Where the Iron Heart of England....

Growing up in Birmingham (or at least going to school there) as I did, you quickly got used to the fact that most of the rest of the country tried to act like the city didn't exist.

Birmingham was perennially the "flyover" city - on the way to everywhere, but a place that people knew nothing about, except New Street Station, Spaghetti Junction, and *that* accent. I say that accent, what most people think is the Birmingham accent is actually that of the Black Country. Birmingham's is a wee bit softer. Paul Anderson, as Arthur Shelby in Peaky Blinders, nails it.

The problem was always that Birmingham was good at too many things. The workshop of the world, or city of a thousand trades, never had one identity around which its reputation could coalesce. It was never the capital of coal, the city of steel or cottonopolis. That's not to say that it lacked major employers, between them Cadbury, Austin and the BSA employed enough for a small city by themselves. Just that it was always the city of artisans - which it remains today in areas like the Jewellery Quarter.

And because it was good at too many things, it was a target for the Luftwaffe. Birmingham suffered in the war, and then suffered after the war when the city fathers decided to remake Birmingham in the image of Detroit. Britain's motown. This perhaps reached it's apex in the promotional film Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham. I'm not making this up, look on YouTube. Allegedly Kojak phoned in his performance from a studio, and never visited the city he extolled. Remember that as you hear him wax lyrical about the disco dancing competition in Cannon Hill Park...

By the 1990s it was rather battered, bloody but unbowed. The outdoor escalators of the Bull Ring were mildewed, the Electric Cinema (Britain's oldest) was reduced to showing the more "interesting" end of the cinemascape, and New Street station was a dark, cavernous hole in the ground. There had been the odd attempt to break out of the grimness, Symphony Hall was a triumph, and a great setting for Simon Rattle's CBSO before he took himself off to Berlin. Then there was the ICC, with it's bridge that wasn't quite wide enough (allegedly), and the turn of the century development of Brindley Place.

Personally, I think fortunes turned with the publication of Jonathan Coe's hymn to Birmingham, The Rotters Club. I'm not sure why that should be, but I went off to university and devoured Coe's depiction of the 1970s, and a school I knew very well, then came back to discover that the city had finally had the rockets put under it. The new Bullring may be a temple of shopping, but it is a supremely intelligent. light and airy bit of architecture. Selfridges is like something that has landed from another planet. The good thing throughout is that the bombs and the 60s planners made a lot of central Birmingham a blank canvas for architectural experimentation. You don't have to like the new buildings, but these days it's rare that anything worthwhile has been demolished to create the space for them.

This trend is likely to continue. Railway enthusiasts mourn the loss of the Euston arch, and the other buildings of the great terminus of the London and Birmingham railway. Well HS2, if it ever gets built is going to breathe new life into the terminus at the other end. Curzon Street still stands, isolated in the wasteland of an abandoned marshalling yard. If you go and look round it on the rare open days you find a building comparable to the best Georgian industrial architecture of the nation's dockyards. Stone faced, sweeping stairs, light and airy, Curzon Street is an unlikely and forgotten survivor and it's about time more was made of it.

Of course, there have been casualties along the way. The 1930s saw the start of the trend of civic vandalism with the destruction of Barry and Pugin's King Edward's School in New Street (although these days, I suppose, King Edward's House which replaced it is worthy of a preservation order itself). It was by the time of demolition utterly unfit as a school building (the school itself relocated very successfully to Edgbaston) but you can't help but feel that they wouldn't demolish it now.

More recently we've seen the destruction of the Central Library, which wasn't to everyone's taste but stood as an example of the best brutalism you're likely to see. I even supported those who wanted to list it as a warning to the future if it would save the damn thing but it wasn't to be.

Birmingham now stands on the threshold of a new age. The West Midlands region, with it's own mayor is waiting in the wings, and this should be the opportunity for Brummies to seize back control of their destiny.

They're a quiet lot, the people of Birmingham, but they know what they're doing. They don't need the glitz and glamour of the brash northern upstarts like Manchester or Leeds to know who they are and where they're going. The Second City is back.

Save Port Meadow

Let's get very local for a minute.  For those of you unfamiliar with Oxford, Port Meadow is an area of common land to the north west of the city centre, which runs from the village of Wolvercote down the Woodstock road to the suburb of Jericho.  Horses and cattle graze on it, the Thames runs through it, and there are a host of small things to go and look at - the Treacle Well at Binsey, for example, or the nunnery at Godstow, from where Rosamund Clifford sallied out to be courted by Henry II.

It's a green lung for the north of the city.  When I lived in Jericho it was basically my back garden - we picnicked on it, swam in the river on hot summer evenings after work, or drifted up to the Trout at Wolvercote or the Perch at Binsey to spend the day with the newspapers.

But one of the chief attractions has always been the views of Oxford.  They're not as spectacular as those from South Park, or Boar's Hill, but there was a panorama of the dreaming spires - the Tower of the Winds, PhilJim, St Barnabas, St Mary the Virgin, the Rad Cam, the Engineering Science Building (the last one may be a joke).

Jericho, however, is full.  What had once been a small densely populated district of workers in the prinitng house of the OUP decayed to the extent that it was nearly demolished in the 1960s.  Students brought it back to life, and then refugees from London arrived to raise their children.  It's all got a bit glitzy, and pricey.  The City Council, wanting to reduce some of the pressure on the housing stock in Oxford, has mandated both Oxford University and Brookes to reduce the numbers of their students living in private rented accommodation in the city.

