice was wild. She wasn’t one to mind being told, but there was something in the way Miss Beryl had of speaking to her that she couldn’t stand. Oh, that she couldn’t. It made her curl up inside, as you might say, and she fair trembled.

Is this how the proles actually spoke? Or how they speak in books i.e. was it a convention? I suspect it is the phraseology and tone they used because it’s the same in all the talkies from the 1930s and ’40s. Unless that, also, is a convention?

Short sentences

Tackling Mansfield’s prose style is too massive a task for me. I’ll just register the importance of short sentences in (some of) her stories. On the whole her sentences are not long and incantatory like Conrad or compiled into long, repetitive paragraphs like Lawrence. Quite the opposite: they are mostly to-the-point and practical, sometimes deliberately curt.

An awkward little silence fell. Mrs Sheridan fidgeted with her cup.

Should she go back even now? No, too late. This was the house. It must be.

Not all the sentences are this short, of course. But it’s often these short sentences which anchor the texts. They are like rivets. Bolts. Nailing the fleeting perceptions down like canvas in a wind.

Like painting

Often Mansfield’s prose consists of individual lines which are like individual brushstrokes, like elements of a painting, and of a very post-impressionist painting at that. She takes realistic subjects but does them with wild colouring, as if by the German Expressionists or the French Fauves.

Here is just one paragraph from ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, which I’ve split up into its separate sentences so you can see how distinct and freestanding each sentence is, each one like a broad vivid brushstroke.

Through an open door I can see a kitchen, and the cook in a white coat breaking eggs into a bowl and tossing the shells into a corner.

The blue and red coats of the men who are eating hang upon the walls. Their short swords and belts are piled upon chairs.

Heavens! what a noise. The sunny air seemed all broken up and trembling with it.

A little boy, very pale, table to table, taking the orders, and poured me out a glass of purple coffee.

Ssssb, came from the eggs. They were in a pan.

The woman rushed from behind the counter and began to help the boy. Toute de suite, tout’ suite! she chirruped to the loud customers.

There came a clatter of plates and poppop of corks being drawn.

The purple coffee feels very Fauve, as do the blue and red and white coats. They remind me of the big broad vivid brushstrokes of the extravagantly anti-realist German Expressionists.

Self-Portrait with a Model by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1907)

There are many, many, many other descriptions where you notice the presence of colour. They’re generally bright primary colours, although this is partly a function of the limitation of the English language. English has hundreds of words or phrases for colours, but most writers use only a handful, only ten or so. Which is a bit boring. But Mansfield consistently embeds these ten or so colours in wonderfully vivid phraseology.

There was a lovely pink light over everything. He saw it glowing in the river, and the people walking towards him had pink faces and pink hands.

Sound effects

Note, also, in the extract I broke up into individual sentences, Mansfield’s sensitivity to sounds: Ssssb go the eggs, poppop go the corks. And the accumulated noise is so loud that it makes the air break up and tremble with it. So as well as colour, in all her stories Mansfield is very alert to sounds and noises.

The clock ticked to a soothing lilt, C’est ca, c’est ca. In the kitchen the waiting-boy was washing up. I heard the ghostly chatter of the dishes.

And the point of the following paragraph is the way it leads up to the onomatopoeic description of the train sound at the end.

Outside, stars shone between wispy clouds, and the moon fluttered like a candle flame over a pointed spire. The shadows of the dark plume-like trees waved on the white houses. Not a soul to be seen. No sound to be heard but the Hsh! Hsh! of a far-away train, like a big beast shuffling in its sleep.
(An Indiscreet Journey)

Same happens in this paragraph:

It had been nice in the Ladies’ Cabin. The stewardess was so kind and changed her money for her and tucked up her feet. She lay on one of the hard pink-sprigged couches and watched the other passengers, friendly and natural, pinning their hats to the bolsters, taking off their boots and skirts, opening dressing-cases and arranging mysterious rustling little packages, tying their heads up in veils before lying down. Thud, thud, thud, went the steady screw of the steamer.
(The Little Governess)

Transcribing sounds

She doesn’t just describe sounds but goes to some lengths to enact them, to directly transcribe them into language. As in the first of these sentences in ‘The Man without a Temperament’:

‘Hoo-e-zip-zoo-oo!’ sounded the lift. The iron cage clanged open. Light dragging steps sounded across the hall, coming towards him…

Or:

Over a bed of scarlet waxen flowers some big black insects ‘zoom-zoomed‘.

And as the man without a temperament comes across some old Italian women in his walk:

At a fountain ahead of him two old hags were beating linen. As he passed them they squatted back on their haunches, stared, and then their ‘A-hak-kak-kak!’ with the slap, slap, of the stone on the linen sounded after him.

And the sound of the landscape itself:

‘Ah-Aah!’ sounded the sleepy sea. And from the bush there came the sound of little streams flowing, quickly, lightly, slipping between the smooth stones, gushing into ferny basins and out again; and there was the splashing of big drops on large leaves, and something else–what was it?–a faint stirring and shaking, the snapping of a twig and then such silence that it seemed some one was listening.

For the duration of reading one of her stories, you become as sensitised to light, colour and sound as she evidently was, and it’s marvellous.

Pings

Mansfield likes the word ‘ping’. In ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’ the protagonist goes for a walk after the rain.

It had been raining all the morning, late summer rain, warm, heavy, quick, and now the sky was clear, except for a long tail of little clouds, like ducklings, sailing over the forest. There was just enough wind to shake the last drops off the trees; one warm star splashed on his hand. Ping!

In ‘Psychology’, the tense encounter between the passionate friends who are trying to ignore their physical attraction is expressed in pregnant silences during which inanimate objects make ironic noises, including the tell-tale ping:

The clock struck six merry little pings and the fire made a soft flutter.

Listen to these sounds in ‘The Daughters of the Colonel’:

The blinds were down, a cloth hung over the mirror, a sheet hid the bed; a huge fan of white paper filled the fireplace. Constantia timidly put out her hand; she almost expected a snowflake to fall. Josephine felt a queer tingling in her nose, as if her nose was freezing. Then a cab klop-klopped over the cobbles below, and the quiet seemed to shake into little pieces.

A perfect fountain of bubbling notes shook from the barrel-organ, round, bright notes, carelessly scattered.

Some little sparrows, young sparrows they sounded, chirped on the window-ledge. Yeep–eyeep–yeep. But Josephine felt they were not sparrows, not on the window-ledge. It was inside her, that queer little crying noise. Yeep–eyeep–yeep. Ah, what was it crying, so weak and forlorn?

In ‘An Indiscreet Journey’:

I ran down the echoing stairs—strange they sounded, like a piano flicked by a sleepy housemaid.

In ‘Prelude’:

She rolled herself up into a round but she did not go to sleep. From all over the house came the sound of steps. The house itself creaked and popped. Loud whispering voices came from downstairs. Once she heard Aunt Beryl’s rush of high laughter, and once she heard a loud trumpeting from Burnell blowing his nose.

And:

A blow-fly buzzed, a fan of whitey steam came out of the kettle, and the lid kept up a rattling jig as the water bubbled. The clock ticked in the warm air, slow and deliberate, like the click of an old woman’s knitting needle, and sometimes–for no reason at all, for there wasn’t any breeze–the blind swung out and back, tapping the window.

Mansfield’s world is alive with wonderful, subtle sounds.

Silence

Sound is often contrasted with absolute silence, to the intensification of both:

In waves, in clouds, in big round whirls the dust comes stinging, and with it little bits of straw and chaff and manure. There is a loud roaring sound from the trees in the gardens, and standing at the bottom of the road outside Mr. Bullen’s gate she can hear the sea sob: “Ah! . . . Ah! . . . Ah-h!” But Mr. Bullen’s drawing-room is as quiet as a cave.
(The Wind Blows)

Something similar in ‘At the Bay’:

Ah-Aah! sounded the sleepy sea. And from the bush there came the sound of little streams flowing, quickly, lightly, slipping between the smooth stones, gushing into ferny basins and out again; and there was the splashing of big drops on large leaves, and something else–what was it?–a faint stirring and shaking, the snapping of a twig and then such silence that it seemed some one was listening.

Voices

And human voices, of course, are included in this world of sounds, of strange sounds, of common sounds which have become strange, alien and intensified:

Her voice was quite calm, but it was not her voice any more. It was like the voice you might imagine coming out of a tiny, cold sea-shell swept high and dry at last by the salt tide…
(Je ne parle pas francais)

Their laughing voices charged with excitement beat against the glassed-in verandah like birds, and a strange saltish smell came from the basket.
(The Man without a Temperament)

Or the other, non-verbal sounds that people make:

Wheeling, tumbling, swooping, the laughter of the Honeymoon Couple dashed against the glass of the verandah.
(The Man without a Temperament)

At last [Fenella] was inside [her bedclothes], and while she lay there panting, there sounded from above a long, soft whispering, as though some one was gently, gently rustling among tissue paper to find something. It was grandma saying her prayers…
(The Voyage)

Smells

Once you become aware of it, you realise that all the senses are intensified in Mansfield’s stories. Along with vividly coloured sights and dramatic sounds go strongly flavoured smells.

From the corner by the gate there came the smell of swedes, a great stack of them, wet, rank coloured.

Frau Brechenmacher’s wedding reeks of beer. Cafés smell of cooked cabbage. Rooms are musty. Flowers have powerful aromas. Women’s hair smells of shampoo. Smell is maybe the most fragile sense and the one most overlooked in fiction but Mansfield is as alert to smells, scents and aromas as she is to the world of sounds.

She was softer than a bed and she had a nice smell—a smell that made you bury your head and breathe and breathe it.
(Pearl Button)

The café slowly filled. It grew very warm. Blue smoke mounted from the tables and hung about the haymaker’s hat in misty wreaths. There was a suffocating smell of onion soup and boots and damp cloth.
(An Indiscreet Journey)

I leaned over the table smelling the violets, until the little corporal’s hand closed over mine.
(An Indiscreet Journey)

But Kezia edged up to the storeman. He towered beside her big as a giant and he smelled of nuts and new wooden boxes.
(Prelude)

The drawing-room was full of sweet smelling, silky, rustling ladies and men in black with funny tails on their coats—like beetles.
(Sun and Moon)

How strong the jonquils smelled in the warm room.
(Bliss)

Her room, a Bloomsbury top-floor back, smelled of soot and face powder and the paper of fried potatoes she brought in for supper the night before.
(Picture)

It had been raining—the first real spring rain of the year had fallen—a bright spangle hung on everything, and the air smelled of buds and moist earth.
(Feuille d’Album)

He leaned towards her, and she smelled the warm, stinging scent of the orange peel.
(Dill Pickle)

He began to imagine a series of enchanting scenes which ended with his latest, most charming pupil putting her bare, scented arms round his neck, and covering him with her long, perfumed hair.
(Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day)

God isn’t the ‘stinging scent’ of the orange peel brilliant? She had a Shakespearian ability for amazing perceptions expressed in astonishingly vivid phrases.

Personifications

Mansfield is restrained in her use of them but many of the stories have at least one telling instance of personification, when an object is given the quality of a person or being.

A shout from the card-players made him turn sharply, and crash! over went the bottle, spilling on the table, the floor—smash! to tinkling atoms. An amazed silence. Through it the drip-drip of the wine from the table onto the floor. It looked very strange dropping so slowly, as though the table were crying.
(An Indiscreet Journey)

She stared at Miss Moss, and the dirty dark red rose under the brim of her hat looked, somehow, as though it shared the blow with her, and was crushed, too.
(Pictures)

There was the great blind bed, with his coat flung across it like some headless man saying his prayers.

The train seemed glad to have left the station. With a long leap it sprang into the dark.
(The Little Governess)

The train began to slow down. The engine gave a long shrill whistle. They were coming to a town. Taller houses, pink and yellow, glided by, fast asleep behind their green eyelids, and guarded by the poplar trees that quivered in the blue air as if on tiptoes, listening.
(The Little Governess)

They sat outside the house in long chairs under coloured parasols. Only Bobby Kane lay on the turf at Isabel’s feet. It was dull, stifling; the day drooped like a flag.

‘Cyril says his father is still very fond of meringues, father dear.’
‘Eh?’ said Grandfather Pinner, curving his hand like a purple meringue-shell over one ear.

Pat the handy-man sprawled in his little room behind the kitchen. His sponge-bag, coat and trousers hung from the door-peg like a hanged man.

A little less dramatically:

Here and there on a rounded wood-pile, that was like the stalk of a huge black mushroom, there hung a lantern, but it seemed afraid to unfurl its timid, quivering light in all that blackness; it burned softly, as if for itself.

All the world comes alive around her, dancing, smelling, dropping, in vivid colours and a huge variety of subtle sounds.

Brilliant phrases

And then there are just scores and scores of brilliant phrasing you want to wrap up and carry around with you forever.

There was the gardener’s cottage, with the dark ilex-tree beside it. A wet, blue thumb of transparent smoke hung above the chimney. It didn’t look real.

Rain was falling, and with the rain it seemed the dark came too, spinning down like ashes. There was a cold bitter taste in the air, and the new-lighted lamps looked sad. Sad were the lights in the houses opposite. Dimly they burned as if regretting something.

Away we jolted and rattled like three little dice that life had decided to have a fling with.

Mansfield was a very great writer indeed, far greater, in my opinion, than Virginia Woolf whose stream-of-consciousness technique is highly advanced but whose actual phrase-making is often quite boring. Mansfield had an ability to wrap an endless number of brilliantly acute perceptions in staggeringly inventive new phrases, in paragraph after paragraph, that exceeds most of the writers I’ve ever read.

Credit

‘Selected Stories’ by Katherine Mansfield was published by Oxford University Press in 2002. I read the 2008 reissued edition.

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Posted by Simon on January 2, 2026

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This Happy Breed by Noel Coward (1939)

‘There’ll always be wars as long as men are such fools as to want to go to them.’
(Frank, the ex-soldier, in This Happy Breed, Act 1, Scene 1)

‘This Happy Breed’ is a play by Noël Coward. It was written in 1939 but, because of the outbreak of World War II, not staged until 1942. He wrote it at the same time as another of his best works, ‘Blithe Spirit’, also put on hold because of the war. Coward suspended writing for the stage the duration of the war and many critics think that, when he resumed, his writing never regained its charge and brilliancy. So, the argument goes, these two plays, ‘Breed’ and ‘Blithe’, represent the peak of his achievement.

Title

The play’s title is a phrase from John of Gaunt’s famous speech in Act 2, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play ‘Richard II’ where he gives a lyrical description of the England of his youth:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…

But in the play, all this stirring patriotic imagery is just the preliminary to Gaunt going on to lament that this wonderful England had in fact declined into a state of decay and mismanagement under the disastrous king Richard II, who had exiled Gaunt’s son, Henry Bolingbroke. Understandably, patriotic writers like Coward leave that bit out, but anyone who knows the play knows that these fine words are an exaggerated and rose-tinted view of the past of a country which has now fallen into decay and decline. How much of this heavy irony Coward intended to hang over his play is not clear.

Class

‘This Happy Breed’ is one of the few Coward plays not to be set among the affluent middle or upper middle class. Its consciously lower-middle class milieu recalls just a handful of other works in the same setting, namely ‘Cavalcade’ (1931) and the short play ‘Fumed Oak’ from ‘Tonight at 8.30’ (1936). But he does it well, persuasively. His mum kept a boarding house and his family was often on the verge of poverty. He captures the speech rhythms and in particular the clichés of the class. You can almost hear the shrill voices of the women working class characters as you hear them in movies from the period.

  • I’m not going to stand here catching me death.
  • Well, I like that I must say.
  • It doesn’t matter, I’m sure.
  • I don’t know what you mean, I’m sure.
  • A nice way to behave, upsetting me like this.
  • These boots are giving me what for.

And Frank’s recurring catchphrase, ”Op it’, which I’ve been trying out on the wife, daughter and cat, with varying degrees of success.

Synopsis

The play is made of three acts, each containing three scenes, which cover exactly 20 years, starting in June 1919 and ending in June 1939. They are all set in the same location, the front room of the Gibbons family in Clapham.

Act 1

Scene 1: June 1919

It’s seven months after the end of the Great War and the Gibbons family is just moving into 17 Sycamore Road in Clapham, South London (an area Coward knew well, having lived in various houses around the area in his boyhood). They lived for the four war years with her mother, Mrs Flint, in a shabby house in Battersea.

The room is mostly empty of furniture with packing cases scattered about.

Ethel Gibbons manages her grumpy mother, Mrs Flint, while Frank fixes up the curtains. Mrs Flint doesn’t like Sylvia, Frank’s sister, who Ethel asked to move in after her fiancée Bertie was killed in the war. Frank comes down and puts his arms round Ethel, they stare into the garden (which needs work) and she tells him how relieved she is that he returned safe from the war, unlike so many of the men they knew.

They’re just having a connubial kiss when the next door neighbour, Bob Mitchell, startles them by knocking on the window. Turns out he used to be an old army colleague of Frank’s and they reminisce about the war, and then details of each other’s kids.

Scene 2: December 1925

Christmas 1925 and the kids are all about 18. The grown-ups (Frank and Ethel, Ethel’s mother (Mrs Flint) and Frank’s sister, the permanently unwell Sylvia) have gone into the front room leaving the young people to clear the table, being Frank and Ethel’s children (Vi, 20, Queenie, 21, Reg, 18). Reg hero worships his friend Sam who proposes a toast but Queenie interrupts and mocks him which triggers him to an earnest speech against capitalism and injustice, anticipating the great day of the revolution:

SAM: She is only one of the millions who, when the great days comes, will be swept out of existence like so much chaff on the wind…

The others carry on mocking so he and Reg go up to Reg’s room. The young women are tidying up when there’s a knock at the window and it’s Bob Mitchell’s son Billy from next door. The others leave him with Queenie who he’s sweet on. He’s a sailor and he asks whether, in a few years, they might get married. But Queenie tells him she hates suburban life, she wouldn’t make him a good wife and rushes out.

Frank enters and cheers up a disconsolate Billy. The latter asks if Frank will put in a good word for him with Queenie and Frank kindly agrees to. Billy leaves and Ethel comes in. Sylvia’s started singing in the living room and they’re both relieved to avoid her.

Scene 3: May 1926

Set during the ten days of the General Strike of 1926. Frank is up in town breaking the strike as a volunteer bus driver, along with Bob from next door. Meanwhile young Reg had a blazing row with his dad about the strike and stormed out a few days earlier.

We learn all this because Ethel is beside herself with worry for both of them. Her nerves are on edge and she gets into an argument with tearful Aunt Sylvia, herself continually picked on by nasty old Mrs Flint.

In the middle of this bad-tempered bickering Frank and Bob arrive home a bit tipsy from the drinks they’ve had on the way back from their shift. Barely has Ethel tutted over them and told him, no, he can’t have another drink, than the front doorbell goes and it’s Sam and Reg.

Reg has been absent since he ran away a few days earlier and Ethel has been worried sick. His head is bandaged with where someone threw a stone at it. Vi confronts Sam for leading Reg astray and throws him out.

Left alone together, Frank doesn’t tell Reg off as the latter was expecting. He says everyone’s entitled to their own opinions. But he criticises Reg for falling for other people’s slogans and language. Also points out that the idea that society is unfair is very old. And thinks where Reg goes wrong is blaming it on government and systems whereas he, Frank, thinks it runs deeper than that, it has its origins in ‘good old human nature’.

After sharing a drink and having this little man-to-man chat they bid each other goodnight and go off to their separate bedrooms. I wish my Dad had been that understanding or articulate.

Act 2

Scene 1: October 1931

It is Reg’s wedding day. The scene opens with Frank having a nice cup of tea after breakfast while all the women in the house run round in a panic, getting ready, fussing about dresses, their hair etc. The family servant or maid, Edie, tells him about her own son, Ernie, who’s just started shaving and cut himself.

Bob pops round for a chat and a smoke. His wife isn’t doing too well since her miscarriage six years ago. God, the great abortionist.

We learn that Reg has abandoned all his socialism, in fact was critical of the last Labour government, has settled down and got a job. His firebrand pal, Sam, has settled down and married Vi.

In comes Reg and Bob leaves allowing Frank to give some fatherly advice. This is to always put your wife first but then, rather surprisingly, to tell Reg it’s alright to have a bit on the side, just make sure nobody finds out and nothing causes upset to your wife and family. Reg is embarrassed, father and son share a little hug, then Frank exits.

Billy from next door comes in, wearing a naval Petty Officer’s outfit. He’s going to be Reg’s best man. Some banter which establishes Billy as a jolly, flippant fellow, before Reg leaves, bumping into Queenie in her bridesmaid’s dress. Remember he had a pash for her? He still does. In fact it turns out that last night he proposed to her and she said no. He asks if she’s in love with someone else and it comes out that yes she is, and he’s a married man. What a fool.

Billy exists and Frank and Ethel come in, dressed for the wedding. Their conversation with Queenie develops into an argument (but then all conversations in Coward tend towards argument), with Queenie eventually saying she thinks her family are common, and hates their narrow horizons and she wants to make something of herself. ‘I’m sick of this house and everybody in it’ etc. She fears being seen by the girls in the posh shop she works in. She flounces out and Frank and Ethel have a parently post-mortem on where they went wrong bringing her up.

Then Reg and Billy come bounding in and his mother bursts into tears and says it seems only yesterday he was a wee baby boy etc, Billy drags Reg out the front door to get into the fancy wedding car to take them to church. Enter grumpy old Mrs Flint and sickly Aunt Sylvia. Then Vi and Sam enter, Sam looking smart and respectable. In effect, we are reviewing the entire cast of characters at this pivotal moment. Even more pile in until there are about 8 characters all talking and fussing onstage. The most striking one is old Mrs Flint complaining about everything but whose conversation is dominated by her own ailments and stories about lots of other old women falling ill or dying. It all leads up to a blazing clash between Mrs Flint and Sylvia and the classic Coward situation of everyone telling everyone else to shut up. ‘Shut up’ must the commonest phrase in Noel Coward’s lexicon (see below).

At the height of the argument the wedding car arrives and they all have to fix their hats and bustle out the room to go to the wedding.

Scene 2: November 1931, midnight

It’s midnight when Bob and Frank tiptoe through the french windows into the living room. They’re both a bit tiddly having attended their regimental reunions and joke and banter and raid the pantry for snacks (fishpaste on Huntley and Palmer crackers with a dash of AI sauce). Through them we catch up on news of the other characters: Billy the sailor is in Malta; Reg and Phyllis are settling into marriage; Vi and Sam have had a baby, making Frank a grandfather.

They drunkenly discuss whether they’ll see another war: not in their time, thinks Bob, but Frank, the more realistic and cynical character, says Don’t bet on it. What about the threat from Japan? They need to keep the Navy up to scratch.

Then, in trying to prevent him pouring him another bog Scotch, Bob grabs Frank’s arm and makes him drop the bottle with a crash. This brings Ethel downstairs in her curlers. She sees Bob off the premises and is just launching in on Frank when she sees a letter on the mantlepiece. It was left there at the start of the scene when we saw Queenie, dressed and in a coat and carrying a suitcase, put it there. Obviously she’s done a bunk.

Sure enough, when they open it, the letter tells them Queenie has run off with her married man because his wife won’t divorce him. She doesn’t say where. This triggers an argument between Frank and Ethel, both claiming the other one spoiled Queenie. Ethel is the harshest. When Frank says he’ll track her down and bring her back, Ethel says she doesn’t want Queenie back. She’ll never forgive her till her dying day. Frank is taken aback at her vehemence.

Scene 3: May 1932

Six months later. Mrs Flint and Sylvia aren’t arguing so much. Mrs F credits it to the new job Sylvia’s got at the library, thanks to a Mrs Wilmot. The regular hours and company have done her good. Frank gets cross with Sylvia for bringing a spray of may into the house and putting it in a vase: bad luck. When he exits, Sylvia remarks that he’s been more short-tempered since Queenie ran away.

They’re in the middle of more bickering and low-level resentments when the front doorbell rings, Vi comes running in with the appalling news that Reg and Phyll have been in a car accident and are both dead. God, how brutal.

Act 3

Scene 1: December 1936

The play really asserts its continuity with ‘Cavalcade’. That play followed a family through major historical incidents from 1900 to 1930. This one has been more domestic but still features contemporary historical events. We’ve had the 1926 General Strike and this scene focuses on the ex-king Edward VIII’s abdication broadcast on the radio. (He abdicated because the Establishment wouldn’t allow him to be king and marry his true love, Mrs Wallis Simpson, who was divorced from her first husband and in the process of divorcing her second.) The scene begins just after the king’s historic broadcast has concluded.

Frank and Ethel have aged since their son’s death. Sylvia, by contrast, looks older. She has adopted the Christian Science faith and its confidence obviously agrees with her. In fact she has an argument with Sam about it, in which she infuriatingly refuses to lose her temper,

We learn that in the past four years Mrs Flint has passed away and the servant Edie has left and not been replaced. Bob next door, his wife Nora has died, after being ill for year.

After some nattering there’s a knock at the french windows and Billy comes in. He’s now an experienced and impressive Royal Navy Warrant Officer.

He has some staggering news. He’s seen Queenie. Ethel bridles because that name has been banned in the house for five years. But Billy quickly gives a recap of Queenie’s adventures, how the married man she ran off with dropped her after a year and her struggles to earn a living, then a case of appendicitis, then taking up with another Brit she met in hospital to set up a tea room in the South of France, and that’s where he met her and…

All in a rush he tells Frank and Ethel that he’s married Queenie. He always said he’s wait for her and he did and she finally accepted him, and she’s next door. Frank shakes Billy by the hand then runs out the french windows and moments later reappears with Queenie. Ethel breaks down in tears etc and there is an awkward but loving reconciliation between her and Ethel. To be honest, I had tears in my eyes when I read it. God, what a world.

Scene 2: September 1938

More of the ‘Cavalcade’ mentality in that the next scene is based round yet another major historical event, this time Neville Chamberlain’s return from Munich and the famous piece of paper he waved around in the hope that it would assure peace in our time.

Developments in the Gibbons household include that Billy and Queenie have had a baby son, currently four months old. Queenie is ill, still recovering from the birth which was difficult.

Sylvia never believed there would be a war and the smug superiority of her Christian Science belief triggers an angry response from Vi, as it did from Sam in the previous scene.

Ethel tells Frank Queenie’s had a letter from Billy asking her to go out and stay with him in Singapore. If she goes she’ll leave the baby with them to look after. For maybe a year.

Bob pops in. Years after his wife died, he’s taken the plunge, is selling up and moving to the country. They’ll miss him. Ethel gives him an embarrassed kiss.

Bob says goodbye to Frank. They reminisce about all the things they’ve seen in the past 20 years and Frank wonders what happens to rooms and houses which have been lived in so intensely by people who then move away. Does a little part of them stay behind…? They drink a toast to happy days.

Scene 3: June 1939

Symmetry. Just as in the first scene, the room is mostly emptied with everything packed up into crates, because Frank and Ethel are moving out. They’re moving to a flat with a fine view of Clapham Common and running hot water.

We learn that Queenie has gone off to Singapore, leaving their baby, who I think is called Frank, with them. It irritates Frank who calls it ‘his lordship.’

Frank and Ethel share a sentimental moment, looking out over the garden as they did in the first scene, before Ethel bustles off in her busy way. This leaves Frank with the baby in a pram and Coward has him deliver a page-and-a-half monologue. This consists of Frank’s cynical view about ‘peace’ i.e. it’ll never happen. He expands the idea he’s mentioned briefly once or twice earlier, that there’ll never be peace because of human nature.

The trouble with the world, Frankie, is there’s too much idealism and too little horse sense. We’re human beings, we are, all of us – and that’s what people are liable to forget. Human beings don’t like peace and good will and everybody loving everybody else. However much they may think they do, they don’t really because they’re not made like that. Human beings like eating and drinking and loving and loving and hating. They also like showing off, grabbing all they can, fighting for their rights and bossing anybody who’ll give ’em half a chance.

Which segues into a passage more specifically about British politics. Frank admits that just recently Britain has allowed itself to be bullied by noisy foreigners and has let other people down.

But don’t worry, that won’t last. The people themselves, the ordinary people like you and me, know something better than all the fussy politicians put together – we know what we belong to, where we come from and where we’re going. We may not know it with our brains, but we know it with our roots.

He ends with defiance of our enemies, based on the optimistic notion that we (the ordinary British people) have fought for human decency for ourselves and won’t let it go lightly.

We ‘aven’t lived and died and struggled all these hundreds of years to get decency and justice and freedom for ourselves without being prepared to fight fifty wars if need be, to keep ’em.

Ethel comes in and finds him delivering this great speech and wonders what on earth he’s doing. When he explains ‘talking to the baby’ she tells him to close the french windows and come along for supper. Loudmouth men, practical women. Reassuring stereotypes to the end.

Thoughts

As you can see it’s not really a play with a dramatic narrative which tells a long complicated story or addresses distinct themes. It’s more like a kind of diary of a family. Or snapshots in a family album, very like Cavalcade. A continuation of Cavalcade but in another class.

Bickering

As you know, as I’ve read my way through Noel Coward’s plays I’ve been surprised at the absence of his supposed wit and the prominence, the ubiquity, of bickering and arguing. The core of all his famous plays is people snapping at each other, bad-tempered squabbling which frequently rises to real abuse and shouting matches. That’s what I associate Coward with.

To take it a bit further, all his characters – whether posh Mayfair types or lower class types as in this work – despite all their superficial differences, all have one basic function or activity, which is to try and shut down other people, and make their version of events or opinions prevail. His plays are battlefields, not of ideas because there are few if any ideas in his plays, but battlefields of will.

And ‘This Happy Breed’ is no different. In Act 2, scene 1, just before Reg’s wedding, there’s a huge argument in which about half a dozen characters are all trying to talk over each other, shut up and silence the others, in order to impose their version, to control the narrative.

MRS FLINT: I’ll thank you not to call me names, Sylvia Gibbons.
SYLVIA: You make me tired.
ETHEL: Don’t answer back, Sylvia, it’ll only mean a row.
SYLVIA: I’m sure I don’t want to say anything to anybody, but really–
MRS FLINT: Pity you don’t keep quiet then!
SYLVIA: Who are you to talk to me like that – I’ve had about enough of your nagging –
FRANK: Shut UP, Sylvia!

Or the passage in Act 2 scene 3 where Ethel tells Mrs Flint (her mother) to just hold her tongue, in response to which Mrs Flint huffily says ‘the less I open my mouth the better’. Once you notice it, you see it everywhere; on almost every pages characters tell other ones to shut up or they don’t like how they talk.

  • FRANK: I do wish you wouldn’t talk like that Sylvia.
  • QUEENIE: I wish you wouldn’t say things like that, Dad.
  • ETHEL: It’s not a fit subject to talk about.
  • ETHE: How often have I told you I won’t have you talking like that, Frank.
  • ETHEL: Don’t let’s talk about it, shall we?
  • ETHEL: Don’t talk so silly.
  • ETHEL: Don’t snap at your father, Queenie.

They even disapprove of the king speaking, in the scene following the abdication speech:

FRANK: Well I suppose he ‘ad to make it but I somehow wish he hadn’t.

There’s another way of looking at it. Philip Hoare writes that Coward knew – like presumably most playwrights – that the essence of drama is conflict. But other playwrights use clashes of ideas, or really the different points of view of vividly conceived characters. Take Virginia Woolf’s favourite play, Antigone, which has at its core the completely irreconcilable positions of Creon and Antigone. Or take any of Ibsen’s mature plays, which dramatise real clashes of deeply portrayed and profoundly conflicting characters.

There’s nothing like that depth anywhere in Coward. A regular complaint is that his characters are generally too alike. In a play like ‘Design for Living’ it’s difficult to tell Otto and Leo apart, just as it’s challenging to tell the two women in ‘Fallen Angels’ apart. They’re basically the same characters given more or less the same qualities, but just set against each other over fairly superficial issues – in both plays squabbling over a shared love object (Gilda in ‘Design for Living’, Maurice in ‘Fallen Angels’).

What I’m driving at is that there’s conflict in Coward plays, alright, but it doesn’t arise from profound differences in character and point of view, as in the ancient Greeks, or Shakespeare, or Ibsen or Shaw. They’re just very similar types of people having an argument. Squabbling. Bickering. Often over absolute trivia. Their arguments don’t shed light on any great issue or illumine deep and interesting characters. They just yell at each other to shut up.

And it’s this which accounts for the regular criticism that Coward’s plays are ‘thin’. They are. The arguing and bickering may well work onstage, by raising the temperature and giving the impression that there’s dramatic action going on. But the superficiality of their bickers and arguments explains why, a few hours later, you can hardly remember what the play was even about. Like the proverbial Chinese dinner. Full of vivid, palate-pleasing flavours at the time. A few hours later you’re hungry again.

Caveat

I wrote that before I read the final scenes in which irritating Aunt Sylvia blossoms into a devout believer in Christian Science. This is an ideology or belief and it does give rise to something like actual debate between the characters as others, like Sam and then Vi, simply refuse to accept her outlandish beliefs (there is no such thing as evil, therefore there is no such thing as pain) and both end up raising their voices.

This is a debate about ideas, I suppose. But it’s not what the play is about. It’s a minor side issue, peripheral to the main narrative. And even here my rule applies, that the characters don’t really debate, none of them are educated or intelligent enough; instead they bicker in order to gain control of the field of discourse and shut each other down.

FRANK: Now listen ‘ere Sylvia, don’t you talk to me like that because I won’t ‘ave it, see.

So many times these bad-tempered quarrels end up in the same dead end as characters realise the pointlessness of even trying to have a discussion. What we could call the futility point which so many of these arguments arrive at.

REG: It’s no use talking, Dad, you don’t understand, and you never will.

QUEENIE: If you’re going to turn nasty about it there’s no use saying any more.

ETHEL: What’s the point of arguing with her, Frank? You know it never does any good.

FRANK: If you feel like that it’s not much good talking about it, is it?

VI: There’s no use arguing with her, Dad, she’s getting sillier and sillier every day.

It’s this sense of stasis, this inability to escape the limitations of the characters they’ve been assigned by their creator, which links Coward, despite all the superficial differences, with the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose characters are similarly trapped in roles they can never escape.

So despite the little flurry of what appears to be actual debate about Christian Science (like the little flurry around Sam’s superficial communism in the first scene) it soon sinks under the usual attempts of everyone concerned to shut everyone else down. So I think the fundamental truth of my analysis remains valid.

Patriotism

Although he is a cynic about idealists and socialists like young Sam and the chances of peace – Frank’s final speech is an unalloyed rousing piece of patriotism. Coward was just going into the patriotic phase which would see his great war films, war work, and significantly change his public image. As Philip Hoare puts it in his excellent biography of Coward:

The Second World War came at a good time for Noel Coward. After the madcap Twenties and bleak Thirties, the war redefined Britishness and served as an antidote to the disillusion and decadence of the inter-war period. Its revival of the values of empire and Britain’s greatness was congenial to Coward: the quality of fortitude required (and mythologised) by the war neatly coincided with the fortitude displayed by Noel… the values he espoused dovetailed with the Dunkirk / Blitz / ‘Britain can take it’ spirit and he was able to exploit them fully. Cavalcade had announced his patriotism; the films, plays and concert tours of the early 1940s helped cement his image in the hearts and minds of the British public. (Noel Coward: A Biography by Philip Hoare, p.329)

Movie version

A 1944 film adaptation, with the same title, was directed by David Lean and starred Robert Newton and Celia Johnson. Interesting to see Johnson doing ‘common’ rather the refained middle class in ‘Brief Encounter’. It’s a fantastic performance. Newton looking fresh and young, nothing like the ramshackle twitcher of the Disney version of ‘Treasure Island’, just 6 years later. Apparently this was his breakthrough role, he was 39. And Stanley Holloway looking exactly as middle-aged as he does in ‘My Fair Lady’, 20 years later (1964). He was 54.

Or… is bickering actually a form of love?

Watching the film version made me reconsider a number of things about the play. The film is fuller and more varied than the play could ever be with, for example, more outdoor scenes and settings, and more historical touchpoints.

But the main thing the film made me reconsider was my hobby horse about arguing. Yes, in the film the characters do spend an inordinate amount of time arguing and bickering and telling each other to shut up and declaring there’s no use even talking to each other, in the classic Coward style, reflecting its ubiquity in the text, as I noted.

But in performance, in this wonderful film, you come to wonder whether the incessant arguing of pretty much everyone with everyone else, doesn’t at some deeper level indicate the enduring ties, and a deeper level of love and affection, between the members of this close-knit family of three generations plus in-laws, all living on top of each other.

Being trapped in each other’s presence in a small terraced house for their entire lives, means they not only know each other’s triggers and sore points and how to provoke and exasperate each other – but also, whenever anything really serious happens, they are there to support and sustain each other. Not very far beneath the bickering surface are the unbreakable ties of family.

At the end of watching the film, despite nearly two hours of bickering, squabbling and falling out, your abiding sense is of deep and enduring love, very beautifully and heart-warmingly portrayed.

Philip Hoare’s view

In his excellent biography of Coward, Philip Hoare says of the movie version that it is ‘an affecting tribute to a mythical England; a Cockney neo-romantic townscape, a snapshot of a city and a people that only existed in Noel Coward’s head’ (Noel Coward: A Biography, page 337).

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Posted by Simon on June 18, 2025

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The 80s: Photographing Britain @ Tate Britain

Linton Kwesi Johnson

Johnson isn’t mentioned anywhere in this exhibition but thinking about the 1980s made me dig up favourite playlists, and I ended up writing most of this review listening to his great 1979 album, ‘Forces of Victory’.

Introduction

Sometimes you wonder whether exhibitions at the Tate galleries are really about art at all any more, but aren’t more like polemically woke sociology lectures, with art, photography, sculpture and other evidence used merely as illustrations for a familiar set of well-worn, ‘radical’ themes.

This exhibition contains rooms or sections devoted to immigration, race, race riots, racism, the Black Experience, the Black Body, the Queer Black Body, feminism, identity, gender, colonialism, imperialism, immigration, sectarianism, pollution and environmentalism. As you can see, these look like the topic tabs on the Guardian website or a list of fashionable humanities subjects at any modern university.

As to the lived experiences of anyone not a left-wing activist, not a feminist, not Black or Asian, and not gay or lesbian during the 1980s, these are less in evidence than the subjects I’ve just listed and where they do appear, it’s mainly to be mocked and ridiculed.

