Rooksmoor's Tablets of Lead

Seven Samurai; 13 Assassins: A Comparison

2012-02-01T08:00:00.007Z

For Christmas I was fortunate to receive a DVD of the movie ’13 Assassins’ (2010). Whilst it is an action movie, I found it surprisingly moving. It also has some alarming scenes. It is rated 15 for the UK but 18 for Eire and I would go with the latter level, not because of the combat but because of what the assassins’ target: Lord Matsudaira Naritsugu carries out. Matsudaira is a brother of the Shogun which effectively makes him untouchable by the law and allows him to behave sadistically. He rapes the wife of one of the noblemen of the Akashi clan into which he has been adopted hosting his visit leading to the suicide of her and her husband. He slaughters an entire village of peasants who rose up leaving only one woman alive who he mutilates. The scene featuring her is one of the most alarming I have seen outside a horror movie. He shoots arrows into bound members of a family including women and children simply as a pastime. At the end of the movie when Matsudaira is dying he revels in the excitement he has had in battling his would-be assassins and considers reinstating the Age of War almost as a source of entertainment. To some degree this ensures that we continue to hate him as even at his end he appears as a spoilt child whose games lead to misery for others. Japanese audiences will know how much damage the Age of War did to their country; it is equivalent to the English Civil War for Britain, the Hundred Years War for France and the Thirty Years War for Germany.

Despite his behaviour and attitudes, Matsudaira is in line to become part of the government, a step which alarms a senior civil servant, Doi Toshitsura. It is he who commissions retired samurai Shimada Shinzaemon to assassinate Matsudaira. Through the movie he assembles twelve other samurai, ronin and a bandit descended from a samurai clan to be the assassins. They trap Matsudaira in a village and proceed to kill him and all his retainers. There is a decent review of ’13 Assassins’ (2010) at: http://aheroneverdies.blogspot.com/2011/04/takashi-miikes-13-assassins-review.html

This version of '13 Assassins' ( running time 2 hours 6 minutes on UK version; 2 hours 21 minutes in Japan) is a remake of the 1963 'Thirteen Assassins' [Jûsan-nin no shikaku] directed by Eiichi Kudo two hours five minutes written by Kaneo Ikegami. The remake was written by Daisuke Tengan, based on Kaneo Ikegami's screenplay and directed by Takashi Miike. I hope one of the terrestrial television channels shows the 1963 version. The movie is very well made and moving. It shows other countries how effective an action movie can be in both exciting and intellectually engage the audience. Unsurprisingly it has been compared to ‘Seven Samurai’ [Shichinin no Samurai] (1954) co-written, edited, and directed by Akira Kurosawa (running time 3 hours, 27 minutes) which remains the best known Japanese-made [‘13 Assassins’ is an Anglo-Japanese collaboration anyway] samurai movie. Given that I spent much of the Christmas period battling through ‘Total War: Shogun 2’ I thought it might be interesting to compare and contrast the two movies.

‘13 Assassins’ is set in 1844 just 23 years before the end of the Shogunate period with the Meiji Restoration which led to the modernisation of Japan. The only reference to the modern world is when one character talks of possibly moving to live in America. The only firearms visible are the barrels of gunpowder and matchlock muskets which had been used in Japan since the 16th century anyway. In contrast ‘Seven Samurai’ is set in 1587 during the so-called Age of War [Sengoku jidai] of Japanese history which ultimately led to the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate which was to rule Japan unbroken from 1603 until 1867. Thus, the movies are set at either end of the last great period of the samurai. The fact that both sets of characters would precisely recognise the clothing, equipment and values of the other shows the degree to which Japanese society was ossified for three centuries if not longer.

In ’13 Samurai’ we see a unit of ashigaru (i.e. non-samurai) soldiers armed with matchlock-firing arquebuses; the bandits in ‘Seven Samurai’ also possess three of these. Arquebuses had been adopted extensively by Japanese forces when introduced by Europeans first in 1543 and within ten years Japan had the highest per capita ownership of such weapons in the world. Once Japan was closed to Europeans after 1635 the technology did not advance until the mid-19th century. However, use of these guns was uncommon in the 1840s and there were few soldiers trained in them, so for them to be used at this time would be very uncommon. Throughout the movie, though, there are references back to the past in Japanese history.

The motives for the action is different. In ‘Seven Samurai’ it is peasants being persecuted by bandits who come looking for samurais to defend their village from repeated attack. The samurai recruited become involved for various reasons, but to some degree it is a question of ‘noblesse oblige’, the obligation of knightly if not noble men to defend those who could not do so. The ‘sword hunt’ which seized weaponry held by non-samurai was not introduced until 1588, the year after the movie is set. In one scene we see all the swords and armour that the peasants have looted from samurai, probably ronin (literally ‘wave man’, samurai without a lord usually due to death; the often became bandits or were ‘hired swords’). Despite the arms and armour which only the possibly fake samurai, Kikuchiyo, makes use of, the peasants are untrained in their usage. The production and delivery of food in exchange for military protection was the basis of feudal society whether in Japan or in Europe. Though not mentioned the role the seven samurai take on should be being filled by the samurai of their overlord, but either he is negligent or his forces are being used in the ongoing conflicts of the period.

The issue of ‘noblesse oblige’ is a more central debate in ’13 Samurai’. Matsudaira and his chief retainer Hanbei emphasise that the heart of the samurai code is loyalty to one’s lord and effectively blind to his behaviour. However, Shimada and his colleagues and effectively Doi argue that the samurai works on behalf of the people. A similar discussion could have been held in medieval Europe though the codes of chivalry were more for stories than for everyday life the way the principles that guided samurai were. Of course, in contrast to ‘Seven Samurai’ it is not simply peasants who are suffering, it is the samurai class itself which is being put under pressure by Matsudaira and there is a fear that any samurai or noble might lose his daughter or son to the man’s behaviour.

