Academics in wartime

An item on today’s Today -- BBC Radio 4 -- described a wartime RAF establishment the name of which I didn’t catch. It recruited archaeologists and other academics, as well as gifted amateurs like crossword geniuses, to interpret aerial photographs taken over enemy territory -- thus detecting from an image a millimetre across the presence of a V2 rocket and estimating from its dimensions its possible range, or inferring from the type of goods trucks in a marshalling yard whether foodstuffs or industrial materials were being transported and working out what the answer might indicate about the state of things in the nearby city.

One of the participants, whose name I also missed, was asked if he and his colleagues resented the lack of any public recognition of the work after the war, in contrast with Bletchley. He answered that they didn’t expect recognition: doing the job was the reward in itself because the work was both worthwhile and interesting and the relationships formed during it were enjoyable.

A constant criticism of public policy under every government since Thatcher has been the failure to acknowledge that the worth and interest of the work can be their own reward, and that the motivation to work hard and to the highest standards can be present when there’s no monetary incentive. This particularly applies to work that people chose because it’s interesting and despite the indifferent pay, such as teaching and research. In teaching it can often be a bad idea to reward good work with marks and grades when you want students to come to believe that the exercise of intelligence and extension of knowledge is a good thing in itself. The same applies to teachers, doctors and NHS managers. Might it not even apply to bankers?

Scum of the Earth

Just read Scum of the Earth by Arthur Koestler, 1941 -- nice edition by Eland, 1991. Can’t quite remember why I decided to get it - I think Koestler was in the papers recently, was it a new biography, him screwing the wives of lots of famous people? Anyway, it’s the Fall of France, an episode that interests me, and he just got out of it by the skin of his teeth having been arrested, though Hungarian, before hostilities started, along with many other exiles, including from Germany -- the French ruling class, as he calls them, preparing to do what Hitler wanted before he even attacked.

So, first imprisoned and throughout in diplomatic and bureaucratic limbo, Koestler joined the Foreign Legion hoping to be posted to Africa, was re-arrested and shipped to Le Vernet, a horrific French concentration camp in the Pyrenees, already full of survivors, now reduced to the state of typical camp inmates, from the International Brigade -- fighters who’d escaped from Spain. This was in undefeated France still, note.

The Germans easily knock out the French army, refugees from the north jam the roads to the south, the country is divided into occupied and Vichy, led by the ancient Pétain for whom Koestler expresses unmitigated contempt)... Koestler in the end he escapes via Marseilles and ‘two African ports’ (he’s revealing no secrets -- in 1940-41 when he was writing others might be trying to use the same route) to Lisbon (‘the last open gate of a concentration camp extending over the greater part of the Continent’s surface’ - 242) and finally England where he’s interned in Pentonville and then joins the Pioneer Corps. Meanwhile the democratic German exiles who were his friends, including his Paris neighbour Walter Benjamin, commit suicide or are handed over the the Gestapo and killed.

Most shocking is the near connivance of the French ruling classes, even before the defeat, in the takeover by Hitler.

The ruling class, Koestler said, scared by the coming to power of the Popular Front in 1936, had decided that ‘the barbarians’ (Germans) ‘had begun to develop truly civilised ideas: the abolition of trade unions, the dissolution of the Left-wing parties. Hitler’s only fault was that he was a German. Otherwise he would be a better “guarantee or security” for vested interests than an unruly French people in arms’ (239). And the bureaucracy reflected that position.

With their concentration camps -- not as murderous as the German ones but brutal and sadistic nevertheless -- they (certain politicians and the bureaucracy) were more or less anticipating the Nazi regime.

Those who prepared the way for Vichy had put these men in camps....For every ignominy they made the, prisoners suffer, they comforted them with the argument that the ignominies of the Gestapo would be worse; and when the cock had crowed thrice, they delivered them properly and solemnly into the Gestapo's hands.
In the days of the French collapse there was a last chance of saving those martyred men by shipping them to North Africa or, if that was too much to ask, by giving them a chance to escape. They refused. They left them in their barbed-wire trap, to hand them over complete, all accounts properly made out, all confidential records of their past (given trustingly to the French authorities) neatly filed. What a find for Himmler's black-clothed men ! Three hundred thousand pounds of democratic flesh, all labelled, alive, and only slightly damaged. (140)

Also very interesting on the communists with their virtues and blind adherence to the party line, right or wrong, which left them in a hopeless state when Stalin suddenly became Hitler’s ally (Koestler had been a communist but had left).

And on the chaos of the desperate escape from the north of France to the south: ‘It was a particular sadistic irony of Fate, to have turned the most petit-bourgeoise, fussy, stay-at-home people in the world into a nation of tramps’ (165) -- and then the adverts in the papers, thousands each day, from families seeking news of their children: Paris-Soir ‘Says there are thousands of “globe-trotters aged six and eight on the roads of France”’ (225); ‘André Roure, who disappeared June 17th near Azay-le-Rideau, please communicate with parents via Le Temps Clermont-Ferrand.’

Despite the rush in which he says he wrote the book, the writing is often terrific and moving. On leaving Marseilles and France finally on a ship: ‘The lighthouses emerging from the black water, with slowly turning green and red beams of light, were the last outposts of Continental France, sleeping under the stars in her enormous, dishonoured nakedness, humiliated, wretched and beloved’ (235-6).