I visited with a friend and we loved the first room because it is packed with a Greatest Hits selection of political issues from the 1980s: photos of anti-racism demonstrations (by Syd Shelton and Paul Trevor), of Rock Against Racism gigs, of the Miners Strike (by John Harris and Brenda Prince), of Greenham Common (by Format Photographers), protests about Section 28 and AIDS, all leading up to the Poll Tax riots – yes, all the usual suspects, shot in vivid black and white, which took us both back to our heady student days.

But as the exhibition progressed her enthusiasm turned to puzzlement and then irritation and, by the end, she was so fed up with being lectured about identity and gender and race and queer Black bodies that she gave up. She described it as the worst exhibition we’ve been to this year and I came to agree. If you read all the wall captions (as I’m addicted to doing), it felt like being trapped in a lift full of woke humanities lecturers all talking at the same time.

‘No title’ from the series Strictly by Jason Evans (1991) Tate © Jason Evans

The central problem with this exhibition

I naively thought the exhibition would be a portrait of the 1980s, that the curators would make an honest attempt to give a balanced account of this troubled decade and the wide range of social and cultural changes it witnessed, as captured in photography – that it would be a visual history of the decade.

Very wrong. What the curators have done is to make a personal selection of just the radical photographers from the period who covered what they think are the important issues (then, as now), the disruptors, the radicals, the subversives. And, as mentioned, although they initially touch on many of the obvious issues of the time (the Winter of Discontent, Thatcher, Miners Strike, unemployment, inequality, Greenham Common, poll tax) this is not where the curators’ hearts lie.

The curators are far more concerned with contemporary woke issues of gender and ethnicity than with genuinely trying to reach back and understand what it was like to live through the 1980s, as my friend and I (and, obviously, scores of millions of other Brits) did.

The result is an exhibition which feels top heavy with the woke curatorial concerns of our own day – gender, race, colonialism, immigration, inequality – but feels like it misses out important aspects of the decade in they’ve chosen to cover.

While the wall labels are fairly neutral and factual about the political history (Callaghan government; winter of discontent; days lost to strikes; Thatcher elected; deindustralisation; working class poverty; anti-nuclear protests) the actual exhibits are utterly one-sided, with a plethora of photos, pamphlets and posters decrying the authorities, the police, the government, for their racism, lack of concern for the poor, inequality, tax and regulation changes to benefit business and the middle classes, and so on.

While all these criticisms are true, they fail to take account of the key fact of the decade which is that Mrs Thatcher was, and continued to be, phenomenally popular with about 40% of the population. Here’s how many voted for her three Conservative administrations.

  • 1979: 13,697,923 (44%)
  • 1983: 13,012,316 (42%)
  • 1987: 13,760,583 (42%)

Lots and lots of people thought Britain had gone down the drain in the 1970s, thought the Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan were in hock to the trade unions who, despite all their promises, seemed to be continuously on strike, while all manner of public services collapsed – that Britain was becoming a failed state or Third World country.

In this narrative, Thatcher not only saved Britain from endless decline under Labour, but went on to remodel the entire economy, letting unprofitable nationalised industries go to the wall while privatising other state monopolies in order to enable international investment (for example, modernising the dire railway network or allowing greater innovation in telecoms). The deregulation of the City of London allowed British banks and investment companies to compete more aggressively around the world and become phenomenally successful. Selling council houses to their owners (as per the 1980 Housing Act) allowed millions of poor people to feel the pride and security of owning their own home for the first time. And, on the patriotic front, her staunch attitude in the Falklands War and victory against quite daunting odds, allowed tens of millions of Brits to feel proud about their country again.

I personally disagree with a lot of this or can point out the obvious criticisms of most of these policies – but 40% of the population enthusiastically agreed with it, saw the world this way, voted for her, and hero-worshipped her.

And my point is simple: None of that is in this exhibition. This is an exhibition of radical feminists, Black and Asian civil rights marchers, gay rights activists, of campaigners against race hate and misogyny and unemployment and nuclear weapons etc. It is like a collection of all the fringe groups you find at a Labour Party conference vying for the attention of those in power who are always too busy to listen, today as 40 years ago.

The large number of people who were relieved by the breaking of union power, the end of permanent strikes, the people who made fortunes in the City or found their pay doubling in newly privatised companies or suddenly owned a home for the first time in their lives or felt the government was (unlike labour) seriously backing them in the war against the IRA, all the people who benefitted from the booming North Sea oil industries in Aberdeen or working on the rigs, all the people who were encouraged by the new spirit of entrepreneurism to set up their own business and prospered – none of them are here.

To be clear, and to bend over backwards for the curators, the main wall labels which introduce each room and give the historical facts behind each theme are broadly objective historical summaries, albeit of the predominantly leftish issues they’ve chosen to discuss. It’s the selection of photos and objects which are unrelentingly one-sided, tendentious and biased and it is, of course, these which make the main impact on the visitor.

For example, the exhibition includes a photo by Anna Fox of this jokey cutout of Mrs Thatcher which has been splattered with orange or something. But to really convey the atmosphere of the decade it should have included many more images of Thatcher, including some of the terrifying ones of her at her most domineering. Now I think about it, the show could have had an entire section devoted just to images of Mrs Thatcher, showcasing all the photographic and image manipulation styles of the day, from adoring Conservative posters to satirical photomontages by Peter Kennard or photos of the Spitting Image puppet of her. That would have been interesting, funny and thought provoking but no. Just this image of the cutout spattered with soup. Disappointing. Missed opportunity. Photos of the woman who dominated a decade.

Friendly Fire, target (Margaret Thatcher) by Anna Fox 1989 © Anna Fox

The relentlessly left-wing perspective of the curators quickly comes to feel so narrow. Can it really be true that every single photographer, photographic studio or collective during the entire 1980s was vehemently left wing, concerned only with radical causes, with ‘pushing boundaries’ and ‘subverting’ all the usual suspects (gender norms, heteronormative stereotypes, racist myths etc)? Can the entire decade‘s photographic output really have been so narrow, repetitive and obsessed with the same handful of left-wing themes and issues?

Facts about the exhibition

This is a vast show: ten rooms, 16 themes, over 70 ‘lens-based artists and collectives’ are represented by over 550 art works and archive items: lots of ‘radical’ photography magazines such as Ten.8 and Camerawork; lots of posters, leaflets, handouts, Greenham Common posters and flyers and badges, anti-racism pamphlets, posters etc. It is massive. Prepare to be overwhelmed and exhausted.

No reasonable human being can be expected to fully process and assess 550 photos and objects at one go – so the curators are either assuming people will go back a second time (probably a good idea) or will hop from one section to another, or will skim through and not give anything enough attention (all too likely).

The negative affect of this jumble-sale overcrowding is exemplified by the sections devoted to the black-and-white documentary photography of two photographers I revere, Tish Murtha and Chris Killip. I raved about their depictions of dirt-poor working class communities when I first saw them in shows at the Photographer’s Gallery entirely devoted to their work, when they had a devastating impact on me. Tish Murtha, in particular, was a photographer of genius.

But here, half a dozen of their (outstanding) photos are wedged in between 6 by someone else, 9 by someone else, 4 by someone else, 7 by someone else, a section about Asian identity, another about the Black Experience, some stuff about pollution in Devon, a sequence of seaside snaps… and so on and so on until the whole thing becomes a blur. They both deserve a better environment and more respect.

Critch’ and Sean by Chris Killip (1982) Tate © Chris Killip

It’s the difference between walking through a landscape, stopping to give every tree and plant time and attention – and driving through the same landscape in a car, noticing the occasional standout feature against the general blur.

Chronological slippage

The exhibition is so huge that it overflows its own boundaries. It is everywhere referred to as ‘The 80s’ and yet the first photo dates from 1976 and the last one from 1993. That’s a 17-year spread, not a ten-year one. It feels bloated chronologically as well as content-wise.

Exhibition structure

At one point I drafted a long section comparing my own lived experience of the 1980s (including going on protest marches as a student, then living in the Brixton depicted in some of these photos, clubbing, protesting, walking through one of the Brixton riots etc) with the depictions given here but it got too long and irrelevant. Instead here is a boiled-down version of Tate’s own exhibition guide (which you can read in full here).

As you can see, the opening sections tick all the boxes, contain interesting facts and seem set fair to give you an interesting historical overview of the decade. It’s only slowly that the curators’ obsession with race and gender become more prominent and you begin to wonder, and then become irritated by, the absence of so many other things.

First a list of what is in the exhibition. Then my list of what, in my opinion, has been omitted.

1. Documenting the decade

Protests and riots from the 1976 Grunwick strike through the Miners Strike, National Front rallies met with anti-racist demonstrations, the Clash playing their famous Rock Against Racism gig in Victoria Park, the election of Mrs Thatcher and the ideology of Thatcherism, Greenham Common (obviously), the poll tax riots.

Paul Simonon of the Clash at a Rock Against Racism concert, Victoria Park, East London, April 1978, photo by Syd Sheldon/White Riot, in The 80s: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain

2. Anti-racist movements

The 1948 British Nationality Act allowed everyone born in Britain or its Empire to become a ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ and tens of thousands came to fill job vacancies. Regrettably, sometimes tragically, this triggered hostility and racial discrimination, marking the beginning of decades of racist rhetoric, rioting and civil rights activism. 1968 Enoch Powell’s river of blood speech. By the mid-1970s, the far-right, anti-immigration National Front was England’s fourth largest political party. So the show has many photos of their rallies and protests by opponents (and posters, badges and flyers), including quite a few about the so-called Battle of Lewisham which took place on 13 August 1977.

Darcus Howe addressing the anti-racist demonstrators, Lewisham, 13 August 1977 by Syd Shelton (1977) Tate © Syd Shelton

Was 1977 in the 1980s? No. Why is it in the exhibition? Because this isn’t an exhibition about the 1980s: it is an exhibition about radical causes the curators support, and which had their origins in the 1970s.

Also, a bit of digging revealed that quite a few of the black-and-white protest photos in this first room are loans from the National Portrait Gallery a mile up the road. Handy. And they’re not just dusty old photos from the archive but are, in fact, star entries in the National Portrait Gallery’s Schools Hub. This includes the Darcus Howe photo and the photo of Jayaben Desai by David Mansell.

3. The Miners’ strike

In March 1984, the National Coal Board announced plans to close 20 collieries, putting 20,000 jobs at risk. The National Union of Mineworkers, led by Arthur Scargill, responded with a series of year-long strikes. Observed across England, Scotland and Wales, the strikes put industrial issues and workers’ rights on the national agenda. Many dramatic photos including the famous one of a mounted policeman wielding a baton against photographer Lesley Boulton at the Battle of Orgreave, 1984.

4. Greenham Common

On 5 September 1981, a group of women marched from Cardiff to the Royal Air Force base at Greenham Common in Berkshire. The site was common land, loaned to the US Air Force by the British Government during the Second World War and never returned. The group called themselves Women for Life on Earth. They were challenging the decision to house nuclear missiles at the site. When their request for a debate was ignored, they set up camp and the site became a women-only space. The camp lasted for 19 years although it was after only 6 years, in 1987, that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan signed a treaty which paved the way for the removal of cruise missiles from Greenham.

Greenham Common, 14 December 1985 by Melanie Friend (1985) reprinted 2023. © Melanie Friend, Format Photographers

I smiled when the curators proudly explained that Gorbachev subsequently paid tribute to the role ‘Greenham women and peace movements’ played in this historic agreement as if they, the curators, were partly responsible for its achievements. And I also liked the implication that you should always believe what a Russian politician says.

The massive political exhibition which filled the same Tate Britain galleries before this, Women In Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970 to 1990, also featured an entire room about Greenham Common. My friend jokingly suggested that maybe every Tate exhibition should have a section devoted to Greenham Common: The Pre-Raphaelites and Greenham Common. Victorian sculpture and Greenham Common.

5. Poll Tax

The community charge, commonly known as the ‘poll tax’, was introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1989 in Scotland, and 1990 in England and Wales. This flat-rate tax on every adult replaced previous taxation based on property value. The tax was accused of benefitting the rich and unfairly targeting the poor. The national anti-poll tax movement began on the streets of Glasgow and led to a series of anti-poll tax actions across the UK. Many demonstrations saw clashes between police and protestors, and resulted in rioting. The fallout from the tax triggered leadership challenges against the prime minister and, in 1990, Thatcher resigned. In 1991, following vehement national opposition, John Major’s Conservative government announced the poll tax would be replaced by council tax.

So news photos of anti-poll tax marches, some of which turned into riots, ‘ordinary people’ carrying placards, burning cars in Trafalgar Square. Ah, those were the days.

Nidge and Laurence Kissing by David Hoffman (1990) © David Hoffman

6. The Gay Rights Movement

In 1967, the Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised sexual acts between two men. It was the result of decades of campaigning but did nothing to address the discrimination gay and lesbian communities continued to face. So photos of LGBTQ+ people protesting for equal rights.

In 1981 the UK saw its first identified cases of AIDS. By 1987 the HIV/AIDS epidemic was a global health crisis. The public focus was largely on gay men who were being infected in much greater numbers than the general population, fuelling anti-gay rhetoric in politics and the press. Queer activists organised in opposition to the resulting homophobia, as well as Conservative ‘family values’ campaigns. Do you remember some media labelling it the gay plague? Bigotry on a national scale. Lots of photos of anti-homophobia and AIDS awareness marches.

7. (Political) Landscapes

This is the first and, as it turns out, pretty much the only section which isn’t about political protest, gender awareness and Black issues. But don’t imagine it’s pretty photos of the British Isles. It, also, takes a heavily ‘theoretical’ i.e. politicised approach to its subject.

This section points out how the entire concept of ‘landscape’ is socially, culturally and politically constructed, and how the British tendency to see the countryside as cosy and reassuring often conceals the way the land has been a battlefield for rights to common land and to roam.

Also, in line with the gloomy focus elsewhere in the show, there’s an emphasis on landscapes as places of deindustrialisation and ruins, and as degraded by pollution and fly tipping.

That said this room contained some of the best sets of images, neither part of the obvious political issues of the first few rooms nor of the gender and race obsession of the second half of the exhibition. Having walked through the whole exhibition twice I found myself gravitating towards this room for the understated, sometimes elusive quality of its photos.

For example, I liked the red river sequence by Jem Southam, a set of 12 colour photos of the country around a stream in west Cornwall. None of them individually are ‘great’ photos but the fact there’s 12 of them collectively creates a great sense of location and strangeness. And the dramatic black-and-white study of a standing stone on Orkney by Albert Watson.

Orkney Standing Stones by Albert Watson (1991) © Albert Watson. Courtesy Hamilton Gallery

But the pull of politics is unavoidable. Nearby are upsetting images from the Troubles in Northern Ireland, namely The Walls by Willie Doherty, and the disturbing series Sectarian Murder by Paul Seawright. This records the sites where murdered bodies were found, after the bodies had been removed and they had returned to their normal, litter-strewn banality.

Even this apparently bucolic image by Paul Graham contains the tiny detail of a Union Jack high up in the tree which, in its little way, throws the shadow of 800 years of history across the green fields and blue sky.

Union Jack Flag in Tree, Country Tyrone by Paul Graham (1985) © Paul Graham

8. Remodelling history

Extensive coverage of radical feminist photographers Jo Spence and Maud Sulter who set out to ‘challenge photography’s sexist and colonial past’, and its relationship to class politics.

Remodelling Photo History: Revisualization by Jo Spence (1982) Tate © The Jo Spence Memorial Archive

There’s a surprising amount about these two figures, Spence and Sulter, including a separate section on Spence’s collaboration with artist Rosy Martin to develop photo-therapy. As with other Tate exhibitions, maybe there’s so much of it simply because Tate owns their archive and needs a pretext to display a decent amount of their work. (We’ll see the same is true of the unexpected prominence given to an American photographer, Lyle Ashton Harris, at the end of the show. Tate owns them so this is a prime opportunity to dust them off and display them.)

9. Black women

There’s a separate section devoted to Maud Sulter who’s quoted as saying, ‘Black women’s experience and Black women’s contribution to culture is so often erased and marginalised’, and so set about rectifying this in series of photos of her dressed up in period costume looking like an extra from Bridgerton.

Zabat, Terpsichore, 1989 from Zabat by Maud Sulter (1989) © Estate of Maud Sulter. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2023. Image courtesy of Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow

10. Image and Text

A section on the use of text in photos, texts designed to amplify or undermine the central image. There is much citing of the artist and theorist Victor Burgin who, the curators tell us, was very influential during this period. He’s represented by some of his series of large, poster-sized photos which include ironical texts, titled ‘UK 76‘. 1976? But I thought this was an exhibition of photography from the 1980s? No. As with all the photos of anti-National Front marches, the Battle of Lewisham and so on, the curators bend their own rules and boundaries when it suits them. (As with the Jason Evans photo at the top of this review, and Albert Watson’s Orkney Standing Stones, both from 1991 and so spilling over the other end of the boundary.)

This section also included some big poster-sized images of rubbish new townscapes with official-sounding quotes from brochures pasted on top (which I liked very much). And it’s the section with the satirical images of office workers by Anna Fox (with mockingly ironic text) and Kroll’s sequence of posh chaps in private clubs (with mockingly ironic text) which I’ll describe below.

10. Reflections of The Black Experience

This is the biggest room in the exhibition. It takes its name from ‘Reflections of the Black Experience’ which was an exhibition held at Brixton Art Gallery in 1986, commissioned by the Greater London Council’s Race Equality Unit. It was followed by D-MAX: A Photographic Exhibition in Bristol.

Both exhibitions played an important role in the development of the Association of Black Photographers, which is now called Autograph ABP. Established in 1988, Autograph’s mission was to advocate for the inclusion of ‘historically marginalised photographic practices’. Working from a small office in Brixton, the agency delivered an ambitious programme of exhibitions, publications and events. Autograph is now one of my favourite small galleries in London, which I’ll discuss below.

There’s lots in this big room, including photos of Brixton from the later 1980s, when I lived there. The display that made the most impact on me was the brilliant series of Handsworth self portraits. This project was set up by Derek Bishton, Brian Homer and John Reardon in which they set up a makeshift studio in Handsworth, a multicultural part of Birmingham, and invited people to take self portraits of themselves. Over 500 people took part and the joy of people messing about, as solo shots, in pairs or larger family groups, is infectious. Once again, though, as throughout the show, works are included from outside the nominal time range because, well, they’re good.

Ting A Ling, from Handsworth Self Portrait, 1979 © Derek Bishton, Brian Homer and John Reardon

11. (Political) Self portraiture

You might have thought this would feature a fascinating range of self portraits by people across society throughout the ten years of the 1980s but no, this is Tate and so only a handful of social groups really count, namely radical feminists, Black activists and LGBTQ+ people. In the curators’ words:

In the nineteenth century, photography was a valuable tool for colonial powers. Ethnographic images of Indigenous Peoples and landscapes were distributed through postcards and magazines. They ‘othered’ subjects and created racist stereotypes that legitimised the mission of empire. The photographs on display here challenge this colonial gaze. They present nuanced, multi-dimensional representations of Black and Asian British selfhood.

So the self portraits in this section are entirely concerned with subverting imperialist, colonialist stereotypes. They link up with the series in the last room by Grace Lau of him or herself dressing up as types from the decade in order to subvert gender norms etc.

From the series ‘Interiors’ by Grace Lau © Grace Lau 1986

Black activists or gender activists. Little attempt to consider the myriad other types of self portrait taken outside these areas, by anybody else, at any other part of the decade.

12. Community

This room hosts series from half a dozen photographers who went to live with communities around the UK to share their experiences and create accurate depictions. Most are in black and white with a 100% left-wing focus on poverty, crappy housing, unemployment, aggressive policing and racial stereotypical. It includes outstanding photos by Chris Killip which, for some reason, didn’t hit me as hard as when I saw his one-man show at the Photographers’ Gallery. I think being set next to the work of 3 or 4 other photographers (for example, the equally as good Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen) doing more or less the same, attenuated all of them.

13. Colour photography

A room full of big, blaring, gaudy colour photos. Apparently, Britain’s first exhibition of photography taken on colour film was Peter Mitchell’s 1979 show at Impressions Gallery in York. During the 1980s technological developments continually improved the quality of colour photography and this room brings together sequences of giant colour photographs by Martin Parr, Paul Reas and Tom Wood. Because they are almost entirely very unflattering photos of very ordinary white people I came to think of it as the Chav Room or the White Trash Room (fuller explanation below).

14. Black bodyscapes

In case you didn’t get enough Blackness in the opening room about anti-racist protests, in the room about Black women or the massive room about The Black Experience, here is a room devoted to the Black Queer Experience. The assembled photographs of Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ajamu X and Lyle Ashton Harris ‘explore masculinity, sexuality and Blackness’.

Fani-Kayode was described by Ajamu X as ‘the most visible, out, Black, queer photographer’ of the 1980s’. Ajamu X’s desire to document ‘the whole of Black queer Britain’ has been dubbed ‘Pleasure Activism’. Harris describes his photographs as a celebration of ‘Black beauty and sensuality’. The photos of Ajamu (black and white) and Fani-Koyode (moody, shadowy colour) are, in their different ways, staggeringly impactful.

Body Builder in Bra by Ajamu X (1990) Tate © Ajamu X

15. Celebrating subculture

The final room. You might have thought that a documentary look at the ‘subcultures of the 1980s’ might have covered some of the movements closely associated with ever-changing fashions of pop music such as post-punk, industrial music, Goths, New Romantics, synthpop and, later, Madchester, acid house, raves and so on. These affected how people dressed, thought about themselves, danced, partied, affected not just styles of music but graphics, album art, posters and many other types of visual content.

But no. None of that is here. Tate curators only know two subjects, race and sex, gender and ethnicity, and so they ignore all the pop cultures I’ve listed. Instead, at the mention of ‘subculture’ their thoughts immediately go to gender issues, to LGBTQ+, and to the furore surrounding the notorious Section 28 of the Local Government Act.

The wall labels go into great detail about how Section 28 prohibited local authorities from ‘promoting homosexuality’ and triggered a wave of protest from gay and lesbian communities. They tell us how Section 28 forced many LGBT groups to disband and saw literature depicting gay life removed from schools and libraries, but that it also galvanised the Gay Rights movement. People took to the streets in a series of marches and so, with thumping predictability, the exhibition ends with lots of photographs of people protesting, marches, banners etc, very much as in the first room, or the Greenham Common room, or the Black Experience room.

If you’re maybe a little bored by the subject of gay activism, tough, because not far away there’s photos by Tessa Boffin who ‘subversively reimagines literary characters as lesbians’, while nearby Grace Lau ‘documents members of various fetishist sub-cultures’.

To be crystal clear, none of this is ‘bad’ in itself, some of it is very good. It’s just that by this stage the visitor who’s been reading all the wall labels is exhausted by the curators’ obsessive harping on just the same two or three subjects to the exclusion of everything else.

End of exhibition summary

I suppose I could stop here, having given you a good summary of what there is to see and my own negative response to it. And you might be wise to stop reading here. But several things triggered me so much I needed to work them through in print.

Omitted subjects

As explained, my friend and I got increasingly frustrated as we looked for evidence of the other, non-political, non-woke aspects of the 1980s which we and millions like us like us experienced. Without trying too hard I made a list of the domestic and international events, music, style and commercial changes which I associate the decade with.

Take sport. There’s nothing about sport at all. Apparently there was no sport during the 1980s and no sports photography. Even if you wanted to ‘keep it Tate’ and make sport as political as possible, they could have mentioned the disastrous Bradford City stadium fire, the legislation which followed forcing all football grounds to become all-seated, and the resulting accusations that the sport was losing its working class fanbase and becoming embourgeoisified. And there were lots of other sporting events, highlights and scandals. But not a hint here.

Pop music. There’s one photo of The Clash performing at a Rock Against Racism gig in Victoria Park and that’s it. Nothing else: no industrial rock, post-punk, synth pop, New Romantics, no Smiths and, at the end of the decade, no Madchester, no ecstasy, no raves, no ambient music. There’s a wall of style magazines at the end, sections on the impact of, for example, i-D magazine, but somehow the curators’ focus purely on design manages to omit the extraordinary output of a decade many consider the greatest era in British pop history. Where’s Wham for God’s sake?

This was the decade when MTV arrived in the UK (1981) and its reliance on pop videos changed the dynamic of how people consumed pop. Same with cable TV generally, and the arrival of Sky TV (1984) with its crazy aerials. I appreciate these aren’t photographic but someone must have taken photographs of them and of this huge transformation of the cultural and visual landscape. Not here.

No jazz. No classical music. None. They didn’t exist during the 1980s or if they did, no one took any photos of them. Whereas I remember in the early 1980s transitioning away from pop music altogether and listening to the likes of Courtney Pine, Loose Tubes or Andy Shepherd. OK they’re not photographers, but it felt like a big cultural shift at the time and surely someone took photos of them.

World music same. Lots of young people got fed up with boring old rock music and sought new sounds from around the world. WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) was founded in 1980 and the first WOMAD festival was held in Shepton Mallet 1982. Nothing here.

Live Aid, remember that, Saturday, 13 July 1985? Not here, not a whisper, not so much of the event itself, but as the invention of really epic mass charity events which it invented. It was based around images because of Bob Geldof’s response to Michael Buerk’s reporting of the Ethiopia famine. I know that’s TV reporting, but there were lots of photographs of it (of the famine and of the concert). Why is Greenham Common included but Live Aid, which was a vastly bigger event and, arguably, more socially transformative, not? All curators are feminists. 39 iconic photos of Live Aid at London’s Wembley Stadium

Fashion photography? No. None. There’s a wall about style magazines but this is chiefly about the magazine design itself: I saw nothing recording the drastic new looks which appeared in the early 1980s, the New Romantics, Blitz nightclub, big hair, big shoulder pads which became crazy fashionable. According to this exhibition, never happened. 38 Iconic ’80s Fashion Photos.

The royal wedding On Wednesday 29 July 1981 Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer. It was a huge social and media event. If you think about it, royal photography is a specialised area or genre all to itself. As with Mrs Thatcher, the curators could have done an intellectually reputable section on how royal images are created, curated, marketed and disseminated, mocked and satirised. 70 Rare Photos From Princess Diana’s Wedding.

The Brighton bombing on 12 October 1984. See the relevant photos by brilliant photojournalist John Downing.

Architecture The 1980s was the great decade of postmodernism in architecture with its flagship building, Lloyds of London. Surely there were photographers specialising in the built environment across the UK and in particular this completely new look which swept across Britain? Not according to this exhibition. A Spotter’s Guide to Post-Modern Architecture.

Foreign reporting? Live Aid was of course a response to the Ethiopian famine and, in particular, the work of photojournalist Mohamed Amin, but there is no photography of events outside the UK in this exhibition. I take the point that the curators decided to limit their scope to the UK, but images of the major foreign stories of the decade were published in the UK and many taken by British photographers. So why aren’t they included here? How Mo Amin Inspired Change in Ethiopia

Chernobyl? No. No British photography of any aspect of it.

The Mujahideen in Afghanistan? Signature images of the decade were the reports on the evening news by some BBC or ITV journalist wearing a keffiyeh or pakol hat while Islamic freedom fighters fired off a Stinger missile in the background. Did no British photographers take any photos of this ten-year war? If they did, why are they excluded from this exhibition? To take one example from hundreds, the Afghan War photos of Scottish photographer David Pratt.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, 9 November 1989. That was a massive, world historic event with photos and footage beamed into every home. The curators can quote Gorbachev when it suits their agenda, when he’s praising the Greenham women, but on none of the other vast issues of the 1980s, namely the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union in which he was the prime actor.

Photos linked to film and theatre, glitz, actors, red carpets – forget Hollywood, just here in the UK? No. Didn’t happen during the 1980s. None here.

One of the biggest domestic stories of the decade was the deregulation of the City of London, nicknamed the Big Bang, which transformed the worlds of finance, banking and insurance, and made lots of people very rich, with far-reaching consequences for the British and maybe global economies. There’s text about it in the room labels but not a single image. Surely someone took photos of the changing culture in the City of London? No? Why not?

North Sea oil? Nada. Did no British photographer take photos of oil workers, Aberdeen, the creation of the refining infrastructure in that boom town? No photographer made a project of recording all this?

And what about The Falklands War (2 April to 14 June 1982) which had a seismic impact on British society and politics – footage of ships setting sail, news photos of battles, muddy paratroopers yomping through the long grass, looking shattered after a firefight, guarding nervous Argentinian captives, the celebrations when the ships arrived back in Portsmouth or Southampton? Even, if you are a Tate curator and insist on taking a left-wing view of the war, surely there was a world of anti-war photos, posters, and what not. Here are 30 Photographs From The Falklands Conflict they could have borrowed from the Imperial War Museum. But no, nothing, zip. Zilch.

Summary

Can you see why I became increasingly dismayed, and then irritated, by how many issues, events, music and fashion styles, new industries and technological innovations that were absolutely central to the 1980s the Tate curators left out because they didn’t fit their handful of woke concerns?

Omitted ethnic groups

As I’ve shown there is plenty of stuff about Black photographers, Black resistance, Black identity, Black photographic practice, Black selfhood, Black representation and much more and yet there are other ethnic groups in the UK – where are they?

From the series Revival, London by Roy Mehta (1989 to 1993) Courtesy of the artist and L A Noble Gallery

It’s not that extensive coverage of Black issues is ‘wrong’, it’s that the curators’ monomaniacal obsession feels like it comes at the neglect of all the other issues, types of people, professions and experiences alive in 1980s UK. Here are some wall labels to recreate the experience:

Frustrated by the misrepresentation of Black people in British mainstream media of the period, Zak Ové used his camera to challenge this visual discourse.

Dave Lewis‘s photographs of Black British communities in South London emphasise the diversity of experiences within these communities.

Marc Boothe‘s photographs sought to challenge traditional documentary practices and introduce viewers to a ‘Black aesthetic’.

Suzanne Rodan‘s candid shots capture moments of everyday life within Black and South Asian communities in 1980s London.

In Impressions Passing Roshini Kempadoo manipulates photographic prints to reflect how racist imagery is perpetuated in modern media.

Ajamu‘s portrait photographic series Black Bodyscapes focuses on intimate sexual desires.

Autoportrait is a series of nine self-portraits which challenge the under-representation of Black women in British fashion and beauty magazines.

Magenta Dress with Pink Tulips by Joy Gregory (1984) Courtesy of the Artist © Joy Gregory. All rights reserved, DACS

To be fair, there’s also quite a lot in the early rooms about the Asian experience, starting with the very first photos of the 1976 Grunwick strike which was triggered by Asian women walking out of the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in Dollis Hill. In that first room there are photos of Asians protesting about racism, against police violence (again, from the 1970s). The ‘Representing the Black Experience’ room also contains images of many Asians. The Communities room has some quieter photos celebrating Asian communities, religious festivals and so on.

Outside police station, Bethnal Green Road, London E2, 17 July 1978. Sit down protest against police racism, 1978 by Paul Trevor © Paul Trevor

I smiled when I saw the section devoted to Indian-born Canadian photographer Sunil Gupta. Gupta also has a wall dedicated to him at the Barbican exhibition of contemporary Indian art, and had no fewer than three sections dedicated to him in the Barbican’s epic exhibition about Masculinity.

Why is Sunil Gupta so popular with art curators? Because he is Asian and gay and so ticks two boxes in the curator’s diversity and inclusion checklist. No exhibition of 1980s or ’90s photography dare be without its Sunil Guptas. Now, you may love Gupta’s work but I found the photos at the Barbican and again, here, very meh. He is represented by ‘Pretended Family Relationships which juxtaposes portraits of queer couples with the legislative wording of Section 28 in order to subvert the blah blah bah. They seemed very average to me, but they are gay activism, so he’s in!

Anyway, despite the Asian presence in many of the photos, the word ‘Asian’ appears precisely once in the exhibition guide while the word ‘Black’ appears 27 times. Draw your own conclusion.

And were they any other ethnic groups in the UK in the 1980s? Apparently not. I tell you a word which doesn’t appear anywhere in the exhibition, which is ‘Jew’. Apparently there were no Jewish photographers in Britain during the 1980s and no Jews to photograph. In the ‘Community’ room there are (inevitably) Black communities, Asian communities and working class communities, but no Jewish community. Didn’t exist or no one bothered to photograph it.

In the same spirit of omission, there are no photos by or of Chinese, Arabs or Muslims. They either didn’t take photographs during the 1980s or have been omitted by the curators. Why? Hispanic communities, all the Brazilians in Stockwell, or European immigrants like the Poles, or the Somalis of Streatham, just to mention ethnic communities I live near? No. Nada.

Because feminism, Black and queer is where the money is. It’s where the academic courses and academic careers are. When I flicked through the exhibition catalogue and saw chapters titled ‘Feminist praxis’ and ‘Challenging colonialism’ I couldn’t help laughing. That’s where the money is, kids. Specialise in those areas and you’ll never be unemployed. Unlike being a trawlerman or a steel worker, being an expert in feminist praxis or post-colonial theory is a career for life.

Underground Classic (John Taylor) by Zak Ové (1986) © Zak Ové

Why Yanks?

Remember I was irritated by the lack of coverage of central events of the 1980s like Chernobyl, Afghan War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and so on while it seemed fine to have stuff about strikes or race riots from the 1970s? You could argue that those pivotal events are omitted because they’re in some sense foreign / happened abroad – which is why I was irritated by the presence of an American photographer, Lyle Ashton Harris, in the exhibition.

Why, you might well ask, are nine photos by American photographer Lyle Ashton Harris (born and works in New York) of American subjects – including one titled ‘Miss America’ – included in an exhibition about Britain and British photographers in the 1980s? Why is one entire wall devoted to four massive self portraits of the American photographer wearing bits of ballet costume?

Constructs 10 to 13 by Lyle Ashton Harris (1989) Tate

Because 1) Harris is Black and queer and, with Tate curators, Black or Queer trumps all other considerations, including the criteria of their own exhibition.

Because 2) America is like heroin to art curators. Everything ends up being about America.

And because 3) it turns out, after a bit of digging, that Tate owns these big Lyle Ashton Harris photos and so, like the room devoted to extensive coverage of Jo Spence and Maud Sulter – whose archives Tate also owns – it’s a good example of the way exhibitions are created around what a gallery already owns, or what curators can cheaply get their hands on, rather than an accurate, objective exploration of the nominal subject matter.

Conclusion

I hope you can see now why I told you this is very much not a photographic history of Britain in the 1980s – it is a selection of ‘radical’ left-wing, feminist, politically committed Black and Asian or LGBTQ+ photographers who were working from the late 1970s through to the early 1990s, some of whose work touches on social or political issues from the time, but a lot simply doesn’t. Unless you consider gay pride or feminism or anti-racism as uniquely 1980s phenomena – which, of course, they very much weren’t and aren’t.

Photos of the white working class

Amid the radical deconstructions of colonialism and the subverting of heteronormative stereotypes and celebrations of the Black Queer Body, there are some powerful photos of British working class life. Two of the best photography exhibitions I’ve ever been to were of Tish Nurtha and Chris Killip at the Photographers’ Gallery in Soho, and both are represented here by half a dozen or so photos of supernatural power. In this vast show they were, however, swamped by so many other images along similar lines, and so neither of them had the devastating power of their Photographers’ Gallery shows.

There’s a set of vividly squalid colour photos by Paul Graham of the unemployed waiting like souls in hell in smelly 1980s job centres. Ken Grant took grim photos of working class people in and around Liverpool. There’s an excellent set of black-and-white photos of working class white people on the Meadow Wall Estate in North Shields taken by Finnish photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen.

Apparently it was in the 1980s that the phrase poverty porn was first used and, somehow, having so many series of stark black-and-white photos of poor people living in squalid or sad circumstances, demonstrated the law of diminishing returns. They began to seem rather samey. Again, this feels like an example of poor curatorship.

Photos of the white middle class

And what about the middle class people, the political, cultural and demographic centre of the United Kingdom? Not just the 13 million who consistently voted for Mrs Thatcher but all the people who made up the bulk of the population: the accountants or lawyers, doctor and dentists, people running family businesses or working at big corporations, the police and fire and ambulance services, people who worked in local government, the social services, in thousands of care homes, in the hundreds of thousand of charities, ordinary people? Not Black or gay or radical feminists or horribly impoverished Brits, but run-of-the-mill, ordinary people like the hundreds I saw visiting this exhibition, people like you or me?

Well, it was hard to not to conclude that these kinds of people, what you could call the white bourgeoisie, appear in this exhibition solely to be mocked and ridiculed. Anna Fox is represented by a series titled Work Stations which satirises people working in London offices. These are horribly vivid colour shots of ordinary office workers captured in the most awkward and unflattering poses, accompanied by ironic captions pinched from business articles and magazines in order to take the piss out of them and their values. Here’s a prime example. The text under the photo reads ‘Fortunes are being made that are in line with the dreams of avarice’, from Business magazine 1987.

Work Stations, Café, the City. Salesperson by Anna Fox (1988) © Anna Fox. The Hyman Collection, Courtesy of the Centre for British Photography

Next to Fox is the Old Master of colour photodocumentary, Martin Parr, represented by works from his ‘Cost of Living’ series (1986 to 1989). Parr felt the kind of people he mixed with, the comfortably-off middle class, had been systematically under-represented by 1970s and ’80s photography, so he set out to depict them. So he simply went along to art gallery openings, garden parties, Conservative party fetes, and photographed the people he saw. Because it’s Parr deploying his customary, unforgiving colour technique, all these people come out looking extraordinarily awkward and ugly, just like the people in the Anna Fox series.

The mere fact that an expert on contemporary photography believed that this huge tranche of the British population, the middle classes, the inhabitants of Middle England, was under-represented in his medium speaks volumes about the narrow ideological focus of the photography of his day. And the way both Fox and Parr’s photos are described as ‘satirical’ confirms how this huge class of people have become, as pictorial subjects, almost an outsider group in their own country.

Installation view of the ‘satirising the white bourgeoisie’ corner at ‘The 80s: Photographing Britain’ at Tate Britain, with the Anna Fox sequence at the back, Martin Parr on the right. Photo © Tate (Jai Monaghan)

Near to the Parr ‘mocking the middle classes’ photos is a selection of 9 photos from the 26 in the famous series Gentlemen by Karen Knorr. Knorr was given permission to photograph the very posh members of the most exclusive gentlemen’s clubs in London’s St James’s district. Beautifully staged and shot, she then ironically undercut the images with texts taken from news reports and parliamentary speeches (just as Fox had done with her office workers). Again, the aim is to mock and satirise.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that all of the depictions of the English middle classes in this exhibition are associated with irony and satire. Now, nobody takes the mickey out of the Black or Asian or women subjects – they are all portrayed as dignified or joyous or righteously angry. But posh white people? Look at the ugly, rich, privileged wankers air kissing, answering phones, stuffing their faces!