These debates bring us back to the nature of the times in which the movies are set. In the Age of War the time shown in ‘Seven Samurai’, whilst samurai fell in their thousands in battles, many peasants and townspeople were caught up in the battles between the different clans, either serving as ashigaru troops, as a result of being caught in sieges or due to rape and looting by soldiers and ronin even when peace had come to an area. By the 1840s, samurai culture had become stylised and one aspect of those recruited is that they keep to the ‘old ways’ and are skilled in the use of swords and in one case, spear. Matsudaira and those around him may preen with their swords but many are no good at using them. Throughout the extended battle scene you often see members of Matsudaira’s entourage screaming in fear or a kind of insanity often batting ineffectually with their swords. This contrasts sharply with the one-blow kills of the assassins, even of the bandit Kiga Koyata using rocks and a sling.

The formation of the group differs between the two movies. As is noted in commentary on ‘Seven Samurai’ the approach in that movie set the pattern for numerous westerns and war movies that followed in the 1960s and 1970s in particular of assembling a disparate group of men typically with different skills. It is unsurprising that the western remake, ‘The Magnificent Seven’ (1960) and its sequels 1966-72 adopted this approach as did ‘The Professionals’ (1966) but you can see it in ‘The Dirty Dozen’ (1967), ‘The Guns of Navarone’ (1961) and even more so in the far weaker ‘Force Ten from Navarone’ (1978) and ‘Where Eagles Dare’ (1968). In ‘Seven Samurai’ the first fighter commissioned recruits the others and while has some acquaintance with them does not know them well. In ’13 Assassins’ the group includes students of the veteran samurai who volunteer and the nephew of Shimada. They have a narrower range of fighting styles than seen in the westerns and war movies. In ’13 Assassins’ veteran widower ronin, Sahara Heizō uses a spear and one of the others uses his wakizashi (short sword) in his left hand and his katana (long sword) in his right in the style of Miyamoto Musashi of the 16^th century. In ‘Seven Samurai’ whilst the bulk fight with the katana, Katayama Gorōbei, the lieutenant to the leader Shimada Kanbei, is an expert archer, interestingly the art that samurai were first renowned for before the subsequent development of the cult of the sword. Both movies have a young, untested samurai; a cool, almost clinical expert fighter (though Hirayama Kujūrō is far happier to sign up immediately for the mission in ’13 Assassins’ than Kyūzō is in ‘Seven Samurai’) and a jolly round-faced warrior.

In both movies there is also a ‘mercurial’ outsider. In ‘Seven Samurai’ this is Kikuchiyo not from the samurai class though he is a good sword fighter. He is like the conduit to the peasants that the samurai are supporting though he is uneasy about reminders of his heritage. He may actually be the son of a ronin or a jizamurai also known as a kokujin, poor rural samurai who was closer to the peasantry than they were to their samurai class. In ’13 Assassins’ there is the aforementioned Kiga who also claims samurai lineage. It is not certain if Kiga is actually human as he appears immortal and may be a spirit, something like a Kitsune (fox spirit) or Mujina (badger spirit). Kiga is asked if he is a ‘coyote spirit’ though I assume this is an American translation of Kitsune as there are similarities between this creature and the coyote trickster spirit of traditional American folklore. In Japanese stories these spirits can assume human form. The Shinto religion also worships Kami, eighty million local gods. He may also be some form of mountain demon such as a Tengu, a bird-like humanoid of Japanese legends. In both movies the role of this character is to show that whilst the band is elite there is a kind of approval for their actions from natural law whether the wider sense of society or literally from nature or the spirit world.

In both movies there is a vital role for the village. This levels up the odds between the samurai and their opponents. Of course, in ‘Seven Samurai’ protecting the village is at the heart of the mission. In ’13 Samurai’ with government funds, the assassins buy out the population of the village and only a few remain briefly to reduce the suspicions of Matsudaira’s entourage that they are walking into a trap. In both movies gates are used to corral small units of opponents and to pick them off with the samurai making use of roof tops and buildings to provide an advantage. In ’13 Samurai’ the preparations are taken to a far greater extent with a whole series of booby traps and false routes injure and disorientate Matsudaira’s men. There are a lot of swords for the assassins to use and though not shown I did wonder if as in ‘Seven Samurai’ there was a stockpile in the village despite the sword hunts.

Both of these samurai movies are primarily about action. However, they also provide more that simple combat including the development of different characters and also discussion about both ‘correct’ and ‘right’ behaviour in Japanese society in the samurai era. It is these other elements which I believe continues to draw back viewers. After all, how many other non-English language movies released in 1954 can you name. I trust that ’13 Samurai’ will be seen in such a light in 2060. I am also looking forward to seeing the movie of ‘The 47 Ronin’ being released in 2012, based on a classic samurai story from Japanese literature.

We Would Like To Complain That You Are Insufficiently Consumerist

2012-01-11T08:00:00.000Z

I am used to advertising coming at me absolutely every way it possibly can. Of course there are the old fashioned methods such as posters, newspaper and magazine advertisements, radio and television commercials that have been around for decades and longer. I would imagine that more content on the internet and certainly the bulk of email traffic is actually trying to sell you something quite often spurious products connected to sexual performance that the vast bulk of users do not even want advertised to them let alone to buy. It almost seems that advertising has become a kind of end in itself rather than a way to increase sales of a company's particular product. The fact that there are awards for television commercials and I assume hidden within the industries themselves for all other kinds of advertising suggests that they have gone beyond simply being a tool to having become a form of art.