Which brings us to Roger Dudman Way.  The university has erected a number of accommodation blocks along the railway line and canal from the west end of Walton Well Road.  In some ways, this is exactly what is needed - getting large numbers of students out of the private sector and freeing up housing for local people.  Unfortunately it's also obliterated the views from Port Meadow, and raidcally changed the character of that end of Oxford.  Debate rages in the local press (this is Oxford, city of lost causes and green ink), about how far what has been built reflects accurately what the city council was shown in the drawings, but the fact remains that somewhere along the line someone has got it wrong.

There's a petition live now to call the whole thing in and get it altered.  No one wants the blocks demolished, but the top two stories could, and arguably ought, to be removed.

you can sign it here:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/850/008/830/port-meadow-oxford-damaged-views/

Some thoughts on Richard III

If you've read your Shakespeare, Richard III is practically the devil incarnate; in the first Blackadder series, he's a particularly malevolent turn from Peter Cook; for GR Elton he was the last of the monarchs before the "Tudor Revolution in Government" - the bane of an A Level student's life since the 1960s.

Problem is, of course, that not only do we know little about him, but that what we do know was in large part handed down by Tudor propagandists.  If you're Henry VIII, you're a born king, with no need to polish your ancestry up a bit.  But if you're before or after him....  Henry VII was a usurper - even if you accept his right to the throne there's no getting away from the fact that he could only achieve it in battle.  His overall position was weak, so it's always nice in that position if you've got a friendly chronicler who can boost you a bit by making your predecessor look bad.  Similarly, if you're Shakespeare, then you've got the aftermath of Henry VIII uppermost in your mind - succession is everything, whether you're trying to justify the position of Elizabeth I or James I....

Now, of course, Richard has been found under a car park in Leicester (2,500 yards under if you believe one of the Daily Mail's more glorious recent typos) - if you're a Tudor, that's probably quite fitting, if not actually better than they can ever have planned.  But, as we descend into the inevitable parochial arguments about where he should be buried, and by what rite, it's probably as well to try and put him into some kind of context.

I'm certainly no member of the Richard III society, but I do feel that he needs a bit of a reassessment.  The Elton view, that before Henry VII all was darkness, is clearly old hat.  It's even possible to rehabilitate certainly the first reign of Henry VI, and Edward IV has always had a good press, but it's possible now to see Richard as a small part of the creation of English bureaucracy, the foundation of what, for want of a better term, was the basis of legal aid, and a swathe of really quite decent legislation in his short years on the throne which really mark him out as pretty much what you want in a late medieval king.

Of course, the big problem is getting past the poor old princes in the tower.  Without going into the Blackadder counterfactual that he was in fact a loving uncle who doted on his nephews, there is scant evidence for what really happened there. I don't want to push this too far, because in historical terms it's the mother of fifteenth century conspiracy theories, but if you want someone with the motive, opportunity and means, look no further than Mr Henry Tudor, of Wales....

Whatever the truth, it's probable and (just good politics) that his reputation was blackened by his successors to a greater or lesser extent, but now that we have a body it's perhaps time for a sober reassessment of his strengths and weaknesses.  He certainly wasn't a saint, but, to adapt Shakespeare's lines for his earlier namesake Richard II,

"not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king."

And he was an anointed king - by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and, in his own opinion, by God.  I'm not sure we're in a better position to judge.

The politics of railway enthusiasm

Over at Liberal England lately there has been an interesting take omn the politics or other wise of railway preservation, by Joseph Boughey.  His take on it is certainly interesting, although I can't help feeling that there is a certain element of wish fulfilment about it - particularly in trying to equate the early railway preservation movement to modern green politics. 

What I don't think is up for debate is the "small is beautiful" element of the movement, in as much as the preserved railways are often most successful when they can present as the underdog.  An interesting observation of the preserved railway scene is that the more successful a particular railway gets, the more divergence there is between the aims of the company and that of its volunteer workforce.  You can see this with the way people leave the premier lines after decades as a volunteer, because it no longer feels like they're all in it together.  There's now a "commercial manager" where once there was the vicar's wife, and money is spent on websites and e-commerce, when they spent half of 1984 restoring an Edmondson ticket press....

In some ways this has been highlighted by the growth in "secondary" preserved lines over the past 2 decades.  The success of the original pioneer lines has become so total that they are now operating at the level of doing up lineside houses to show what a railwayman's cottage was like, or building mutimillion pound interpretation centres for visiting schoolchildren.  The role of the enthusiastic amateur, who got involved simply because he'd seen the Titfield Thunderbolt and didn't want his local station to close, is less clear here.  If we take preserved railways as being about nostalgia, then it should come as little surprise that they contain within them individuals who are nostalgic about the nostalgia, and who believe that their own particular line hasn't been quite the same since it stopped being about an ex-industrial tank engine and a couple of Mark 1 coaches.  Such people withdraw their labour and shift their focus 10 miles down the road to another branchline.  The problem here. of course, is that these newer lines were often passed over by the original preservationists because they weren't as scenic, or there were problems with the trackbed - essentially, there was a reason why they weren't top of the list for preservation.  What you get, then is a glut of lines being preserved for the sake of being preserved, just because the post-Beeching generation are now at a lifestage where they have the time and the money to be able to do it.  It is genuinely questionable how many of these smaller lines will still be with us in say 20 years time.