The Colour Photography room gives interesting explanations of the technological developments which made colour photography cheaper and better – but it, also, flays its white subjects mercilessly. It includes another series by Parr, his famous seaside scenes, The Last Resort, in which everyone is captured in bright colour with unforgiving candour.

Next to them are half a dozen similarly merciless photos of very ordinary people in Welsh supermarkets by Paul Reas. Like Parr’s photos, like Fox’s series, these seem so pitilessly unflattering as to be actively cruel. The Photography of Cruelty. Or maybe just mockery. Look at the poor white chavs.

Hand of Pork, Caerphilly, South Wales by Paul Reas (1988) © Paul Reas. Martin Parr Foundation

White trash, Black gods

The humiliation of white chavs and poshos in Parr and Fox and Wood’s photos is emphasised by the way that, in the rooms directly before and after them, Black people are depicted in stylish black-and-white photos which make them look dignified, noble or even godlike.

In the room before the white chavs is this set of serious, searching portraits made by Pogus Caesar. They were taken on an Ilford HP 5 camera using 35mm film to achieve a rich grainy effect as he travelled round the country taking shots of people in the street, as far as I can see, solely Black people. They’re really good. Stylish and atmospheric, they dignify and enrich their subjects.

Installation view of ‘The 80s: Photographing Britain’ at Tate Britain showing ‘Into the Light’ by Pogus Caesar (1985 to 89) (photo by the author)

The room after the white trash room is the one titled ‘Black Bodyscapes’, the one featuring photos by Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ajamu X and Lyle Ashton Harris, photos which ‘explore masculinity, sexuality and Blackness’. I dare say these are important issues to the curators but to the ordinary visitor what you see is a set of spectacularly buff Black male bodies. Wow! Gorgeous, hunky men in prime physical condition, what’s not to lust after?

The Golden Phallus by Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1989) © Rotimi Fani-Kayode / Autograph ABP. Courtesy of Autograph ABP

(I first encountered both Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Ajamu X at the drolly titled A Hard Man is Good to Find! exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, and loved them both. I dare say they’re exploring this issue and subverting that stereotype but they are also extraordinarily sexy pictures of beautiful male bodies.)

Anyway, it’s impossible to miss the stark contrast between the dignified Black people in Pogus Caesar, the stunning Black nudes of Fani-Kayode and Ajamu X, and the 15 or so images of the pale, pasty, fat, badly dressed white people captured by Wood, Parr and Reas in the Chavs Room. Step into the Black room to be thrilled. Then back into the white room to be appalled. This isn’t a contrived comparison. The two rooms are right next to each other. They make for an unavoidable and extremely powerful visual contrast.

Autograph ABP versus Tate

Autograph ABP in Hoxton specialises in photography by Black photographers from around the world and is maybe my favourite small gallery in London. Everything I’ve ever seen there has been outstanding. It is a centre of photographic excellence and I was interested to read about its history in the ‘Representing the Black Experience’ room here in this show.

But it also made me wonder, why do I love Black photography at ABP but bridle at the exact same work when it is shown here in Tate Britain? Three reasons. 1) The attitude of the curators. At ABP it is taken for granted that the work is by Black photographers. There may be some stuff about combatting racism, if relevant, but quite often the labels just explain the specifics of the particular project. The ABP curators treat their artists and visitors with respect, as if they’re grown-ups.

Whereas Tate curators can’t stop haranguing their visitors about the horrors of racism and colonialism and the white gaze, as if we’re first year arts students who need to have all the evils of the world explained to us in a tearing hurry. The photographers’ Blackness or queerness becomes the primary thing about them.

This is what I meant be saying the Tate curators treat their artists and works as specimens in extended lectures on their handful of woke topics, about the evils of capitalism and colonialism and racism and sexism, explaining all these issues in words of one syllable or less as if it’s the first time their visitors had ever heard of such things.

So I’m not bridling at the photographers or their works. In other contexts I’ve really loved many of them. I’m reacting very negatively to the patronising tone of Tate’s curators.

2) Individually, many of the works here are great but something negative happens when a load of works by different photographers are all bunched together in a room demonstrating a thesis. So, for example, when I first saw Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s photos, I read the captions about the queer sensibility and undermining stereotypes of Black male sexuality etc, but I also responded to their plain weirdness. To what they look like. These are strange, disconcerting, haunting images which trigger responses beyond the verbal or easily expressed. They did what all good art does which is take you to strange places in the imagination, open doors you didn’t know were there.

But here, lumped together in one room, they feel subservient to the curators’ concerns to lecture us all about the Black Queer Body. This is what I mean by turning art into specimens, pinned like butterflies to a board to make a point.

3) Bulk. Volume. Sheer number. Same point I made about Tish Murtha and Chris Killip. Seen by themselves, their work felt seismic. Bundled together with half a dozen photographers working on the same subject (dirt-poor white communities), and making the same point (Thatcherism, inequality, poverty = bad), a lot of the power and individuality leached out of them.

Message to the curators

  1. Less is more.
  2. If you’re going to group lots of artists together, doing it by their most obvious feature (feminists, Black, queer, working class) tends to diminish their individuality and impact. Think of more imaginative, left-field ways of arranging them. Try to create surprises.
  3. If you claim your exhibition is about a subject, please make an effort to make it fully and adequately about that subject and don’t just restrict it to the handful of woke subjects dear to your hearts plus chucking in some archives you happen to own. Make it about the world, not just the same three curator obsessions (gender, ethnicity, class).

Yet another conclusion

So you can see why, by the end, I was fed up of being lectured about the wonders of queerness and feminism and the Black body and post-colonial identity, and deeply disappointed that so much of the actual history of the 1980s, the global incidents or – just to restrict it to the UK – the key social and media events, and the changing face of technology, music and style which meant so much to me personally, had simply been left out.

This is why the friend I went with thought it was the worst exhibition we’d visited all year: because of its glaring omissions of loads of the things we liked and remembered about the 1980s, because of its systematic rewriting of cultural history to be only about radical left-wing artist-activists, because of its flagrant political bias, because of its mockery of the white middle class which (I’m afraid) I belong to (just like everyone else I saw visiting this show) but, above all, because of its terrible, terrible narrowness of vision.

Well, I’ve given you a strong flavour of my own negative reaction to the thing, but I’ve also tried to give an accurate summary of the exhibition structure, objective summaries of all the rooms, and a good selection of the images, along with the curators’ own words.

This is a massive, exhausting and deeply problematic exhibition – but there’s lots of very good stuff in it and maybe you’ll have a completely different response. Go along and make your own mind up.

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Posted by Simon on December 21, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/12/21/the-80s-photographing-britain-tate-britain/

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (1913)

LIZA [rising and squaring herself determinedly]: He’s off his chump, he is. I don’t want no balmies teaching me.
(Eliza Doolittle’s very reasonable reaction to Henry Higgins’s impulsive suggestion that he become her tutor, Pygmalion, Act 2)

Pygmalion is by far George Bernard Shaw’s most famous play, turned into a British film in 1938, into the Broadway musical ‘My Fair Lady’ in 1956, and then into the multi-Oscar winning movie of the musical, starring Audrey Hepburn, in 1964.

It exists in two versions, the original 1914 version and a 1941 version to which Shaw added several sequences in light of helping write the screenplay for the 1938 movie. Having ground my way through his earlier plays, I hadn’t expected it to be quite so brilliantly funny as it is. It’s a comic masterpiece and I was surprised how little needed to be changed to turn it into the musical.

Act 1. The portico of St Paul’s church, Covent Garden

A random cross-section of Londoners take shelter from a sudden downpour of rain. It starts out with dialogue between a middle-class mother and her disapproving daughter, Clara, who demand that their wet harassed son, Freddy, finds them a cab. There arrives a Cockney flower seller who tries to hawk her flowers to all the shelterers-from-the-rain.

One of the crowd points out that there’s a bloke here taking notes of everything in a notebook, maybe he’s a copper’s nark. The flowerseller becomes alarmed and protests she wasn’t doing anything wrong in strident Cockney tones. Once drawn to everyone’s attention the note taker, obviously a man of education, amuses himself and entertains the crowd by saying precisely whereabouts in London the flowerseller, the mother and daughter, and other members of the crowd are from.

There’s another gentleman among the crowd, and he politely asks the note taker how he is able to locate people so accurately.

THE NOTE TAKER: Simply phonetics. The science of speech. That’s my profession; also my hobby. Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby! You can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue. I can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.

He goes on to explain to the Gentleman that he makes quite a good living giving elocution lessons. And while the flowerseller moans that he’s out to get her, the note taker makes the bet which is the core of the story:

THE NOTE TAKER: You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party. I could even get her a place as lady’s maid or shop assistant, which requires better English. That’s the sort of thing I do for commercial millionaires. And on the profits of it I do genuine scientific work in phonetics…

At which point the two posh men introduce themselves. The note taker introduces himself as Henry Higgins, author of Higgins’s Universal Alphabet, and the gentleman is none other than Colonel Pickering, author of Spoken Sanscrit, who’s come all the way from India to meet Higgins. They agree to go off to Pickering’s hotel, the Carlton, for dinner and further conversation.

All through this the flowergirl has continued to pester them, although Pickering insists he really has no change to give her. Higgins is just as dismissive, so dismissive that in a strop, the flowergirl flings her entire basket of flowers at his feet. The church bell chimes and, realising how uncharitable he’s being, Higgins tosses into it all the change he had in his pocket, before the two gentlemen exit to dinner.

The 1941 version adds a scene where we follow the flowergirl getting a cab to Angel Court, Drury Lane, and follow her up to her squalid room, an epitome of real poverty, where she counts the money Higgins tossed her with glee, before getting into bed.

Act 2. Higgins’s laboratory in his flat in Wimpole Street

Higgins has just finished giving Colonel Pickering a comprehensive tour of his recording and transcription devices, when his housekeeper, Mrs Pearce, announces the arrival of the flowerseller. She enters dressed up to the nines and announces she heard Higgins talking about elocution lessons the night before, and she wants some. For the first time she tells us her name, Eliza Dolittle.

Amid four-way banter between resentful Eliza, scornful Mrs Pearce, brutal Higgins and courteous Colonel, the latter says he’ll pay the costs of all her lessons if Higgins can train her so well that she passes for a lady at the ambassador’s forthcoming party and Higgins accepts the bet:

HIGGINS [becoming excited as the idea grows on him]: What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day. I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe.

So Higgins says he’ll start the experiment straightaway and orders Mrs Pearce to take Eliza to the bathroom, strip her, throw away her filthy clothes, give her a thorough wash and order some proper clothes from Whiteleys, despite Eliza’s protestations at being treated like an object. Most of the comedy derives from how brutally direct Higgins is.

PICKERING [in good-humored remonstrance]: Does it occur to you, Higgins, that the girl has some feelings?
HIGGINS [looking critically at her]: Oh no, I don’t think so. Not any feelings that we need bother about. [Cheerily] Have you, Eliza?

Or his wonderful devil-may-care insouciance.

PICKERING: Excuse me, Higgins; but I really must interfere. Mrs. Pearce is quite right. If this girl is to put herself in your hands for six months for an experiment in teaching, she must understand thoroughly what she’s doing.
HIGGINS: How can she? She’s incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?

So the plan is agreed that Eliza will come and live with Higgins, be supervised by Mrs Pearce and taught not only how to speak, but how to behave, like a gentlewoman.

The bathroom scene (added in 1941) where Mrs Pearce takes Eliza up to the spare room which will be hers and introduces her to a bath, which she has never seen before. ‘I dursn’t. It’s not natural; it would kill me. I’ve never had a bath in my life.’

Meanwhile, Pickering is seriously asking whether Higgins is a gentleman when it comes to women. Higgins boisterously assures him that he detests women and the undermining influence they have. He is a confirmed old bachelor.

Mrs Pearce enters (with Eliza’s lice-infested hat) and sternly asks Professor Higgins not to swear in front of Eliza. He loftily insists that he never swears but Mrs Pearce is not to be brow-beaten. She goes on to ask him to mind his manners more, particularly his table manners, to which Higgins reacts with angry scorn until she lists his bad table manners. Pickering is greatly tickled by all this and it is all quite brilliant comedy.

An extra layer of comedy comes from the way Higgins, with his excitable enthusiasms and blunt rude manner, sees himself as the soul of amiability and politeness; from his lack of self awareness.

No sooner is this scene concluded than Mrs Pearce re-enters to announce the arrival of Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle. This also is brilliantly comedic because, rather than waiting to hear what Alfred has to say, Higgins launches straight in on a ferocious attack, accusing Alfred of a plan and ruse to send his daughter to his house then accuse him of abducting her. It is nothing short of blackmail, he says he’s going to phone the police, goes to the table and picks up the telephone receiver.

As you can imagine, Alfred Doolittle loses all the self righteousness he came with and is thrown on the defensive, explaining that he hadn’t heard from Eliza for two months till he bumped into a ‘boy’ Eliza took in the cab to Higgins’s house for a jaunt. When she learned she was going to stay, she sent the boy back to fetch her stuff from her rooms. Alfred bumped into this boy in the pub and learned about his daughter moving in with a gentleman and he’s come to see what it’s all about.

Higgins, in his aggressive style, tells Alfred he can take Eliza back, now, right now, and rings for Mrs Pearce and tells her to hand the girl over to her father. Mrs Pearce protests she has no clothes since she burned the old ones as requested. In his usual style, Higgins doesn’t care, her father can carry her naked through the streets of London for all he cares.

Alfred protests and asks to talk man to man (so Mrs Pearce discreetly leaves). Alfred tells Higgins he can have his daughter for £5. When Pickering delicately points out that Higgins is not installing Eliza as a mistress, Alfred righteously says of course not; if he thought that was the case, he’d ask for £50! Which made me laugh out loud.

When Pickering and Higgins are revolted by this venality Doolittle gives a droll speech about being one of the ‘undeserving poor’:

DOOLITTLE: Undeserving poverty is my line…I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth.

And humorously explains he has just as much right to the basics of life and a bit of a laugh as what the (hypocritical) middle classes call the ‘deserving’ poor.

DOOLITTLE: What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

Higgins is so impressed by the man’s blarney that he gives him a fiver. As he opens the door to leave he nearly bumps into a vision of beauty dressed in a kimono. He doesn’t recognise his own daughter, and Higgins and Pickering are just as astounded. They have a bit of repartee, then he leaves.

Eliza gives her impressions of having a bath, and putting on clean clothes, expresses her horror at seeing a mirror, then it’s announced that the new clothes have been delivered and she and Mrs Pearce exit. This really ought to be the end of this long act but Shaw, prolix as ever, added a further scene as an example of the kind of lessons Higgins set about giving Eliza.

Which allows Shaw to jump past months and months of similarly painful elocution lessons, to the eve of her first presentation in polite society.

Act 3. The drawing room of Henry’s mother, Mrs Higgins

Which Shaw, as usual, describes in pedantic detail, describing the William Morris furniture and curtains and the precise style of the paintings on the walls. There is absolutely nothing over which Shaw is not a finicky precisionist.

Enter Higgins in a flushed hurry as always. Mrs H is horrified and tells him to go home, reminding him that he offends all her friends but Henry refuses to take no for an answer. He’s invited Eliza to the ‘at home’ and is nervous how she’ll perform.

By one of those wild coincidences which is allowed in comic novels or plays (in fact adds to the comic mood) Mrs Higgins’s guests are the very same family we met fussing about getting a cab in the rain in Act 1, namely Mrs Eynsford Hill, her son Frederick and daughter Clara.

Enter a transformed Eliza who looks and speaks brilliantly in front of pukka guests who, however, all have a nagging feeling that they’ve met her before though they can’t remember where (which plays up the irony of Eliza being the common flower girl they were all trying to avoid in the first act).

Eliza impresses until, that is, she starts telling a long story about her aunt who she thinks was ‘done in’ and Henry’s work quickly unravels, very amusingly. But not before the posh daughter of the guests (Clara) is delighted by what she takes to be the latest racy slang and the posh son (Frederick) falls in love at first sight.

Higgins signals to Eliza that it’s time for her to leave and the Eynsford Hills get up to leave, also. Once alone with her son, Mrs Higgins is cross with him and Pickering for not having considered what will happen to Eliza after their experiment is concluded. She will have become too highfalutin’ to return to her career as a flower seller but have no money to support the position in society her new accent requires. Neither Pickering or Higgins had given this a second’s thought which is why she calls them ‘a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll’ and ‘ two infinitely stupid male creatures’.

Act 4. Higgins’s rooms

A few months later Pickering and Higgins return late at night from a series of special engagements where Eliza passed herself as an upper class woman. Pickering congratulates Higgins and agrees to pay the wager (the cost of Eliza’s course of elocution lessons, and her outfits). Neither of them pay any attention to Eliza who has a fit and throws his slippers at self-obsessed, rude, bullying Higgins.

LIZA: I’d like to kill you, you selfish brute. Why didn’t you leave me where you picked me out of – in the gutter? You thank God it’s all over, and that now you can throw me back again there, do you?… What am I fit for? What have you left me fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to do? What’s to become of me?… Now you’ve made a lady of me I’m not fit to sell anything else. I wish you’d left me where you found me.

She takes off the fine jewellery she’s wearing and shoves it at him, and takes off the ring she’s wearing and flings it at him and tauntingly asks how much of what she’s wearing is hers since they burned all her clothes when she arrived. Higgins is furious at her attitude and says she can take the whole houseful of clothes for all he cares, tells her to give instructions to Mrs Pearce for his breakfast and exist. Later that night Eliza packs her things and does a bunk.

Act 5. Mrs Higgins’s house

At Mrs Higgins’s house again where Henry and Pickering come to tell her that Eliza’s done a bunk. Mrs H has to explain to her son that neither of them treated Eliza with any respect or gave her any credit for her achievements.

Alfred Doolittle arrives wearing super smart wedding dress due to a wildly improbable sub-plot. Turns out Henry, in correspondence with an American millionaire about devising a universal language, mentioned in passing that Alfred was one of the most remarkable moral philosophers in England today, and so this millionaire left Alfred in his will ‘a share in his Pre-digested Cheese Trust worth three thousand a year on condition that I lecture for his Wannafeller Moral Reform World League as often as they ask me up to six times a year.’

Doolittle laments that the money is going to ruin him – it’s going to make an honest man of him and force him to live by middle-class morality. As an example of middle-class morality he wails that all his relatives, with whom he previously had very little contact, are now getting in touch to sponge off him. He’s dressed up like this because the first requirement of middle-class morality is to get married and so he’s feeling compelled to marry his latest lover, much against both of their wishes.

In the middle of all this Mrs Higgins staggers Henry by revealing that Eliza is upstairs. She came seeking refuge the night before and Mrs Higgins graciously took her in. Mrs Higgins proceeds to lecture Pickering and Henry on how abominably they’ve treated the girl. Henry whines that Eliza threw his slippers at him but Mrs Higgins replied that, if it had been her, she’d have thrown her fire tongs!

Eliza enters acting very self possessed and quite beautiful. She and Mrs Higgins tell Henry a few home truths, starting with how he treated her like an object in an experiment. By contrast her real education in how to be a lady she attributes to Colonel Pickering who treated her with kindness and respect.

Pickering is genuinely fond of Eliza and repeatedly begs her to come back and live with them. Then he, Alfred and Mrs Higgins all go off to the wedding, leaving Eliza and Henry to have a long final scene between them. This is one long argument in which Eliza wails that all she wants is a little respect:

LIZA [much troubled] I want a little kindness. I know I’m a common ignorant girl, and you a book-learned gentleman; but I’m not dirt under your feet.

Henry softens a little, saying he’d quite like her to come back as he’s grown accustomed to her face. But they quickly fall to quarreling and he’s back to calling her an ungrateful idiot and she calling him a cruel tyrant etc.

This could go on all day but is drawn to a conclusion by two things. First, Eliza tells Henry that Freddy Eynsford Hill is in love with her and wants to marry her, which makes Henry burst out in contemptuous laughter.

But what finally breaks the deadlock is when Eliza has a brainwave and declares she could become a teacher of phonetics, just like Henry. In fact Henry had often commented that she had a better ear than him. Yes, she could earn a pretty living. This infuriates Henry who accuses her of ripping off everything he’s taught her but she is delighted that she’s cut through his hard skin and bluster and genuinely scored a point.

LIZA: What a fool I was not to think of it before! You can’t take away the knowledge you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can. Aha! That’s done you, Henry Higgins, it has. Now I don’t care that [snapping her fingers] for your bullying and your big talk. I’ll advertise it in the papers that your duchess is only a flower girl that you taught, and that she’ll teach anybody to be a duchess just the same in six months for a thousand guineas. Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.

To his own surprise, Henry admits that it is a good idea. Above all it will make her independent instead of a millstone round his neck. Yes, he rather likes her like this, strong and independent. She can come and live with him and Pickering and they can be three bachelors together.

But at this moment Mrs Higgins re-enters to say the carriage has arrived to take them all to Alfred’s wedding and Eliza says, Yes, she’s ready. Patronising to the end, Henry asks Eliza to convey a message to Mrs Pearce about the shopping but Eliza simply replies that she’s passed all this information along already and can’t imagine how he’s going to manage when she leaves, and exits.

Mrs Higgins lingers long enough to tell her son that he has quite literally spoiled the girl but Henry humorously replies that she’s not to worry. Eliza is going to marry dim lovestruck Freddy and at the thought he bursts into hysterical laughter.

THE END.

Shaw’s controlling stage directions

As usual, I am a bit staggered by the minute control Shaw exercises over every aspect of the play. There is no detail of the sets, the costumes of the characters, their every gesture and line of dialogue, which Shaw doesn’t fuss over and dictate. There are the long, detailed and often very opinionated descriptions of each set which open each act. Then there are the countless pieces of dialogue are heavily directed by the stage directions in the text:

HIGGINS [revolted]
DOOLITTLE [unabashed]
HIGGINS [troubled]
DOOLITTLE [with fatherly pride]
MRS. PEARCE [blandly]
HIGGINS [impressively]
DOOLITTLE [evasively]

And so on and so on and so on. And then the notes in the New Mermaid edition by Shaw scholar L.W. Conolly bring this out even more, citing the refinements and additions Shaw made in the 1941 version, as well as countless notes for actors and directors he scribbled in the playbooks used to direct actual productions.

For example, when Higgins threatens Eliza that Mrs Pearce will thrash her with a broomstick, Shaw specifies that at this line, Eliza should grasp the back of a chair in fear (p.40); or correcting the actress playing Mrs Pearce who spoke the line ‘I won’t allow it, It’s you that are wicked’ with anger that, on the contrary, it should be spoken ‘steadily and quietly’ (p.36); or specifying that Eliza should throw the slippers at Higgins with real violence (p.93).

Summary

Act 1: Introducing Henry Higgins the phonologist, Colonel Pickering his fan and Eliza Doolittle the Cockney flower seller, taking shelter from the rain in the portico of St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, with a few other Londoners and a middle-class mother and daughter nagging their (grown-up) son to get them a cab. In explaining who he is, Higgins says he offers lessons in elocution which the stubbornly persistent flower girl overhears.

Act 2: Eliza calls at Higgins’ apartment for lessons and Pickering and Higgins make a bet whether the latter can improve her elocution and manners so completely in 6 months that Eliza can pass for a duchess. To this end she will move in with Higgins and Pickering (and their housekeeper Mrs Pearce), be taught manners and elocution.

Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle, a navvy and dustman, turns up expecting some kind of recompense for having his daughter abducted. Higgins is so ferociously aggressive, accusing Alfred of planning to blackmail the two bachelors, that Alfred is thrown right back on the defensive, but leaves with £5 which is just enough for him and his fancy woman to go on a spree.

Act 3: A few months later Henry brings a transformed Eliza to one of his mother’s ‘at homes’ where she looks and speaks brilliantly in front of pukka guests. Until, that is, she starts telling a long story about her aunt who she thinks was ‘done in’ and Henry’s work quickly unravels. But not before the posh daughter of the guests (Clara) is delighted by what she takes to be the latest racy slang and the posh son (Frederick) falls in love at first sight.

Act 4: A few months later Pickering and Higgins return late at night from a series of special engagements where Eliza passed herself as an upper class woman. Pickering congratulates Higgins and pays up the wager. Neither of them pay any attention to Eliza who has a fit and throws his slippers at self-obsessed, rude, bullying Higgins. Later that night she packs her things and does a bunk.

Act 5: At Mrs Higgins’s house again where Henry and Pickering come to tell her that Eliza’s done a bunk. Mrs H has to explain to her son that neither of them treated Eliza with any respect or gave her any credit for her achievements. Alfred Doolittle arrives wearing smart wedding dress due to the legacy from the American millionaire. Eliza enters and declares she won’t return to their flat and complains about Henry’s bullying insensitive behaviour. A very long argument between the pair ends with Eliza having the brainwave that she could become a teacher of elocution and marry lovestruck Freddy Eynsford Hill and she exits, along with Mrs Higgins, Colonel Pickering and Alfred for the latter’s weeding, leaving Henry helpless with mirth at the thought of his transformed flower seller marrying an upper-class twit.

The preface and sequel

The play has both a preface (5 pages) and what Shaw describes as a ‘Sequel’ (11 pages).

Preface

This is the usual inconsequential ramble. Shaw claims the notation of the English language is a shambles and requires an energetic phonetic expert to revise it. He names various phonetics experts from the 1870s and ’80s before alighting on the figure of English philologist, phonetician and grammarian Henry Sweet. Shaw devotes a page to this stubborn, contrarian character, and the difficulties of the form of shorthand he created which fell victim to the superior marketing strategy of the Pitman system. This is what I mean by ‘rambling’. He claims the University of Oxford never gave Sweet the credit he deserved, then goes on:

I do not blame Oxford, because I think Oxford is quite right in demanding a certain social amenity from its nurslings (heaven knows it is not exorbitant in its requirements!); for although I well know how hard it is for a man of genius with a seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the best places for less important subjects which they profess without originality and sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect them to heap honours on him.

See how difficult it is to make out what Shaw is on about half the time? Anyway, the point of this windy preface is apparently to point out that Sweet (1845 to 1912) was not Shaw’s model for Henry Higgins, which all seems excessive for an audience who have never heard of Henry Sweet and never thought he was the model for Henry Higgins.

At the end of the preface, with uncharacteristic brevity, Shaw says the play had one simple aim:

If the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among the most important people in England at present, it will serve its turn.

The play’s politics

It is worth stopping to consider this statement for a moment. Shaw was a member of the Fabian Society which believed sweeping reform of British society was necessary to achieve greater equality, but that it should be constitutional, parliamentary reform, not violent revolution.

Because of ‘My Fair Lady’ it’s tempting to see the play as simply a brilliant entertainment. But seen through Shaw’s Fabian prism, he is attacking, not the economic basis of British class structure but one of its most powerful symptoms or markers, snobbery about speech. All the modern debates about whether Eliza and Henry love each other, whether Higgins is a closet gay, whether Eliza becomes a strong independent feminist or remains the doll of two old misogynists – it is easy to forget the genuinely revolutionary intent of the play’s thesis: how we speak determines how we are perceived in society, society’s revolting inequalities are there for everyone to see in Britain’s howling snobbery about our accents and dialects, and it’s from this socialist perspective that Shaw says the phoneticians ‘are among the most important people in England at present’. So Pygmalion is very much an issue play but it’s worth trying to get back behind the feminist interpretations which now dominate discussion of the play, closer to Shaw’s original intent of attacking one of the bastions of Britain’s radically unequal and repressive society.

On a practical front, do you think anyone who saw the musical or watches the movie ‘My Fair Lady’ has ever been educated into realising there was a caste of men called the phoneticians and that they were ‘among the most important people in England at present’? No. Me neither. Authors, like artists, often have a grossly exaggerated sense of their impact on society which, by and large, is pretty close to zero.

The sequel (1916)

Shaw was furious when the actors in the British premiere of the play changed the scene to imply that Higgins and Eliza were on the verge of falling in love. Indeed this wish to have the lead protagonists end their bickering with a lovely romance has plagued interpretations and is the ending enshrined in the 1938 movie, the Broadway musical and Hollywood movie versions.

Shaw bitterly regretted describing the play as ‘A romance in five acts’ and ended up writing this ‘Sequel’ to try and clarify matters. For a start he says he called it a romance not in the sense that the hero and heroine get married at the end (they don’t) but simply because the transfiguration in Eliza seems fantastical, like something from an ancient myth of medieval legend.

You’d have thought this would be a simple point to make but somehow Shaw launches into a farrago of twaddle about why some men and women marry and others remain unmarried, a windy discourse unenlightened by any contact with Freud or any form of psychology, sociology, feminism or any school of thought except Shaw’s egregious satisfaction with his own genius and intolerable fondness for the sound of his own voice. If you think I’m being unfair, here’s an example:

When we look round and see that hardly anyone is too ugly or disagreeable to find a wife or a husband if he or she wants one, whilst many old maids and bachelors are above the average in quality and culture, we cannot help suspecting that the disentanglement of sex from the associations with which it is so commonly confused, a disentanglement which persons of genius achieve by sheer intellectual analysis, is sometimes produced or aided by parental fascination.

As with the preface, this is 1) quite hard to understand – taking several readings to comprehend its full intent – at which point 2) you realise it’s useless.

But after a few pages like this Shaw gets round to the point he wants to make which is that: Henry Higgins for not, repeat not marry Eliza. Eliza marries Freddy. That’s the point the Sequel exists to make, emphasise and ram home, contrary to all producers, adapters and screenwriters who wanted Higgins and Eliza to end up an item.

Shaw goes on to elaborate on the young couple’s fortunes. They are poor because Freddy has no education and no prospects. The Colonel gives them £500 but this eventually runs out. Alfred refuses to subsidise his daughter because he has become a social success in the highest circles (dining with dukes) and this turns out to be very expensive, soaking up his £4,000 a year.

So Eliza asks if she can move in with the Wimpole Street bachelors and they agree, bringing Freddy, too. Henry objects to her teaching phonetics so she gives that up. Instead she recurs to the suggestion that she’d floated during the play of opening a flowershop and this is exactly what she and Freddy do, at South Kensington tube station. I go through there regularly to exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This fictional nugget has changed my view of that busy tube station forever; I’ll imagine Eliza there bustling over her buttonholes.

For some reason the Sequel contains a lengthy digression about the fate of Clara Eynsford Hill, Freddy’s sister, who Shaw seems much more concerned with than Eliza. She is a snobbish failure whose eyes are opened by the novels of H.G. Wells (who was, of course, a friend of Shaw’s). These (I think) make her see her life and values are all wrong but also make her determined to meet her hero which she finally does, for half an hour at a garden party, remaining dazzled for weeks afterwards. She happens to mention all this to the owner of a furniture shop who is also a ‘Wellsian’ who promptly hires Clara in the hope that she will attract Wells to the shop and effect a meeting. It is on this whimsical basis that Clara gets a job. It causes an almighty row with her mother who hoped her children would be above ‘trade’ but it means that the battle of trade has already been fought when a few weeks later Freddy shows up to tell mother he’s opening a flower shop with Eliza, and Mrs Eynsford Hill just gives up. The real puzzle about all this rambling digression is why on earth Shaw felt it necessary to drag his friend Wells into this farrago and include a physical description of him at the garden party where Clara meets him?

She had made up her mind that, cost what it might, she would see Mr. Wells in the flesh; and she had achieved her end at a garden party. She had better luck than so rash an enterprise deserved. Mr. Wells came up to her expectations. Age had not withered him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety in half an hour. His pleasant neatness and compactness, his small hands and feet, his teeming ready brain, his unaffected accessibility, and a certain fine apprehensiveness which stamped him as susceptible from his topmost hair to his tipmost toe, proved irresistible.

Is this a description written by a friend or an enemy? Either way, why on earth does Shaw give such prominence to his frenemy, placing him at the centre of this odd story?

Anyway, the flower business almost fails, repeatedly bailed out by the Colonel, much to Henry’s howling amusement, until Pickering insists they learn book-keeping to run it properly. This involves a course at the London School of Economics and Eliza begging Henry to show her how to write which turned into an intensive course in fine calligraphy, which led to them spending a fortune on unnecessarily high quality paper.

But meanwhile the business actually began to prosper, especially when they branched out into vegetables (asparagus being particularly profitable). She is a regular at Wimpole Street where she considers the Colonel the father she never had, but she has ferocious fights with Henry, and more than stands her own ground. In fact sometimes the Colonel asks her to be kind to poor Higgins. Sometimes she has fantasies about whisking him away to a desert island and using her wiles to force him to make love to her. But in real life, she likes the Colonel and sturdily dislikes Henry Higgins and that’s how it remains.

Henry Higgins in modern London

Although the play still has currency among the white middle classes who go to the theatre, and the movie appeals to all soft-hearted fans of the radiant Audrey Hepburn, its subject is receding into a historical past, into an ended era.

There are still plenty of chavs and proles who speak as roughly as Eliza but London, where the play is set, is now a staggeringly multicultural city. Higgins prides himself on being able to place a Londoner’s birthplace to within a few miles based on their accents. But most Londoners now weren’t born in London, many of them weren’t even born in England, and English isn’t their first language. According to the most recent data, the percentage of Londoners born in London may now be as low as 25%, and as many as 41% of current Londoners were not born in the UK.

In West London out towards Heathrow, a modern-day Higgins would have more grist detecting which part of India a person came from; in south London where I live, he would be challenged to decide which Caribbean island his random Londoners came from. But these are only two groups among the hundreds of nationalities and ethnicities which throng contemporary London. A modern-day Higgins would be just as challenged to determine which bit of Poland or Albania or Somalia or Ukraine or China a modern Londoner originated from.

The play and the movie feel nostalgic because they refer to a London, and an England, which have been abolished.

Credit

‘Pygmalion’ by George Bernard Shaw was first published in 1914. I read it in the 2008 New Mermaid paperback edition, edited with an introduction by L.W. Conolly who is extremely knowledgeable but, alas, American.

Related link

Bernard Shaw reviews

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Posted by Simon on November 6, 2024

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The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen (1884)

‘Oh really! There’s no end to all these comings and goings!’
(Hjalmar Ekdal accurately summarising the busyness of an Ibsen play)

The backstory is carefully concealed and takes two acts to leak out but it is this: a generation ago Old Ekdal and Haakon Werle were in business together. Something happened whereby Old Ekdal was sent to prison, to do hard labour, and emerged a broken man, whereas Werle went on to become a business tycoon, managing a booming timber company. The play starts 20 or so years later and focuses on the sons of these two men, Hjalmar Ekdal, Old Ekdal’s son (who has become a photographer and lives in shabby poverty with his uneducated, former-serving girl wife Gina) – and rich old Werle’s son, Gregers Werle, who has grown up in a wealthy household but has a yen to improve the world. Feeling guilty for his unspecified role in Old Ekdal’s fate, Werle has given broken old Ekdel a sinecure of a job ‘copying’ papers which helps keep the Ekdal household afloat, but otherwise keeps him hidden away like a shameful secret…

Cast

  • Werle – merchant, factory owner and so on
  • Gregers Werle – his son
  • Mrs Sörby – Werle’s housekeeper who he plans to marry
  • Old Ekdal, broken, alcoholic fantasist
  • Hjalmar Ekdal – Old Ekdal’s son, a photographer
  • Gina Ekdal – Hjalmar’s wife
  • Hedvig – their daughter, 14 years old
  • Dr Relling – a doctor who lives downstairs from the Ekdals
  • Molvik – a former theology student who lives downstairs from the Ekdals
  • Graberg – book-keeper to Werle
  • Pettersen – servant to Werle
  • Jensen – hired waiter

Act 1

A grand dinner at Werle’s house which he is giving for his son, Gregers. The pair, father and son, don’t get on and only communicate via business letters. Werle is cross that Gregers invited his old schoolfriend Hjalmar because it took the number of guests to unlucky 13. We are introduced to two or three of the guests who are portrayed as fat and greedy (and named only as types – the bald guest, the fat guest, the short-sighted guest) although it is also repeated that they move in ‘Court circles’, strongly suggesting the ambience of wealth and influence which old Werle operates in.

The play starts in a studiedly indirect way: instead of going straight in with the main characters we are shown below-stairs chat between Werle’s servants, gossiping about the old man, about his reputation for being a lad when he was young and about the fate of Old Ekdal, hiw one-time business partner who ended up in prison.

The main events in Act 1 are:

1. Gregers talks to his old school-friend Hjalmar who he hasn’t seen for years and discovers that a) his training as a photographer was funded by Werle and b) Hjalmar married a former servant woman at the Werle house, Gina Hansen.

Interrupting this, Old Ekdal himself appears, he’s been working late with a colleague named Graberg the book-keeper and, the other gates being locked, the only way the pair can exit is via the living room where the grand party is happening. Old Ekdal’s appearance is like Banquo’s ghost, all the guests fall silent as he shuffles across the room and his own son, Hjalmar, turns to the fireplace in order to ignore him. Shame all round…once he’s gone conversation picks up and Mrs Sörby promises to play the piano to entertain the guests.

After interacting badly with the rich sophisticated guests (very pointedly he is made not to understand the idea that ‘vintage’ wines are older and more valued), Hjalmar makes his apologies and leaves. The other guests are being entertained by Werle’s housekeeper Mrs Sörby in the back room, which allows for:

2. A confrontation between Gregers and his father in which all kinds of things come out:

  • it was Werle who set Hjalmar up as a photographer, out of guilt at ruining his father
  • around the same time Werle fixed up for Hjalmar to marry the former maid Gina and this was because…
  • Gina was just the latest female servant Werle had been carrying on with, then tired off and so dismissed from his service, sent her home to live with her mother, but engineered her marriage to Hjalmar
  • Werle’s wife, Gregers’s mother, knew all about her husband’s infidelities and told Gregers

As to why Werle has given this whole party for his son, and invited so many outsiders, Werle says he wants to make Gregers a business opportunity, he wants to bring him into the family firm as a partner. But Gregers discerns the Machiavellian scheme beneath this – Werle is going to marry his housekeeper Mrs Sörby and so he set up this party because … he wanted to present a respectable face to the important people in his community – this is why the guests Gregers doesn’t know are at ‘his’ party, because it’s nothing to do with him, it’s to do with his father wanting to put on a show of happy father and son and, by implication, of his son happily accepting his (Werle’s) forthcoming marriage to Mrs Sörby. A tableau for public consumption.