Keen-eyed readers or those listening very astutely to their screen reader will notice I have, as yet, not mentioned telephone advertising. Of course, you can now sign up to a service that removes you from the lists of permissible numbers to call. This saved us a lot of time and effort in our house, not only from calls from people but also from calls from machinery. It seemed particularly invidious that the company could not even bother to employ a person to bother us and left it to a machine; even the ten-year old boy who lives in my house, younger then, knew immediately when he answered the phone if it was about to play out some recorded message and would slam the receiver down with a curse. He was well trained in this as some scammers played on children answering phones to get them to call back premium lines. Perhaps a child should not answer a telephone but given he moved much faster than the other residents of the house and could get down the stairs fast enough to reach the phone before it rang off and without injuring himself as I tended to do, it was often down to him to answer it, especially as the answering service supposedly provided by BT proved so unreliable.

On mobile phones it is even worse because phones have two ways of getting messages to you, either by calling you up or texting you. I have owned a mobile phone since 1999 when one I was incredibly lucky to have one given to me as a present as I was living at the time in a house without a landline. It cost the phenomenal sum of £199 (equivalent to about £296 at today's values). I have only owned three handsets. One I left in a taxi and one broke down. From the initial gift I have stayed with O2 (or BT Wireless as it was up until 2001) and so have simply had the handset replaced. Currently I do not have a smartphone so I imagine I am missing out on third and fourth ways to advertise to me through my phone, i.e. by sending me the equivalent of television and internet advertisements to me over it. If I want to take photographs I use a camera; if I want to surf the internet, I use a computer. I have no desire to use a second rate device as phones tend to still be in these respects to do those activities. I realise that makes me an eccentric. Typically I immediately delete any advertising texts but one company I cannot stop advertising to me directly is O2 itself. I suppose as my long-time provider they have a right to contact me. However, what alarms me about their advertising, as the title of this posting suggests, is not that they try to sell me things but they go further and try to tell me how to live my life.

It is a recognised advertising technique that you encourage potential customers to feel they are buying into a certain lifestyle or even into a kind of elite through purchasing their products. Companies develop sub-brands to appeal to different sectors of their customer base separating them out by age or income, always by gender and sometimes by location. Advertising often sells a story, that if you have the item somehow you will be a different person. This is semi-spoofed/semi-replicated in the long-running campaign for Lynx deodorant and shower gel (interestingly the product is called Axe in continental Europe) which suggests one spray or dollop will make a man irresistable to women. In fact, buying a handbag will not make you any more popular or beautiful or successful, despite the advertising. It may signal to other people that you are of a certain wealth or taste and that may, in some rare circumstances, open up some social contact that you might not have previous garnered. The main benefit is that it makes you feel a part of a set of people that you want to associate with, even if the feeling is not mutual or at least to show you share common taste/attitudes/aspirations with those people.

Some advertising goes beyond the change being brought about by purchasing the product to saying that some people do not deserve the product unless they already lead a certain lifestyle. There are a couple of memorable ones of this style. One was the 2009 campaign from Phones 4 U which only offered particular deals to people who had 50 friends or more, see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jul/11/phones4u-advertisement There was another one which I think was for Audi cars, but I might be mistaken as this was probably a decade ago. It showed a flash, brash stock broker type taking a test drive and then turning down the car saying it was not the car for him and the salesman agreeing, implying it was for customers with far greater taste. I feel I am facing the same kind of pressure from O2.

Just after Christmas I was telephoned by O2 to ask if I was happy with the service they provided. I said I was. However, that was not enough for them. They asked me why I was not using my phone more than I did. The man on the other end of the line said 'I can't believe you're not using the 10% discounts' and then asked me why I did not want additional texts or calls or a whole string of offers that they regularly text and also email me about. I then had to spend five minutes telling him that generally my phone is either switched off or without charge in it. I probably receive one to two calls per month on it and make even fewer. I probably send one text per month to my mother, one to the woman who lives in my house and one to my landlord generally when he has offered to cook me a curry. Thus, if I was suddenly offered 100 free texts it would most likely take me until 2015 to use them all. A lot of the calls and texts I receive are advertising. I do not have an active social life and have lost contact with almost all of the friends I had ten years ago. The ones I have prefer to email or even send postcards. I had to keep repeatedly saying that my mobile phone was far more a safety device for when my car breaks down or to confirm with my mother or my co-resident that I have arrived safely. Last time my car broke down the charge in my mobile was exhausted and I was compelled to use a phone box, something I have not done in probably a decade and was alarmed to find how much it cost.

What irritated me was that not only did I have to keep repeating myself, even though O2 knows how much I use my telephone from how much credit I put into it around £30 every 4-5 months. I was resentful that they were trying to get me to live some kind of different life in which I have many more friends and I call them regularly rather than struggling home exhausted to spend the weekend on domestic chores and sleeping. I half expected the caller to say I no longer deserved the phone I had because I was not living the appropriate life that their customers are supposed to have. I felt that I had to fight for the right to live the dull life that I have been dealt. Imagine the impact of such targeted advertising on someone like a teenager far less confident of their lifestyle or unable to see that actually in the UK in 2012 we have very little control over our lives. The woman who lives in my house who lives pretty much the same sort of life as me though she runs a company and has local friends, was similarly called by her provider and questioned about using her phone more. I guess the fact as an entrepreneur and yet has little need of the phone in this age of email and Skype, in order to do business may suggest why the companies are so tenacious and have no embarrassment in trying to press us to live what they feel is an expected lifestyle.

I am reminded a little of an episode of 'Doctor Who' in an alternate version of 2000s Britain in which everyone wears blue tooth kinds of ear pieces and consequently become programmed to behave in much the same way as their fellow citizens and are steadily being turned into cyber(wo)men. A mobile phone is useful, but I feel no compunction to live the way the company that provides it expects. I could not do so without a sudden injection of lots of friends. I do feel that I should not be rung up at regular intervals and have to defend my lifestyle choices so vigorously. I guess this is another element of the shift in service provision that I have noticed. It is no longer the case that 'the customer is always right' now it is clearly, 'the company is always right' in how they take and hold your money and how they tell you that you should be living your life. Hands off my personality!