The Titfield Thunderbolt is in any case an interesting film to mention, because whilst viewed now it is a bit of a curio, in context it's actually deeply subversive.  What we're being asked to buy into is the idea of the local village buying its railway and running it itself when British Railways withdraw their support.  In the 21st century this is a distinctly period piece, but what people tend to miss is that the villagers are not running it as a tourist attraction - their whole plan is to continue providing a service.  This isn't about nostalgia so much as the much derided big society.  Of course it helps that the vicar is a steam engine nut, but the whole point is that they are using steam traction because that's what everyone else is using.  The 14xx tank they have might look antiquated, but it's actually all of about 20 years old at the time of the film - indeed, the opening scene shows the Titfield-Mallingford service crossing over a passing express, itself hauled by a steam locomotive.  The film has been adopted by the preservation movement as a totem of the need to keep hold of the past, whereas seen in context it's actually the equivalent of someone saving their local line today and buying a Class 150 Sprinter to run it  -for the Titfield Thunderbolt, steam is incidental, it's the service that they're trying to support. Quite apart from anything else, the buy-in from the local squire, vicar, and millionaire rather gives the lie to this being anything to do with "green politics" - this is near luddite preservation of the old way of doing things, by the pillars of society.  That particular strain of railway preservation is actually One Nation Conservatism if it's anything.

I mention the Titfield Thunderbolt because it's based on the experiences of Tom Rolt and the other pioneers who rescued the Talyllyn Railway at the beginning of the 1950s (indeed, their initial hope was that the film could have been made on their line).  Rolt is an interesting character, not least because he so quickly took charge - but that level of autocracy is common in the preservation movement, simply beacause high calibre people are spread so thinly.  I don't mean that to be a pejorative judgment necessarily, it's just that when it comes down to it even the most voluntary of the preservation schemes are businesses, and they need business brains to keep them afloat - even if it's just to keep the line there for the the enthusiasts to give up their time to.  Given that people who focus on commercial success have a tendency to be doing so in slightly more lucrative fields, there is consequently a need for the preserved lines to have to take what they can get.  You could say the same about  a local zoo, or a League 2 football club, but it remains the case that the movement provides a stage for the wannabe demagogue to strut upon.

I think ultimately the truth is that the politics of the railway preservation movement is as varied as the people involved in it.  You'd struggle to get away from the nostalgia angle of course, but there is a definite appeal to the sort of person from any walk of life who wants to try and hold back the tide, or maintain a bit of the old way, just for the sake of doing it.  Mr Culpepper in "A Canterbury Tale" would doubtless be  campaigning for the preservation of the line from Chillingbourne to Canterbury in the post war years, just as assiduously as he worked to preserve the pilgrims' bend above his village in pre-war England.  It can be claimed for the supporters of any political movement or none, but it does seem to be much more prevalent in Britain than anywhere else - possibly because we have the luxury of worrying about things we really don't need to worry about in the great scheme of things - but then that's another angle entirely....

A few thoughts for Burns night

The other day, I was watching Michael Powell's early masterpiece "The Edge of the World." Inspired by the evacuation of St Kilda, it tells the story of a community torn over the way forward - do they stay and make the best of the only life any of them have ever known, or do they cut their losses and leave?

Of course, Scotland has been gearing up to ask, and answer, a similar question for some time now, with a final agreement reached last year on a referendum for 2014 on whether it should remain part of the United Kingdom. As in Powell's film, there are voices on both sides of the argument, but it is a fairly fundamental question that faces the Scots - stick with the UK, or go it alone; reset the clocks to pre 1707 and forge a new path.

I've always been fairly persuaded that the SNP would lose that vote.  But now we have to factor in something else. Europe.

The prospect on a referendum on the UK's future in the EU is a potential disruptor for the unionist cause.  If the majority of the UK votes to leave the EU, but there isn't a majority in Scotland, then Scotland would presumably be taken out of the EU along with everyone else, but against the wishes of its population.  Scots might presumably look over the border between now and 2014 and wonder what the English are thinking.  The unionists have been saying that a vote for independence would be to introduce uncertainty over Scotland's future, particularly with regard to automatic continued membership of the EU. This is a fairly convincing argument.  However, if we're now saying that the only way to guarantee continued Scottish presence within the EU (even if there has to be a hiatus while they apply for membership) is a vote FOR independence then the rules of the game have changed slightly.  All of this presupposing of course that the Scots are more pro-EU in the first place.

Since devolution a lot of genies have escaped from a lot of bottles, and now that's happening on both sides of the border-that-currently-isn't-a-border. Mr Cameron could be shaping up as the Prime Minister who took Britain out of Europe and presided over the break-up of the UK.  Well, it's certainly a legacy.....

Interesting times.

Who's escorting the escorts?

One of the knock ons of the great aircraft carrier saga, has been the decimation of the RN's surface fleet to pay for them.  A succession of First Sea Lords have been forced down the gruel today for jam tomorrow route, justifying ever greater cuts to capability on the basis that it will free up the funds to ensure that in the future we will have enormous great toys with nice planes to fly from them.