Werle has, typically, used his son, as he always has, and as he always used and betrayed his mother. Gregers is beyond angry, he overflows with contempt for his father, who feels it.

In their final skirmishing Werle renews his offer of a partnership in the business but Gregers turns this down, revealing that he has just discovered a new purpose in life. The rest of the play reveal that this purpose is to save and redeem the much-abused Ekdel family…

Act 2

The setting switches to Hjalmar Ekdel’s photography studio, which is also the main room for Hjalmar and Gina. It’s the same evening as Werle’s dinner. Gina is sitting with their 14-year-old daughter Hedwig. Their conversation is designed to show how poor they are, not illiterate peasant poor but scrimping to make ends meet. Gina talks about the high cost of butter and both are thrilled that they’ve managed to let their spare room which will bring in a bit of extra money.

(Apparently, in the original language Gina’s speech is littered with grammar mistakes and malapropisms i.e. getting words mixed up, to indicate her lack of education, though English translations struggle to convey this.)

Old Ekdal appears with a bundle of documents to copy and shuffles across to his room. Although he tries to hide it Gina and Hedvig realise he’s got a bottle of booze. Years in prison broke him. He is an alcoholic.

Hjalmar arrives, he shows off some of the knowledge he acquired at the party (the banter about vintages) which impresses the girls but Hedvig had been telling Gina how excited she was because he promised to bring her something, but he forgot. He rummages around for the menu from the party to give her but Hedvig can’t help crying with disappointment.

Then Gregers arrives. He is rather shame-faced in front of Gina. His polite enquiries reveal that Hedvig is 14 and Gina and Hjalmar married 15 years ago. I think we are meant to deduce that Hedvig is old Werle’s child i.e. the old man got his serving maid pregnant, sent her home to her mum, who then engineered for her to be married off to the naive Hjalmar.

When she is out of the room fetching their guest a beer, Gina and Hjalmar also reveal that Hedvig has a degenerative disease of the eyes. They haven’t told her but a doctor has confirmed it. When Hjalmar says the doctor said it was hereditary Gregers starts in a way that suggests he realises it was inherited from his father. As in Ghosts, the implication seems to be that sexually transmitted infections are hereditary, which is incorrect. The symptoms of an STI such as syphilis would only be passed to Hedvig if the mother, Gina, had them but here she is apparently right as rain.

The act ends when, as part of telling them about the apartment, Gina and Hjalmar mention that there’s a spare room they want to let out. Now in fact, before the men arrived home, Gina and Hedvig had been gleefully celebrating that they’d managed to let the room and would thus be generating family income but had agreed not to tell Hjalmar till the following day. The result of this decision is that Hjalmar doesn’t know the spare room is let and when Gregers asks if he can have it, Hjalmar promptly says yes, although the girls look at each in mortification.

But the most important part of the act is when Old Man Ekdal insists on letting Gregers into their secret – this is that the entire back part of the loft, which they reveal by rolling apart two sliding doors, is a kind of menagerie: it contains hutches for rabbits and hens along with loads of pigeon roosts.

And Old Ekdal proudly displays his latest acquisition, a wild duck which was shot by Gregers’s father during a shoot, which was winged and fell into the lake and down into the water but was rescued by a plucky hunting dog. They took it back to Werle’s grand house where it didn’t thrive to Werle ordered it killed but his servant, Pettersen, who we met in Act 1, is friendly with Old Ekdal and saved it and passed it on to him. And now it’s been given pride of place in a special manger, here in the Ekdal attic.

Act 3

Same scene, the main room at Hjalmar Ekdal’s which is to be the setting of all the remaining scenes. Next morning. Hjalmar is grumpily getting on with touching up the most recent photographs. He snaps at Gina who has booked a couple to come and have their photo done. It becomes plain that he is a difficult man to live with, partly because he feels the weight of so many responsibilities.

Gregers and Hedvig: Gregers finds himself alone with Hedvig and finds out more about her, discovers that Hjalmar has stopped her going to school (because of the strain on her sight, though she doesn’t know that), promised to home school her but hasn’t found the time. Instead she helps out round the house and spends her spare time in the back room which, besides being a menageries is a lumber room full of old books which she loves to read or rather gaze at the pictures. Hjalmar realises she is a sensitive child full of untapped potential.

Gregers and Hjalmar: a lengthy exchange in which Hjalmar reveals that he doesn’t like photography and leaves most of that to Gina. His heart lies in his inventions. Some of this is tinkering, for example making not just the sliding doors which partition off the menagerie but also a kind of curtain which can be raised from the floor. He also likes stripping down, oiling and fixing his father’s antique rifle. He is, in other words, good with his hands, not with the aesthetics of photography.

And it’s now that Hjalmar reveals to Gregers he’s working on a marvellous invention which will restore the good name of the Ekdel family name. It’s only commitment to this project which keeps his head up above all these ‘petty things’ i.e. the shabby life he is forced to lead. We don’t get any detail about the invention but a strong feeling that Hjalmar is bonkers.

He also has a pistol, in fact to Gregers’ alarm he fires it in the menageries then, realising Hjalmar is here, emerges to explain that he indulges his father’s whim and fantasy that he is a still a proud lieutenant in the army. He places the gun on a shelf telling Hedvig to be careful with it as it still has a round in the chamber.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to instantly suspect that a loaded gun, on a stage, must inevitably go off. From this point onwards the only question is who is going to get killed.

In fact talk of the gun triggers a monologue explaining how brave and proud Lieutenant Ekdel was in his prime, a hunter of bears, a commander of man but reveals that when he was sentenced there was a moment when he was alone with his pistol and put it to his head but… failed to pull the trigger. And then, even more upsettingly, tells Gregers about the time that he, Hjalmar, the son of a disgraced army officer, crushed by circumstance, also held the gun against his breast, but also bottled out – despite all his ill fate, determined to live (p.166).

Trying to make light of all this, Gregers says there’s something of the wild duck about Hjalmar, what with being shot and winged, and mauled by a hunting dog and plunged down to the depths of a lake. He continues the metaphor, telling his friend he is living in a poisoned atmosphere, a swamp (from which Gregers obviously means to save him) but Hjalmar becomes offended and asks him to stop (p.167).

Lunch. Gina has invited to the two men who live downstairs, Dr Relling, a doctor, and Molvik, formerly a student of theology. Lunch is, of course, the setting for several further revelations. Just as the two guests from downstairs are greedily tucking in, Old Ekdal emerges from the loft with a fresh rabbit skin, announcing that he’s just killed, skinned and salted a rabbit. Tender-stomached Molvik makes to vomit and rushes out the room.

But the main revelation is Dr Relling telling everyone that, when he was young, Gregers used to go among the cottages of the labourers up at his father’s works preaching about ‘the claim of the ideal’. In other words, Gregers is an inveterate idealist, preacher and saver of souls. This adds depth to his attempts to heal the Ekdel household.

Hjalmar has just offended everyone, especially Gina, by telling them he doesn’t like the poisonous atmosphere, when there’s a knock at the door. Just as in ‘An Enemy of the People’, the set is busier than Piccadilly Circus.

To everyone’s surprise it is the villain of the piece, old Håkon Werle. He asks to see his son in private so the others vacate the stage. Werle asks Gregers if there’s any chance of his returning home or accepting the partnership in the firm to which his son, inevitably, says No. What does he expect to achieve here? To open Hjalmar’s eyes to the truth. And does he expect Hjalmar to thank him for having his eyes opened?

Lastly the father asks his son if he’s going to return up to the works? No, he regards himself as having quit his employ. How is he going to live? Oh he has a few savings which will last as long as it takes. This exchange strongly confirms the sense that Gregers is going to carry out his mission then kill himself.

His father leaves, the other characters re-enter the stage and Gregers invites Hjalmar for a walk, he has a few things to tell him. Both Relling the doctor and Gina tell him not to go but Hjalmar asks what possible harm could there be?

Well, the audience realises, the vast harm of having the bottom ripped out of his world.

Act 4

Later the same day, Gina had handled the appointment with the couple who wanted to be photographed and is getting anxious about Hjalmar. He arrives home and is a changed man. Gregers has foolishly and selfishly told him everything. For a start he forgets that it’s his daughter’s 15th birthday tomorrow. When she mentions the wild duck he rashly says he wishes he could wring its neck which reduces her to tears. He hugs her and sends her off for her evening walk.

This allows Hjalmar to confront Gina with all the lies she’s told. She clarifies that she didn’t sleep with Werle when she was in her service, it was afterwards, when she’d gone back to live with her mother and her mother encouraged her to in order to make money. So Hedvig is old Werle’s child.

One last point: Gina has always done the household accounts so Hjalmar’s never realised how much money Werle contributed to them, allegedly pay for Old Ekdal’s copying work. Hjalmar thought he was supporting his family but turns out even this is a lie.

Gregers, in his idealistic stupidity, knocks and comes in expecting to find a scene of seraphic sweetness and light so is disappointed to find the couple in deep gloom. Gina curses him. Relling the doctor comes in, quickly learns the situation and warns them all that it’s the children who suffer most in broken marriage.

At which point there’s another knock on the door and it’s Mrs Sörby. She’s come to say goodbye because she’s going up to the works at Höidal because she’s getting married to old Werle. They all react surprised but Dr Relling reminisces when they knew each other when they were younger. At least Werle won’t beat her up like her first husband, now dead. Gregers toys with telling his father his new wife once had a thing for Dr Relling but Mrs Sörby says she’s told her husband-to-be everything about her past, no secrets at all.

She reveals she will be a useful housemeet to Werle considering that he’s going blind. Now we see the genetic link between Werle and Hedvig.

Hjalmar now invokes the same stupid idea Dr Relling accused Gregers of peddling to the labourers, ‘the claim of the ideal’, and in this spirit announces to Mrs Sörby that he pledges to pay off the entire ‘debt of honour’ i.e. all the money Werle has given to his household under cover of paying Old Ekdal. This is, obviously, a stupid and impractical thing to do.

Re-enter Hedvig who is girlishly excited because she met Mrs Sörby going out who gave her an advance present for her birthday, a letter. When she shows it the others realise it is addressed in Old Werle’s hand. Hjalmar opens it and it is a splendid gift from old Werle; that Old Ekdal need do no more work but will be awarded a pension of 100 crowns a month and when he dies, this sum will pass to Hedvig! Hedvig is, of course, thrilled and says she’ll give it to her mummy and daddy and asks why they aren’t happy.

Gregers asks Hjalmar what kind of man he is and, in effect, goads him until Hjalmar calmly tears the letter in two. He then asks Gina why the old man encouraged her to marry him and Gina reluctantly explains that Werle expected to be able to call by and shag her after her marriage. Hjalmar asks Gina point blank whether Hedvig is his child and she says she doesn’t know.

Hjalmar says he can’t stay in the same house a moment longer. Gregers says he must stay in order to win through to ‘that sublime mood of magnanimity and forgiveness’ which he is so obsessed with promoting, like all zealots, like all interfering busybodies.

Hedvig comes out of the kitchen as Hjalmar prepares to leave, he refuses to hug her, she clings on to him screaming, he can’t bear it, pushes her away and walks out. Gina says he’ll go fetch him back and exit.

This leaves Gregers along with Hedvig. She doesn’t understand why her Daddy has left, was it something she did? She mentions the wild duck and Gregers decoys the conversation onto that. Turns out she’s added the wild duck to her regular evening prayer for her father. Gregers makes the preposterous proposal that Hedvig should kill the wild duck as a sacrifice in order to win her father back, to show that she is ready to make the biggest sacrifice in her world for his love.

Gina comes back saying Hjalmar’s gone out with Dr Relling and Molvik on the piss, and ruing the interference of clever strangers.

Act 5

Next morning, heavy snow on the skylights. Gina discovers Hjalmar did go out with the boys the night before and spent the night at Dr Relling’s i.e. downstairs.

Dr Relling arrives and delivers a blistering reality check. he tells Gregers he has a bad case of inflamed scruples; he is addicted to finding heroes to worship who are not heroes at all, like this Hjalmar who was very plausible at college because he was handsome and could quote other people’s ideas and words but was always a hollow man.

Dr Relling goes on to deliver what may be the play’s Big Idea which is the crucial importance of the LIFE-LIE. This is the lie about ourselves which enables us to go on living. Dr Relling has invented a category, the demoniac, to describe Molvik, who wears it as a badge of pride which explains his behaviour. Old Ekdal has invented his own life-lie and treats the loft with its old Christmas trees and rabbits as if it’s a vast forest which the he-man hunter bravely treks through. And Hjamar had a life-lie of himself as Provider for his family who was on the cusp of making the Great Invention which would free his family, until Gregers came along to destroy it.

Gregers disapprovingly asks if Dr Relling equates his ‘life-lie’ with Gregers’ notion of ‘the ideal’ and Dr Relling says, Damn right he does.

Hedvig enters. When Gregers points out that she hasn’t killed the wild duck, Hedvig very sensibly says she woke up this morning and it seemed like a silly idea. Ah, says Gregers, that is because you are a mere child and haven’t learned the ‘joyous spirit of self-sacrifice’. He really is a sanctimonious wanker.

Gregers leaves and Old Ekdal enters from the loft. Hedvig gets him to describe how he would go about hunting and shooting a wild duck – in the chest, that’s the place, he explains. After he’s pottered out Hedvig goes over to the shelf where Hjalmar left the pistol with one bullet in it and is touching it when Gina enters and she quickly turns away.

Hjalmar knocks and enters. Hedvig runs crying over to him but he cruelly pushes her away. He’s only come for his scientific books. (It’s a telling detail that Gina tells him these books a) lack spines i.e. they’re knackered and old but at the same time b) haven’t had the pages cut i.e. he’s never read them. The entire inventor thing is a palpable life-lie.)

When Hjalmar goes to go into a bedroom to look for his autobiography and other papers he sees Hedvig again. She comes out and tries to cling to her but he pushes her away. It’s then that she starts to think about the wild duck, about Gregers’s suggestion to sacrifice it. She goes to the shelf, takes down the pistol, hides it and sneaks backstage into the loft without her parents noticing, as they fuss and fret about which suitcase Hjalmar can use to take his stuff etc.

Gina asks if he wants to take his flute but he says no, just the pistol. They both look for it but can’t find it and assume the old man’s gone off with it.

Gina is admirably restrained. With the common sense of the uneducated she doesn’t make a scene or listen to any of Hjalmar’s fluff about the ideal and instead makes him a hot breakfast and cup of coffee. Erst fressen, den der Moral. Even as he craps on with his typically male grandiloquence and self-flattering visions of going from door to door in the snow asking someone to give him shelter, Gina tops up his coffee, brings him butter and feeds the animal, and the animal softens and asks, well, would it be possible for him to maybe bunk down in the living room for a few days. A process of healing the mind through the body.

In a similar spirit he comes across the letter from old Werle which he tore up yesterday, fingers it a bit, then asks Gina to bring some glue and more paper, and pastes it back together. After all, what right does he have to deprive someone else (his father) of their property.

Unfortunately the meddling imbecile Gregers arrives but Hjalmar is tired of his guff. When Gregers tells him he has his invention to live for, Hjalmar pooh-poohs that there’ll ever be an invention; anything good has already been invented. He reveals it was Dr Relling who gave him the idea of making a Great Invention in Photography, at which Gregers and we the audience go, aha – so this was the life-lie Dr Relling gave him – and that it made Hjalmar intensely happy to have one.

Now his life is in ruins. Above all he wonders whether Hedvig has ever loved him or whether she’s overheard Mrs Sörby and the other women talking, has realised she isn’t Hjalmar’s child, and has played him for a fool, just waiting for the opportunity to get money from her real grandfather and leave. What if Werle and Mrs Sörby come along and entice her away with a better life. Now his love for his daughter has been crushed.

It’s at this point that the gunshot we’ve been waiting for ever since we saw the pistol rings out. Gregers explains that Hedvig got her grandfather to shoot the thing that means most to her, the wild duck, in order to prove her love for her father. Hjalmar takes this at face value and is transformed, saying everything’s going to be alright now.

Unfortunately Old Ekdal comes out his bedroom door wondering what the shot was about. Gregers is even more impressed, that Hedvig has shot the wild duck by herself, but when they throw open the door to the animal loft they, of course, see her lying on the floor.

They carry her out and lay her on the table while Gina shouts down the stairs for Dr Relling who comes running and, after an examination, declares her dead, shot in the heart.

Hjalmar is thrown into an absolute delirium of anguish, if only he could call her back just for a minute, just long enough to tell her how much he infinitely loves her, oh God God, why won’t you allow me to tell her etc.

They carry her body into her bedroom for privacy and Gina tells Hjalmar that now they are the child’s parents, united in sorrow.

Dr Relling tells Gregers it was suicide. The powder burn on the dress indicates it was pressed right up against her chest. Gregers tries to salvage something by saying at least the child’s death will have an ennobling effect on the parents. Dr Relling witheringly replies, Give it nine months. Hjalmar is no poet or hero. He will spend the rest of his life wallowing in sentimentality and self pity. And Dr Relling sums up, maybe, the moral of the story:

RELLING: Life wouldn’t be too bad if only these blessed people who come canvassing their ideals round everyone’s door would leave us poor souls in peace.

Comments

Secrets and lies in marriage (yawn), combined with two of the half dozen oldest stories in the world – the rich and powerful man who has adulterous affairs and children with his servants and the innocent man who is palmed off with someone else’s child.

As the play went on, the simple-minded religiose language of Gregers, who insists his friend is undergoing a great spiritual revival, began to really irritate me. He’s an interfering twat.

Similarly, I got tired of his repeated use of the key phrase ‘claim of the ideal’. a) It’s such a stupid phrase in itself, but b) Ibsen has Gregers repeat it in a totally unrealistic way, more like a parrot than a man. This obtrusive repetition of the play’s catchphrase reminded me of the over-use of the phrase ‘enemy of the people’ which dominates the second half of the play of the same name.

According to the introduction, many critics consider ‘The Wild Duck’ Ibsen’s greatest play and, certainly, all the backstories and information are released in instalments with great cunning and artistry. But, in my opinion, all this artistry is in support of a dull premise. A poor man discovers his child may not be his after all and that his family is secretly supported by wealthy man who’s probably the child’s real father…

The symbolism of the wild duck hung very heavy round the neck of the narrative from its first mention – is it a poor, delicate, wounded and vulnerable creature like the girl who adopts it? Yes.

On top of this is the sheer dumb obviousness of the loaded gun. Everyone knows if you bring a loaded gun onstage in a play it is sooner or later going to be fired, from the moment it appeared the only question was who was going to snuff it and Ibsen plays with this by having Hjalmar tell Gregers about both his and his father’s suicide attempts. But these turn out to be not-so-clever decoys from the true victim.

And I was very upset by the suicide which ends the play but not in the way Ibsen intended: rather than bursting into tears at the sacrifice of this sweet innocent I was upset by how flagrantly manipulative it was.

A digression about opera: in my late 20s and 30s I went to lots of operas, at the Royal Opera House and the English National Opera, at festivals and experimental theatres. All in all I went to about 100 operas. Eventually I started to get a bit fed up with several things about seeing opera, like how long they are and how hot it gets up in the gods at opera houses. But it was something very specific which made me stop buying tickets. I happened to see a run of four or five nineteenth-century operas in a row and in every single one the female lead died. Carmen, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, La Traviata, suddenly I had a kind of revelation. I looked around me and saw hundreds of people all being entertained by the spectacle of women being tortured, blackmailed, threatened, dying of disease or tormented into killing themselves and suddenly, in a flash, it disgusted me. The whole notion of women being subjected to grotesque suffering for my entertainment sickened me. I stopped and I’ve never been back.

So that is the mood in which I read the description of poor sweet Hedvig’s suicide and I felt that same revulsion all over again, that I was being emotionally manipulated and that a 14-year-old girl was the tool of my manipulation. Yuk!

In the same scene Hjalmar’s thrashing around begging for God to give him just one more minute so he could tell his daughter how much he loved her etc… I’d had enough.

It’s extremely well constructed, deeply pondered, the work of a master, but I didn’t like it at all.

Repelled by the exploitative melodrama of the climax, I realised I most enjoyed the opening scenes at old Werle’s party. I liked the banter between the servants Pettersen and Jensen. I liked the simple honest excess of the fat man and the bald man boasting about how much they could eat at a sitting. Gross but in a straightforward way which does nobody any harm except themselves.

A bit more subtly I liked the way Gina, with the wisdom of the uneducated, knew she didn’t have to engage in all this man talk about ideals and life-lies but simply had to lay on coffee and toast to begin to win her man back. I liked the subtlety of that scene and I think Gina emerges as the most sympathetic character, with almost all the men behaving like idiots.

But the constantly reappearing figure of Gregers, whose idiotic ‘idealism’ ruined every life he touched and killed a lovely little girl, left a very bad taste in my mouth.

James McFarlane’s introduction

In 1881 Ibsen began to draught an autobiography. He didn’t get further than his boyhood but that was enough to revive memories of: his sister, who was called Hedvig (!); his father who was bankrupted, suffering social ostracism and reducing the family to penury; the cramped attic where the Ibsen family was forced to live; the mess of furniture, old books and junk left by the previous occupants. In other words, there’s a surprising amount of autobiography in ‘The Wild Duck’.

McFarlane brings out how the world of the Ekdal household, although built on ‘a lie’ is a lovely fantasy. Hedvig lives a child’s fantasy of her father. Old Ekdal is away in his fantasies of hunting in the great pine forests. Hjalmar lives for his fantasy of becoming the Great Inventor, despite the complete lack of evidence for this. Only the down-to-earth Gina doesn’t live in a fantasy which is ironic because she is the one at the heart of the ‘lie’ i.e. the knowledge of how the entire fantasy world is sustained by Old Werle who used her as his mistress.

Like many of Ibsen’s plays ‘The Wild Duck’ comes ready-made for critical analysis. It is perfectly designed to be converted into a Sparks Notes summary of characters and themes. It is prime A-level material. ‘Discuss the role of truth and deception in…’ etc.

The central conceptual clash, I suppose, is between Dr Relling’s notion of the life-lie, the self-deceptions necessary to make the harsh realities of life bearable, to give life a meaning – and Gregers’ insistence on the claim of the wretched ‘ideal’, namely remorseless truth-telling at any cost. There’s enough there for a good essay. What McFarlane’s introduction made me realise was there’s a third big philosophy of life, which isn’t given a big name and is hiding in plain sight, and this is the worldly wisdom of Old Werle.

Werle makes no great speeches, wields no big ideas, but he represents the triumph of savoir faire, how to get on in the world, how to run a successful business for decades, how to arrange and manipulate everyone around you to suit your needs. As the play proceeds, what we see and sympathise with is the systematic destruction of all Hjalmar’s delusions: he thought he was happily married, he thought his wife was faithful, he thought he had fathered a beautiful little girl, he thought he was the provider and keeper of his little family – and he is wrong on every single on of those counts. Werle is presented as his nemesis, as the evil wizard behind all his woes. What’s not so obvious is to see it from the other end of the telescope, as a play about Werle’s triumph. This is what worldly wisdom looks like.

Apparently, we have Ibsen’s drafts of many of his plays and McFarlane explains what the drafts of ‘The Wild Duck’ tell us. This is that all the characters existed in early drafts but then he moved them around, gave them names or removed names, to create a sense of foreground and background characters. And the same with issues or events. McFarlane points out how the precise details of Old Ekdal’s crime, the murky references to Old Werle mistreating his wife, and above all the exact status of Hedvig’s paternity, these are all important but left deliberately vague and blurred, like the background in a painting.

Lastly, McFarlane devotes a page to the symbol of the wild duck itself which I found boring. He says it fulfils two functions: it means something but something different to every individual in the play; and it binds together the many strands of the play. Although it is never seen and not mentioned for long periods, in some sense it binds together not only the characters but the many themes of the play.

I can see how this is true and I can appreciate the extraordinary skill of the play’s construction. But it’s an entertainment based on the killing of a 14-year-old girl and I couldn’t overcome my simple revulsion at that fact.

Credit

I read ‘The Wild Duck’ in the 1960 translation by James McFarlane which was packaged up, along with his translations of ‘An Enemy of the People’ and ‘Rosmersholm’ into a World’s Classics paperback in 1988. I read the 2009 reprint.

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by Simon on October 4, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, Theatre, Translation
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Posted by Simon on October 4, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/10/04/the-wild-duck-henrik-ibsen/

‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger @ Serpentine South

When hippies go bad…

Barbara Kruger is an American artist. She was born in Newark in 1945, the same year as Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton and Pete Townsend i.e. she is 78 years old and from the generation which made their names in the later 1960s and 1970s.

At the start of her career Kruger worked as a graphic designer for American magazines, and when she branched out into fine art she brought with her a feel for the impact of combining images and words. Over the decades she’s developed a powerful visual language that borrows, adapts and expands the techniques and aesthetics of advertising and other media.

It comes as no surprise to learn that, as a white American female artist of the 60s generation, her artworks have, to quote the curators, ‘continually explored mechanisms of power, gender, class, consumerism and capital’ – in other words, exactly what you’d expect.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You’ at Serpentine South is Kruger’s first solo show in London in over twenty years, so an opportunity for Kruger fans (and a friend of mine did describe himself to me as ‘a Kruger fan’) to catch up with her work this century.

These aren’t pictures hanging on a wall so that you stroll from one to the next, they are massive installations plastered across entire walls and, in some cases, round corners and into the next alcove or room. It feels like a total environment and one in which really important messages are being SHOUTED at you from disturbing and challenging billboards or hoardings.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

So you feel you’re being bombarded with really important messages, the only problem being that it’s quite frequently hard to make out what they are, although the general vibe is disillusioned, cynical, confrontational, an outpouring of negativity and doom. Take the text in the big room with black and white text all over the wall:

This is about loving and longing, about shaming and hating, about the promises of kindness and the pleasures of doing damage. This is about crazy desire and about having a gift for cruelty…

Already my attention is wandering but it goes on, covering the entire wall:

This is about the difference between the figure and the body, about the fickleness of renown, about who gets what and who owns what, about who is remembered and who is forgotten, here, in this place, this is about you, I mean me, I mean you.

Now, words are words and unavoidably spawn meanings and intentions, triggering our instinct for decoding and interpretation whether we want to or not. It is fairly common for modern art works to feature words, or be entirely made up of text, or even hoarding-sized presentations like this. (I immediately think of current Royal Academy exhibition which includes a set of 8 or so picture frames containing coloured paper on which are printed the names of native American tribes. That’s it, just the names, no images. Words on a coloured background.) Here in Kruger’s works the variety of layout and design is visually pleasing, up to a point – although the use of the same tone of red for all the frames and captions quickly becomes monotonous and wearing.

But the main experience of reading these words, which we are condemned by our literacy to do, is of struggling with their calculated, in-your-face negativity and either responding to them or giving up. How much of the following should you read before you realise you don’t care?

You. You are here looking through the looking glass, darkly. Seeing the unseen, the invisible, the barely there. You. Whoever you are. Wherever you are. Etched in memory, until you, the looker, is gone. Unseen. No more. You too.

The texts are not rubbish. They are obviously aspiring to a kind of poetic, not a million miles away from Samuel Beckett’s minimalist and repetitive prose. But I liked neither their style nor their content. If the message of this black-and-white piece is that you, the gallery visitor, are seeing (and taking part in) a series of choices and selections which include some artefacts (based on certain institutional and cultural values) but excludes other things (for the same reason), this is fair enough, if a bit obvious, like a lot of the other sentiments on display.

But having read hundreds of examples of prose poetry in my lifetime, I think Kruger’s stuff is on the poor side. Putting the meaning to one side, it lacks any rhythm or flow. It’s often staccato. In fact it’s remarkable how many words there are on display and how few of them are at all memorable or striking. Which is the exact opposite of advertising, where immense time and effort goes into trying to coin short phrases which will catch our distracted attention and burrow into our minds (‘Every little helps’, ‘Domino ooh hoo’).

Instead, all the texts have that dire, stricken quality of so much art text, emotionally numb phrasing conjuring up a dire sense of crisis and emergency. It’s like reading the gasped utterances of a Kafka character having a panic attack.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

That’s when it’s not being patronisingly dumb, as in the set of wall panels presumably satirising the self-righteousness of American Republicans, or maybe ‘the West’ in general, sixth-form sarcasm expressed in the big red panel reading:

Our people are better than your people. More intelligent, more powerful, more beautiful, and cleaner. We are good and you are evil. God is on our side, our shit doesn’t stink, and we invented everything.

Presumably this a satire on the imagined attitude of ideological defenders of America, for example the circle round George Bush who launched the fabulous invasion of Iraq, or maybe of Western conservatives in general. Or maybe it’s a critique of anyone of any nation or race who adopts these kinds of chauvinistic attitudes. But the triteness of its attitude undermines your faith in the level of her analysis or interpretation. Makes you realise you’re dealing with not very sophisticated stuff.

In the same vein of crushing obviousness, the three panels on the left contain the entire texts of 1) the marriage vows 2) the US pledge of allegiance and 3) the oath you take in a court of law. They are presented without any comment but, in the context of this exhibition, you can almost feel the irony and sarcasm dripping from them. It reminds me of the famous shots of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sarcastically ‘applauding’ Donald Trump after he made his State of the Union address. It has the same feel of self-undermining childishness. Because some people actually do want to get married and do mean their vows; some people actually do feel patriotic about their country. And from an aesthetic point of view, having the words slowly appear one by one, in the style of a lame PowerPoint presentation, doesn’t make them any more intelligent or interesting.

Kruger’s works are visually striking but textually weak, and most of them are made of text or heavily rely on text, so the overall effect was, for me, limp and disappointing.

‘No Comment’

The exhibition marks the UK premiere of ’Untitled (No Comment)’ (2020). This is an immersive (i.e. a room containing a) three-channel video installation. This kind of thing is pretty common nowadays: right now in London there’s a huge and stunning three-video installations in the Edward Burtynsky exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, and one by John Akomfrah (‘Vertigo Sea’) in the Royal Academy’s ‘Entangled Pasts’ exhibition.

Kruger’s piece is much more modest in scope than those two pieces (which are huge, world-encompassing depictions of a) man’s destruction of the natural environment and b) cruelty to animals, respectively). Much more narrowly, ‘No Comment’ is about the brave new digital world, conceived as exploring ‘contemporary modes of creating and consuming content online’.

It combines text, audio clips, and a barrage of found images and memes, ranging from blurred-out selfies to animated photos of cats. Cats. Yes, there are definitely more cats in this piece than in the Burtynsky or Akomfrah films. This piece includes a barrage of nihilistic slogans, hippy idealism turned very sour indeed, warnings about how FAKE NEWS can turn us AGAINST OURSELVES, yawn. I was standing next to three student-age young women who were recording it on the smart phones and the only bit they reacted to was when the cats started talking, which made them explode with giggles, nudge each other and try to capture it on video so as to TikTok or Instagram it. This stuff doesn’t interrogate or subvert anything, it’s just tired slogans and strained sight gags.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

The exhibition also features recent video ‘reconfigurations’ – or what the artist calls ‘replays’ – of several of Kruger’s most iconic pieces from the 1980s. I think this refers to the collage-type assemblages of magazine photos all splattered with controversial slogans, and includes ‘Untitled (I shop therefore I am)’ (1987) and ‘Untitled (Your body is a battleground)’ (1989). (Personally, I find it irritating when an artist calls their work ‘untitled’ and then immediately gives it a title.)

I think the ‘updating’ of these amounts to the fact that they are no longer static artefacts but videos of these ancient works which assemble the originally static images from jigsaw pieces, each piece of the jigsaw slotting into place with an amusingly literal click. Again, like a basic PowerPoint animation.

Anyway, the titles of these pieces alone indicate Kruger’s intention to ‘subvert’, ‘interrogate’ and generally question the consumer capitalism and sexualised imagery which have shaped our culture for decades. But after forty years of challenging this consumer culture and these sexualised images, have they been erased from the face of the earth, has the good fight been won – or are they more ubiquitous and powerful than ever before? Obviously the latter so, to be a little harsh, the content and aim of most of these pieces began to feel like art school whining rather than anything which might have any impact outside a lecture hall or gallery.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

The wall labels tell us that over the past 40 years, Kruger has displayed her work in numerous types of urban settings, including on buildings, billboards, hoardings, buses, in skate parks and so on. So a feature of her work is how adaptable it is to the setting or environment. Which explains why, for this exhibition, we are not, as I said, strolling between individual pictures hung on a wall, but, at several points, ‘immersed’ in works which have been adapted to the scale and layout of the Serpentine Gallery’s rooms, very impressively designed to fit around them.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

Massive works. Clever videos. Loud audio. Images interspersed with text. The same monotonous tone of red everywhere. And the same monotonous, psychologically null, Kafka expressions of art school alienation:

You ask a question. You wait for an answer. You want to keep on breathing. You want a room with a view. You want to change your life. You try to be generous. You never lie. You fall in love.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

Suddenly I knew who all these texts remind me of – Talking Heads lyrics:

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’

The same dumb repetition, the same American suburban nervous breakdown aesthetic, the same panic attack chic. If you think Talking Heads are cutting edge (the song this lyric is from, ‘Once in a Lifetime’, dates from 1980, 44 years ago), then Kruger’s approach is for you.

Text and commentary

One room contains what looks like a ‘brief’ from an art school lecture, a text which is packed with buzzwords such as ‘globalised world’, ‘post identity’, ‘post gender’ and so on, which has been blown up and pasted onto two boards. And then Kruger has crudely circled all these buzzwords and written in notes querying and questioning them. For example:

[Sentence in the text]: ‘It’s clear that identity is back.’
[Kruger’s commentary]: When and where did it go? Its new renditions come with the added features of agency, disruption and exchangeability. In what venues, locations, events and discourses was identity missing and mistaken?

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

Three points:

1. The Biter Bit

It is a bit rich of Kruger, an American artist committed to ‘subverting’ and ‘interrogating’ ‘modes of discourse’ around ‘gender’, ‘identity’, ‘consumer capitalism’ and so on to suddenly notice the riot of sociological jargon which has overtaken and infested the humanities, and then to object to it – because this is her intellectual environment, the one created by decades of hyper-intellectualising, left-wing, feminist and post-colonial critique in the academic and art worlds, the kind of thing to which she and her work have made a notable contribution

And this runaway discourse above all stems from the United States, her United States, which pioneered this clotted, exclusionary jargon and then exported it to universities and humanities departments around the world, where it now runs rampant. Kruger herself is deeply imbrued in this jargon and the art world she operates and flourishes in is itself a global epicentre of this sociological-cum-aesthetic discourse, as a glance at the wall labels, let alone the exhibition catalogue, instantly reveals.

2. Cultural politics turn out to be stunningly counter-productive

So when it comes to mocking academic jargon, she is like a fly stuck in the flypaper of the impenetrable postmodern jargon which she and her generation helped to create. But, after decades of bubbling in the background (where I was taught it all decades ago) this kind of sociological argot is now spilling over into mainstream politics. And what’s interesting about our times is how this is creating the same toxic divisions as it has done in academia for decades, but now out in the wider world – triggering unwinnable arguments in which everyone accuses everyone else of antisemitism, Islamophobia, sexism, racism, bigotry, transphobia, xenophobia – a world, especially down in the sewer of social media, in which the campaigns in favour of wokeness, Black Lives Matter, #metoo, no matter how well-intentioned, have in practice created a whole roster of toxic touchstones by which the zealous can judge and accuse others, while the ones accused can fight back with their own forms of toxic catchphrases and slogans – calling out, wokeness, slagging off the ‘Guardian reading, tofu eating wokerati’ and so on and so on.

No matter how well-intentioned and morally right all these left-liberal campaigns may be (as well as all the environmental ones like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion) the practical, real world impact has been to alienate huge numbers of people who feel (or are manipulated into feeling by the right-wing media) that their core values and identities are being got at, threatened, denied.

This, in the cultural sphere (along with stagnant economies and ecosystems coming under stress in the economic and environmental spheres) helps to explain the rise of nationalistic right-wing populism around the world. Technology is changing fast, the planet is fucked, and everywhere pressure groups are attacking the conservative staples of the religion, family and racial identity. Hence, in Kruger’s US of A, 50 years of feminism, anti-racism and university Marxism are more than likely going to result later this year in…the return of President Trump.

It seems like the more hyper-complex and impenetrable the radical academic jargon becomes, and the more it spreads throughout all the humanities and then leaks out into the real world, the more the very forces it sets out to question and undermine (capitalism, consumerism, environmental destruction, inequality, racism and sexism and homophobia) triumph, going from strength to strength, as if there is some deep, voodoo social law at work, some law of paradoxes so that the more feminists write about the male gaze (and the more you read the phrase on caption after caption at exhibition after exhibition), the more sexist and objectifying the media become; the more post-colonial studies books pour from the presses, the more openly racist leading politicians become.

I can’t be the only one feeling we’re living through a kind of death vortex of ever-accelerating abuse and anger, claim and counter-claim, outrage and cancelling, naming and shaming, whose clamour drowns out all moderate conversations.

‘Your body is a battlefield’ by Barbara Kruger. Photo by the author

3. It’s a generational thing

As I pointed out at the start, Kruger was born in 1945 and began her career in the late 1960s. This makes her a second wave feminist:

My daughter is a Sociology student and fourth wave feminist, extremely sensitised to the third wave issues of race and intersectionality, and in addition a fourth wave child of the internet and social media. She calls Woman’s Hour white feminism, a term she cheerfully interchanges with ‘BBC feminism’ – nice, clean, middle-class, private school-educated and white feminism. Emma Barnett.

Having had so many conversations with her on the subject(s), having helped her revise for her Sociology A-level and proofread her essays for her Sociology degree, I now see many issues, articles, movies, books and art works through her eyes. Above all, I recognise how completely different the worldview and assumptions of people under 25 are from those of me and my generation, even the supposed ‘radicals’ or ‘left wingers’ of my generation. We have been left waaaaaay behind by cultural and sociological assumptions which have moved on, light years on, sometimes – in the every day, every minute, every second use of social media and how that affects communication and perception and people’s sense of themselves and of the world they’re moving through with their smartphones set permanently to ALERT – beyond anything I can really understand or take in.

All I really know is that the assumptions, beliefs and worldviews of my 20-something daughter (and my son, too) are radically different from mine, far more switched on, plugged in and attuned to the subtleties and complexities of issues around race and gender in polyglot multicultural societies than my clodhopping old ’70s leftism ever dreamed of.