The List For 2011 Which Interested Me The Most

2012-01-09T08:00:00.166Z

For some reason many in the media seem an urge at the end of the year to compile lists usually related to things that have occurred in the preceding year. I suppose it is a very easy way to fill up newspaper and webspace without really having to put much effort into composing something. 'The Guardian' which along with the BBC news website, is my media source of choice was not immune to this tendency. However, rather than the 'Five Things We've Learned About Fashion' (despite it being penned by the very sexy Jess Cartner-Morley) or 'Five Things We've Learned About Television/Art/Food/Science' and definitely skirting Grace Dent's 'Five Things We've Learned About Celebrity' I was ironically drawn to the more eclectic almost surreal 'Famous List Words': lists produced by a range of 'celebrities' including former Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling and teleivsion presenter Lorraine Kelly to the puppet character Sooty. The items listed included Scottish anthems, top people called Jones and favourite past shapes (with spaghetti, penne and fusili rounding out the top three). The one that attracted my attention most and I felt was worthy of comment was '8 Movie Characters You Wouldn't Want To Fuck With' as selected by current pop star Jordan Stephens (born 1992) of Rizzle Kicks, a hip hop group from Brighton, southern England.

Of the movies listed I have only seen six but hope that I know enough of the work of the actors featured to comment on the list as a whole and I may come back to this posting if I see the remaining two movies. I replicate the list here for reference with some additional information for ease of subsequent discussion:

1) Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills in 'Taken' (2008) - Literally slaps up most of Paris in 96 hours.
2) Brad Pitt as Mickey O'Neil in 'Snatch' (2000) - One-hit wonder.
3) Gary Oldman as Stansfield in 'Leon' (1994) - No one plays gun-toting villains like Gary Oldman
4) Vincent Cassel as Jacques in 'Mesrine' (2 parts; 2008) - He holds up a judge at gunpoint. Enough said.
5) Keanu Reeves as Neo in 'The Matrix' (1999; but presumably too in the sequels both 2003 in which the character becomes stronger) - Can literally do ANYTHING.
6) Denzel Washington as Eli in 'The Book of Eli' (2010) - Can batter people while wearing a backpack.
7) Samuel L. Jackson as Jules in 'Pulp Fiction' (1994) - Just wants to be the shepherd.
8) Sir Ben Kingsley as Don Logan in 'Sexy Beast' (2000) - Doesn't take no for an answer.

This is the kind of list you would expect men in their thirties sitting slumped in front of the television, perhaps portrayed by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in the movie version. It is notable that all the characters are male and what is interesting is that what seems to have got them into the list is not simply that they can be physically violent but also that they have an attitude. The nature of each is very different, but you could argue that all are self-righteous, and in a couple of cases righteous too. I suppose that is something that is very scary about such an opponent that they have blind faith in what they are doing and believe that to challenge that is utterly unacceptable even if, on an objective moral judgement their own behaviour would be condemned. This is particularly the case with Stansfield and Logan, both of whom are evil men and yet it is their indignation that anyone would challenge their world view that gives them real nastiness. Jules is a little like this but his indignation really stems less from his world view which in the course of the movie seems to be moving towards some kind of Christian religious revelation but rather irritations to his day-to-day life; he is most angered not by immoral behaviour but by people disturbing his coffee drinking. That mundanity of violence is another aspect of evil and shows a complex character who seems to feel that he is moving towards good whilst at the same time behaving in an evil way without thought.

Eli and Neo are different, both being at least prophets if no messiahs. I have not seen 'The Book of Eli' but it is about a blind traveller carrying a braille copy of the Bible across the USA thirty years after a nuclear apocalypse. In many ways it panders to the US view that much of the population of North America could survive a nuclear war and in some ways the world would be a better place if American society could start from scratch, in this way the premise is very similar to 'The Postman' (novel 1985; movie 1997). Having Washington play a blind character also references martial arts movies with blind action heroes. In parts of the movie Eli seems able to dodge bullets as if protected. Thus his violence fighting against Carnegie played by Gary Oldman, is righteous as he is seemingly on a mission from God. Washington's action characters tend to be rather stoic almost relaxed in many of his movies such as 'Devil in the Blue Dress' (1995), 'Fallen' (1998), 'The Siege' (1998), 'Man on Fire' (2004) and especially 'Deja Vu' (2004). Keanu Reeves struggles as an actor and whilst Washington can show a wider range of emotions Reeves is a one-note actor. 'The Matrix' is engaging due to its premise, but Reeves is so emotionless that he might as well have played a construct of the computer system. Yes, Neo can do everything, but in many ways that is what makes him unappealing. There are times when we feel Neo is in jeopardy, not through Reeves's portrayal but because it is explained to us, yet ultimately we know he has the power to overcome everything and an invulnerable hero is no hero at all. Even Stansfield and Logan have a vulnerability if their plans do no go right. They suffer the double hit of things not working out and them becoming apoplectic that other people have derailed what they felt was the thing that had to be done.