In the words of Blackadder, there was one small flaw with this plan.....

Let's consider the fleet as it was when I joined a decade ago:

3 x Invincible Class CVS

9 x T42 destroyers

4 x T22 frigates

and the finishing touches being put to 16 T23 frigates.  I'm pretty sure that there were actually a couple more T22s knocking around, although of the earlier Batch 2 so gunless (my guess would be SHEFFIELD and COVENTRY).  Regardless, this in itself was a massive drawdown from the fleet of 1992, and even more so from that of 1982 - and we should all be aware of what happened in 1982....

Now, it's more like:

1 x Invincible CVS in an LPH role

2 (as of Yesterday with the paying off of LIVERPOOL) Type 42 destroyers

2 (ish) Type 45 destroyers, with another 4 in various stages of completion

13 Type 23 frigates

The surface fleet has been pared to the bone.  Of course, there are bright spots amidst the gloom - for example, the arrival of Type 45.  However, even here, what was supposed to be an order for 12 ships has been reduced to 6.  The staff argument is of course that these new ships are so much more "capable" thn their predecessors that you don't need so many of them.  This is fine (and true, up to a point), but doesn't do much to challenge the fact that, unless DE&S has got some sort of multi-dimensional transporter in development, each one can only be in one place at a time....

However, whatever the shortcomings in terms of hull numbers, and weaponry (the hydra of fitted-for-but-not-with raises one of its many heads again - or rather it doesn't), the Type 45 does represent a quantum leap forward over the kit it replaces.

A certain hard core within the fleet will tell you that there is nothing to beat a batch 1 Type 42 to serve in, and in many ways I'd be minded to go along with that.  My first ship out of Dartmouth was a "stumpy," and frankly we had a whale of a time.  I'd happily go back tomorrow.  The advantage of the Type 42s were that they were pretty "agricultural," in that you could see a lot of what made them tick, and a lot of essential equipment could be maintained with the judicious application of a spanner.  However, there was no denying that by the first half of the last decade they were well and truly obsolescent.  It was just that they were forced to soldier on because MOD procurement was making its usual ham fisted job of getting their successor into service - notice a theme developing here?

Lewis Page would have us believe that there is no rationale for the RN's escorts.  They are expensive ways of showing the flag, and giving aspirant admirals nice shiny toys to play with.  In as much as fast attack craft seem to work well for the Germans and Swedes, I'd go along with us buying some; and there's something to be said for the sort of cheap and cheerful corvettes the French have forward based to protect their overseas territories; but the fact remains that places like the Falklands are a long way away from the home base.  I know the defensive posture down there is based on preventing an attack in the first place, rather than trying to retake them once an invasion has occured, but to properly defend them we do need organic air cover, so we need aircraft carriers.  If we're going to have carriers then they need to be escorted, so we need a good balanced force of frigates and destroyers that will allow us to do that while also maintaining our responsibilities elsewhere in the globe.

What we don't need, but what we could well be about to get, is the world's largest and most expensive LPH (QE), accompanied by a botched CVF (POW) with an airgroup of about 12, and enough escorts to be sure of nothing nasty happening to them while they're all in the Solent.  Which is certainly an interesting definition of "balanced and capable."

Back to the subject of spatial strategy (do try and stay awake...), or the coming sacrifice of Meriden on the altar of new city building

Interesting article in the MoS today (which must nearly be an oxymoron) about government plans to put 100,000 houses in the increasingly narrow gap between Birmingham and Coventry.  Is there any common sense left in the world.  The same article, in what we must hope is just typical Mail outrage/spin, suggests the rebranding of Birmingham International Airport to, wait for it, Birmingham London Airport....  You know those occasions when you truly think you are living in the end of days?

Actually there is some method in the airport madness, in as much as assuming HS2 gets built then it will be quicker to get into London from Birmingham airport than it is from Stanstead.  That having been said, it doesn't do much for the sense of Birmingham as a city in its own right, rather than some form of extremely northern dormitory suburb of the great metropolis - rather like a super-sized version of Acton...

The problem is that this answers part of the demand for expansion of the national housing stock, without really addressing what it is that all these new Brummies are going to do when they get there (other than commute to London).  The idea of a forty mile continuous urban sprawl from the rust belt of the Black Country through to Coventry is something that really ought to make people stop and think about what it is that they want from where they live.  I know the relaxation of the planning laws is going to create a presumption in favour of new development, but at what cost to the domestic environment, and the sanity of the inhabitants?

I'm going to write something in the next couple of days about the coming referendum on whether Birmingham should have an elected mayor, but it would be interesting to see where the putative contenders stand on the idea of annexing Coventry as a flagship policy....  Not quite local democracy all this, is it?

The hiatus stumbles to a conclusion

What we see here is actual words in an actual blogpost - the shock!  The general craziness of life has subsided, but it's been a good time to take stock, reassess, and all the rest of it (to say nothing of note just how many ways the Chancellor has developed to extract my assets....).