I’m sharing all this because it explains why, as I moved through this exhibition of Barbara Kruger, I felt like I was listening to the sound of a white, second-wave, American feminist tutting and disapproving of a world, and of a discourse, which have moved on and left her far behind, as it’s left most of us behind.

Reading Kruger’s cranky comments on these huge billboards (what else are we intended to do?) was not only:

1) Tedious – too much like my day job of proofreading government documents where I spend a good deal of time reading the impenetrable original text and then breaking my head trying to understand the cryptic, sometimes bad-tempered comments scrawled over them.

2) Amusing – but not in the way she intended it to be. It felt like listening to my Dad complaining about how football is nowadays all about Saudi money and American owners and nothing like the simple, honest sport it used to be in his day. Or listening to Rod Stewart complain that modern music’s all made by kids with laptops in their bedrooms, instead of honest bands performing in front of live audiences in their local clubs, like back in the good old days.

‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You’ felt, in other words, like the voice of the old generation railing against the new-fangled jargon and technology of the young – the take-home message of the annotated comments artwork I described above could be summarised as ‘Things were so much simpler and more honest in my day’.

Kruger’s installations complaining about tired old subjects like the perils of consumer capitalism (‘I shop therefore I am’) read like tattered old banners from the Miners’ Strike or posters from CND marches – relics from a bygone era, beautifully presented, stylishly designed, and completely out of date.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by the author

The merch

It goes without saying that after you’ve been bombarded with slogans and messages telling you to Stop Consumer Capitalism Now, Our Earth Is Not A Trash Can, I Shop Therefore I am etc, you emerge from the exhibition into the, er, gallery shop. Here you can buy loads of Barbara Kruger merchandise, such as anti-consumerist tote bags, posters, postcards, t-shirts and the expensive glossy catalogue. There! That’s your ‘continually explored mechanisms of power, gender, class, consumerism and capital’ all wrapped up in a tidy box and good to go. Have a nice day, sir.

Night falls

Dusk falls over Serpentine South gallery, highlighting one of Kruger’s text-heavy works.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

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by Simon on March 13, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Politics
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Posted by Simon on March 13, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/03/13/thinking-of-you-i-mean-me-i-mean-you-barbara-kruger-serpentine-south/

Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts (1999) part 2

‘Whatever happens will be for the worse and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’
(Salisbury writing about the Balkan crisis of 1887 in a sentence which sums up his political philosophy)

‘Salisbury: Victorian Titan’ is divided into two equal parts of about 430 pages each:

  1. Tory Tribune, 1830 to 1885 (pages 5 to 422)
  2. Tory Titan, 1885 to 1903 (pages 425 to 852)

By the second half I thought I had a good handle on the book’s strengths and weaknesses. Its obvious strength is the way it examines all the major political events and issues in British and international politics between about 1865 and 1902 in fantastic detail, as seen from the point of view of the hero of this enormous biography, Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury.

Using extensive quotes from Salisbury’s correspondence and speeches, plus citations from the letters or reported remarks of those around him (principally his political colleagues, occasionally his family) we get day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour recreations of how it seemed to Salisbury, what his thoughts and strategems were, how he manoeuvred those around him or attacked those on the opposition party, how he managed the relentless, hyper-complex task of managing British domestic, international, and imperial challenges.

So: amazing insights into a figure who really does emerge as a giant of his times, Prime Minister from 1885 to 1902, with only a three year gap. And yet the book’s strength is also, I think, its weakness, which is that the focus is so unrelentingly on Salisbury, what he said and thought and wrote, his speeches around the country and in the House of Lords, his comments over dinner or at parties, what family and confidantes recorded him saying to them – that, although the book covers an amazing number of issues, I began to realise that you fail to get a well-rounded presentation of those issues.

One example stands for many: only as much of the ill-fated expedition of General Gordon to Khartoum is explained and described as is necessary to understand what a political opportunity it presented to Salisbury to attack Gladstone for failing to relieved besieged Gordon in time. But the full background to the Mahdi’s rising, explaining the context of his rise, his appeal, and previous military engagements, and the subsequent history of British involvement in the Sudan are mostly missing. The topic swims into view as it affects Salisbury then, when it ceases to be relevant to him, disappears.

A bigger, more dominant and recurring theme is Ireland and Irish nationalism. Again, it initially feels like you’re getting a lot of information but, after a while, I realised it was a lot of information only about Salisbury’s day-to-day management of the way successive Irish crises impinged on British politics. So Roberts mentions agrarian disturbances, the regular murders and atrocities, and he mentions that this is mostly caused by inequalities to do with land and rents – BUT you don’t get a clear explanation of why. There’s no stopping to give a broader explanation of the context of Irish discontent, the rise of nationalism, the background to rural violence and so on. Roberts mentions a number of organisations, such as the Irish Brotherhood, but without any background on their formation and activities.

The great tragic Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell appears in the narrative mainly in a very detailed account of his trial which Salisbury helped to organise and provided evidence for. Yet after reading pages and pages about this I was still left feeling unclear what the distinctive thing about Parnell and his party was. And Roberts throws away the event that ruined Parnell, his being mentioned in a divorce case, which led his puritanical supporters to abandon him, in a few phrases. So I didn’t get a full, rounded, thorough explanation of Parnell’s success and rise, just a few episodes as they impinged on Salisbury’s concerns to manage the Irish Problem.

I hope by now you’ve got my drift: this is an awesomely huge, thoroughly researched, insightful, clever and beautifully written biography of Salisbury BUT it is not a good history of Britain during his times. Every page is plastered with quotes and citations from his letters and speeches but these focus entirely on how Salisbury used events to manipulate the politics around him.

It is an extraordinarily detailed view of what politics is actually like i.e. the ceaseless calculating of what is to your own or your party’s advantage, the constant jostling and politicking against the opposition party and just as much with enemies within your own party. Reading about Salisbury’s Machiavellian manipulations is wonderfully insightful and entertaining. But time and again I felt I was being short-changed on the issues themselves. It’s perfectly logical and entirely sensible that we only see events or issues insofar as they impinge on our man Salisbury. But as page 400 turned to page 500, and then on to page 600, I became a little irked at a sense that I was missing out on the actual history of the period.

Contents

Roberts gives sub-titles to his chapters which summarise the issues each one covers, so an effective way of conveying its scope is simply to copy that:

Chapter 26: Reconstruction at home and abroad (January to April 1887)

  • 1887: Salisbury reshuffles his cabinet, coming to rely on George Joachim Goschen, 1st Viscount Goschen, a former Liberal, then Liberal Unionist, who he makes Chancellor of the Exchequer; Sir Michael Hicks Beach as the Chief Secretary for Ireland
  • death of Stafford Henry Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh, formerly Lord Northcote, Salisbury’s challenger in the Commons to leadership of the Tories
  • 1887: The Mediterranean Agreements, a series of treaties with Italy, Austria-Hungary and Spain
  • Bulgaria: Alexander of Battenberg, prince of Bulgaria, abdicated in 1886 after a pro-Russian coup, triggering a Balkan crisis about who to replace him: the constant worry was that Russia would interfere, prompting Austria to retaliate, triggering a general European war
  • 1888 June: Kaiser Wilhelm II ascends the throne of the German Empire, worrying everyone with his impetuous outbursts and lack of understanding of the intricate skeins of European diplomacy
  • Egypt: ‘I heartily wish we had never gone into Egypt’, Salisbury wrote. British influence was necessary to safeguard the Suez Canal but upset the Ottoman Sultan, the rival Power, France, and the people of Egypt who resented British influence
  • The French were afflicted by a permanent ‘inferiority complex’ and so behaved badly at every opportunity, in a dispute about the Newfoundland fisheries, in the New Hebrides in the Pacific, obstructive in Egypt, planting a flag in the empty wastes of Somalia

Chapter 27: ‘Bloody Balfour’ (March 1887 to July 1891)

  • March 1887 Salisbury appointed his nephew Arthur Balfour the Chief Secretary for Ireland. An aloof, philosophical man, commentators thought he would be a soft touch but he implemented Salisbury’s strategy of cracking down on lawlessness that, in the wake of the Mitchelstown Massacre when Irish police opened fire on protesters killing 3 (9 September 1887) and Balfour gave them his full support, he was nicknamed ‘Bloody Balfour’. Conversely, Balfour’s sternness impressed the future defender of Ulster, Edward Carson.
  • (It speaks volumes about this society and this ruling class, that the Irish Viceroy, the 6th Marquess of Londonderry, had been Balfour’s fag at Eton.)
  • July 1887: Balfour steered the passage of the ‘Perpetual Crimes Act’, a Coercion Act to prevent boycotting, intimidation, unlawful assembly and the organisation of conspiracies against the payment of agreed rents which led to the imprisonment of hundreds of people including over twenty MPs
  • March and April 1887: The Times newspaper published letters they claimed proved Parnell’s association with the Phoenix Park murders and violent crimes. Parnell sued the newspaper whereupon it emerged that the letters were all forged by a notorious crook. Salisbury backed the Times and the prosecution i.e. Tories talk about ‘honour’ and ‘the law’ when it suits them, but break it or ignore it when it suits them

28: ‘The genie of imperialism’ (May 1887 to January 1888)

  • June 1887: Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee; interesting to learn what a struggle the authorities had to know how to mark it appropriately; in the end it was the template or trial run for the much bigger Diamond Jubilee ten years later; of course a cartload of ‘honours’ were doled out, usually as a reward to the Unionist cause (p.461)
  • The Colonial Conference: Salisbury was not a doctrinaire imperialist and was against the idea of forging a closer union or federation with the (mostly white) colonies i.e. Canada, the Cape Colony, Australia and New Zealand; but the Colonial Secretary Sir Henry Holland took advantage of all the premiers being in London for the Jubilee to stage one anyway
  • In the 1880s Britain took control of Bechuanaland, Burma, Nigeria, Somaliland, Zululand, Kenya, Sarawak, Rhodesian and Zanzibar
  • 13 November 1887 ‘Bloody Sunday’: a crowd of marchers protesting about unemployment and the Irish Coercion Acts, and demanding the release of Irish Nationalist MP William O’Brien, clashed with the Metropolitan Police, with 400, 75 badly injured, two policemen were stabbed and one protester was bayonetted
  • Tithes: an example of Salisbury’s defence of the Church of England, his Tithe Rent-Charge Bill was wrangled over for 4 years, from 1887 to 1891; it aimed to get non-payers of tithes to the Church subject to County Court judgements which would make it easier for the clergy to obtain their money
  • Allotments: Salisbury strongly objected to a Bill brought to allow local councils to compulsorily purchase land in order to create allotments for the poor;
  • Fiscal retaliation: this was another phrase for protectionism which Salisbury was also vehemently against; the issue was to grow and grow, reflecting the fact that sometime in the 1880s Britain lost the industrial and economic lead she had enjoyed for most of the century; protectionism was raised at party conferences again and again but Salisbury managed to stave it off; after his retirement the policy of imperial protectionism would tear the party apart and contribute to the Tories’ catastrophic defeat in 1906

Chapter 29: Rumours of Wars (February to July 1888)

  • A reshuffle:
  • ‘Pom’ Macdonnell: Salisbury appointed as his personal private secretary Schomberg ‘Pom’ McDonnell, fifth son of the Earl of Antrim who turned out to be an outstanding administrator and confidante
  • The Vienna Incident: the new young touchy Kaiser thought that his diplomatic overtures had been snubbed and so made it known that he planned to ‘cut’ his uncle, the Prince of Wales, when they were both on visits to Vienna; diplomatic panic; chancelleries and embassies go into overdrive; children
  • General Boulanger’s war scare: Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger, nicknamed ‘General Revenge’, was a French general and politician, an enormously popular public figure who won multiple elections in the 1880s, vowing revenge for the defeat of 1870, taking on not only Germany but Britain if necessary, causing many sleepless nights in the Foreign Office; at the height of his popularity in 1889 it was widely was feared that he might make himself a dictator; as usual with French bluster, it came to nothing
  • Newfoundland and Bering Sea disputes: diplomatic fracas with France about fishing rights off Newfoundland and then with America about ownership of the sea around the Bering Straits; the point of all these quarrels is the way Salisbury managed them down, without letting them escalating into fighting talk
  • House of Lords reform: surprisingly, Salisbury supported reform of the House of Lords (mainly to kick out crooks) but was predictably against professionalising it; he defended the House of Lords not for its members’ achievements or intelligence but because simply by dint of being wealthier and better educated than most people, they were less likely to be influenced by ‘sordid greed’ (p.493); this of course sits at odds with the reams of evidence throughout the book that those who sought ‘honours’ were precisely the ambitious and greedy
  • February to July 1888: Sir Garnet Wolseley, hero of the (unsuccessful) march to relieve Gordon at Khartoum (1885), was promoted to Adjutant-General to the Forces in the War Office from where he issued a series of alarmist warnings about the threat of a sudden invasion from France and cuts to the army budget, all of which an irritated Salisbury had to manage down

Chapter 30: The Business of Government (August to December 1888)

  • County councils: the most important piece of domestic legislation of 1888 was the creation of County Councils as the primary instruments of local government replacing the previous ad hoc and regionally varying procedures (p.499)
  • The Drinks trade: the nonconformist and Temperance interest among the Liberal Unionists tried to add to the local government bill provisions to limit pub opening hours and cut back on the drinks trade; Salisbury opposed this, believing every Englishman should be free to go to hell his own way
  • Votes for women: in the County Council elections which were held in 1889 women candidates were elected for the first time (p.502); Salisbury wasn’t against women having the vote, and is cited as saying he had no problem with educated women having it; he was against extending the franchise to the lower classes; in the event, like lots of other pressing issues he managed to block and delay it so women’s suffrage became an issue which damaged the Edwardian Liberal governments
  • In 1888 Sir Lionel Sackville-West, British minister at the Washington legation, made a rookie error by replying to a letter, ostensibly from an Englishman in America, asking who he should support in the presidential election; Sackville-West wrote back suggesting Grover Cleveland would be better for Britain; the letter was a ruse, written by an American, Sackville-West’s reply was published in the newspapers and the US government kicked him out for this undiplomatic faux pas i.e. an ambassador expressing about an election in a foreign country; Salisbury was furious; during the fracas Sackville-West succeeded to his father’s title and went back to the huge Knole Park estate with a state pension
  • A ‘black man’: in 1885 a Tory colonel had won the Holborn by-election against an Indian, Dadabhai Naoroji; in 1888 Salisbury made a speech in which he referred to this event and made the remark that ‘I doubt if we have yet got to the point where a British constituency will elect a black man to represent them’; not only the Liberals but many commentators came down on him like a ton of bricks; interestingly, the Queen wrote to criticise him; Dadabhai Naoroji was elected MP for Finsbury Central in 1895, becoming Britain’s second ethnic minority MP; he enjoyed referring to himself as ‘Lord Salisbury’s black man’
  • The Viceroy’s India proposals: before Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was sent off to India to be viceroy (in 1884) he had drawn up proposals to extend the powers of viceregal and local legislative councils, including an element of direct voting; Salisbury quashed these as all other hints at Indian self-rule
  • This leads Roberts into a consideration of Salisbury’s diplomatic style which was highly secretive; he often didn’t inform cabinet colleagues about initiatives; this was partly because he considered the Foreign Office ‘a nest of Whiggery’ and the level of ambassadorial competence generally very low (p.514); Roberts discusses the basis of his diplomatic thinking which was utterly pragmatic – most treaties, he admitted, are based on force or the threat of force (p.512) or, as he put it somewhere else, bluster and bluff; 15 years later, as the world entered the new century, that bluster and bluff would no longer do – big armies, big navies and heavy industry increasingly became key to international affairs
  • Fascinating fact: before 1914 Britain only had 9 ambassadors (compared to 149 in 1997) and just 125 diplomatic posts abroad

Chapter 31: Africa (1885 to 1892)

When Salisbury left the Foreign Office in 1880, nobody talked about Africa. When he returned in 1885, everyone was talking about Africa, and the quarrels it was causing between the Powers (p.518).

Between 1885 and 1900 most of the borders of modern Africa were set by European statesmen who’d never been there. To this day, this is one of the root causes of the chronic instability, political and economic backwardness of Africa. But at the time the various deals the nations of Europe struck, and the straight lines they drew through jungles and deserts, represented a triumph because the primary aim was never fairness or the interests of Africans, it was to prevent European nations going to war.

The lines on the map weren’t drawn in accordance with the logic of geography or tribes, traditional territory, language or commerce. The aim was to stop Europeans going to war.

‘We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot has ever trod. We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.’ (p.529)

(Some) reasons the European colonisation of Africa accelerated in the last decades of the nineteenth century:

  • the discovery of gold and diamonds in South Africa
  • the opening up of East Africa by the Suez Canal
  • the evangelical impulse to eliminate the slave trade and convert the heathen
  • France’s lust for la gloire after her ignominious defeat in the Prussian War
  • private adventurism and entrepreneurship (Rhodes)
  • the quests of each nation’s industry to sources of raw materials and markets
  • the evil greed of Belgian’s King Leopold II
  • Britain’s need for a safe route to India
  • the invention of steamships and advanced weaponry (the Gatling gun)
  • the development of medicines for tropical diseases (p.518)

African issues:

  • Bullying Portugal: ‘a tiresome little Power’ (p.520) I was surprised how much trouble it was to negotiate a treaty with Portugal to stop their incursions into what we called Nyasaland, thus preventing the Portuguese owning a belt right across the middle of Africa, from Angola in the west to Mozambique in the East
  • Zanzibar: managing German attempts to overthrow the Sultan of Zanzibar and to establish Uganda as a German protectorate; Salisbury was appalled at the Germans’ brutality to Africans; acquiring Zanzibar involved a trade-off whereby we accepted France’s acquisition of Madagascar (p.529)
  • March 1890 the Kaiser abruptly sacked Bismarck (p.525); Salisbury negotiated a deal to hand Germany Heligoland in the Baltic in exchange for sole protectorate over Zanzibar
  • Britain acquired the future Uganda and Kenya, Germany kept Tanganyika, Rwanda and Burundi;
  • 1890 The Sahara: Salisbury agreed Conventions with France whereby we backed the Royal Niger Company’s claim to the Niger valley in exchange for agreeing French control of the western Sahara and the Algerian hinterland as far as Lake Chad
  • Italian ambitions: in exchange for British control of the Nile valley Salisbury let the Italians stake the Red Sea coast i.e. Eritrea and Somalia
  • Cecil Rhodes: Salisbury though Rhodes a chancer but backed his request for a royal charter to develop the huge area in south-central Africa which would develop into Rhodesia; in thanks for his support Rhodes named the dusty capital of his new territory Salisbury (which would become the city of Harare, capital of modern Zimbabwe) (p.534)

During a seven year period Salisbury laid down the outlines of colonial Africa which were to last well into the twentieth century.

Chapter 32: Mid-Term Crises (January 1889 to December 1890)

  • The Kaiser pays Victoria a visit, potentially embarrassing because he had been rude to the Prince of Wales the previous year
  • General Boulanger, a bellicose right-winger who had threatened a coup in Paris, in the event fled to Brussels
  • Royal grants: Salisbury became very close to the Queen, they thought alike on many matters, and so he tried to move the question of grants to minor royals out of the Commons, where it had become a regular peg for Liberals and Radicals to make republican remarks
  • The two-power standard: Salisbury secured cabinet support to greatly increase spending on the navy and invented a new rule of thumb, that the Royal Navy should be as big as the next two largest navies (of France and Russia) combined
  • The Paris Exhibition: Salisbury refused to let the British ambassador attend the centenary celebrations of the French Revolution, an event which haunted Salisbury and informed his reactionary Toryism
  • The Shah’s visit: after initial reluctance Salisbury hosted Nasr-el-Din in London and at his Hatfield home
  • The ‘socialist’ current: the London dock strike from August to September 1889 and the huge marches to support it worried gloomy Salisbury that socialism was on its way; he thought it represented an attack on property and law (of contracts, rents etc)
  • The Cleveland Street Scandal: scandal about a male brothel just north of Oxford Street, frequented by members of the royal household and some posh army officers
  • A mid-term crisis: objections to a slew of domestic bills bring his government close to losing a vote and having to quit
  • Prince Eddy in love: Eddy being Prince Edward’s eldest son, second in line to the throne; when he fell in love with a French princess it threatened the delicate balance of European power because Salisbury’s general aim was to keep in with the central powers (Germany and Austria) as protection against France and Russia; having a potential French queen-in-waiting would wreck his whole strategy so he moved heaven and earth to get Victoria to forbid the marriage
  • Trouble at Barings bank which faced bankruptcy until the ruling class rallied round to refund it

Chapter 33: Alliance Politics (January to October 1891)

  • Visitors at Hatfield: the Kaiser visits; Salisbury thinks he is mad and dangerous; and then Crown Prince Victor Emmanuel of Italy
  • Free education: a policy of Chamberlain and the Radical Unionists to which Salisbury acquiesces, creating an Education Bill which passed in August 1891
  • The Prince of Wales in difficulties: Salisbury negotiates peace in a bitter row between the prince and some offended aristocrats
  • The death of W.H. Smith, a steadfast and loyal supporter of Salisbury as Leader of the House of Commons; after careful politicking Salisbury has the post filled y his nephew Arthur Balfour
  • Party organisation: the importance of chief agent of the conservative party, Richard Middleton, and Chief Whip, Aretas Akers-Douglas
  • The Liberal Unionist alliance: the importance of the good working relationship with the super-posh Marquess of Hartington, 8th Duke of Devonshire, leader of the Liberal Unionists

Chapter 34: Leaving Office (November 1891 to August 1892)

  • The general election: friends and colleagues die; the Tory government finds it hard to pass bills; by-elections go against them; much debate whether to call an election for the end of the year (Salisbury’s preference) or June; July 1892 it was and although the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists won 314 seats and the Liberals 272, the balance of power was held by the Irish Nationalist MPs who won 72, and who went into alliance with the Liberals on the understanding that Gladstone would introduce a Home Rule bill
  • Gladstone: Salisbury considered Eton and Christ Church-educated, Anglican Gladstone a traitor to his class in the long bloodless civil war which is how he saw British politics
  • Cabinet style: Salisbury accepted the result and in August tendered his resignation to the Queen, who was very upset; she loathed Gladstone; his cabinet colleagues testify to Salisbury’s calm and cheerful collegiate style; once they got rid of Randolph Churchill, it had been a successful and good tempered cabinet

Chapter 35: Opposition (August 1892 to June 1895)

  • The Second Irish Home Rule bill: Gladstone lost no time in forming an administration, then moving his Home Rule Bill on 13 February 1893; Salisbury’s calculations about the best strategy to block it, his effectiveness because it was defeated by 10 to 1 in the House of Lords
  • Gladstone resigns: Gladstone found himself increasingly at odds with his own cabinet, in particular opposing the ongoing increase of the Royal Navy; he was the oldest person ever to be Prime Minister, aged 84, and on 2 March resigned
  • Lord Rosebery: the Queen couldn’t call for her favourite, Salisbury, because the Liberals still had a majority in the Commons, so Gladstone was replaced by the Liberal Imperialist Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, who was Prime Minister from March 1894 to June 1895 when he called, and lost, a general election; Rosebery was naive and fell into Parliamentary traps Salisbury laid for him, undermining confidence in his government
  • Evolution: Salisbury was sympathetic to science and Roberts describes a major speech he gave at Oxford about Darwin’s theory of evolution which, however, basing itself on Lord Kelvin’s completely erroneous theory about the age of the earth, claimed there wasn’t enough time for Darwin’s theory to have taken place; all completely wrong, as Kelvin’s theories were utterly wrong: Kelvin thought the sun about 20 million years old, whereas we now know it is about 4.5 billion years old, and that the earliest life on earth probably developed about 3.5 billion years ago
  • Dissolution: The Spectator called Lord Rosebery ‘the butterfly Premier’ and he couldn’t heal the widening divide between his form of Liberal Imperialism, aggressive abroad, radical at home, with the Liberal core; his cabinet split on all its policies, namely the annexation of Uganda, the increased navy budget and appointing Lord Kimberley foreign minister, and Home Rule and the introduction of a graduated death duty at home
  • 21 June 1895 Rosebery lost a minor vote, when his war minister was censured for a supposed lack of cordite for the army, and chose to take the opportunity to resign; the Queen called for Salisbury who agreed to take office and prepare a general election for July
  • Chamberlain: though he disagreed with some of his Radical policies Salisbury came to respect Chamberlain for his forthright character and that, not having gone to public school or university, he didn’t give himself airs

Chapter 36: Problems with Non-Alignment (June to December 1895)

  • A landslide: oddly, to us, Salisbury formed his government before holding the election; it was a landslide, the Tories taking 340 seats, their allies the Liberal Unionists 71, with the Liberals on 177, and 82 Irish Nationalists; the cabinet numbered 19, compared to 1886’s 15 (today it is 22)
  • The Hamidian massacres: series of atrocities carried out by Ottoman forces and Kurdish irregulars against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire between 1894 and 1896, named after the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II, up to 100,000 died; Salisbury wanted to send the fleet to the Dardanelles but was over-ruled by his cabinet and the reluctant Royal Navy, infuriating him, and then he was castigated in the press and by the opposition for being weak

I was particularly interested in the fervid debate about this because lots of well-meaning liberals and churchmen insisted that ‘something must be done’, just as they do nowadays when there are atrocities in the Arab/Muslim world, but Salisbury’s objections remind me of the modern debate I’ve followed in the pages of Michael Ignatieff, Frank Ledwidge and so on, which is, there’s only so much we can do? Exasperated, Salisbury asked one correspondent would he have us invade Turkey and take on the Sultan’s army of 200,000? And then other European powers come in on Turkey’s side thus triggering a European war? No.

  • The signing of a Franco-Russian Entente led to the setting up of a Joint Naval and Military Defence Committee
  • Walmer Castle: his other nominees crying off because of the cost, Salisbury ended up appointing himself Warden of the Cinque Ports
  • Venezuela: the problem – America takes a very tough line about a border dispute between Venezuela and British colony, British Guiana, with President Cleveland seeking re-election, populists and the yellow press calling for war; Salisbury loftily ignores the fuss

Chapter 37: ‘Splendid Isolation’ (December 1895 to January 1896)

  • The Jameson Raid: the foolishness and failure is dealt with in my review of The Boer War by Thomas Packenham
  • The Kruger telegram: the Kaiser congratulated the Boer president, Paul Kruger, for snuffing out the Jameson Raid before it got started; the British press went mad with anti-German hysteria; rumour had it Germany was sending marines to help the Boers; Britain responded by sending battleships; it knocked British trust in German good faith
  • The poet laureate: Tennyson died in 1892. In 1895 Salisbury appointed his sometime all, the small poet and pamphleteer Alfred Austen to the job; Roberts thinks was a joke at the expense of the literary establishment
  • ‘Splendid isolation’: Roberts is at pains to show that Salisbury was never a splendid isolationist, a phrase coined by a Canadian politician and which he rejected; on the contrary he had signed various treaties and deals which allied us with various European powers, but his belief was that the country should act independently of treaties, in response to ever-changing events
  • Venezuela: the solution – the Americans continued very belligerent and Canada made plans to repel an American attack and Salisbury asked the war office to make plans to send Canada help, but after months of bombast an international tribunal resolved the Venezuela question

Chapter 38: Great Power Politics (February 1896 to May 1897)

  • The Jameson aftermath: i.e. the raiders were handed back over to the British authorities who brought them back to Britain for trial, as well as setting up a Royal Commission which, as usual, exonerated the senior political figures (most notably Chamberlain who almost certainly encouraged the raid) while sending to prison some small fry
  • The march on Dongola: on 1 March 1896 the army of the Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia defeated the Italian army of Eritrea at Adowa. This raised fears that he might incurse into Sudan and so threaten southern Egypt. This was the pretext Salisbury needed to send an army south into Sudan to retake it from the Dervishes also known as the Mahdi Army, who had held it ever since the killing of Gordon at Khartoum in 1885
  • September 1896: The Balmoral Conversations: against the backdrop of another pogrom against Armenians, with Tsar Nicholas II about Turkey in which Salisbury raised his hobby horse that the Powers partition the Ottoman Empire while the Tsar said his country wanted control of the Dardanelles
  • The ‘wrong horse’ speech: Salisbury’s speech to the House of Lords on 19 January 1897 announcing an end to support for Turkey and its bloody Sultan, saying British policy since Lord Palmerston (the 1850s) and the Crimean War (1853 to 1856) had been mistaken; ‘we put all our money the wrong horse’ (p.646); British Near Eastern policy had shifted from Turkey to Egypt (p.703); a major foreign policy rethink; into the vacuum left by Britain’s rescinded support stepped Germany, as described in The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898 to 1918 by Sean McMeekin
  • Crisis on Crete: Christian Greeks outnumbered Muslim Turks 7 to 1 and wanted to be united with Greece; Salisbury thought it ridiculous that the territory or policy of a modern nation ought to be based on its literary history; he blockaded Crete ports to try and enforce peace but representatives of Greek Prince George landed and acclaimed him leader of liberated Crete at which point both Greece and Turkey started preparing for a major land war. Salisbury cajoled the cabinet into blockading Greece but war broke out in April 1897 with Turkey quickly invading northern Greece who promptly begged the Powers to intervene for peace: ‘The Greeks are a contemptible race’
  • Gerald Balfour: Salisbury appointed another nephew, Gerald Balfour, Chief Secretary for Ireland, and he promptly brought out an Irish Land Bill which Salisbury thought contemptible and worked to defeat in the Lords; then the idea of a permanent royal residence in Ireland, like Sandringham, except none of the royal family approved; then the 1898 Irish Local Government Bill
  • The Transvaal: the economic and political build-up to the Boer War, namely that British experts predicted that the Transvaal’s mineral wealth would soon make it the pre-eminent power in South Africa to which the Cape Colony would defer; Salisbury appointed Lord Milner as Governor of the Cape Colony and High Commissioner for Southern Africa; Salisbury himself wanted to avoid a conflict with the Boers, but in his first official meeting with British officials in SA, Milner made it clear he was determined to engineer one

Chapter 39: Apogee of Empire (June 1897)

  • The Diamond Jubilee: detailed description
  • Jingoism: Salisbury was against extreme patriotism and sabre rattling in speeches and articles; in practice he believed all international affairs derived from physical force but a permanent aggressive imperialist stance hemmed in a foreign policy which he believed had to remain agile and adaptive; scornful of the two Jingo pipe-dreams of 1) a Cape to Cairo railway entirely through British territory, 2) an Imperial Federation behind protective tariffs
  • The three high points of Jingoism were the Diamond Jubilee, Mafeking Night and the Khaki Election (p.835)
  • Honours: Roberts gives a sustained consideration of Salisbury’s attitude to, and record of, giving ‘honours’ (see section below)
  • Bishop-making: as with the honours, an assessment of his policy of bishop making which was pragmatic i.e. he tried to make equal appointments from the Low, Broad and High church traditions in order to keep the Church of England together, something he believed vital for the nation
  • The Munshi: Victoria became irrationally attached to an Indian Muslim named Abdul Karim, aka the Munshi, meaning ‘teacher’, who came to represent all her Indian subjects to her; unfortunately, pretty much the entire Royal household hated him and Salisbury was called in on several occasions to calm arguments

(It’s worth noting Queen Victoria’s striking lack of racism, the reverse, her active wish to promote and encourage subjects of all races from across the empire. Thus she repeatedly demanded that the army in South Africa be supplemented by Sikhs, Gurkhas and Zulus, only to be met by obstructiveness from the War Office, Cabinet and Salisbury himself. Their arguments were 1) distributing arms to coloured subjects set a bad precedent and 2) in a tight spot, English squaddies might refuse to take orders from a person of colour; p.756.)

Chapter 40: Choosing his ground (July 1897 to September 1898)

  • Imperial Federation: pipe-dream Salisbury pooh-poohed; thought Britain stood to lose out economically and, if every citizen in the Federation got a vote, politically, too
  • A French convention:
  • Port Arthur: the Russians seized Port Arthur on the coast of China forcing British ships to vacate the area, signalling a ramping up of the scramble for China; newspapers, politicians and even his own cabinet saw this as a humiliation and claimed Salisbury’s policy of splendid isolation had failed, but Salisbury’s mild response was because he saw trouble brewing with France
  • Anglo-German relations: when Salisbury was off sick his Secretary for the Colonies, Chamberlain, suggested to the German ambassador that Britain and Germany sign a non-aggression pact
  • 4 May 1898 the ‘dying nations’ speech: to a packed audience of the Primrose League at the Royal Albert Hall describing a Darwinian vision of nation states, that weak states become weaker whilst strong states become stronger; “The nations of the earth are divided into the sheep and the wolves – the fat and defenceless against the hungry and strong”; as a comment on the rise and fall of nations it was banal enough; its real purpose was to justify Realpolitik
  • The death of Gladstone: Salisbury was one of the coffin bearers and was genuinely upset which is strange given his deep-seated loathing of Gladstone as a traitor to his class, not least in Ireland (p.693)
  • Curzon as Viceroy: January 1899, Salisbury appointed George Nathaniel Curzon, aged just 40, Viceroy of India; he was to be an inspired choice (p.694)
  • Secret Convention with Germany (‘the Delagoa Bay agreement’, p.719) agreeing no other Power allowed to intervene in Angola or Mozambique the two huge colonies of the weak Power, Portugal, and how the 2 colonies would be divided if Portugal collapsed
  • 2 September 1898 The Battle of Omdurman: part of General Kitchener’s campaign to retake Sudan from the Mahdist Islamic State, revenge for the death of Gordon, a disciplined Anglo-Egyptian force let 50,000 or so Mahdists charge their lines and massacred them with machine guns; around 12,000 Muslim warriors were killed, 13,000 wounded and 5,000 taken prisoner while Kitchener’s force lost 47 men killed and 382 wounded (p.697); journalists present with the British force, and young Winston Churchill in his account of it, were critical of Kitchener for allowing the wounded Sudanese to be murdered; Kitchener was rewarded by being made Baron Kitchener of Khartoum
  • 1898: Winston Churchill published his first book, aged 24

Chapter 41: The Fashoda Crisis (September to November 1898)

  • The Fashoda Crisis was the biggest international crisis since 1878. The intrepid Captain Marchand of the French army marched across the Sahara and planted the French flag at the abandoned mud-brick fort on the banks of the White Nile named Fashoda. A week later General Kitchener, fresh from the victory of Omdurman, arrived with his army and insisted that Fashoda, like all of the Sudan, belonged to Britain. There was a real risk Britain and France would go to war. Salisbury wasn’t fussed about places in mosquito-ridden West Africa (about which we signed Conventions with France) but was insistent that British control of the Nile valley was a sacrosanct principle of British foreign policy
  • France was being disputatious over colonies around the world including Siam (Thailand), Tunis, Madagascar, Niger; ‘They [the French] are so unreasonable and have so much incurable hatred of England’ (p.480)
  • It’s worth remembering how rubbish France was; a century of revolutions, not least the 1871 Commune, had left its society riven by religious and class hatred which had been revived by the bitter Dreyfus Affair – Émile Zola published his famous letter ‘J’Accuse…!’ on 13 January 1898 – and France was on her seventh government since 1893; that’s why its governments and ruling class were so touchy about Britain’s apparently effortless superiority; that’s why populist press and politicians whipped up patriotic feeling against Britain – to try to paper over the large cracks in French society
  • The Marchand expedition: the impressive achievement of Captain Marchand who led 20 French officers and NCOs and 130 French Senegalese over 2,000 miles on a 24-month trek on foot and by boat from Loango at the mouth of the Congo to the Nile
  • When Kitchener met up with Marchand at Fashoda the two men raised their respective flags, denied each other’s right to occupy it, then settled down into a cordial friendship while they let the politicians back in Europe sort things out
  • Parisian politics: the British ambassador worried that war fever was running so high there might be a military coup in Paris led by generals who would use a war with Britain to smother the ongoing Dreyfus scandal; while her populist press ranted for war, ministers were uneasily aware of Germany’s ongoing animosity, and when the Tsar explicitly proclaimed the Franco-Russian entente didn’t apply outside Europe France’s position got steadily weaker; the French government looked like collapsing (again)
  • Triumph: realising they couldn’t win, the French backed down, covering their pusillanimity with vaunting rhetoric; Marchand was ordered to make his way to the Red Sea through Abyssinia (he didn’t have enough provisions to return the way he’d come and returning down the Nile under British supervision would have been humiliated)
  • In February 1899 a Convention was signed with a new French ambassador laying out clear demarcation between the zone of French influence in west Africa and the Maghreb, giving Britain exclusive influence over Egypt and Sudan

Chapter 42: The Outbreak of the Boer War (December 1898 to October 1899)

  • grossly overweight Salisbury had a tricycle with raised handlebars made for him and cycle paths laid out in the grounds of Hatfield House
  • like many grandees back in London, Salisbury had a low opinion of the Boers who he had met on his travels 30 years earlier and thought rough, ignorant slave drivers of the native Africans;

Background: Britain had annexed the Cape Colony, the band of territory right at the bottom of Africa, with the results that the Boer population, descendants of the original Dutch settlers, undertook their ‘Great Trek’ into the interior and set up what developed into two states, the Orange Free State and, to its north, the much larger Transvaal, so called because it was on the other side of the River Vaal. Their descendants called themselves the voortrekkers.

In the 1880s diamonds and gold were discovered which promised to make the Boer government rich. In 1882 the Boers elected as president Paul Kruger, a hard-core, unrepentant Boer nationalist.

The issue was that tens of thousands of migrants had moved into the Transvaal, to work in the ever-growing mines. The Boers referred to them as ‘Uitlanders’ and subjected them to an array of discriminatory laws: they were heavily taxed but in return had worse schools, poor accommodation, were subject to high prices, police brutality, arbitrary arrest, biased legal decisions, censorship of the press and so on. Above all, although they paid taxes, they were forbidden from voting. In Roberts’ opinion the Boers ran little less than ‘a tight, tough, quasi police state’ (p.717). Most of these Uitlanders were ‘freeborn’ Britons so that when the British Uitlanders petitioned the Queen to intervene on their behalf, the war party could claim that lack of help undermined the prestige and authority of Britons throughout her empire.

So British men of the war party, such as Cecil Rhodes, Joe Chamberlain and Lord Milner, kept up a steady barrage of propaganda back to their masters in London, claiming the Boers subjected their black workers to slave-like tyranny, were backward and uneducated, were liable to declare war on friendly black tribes, as well as all the injustices meted out to the Uitlanders.