That theme of sexual humiliation -- interesting in view of what that biography reported -- is deployed to powerful effect in his summing up of the state of a France that has put a psychological ‘Chinese Wall’ around itself, refusing to acknowledge the new reality of Europe:

Inside, on a brittle Louis XIV chair, sat an elderly, sharp-faced Marianne, her once lovely chestnut hair replaced by a toupet. Scared to death by the noise of the people Outside the Wall, she waited for the barbarian prince to save her. She knew, of course, what price she would have to pay; and while trying to convince herself that he would behave like a gentleman, she waited with a shame-faced curiosity for her dishonour. And when it had happened, and the saviour had knocked off her Phrygian helmet and her wig, she looked into the mirror with horror, and the world looked with horror at her face. (240)

Brian W. Aldiss

Not much more than token amends, this, for my recent neglect of the blog -- too much else going on, but mostly the research I’ve mentioned before into the teaching of English in London in the post-war period 1945-65.

This exercise has been a great excuse to read lots of history, an experience I’m enjoying immensely. The latest was Ross McKibbin’s (1998) Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51.

Dealing with the effects of war service on class relations McKibbin mentions a novel in which a middle-class boy is liberated from his class awkwardness by participating in the sheer coarseness of working-class male habits when he’s posted to India and then into Assam and war with the Japanese. So I got it and what a great Corgi cover (1972).

The name Brian Aldiss was familiar to me as a writer of SF, a prolific one, it turns out. I may have read some of his stories. I also knew the title The Hand-Reared Boy but hadn’t associated it with Aldiss. The sequel is A Soldier Erect in which the boy joins the army. I’ve gone to it without reading Hand-Reared -- but I've sent for that now (10p or something, plus stamps) and hope it arrives in the same Corgi edition.

The theme of hand-rearing and erection is, of course, as prominent as I assume it was in the first novel, and the efforts of Horatio Stubbs to get his end away in the back streets of India are often hilarious. But the last third of the book shifts tone completely and draws, I gather, on Aldiss’s own military experience, and the account of the Assam campaign is in quite another league and both intriguing and moving. (Strangely, though, the actual killing the narrator does is related in a rather impersonal and summary manner.)

I don’t think I've read anything about the 14th Army’s war in Assam and Burma though I'm fascinated by World War II in general. (I’ve religiously watched everything about the Battle of Britain in the last few days -- terrific programmes, loads of new insights and, like Aldiss on Assam, very moving.)

The book, it turns out, connects with our research not just in treating how class relations were changed by the war but because my first immediate boss in a school, Paddy Price, the head of Walworth Lower School, had fought through Burma with -- as he told it -- 500 elephants delivering supplies and fighting all the way -- Mountbatten dropping in from the air one day and, hearing complaints about the cigarette issue, ordering an air drop of top quality Players. For Paddy, too, the war had been preceded by an enjoyable spell in India. (My dad was in India too, and luckily never had to make the move into Burma.)

It’s a constant frustration, the number of people like Paddy, and my dad, now sadly dead, who I never thought to interview or even ask about things when they were alive. But perhaps that’s how it always is with history. Knowledge acquires significance when it’s no longer accessible.

McKibbin is full of useful references. When I was teaching PGCE (teacher training) my students did teaching practice at Raynes Park School (comprehensive), near Wimbledon. Now I find in McKibbin that it was a rather high-status grammar school in the 1930s and that there’s a good memoir that includes a pupil’s experience, by Paul Vaughan. That I've got too -- so cheap from Amazon that it’s hardly worth going to the library any more.

If my resolution holds up to keep the blog going, I'll report in due course.

Walworth School / Mina Road after the war

When I went to teach in Walworth in 1964 Mr Ash -- Wilf Ash to colleagues -- was one of the few who had been there since the school opened in 1946. I never knew him well enough to talk to properly but used to get his stories of the early days second-hand, as relayed by Paddy Price who’d arrived a year later in 1947 (came for a day’s supply teaching, stayed for forty years, ending up as a deputy head in charge of the Lower School -- the old Nelson School in Trafalgar Street).

According to Ash according to Paddy, when school opened in September 1946, the teachers turned up at the shabby, bomb-damaged old building and reported to Miss O'Reilly, the headmistress. (There’s a question straight away because Miss O'Reilly came only in summer 1947; the first head was a Miss Plastow, who no sooner than appointed was whisked off to do something in the Home Office.) Miss O'Reilly handed the teacher his or her register which immediately proved to have no names in it. Asked about this she explained, ‘There’s the streets -- go out and get yourself a class.’

So Wilf Ash had to go and gather in a class of pupils, most of whom had probably spent the war running free and playing in the bombed out buildings. Once in the classroom with his captives, you shut and locked the door (from the inside), took your jacket off, rolled up your sleeves and said, ‘Right, who wants trouble?’

Trouble there was - whether for Ash himself I doubt. One class was known for removing the blackboard from its easel and circulating it round the room over their heads at ever-increasing speed.

By all accounts Miss O'Reilly was a match for all that.

What was the truth of the re-opening of schools after the war? If the kids hadn’t been attending school, how did they even know which they were to go to? September 1946 must have been chaotic. Not only were the pupils from the previous school there -- if they turned up -- but also many from other schools that had been closed or reorganised.

Who remembers any of this? who was in that first lot to join Walworth (Mina Road) in 1946? Any memories, please email them to walworthresearch@me.com. Then I'll post it here if you’re happy about that.