When I first started this blog, last year, there was a manifesto of sorts to go poking around in the sort of places that people overlook - to say that actually there are wonderful places right here under our nose, and that to pass them up for a safari holiday, for example, is nothing so much as an abject failure of imagination.  However, it quickly developed into much more of a meditation on Englishness, rather than England per se, and I wonder if that doesn't need to take more of a back seat in the future - I'm pretty sure that my just about three figures readership has worked out where I stand and it doesn't do to become a one trick pony.  I think it's going to be a more rich seam to mine for the growing short story output to be honest - watch this space; there's a novel coming in the next year or so too!  It's only taken me seven years - now just got to find a publisher....

However, in the hope that the audience haven't quietly drifted away, seduced by shinier things in the slightly-longer-than-expected pause; coming in the next week:

What we need from the next Archbishop of Canterbury

Carrier Aircraft U-Turn?

and

The Biggest Bang you've never heard of (or heard)......

Matt

What If?

Over Christmas, I saw a couple of episodes of 'Allo 'Allo, for the first time in a while.  Although it is obviously bawdy farce, there is a thread running through of making light of a pretty awful situation, the Nazi occupation of France.  One can make a case that half of Britain's issues with Europe at a political level are because we weren't invaded in the twentieth century; there is no folk memory of the tanks rolling across the border, of the mass displacements or refugee crises as the blitzkreig swept through, or of the enemy living amongst us, drinking in our pubs, and consorting with our women.

Of course, one piece of British soil was occupied by the Germans.  Any visitor to the channel islands can see the great concrete fortifications thrown up by the wehrmacht, or the site on Alderney which was home to the only concentration camp in Britain.  The Channel Islands experience ought to give the lie that there is any genuine British particularity; that the experience of being occupied would have been any different for the British subject than it was for the millions of Dutch, Belgians and French that actually had to live with the reality of foreign subjugation.  Yet the idea of what Britain would have been like if the Nazis had been successful in mounting an invasion is a subject that has provided fertile territory for film makers over the years, for a variety of reasons.

1) Film as propaganda.

At the height of the second world war, Alberto Cavalcanti made a film of a specially commissioned Graham Greene script - Went the Day Well?  WTDW is a shocking little film, which is quite nasty in many ways.  It tells the story of a German army unit disguised as Royal Engineers, on a mission to disrupt the British radar network on the South Downs, and their interactions with the villagers of Bramley End from arrival, through detection, to the final battle with the regular army.  Of course, being propaganda, I don't think I'm giving away to much of a spoiler to say that the German invaders are defeated, but WTDW does not make it easy, or say that there is anything inevitable about such an outcome.

The film deals with all the obvious points that you would expect the British authorities to want to hammer home to their population: careless talk, reporting anything that looks suspicious, etc, but then goes beyond that.  It raises the existence of fifth columnists in unlikely places, and throughout the film is perfectly clear about the sort of sacrifices which the ordinary citizen may be required to make - from the postmistress killing a German in her kitchen before being killed by another soldier in her turn, to the scene at the manor house where the village's very own version of Linda Snell saves the evacuees by calmly picking up the handgrenade which has landed in their bedroom and walking out onto the landing with it, no one has an easy time.  There's even an eight year old boy who manages to get shot while trying to escape.  WTDW does not pull its punches, and is in many ways a remarkable film - even if some of the acting is a bit dodgy (but full marks to Elizabeth Allen and the young Thora Hird!)

2) Film as escapist fantasy.

By the 1970s, most of the key events of WW2 had been filmed, with varying degrees of success, but the budgets and demand existed for a succession of thrillers, which began to deviate further and further from actual events.  Fitting into this canon are films like The Eye of the Needle, starring Donald Sutherland, and of course The Eagle Has Landed.

Based on the novel by Jack Higgins, TEHL uses the story of a Luftwaffe paratroop unit trying to assassinate Churchill during a visit to Norfolk as the backdrop for what is basically sunday afternoon popcorn fodder.  However, it does, consciously or otherwise, hark back to WTDW in many ways, including the difficulty of villagers trying to communicate their plight with the outside world, and the varying levels of competence displayed by their putative rescuers.  Like the earlier film, TEHL relies for its plot development on the existence of traitors within the local community (In this case Donald Sutherland and Jean Marsh), who are clearly outnumbered by "decent"British types who eventually see them off.  As with the wartime propaganda films, there is never any real doubt about the final outcome.

3. Film as historical counter-factual.

This is what we might call the Virtual History approach, and the exemplar is the most difficult of all the films in the German Invasion genre, Brownlow and Mollo's It Happened Here.  IHH sets out to provide a documentary style investigation of what it would have been like if a German invasion of the UK had been successful, and followed up with prolonged German occupation.  In the 40 odd years since its release IHH has never been very far from controversy; from its use of actual British fascists as extras, through to a clinical style which is totally non-judgmental about what it is portraying.  The result is a deeply unsettling, uncompromising thesis that turns the British national folk myth of WW2 on its head.

For Brownlow and Mollo, the British would have capitulated before the Germans every bit as readily as was the case anywhere else.  Of course, there would have been partisans and resistance, but the great majority would have settled down quietly under some form of crypto-Vichy regime (in this case under the aegis of the paramilitary Immediate Action organisation, which apparently works in support of a British puppet government, headed by Oswald Mosley).  IHH raises important questions about the role of free will and individual choice, as well as the capacity for realistic resistance in the face of totalitarianism.  Indeed, it asks (and answers in exactly the same way) the core question from Powell and Pressburger's Life and Death of Colonel Blimp - how far should people be prepared to go to fight fascism, given that the alternative to winning is no alternative at all? 