The fundamental argument was that the ongoing existence of two troublesome, unjust, unpredictable colonies disturbed Britain’s settled rule in South Africa and would only get worse. The war party argued that conflict was inevitable, and so helped to create the expectation, in Parliament and the press, for war. Milner sent Salisbury a note comparing the British workers were treated like ‘helots’ (p.721), Salisbury said they were treated like serfs.

The Boer view was it was their country which they had founded by the sweat of their brows in the face of native reprisals, and that they had their own, highly puritanical ultra-protestant belief and culture, all of which were being swamped by tens of thousands of incomers, and also by the booming immigrant population in the Cape. In other words, they felt their entire identity and heritage was being threatened (p.726).

  • Sir Alfred Milner: High Commissioner of the Cape Colony, was instructed to negotiate better rights for Britons at the so-called Bloemfontein Conference, but found Kruger unmoveable and called him ‘a frock-coated neanderthal’ (p.722)
  • Appeasing Germany: Britain and Germany had been haggling about possession of the islands of Samoa; Salisbury didn’t care tuppence about Samoa so happily gave them all to Germany with a view to mollifying the ever-aggrieved Kaiser
  • Lady Salisbury’s illness: she suffered a stroke and showed signs of dementia, partly distracting Salisbury from his duties; you wonder whether Roberts inserts this as an extenuating factor, softening Salisbury’s responsibility for the war
  • Exasperation with the Transvaal: Kruger offers to give Uitlanders the vote once they had been resident for 7 years, plus guaranteed seats in the small Transvaal parliament; some in the cabinet thought the crisis was over
  • (The Aliens Bill: Roberts points out that at the same time as Salisbury et al were supporting unlimited emigration to the Cape and were compelling it on the Boers, his cabinet passed an Aliens Bill designed to severely restrict immigration into Britain; this was to address the flood of Jewish immigrants who were fleeing antisemitic pogroms in Poland and Russia)
  • Both sides arm: British intelligence reported that both the Transvaal and Orange Free State were buying arms in Europe and importing it via Delagoa Bay, the major port right at the bottom of Mozambique, only 30 or so miles from the border with Transvaal (p.724); for their part the British government moved troops into Natal
  • The Smuts Proposals: Transvaal’s Attorney General Jan Smuts contacts the ambassador to make a series of proposals which represent significant concessions around offering Uitlanders the vote and representation in parliament, but premised on the Transvaal remaining independent and outside British suzerainty
  • The Boer Ultimatum: the British government ramped the pressure up on the Boers, with a series of demands which the Boers, initially, acceded to; so it was a surprise when it was the Boers who issued the set of demands or ultimatum which finally triggered the conflict, setting out a list of demands which must be met by 5pm on Wednesday 11 October

Chapter 43: ‘The Possibilities of Defeat’ (October 1899 to May 1900)

I was wrong about Roberts mentioning Lady Salisbury’s illness in a bid to exonerate his hero because he does the opposite; he heavily blames Salisbury for the Boer War. He cites AJP Taylor who apparently said that Milner dragged Chamberlain who dragged Salisbury into the conflict – but in order to flatly contradict him (Taylor).

No, Salisbury had masterminded British foreign policy for over a decade, was a master of far-seeing strategy; he personally approved every dispatch sent to the Boers, and Roberts cites memos and messages between the key ministers which show Salisbury approving the escalation of Britain’s demands, approving the sending of troops to Natal, and manipulating the presentation of the issues so as to ensure the casus belli (cause of war) was one which would rouse and unite the widest number of the population, or politicians and the press (p.736).

Salisbury should have known better. He should have accepted Kruger’s very fair offers to address the issue of the Uitlanders and worked to extend British suzerainty slowly, by economic means maybe. He should have thought of a clever solution.

Instead he let himself and the British government be painted into a corner where the only two options were fight or have British prestige around the world undermined (p.734). This was an epic failure of statecraft. It was Salisbury’s war and, although he proved remarkably phlegmatic about its initial reverses (so-called ‘Black Week’, Sunday 10 December to Sunday 17 December, when the British Army suffered three devastating defeats) its length, bitterness, cost, the way it divided the nation, the enmity it raised in the other Powers, especially Germany, and the sheer cost of death and misery, all are down to Salisbury.

As Britain’s powerful and long-serving Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Salisbury must bear overall responsibility for the situation. (p.732)

Moreover, it was entirely his responsibility that the War Office and the British Army were so poorly prepared to fight such a war (p.756).

  • The death of Lady Salisbury: Salisbury was devastated and never the same again
  • ‘Black week’: Sunday 10 December to Sunday 17 December (p.749): the British army began its war the same way it had begun every one since Waterloo, led by useless generals to a series of disastrous defeats
  • A peace offer: the presidents of the two Boer republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) offered peace, so long as they retained sovereignty, which Salisbury contemptuously refused, claiming they had started the war
  • In the first weeks of the war the Boers surrounded and besieged three major towns, Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. The military turning point probably came when Ladysmith was relieved on 28 February 1900 but the psychological breakthrough came with the relief of Mafeking on 17 May 1900 after 217 days (p.761) though not before 478 people had died of starvation

Chapter 44: Resolution (May to October 1900)

  • Curzon: Curzon was an outstanding Viceroy in India but was obsessed with the idea that Russia was extending its influence into Persia and that we must fight back; Salisbury put up with Curzon’s criticisms but complained that he spoke as if Salisbury had an army of 500,000 at his back (as the Czar did) when a) there weren’t that many British troops in the whole world and b) the most active forces were tied up in South Africa
  • The Boxer Rebellion: see my review of The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China by David J. Silbey (2012)
  • On 3 September General Frederick Roberts formally annexed the Transvaal
  • Social policy: Liberal Unionist Joe Chamberlain bombarded Salisbury with proposals for social reform bills almost all of which Salisbury managed to reject; they did manage:
    • 1897 Workmen’s Compensation Act
    • 1899 Small Dwellings Acquisition Act
  • The ‘Khaki’ election: held between 26 September and 24 October 1900, when popular opinion believed the Boer War was won, the Boer president Kruger had fled to Holland and all their regular forces had surrendered; result: the Conservative and Liberal Unionist Party 402, Liberal Party 183
  • The Unionist alliance: a short review of the effectiveness of Salisbury’s coalition of Conservatives with Liberal Unionists; Chamberlain said he was treated with more respect as a Liberal Unionist in a Conservative cabinet than he had been as a Radical in Gladstone’s Liberal cabinet

Chapter 45: Reconstruction (October 1900 to January 1901)

The ‘Hotel Cecil’: Salisbury handed out so many official positions to members of his extended family that he prompted widespread accusations of nepotism and croneyism (pages 789 to 790), something he himself acknowledged (p.825). Conservative MP Sir George C. T. Bartley wrote to Salisbury in 1898 complaining that in the Tory Party:

‘all honours, emoluments and places are reserved for the friends and relations of the favoured few’ (p.788)

It says it all that, when he finally resigned as Prime Minister, on 11 July 1902, he was succeeded by his nephew, Arthur Balfour.

The death of Queen Victoria: they had become very close, and even if they disagreed, the Queen was always a fixed point of reference to navigate by, so Salisbury took her sudden death (on 22 January 1901) very hard. Late in her life her eyesight was failing and notes to her had to be written in letters one inch high, often only ten words to a page. In return she sent replies written in a handwriting which had become so indecipherable that special experts were called on to explicate it (p.794).

What this kind of anecdote displays is not so much something about Victoria, but about Roberts and the kind of book he wants to write, namely popular, unacademic, accessible, strewn with humorous anecdotes and so, very readable.

Chapter 46: ‘Methods of Barbarism’ (January to December 1901)

  • King Edward VII: Salisbury had had some professional encounters with the new king, when they sat on committees, but he generally ignored his suggestions and limited what government papers he saw; but to his own surprise they quickly formed an effective working relationship
  • The Boer War, the second phase: the main fighting ended but the Boers upset everyone by mounting a scattered guerrilla war; when you consider that they were fighting for the land they had settled and called their own, for land they and their forefathers had worked for generations, it’s entirely understandable
  • Anglo-German relations: after victory in the Khaki election of 1900, Salisbury reshuffled his cabinet but the biggest change was him giving into cabinet pressure and relinquishing the dual role he had had of Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary; he was replaced by Lord Lansdowne, a Liberal Unionist, who had had a poor reputation at the War Office (but then, everyone did); Lansdowne’s arrival marked a break with what had come to be regarded, rightly or wrongly, as Salisbury’s policy of ‘Splendid Isolation’ i.e. refusing to commit to alliances with any of the major European Powers (France, Germany, Austria, Russia)
  • The concentration camps: Roberts seeks to set the record straight: the concentration camp was not invented by the British but by the Spanish in the war against America 2 years earlier; the camps came about because thousands of Boer women and children, left undefended when their men went off to join commando unit, were at the mercy of the Blacks and/or unable to fend for themselves; plus the deliberate British policy of deliberately burning homesteads anywhere near where a commando attack took place rendered them homeless; but the British were completely unprepared for the scale of the immigration and coralling all underfed people in barbed wire encampments quickly led to the spread of epidemic disease; at their peak the numerous camps held some 118,000 white and 43,000 coloured inmates; the Royal Army Medical Corps had planned to serve 40,000 soldiers – in the event they had to cater to 200,000 soldiers and over 200,000 refugees; some 20,000 women and children died (4,000 adults, 16,000 women); these were obviously not extermination camps like the Nazi ones, but British incompetence led to a holocaust of innocents which is held against us to this day; Roberts lists all the possible extenuating circumstances (a handy list) but is robust regarding his hero: Salisbury ‘must bear the ultimate responsibility for what happened’ (p.806) campaigner Emma Hobhouse blamed it on ‘crass male ignorance’ i.e of the hygiene and accommodation required by women and children

It’s worth pointing out that even in Roberts’s broadly sympathetic account, Salisbury, as I understand it, habituates himself to lying about the causes of the war; its origins were all about redressing the injustices suffered by the Uitlanders; once the fighting started, some Boer units mounted incursions over the border into the Cape Colony; and this allowed Salisbury to completely change his rhetoric and claim that the British were acting in self defence against a dastardly invasion. He took to repeating this in public speeches, in private correspondence and diplomatic replies to the Powers, for example in a note to the new king, advising him how to reply to a personal communication from Tsar Nicholas:

‘The war was begun and elaborately prepared for many previous years by the Boers and was unprovoked by any single act of England’ (p.808)

Obviously, he is presenting the strongest, most unambiguous case possible to one of the great Powers, and during a time of war but it was a line he peddled in a variety of contexts, including private correspondence. Here he is writing to his son:

‘This unhappy war has lasted much longer than we expected…but I have no doubt that it was forced upon us and that we had no choice in regard to it.’ (p.810)

This strikes me as being a very Big Lie. Moreover, if Salisbury and his ilk based their claim to rule the country on the idea that they represented a disinterested values of honour and legality, then bare-faced lies and distortions like this undermined that claim, and showed them up to be just another special interest group protecting their own interests (and grotesque mistakes).

The cost of the Boer War

Salisbury spent a lifetime castigating the Liberals for the costs of their policies and claimed to run a fiscally responsible administration. Roberts shows how the Boer War blew that claim out of the water. It ended up costing some £223 million, led to increases in income and other taxes, and a vast increase in government borrowing. Salisbury left his successor (Balfour) a fiscal disaster.

  • The Taff Vale judgement: on 22 July 1901 the House of Lords handed down a judgement that a trade union could be sued (by employers who suffered from a strike). Superficially a victory for the forces of Reaction, this decision single-handedly galvanised working class movements and activists to realise they needed organised representation in Parliament and led to the setting up of the Labour Party.

Chapter 47: A Weary Victory (January 1902 to August 1903)

  • The Anglo-Japanese alliance: 30 January 1902 Britain departed the splendid isolation she had enjoyed for decades by making a defensive pact with Japan to last 5 years; this was to counter relentless Russian expansion into decaying China and the worry that the Russian and French fleets combined outnumbered the British one and so could, potentially, disrupt Britain’s Pacific trade
  • Coronation honours: Salisbury strongly opposed some of the names the new King Edward put forward for his coronation honours, particularly Thomas Lipton who he thought entirely unworthy of entering the House of Lords
  • The Education Bill: English education policy was stymied because the core of the system was so-called Voluntary schools which were run by the Church of England and taught Anglican religion; many of these schools were poorly funded and so Salisbury wanted to give them government support; however, ratepayers from other religions, some Catholic but many non-conformists, refused to pay rates if they were going to support their children being taught a different religion; the solution was, obviously, to increase the provision of non-denominational state schools but Salisbury blocked this because a) of his deep attachment to defending the Church of England and b) because of his scepticism about teaching the children of the working classes, anyway; Roberts digs up some scandalous comments from his journalism period, in which Salisbury says what’s the point of educating working class kids if they’re just going to return to the plough or the factory; this was not only a scandalously snobbish, privileged point of view, but economically stupid; while Britain wasted a huge amount of political time and money fussing about these issues, the Germans and Americans were instituting practical educational systems appropriate to the needs of a modern industrial economy i.e. technical and engineering apprenticeships and colleges; Salisbury embodied the kind of ‘principled’ and ‘honourable’ Reaction which condemned Britain to slow economic decline
  • Peace at Vereeniging: 31 May, after prolonged negotiations, a peace was signed ending the Boer War; Milner had wanted to fight on until every Boer combatant was killed but head of the army Kitchener thought enough had been done, a difference of opinion reflected in fierce arguments in the cabinet; the treaty terms were surprisingly lenient, amnestying most Boer fighters and letting them return to their farms (the ones that hadn’t been burned down) and families (the ones who hadn’t died in the British camps)
  • Retirement: Salisbury had said he would go when the war ended; with his wife dead and Queen Victoria dead and the war over, he began to feel his age and infirmities, nodding off in cabinet meetings;

‘I thought I had much better resign and get out of the way; especially as, since the death of the last Queen, politics have lost their zest for me.’ (p.829)

  • Salisbury prepared the way for his retirement with his cabinet colleagues; he rejected the plan to have his nephew, Balfour, replace him on the same day as smacking too much nepotism; and went to see the King to hand over the seals of office on 11 July 1902; the King was prepared for the visit and handed him the Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order; within 24 hours his nephew was appointed Prime Minister, to much mocking from the Liberal and Irish Nationalist benches; allegedly, this is the origin of the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’, though that is disputed; Balfour found it difficult to fill his uncle’s giant shoes, the coalition began losing by-elections, and was eventually massacred in the landslide Liberal victory at the 1906 election
  • Death: he went steadily downhill after retiring, suffering a series of ailments (ulcers, kidney problems) then a heart attack which led to the final decline and he died on 22 August 1903

The legacy

What an enormous biography this is, overflowing with facts and insights, completely achieving its goal of persuading the reader that Salisbury was one of the titans of the Victorian age. Roberts makes a sustained case for his hero but the more he defends him, the more negative the final impression one has, of a big reactionary buffalo who set his face against all change in any aspect of British society, and solidly, intransigently in defence of his class, the landed aristocracy, its wealth, privileges and power.

The nature of the Conservative Party

‘Hostility to Radicalism, incessant, implacable hostility, is the essential definition of conservatism.’

‘The use of Conservatism is to delay changes till they become harmless.’ (writing to Lady Raleigh after the 1892 election defeat; p.841)

Salisbury engaged in a lifelong struggle against what he saw as the forces of atheism and political progressivism, becoming a master of patient obstructionism. (p.841)

The Conservative Party opposed the extension of the franchise, votes for women, reform of the voting system, home rule let alone independence for Ireland or any of the other colonies, opposed trade unions and workers’ rights, opposed universal education, opposed old age pensions, opposed the welfare state, opposed the National Health System, opposed the abolition of the death penalty, equal rights for women, gay liberation, opposed the expansion of universities and every new artistic movement for the past 200 years. In other words, the Conservative Party opposed every political measure and social achievement which most modern people would describe the hallmarks of a civilised society. They defended the privileges of the aristocracy and the bigoted Church of England, hanging, fox hunting, the brutal administration of Britain’s colonies, and corrupt nepotism. In international affairs they gave us the Boer War, Munich and the Suez Crisis. In every argument, on every issue, they have been the enemy of enlightenment, peace and civilisation.

And what kind of people are attracted to this small-minded, snobbish, xenophobic party of reaction? Admittedly he was writing in a private letter to the Radical Liberal Unionist Joe Chamberlain, but in 1900 Salisbury described the Conservative Party as:

‘a party shackled by tradition; all the cautious people, all the timid, all the unimaginative, belong to it. It stumbles slowly and painfully from precedent to precedent with its eyes fixed on the ground.’ (p.800)

Roberts reports this all quite candidly. It’s for the reader to decide how much this description still applies to the Conservative Party of today.

No policies

To explain, or put the case for the defence, Salisbury’s was a strong disbeliever in theories, manifestos and policies. He distrusted all such claptrap. He despised continental philosophy and was proud of being a philistine in the arts. 1) He thought general theories (such as everything the Liberals espoused) led to unintended consequences, and tended to overthrow the established practices he was so attached to (see the French Revolution, proclaiming brotherhood and ending in tyranny). And 2) he thought a politician needed to be free of pre-commitments in order to react to each issue or crisis as it arose, with the maximum of flexibility, without having his hands tied by promises made to get elected years previously. Epitome of pragmatism.

‘I believe that freedom from the self-imposed trammels of particular theories is necessary if you want to deal with the world as it is.’ (p.475)

He could barely be persuaded to issue any kind of manifesto or platform before the general elections he fought. He thought it sufficed to say the government of the country would be in safe, conservative hands.

Foreign policy

The case is stronger for Salisbury’s foreign policy. Here his dislike of prior commitments was (arguably) a virtue, as it led him to reject every suggestion by his cabinet colleagues to form alliances with this or that of the Powers (France, Germany, Austria or Russia). The central portion of the book makes it clear that this was important as it allowed Salisbury maximum freedom of manoeuvre in handling the many crises which kept coming up, especially in the decaying Ottoman Empire. In fact the major learning from the diplomacy of the 1880s and 90s was how close Europe repeatedly came to a general conflagration, and Roberts shows that Salisbury’s adept diplomacy often prevented that coming about.

Roberts calls the period from Salisbury’s becoming Foreign Secretary to his retirement the Pax Saliburiana. On the face of it the Boer War is a massive, disastrous stain on that claim but from Salisbury’s point of view the single most important thing about it was that none of the major Powers got involved. They complained but the crisis didn’t trigger a general European war.

Same with the Scramble for Africa. In most modern books this is viewed from a woke perspective as a scandal, a historic crime. But seen in context, the thing is not that Africa was arbitrarily carved up with no consultation of the people who lived there, but that none of the potential conflicts between the Powers led to actual war. At the back of his mind was fear of a vast European conflict and he was 100% successful in avoiding this. As Roberts pithily puts it, one of the most remarkable things about the First World War was not that it occurred, but that it didn’t break out earlier.

Everything changed as soon as he retired, and the Entente Cordiale of 1904, far from securing Britain’s security and the peace of Europe, was just the first of the web of alliances which was to plunge Europe into the catastrophic World War ten years later. Would the war have occurred if Britain had stuck to Salisbury’s policy of splendid isolation? Discuss.

Salisbury sayings

‘I was delighted to see you had run Wilfred Blunt in. The great heart of the people always chuckles when a gentleman gets into the clutches of the law.’ (p.448)

The Pope is ‘to be looked upon in the light of a big gun, to be kept in good order and turned the right way.’ (p.449)

‘Always tell the Queen everything.’ (p.515)

Salisbury cynicism

Salisbury was brutally honest about imperialism. He didn’t waste his time with fancy ideas of civilising and morality and whatnot. He really disliked colonial adventurers and chancers. He saw imperialism as an extension of the precarious balance of power between the ‘powers’ or main countries of Europe (Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Russia). Thus he was under no illusion that empire was anything other than the imposition of force to maintain Britain’s interests. Thus Egypt and Sudan had to be held in order to secure the Suez Canal as the conduit to India (p.519), whereas he frankly rubbished the fantasy the fantasy of Cecil Rhodes and the Jingoists of building a railway running from Cairo to the Cape without leaving British territory (p.534).

Thus Britain installed a new pliable ruler of Zanzibar who was installed:

as soon as British warships had bombarded the palace and ousted the pretender. (p.52)

Overthrowing the Ottoman Sultan for a more biddable alternative; overthrowing the king of Burma; overthrowing the Khedive of Egypt; overthrowing the Amir of Afghanistan; overthrowing the heir to the Zanzibar throne, and so it goes on, Britain bringing ‘civilisation’ to the rest of the world and then lecturing everyone about rights and duties and law and honour. No wonder the French despised the British establishment for its deep-dyed hypocrisy.

Imperialism

Poor Lord Curzon saw all his grand schemes for India and beyond (winning influence in Persia, building railways lines across the Middle East) stymied by Salisbury’s basic principle of not alienating Russia and then, when the Boer War drained Britain’s finances, by chronic lack of money. In one of his many letters to Curzon Salisbury gives a (maybe exaggerated) insight into imperial policy earlier in the century:

‘In the last generation we did much what we liked in the East by force or threats, by squadrons and tall talk. But we now have “allies” – French, German, Russian: and the day of free, individual, coercive action is almost passed by. For years to come, Eastern advance must depend largely on payment: and I fear that in this race England will seldom win.’ (p.809)

Salisbury was always gloomy about the present, but this suggests the interesting idea that the empire was created during a unique ‘window’ when force and bluster won huge territories but, by 1900, that era had ended. (Cf taking colonies by force, p.511)

Manipulating the legal system

One of the things that comes across powerfully is the way the ruling class of all flavours (Tory, Liberal, Liberal Unionist) blithely manipulated the legal system, throwing their weight behind prosecutions or releasing individuals early, as it suited them, for example, releasing Irish MP John Dillon early from prison because he was ill, to ensure he didn’t die behind bars and become a martyr (p.451). In the case of the Cleveland Street scandal, Roberts casually mentions that his hero ‘technically’ conspired to pervert the course of justice and committed misprision of a felony, but he did it in a good cause so that’s alright (p.546).

The rotten ‘honours’ system

And the way politicians treated the ‘honours’ system as a simple set of partisan rewards. There was absolutely nothing ‘honourable’ about them, as there isn’t to this day. ‘Honours’ were used to reward loyal service to the government or big financial donors or, frequently, to get rid of unwanted colleagues, ‘kicking them upstairs’ to the House of Lords. Talking of the Liberal Unionists, Robert remarks:

although they refused the rewards of office Salisbury ensured that they were liberally sprayed by the fountain of honours. (p.427)

Home Secretary Henry Matthews was considered to have performed badly during the Jack the Ripper crisis (3 April 1888 to 13 February 1891):

and in 1895 he was awarded a viscountcy as a consolation for not being asked to return to office. (p.507)

The Duke of Beaufort, an important Tory magnate:

corresponded with Salisbury over twenty-five years on the usual aristocratic subjects of cadging arch-deaconries for friends, baronetcies for neighbours and honours for the mayors of towns on his estate. (p.546)

The only reason the Lord Mayor was keen on the visit of Kaiser William was that he thought ‘he might cadge a baronetcy out of it’ (p.555). In 1890 some Tories planned to lure the Liberal Lord Bernard over to their party with the offer of an earldom (p.569). Salisbury himself turned down the Queen’s offer of a dukedom not once but twice, but allowed his son (already Lord Cranbrook) to be raised from a viscount to an earl (p.579).

When forming his 1895 cabinet Salisbury did not appoint Henry Holland, Lord Knutsford, and so gave him a ‘consolation’ viscountcy; Matthews was no reappointed but made Viscount Llandaff; Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett wasn’t given a job, but ‘picked up a consolation knighthood’ (p.602).

Thomas Lipton the tea magnate brown-nosed the queen by donating a huge £25,000 to the Princess of Wales’s project to give London’s poor a banquet at the Diamond Jubilee. Salisbury considered him ‘worthless’ (p.796) but he was a friend of the Prince of Wales and so ‘duly received his knighthood the next year’ (p.661). Basically, you can buy these ‘honours’ if you pay enough and put in enough brown-nosing.

Salisbury despised ‘the rage for distinctions’ but used it as cynically as any other prime minister (pages 668 to 673). In fact in the 6 months of his short caretaker government, he doled out no fewer than 13 peerages, 17 baronetcies, and 23 privy councillors. As Roberts says, not a bad haul for party hacks the party faithful (p.670).

The man more responsible than anybody else for the self-defeating fiasco of the Boer War, Lord Milner, was, of course, given a barony as reward (p.800). Then, as now, colossal failure was rewarded by corrupt politicians.

(Roberts uses the verb ‘cadge’ so many times to describe pushy officials grubbing for honours that I looked it up. ‘Cadge’ is defined, formally, as: ‘to ask for or obtain something to which one is not strictly entitled’, less formally as: ‘to get (food, money, etc) by sponging or begging.’ So you can think of all those Victorians jostling and bothering the Prime Minister for honours as well-heeled beggars and pompous spongers.)

The endless queue of people in the worlds of politics, the church or local government relentlessly pestering him for awards and honours made Salisbury’s view of human nature even more cynical and jaded:

‘Directly a man has satisfied his most elementary material wants, the first aspiration of his amiable heart is for the privilege of being able to look down upon his neighbours.’ (p.668)

And yet he continued to hand them out like smarties, as politicians have continued to do right down to the present day.

Credit

Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts was published in hardback by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1999. References are to the 2000 Phoenix paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on August 23, 2023

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The Fatal Shore: A History of The Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787 to 1868 by Robert Hughes (1987)

‘Warra, warra‘
(First recorded words of the first indigenous people met by the captain of the first convict fleet to Australia in 1788. They mean: ‘Go away’)

Prime fact: The First Fleet of 11 ships transporting convicts from Britain to Australia landed at Botany Bay on 20 January 1788.

If you’re my age you might remember watching the Australian journalist and art critic Robert Hughes (1938 to 2012) presenting his ground-breaking TV series about modern art, ‘The Shock of the New’, back in 1980. He looked like a boxer and expressed feisty, sometimes controversial, opinions in a muscular, punchy prose style.

Seven years later Hughes published his epic study of the British penal colonies and early European settlement of Australia, ‘The Fatal Shore’ (1987). It became an international best-seller because there were few if any histories of Australia which presented the facts of the country’s early history with such a combination of solid research and journalistic brio.

‘The Founding of Australia by Captain Arthur Phillip RN, Sydney Cove, 26 January 1788’ by Algernon Talmage (1937) [The British flag was not officially planted until 7 February 1788, when possession was formally proclaimed]

The text is laid out in a pleasingly clear structure, proceeding logically topic by topic and exploring each of them thoroughly and convincingly.

The narrative starts dramatically with the arrival of the first shipload of convicts at Botany Bay on 20 January 1788. What was the land like that they had arrived at? Hughes gives us several pages description of the astonishingly weird and unique fauna of Australia (pages 3 to 7) and his narrative will go on to be peppered with periodic descriptions of the arid, sunburned, eucalyptus-riddled terrain.

Indigenous Australia

What were the people like that they met? He gives us a ten-page summary of what was then known (1980) about Aboriginal or indigenous culture (pages 7 to 18).

What comes over in his description is the really primitive nature of Aboriginal culture: the Aborigines hadn’t invented the bow and arrow, they had no buildings, they hadn’t even invented the tent (unlike American Indians) because they never stayed long in one place. Some made temporary lean-tos out of bark which the settlers quickly nicknamed ‘humpies’ but their entire way of life was based on firing the bush to catch wildlife, then moving on.

It’s now thought that Australia had been inhabited for over 60,000 years when the Brits arrived. Its  inhabitants had developed a patchwork of tribes and peoples and nations, each inhabiting large tracts of land (Australia is only fractionally smaller than the landmass of continental United States, 2,969,907 square miles to America’s 3,119,884 square miles). To this day scholars debate the precise number, but at least 300 languages and language families existed.

The AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of indigenous Australia

The people who inhabited the area of south-east Australia where the Brits landed were called the Iora. They had no concept of private property so the Brits couldn’t barter with them. They didn’t wash, in fact they covered their bodies with fish guts as a prophylactic against disease and so stank to high heaven. They treated their women appallingly. Unwanted children were aborted by ingesting herbal medicines or simply thumping the pregnant woman’s stomach. Deformed babies were killed at birth. There was no room for the weak in the Indigenous people’s nomadic economy.

Hughes’s description of the Aborigines sets the tone of the entire book. It is going to be deliberately anti-Romantic, debunking myths, puncturing legends, showing that the reality is always more squalid and sordid than the rose-tinted stories he and his generation were told at school or prim progressives tell each other today about the noble savage. In this story, nobody is noble.

According to the estimates available to Hughes, when the Brits arrived in 1788 there were an estimated 300,000 Indigenous Australians across a continent the size of America. No wonder it felt almost ’empty’ to the Europeans: no towns, no villages, no buildings of any kind, no agriculture, nothing that registered with them as civilisation or culture.

(I wouldn’t be surprised if someone contacts me to say this description is unduly negative. Hughes makes every effort to be fair to the Indigenous Australians, and to depict their heart-breaking plight, but he was writing nearly 40 years ago, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of his account is wrong and/or nowadays considered offensive. I apologise in advance if it is and am happy to be corrected.)

Georgian crime

Why was the transportation policy created by the British? Hughes gives a fascinating review of the growth of criminality in Georgian Britain (the long century from 1714 to 1830), which powerfully conveys the stink, poverty and abject misery endured by most of the population (pages 19 to 42).

The Georgians refused to set up a police service, as many nations on the continent had, because of an obstinate belief that it would infringe on the ‘liberty of the subject’ which they fetishised. (Plus the French had a form of police who had the right to enter and search private dwellings, so if the French had one, it must be bad.) But at the same time, the second half of the 18th century witnessed a population explosion which resulted in a surplus of young men who migrated from the country to the city, discovered there were no jobs for them, and so took to crime.

In the absence of a police force the Georgian authorities resorted to passing ever more draconian laws, an astonishing number of them carrying the ultimate sanction i.e. the death penalty. Eventually, there were some 200 statutes carrying the death penalty on the books and you could be hanged for burning a house or hut, a rick of corn, for poaching a rabbit, for damaging a fishpond, for cutting down an ornamental shrub of appearing on a high road with a sooty face (p.29). These were in fact provisions of a particular law, the Waltham Black Act of 1723, designed to stop agrarian unrest in Hampshire (the lawbreakers moved at night with blacked-up faces, hence the oddly specific provision). But most crime was urban and the result of poverty and starvation. As you read on you come across plenty of examples of people transported for life for stealing a loaf of bread, some butter, some bacon etc.

Middle-class people could be transported too. An architect was sentenced to death for forging a contract, commuted to transportation for 14 years (p.297). A satirical poet, Michael Massey Robinson, tried to blackmail an ironmonger by threatening to publish a scurrilous poem about him and was transported for life (p.300).

Hughes describes the rituals of hanging day and the long trek of the victims’ cart from Newgate prison to Tyburn ‘tree’, the sturdy wooden frame situated where Marble Arch is now, the route lined with cheering Londoners, the actual hangings witnessed by crowds of up to 30,000, drinking heavily, pullulating with pickpockets and whores, the whole thing, paradoxically, a festival of criminality, something which outraged moralists deplored in Boswell’s day (1760s and 70s) and Dickens was still complaining about in the 1850s (pages 31 to 36).

‘The Idle Prentice Executed at Tyburn’ by William Hogarth (1747)

In fact Hughes returns to the question of class and crime repeatedly throughout the book. I suppose it’s obvious but I hadn’t thought about the way the policy of transportation was merely one aspect of British penal policy. In other words, it was entirely dependent upon and reflected 80 years of British social and economic history. What was happening in Britain entirely dictated who was sent to Australia, and when and why and in what numbers.

In other words, the book is as much a social history of Britain during this period as it is of Australia. Thus there’s a lot more detail than you’d expect about, especially early on, about, for example, the geography, slums and criminal classes of Georgian London.

The hulks

Britain had no nationwide prison system, in fact at least half of the prisons were privately owned and run (p.37). There was no belief in rehabilitation, prisons were just regarded as dumping sites for toxic males to stew in their own juice.

By the 1770s the prisons had become so overcrowded that the authorities had the bright idea of sending the ever-increasing population of convicts to prison ships or ‘hulks’, the rotting shells of decommissioned navy ships moored in harbours like Portsmouth and Plymouth. In 1776 Parliament passed the ‘Hulks Act’ (16 Geo III, c.43) (p.41). These hulk-bound prisoners were used as labourers in the naval dockyards and, in the picture below, can be seen being taken by boat from a hulk to their work on the mainland.

Prison hulk at Deptford, London, after a painting by Samuel Prout (about 1826)

The American precedent

One of the little known facts about the period which I found fascinating is that the practice of transportation was already well established, but it was transportation to the American colonies. The Transportation Act of 1717 had begun the process of sending indentured servants to Britain’s colonies in the Americas 53 years before Australia was even discovered. Between 1717 and 1777 as many as 40,000 convicts were sent to America for seven or 14-year periods. They were sold to shipping contractors who then sold them on in America to plantation owners in the Caribbean or mainland in what Hughes describes as a ‘thinly-disguised form of slavery’ (pages 40 to 41).

But when they declared independence in 1776 the Americans refused to accept any more British criminals. Anyway, as Hughes points out, they didn’t need them. By the year of independence more African slaves were arriving in America every year (about 47,000) than white convicts had done in the previous 60 years put together (40,000) (p.41).

At first the British authorities thought the Americans would give up their fight for independence. It took until 1783 for the government to finally accept American independence and another few years for the full implications to be worked out for Britain’s overflowing prisons. By the early 1780s even the hulks were overflowing and William Pitt’s government was receiving angry demands from MPs for Plymouth and Portsmouth to do something about them. There began to be riots aboard the hulks, convicts rebelling against the disgusting conditions. In one riot aboard a prison hulk, in 1786, eight convicts were killed and 36 wounded (p.65).

It’s fascinating to read Hughes’s account of the way the mounting complaints of MPs with hulks in their constituencies became a real political problem for Pitt and drove him to appoint a commission to look into ways of disposing of the convicts which filled them – surprising that the problem of what to do with Britain’s surplus convict population became such a leading political issue. It crossed my mind it was a little like the refugee crisis of our own day: successive governments keep promising to do something decisive about it and keep dismally failing. And both involve boats and the problem of what to do with unwanted people…

The other side of the world

Fascinating to learn that, as a result, the British authorities were open to all suggestions, and that a number of entrepreneurs came up with bold and crazy schemes. One was to transport the convicts to the island of Lemane 400 miles up the River Gambia and set up an African penal colony there (p.64). Or how about a penal colony somewhere off the coast of South America?

Zeroing in on the continent which was eventually chose, Hughes gives us a potted history of European theories and encounters with the legendary southern continent before Captain Cook did his first definitive exploration of Australia’s eastern coast (pages 43 to 48). He describes the voyages of Magellan and various intrepid Dutchmen, mentions the Englishman, William Dampier, who touched on the north-west coast of Australia in 1688.

Captain Cook

Then, of course, Captain Cook. Hughes gives a typically factual, forthright and gripping account of Cook’s expeditions, devoting some space to the long-running problem for all seafarers of scurvy, and how Cook, a modern innovator in this as so many other things, lost not a single man from scurvy by the savvy use of anti-scorbutics. As Hughes puts it, with typical pith and wryness:

Malt-juice and pickled cabbage put Europeans in Australia, as microchip circuitry would put Americans on the moon. (p.49)

Hughes gives a characteristically thorough and vivid description of Cook’s voyage in the Endeavour (‘a converted Whitby trawler, small and brawny’, p.51). He devotes a fascinating few pages to the technical inventions which had just recently made such map-making voyages more precise and useful, namely John Harrison’s invention of the marine chronometer, a device for solving the problem of calculating longitude while at sea (pages 50 to 57).

The convict problem

Prisons overflowing with unreformable criminals? A newly discovered continent on the other side of the world? The British authorities put two and two together and realised that this was an opportunity to redirect the now-defunct American transportation policy, and on a far larger scale. Fascinating to learn that the policy was accompanied or swayed by a number of other considerations. For example, Admiralty strategists suggested that establishing a colony in Australia would aid in the ongoing conflict with France to establish naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean. Others pointed out the need to have a base in the Far East to compete with the well-established Dutch colonies out there.

Practically minded boosters claimed that the tall pine trees and flax plants Cook had noted on what he named Norfolk Island, 1,000 miles off the Australian coast, could quickly become a commercial business, capable of supplying Royal Navy ships with masts and sails. In the event, none of these pipe dreams were to work out. Sydney is, quite obviously, on the wrong side of the continent to be of use in patrolling the Indian Ocean and the ‘pine’ and ‘flax’ on Norfolk Island turned out to be commercially worthless.

The First Fleet

And so, after a great deal of prevaricating, and parliamentary committees, and bickering about the number of ships and who should captain them and how it should be paid for – typical British bumbling – the first convict convoy was dispatched to Australia in May 1787 and arrived in the place Cook had named Botany Bay, on the southeast coast of Australia, on 20 January 1788. It was commanded by Captain Arthur Phillip who was to become first governor of the new penal colony.

Hughes gives a characteristically thorough profile of this modest man (a ‘middle-aged nonentity’) who had had a patchy naval career and was in retirement when contacted by the Admiralty to carry out the policy which had finally been agreed by the government of William Pitt (pages 67 to 71). What comes over is Phillip’s professionalism. Hughes shows that he thought the equipping and provision for a fleet setting out to colonise an entire continent from scratch was hopelessly inadequate and bombarded ministers and Admiralty for more (p.71).

Of the 736 convicts sent at least 431 were guilty of ‘minor theft’ and Hughes gives examples of how pitifully trivial these might be (p.72). The oldest was Dorothy Handland, aged 83, a dealer in rags convicted for 7 years for perjury. The youngest was John Hudson, a chimney sweep aged 9 (p.73).

Hughes gives a characteristically thorough description of the challenges of the 8-month-long voyage (252 days) across 15,000 miles of ocean. Forty-right people died on the journey while 28 were born. All were to be confronted by the immense disappointment of Botany Bay when they finally arrived. Within days Phillips and his lieutenants had realised it was wholly impractical as a settlement, not least due to the thin sandy soil cluttered with eucalypt detritus. The bay was open and unprotected, the water was too shallow to allow the ships to anchor close to the shore, fresh water was scarce, and the soil was poor.