Gary Oldman seems to be coming down to two settings. One is a quirky almost pleasantly, camply sinister bad guy as he has portrayed not only in 'Leon' but also almost taking off that role in 'The Fifth Element' (1997) and producing something similar in 'Airforce One' (1997), 'Lost in Space' (1998) and more recently voicing Lord Shen in 'Kung Fu Panda 2' (2011) and funnily I always see him in mind's eye rather than Tim Roth, playing Archibald Cunningham in 'Rob Roy' (1995) - perhaps since they were in 'Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead' (1990) together. The other is a warmer, usually bearded character, notably in the Harry Potter series (movies feauring Oldman 2004-11) and perhaps 'Red Riding Hood' (2011) though I have yet to see that. To some degree he seems to have lost the range of his early work notably 'Sid and Nancy' (1986) and 'Prick Up Your Ears' (1987) which may explain his movie hiatus 2001-4. I find Oldman's warmer characters far more credible than his evil ones which he tends to ham up. This was no doubt intentional in 'The Fifth Element' which was a light-hearted movie, but I feel weakens his portrayal in 'Leon'. His best bad character is probably the title role in 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' (1992). The elements of the mundanity and self-righteousness that makes the others listed here often so sharp is lost in Oldman's ostentatious portrayals.

Brad Pitt plays against type in 'Snatch' which is a gritty movie. It has elements of humour but having lived in East London, I also felt it managed to catch the everyday harshness and easy criminality of the area. Pitt plays an Irishman rather than an American (something he also did in 'The Devil's Own' (1997)) whose dialogue is deliberately inaccessible. He is a traveller who also bareknuckle boxes, an illegal sport in the UK. The part draws on the muscular build Pitt gained for 'Fight Club' (1999) through boxing and other martial arts. O'Neil is a violent man for his living but that fits the context in which he lives. Ultimately what he does is for his family especially when their caravans are torched by gangsters. Thus, while not showing the indignation of Stansfield or Logan, O'Neill still adheres to a rule, one which I think would be more broadly accepted in UK society and probably even more so in the USA or looking out for your family and taking revenge on anyone who harmed them. I think people like his character because people underestimate O'Neil and yet he bides his time until he can have the situation to his greatest advantage. The character in 'Snatch' that I despise is Brick Top portrayed by Alan Ford, who like Logan and Stansfield creates his own selfish rules and viciously punishes anyone who steps over the line of his self-imposed laws. These people believe they are in the 'right' because they have created their own 'moral' universe simply based on their base desires.

I think the reason why Mills is at the top of the list is for much the same reason that O'Neill is favoured. Mills is a retired CIA operative (as with war veterans, the USA seems to be full of such men) who goes after the slavers who snatch his daughter while on holiday in France. He is the manifestation of millions of fathers sitting in the audience imagining what they would do if their own daughter was taken. Mills shows a lot of paranoia in the early part of the movie, which actually turns out to be well placed. 'Taken' taps right into the fear that parents especially in the UK and USA have about even letting their 18 year old children out of their sight and into the dangerous place called 'Europe' (most British people do not see the UK as part of Europe). Mills has both to fight authority in the typical way of many cop and spy movies as well as beating up and shooting the bad guys who turn out to be the 'acceptable' racial stereotyped enemy of the past two decades: Arabs. Mills does appear vulnerable and he appears human too; he seems motivated by the best of intentions, which for the average cinema goer is defence of family well above religious or other moral motives. It seems no surprise that Neeson is starring in 'Taken 2' (2012) set in Istanbul and featuring Mills and his wife taken prisoner by the father of the man he killed in the first movie.

Finally I turn to Jacques Mesrine. Unlike the other characters the two movies featuring Cassell are biographies of a renowned French gangster from the 1960s and 1970s who carried out the acts featured in the movies for real even if these have been dramatised. I have not seen these movies by Cassell is an accomplished actor. His bady guys can be rather camp like Oldman's, for example in 'Dobermann' (1997) [Tcheky Karyo as Inspecteur Sauver Cristini is actually more terrifying in that movie], 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' (2000), 'Ocean's Twelve' (2004) and 'Ocean's Thirteen' (2006) and I hope has been able to channel more of the edginess which was apparent in 'La Haine' (1995).

Even though Stephens is only 20, he has produced an interesting list that certainly provoked thoughts for me. I think what it shows is that a 'hard nut' character in movies is not necessarily the most violent character, there has to be something more. Perhaps it is the righteouness of the character that makes them appear unstoppable that adds that edge to what they do and means that you would not want to cross their paths as you would know that they would never let up. In some cases, notably Mills and O'Neil this gives heart to the audience. In reality we know that if our child is snatched there is very little that we can do and the authorities have very little more power, so being shown even a fictional case of someone getting something back, some revenge at least for their family heartens us as viewers and it also allows us to watch the violence without feeling uneased by it.

The Trouble With Steam

2012-01-07T08:00:00.071Z

This is not a posting about water above 100oC, it is about the online gaming service called Steam. Now, living away from home five days per week and lacking the money and the energy to go out at all, my laptop is my prime source of entertainment. As regular readers know I have long been a fan of the 'Total War' historical computer wargames. Unfortunately since 'Empire Total War' in 2008, even though you buy a disk to load the game into your computer, you have to subscribe to Steam to play it. There is no charge to subscribe, but it does inhibit game playing quite a bit and leaves me feeling resentful that many evenings I am unable to play a game that I have paid for. You can buy games that you download from Steam too and they sell numerous classics at a discount rate, I reconnected with 'Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines' this way and was able to play it without having to download the 23 patches needed to make the disk version work.

I can see why the Steam system was developed. It allows the company to advertise upgrades and extra content and they encourage you to buy other similar games. There is also an online community to connect with. There have long been options to fight battles in the Total War series online. However, given how unpleasant the bulk of people I have encountered through online gaming are, notably so many players of 'World of Warcraft' I have no desire to play with them. This blocks many of the unlockable achievements on the Steam system from me. I hate being compelled to become part of a community. I used to be a regular contributor to the online fora for Total War run by Sega itself and between being told I was utterly useless because I could not simply storm through each of the games on Very Hard setting by people unable to spell properly and having my comments censored by the company, I got very little joy from there either.