The problem for IHH is that it doesn't supply any easy answers, or offer much in the way of hope. Yes, the film ends with news coming over the wireless of a series of landings by the United States Army in the West Country (a sort of alter-D-Day), but this doesn't kick off delirious national celebrations so much as an orgy of score-settling on the part of the partisans, machine gunning British SS members and anyone that can be loosely defined as a collaborator in woodland clearings and generally setting the scene for a new dictatorship of the left, qua eastern Europe.

All of the films use the national myth of British exceptionalism for their own purposes - whether to stiffen national resolve in the face of external threat, or to provide a cheerful way of spending 2 hours in a cinema in the case of TEHL.  What makes IHH so unsettling is that it attempts to question the veracity of the stories that we tell about ourselves as a nation, and show that we are simply just another part of a wider humanity. 

In this analysis, there is nothing special about Britain or the British, except the luck of having 30 miles of water between us and a succession of European tyrants.

How We See Ourselves

I was going to write about Hampton Gay today, but the Oxfordshire mists have descended and made photography impossible - and it really needs photographs.  So, instead, it's film matinee time.

I wrote last year about Powell and Pressburger's lyrical hymn to England, A Canterbury Tale.  Although I think overall ACT edges it as a film, Englishness was a theme they returned to in colour in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Starring P&P regular Roger Livesey in the title role, the film conducts a microscopic dissection of what it means to be English in the age of total war; by following the life of Clive Candy from dashing war hero just back from South Africa, through the Kaiser's Berlin and the Western Front to the period after Dunkirk when, as a general, his carefully planned military exercise is finished before it has properly begun by the actions of a young army officer who refuses to play by his rules.

Candy is everything that the British capacity for self-mythmaking would have the ideal army officer be - chivalrous, brave, kind to defenceless women, honourable.  P&P's point in the film is that ultimately this is not enought to beat forces driven by evil ideology - a theme returned to slightly less successfully in Brownlow and Mollo's "It Happened Here" ("the terrible thing about fascism is that you have to use fascist methods to defeat it.")

The portrayal of Blimp is sympathetic, but underscored with the thesis that his time has passed and that a new approach is required to secure Britain's safety.  This was not an opinion that went down well with Churchill, who tired to have the film banned as unpatriotic, but it is one that they advance very powerfully. The core argument is essentially that much of what Britain/England values about itself will have to be sacrificed to ensure that any of it survives at all.  In one of the most poignant scenes, when Candy realises that his frontline military career is over, it is explained to him by his friends that this is a new kind of war, it's not a rugby match, and there will be no peace with honour for the loser - just a descent into darkness.  Therefore, given that losing is not an option, you can't choose how you want to fight.

Although these days P&P are rightly lauded for their cinematography and direction, one of their bravest strokes in this film is the writing of a sympathetic German character as second lead, played brilliantly by Anton Walbrook.  That even in the depths of the Second World War they were able to put a German army officer centre stage says a great deal for both their readiness to take risks, and their absolute humanity. 

This is a film that will make your hair stand up on the back of your neck on several occasions, but never more so than when Walbrook's character, making his case for political asylum in a 1939 London police station, relates the story of how his children became Nazis, and howm therefore, with the death of his English wife, his life has essentially come to an end.

The female lead is Deborah Kerr, who plays no fewer than three parts spanning 45 years - Theo's wife, Candy's wife, and Candy's ATS driver.  She carries a lot of the weight of the film and makes it look effortless. 

Of course, being Powell and Pressburger, there has to be at least one scene of jawdropping technical achievement, but this one provides two.  The real film technicians get very excited about the duelling scene (again, typical of P&P, you never actually see the duel) where the camera pans down over a snowy Berlin and in through the gymnasium skylight in a single take, but that's not the high point.

For something utterly dislocating the film takes the viewer into a First World War POW camp.  But one in England, full of German officers.  Candy goes to visit his German friend and finds the officers sitting by the side of lake listening to a concert.  During the interval he picks his way through the prisoners and catches sight of his old friend just as the music starts up again.  Walbrook looks straight through him before turning away, kicking off a beautiful shot of groups of Germans turning in differenct directions to face the music to the opening bars of Fingal's Cave.  It's powerful, magical, heartbreaking, and utterly captivating.

The film was mauled by unsympathetic postwar editing, but is generally now shown essentially as Michael Powell intended.  It's long, but there are fewer more genuinely pleasurable ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than to watch it.  As a portrayal of friendship it's unmatched, as an examination of national values, and whether these should be set in stone, or adapted to changing realities, it stands alone.

Aircraft Carriers - it's what's on the flightdeck that counts....

Just occasionally it's nice to get out of the shires, at least that's what I thought a few years ago when I ran away to sea.  To a navy with three whole aircraft carriers, all of its very own - I left before they did as it turns out....

The Royal Navy has been in and out of the news ever since the Strategic Defence Review of 2010, one of the main points of which was the aircraft carrier debacle, which suggests that of the two carriers currently in build, the first will be mothballed pretty much at launch, while only the second will ever embark a fixed wing air-group.  Cue Daily Mail self-writing headlines along the lines of "Aircraft Carriers Without Planes - Shock!!!"