So they sailed up the coast to Port Jackson, the name given to the bay area where Phillip established a settlement he called Sydney, after the current Home Secretary ,Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney (p.87).

The starvation years

Agricultural opportunities turned out to be very poor. Supplies were meagre and Phillip had to introduce rationing which got steadily tighter (p.96). Crops failed or wouldn’t take. The convicts became too tired and listless to work. The first couple of years were dire and some wondered if the entire colony would die of starvation, before the final arrival of the Second Fleet in June 1790.

The Second Fleet was notorious for the poor conditions aboard the vessels, and for cruelty and mistreatment of its convicts. A quarter of the 1,006 convicts transported aboard the fleet died during the voyage and around 40 per cent were dead within six months of arrival in Australia. Hughes describes in stomach-churning detail the disgusting conditions aboard the early convict ships. Not all ships in the fleets had the same standards. Those in which people suffered worse, were worse treated and with the highest death rates came to be called the ‘hell ships’.

First failed attempt to colonise Norfolk Island

Norfolk Island is about 1,000 miles east of the Australian coast. It turned out to be extremely inhospitable, the pine trees weren’t true pines, the flax couldn’t be woven, it was immensely difficult to clear the land for agriculture. A ship bringing supplies and more convicts sank, losing the supplies but adding hundreds of mouths to feed, making 959 in total. All that saved the first settlers from starvation was easy availability of tame mutton birds, Pterodroma melanopus which they slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands. By 1830 the settlers had driven the mutton bird to extinction (p.100).

Van Diemen’s Land and the genocide

He devotes a section to the settlement of Van Diemen’s Land off the south coast of Australia under the command of David Collins (pages 120 to 128). The island had named in honour of Anthony van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies who had sent the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman on his voyage of discovery in the 1640s. In 1642 Tasman became the first known European to land on the shores of Tasmania but the Dutch never followed through on the discovery. Now, 150 years later, the British claimed it. The capital, Hobart, was named after the Secretary of State for the Colonies who was the patron of Collins’s expedition.

The island was initially perceived to be less fertile than the land around Sydney and early attempts at farming failed, so the colonists faced starvation. What saved them was the humble kangaroo which was far more common than around Sydney. Every able-bodied man was issued a gun to hunt and kill kangaroo for himself and dependents (wife or children).

As Hughes pithily puts it this reliance on hunting triggered social results, all of them bad. It installed the gun rather than the plough as the totem of survival on the island. It incentivised settlers to ignore long-term planning required for farming and live by day-to-day hunting. And as nearby roos were wiped out and the heavily white settlers ranged further afield it brought them into conflict with the native populations who, more often than not, they shot.

It soon created a fringe class of armed, uncontrollable bushmen, most of whom regarded Aborigines as vermin. (p.126)

With their guns and hinting dogs these men became completely independent of the authorities. They were the first bushrangers. And so were laid the foundations of what would be the only real genocide of the British Empire, the deliberate extermination of the entire native population of Tasmania.

Impact on Indigenous Australians

As to the natives, the government had explicitly ordered friendly treatment, enjoining Phillip to ‘conciliate their affections…[and] live in amity and kindness to them.’ At first this held, but what nobody knew was the white ships had brought white infectious diseases, endemic in Britain and entirely unknown in Australia, flu, cholera, smallpox, typhus, which quickly spread. it was a common sight for the early settlers to come across indigenous corpses huddled in the bush where they’d crawled to die. The British incomers were, literally, a plague.

As settlement spread out from Sydney, the Aborigines took to fighting back, raiding farms, killing livestock, singling out for assassination white farmers of community leaders who’d acquired reputations for killing them. Which triggered massacres of unarmed Aborigines by vigilante gangs, for example the Myall Creek massacre when at least 28 unarmed Indigenous Australians were executed by 12 armed colonists on 10 June 1838. Which triggered further revenge raids, and so on, in a deadly spiral downwards into a sustained ‘frontier war’ (pages 272 to 281).

The System

Year by year the shipments came to be called ‘the System’, the process of sending shiploads of convicts to Australia, who had to build their own prisons and barracks for the soldiers who guarded them and pleasant houses for the civil authorities who supervised the whole thing.

Between 1787 and 1868 around 162,000 convicts were sent to Australia and Hughes goes on to give a fascinating and vivid description of every stage of the development of the System.

Hughes is at pains to dispel the stereotype of life under the convict system which he and his generation inherited, which is that it was a living hell on remote ‘secondary’ or punishment settlements on Van Diemen’s Island. On the contrary, most convicts served out their time, then were released to become citizens in the fast-growing new colony.

Only a fraction of the men and women transported to Australia spent any time in these ‘secondary’ settlements, which were as a rule reserved for prisoners who had committed second crimes while in the colony. Most served a few years of their sentences in assignment to a free settler or in government labour, never worse chains, got their tickets-of-leave and in due course were absorbed into colonial society as free citizens. (Introduction, page xiii)

He makes one simple but devastating riposte to the endless cheap jokes about Australia being a land of convicts:

Whatever other conclusions one might draw from our weird national origins, the post-colonial history of Australia utterly exploded the theory of genetic criminal inheritance. Here was a community of people, handpicked over decades for their ‘criminal propensities’ and for no other reason, whose offspring turned out to form one of the most law-abiding societies in the world.

Hell ships

Conditions on the first ten years or so of ships was so appalling they acquired the nickname of ‘hell ships’. Conditions of unbelievable squalor which people who’d sailed on both thought were worse than slave ships. And the condition of the survivors was no better. A propos slavery, an anonymous convict ballad from 1825 runs:

The very day we landed upon the Fatal Shore,
The planters stood around us, full twenty score or more;
They ranked us up like horses and sold us out of hand,
They chained us up to pull the plough, upon Van Dieman’s Land.

Conditions were dire. In the early years the entire colony nearly starved. But as the settlement at Sydney became established so did its reputation for appalling brutality. The descriptions of lashings and floggings which litter the book are quite nauseating, with prisoners’ backs being reduced to raw meat, bystanders being flecked with lumps of raw flesh.

Hughes devoted a passage to proving that conditions for the convicts were not literally slavery, not as practiced in the Caribbean or American South; convicts had legal rights and could take the masters they were assigned to to court (pages 282 to 287), if arrested they could invoke habeas corpus (p.346), something African slaves couldn’t do. But conditions were consistently atrocious and exploitative nonetheless. It’s difficult to imagine the primitiveness of the conditions.

Governor Macquarie’s Australia was more backward than Cromwell’s England. There was as yet no steam power; draft animals were few; and there were no streams near Sydney reliable enough to turn watermills. So every hole was dug, every log sawn, every rock quarried and every ton of rubble moved by that least efficient of engines, the human body toiling in gangs. (p.298)

Futile escapes

Obviously convicts tried to escape continually. The most shocking story is of a group of convicts that escaped in Van Diemen’s land (Tasmania) and ended up eating each other. There was a persistent folk belief that if you travelled north far enough you would get to China. In fact most escapees either perished in the Outback from starvation and thirst, were murdered by Aborigines, or stumbled back into government settlements more dead than alive. Hughes devotes a chapter to the more colourful escape attempts, notably that of Mary Bryant (pages 203 to 226).

New South Wales Corps

The New South Wales Corps were formed in 1789. Indisciplined and corrupt it quickly gained a reputation for lawlessness and corruption. In particular it acquired a monopoly of the importation and sale of rum to convicts and freemen alike, so much that it was nicknamed the Rum Corps. It repeatedly clashed with the civil governor, most flagrantly in the 1808 Rum Rebellion against governor Bligh who tried to assert civil power over them, see below.

Governors of New South Wales

1. Arthur Phillip 1788 to 1793

Commander of the epic First Fleet and settlement at Sydney, which he named. After guiding the colonists through the early starvation years as they struggled to establish agriculture and had to repeatedly reduce rations of the limited supplies they’d brought from Britain, Phillip was allowed to return home.

Lieutenant-Governorship of Francis Grose 1793 to 1795

For the next two years the military were in complete control of the fledgling colony under Lieutenant-General Francis Grose. The European population of New South Wales when Grose took over was 4,221, of whom 3,099 were convicts. Grose established military rule, abolished civil courts, and made generous land-grants to his officers. Grose unmercifully exploited the convicts and during his lieutenant-governorship a great traffic in alcoholic spirits (mostly rum) developed, managed and run by officers of the New South Wales Corps. This clique gained control of the courts and management of the lands, public stores, and convict labour, all led by John Macarthur, ‘British Army officer, racketeer, entrepreneur, grazier, usurper and politician’.

2. John Hunter 1795 to 1800

Hunter had been second in command on the First Fleet. He was appointed governor and tasked with combating the abuses of power built up by the New South Wales Corps, represented by their commander, John MacArthur, but was too mild and fair-minded to succeed. In fact the militarily cleverly sent letters back to the British ministers accusing Hunter of the very crime and peculation he was trying to stamp out, with the result that he was recalled in 1799 to defend himself.

3. Philip Gidley King 1800 to 1806

King helped develop livestock farming, whaling and mining, built many schools and launched the colony’s first newspaper but was forced to resign after conflicts with the military. He appointed Major Joseph Foveaux as Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island where Foveaux ruled with extreme brutality and sadism.

4. William Bligh, 1806 to 1808

Chosen as the job because a strict disciplinarian who was tasked with taking on the military and their control of the hugely profitable rum trade. However his confrontational style led to the so-called Rum Rebellion of 1808, a coup d’état in which the New South Wales Corps arrested Bligh, keeping him first in confinement in Sydney, then aboard a ship off Hobart, Van Diemen’s Land, for the next two years.

Lieutenant-Governorship of Major George Johnston, 1808 to 1810

Johnston led the troops that deposed Governor William Bligh, assumed the title of lieutenant-governor, and illegally suspended the judge-advocate and other officials. The administration of justice became farcical, and there were signs of strong discontent among the settlers. He sailed back to Britain in 1809 where he was court-martialled but let off with the lenient sentence of being cashiered.

5. Lachlan Macquarie 1810 to 1821

Had a crucial influence on the transition of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free settlement and therefore to have played a major role in the shaping of Australian society in the early nineteenth century

The Irish

Like every subject he touches, Hughes gives the background to the arrival of the first Irish convicts with brisk authority. He gives a whistlestop review of the colonisation of Ireland by England, which had started back in the twelfth century, and led to the creation of a society divided between Protestant rulers who deprived the native Catholic majority of land and rights for centuries (pages 181 to 195).

The reason this is needed is because in 1798 a great rebellion broke out in Ireland which terrified the English ruling class because a) it united both Protestant and Catholic rebels and b) the rebel leaders allied with England’s traditional enemy, France, leaguing with a French force to land in the west of Ireland and combine with them against the British occupiers. Unfortunately, the plans were discovered and most of the rebel leaders arrested before the planned rising and invasion could take place.

Most of the rebel leadership was killed and estimates of the total death toll of the subsequent fighting have been put in the tens of thousands. Hundreds of the rebels were briskly tried and transported to Australia. Here they presented the authorities with a severe security problem. The English convicts, surly and disobedient and quick to escape, nonetheless were the same nationality as the authorities. The Irish, on the contrary, refused to accept the authority of any part of the System and took every opportunity to buck it. With the result that governors and leaders of the New South Wales Corps were doubly severe and brutal with them.

The Irish were ‘doubly’ convicts. At the slightest suspicion of ‘mutiny’ they were liable to severe punishment, for example when five suspected leaders were each given 500 lashes (p.187). The brutality of their treatment triggered the very mutiny the British authorities feared in the form of the Castle Hill revolt in 1804. On 4 March 1804 233 convicts, led by Philip Cunningham (a veteran of the rebellion of 1798, as well as a mutineer on the convict transport ship Anne), escaped from a prison farm intent on capturing ships to sail to Ireland. The authorities quickly declared martial law and despatched troops who surrounded the rebels on a hillock nicknamed Vinegar Hill on 5 March. While negotiating under a flag of truce Cunningham was arrested then the troops opened fire and decimated the rebels. Nine of the rebel leaders were executed and hundreds were punished with severe floggings.

This was the largest convict mutiny in Australian history but there were further small revolts and a continual atmosphere of sullen anger among the Irish and paranoia among the English. From 1815 to 1840 the Irish countryside was in a state of more or less continual civil war and, in total, some 30,000 Irish men and 9,000 Irish women were transported from Ireland to Australia. This was never forgotten in Irish communities who nursed the grievance of their persecution.

Hughes attributes a strong Irish flavour of bolshie independence to the Australian national character, especially to its working class culture. The long, bitter memories of the Irish community gave a permanent legacy of sectarianism to Australian politics.

Rebels and revolts

Transportation would deal with representatives of every British protest movement, rebellion, upheaval and agrarian revolt for the first half of the 19th century so Hughes’s account has the effect of shedding light on a whole series of political rebellions back in Britain. It’s like reading two histories side by side, that of Britain and that of Australia. British protest movements included:

  • the Scottish Martyrs – the first political agitators transported in the life of the System were convicted in Edinburgh in 1793 and were known as the Scottish Martyrs (pages 176 to 181)
  • the Irish rebellion 1798 – In 1798, an underground republican group known as the Society of United Irishmen instigated a major uprising against British rule in Ireland
  • English Jacobins i.e. sympathisers with the French Revolution, whose activities were increasingly persecuted after Britain and France went to war in 1793
  • frame-breaking Luddites 1812-13
  • food rioters from East Anglia 1816
  • members of the Pentridge Rising 1817
  • members of the Cato Street Conspiracy to which planned to assassinate the entire cabinet, 1820
  • radical weavers from Scotland, 1821
  • Bristol rioters 1831
  • Captain Swing – fictional author to whom threatening letters were attributed during the rural Swing Riots of 1830, when labourers rioted over the introduction of new threshing machines and the loss of their livelihoods (pages 198 to 200)
  • the Tolpuddle Martys, 1834
  • more than 100 Chartists, political activists associated with political campaigns surrounding the Great Charter, a set of demands to extend the franchise to the working class, which was inaugurated in 1839, then flared up periodically through to 1848
  • the Canadian Rebellions of 1837 and 1838 led to the execution of the ringleaders and the transportation to Australia of at least 100 convicts (p.261)

The colourful adventures of the first fleets and the starvation and the antics of the New South Wales Corps grab the reader’s attention, but the heyday of transportation was actually during the 1830s, which saw unparalleled poverty and suffering throughout rural Britain, an epidemic of disorder and crime, and so the peak numbers of transported convicts (p.197). So, throughout the book, the history of transportation is also a detailed history of English social and economic misfortunes.

Bushrangers

Though most attempts to escape were futile failures, plenty of convicts ran off into the wild and became known as ‘bolters’. As the colony expanded, agricultural land was created along with flocks of sheep so there was more for convicts living in the wild to steal. By the 1810s society was stratified enough between large landowners, often senior officials in the administration, judges and the like, and more ordinary smallholders, for convicts living in the wild to make a living stealing sheep or goods from rich landowners and secretly selling it onto the poor. These were the first whites to range through the uncultivated parts of the territory which the settlers had taken to calling ‘the Bush’ – hence ‘bushrangers’ (also known as ‘bolters’). With typically neat turn of phrase, Hughes says:

By taking to the bush, the convict left England and entered Australia. (p.243)

Hughes is as cynical and unillusioned about the bushwhackers as about everyone else in this sorry story. They gave rise to a legend which help inform Australian’s image of themselves as rebels and non-conformists and freedom fighters, who ran away rather than submit to injustice, as Robin Hoods stealing from the rich to give to the poor. The reality was, of course, both more complex and less idealised than that.

Colonial life

Population

The first formal census of New South Wales was made in 1828. It showed that for the first time the free population eclipsed the number of convicts, 20,870 free and 15,728 convicts = total of 36,598. Sydney had a population of 10,815 i.e. less than a third.

Contented convicts

In fact the peak of transportation due to English rural unrest leads to a counter-intuitive result; which is that, as Hughes showed, many of the convicts transported in the 1830s loved their new lives. He quotes many letters back to loved ones reassuring them that convict life was not at all the hell everybody believed it to be. Why? Because there was work, pay and food. These were the very basic elements of life the rural poor were rioting for during the 1830s and they were to be had in abundance in a now settled and well-organised colony.

The man assigned to a decent master in the country districts in the 1830s was, as Eyre pointed out, ‘in a better position than half the honest labourers of England’. (p.314)

And:

Convicts who found benevolent masters far preferred their assigned life to the miseries they had known in England. (p.316)

Class and snobbery

Hughes shows that, contrary to stereotypes of matey modern Australia, the early colony developed into a society obsessed with class. In particular the newly rich and free emigrants were desperate to distance themselves from ‘the stain’ of convictry. Names developed to describe the new colonial classes and the number of names for the same thing indicates the intensity with which people indicated their (or others’) origins:

  • Convict: British prisoner, generally sentenced to death back in Britain, who has their sentence remitted to either a 7-year or 14-year transportation
  • Government man: a convict
  • A ticket-of-leave man: a ticket of leave was a parole document issued to convicts who had shown they could be trusted with some limited freedoms
  • Emancipists: convicts who had completed their terms of imprisonment and were now free settlers
  • Exclusives: members of the sociopolitical faction of free settlers, officials, and military officers of the convict colony, who tried to copy English fashions and recreate a hierarchical class system
  • the Currency: ‘currency lads and lasses’ (collectively known as Currency or The Currency) were the first generations of native-born white Australians, the children of the British settlers and convicts; currency as in money, coins or notes that were ‘only good in the colony’ (p.354)
  • the Sterling: by contrast with the Currency, the Sterling was another name for free-born emigrants (p.355)
  • Merino: an early immigrant to Australia with no convict origins; a member of a leading family in Australian society; a person of fine breeding or good character
  • Specials: educated convicts, a relative rarity (probably fewer than a third of transported convicts could sign their own names, p.349)
  • Old hands: old former convicts who lived on into the era after transportation ended (p.594)

Sheep or seals

Hughes devotes a passage to describing the first sheep farms in Australia and profiling the men who imported and cross-bred the delicate merino strain with hardier breeds (pages 318 to 322, and 326 to 331). He explains how the isolation of shepherds sent off into the Outback to guard their master’s flocks, sometimes in pairs, helped develop the particularly strong Australian concept of ‘mateship’, i.e. sticking with your mate through thick and thin.

So it comes as a surprise to learn that for the first 50 years of its existence, the colony’s major trade was whale and seal catching (pages 331 to 336).

The end of transportation

Overall, the transportation System lasted from 1788 to 1868, during which period some 162,000 convicts were transported. By the 1830s Sydney was settled enough and large enough, with an increasingly free-born residents and settlers, that they lobbied the British government to end transportation. At the same time there was another force at work which is fascinating to learn about. I knew about the long-running opposition among British liberals and religious groups to slavery which became the abolitionist movement and which achieved its goal of having slavery made illegal within the British Empire in 1807. I didn’t realise the same group of people opposed transportation just as vehemently, and gained growing support in the 1800s as reports percolated back to Britain of the atrocities carried out against convicts in hellholes like Norfolk Island. Just as there was a movement to abolish slavery, so there was a movement to abolish transportation.

Thus with pressure from liberal Establishment figures in Britain combined with lobbying from the increasingly free and genteel population of New South Wales and led the government to cease transportation to New South Wales in 1840 (p.484). Transportation to Van Diemen’s land ceased in 1853 (p.402) 50 years to the day after the first settlement was founded at Risdon Cove (p.572).

Was the System a success or failure?

Over the life of the system the British government used about five reasons to justify the policy:

Strategic To protect against French influence in the Indian Ocean and Far East. In the event the French never tried to claim any part of Australia, the Dutch Empire was engaged by other means. No port in early Australia became an important naval station.

Regarding specifically crime, the System aimed to do four things: separate, deter, reform and colonise.

1. Separate

Separate the criminal classes from the general population on the analogy of amputating a diseased limb. This failed because it was based on the false premise that criminality is an inherited genetic attribute whereas, in almost all cases, it is the result of bad education, poor upbringing, childhood abuse and, in the great majority of transported convicts, the result of lack of work, lack of opportunity, poverty and starving.

2. Deterrence

This is always difficult to assess because it’s impossible to measure the number of crimes which weren’t committed. But the arguments against are a) contrary to the claims of its proponents, the crime rate in England did not drop after the policy of transportation was introduced (because its roots lay in gross inequality, crushing poverty and lack of opportunity) and b) for a lot of the English working classes, especially from the hunger years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Australia sounded like a land of opportunity. Hence the instructions given to governors like Brisbane, Darling and Arthur to apply relentless suffering to the convicts; hence the appalling brutality of the chain gangs and the barbaric cruelty of Macquarie Harbour, Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay. But it didn’t work. Increasing number of emigrants left for Australia of their own free will. The gold rush of 1851 crystallised the image of Australia as a place the poor and downtrodden of Britain could go to to make a fortune.

3. Reform

Hughes thinks chances are the system did actually ‘reform’ a lot of convicts, in the sense that they came out the other end as law-abiding citizens and, if so, this was down to the assignment system. Many masters were poor, brutal, some were sadistic; but the system did assign men to meaningful labour, which gave them some sort of self respect. It had many flaws but assignment did get many men back into society as self-sustaining workers.

4. Colonisation

Here the system was an undoubted success. Australia would never have been colonised without the forced labour of over 100,000 transported convicts. No sane free man would have emigrated there in 1788 or 1808. Although most of the first buildings they erected have been demolished and built over, convict labour created from nothing the settlements which now have populations of millions.

Hughes’ style

When he wants to be, Hughes can be a formidably vivid writer:

The sight of the hulks at Portsmouth, Deptford or Woolwich was deservedly famous. They lay anchored in files on the grey, heaving water, bow to stern, a rookery of sea-isolated crime. As the longboat bearing its prisoners drew near, the bulbous oak walls of these pensioned-off warships rose sheer out of the sea, patched and queered with excrescences, deckhouses, platforms, lean-tos sticking at all angles from the original hull. They had the look of slum tenements, with lines of bedding strung out to air between the stumps of the masts, and the gunports barred with iron lattices. They wallowed to the slap of the waves, and dark fleeces of weed streamed in the current from the rotting waterlines. (p.138)

The kind of purple descriptions a scholar, a professional historian, would never attempt. But his narrative is continually punctuated with dazzling displays of prose virtuosity.

Some convicts who tried to cross [the Blue Hills], thinking China lay beyond, died of hunger in their immense labyrinth of sandstone, where bellbirds chimed and long filaments of water fell, wreathing, from distant cliffs. (p.299)

And pages 373 (Macquarie Harbour), 399 (Port Arthur).

Slang and jargon

  • basil – an iron fetter worn on one leg only
  • a canary – 100 lashes (p.345)
  • buttock-and-twang – sex as practiced by prostitutes (p.255)
  • cramping box – punishment cell or room or box too small to sit or lie in (p.155)
  • a sandstone – weakling who crumbled under flogging (p.345)
  • stringy-back – wizened, poor farmer (p.256)
  • triced – secured by a rope or chain (p.155)

Placenames

Australia – since australis is Latin for ‘south’ terra australis was the name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times.

Botany Bay – named by Captain Cook as testament to the number of specimens collected by expedition scientist, Joseph Banks.

Brisbane – named after Major General Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane, 1st Baronet, British Army officer, administrator, and astronomer, and sixth governor of New South Wales, from 1821 to 1825.

Hobart – named after Robert Hobart, 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire aka Lord Hobart, secretary of state for the colonies who commissioned Captain David Collins’ expedition to settle Van Diemen’s Land.

Melbourne – founded in 1835 with the arrival of free settlers from Van Diemen’s Land and named after the then British Prime Minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne.

Sydney – named after Home Secretary Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney by Captain Arthur Phillip, leader of the first transport of convicts to Botany Bay, who moved location to the cove north of it, called Port Jackson by Cook, but renamed after Sydney.

Van Diemen’s Land – named in honour of Anthony van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies who had sent the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman on his voyage of discovery in the 1640s.

Old joke

Australia was always destined for greatness because her population was chosen by the finest judges in England! (p.354)

Credit

The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes was published by William Collins in 1986. References are to the 1987 Guild Publishing hardback edition.

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Posted by Simon on May 10, 2023

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The Day of The Triffids by John Wyndham (1951)

This is a much more interesting and genuinely horrifying book than I expected.

I thought I knew the story well enough from fond memories of the 1962 Cinemascope film version, but I was wrong. Like all films, the movie version requires action and so, in the film, the triffids are much more prominent and horrifying from the start. However the book, like all books, has the space to be more thoughtful and psychological than any movie or TV series, and so it came as a surprise to discover how much less of a part the triffids play in it, and instead how full the novel is with moral and philosophical speculations. The lead character:

  • spends a lot of time meditating on the nature of ‘normal society’, how fragile and contingent it is
  • has numerous conversations about the morality of deciding who to save and who to abandon in a disaster scenario

In addition, there’s a surprisingly persistent discussion of the nature of ‘class’ in 1950s England, which comes to revolve around the ambiguous character of Coker.

Above all, focusing on the monsters underplays the extent to which the book is more grippingly a terrifying vision of an entire world gone blind. It’s that, the advent of universal blindness and all its implications, far more than the monsters, which absolutely terrified me. J.G. Ballard gave his novel about global warming and melting ice caps the bluntly descriptive title, The Drowned World. For the first two-thirds of the book, when the triffids are mostly peripheral to the protagonist and his adventures, the novel could have been more accurately titled The Blinded World or Planet of the Blind.

John Wyndham

Wikipedia sums Wyndham up well:

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (July 1903 to March 1969) was an English science fiction writer best known for his works published under the pen name John Wyndham, although he also used other combinations of his names, such as John Beynon and Lucas Parkes. Some of his works were set in post-apocalyptic landscapes. His best known works include The Day of the Triffids (1951) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957).

After attending the unorthodox public school, Bedales, Wyndham didn’t go on to university but had a succession of jobs while he tried to launch a career as a writer. He sold science fiction stories to American magazines while also writing detective stories. He was 36 and not at all successful when the Second World War started, in which he initially served as a censor, was a fire warden in London, and then saw action as a corporal cipher operator in the Royal Corps of Signals, taking part in the Normandy landings.

After the war Wyndham continued to struggle as a writer until, at the end of the 1940s, he made a conscious decision to alter his style and treat subjects in a more realistic, less Americanised and pulp manner. The first book he wrote in this new voice was The Day of The Triffids which remains his best-known and most successful work to this day.

His reputation rests on the first four novels he wrote under the name John Wyndham during the 1950s – The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos – each of which conceives an astonishingly powerful scenario depicted with tremendous imaginative immediacy. He also wrote quite a few short stories, some novellas and later novels, but none match the haunting power of these big four fictions.

The Day of The Triffids

Chapter 1. The end begins

The first-person narrator, William ‘Bill’ Masen (p.17) is nearly 30-years-old (pp.53 and 147). He is ‘a very mediocre biochemist’ (p.243).

The narrative opens as Bill wakes up in a strangely silent hospital. He’s in because of a vicious sting he got across his eyes, whose treatment required his eyes to be swathed in bandages. That’s why he missed the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the amazing natural firework display of the night before, as earth moved through the debris of a passing comet, creating thousands of shooting stars and green flashes across the sky. He heard all about it on the radio and the nurses who came to check on him told him how wonderful it was to see.

The following morning he wakes to a strange silence, not only in the hospital but in the usually busy streets outside. Intrigued and then worried, he eventually decides to undo the bandages over his eyes himself, first carefully feeling his way to the window to lower the blinds so his room is dark. To his relief, his eyes appear to be working fine though he gives them an hour or so to acclimatise to full daylight before venturing out into the hospital.

Here he discovers, to his growing horror, that everyone has gone blind. Doctors, nurses and patients are all stone blind. Some have fallen down stairs and hurt themselves. He helps a smartly dressed consultant to his office who, after trying the phone and finding it dead, throws himself out the fifth floor window. Going downstairs to the lobby, he finds it a sea of moaning blind people milling about trying to find the doors, crushing the weak against the wall, in helpless confusion.

Too many for him to help. He finds the service stairs, makes it down to a back alley and across the road to a pub, the Alamein Arms. It is open but empty and he discovers the landlord, very drunk, getting drunker. Landlord tells him that this morning, when his wife discovered she was blind and then that the kids were, too, she turned on the gas and lay on the bed. They’ll all be dead by now. He didn’t have the guts.

By now Masen and the reader are thoroughly harrowed. I found this opening chapter genuinely scary, a terrifying vision of the entire world struck blind. Masen downs another double brandy to stop his hands shaking, then leaves the pub to face this brave new world.

Chapter 2. The coming of the triffids

Chapter two takes us back into the past to tell us Masen’s backstory and explain the backdrop to the opening chapter. It is told from the contemporary, post-catastrophe situation and so is sprinkled with the idea that everything he is going to describe is from the old world, the world before the cataclysm, the world when people could see.

It contains passages where he laments that nobody back then, back in the Old World, really understood how interconnected all the goods and services they took for granted were. You turned on the tap and water came out; you went to the shops and they were full of food; you picked up a phone, turned on the radio or TV, and everything worked, as the result of the collaborative interaction of hundreds of thousands of people scattered across the globe. Now all that has finished, forever, and that is the basic, fundamental thrill that all post-apocalyptic novels give.

He tells us about the origin of triffids, the derivation of their name which refers to their three legs. In quite a convoluted passage he explains that they appear to have been bred in Soviet Russia in a genetic experiment associated with the name of the discredited biologist Lysenko. He goes into quite a convoluted, cloak-and-dagger story about a dodgy middleman, Umberto Christoforo Palanguez, who approaches a Western fish oil company and says he has a product which will revolutionise the market. He is referring to the oil which can be harvested from these ‘triffids’.

Umberto then commissions a Russian working in some kind of experimental lab to smuggle out some seeds of these new genetically-modified organisms, which are collected by a light airplane which is going to fly them to Umberto in the West. However, the plane is involved in a mid-air collision and millions of triffid seeds, light as air, float around the world with the trade winds.

At first they were treated as a rare novelty and in a slightly too pat coincidence it turns out that the narrator was one of the first to see them in England, as he discovers a specimen growing in his garden in the suburbs of London. That is until he is bending over it one day when its loose swinging ‘arm’ clobbers him, at which point his father uproots and destroys it.

But Masen goes on to defy his father’s wishes that he get a sensible degree and a secure profession and instead studies biology and finds himself a few years later working in an experimental triffid farm. By this point it has become well-known that the triffids produce cheap oil and other foodstuffs. The downside is we learn that the plans not only grow to a huge size but can uproot themselves and walk forward on their three stumpy ‘legs’. Worst of all, they possess a really long flexible arm, like a whip, which is covered in poison sacs. One whipping blow from a full-grown triffid and the poison lashed into a human’s flesh is fatal. And so all the workers at the triffid farm take elaborate precautions and wear outfits a little like a beekeeper’s, covering every inch of the skin in leather protection, and wearing a metal grille mask.

A colleague of Masen’s at the triffid farm, Walter Lucknor (p.46) has spent a lot of time observing the plants and developed some idiosyncratic theories. He thinks the triffids use the odd bunch of sticks down at the front of their ‘bodies’ to communicate. He thinks they can talk to each other.

In a disturbing conversation down the pub one day, after work, Lucknor dwells on the triffids’ tremendous survival effectiveness. It worries him that they know just where to sting a person, namely on the unprotected face and across the eyes – rendering their prey blind. Lucknor makes the worrying point that, if forced to choose between a blind man and a triffid, he’d bet on the triffid every time (p.48), just part of a casual conversation but which, to the narrator, later on, comes to seem grimly prophetic.

These two opening chapters create an awesomely complete setup. The narrative is so tightly bound, every part contributes to every other part. It has the fully-formed feel of a myth or legend.

And then comes the day when Masen and Lucknor are working in one of the compounds of farmed triffids and Masen is bent over one when, without warning, it lashes its sting against his mesh mask with such force that some of the poison sacs burst and spatter into his eyes. It’s only because Lucknor acts promptly to wash his eyes and then provide the antidote to the poison that his sight was saved, but still an ambulance comes, they bandage his eyes and off to hospital he goes, missing out on the great meteor shower in the sky which took place on the fateful night of Tuesday 7 May

Chapter 3. The groping city

Masen decides to head into central London. Like The War of The Worlds the thrill, the horror, comes from reading about places you’re familiar with, and the streets of the capital which most people have visited at some point, now empty of all traffic and strewn with blind people pitifully feeling their way along walls and railings, occasionally bumping into each other.

Masen records what you might call the standard thoughts about the collapse of civilisation. Slowly he sees people becoming angrier, more violent, covetous, stealing parcels off each other in case they contain food, increasingly prepared to smash windows and grope around inside in case it’s a food shop. Initially he is reluctant to behave the same way. He takes food from a delicatessen which a car has ploughed into, but leaves the correct money on the counter.

But as Masen continues his odyssey along Piccadilly, stopping for free brandy at the Regents Hotel, before walking through Soho, it begins to sink in that all the values and morality of the old world have evaporated. Only people ruthlessly focused on their own survival will survive.

Several times he comes across children or toddlers who can see in the care of blind mothers. Quickly they attract crowds of the blind who need their help and the children start crying in fear. Once Masen encounters the leader of a gang of blind men, all drunk, he’s promising to take them to the Café Royal for a piss-up and when one of them mentions women, the leader reaches out to a blonde young woman fumbling blindly by and hands her to his follower. Masen, being a decent chap, intervenes to stop this and, the next thing he knows, is waking up on the pavement having obviously been punched very hard.

My head was still full of standards and conventions which had ceased to apply. (p.59)

Now Masen begins to refer to the fact that he is writing all this from the vantage point of ‘years later’, long after the events, long after civilisation as we know it has ended. As he watches the crowds of looting leaderless, blind people he realises:

There would be no going back – ever. It was finish to all I had known. (p.60)

Chapter 4. Shadows before

In Soho watching the crowds Masen has much the same thoughts as crop up among the characters in John Christopher’s disaster novel, The Death of Grass, namely – if only a handful of people are going to survive this catastrophe, who should it be? And who should choose? Should you try to help everyone? Or is it only practical to restrict your help to a small group? In which case, who? How on earth do you decide who?

Masen comes across a brutish blind man in a side alley viciously beating a young woman cowering on the ground who’s tied with rope round the wrists and held by a leash. Masen beats the man and cuts the cord, releasing the girl, and they both nip out of the blind man’s reach.

Masen takes her to a nearby pub, where she recovers and tells her story. She’s Josella Playton (p.66) who lived at a posh house in St John’s Wood with her mummy and daddy and servants. She’d been to a big party on Monday night and had such a bad hangover she’d gone to bed early on Tuesday afternoon, having taken a sleeping draught and thus missed the comet.

They find an abandoned car in Regent Street and drive between the scattered pedestrians through Regents Park across to St John’s Wood and to Josella’s nice house. They haven’t walked far up the drive before they see the body of a man on the gravel, with a red welt across his face. In a flash Masen realises it’s a triffid sting. He sees the triffid hiding in the undergrowth. They skirt around it and into the house where they find Josella’s father dead in the living room – but not before another triffid has a go at them from the halway; they hurriedly slam the door shut. Then one comes lumbering across the garden. Masen hurries Josella into the car and they drive off as she bursts into tears.

Chapter 5. A light in the night

Masen drives them towards Clerkenwell, to a factory he knows which makes anti-triffid masks and weapons. By King’s Cross there’s a huge crowd blocking the way and they hurriedly exit the car before they’re pulled out by the mob. They make it on the foot to the factory, load up with weapons, then scout around and find a ritzy tower block, go up some stairs and break into a luxury apartment.

Once they’ve established it’s quite safe, Masen goes on a sortie for food. As he exits, a door further down the corridor opens and a young couple, obviously blind, leave their flat. The man navigates to the big window opposite, embraces his sweetheart and then steps through, plunging them to their deaths.

That’s two suicides Masen has seen, Josella being beaten up, people being crushed to death, the landlord who told him about his wife gassing herself and the children, young women getting parcelled out to rough men to abuse, children crying in the streets which are full of pitiful whimpering crowds. Brian Aldiss made the unjust criticism that Wyndham’s novels depicted ‘cosy catastrophes’, but this doesn’t feel at all cosy. It feels utterly harrowing.

Masen and Josella use an oil stove to fix up a fine meal and drink all the apartment owner’s sherry and wine. Afterwards, looking out the window, Josella notices a light pointing directly up into the sky, presumably a beacon, presumably set by someone who can see. But the thought of making their way across London’s increasingly lawless streets in the pitch black deters them.

Chapter 6. Rendezvous

Next day Masen and Josella drive towards the University of London building, see a crowd milling round the fence, park up Gower Street, make their way through back gardens to see a crowd laying siege to the gates. They watch the leader of the blind mob arguing with some kind of representative of the sighted people within. When this ‘leader’ seizes one of the insider’s arms and the mob turns ugly, those on the inside disperse it with sub-machine gun fire.

Once the mob has cleared, Masen and Josella present themselves at the locked gates and, as sighted people, are immediately let in. They discover a community of 30 or so people who have barricaded themselves into Senate House, most sighted although they have brought a few blind partners along. They are introduced to ‘the Colonel’, a plump chap trying to keep up a military bearing, and a colleague, Michael Beadley, who explains that they plan to load up with as much food and resources as they can, then leave London as soon as possible.

Masen is tasked with going to collect foodstuffs from various warehouses. When he returns, the others raise an eyebrow at him half filling a lorry with anti-triffid weapons. It turns out none of them have seen one, none of them have had anything like the experience Masen and Josella had at her parents’ house. But, having seen the movie half a dozen times, we, the readers, know better.

This chapter sees the inauguration of the theme of class in Britain. As Masen listens, he finds the man leading the mob difficult to place within England’s stratified class system because his voice veers between the educated and the common.

His voice was a curious mixture of the rough and the educated, so that it was hard to place him – as though neither style seemed quite natural to him, somehow. (p.118)

Indeed we will meet this man, Coker, later in the London episodes, and beyond and his amphibian nature, a man between two worlds, becomes a sort of symbol of the plot, or of all the characters, raised in one world, but having to face a completely different one.

Chapter 7. Conference

Having settled in with the Senate House community, Masen and Josella are called to a conference of the community in a lecture hall. A succession of speakers outline the need to leave London. It falls to a sociology professor from Kingston University, Dr. E. H. Vorless, D.Sc., to give a long speech saying times change and values with them. Everyone is going to have to work in the new world, and he predictably upsets the women present by pointing out the simple truth that they are going to have to breed, a lot, no more 2.4 children per breeding pair. If their children are to stand any hope of recreating anything like civilisation there are going to have to be a lot of them.