The key problem with Steam, though, is that despite having paid my £35 for the game, unlike in the old days with games like 'Medieval II Total War' or 'Rome Total War' simply having the disk is not enough to play the game. I have owned a copy of 'Napoleon Total War' since it came out and enjoyed it. There was a bug which meant that the game crashed about four years into the game time. However, there was a patch that resolved that. When I got a new laptop I reinstalled the game, but, of course, with the cyber attacks on Sega they had taken down the patch. Thus, when I try to play it through the Steam account I am compelled to have, it simply crashes as before. Steam are no use simply sending me back to Sega and anyone offering the patch now is in fact nothing more than a scam trying to infect your machine. Thus, through no fault of my own except upgrading my computer, I can no longer play the game.

A new problem has arisen over the Christmas period with simply accessing games. I have been enjoying the Rise of the Samurai scenario of 'Total War: Shogun 2'. However, just when I have my strategy planned of how to defeat the tough clan in what is a pretty challenging version of the game, I find that I cannot get into the game. I get time markers and then am told that the game is unavailable or has crashed. Repeated tries bring no joy. Again, I cannot play a game I have paid for. The £35 only bought me the occasional chance to play the game, not regular access to it. In addition, every couple of months there is some upgrade, some of them entirely spurious such as the one which made the opening screen which shows a 15th century Japanese castle, suddenly decorated with snowmen out the front of it, one holding a candy cane, something only invented four hundred years or so later, on a different continent. In addition, the downloads seem to make my computer forget that I have bought the game and it tells me it is unavailable. Initially the Steam staff again referred me to Sega, but then another told me I had to delete almost all the files and reinstall the game from Steam. This I do diligently every time. Again it is clear that paying my £35 has not brought the game to my computer, it has simply allowed me occasional random access.

I understand why, for commercial reasons, a hybrid online-disk system like Steam was created. However, in terms of customer service it marks a real retrograde step. If I buy a game I cannot be sure that I will be able to play it more than one or two evenings per week. In the old days, as long as the disk was not scratched, once I had bought it, I could keep on playing it repeatedly for years to come. The disk of 'Shogun Total War' that I bought in 1999 still works and I go back to it when I find for whatever reason I am unable to access its sequel.

This model of only be able occasionally to use something you have paid good money for seems to be the acceptable model. When I had BT internet they kept charging us month after month even though the internet connection broke down on a daily basis. Despite a very patchy service they wanted to charge us £120 to break the contract and a further £90 to remove their equipment. Since when did basic economics state that you have to pay for a service you might actually receive and pay even more to try to get out of that purchase of in fact sometimes nothing? Will it spread and I will go to the dry cleaners and sometimes find my suit has not been cleaned and then be charged more if I want to have it cleaned at another dry cleaners? Will I try and buy a burger and be told that they are unavailable at the moment and I have to come back an hour later for my fast food?

Utility Company Holding On To My Money

2012-01-05T08:00:00.004Z

The behaviour of utility companies has been a perennial concern of mine, prompted when the deign to send me a bill: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/05/uk-utility-companies-cash-vampires-of.html The constantly rising prices are well known to everyone in the UK and cause real difficulty for millions of people, even when we are having an incredibly mild winter like we are at present. It is ironic that global warming may be sparing the lives of thousands of British elderly people. Utility prices rise whenever there is some crisis that increases the cost of gas and oil and that they do not decrease when these costs fall; our monthly combined gas and electricity is now equal to what our quarterly bill was in 2008. In addition it is clear that the six power utility companies are running a cartel unchallenged by anyone. All their prices rise by approximately the same amount at the same time of the year with an increase of around 20% in 2011, well above the increase in pay and even general inflation.

What I am focusing on today is not simply the rising prices, but in particular the way customers are treated. There now seems to be an accepted way that service providers feel they can treat you. They are not compelled any longer to even provide a service for what you pay them let alone one which is timely and efficient. This applies to things like telecommunications and rental property as well as other utilities. If you are disgruntled with them, you find it difficult to break a contract that they insisted was the only terms you could sign up for and they feel free to levy all kinds of charges to get away from them even if they are failing to provide the service. I have also noted before how these days you pay in advance for so much and how this actually works against people being efficient in their usage of gas and electricity because with the fixed monthly rate you do not see any gain for yourself especially if on rental contracts of less than two years that are so common: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/06/annual-utility-bills-no-incentive-to-be.html

I live in a house in which we economise as much as we can in terms of utility usage not simply in an (often fruitless) effort to keep bills down but also because we are aware that humans are causing damage to the world through excess usage of finite resources. We tried to have solar panels installed but out roof proved to be the wrong shape which suggests to me that people should be working on all kinds of shapes of panels if we are really going to make a break through for renewable energy. The halving of the government incentive to have panels installed is damaging in so many ways, notably in raising unemployment in the private sector which is supposed to be soaking up job losses from the public sector and slowly down an improvement in our 'fuel security'. Fuel security is something the British government has been obsessing about at least since the 1960s and focuses on how Britain can ensure it has enough fuel to power its industry and domestic sector. As Britain moved steadily away from the consumption of domestically produced coal from the mid-1960s down to 1985 and the North Sea oil reserves were depleted there was a renewed awareness of a need to secure sources of oil in countries friendly to the UK. This is nothing new and was on the agenda particularly 1967-73 where turbulence in the Middle East led to the cutting of oil supplies and then a substantial price rise which ended the post-1945 economic boom for good. Fuel security has been what has motivated US and UK involvement in Iraq, probably in the Libyan revolution too; British involvement in Nigeria and US concerns in Venezuela. The complicating factor compared to the 1960s that China too is securing fuel resources by heavy investment in any country which will accepts its money.