The problem however is not with the carriers themselves; steel is cheap and air is free; so much as the planes.  Britain is supposed to be buying the Joint Strike Fighter, which it is developing in conjunction with the USA.  However, it is here that the procurement fun really starts.

Because the RN has been operating Harrier jump jets for 30 odd years we decided, against all logic, that that is what we should carry on doing, and committed to buying the jump jet variant of the JSF rather than the conventional variant (which would require catapult assistance for take-off, and arrestor wires on the deck for landing).  The SDR changed that decision and committed the UK to the conventional variant - meaning that the carriers need to be redesigned.  Then last week we learned that there have been problems with the design of the arrestor hook, meaning that the plane itself is going to have to be redesigned.

Defence procurement is a licence to print money in so many ways - you're dealing with cutting edge technology, long lead times, and defence manufacturers who know that they are the only people governments can go to, and thus have them over a barrel.  Maybe it's time for a pragmatic rethink?

UKIP were first out of the traps last week with the suggestion that now was the time to pull out of the JSF programme and, as far as it goes, I'd be minded to agree with them.  However, they then suggested that the answer to Britain's problem was to "navalise" the Eurofighter, citing a BAe feasibility study from early in the last decade.  Their argument essentially runs along the lines that this would be good for British manufacturing.  Fine, but the Eurofighter is just another in a long line of UK procurement disasters; late and over budget. 

The plane would have to be completely redesigned, and the UKIP plan does nothing to address the old truism that whilst it is easy to make a very good land based plane from a naval design, it's much harder to go the other way and turn a normal jet into something suitable for carrier operations (apart from anything else the sea is a particularly unforgiving operating environment which demands different materials to be used in construction, hence naval jets are typically heavier than their land based brethren and will handle differently and carry a different payload).

If we are going to have carriers at all, then we need to ask what we are going to realistically use them for, and cut our cloth accordingly.  If we're going to fight a major power, then we're probably going to do that as part of an alliance, and so do we really need the best planes in the world, when the sky is likely to be full of them?  Quite apart from this, things are likely to have got pretty serious geo-politically, and we're probably getting into wars-of-national-survival territory.

If we're going it alone against a second rank power, then surely all that matters is that our planes are better, rather than that they are the best in the world?  The best is after all the enemy of the good.  I think it might be time to start thinking about buying off the shelf  - especially if the rumours are true that we're unlikely to put a carrier to sea with more than 12 JSF on-board, when it has been built to hold more than 30.

For the price of JSF we can afford to buy something designed for the job, that's combat proven, in greater numbers, and better than anything we're likely to come up against from potential enemies - unless we're going to unlaterally declare war on a superpower.  Therefore, the UK realistically has a choice, we either buy Rafale off the French for the most modern carrier jets, or F18s off the USA.  Both would be fine for our realistic needs for a couple of decades until being superceded by UAVs, and either would be cheaper.

 JSF is a nice to have, not the be all and end all.  Given that we seem to lack a workable defence industrial strategy, I don't think a large number of defence jobs AND decent kit are achievable across the full spectrum of defence equipment needs.  Perhaps it's time to retreat from some of them and recognise that the needs of our forces ought to come first, and we should aim to give them something that is good enough, rather than world beating.

I'm not sure I'm totally right, and willing to be convinced of the merits of any aircraft type, but I think the option ought to be on the table that the solution to our carrier needs already exists, and is flying from a navy very nearby - whether it's to our east or west.

Finally, for the nostalgists, a picture I took back in the days when we could embark a fixed wing carrier air group.....

Happy Burns Night!

"Titfield.  One can't open the newspaper these days without reading about Titfield."

With these exasperated words the Minister of Transport in Ealing Studios' "The Titfield Thunderbolt" wearily resigns himself to the fact that Something Must Be Done.  It isn't just going to go away.  At the moment, the same can be said about Scotland - and the fact that it's everywhere in the papers at the moment as one side seeks to cut loose, whilst the other searches for elusive positive arguments for why we'd be better off sticking together....

So anyway, given that it's Burns Night, its time to sit down and consider the story of the struggle between a cheery streetwise ginger Scotsman, and his ancestrally Scottish putative overlord up from London with the English accent - yes, Ronald Neame's film of James Kennaway's "Tunes of Glory."

TOG fits perfectly in with the first rule of British cinema - that if it's set in Scotland and was made before about 1965 it's going to be good (the exception, naturally, being Jack Hawkins and David Niven in "Bonnie Prince Charlie").  It tells a complex story of power and identity, that is fairly ambivalent in its presentation of the two protagonists Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness) and Basil Barrow (John Mills).  Indeed, by the end it's difficult to know who you're supposed to be rooting for.

The plot is straightforward enough: Jock, an officer commissioned from the ranks after Alamein, is acting colonel of his highland battalion, garrisoned in a peacetime barracks similar to Stirling Castle.  Basil is the 5th generation regimental officer sent up from instructing at Sandhurst to take command over Jock's head.

The antagonism between the two characters provides a window on the eternal questions of Scottish identity, and what is proper behaviour.  Jock has his officers dancing reels with gay abandon, hollering and raising their hands above their heads; Basil is convinced that his officers should be dancing "correctly," and orders them to attend remedial dancing classes at dawn with the pipe major.  As an aside, as someone who has been given some very stern looks at the Northern Meeting I can confirm these attitudes persist on the 21st century Scottish dancefloor.