A number of women forcibly object – feminists because they don’t want to be treated like chattels; from the other end of the spectrum, a spirited Christian woman makes a speech from the floor saying she and others will not bow to this godless immorality, and gives the Christian interpretation that this entire catastrophe is God’s punishment for modern immoral society, a claim which can be made about more or less any society at any point in history.

Masen and Josella listen, smiling at the controversy. After the meeting they go out into the square behind Senate House and sit on a low wall. Masen is surprised when Josella suddenly says she’ll be happy to pair off with him. And then stunned when she says that he will also have to take responsibility for two blind women as well. It’s only fair. They will breed while he hunts, guards and so on. The new tribalism.

Chapter 8. Frustration

In the middle of the night, Masen is woken by shouting and the smell of smoke. People are yelling ‘Fire! Fire!’ He gets dressed in a flash and runs downstairs only to trip and fall and be knocked out. When he awakes he is in a small room, bare of everything but a bed and his hands are tied. A rough cockney geezer unlocks the door and gives him some food, but doesn’t untie his wrists.

Coker comes in. He is the ringleader of the mob who were baying at the gates of Senate House. He explains they broke into the building, started some small scale fires and set up tripwires at the bottom of stairs. It’s one of those that Masen tripped over. Then Coker’s gang rounded up the sighted people, tied them up or carried their unconscious bodies to the new location.

He gets out a map. He has a plan. He has divided London into sectors. Each sector will be assigned one sighted person and a group of the blind. Masen is assigned Hampstead. First he is tied to very tough blokes, no way he can jump them. So he’s given a group of blind people and he drives a lorry full of them to Hampstead. He scouts around for them and finds an empty hotel where he quarters them. Then he has to take them on foraging missions. This is it. He’s not intended to go back to Coker’s HQ. This will be his life, his future.

He describes how wearing it is trying to supervise blind people looting shops and loading stuff up. Not only that but some of them have started to report sick, stomach pains. On one expedition a few days in, they walk round the corner and one of the goons he’s tied to is shot down. Masen and the other hurriedly retreat back round the corner and Masen forces the other one to free him. He tells his group to walk away, stick together, stay in the middle of the road. He himself grabs a stick and pretends to be blind tottering along.

Round the corner comes the man who shot at them, the confident red-headed leader of the another gang which was looting one of the shops Masen was taking his posse towards. Red head walks behind Masen’s cohort, with Masen blindly tapping along the pavement behind him. Then one of the sickest of Masen’s gang falls to the floor, clutching his stomach. Red hair walks up to him, looks with distaste, then calmly shoots him in the head, turns and walks back to his gang.

Masen rounds up his gang, finds a lorry and takes them up Hampstead High Street. They’re looting a shop under his supervision when they’re attacked by triffids causing a mad panic. Many of the men are stung across the face, Masen leads them out the back of the shop, over a few walls into a small garage where he packs them into a Daimler and roars off past some triffids which lash out with their ten-foot stings. Things are going from bad to worse.

That night a blind girl comes to his bedroom at the hotel where they’re boarded. She has been sent by the others to offer herself to him to make him stay. Masen is overcome by the tragedy of so much beauty and freshness and innocence forced to abase itself. In the morning it is a warm day and for the first time he smells the smell of rotting flesh. The dead of London are rotting. Leaving the house he passes her room, she calls him in. She has got the mystery ailment, fever and bent double in cramps, she begs him for something to end it. Masen goes to the nearest chemist, finds something toxic, gives it to her and a glass of water, and leaves the house weeping.

God, the sense of loss, the immense human suffering, weighs heavily on the reader, well this reader, anyway.

Chapter 9. Evacuation

The book is full of meditations on what you’d have to do to survive, the steps you’d have to take, how you would have to change and adapt, drop a lot of the old ‘civilised’ values, be ready to defend yourself and yours.

Since I was sixteen my interest in weapons has decreased, but in an environment reverting to savagery it seemed that one must be prepared to behave more or less as a savage, or possibly cease to behave at all, before long.

So he drives to a gunshop in Westminster, which he thoroughly loots, and then heads to Victoria because he thinks that’s the part of London allotted to Josella. It is deserted like everywhere else. Wyndham makes a penetrating comment that the newly blind, people afflicted by this tragedy, prefer to nurse it silently indoors.

He finds an old blind lady. He gives her some cans and a can opener and she tells him she was part of a group led by a sighted woman and he prods her to give him enough of a description of the hotel where they were based for him to find it. But it is empty apart from a decent bloke who’s dying of the plague in the foyer. Masen gets him some water and the dying man confirms Josella was there but she’s left with her troupe. Doesn’t know where.

Masen drives back to the University of London. It’s now empty but inside someone has drawn an address on the wall, Tynsham Manor, near Devizes, Wiltshire. Masen finds four of the lorries are still there, including the one he loaded with the anti-triffid weapons. Well, so he’ll head off for Devizes in the morning.

He goes for a last walk in Russell Square, finds a triffid hiding in the undergrowth and blasts its top off with a shotgun. If you shoot the top of a triffid off it’s like decapitating it. It ceases moving or being a threat.

He sits against a big tree in the gardens, saying goodbye forever to London which is starting to reek of its dead. Then hears footsteps on gravel. He’s scared and, for the first time, realises what it was like for primitive man and what it’s going to be like for him – living in continual fear. Then the figure steps forward and he sees that it is… Coker, the orator, the mob leader, who kidnapped him and the others.

They decide to make a truce. Coker admits his initial strategy was wrong. Michael Beadley’s crew was right in wanting to leave London altogeher. They declare an amnesty for the past and will work together, leaving London together. They go into Senate House and so to bed.

Next morning they leave London in the two most-loaded lorries. Masen describes the difficulty of driving along roads littered with cars. They stop for gas and food. At one stop Coker quotes Shelley, which is slightly odd because Roger, a character in the 1956 apocalypse novel, The Death of Grass, is also given to quoting poetry, including Shelley. Was Shelley particularly popular in the 1950s, among middle-brow readers of science fiction?

And now we get an extended passage about the class system as Masen asks Coker straight out how come, a week ago he was rallying a London mob in broadest cockney but now is sounding quite middle class and quoting Shelley when he wants to. For someone like Masen this is confusing (p.161). Coker explains that he comes from a working class background but educated himself at night school so he could talk the language of the educated, the nobs, the people who run things (p.162). Still, Masen quietly proves his superiority by correcting Coker when he misquotes the famous lines from John Milton’s Lycidas, ‘Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.’

Chapter 10. Tynsham

Masen and Coker arrive in their lorries at the manor house in the village of Tynsham in Wiltshire, as indicated by the message scrawled inside Senate House. It is populated by refugees from London but they discover that the Colonel and Michael Beadley are not there, as they expected. Instead they are shown through to the office of Miss Florence Durrant (p.172), who turns out to be the prim Christian woman who objected, during the conference at Senate House, to polygamy and breeding as being unchristian and immoral.

Our guys learn that when the London posse arrived at Tynsham there quickly developed a rift between Miss Durrant and her high-minded followers and the Colonel, Michael Beadley and most of the men. Most of the men left with the Colonel, drove off, Miss Durrant has no idea where. This left the community at Tynsham with five sighted women, a dozen blind women, some blind men and no sighted men at all. They have rounded up survivors from the nearby village and are planning to run a godly and moral community. On arrival they had discovered the mansion’s inhabitants had been killed by a few triffids loose in the grounds. Miss Durrant and the other sighted women had broken into the manor’s gun cupboard and blown the tops off 26 triffids. Over the previous few days more stragglers had arrived from London, mostly women. But not Josella. Masen is disappointed – he’d had been hoping all the way down that he’d find her here.

Masen chats to a young woman mending clothes by candlelight. Suddenly the electric lights come on and she is amazed. It was Coker, he found the generator and turned it on. He is appalled that the women hadn’t found it or realised there would be one. He takes it out in a big rant at the young darner, saying women are parasites, convincing themselves and men that they are too delicate, too spiritual and too high-minded to work. That’s why hitherto most have latched onto a man and then lived like leeches off his pay, while irresponsibly breeding children who others will have to educate.

Well, there’s a view you don’t hear very often these days, when the women of the past are uniformly portrayed as helpless victims of the patriarchy. The young woman storms out, Masen bursts out laughing.

Chapter 11. And further on…

Masen spends a sleepless night. He had hoped to find Josella at Tynsham, he is bitterly disappointed (a novel needs a plot and so Masen’s quest for Josella is developing into the main motor of this one – as the Custance party’s odyssey across England to Westmorland is the motor of The Death of Grass). When pushed, Miss Durrant told them that the Colonel et al had headed off for a place called Beaminster in Dorset. Masen and Coker decide to go looking for them and drive off. More careful driving along car-strewn roads. Masen notices there are very few animals about, only vacant cows lowing to be milked.

In a place called Steeply Honey they see a man apparently trying to warn them away who, the moment he steps out his front door, is whiplashed by a triffid. Pushing on into the high street they park, Masen gets down, and is immediately confronted by a fair-haired man with a rifle.

Chapter 12. Dead end

But Coker has seen all this from the cab of the other truck and now enters from the side, pulling his weapon on the man. Both agree to lower them. Turns out fair hair is one of just three sighted people. They thought Masen and Coker were the advance guard of some mass gang from the city who they expect to come marauding at any moment. Masen and Coker put them straight – the cities are just massive mortuaries now. No marauding parties are coming from them.

The three locals take them to a fortified manor whither they’ve taken lots of weapons and food and turned into a base. From here, Masen and Coker persuade them to embark on a systematic sweep of the surrounding countryside looking for the Colonel’s party. They use maps to divide up the territory and set off on long lonely drives round the country, regularly beeping their horns, but find nothing.

It’s in these passages that we learn for the first time that the animals have been blinded by the comet, too. Cows and sheep are blundering around blinded. That explains his occasional references to seeing no animals except a few birds.

One of the locals manages to get a helicopter at a local airport working, and they fly low over large parts of the countryside, but they don’t find the London gang. They encounter scattered groups in farms and holdouts. When they land, these isolated groups simply refuse to believe the catastrophe is universal. Rather than joining together, they prefer to stay in the little groups and places they know. It is a very persuasive description of ‘disaster fatigue’, the refusal to accept what’s happened or to think straight. And trauma. The preference to stay within a small tight-knit community in places they know. Fear and trauma.

On one of his trips Coker unexpectedly recruits a forceful old lady, Mrs Forcett, who is a great cook. But the days are passing and nothing is changing. Coker makes a big speech saying they need to group together in as large a community as possible so that the labour of the many can enable the few to be teachers and pass on knowledge, otherwise the future is utter barbarity. For that reason he announces he is going to drive back to the Christian community at Tynsham. With its walls, extensive land and large buildings it has the potential to become an organised agrarian community.

Masen sees the force of Coker’s argument but, in the small hours, realises he is not going to go with him. He needs to find Josella, it is his quest. Back in London, on that moony evening when they sat outside Senate House and she surprised him by saying she wanted to pair off with him, she had mentioned her dream house, a lovely country house on the north-facing slope of the South Downs. Now, Masen knows he must seek her there.

Chapter 13. Journey in hope

So next morning Coker and the other three pack up and head off back north to Tynsham while Masen heads east to the South Downs. He becomes increasingly lonely driving through the silent countryside and the empty towns. In the New Forest he is startled when a small girl runs out into the road waving her arms. She is ten and named Susan, she asks him to come and see Tommy. Tommy is lying on the lawn of her house with the tell-tale red welt across his face where he’s been stung by a triffid. Masen spots it and blows its top off with his shotgun. Then confirms that Tommy is dead. Susan had been sent to bed early on the fateful night of the comet. Both her parents had been struck blind. First her father had gone to get help and never returned. Then her mother. She had a narrow escape from a triffid and warned Tommy not to go outside, but one day he had and… Masen buries the little boy, feeling desolate. Then loads up and takes Susan with him.

When it gets dark he stops for the night, scopes out a safe house, makes a meal, then outs Susan to bed. A little later he hears her sobbing and goes up to comfort her. The truth is he needs comforting, too.

Next day it rains heavily. They arrive on the north side of the South Downs around Pulborough. He has no idea where Josella’s house is or whether she’d be there. He has a brainwave. As it gets dark he finds a big detachable lamp attached to a Rolls Royce, sets it up on the front of the lorry and shines the powerful light across the long reach of the hills. There’s a bit of suspense and then, rather inevitably, Susan sees an answering light flickering in the distance. Excitedly they set off, it’s a long way, the rain obscures the view, the roads don’t go where you want them to, but eventually they identify the house on the hillside, drive up the drive, the door opens and out comes running… Josella!

I jumped down.
‘Oh, Bill. I can’t — Oh, my dear, I’ve been hoping so much…. Oh, Bill…’ said Josella.
I had forgotten all about Susan until a voice came from above. [in the cab of the lorry]
‘You are getting wet, you silly. Why don’t you kiss her in-doors?’ it asked.

Chapter 14. Shirning

The house is called Shirning Farm. Masen discovers it is owned by Dennis and Mary Brent. They’d been hosting guests, Joyce Taylor and Joan and Ted Danton on the night of the meteors. All five had been blinded. A few days later Ted had ventured out from the farm but never returned. Then Joan went to find him and never returned. Mary had been half-sting by a triffid through a part-open window, so they slammed all windows and doors shut, nursed her back to health and Dennis cobbled together an outfit covering all his skin and a mask from wire mesh, and had ventured on several terrifying trips to the nearest village in search of food.

Then Josella had arrived. Masen learns that a) she had been grabbed by Coker’s gang on the night they attacked Senate House b) she had been allotted a troupe of blind people to lead in the Victoria area c) when they began to drop like flies from the plague she’d made her way back to Senate House d) by enormous coincidence overhearing the shot of Masen decapitating the triffid in Russell Gardens on the same night when Coker had also returned and the two men had made a truce. But fearing a trap, Josella had turned back, taken a car and driven south to Shirning.

So now there are three sighted people there – Bill, Josella and young Susan – and the three blind ones. They set about fortifying the house, going on food trips. After three weeks Bill drives back to Tynsham Manor and returns with grim news. They’re all dead. Looks like the plague killed everyone. There was some kind of note pinned to the door but the piece with the text on had been torn off by someone or something, presumably a message about where the survivors were headed. Masen searched for hours but couldn’t find it anywhere.

Josella breaks down in tears. She wasn’t made for a life like this. Bill tries to reassure her that there must be thousands of groups like theirs scattered all over Europe. They just have to link up, he says, without much conviction.

Chapter 15. World narrowing

Quite a long passage describes the passing years, how Masen makes numerous trips to local towns for supplies and oil and petrol for the generator, fairly often goes up to London and watches its decay, grass colonising the rooftops, plaster facades falling into the street.

They erect a strong fence against the triffids, but on several occasions the plants break through and have to be fought off with flame throwers. Young Susan studies them closely and becomes convinced they can communicate and they have intelligence. They are watching and waiting.

One day he drives Josella to the south-facing part of the Downs and they sit looking down over the sea. They discuss the world their children will inherit, they wonder whether to tell them a myth, a legend about the old times. Masen worries that stories about the ancestors who had magic devices would crush the young, sit like a stifling shadow over them.

Then he shares with Josella (Josie) his theory that the event on that fateful night was no comet at all. What if the flashes which blinded everyone were the product of one of the numberless weapons satellites circling the globe at the start of the Cold War, which contained a weapon deliberately intended to burn out the optic nerves? What if it was an utterly man-made catastrophe after all (p.247)? God, that makes it even worse.

They have talked themselves into a mood of philosophical resignation, going so far as to say that if it all ends tomorrow, at least they will have had this time… when they hear a droning and realise a helicopter is approaching from the west. They start dancing around, waving their arms and shouting, but well before it gets close enough to see them, it abruptly changes direction and heads north inland.

The point being, its appearance destroys the mood of wistful resignation they had conjured up. Now both are on edge – maybe things aren’t sliding elegiacally towards an end. Maybe, somewhere, some people are doing a whole lot better than they are. How can they find them?

Chapter 16. Contact

Driving back from this jaunt they see smoke rising and they – and the reader – become terrified that it is the cottage at Shirning, the triffids have broken through the fence and some disaster has occurred.

Sure enough the fire is on their land, but it is the smoke stack not the house and… the helicopter they saw from the beach has landed in front of the house. Out of the house to greet them comes Ivan Simpson, the same man who had pinched a helicopter and landed it outside Senate House in London all those years ago.

He tells them that after they decided to leave Miss Durrant’s Christian commune at Tynsham, the Colonel and Michael Beadley’s group had gone north into Oxfordshire (and not south-west to Beaminster – that had been a complete fabrication on Durrant’s part) and spent two years building up a defensible property there. But after two years the proliferation of triffids all along the perimeter fences made them realise that maintaining the fences and patrolling the grounds against triffids had become impossible.

So Beadley’s group moved lock, stock and barrel to the Isle of Wight, figuring an island was the optimum defence. They had spent years eradicating the triffids with flame throwers from every inch of the island. In the spring seeds blow over from the mainland but it is reasonably easy to spot them and burn them out before they can grow.

All through this period Simpson had taken jaunts in the helicopter and landed wherever he saw survivor communities. A dead giveaway from the air was the dark band of triffid foliage surrounding any populated settlement.

There are now about 300 of them in the Isle. And then Coker had turned up. He told the story of Tynsham’s end. Some women arrived from London and they brought the plague. Coker quarantined them but it was too late, it spread, Coker and others fled but took it with them. Eventually they settled down in Cornwall, using a river as a block against the triffids, but it wasn’t secure. When Sampson discovered their community from the air, landed and explained about the security of the Isle of Wight, Coker’s group chose to go, packing into fishing boats and making the journey by sea.

Chapter 17. Strategic withdrawal

Next day Masen sets out on a day-long trip to fetch coal. When he returns he sees an odd, military style vehicle parked in the driveway. Josella exits the house to greet him and makes signs to be wary, and is followed by a tall tough looking man in combat fatigues. Josella introduces him as Mr Torrence. Torrence introduces himself as the chief executive officer of the Emergency Council for the Southeastern Region of Britain. Their base is in Brighton which is running out of food. The council have devised a plan to take over, or manage all the small communities within reach of Brighton. They’d heard about Shirning but not been able to locate it until Susan lit the fire yesterday.

Now Torrence presents a menacing offer. The council is a semi-fascist dictatorship. They have drawn up plans to sequester blind people on every habitable settlement near Brighton, twenty blind to two sighted. Slowly Masen realises that he is to treat them as serfs. He will give them food enough to work the land. When Masen protests that it’s preposterous, he’s not sure he’s got enough food to feed his six, Torrence explains he can feed the blind on mashed up triffid. On cattle fodder, in other words. As to working the land, there’s a shortage of horses, so he can get the blind to pull a plough. They will be little more than human pack animals. Masen, in turn, will ‘hold’ the property on the authority of the council in Brighton. It is pretty much a reversion to feudal authority.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, Torrence goes on to justify his council’s authority on the basis that other organisations are probably springing up across Europe, soon they will organise and become powerful. England needs to generate a social structure, and food enough to feed the new young generation while they are trained to fight. He is, in other words, like all fascist organisations, basing his entire social structure on the anticipation of war.

Throughout this recitation Masen has veered from honest indignation to realising that Torrence is deadly serious and will confiscate the farm by force if they don’t go along with the scheme. More than that, Torrence says they will take Susan with them, claiming it is for her own good, but Masen can see she’ll be held as a hostage for his good behaviour.

Masen and Josella decide the best thing is to play along, to reluctantly and grumpily acquiesce. They do so and Josella volunteers to feed them. She puts on a big spread with lots of wine, lots of conversation till late in the night, trying to allay the suspicions of Torrence and his men and the latter, eventually, are put to bed in spare rooms.

At which point Masen and Josella round up the others. She had already pulled out some honey on his instructions. Now he sneaks out to the drive and pours the honey into Torrence’s military vehicles gas tank. Then Masen sneaks everyone out of the house and into the half-track. When they fire up the half-track’s engine it obviously wakes Torrence and his men but by that time Masen has driven the half-track at top speed through their carefully assembled protective gate and halfway down the battered road. They park a few hundred yards away and, looking back, can see the waiting triffids piling through the breached gate, even as lights go on in the house. Torrence and his men presumably make it to their vehicle because our team hear the sound of the ignition starting up but then sputtering and dying as the honey is sucked into the engine. Then silence. How grisly! Torrence and his four men are trapped inside a vehicle utterly surrounded by triffids, never to be able to escape. Or if they try, inevitably to be struck down… My God!

The abrupt ending

And that is the end. Quite suddenly, on the last page, Masen ceases his narration. They rendezvoused with Simpson who flew them over to the Isle of Wight and Masen declares that his own, personal account can now hand over to the broader account of the community on the Isle of Wight which has been written by a certain Elspeth Cary. It’s been a long and gruelling read. I felt upset and harrowed by many of the details. The text’s final words are:

So we must think of the task ahead as ours alone. We believe now that we can see our way, but there is still a lot of work and research to be done before the day when we, or our children, or their children, will cross the narrow straits on a great crusade to drive the triffids back and back with ceaseless destruction until we have wiped out the last one of them from the face of the land that they have usurped.

Hard not to feel this is an anti-climax, a very abrupt ending. Then again, it would have been difficult to continue at the same level of detail descriptions of the flight to Wight, the settling into the community and the many, many years which have followed. It would have required a second volume and, in fact, several authors have written sequels to the Wyndham original which carry the story on…

The persistence of America

Throughout the story, numerous characters express the conviction that the whole world may be blinded, but not America (pages 194, 201). They refuse to believe that America can have been affected. The isolated rural groups Masen meets around page 200 all refuse to accept that America won’t come to rescue them. The theme reaches a climax in the blind (sic) insistence of a young woman they meet in the West Country that America simply must be unaffected.

‘The Americans will be here before Christmas,’ said Stephen’s girl friend.
‘Listen,’ Coker told her patiently. ‘Just put the Americans in the jam-tomorrow-pie-in-the-sky department awhile, will you. Try to imagine a world in which there aren’t any Americans – can you do that?’
The girl stared at him. ‘But there must be,’ she said.

Same thing happens in John Christopher’s disaster novel, The Death of Grass, where numerous characters cling on to the belief that America has somehow survived the catastrophe which has plunged Europe into barbarism. The British survivors pick up radio signals from America long after the BBC has gone off air…

The way the theme of this ‘Micawber fixation on American fairy godmothers’ as Coker sardonically calls it (p.202) appears in both books meshed with my recent reading of a couple of history books about the immediate post-war period (The Accidental President by A.J. Baime and Crucible: thirteen months that changed our world by Jonathan Fenby) to make me realise the deep sense people who’d lived through the Second World War must have had that there was support and succour out there in the West – that even while they were bombed night after night by the Luftwaffe, everything would be OK as long as America was still free. In both these novels the survivors of apocalyptic events in England still look to American for succour and simply refuse to believe it, too, has been devastated.

They make you realise the vast impact which American aid and money and moral support, both during and after the Second World War, had on the psyche of the war-torn populations of Britain and Europe, and how the sense of America’s underpinning our entire way of life lived on long afterwards in Europe’s fictions.

Credit

The Day of The Triffids by John Wyndham was published by Michael Joseph in 1951. All references are to the 1974 Penguin paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on March 3, 2021

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A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton (1613)

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside is universally agreed to be the best of the half dozen or so comedies Middleton wrote or co-wrote. It is yet another comedy about sex and class and money, about corruption and greed and adultery – all the usual subjects – in fact the oppressively narrow range of subjects which Jacobean comedy dealt with. Elizabethan comedy is generally mirthful, while comedy under James I (came to the throne in 1603) becomes more and more disgusted.

These plays are saturated in an atmosphere of sex – not only are the plots about legal and illegal couplings (i.e. marriage and adultery) but right down at the verbal level, almost every word in Jacobean English was packed with sexual double meanings and innuendo.

This thick fog of sexual meaning radiates from just the cast list, before the play itself has even begun. As a little academic exercise I was going to keep a record of the sexual ambiguities mentioned in the notes, but there are four or five on every page and the play is 100 pages long, so it almost immediately became unmanageable.

Cast

Master YELLOWHAMMER, a goldsmith
MAUDLIN, his wife
TIM, their idiot son
MOLL, their daughter – heroine of the play
TUTOR to Tim
SIR WALTER WHOREHOUND, a suitor to Moll who has, for years, been sleeping with and impregnating Allwit’s wife
SIR OLIVER KIX, and his wife LADY KIX – endlessly argue because they can’t get pregnant
Master John ALLWIT, and his wife MISTRESS ALLWIT, whom Sir Walter keeps i.e. he pays for their entire London establishment on the agreement that he can sleep with the wife whenever he’s in town, and has sired on her no fewer than seven children!
A WELSH GENTLEWOMAN, Sir Walter’s whore, who he brings up to London to marry off to dim Tim
WAT and NICK, Whorehound’s bastards by Mistress Allwit
DAVY DAHUMMA, Whorehound’s man
TOUCHWOOD SENIOR and his wife MISTRESS TOUCHWOOD – helpful older brother to…
TOUCHWOOD JUNIOR – the ‘hero’ of the play, in love with Moll, the two young lovers who feature in all these plays
TWO PROMOTERS i.e. officials paid to police the city’s Lent policy i.e. buying, cooking or eating meat is forbidden
Three or four WATERMEN, who get involved in Moll and Young Touchwood’s attempts to escape the City by river
A WENCH carrying Touchwood Senior’s bastard, who confronts him in the street
Jugg, Lady Kix’s MAID
A DRY NURSE and A WET NURSE for Lady Mistress Allwit’s baby
TWO PURITANS, the first named Mistress Underman
FIVE GOSSIPS, a word which means both middle-aged wives and godmothers
A PARSON – drafted in to hurriedly marry Young Touchwood and Moll in Act 5
SUSAN, Moll’s maid – who is instrumental in the final plot

Smut

The play opens with Moll playing on the virginals – nudge nudge – and her mother, Maudlin, chastising her for missing her dancing classes, commonly associated with sexual opportunity. Page two starts with a pun about the size of women’s vaginas (‘When I was of your bord’, Maudlin tells Moll, where bord derives from ‘bore’ as of a rifle, i.e. when I had a nice young ****), then goes on to talk about imperfections, cracks and rents in smart fabrics, ‘cracks’ which need to be filled up by a husband, fnah fnah…

And on it goes, three hours of unrelenting smut and obscenity. Every mention of entering, before and after, up and down, standing to attention and so on, are drenched in sexual overtones. Her mother tells Moll she’ll have to get used to kissing her husband ‘when he enters’ and using her hand ‘before and after’ and ‘waving her body’ i.e undulating up and down as in sex – not to mention the wealth of Jacobean slang terms for aspects of sex which crop up in the oddest places – ‘nock’ was a slang term for the female genitals. I don’t think I’ve ever read the words ‘c***’ and ‘f***’ and ‘penis’ used so often in the notes of any text.

The plot

Critics discern five plots in the play:

1. Young love

A straightforward young-couple hampered-love story, namely Moll Yellowhammer (the chaste maid of the title) is the daughter of a wealthy Cheapside goldsmith and his wife. She is in love with dashing Young Touchwood, but her ambitious parents want to marry her off to Sir Walter Whorehound, who has just arrived in town, accompanied by a young woman, his ‘landed niece from Wales’ who they don’t realise is his whore.

2. Tim nice but dim

The Yellowhammers have a son, Tim, who returns from Cambridge with his Latin tutor. Much piss is taken out of his low level classical learning, with Tim and the tutor given a scene where they speak to each other in pig Latin (Act 4 scene 1) and later he speaks to the Welsh niece in Latin and she replies in Welsh so they merrily speak at cross purposes for a bit before servants come in and misinterpret both their speeches.

Anyway, the idea is that Tim will be married off to the landed niece, and he is promised 19 mountains and 2,000 runts (there is much unsubtle wordplay on a rude word which rhymes with run) and indeed, at the end of the play dim Tim and his Welsh whore do get married, in an obvious parody of the happy wedding of the heroes Young Touchwood and Moll, and discovering she has no mountains and no runts, although she does have a nice ….

3. Whorehound’s arrangement

In the most interesting because most genuinely original storyline, Whorehound has been paying Allwit and his wife to live in luxury, in a house with all mod cons, with food on the table every day and a bunker full of Newcastle coal, purely and simply so that he can sleep with Allwit’s wife every time he is in London. Allwit doesn’t mind, he’s been kept in very fine style for ten years! He has a soliloquy (Act 1 scene 2) in which he sings the joys of being a kept cuckold, not for him any worries or cares as long as Whorehound carries on shagging his wife. And his wife is quite happy with the arrangement, too, an occasional loaning out to Whorehound in return for a loving marriage and financial security.

In fact she has proceeded to bear no fewer than seven children to Whorehound, some of whom are 12 or 10-years-old and going to school. They are proudly presented to him on his arrival at the Allwit house and he promises them all financial support.

The other plotlines – frustrated young lovers, idiot young man duped into marrying a whore – these are boringly familiar. But the Whorehound-Allwit plotline feels as if it breaks new ground, and takes things into an entirely new realm of (entertainingly) cynical depravity.

4. The prolific Touchwoods

Meanwhile, Touchwood Senior (the elder brother of Moll’s true love, Young Touchwood) has a scene (Act 2 scene 1) where he tearfully takes leave of his wife. His problem is that he is prodigiously fertile and impregnates any woman he sleeps with, but he is poor. Thus the couple have had umpteen children each one of which impoverishes them further.

we must give way to need
And live awhile asunder, our desires
Are both too fruitful for our barren fortunes.

Little more is heard of Touchwood Senior’s wife, and most of his energy goes, in the second half of the play, into helping his young brother organise eloping with beautiful Moll.

5. The barren Kixes

Finally, there is yet another couple, the Kixes, an aging couple who are the mirror opposite of the Touchwoods in that they have been trying for years for a baby but cannot conceive. The result is an endless cycle of recriminations and arguments in which they blame each other for being barren or sterile before bursting into tears and falling into each others’ arms – as Touchwood witnesses on an embarrassing visit to their house.

As so often, fertility is directly connected with money across a web of relationships, because if they die without an heir, Whorehound will inherit their estate. He is so confident this will not happen that he has been living beyond his means for years, banking on inheriting and paying off his debts. Unfortunately for him, the Kixes’ maid, Jugg, tells them that Touchwood Senior has a special fertility potion which will soon see Lady Kix pregnant and in a sly scene (Act 3 scene 3), Touchwood Senior inveigles his way into Lady Kix’s bed, waves his magic wand and lo! she becomes pregnant.

So those are the five storylines which Middleton confidently and stylishly weaves together to make a play which is brilliantly crafted, and benefits from a really confident and mature interweaving of blank verse, rhymed verse and prose – but which I found utterly unfunny and unmoving. It is brilliantly made – but sterile.

The way the five storylines are interwoven becomes very complicated, but the key highlights are:

– There is an immensely long scene after Mistress Yellowhammer has given birth to another baby, her eighth child by Whorehound and – this is what makes it so long – a large retinue of ‘gossips’ i.e. local merchants wives, and several Puritan neighbours, are all called in to attend what we’d nowadays call a baby shower. The mickey is taken out of the gossipy ladies, and of the two Puritans who get blind drunk, at extreme length. Most modern productions of the play cut the entire scene as it isn’t part of any of the five plotlines and a lot of the force of its contemporary satire has evaporated.

– Similarly, seven pages are devoted to two ‘promoters’, officers who were set to enforce the new and more strict laws enacted under James I to ban the buying, cooking or eating of meat during Lent. Their scene exists solely to demonstrate how utterly corrupt they are, as we see them bullying citizens, all the time keeping the meat they confiscate either to sell to rich patrons or for their own families – until they get their come-uppance when a woman pretends to be caught red-handed with a basket full of meat, only for the promoters to discover a crying baby at the bottom of it for which they thereupon become legally responsible (and it is a hanging offence to abandon or kill).

Like the Puritans in the baby shower scene, it feels as if the promoters have been thrown into the play solely to get the audience laughing, mocking and jeering these popular hate figures.

– There’s a cooly cynical scene where Allwit presents himself to Yellowhammer as himself a remote member of the Yellowhammer family and says he has come to visit out of the goodness of his heart because he knows that they plan to marry their fine daughter off to Sir Walter Whorehound and he (Allwit posing as a Yellowhammer) has the sad duty to inform them that Sir Walter has for many years kept a married woman as whore in London and fathered a brace of bastards by her. Yellowhammer acts shocked and Allwit goes his ways rejoicing that he has scuppered Sir Walter’s plans for getting married (which means that he, Allwit, will remain in the life of luxury because Whorehound will continue swiving his wife indefinitely). What he doesn’t realise is that Yellowhammer doesn’t mind – he still thinks the marriage will bring his family social advantage and, after all, he casually tells the audience, he kept a whore when he was young and fathered a bastard on her (Act 4 scene 1).

– After an initial attempt to elope with Touchwood Junior, Moll is locked up in her room until the wedding with Whorehound. The day before the wedding, she manages to escape through a small hole and flee her parents’ home again – hooray! – but is once again caught just as she was getting into a waterman’s boat to go upriver to meet Touchwood Junior – boo!

Moll is dragged onstage by Yellowhammer’s furious wife, Maudlin, half-soaked from his riverside capture, locked up again and falls into a sickness, partly from the cold water, partly from despair (Act 4 scene 2). Eventually, while Touchwood Senior is visiting, she appears to collapse and to actually expire. Touchwood Senior takes her into the other room to tend her along with a maid. Later it will emerge that he has paid the maid a handsome fee to conspire to pretend that Moll is dead, get her laid in a coffin and brought onstage as if dead in the final scene.

– Touchwood Junior and Sir Walter encounter each other in the street and, as rivals for the hand of Moll, draw swords and fight. They manage to wound each other and stagger off in opposite directions.

– Believing he is dying, Sir Walter staggers to Allwit’s house where he surprises the complaisant couple by sincerely repenting his sins and attacking the Allwits for leading him on to damnation (Act 5 scene 1). Whorehound’s repentance is delivered in a long speech in powerful verse, and I found it the most moving thing in the play.

Still my adulterous guilt hovers aloft,
And with her black wings beats down all my prayers
Ere they be half way up; what’s he knows now
How long I have to live? O, what comes then?
My taste grows bitter, the round world all gall now,
Her pleasing pleasures now hath poisoned me,
Which I exchanged my soul for;

Which makes it all the more bitter when news arrives that Lady Kix is pregnant (hang on, didn’t she only have sex with Touchwood Senior about half an hour ago? No-one cares about timeframes or plausibility, this is the theatre). The point is that the advent of an heir to the Kixes spells financial ruin for Sir Walter and so the Allwits, in a gesture of breath-taking cynicism and cruelty, order their servants to kick Whorehound out onto the street, in fact to get him arrested for murdering Young Touchstone (news of whose demise also arrives by messenger). Super-cynically, they coolly plan to rent out the big house (I think the implication is to turn it into a brothel) and themselves move to a smaller one in The Strand.

– As mentioned above, Moll continues very sick and when Touchwood Senior brings word that his brother has died (as a result of wounds incurred in the duel with Whorehound), she faints and appears to die. Her parents are distraught and, with wild improbability, allow Touchstone Senior and her servant to look after the body. This is where they cook up the plan to convey her in a coffin to the same place where the coffin conveying Young Touchwood will go.

– Thus the climax of the play is reached when, to doleful mourning music, the two coffins are borne onstage containing Moll and Young Touchwood and Touchwood Senior asks the assembled cast whether they would do anything and forgive anyone to see the two young people alive again? Like the audience at a pantomime, everyone shouts ‘Yes’ and so Touchwood Senior orders the young couple to arise from their coffins – and the two young lovers spring up large as life. Hooray!

Now to tie up all the loose ends: 1. Young Touchwood and Moll are married and her parents finally give their blessing, as parents in all these plays eventually do. 2. Dim Tim is married to the Welsh niece, discovers she is a whore, and is jokily challenged by his mother to prove his Latin learning and logic to transmute her into a chaste wife. 3. Lady Kix, as we saw, is now pregnant so she and Sir Oliver are so delighted they promptly promise to support the family of Touchwood Senior, so he’s sorted out. 4. Finally, Touchwood announces that Sir Walter has recovered from his wounds but is now confined to the debtors prison where he is likely to say for a very long time.

Which is a shame because the shamelessness with which he carried out his scandalous arrangement with the Allwits – and then the blistering sincerity of his fear of hell and damnation when he thinks he is dying – were, for me, by far the most vivid and memorable moments in the play.

Thoughts

As with The Roaring Girl, I don’t know whether it’s me or Middleton, but I didn’t find any of the characters or any moments in the play actually funny, and the whole thing left an acrid, metallic aftertaste. This was caused by at least two things:

1. The extended scene where Sir Walter thinks he’s dying and calls down genuine and powerful curses on the Allwits head is very vivid ≥ and then is compounded when they, hearing he is no longer of financial value to them, kick him out on the street, ordering their servants to fetch officers to arrest him, this adds sulphuric acid onto sump oil.

2. The sad music, the slow procession, the widespread weeping and moaning of the cast, of the many gossips and mothers and bystanders at the double funeral of Young Touchwood and Moll was genuinely doleful and depressing, it had real emotional and dramatic impact. So much so that when the lovers then suddenly sprang to their feet and were reunited in a happy marriage, this seemed somehow trivial and superficial. The bleaker narrative felt more true to the play’s tone of rancid cynicism.

So, for me, a page or so of ‘happy ending’ in no way counters the much harsher and bleaker notes struck earlier in the play. It felt like the harsh vision of human nature demonstrated in Ben Jonson’s plays but without the energising zaniness of the fox or the alchemist which redeems his plays.

Middleton is solicitous to please his audience with what they expect; but there is underneath the same steady impersonal passionless observation of human nature. (T.S. Eliot on Thomas Middleton)

A final, fairly obvious thought is that the play is titled A Chaste Maid in Cheapside but, of course, the chaste maid – Moll, the young lover – is in many ways the most minor of all the characters; she is easily overshadowed by the cynical Allwits, by her dim brother, and by the monstrous but somehow dramatically powerful figure of Sir Walter Whorehound. At some point I realised that that is the intention, to show how a chaste maid in Cheapside is overshadowed and dwarfed by the corruption all round her.

Related links

More Elizabethan and Jacobean reviews

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by Simon on September 25, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 25, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/25/a-chaste-maid-in-cheapside-thomas-middleton/

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