Government subsidies to install solar panels right across the country would secure and increase jobs as well as help reduce the UK's fuel insecurity through reducing dependence on fossil fuels from countries which might not like us. As I have noted before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-if-uk-had-handled-oil-shock-of.html Britain gave away its lead in sustainable energy. However, in Derby recently I saw a line of small scale turbines on the roof of an office building that were providing electricity to the building. Britain lags behind building wind turbines along motorways the way the Germans do and can be achieved without even having to upset the powerful pretty-England lobbyists.

Anyway, solar power is currently out for our house. This means we remain dependent on one of the six companies and their authoritarian approach to pricing and charges. For the last twelve months we have paid £140 (€167; US$217) each month. Our consumption of gas has risen probably due to the cold period in January compared to 2010 but our consumption of electricity has fallen. In 2010 we ended the year with £277 in credit, i.e. we had paid them £277 more than was due for the amount of gas and electricity we had used. I contacted the company, Scottish Power, to ask for a refund but was told that was not possible as our consumption might rise. So, they were saying that they were holding this money to hedge against us suddenly consuming more. This makes their statements that readings are important so that we 'only pay for the fuel you use' utterly ridiculous. Instead we are simply giving them a set amount of money and they take out what they feel they need.

The invidious nature of this has been revealed this year. For 2011 we ended the year £582 (€692; US$902) in credit to the company, so they now have an additional £305 of mine for fuel of theirs I have not bought. On this basis the more fuel I save this year the larger that sum will rise. I have enough credit with them to pay for all our gas and electricity until mid-April 2012. However, if I stop paying penalty charges will be levied on me. You might think that on this basis they might reduce my standard monthly charge, but no, it has been set again at £140 per month. I guess I should be grateful that the monthly charge has not risen but I am resentful that the company is holding on to my money gaining interest on it in their account when that is money which could feed my household for more than two months. At the rate we are going within two years I will be paying a whole year in advance for my fuel. I can see that is in the utility company's interest but it is certainly not what the majority of us would consider good customer service.

You have to step outside the world of utility companies and their warped mindset to see how greedy and twisted their approach is. Imagine I went into a supermarket and when I arrived there they took £140 from me. I then proceed to spend £100 on food. When I reach the till, rather than be refunded the £40 that I have not spent, the shop holds on telling me that they need it just in case more than two years from now I might suddenly spend some extra on one of my trips. Surely if I do then they can charge me more. The amount of cash that utility companies must be holding for resources they have not provided to the customer must be in the millions. They do not seem to be investing it in improving their provision and they are certainly not reducing prices to customers. Fuel poverty now affects 5.5 million people in Britain up from 3.8 million at the end of 2010. Partly this is due to the fact that household incomes fall as all costs rise, pay in many cases is actually falling and unemployment continues to rise. To me it seems that the only way I can get my money back is to say that I am leaving Scottish Power and moving to another company, presumably, though I have not put this to the test, they would be compelled to pay me back the excess money they have taken from me. Much of the focus is on the price that we are charged for the utilities we use, but pressure also has to be brought to bear on companies for how they charge us especially for fuel we have yet to use.

P.P. 09/01/2012
Well, I am pleased to say that by threatening Scottish Power with moving my account to another provider they have agreed to refund me £440 in two stages. I received the £40 last week and should get the £400 by 17th January. They have also reduced my monthly payments from £140 down to £90, thus by the end of the year I will be £1040 better off. Now, that is a reward for using less gas and resources and has come at just the perfect time to deal with all the New Year bills. What is irritating is that it has taken pressure spread over two years plus a threat to move my account to get my money back when, in my view, they should be attentive to these things and do them unprompted.

Manufacturing Traffic Jams

2012-01-03T08:00:00.023Z

As regular readers know I am a frequent car driver, topping 320 Km per week. Whilst this is nowhere close to the distances covered by truck drivers or even the travelling salesmen left in business, it does mean I spend quite a lot of time on the road. In the past it used to be the M25 and these days it is often the M4. Both are very busy motorways in South-East England (and if you think that no motorway is ever not busy, I suggest going along the M40 or the M69). The traffic along them is often congested. The western arc of the M25 seems particularly worse than it used to be, a factor I put down to so many people like myself commuting in on a daily or weekly basis from South-West and West England and the West Midlands to work in London. What exacerbates the congestion on the M25 and now increasingly on the eastern Berkshire (I know that part of the county has been fragmented into a number of consolidated authority ‘city-states’) stretch of the M4 is the variable speeds approach. This is explicitly warned about on the M25 but also now occurs on the M4.

Now, I am a person who adheres strictly to road speed limits and I have no issue about speed cameras. However, what I do not like is how the speed limit is jerked back and forth on the M4 and M25. The speed limit for a motorway is 70mph (112 kph) but the matrix signs daily alter this down to anything from 40-60mph (64-96 kph). Often you have ‘Queue caution’ appearing as well. This is ironic, because as I have discussed before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/06/rubbernecking-far-less-common-than.html putting up any sign on the motorway causes people to slow down automatically so creating the queue that they were seeking to warn people about. The other day I actually saw a sign that said ‘Strong winds forecast’, not that they were happening then, they might as well have said ‘Long-term recession forecast’ in terms of how much it may have modified the average driver’s behaviour. The signs appearing saying ‘Fog’ always strike me as a waste of electricity. Anyway, what you find is that you are slowed down, sometimes jumping from 70 mph to 40 mph and then back up to 50 mph or 60 mph, or any combination of these speeds. What this tends to do is not actually moderate the flow in the way that I assume the Highways Agency intends, it simply creates a jam wherever the signs start.