Some of it is more subtle - can Basil really be considered Scottish with his English accent, even though he is undoubtedly from north of the border and from an old Scots family?  Are the attitudes of his officers to him mirrored in the scorn of the pipe major for the clearly English Regimental Sergeant Major, Riddick? And can any self respecting Scotsman take seriously as his commanding officer a man who will turn down whisky in favour of lemonade?

The officers are an odd bunch.  Gordon Jackson is ever-reliable as the adjutant, but then there are characters like Alec Rattray, clearly a bruiser after Jock's heart, and a marvellously malevolent turn from Dennis Price as Major Scott - a man who manages to alienate everyone around him by the end of the film, stealing Jock's lover  and completely undermining Basil whilst giving every outward impression of being on his side.

Shot in technicolor, the film is these days a distinctly period piece, but it has some marvellous scenes - particularly of the reeling - and Guinness was never better than in this film: indeed, he saw it as the performance he was most proud of in his career.

Ultimately, it's a study of leadership, and the shifting currents of loyalty within a tightly sealed world.  It gets under the skin of the immediate postwar army in a way that perhaps only George Macdonald Fraser's McAuslan stories (interestingly also dealing with a Highland battalion) have matched.  It deserves a new audience.

Self Determination

Lots of people died on both sides, shouldn't we let the people who live there decide?

Sleeping your way to a Meeting

Recently, the sleeper service between London and points Scottish has come under the threat of having its funding withdrawn.  Whilst this lunacy seems to be diminishing after a rare outbreak of common sense, perhaps now’s a good time to consider why these services are so vital to the wellbeing of their users.

The first thing to say is that I’m not rampantly anti-aviation. I think it would be a good thing if we all took fewer, and shorter flights, but there are times when obviously only the plane will do.  In the UK we have the real advantage that nowhere is really all that far from anywhere else.  Admittedly, if you live in Truro and get asked to a forty minute business meeting in Inverness then you should probably think twice about whether a conference call might not be a better idea; but there is generally no need to be leaping on the plane for an internal flight every couple of days. 

A couple of years ago I was travelling regularly from London to Edinburgh on business, and you got to recognise the same faces standing in the queue for security at 0630 on a Monday morning.  I just couldn’t understand how people could keep up this existence for any length of time.  Of course, I realise that some people make calculations based on needing to do it – in order to see more of their children and have a workable home life - but it did seem to me that this sort of extreme commuting meant serious compromises in other areas of life, and high levels of stress and exhaustion.

After a while I investigated the possibility of taking the sleeper instead of the plane – I’m generally pretty positive about rail travel anyway, and it seemed to have been the right solution for Richard Hanney….

Quite simply, it was a revelation.  Yes it takes longer – London to Scotland and back in 30 odd hours instead of say 14, but it opens up time for much better use than standing in queues or waiting for the transfer bus to a far distant airport car park.

Given my general antipathy to London, the sleeper at least gives me the opportunity to go and have dinner with those of my friends who haven’t yet managed to escape!  From the restaurant or bar a quick tube to Euston sees me on the train and in bed by midnight, before being lulled to sleep by the motion of the train as it makes its way out through the northern suburbs and onto the West Coast mainline.

The berths are spartan but comfortable, and if you know the dates you want to travel a decent time in advance then you can usually get a cabin to yourself for about the same price as a business internal flight.  When you wake up it’s to the sight of the Pentland Hills rolling past the window, and you’re into Edinburgh in time for a shower, breakfast, and a read of the paper before your nine am meeting.  You’re less stressed, better rested, and arguably better able to perform.  That night, simply repeat the process with your Edinburgh based friends….

Of course, this sort of thing is made a lot easier if you’re single, and don’t have a partner or family who may be less enthusiastic about you spending more time away than you technically have to, but, if you can get away with it, then it really is the only way to travel.

 If the sleeper service was withdrawn tomorrow then the world would still keep turning, and most people would carry on without batting an eyelid, but something that makes Britain ever so slightly more civilised would have vanished; in the long run that would make us all the poorer.

Where do we go from here?

One of the most striking features of the current "Age of Austerity" is the growing need for authenticity in consumer habits.  As household and discretionary spending undergoes a squeeze, people have been forced to confront their consumption and make real choices about what is important in terms of quality and quantity.

One of the more pleasing bi-products of this has been the gradual trend away from consuming for its own sake, in favour of buying fewer better quality items (something that has been genuinely the case in Switzerland for many years, and that a Frenchman would at least tell you was the case in France, even if it is more honoured in the breach...).

However, it's not enough just the recession that has brought this about.  Even before 2007, the UK public were becoming increasingly concerned about issues such as food miles, seasonal/local produce, and ethical consumption.  This catalysed the growth in regional food fairs, and initiatives like Cittaslow, making it increasingly possible for people to take a real interest in what they wear, what food they put on the table, and how they live their lives.

I'm currently rereading Carl Honore's In Praise of Slow, which more and more seems to make sense as a blueprint of how we can all live better, slower and more ethical lives.  As the world staggers slowly towards what we can only hope are the broad sunlit uplands Mr Churchill was so enthusiastic about, maybe we do need to start thinking about what sort of society and structures we want to build to ensure that we don't fall into the same consumerist trap as before.