What is the expectation of the ‘Queue caution’ sign? One might expect people to slow up so that they do not crash into the unmoving cars. They would slow up even if you put a smiley face on the matrix boards. In addition, motorways are designed so that you can see far into the distance. Particularly at this time of the year you can see the cluster of red lights long before you come close to them. Is there an assumption that we see a queue warning sign and decide to leave the motorway and try an alternate route? There are a few places where not going down the motorway will get you to your destination faster than using the motorway. I know that most days it is easier to get into Dorset via the single carriageway roads through Newbury and Salisbury than going along the motorways and dual carriageway route through Winchester and Southampton: M3-M27-A31. However, most of the time, taking the motorway is the most direct route, especially going into a city like London. The whole reason why motorways were invented was to move vehicles between cities more effectively so it seems ironic that we are now being encouraged to leave them.

Of course, not all of the blame can be put on whichever human or computer decides to put these random speeds into the mix, some of it depends on the drivers too who simply exacerbate a difficult situation. Many drivers on the M4 simply ignore the signs and keep going as fast as they can until they actually come to the start of the jam. There will always be those, like myself, who obey the speed limit immediately and the bulk of drivers who will not seek to match the limit but will simply lift their foot off the accelerator as they process the information. There are also those who speed along the hard shoulder with their emergency lights flashing away pretending that they are having a break down right up to the next junction. The other major challenge is that so many drivers see the queues as a good opportunity to switch lanes believing that in doing so they will suddenly get clear of the jam. This is particularly troublesome when an articulated lorry decides it is time to switch lanes and so a space the length of five cars is forced to open up. All of this behaviour simply adds to the jam.

I am not saying that without variable speed limits jams on motorways would not come to an end. However, it is clear that without the signalling of queues and the constant slowing down and speeding up on the M25 and M4 and probably other motorways I do not frequent too, the queues would be shorter both in length and duration. This is apparent, when suddenly for no reason the queue breaks up and you find yourself travelling again at a decent speed. If you can see an accident by the roadside you know the course, but these days more often it is simply the exclamations about queues which is creating these things and you then find the road is perfectly clear and that there is, in fact, no reason why you could not have been driving at 60-70 mph for the past two miles. My father, among others, feels that variable speeds on motorways is a game being played by bored staff at some traffic monitoring centre. I agree with him on very few things, but for now, these seems as rational explanation for this irrational behaviour as any other.

Books I Read In 2011

2012-01-01T08:00:00.412Z

This posting follows my annual habit of reviewing the books I have read. With me being unemployed in the first half of the year I read very little; the second half was a complete contrast with me back in work and living away from home so with ample opportunity to read. As a consequence, I have much more to comment on that I would have anticipated this time last year, but again pretty much an eclectic mix with a fair share of books I regret wasting time on. Hopefully by reading this you can be warned off them if you happen to stumble across them in a second-hand bookshop or charity shop and like me, foolishly are tempted to buy them.

Fiction
'The Space Machine' by Christopher Priest
I have said a bit about this in my review of Priest's work. It was the last published to date book of his that I read. It was well written mixing 'The Time Machine' and 'The War of the Worlds' into a good action story with nice pastiche of science fiction novels of the late 19th century, though to some degree influenced by the foibles of the 1970s when it was written. For anyone into steampunk, I suggest reading this.

'Armadillo' by William Boyd
I was given this as a gift in the 1990s. It is a strange though no unpleasant book, a 'slice of life' story about a man from Transdniester gypsy stock, working as a loss adjuster in London and deciding between how to respond to various incidents, breaking a long-term relationship, having an affair, being threatened by clients and misused by acquaintances.   It is written in a way which draws you along well, but you may be dissatisfied because there is little plot. It is interesting how date the technology seems, but all the same, it reminded me of some of the good times I had while living in London in the mid to late 1990s.

'Departures' by Harry Turtledove
This is a collection of short stories by the US author known for his numerous alternate history novels. Saying that, a number of the stories are more purely science fiction for example including a time traveller arriving in the 20th century mistakenly looking for Genghis Khan, a post-apocalyptic shaman using veterinary books he finds in ruins, aliens mistakenly thinking humans have telekinesis and a story about discrimination between aliens that seems to be a parable around the persecution of Jews. Turtledove does reference his Judaism in a number of the stories from one about a werewolf in 12th century Koeln to one about genetically engineered pig that chews the cud, so making it kosher. Some of his stories are almost impenetrable to non-Americans, especially difficult are the ones around baseball and the one which turns on the joke that 'oreos' are American biscuits and 'Oreopithecus' was a type of hominid. The story falls entirely flat and I read it twice before I realised what I was missing.

All I know about school education in the USA stems from what I have seen from television programmes both documentary and fiction and from movies. I accept this probably gives a distorted view falling into four categories: nostalgia for how schools were fifty years ago, inner city schools with lots of pupils with economic and social challenges, very Christian schools with a particular take on the world and bland schools where there are minimal challenges and it is interaction between the pupils that makes the story. What I do not see is programmes whether true or fiction in which the teachers are utterly useless. The one exception is probably 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' (1986) and that is a comedy. However, Turtledove seems convinced that the majority of schoolteachers in the USA are useless and have only gone into the profession as an easy option. This shows a real disconnect to reality because no-one is deluded enough to think teaching is easy and those who do certainly never survive the initial training. Yet Turtledove uses his power to not criticise but dismiss a whole class of important worker as useless; he does the same to child minders too. He may have had a bad personal experience but in his foreword to the story about a society where teachers are lauded is unpleasant.

The better stories are ones on a more alternate history such a number on the basis of Turtledove's 'Agent of Byzantium' that Mohammed became a Christian Orthodox monk rather than finding Islam. There is a more standard science fiction (published in 1984) about murders on Saturn's moon Mimas during an Olympic event there. However, it involves a portrayal of the Earth divided into various federations: United Europe, Eastern Europe (which has thrown off Communism), the Anzac Federation (despite the fact that ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), Japan, the Chinese Empire (which is also free of Communism), a weakened USA, Arab World (which has conquered Israel), Communist Muscovy, Tsarist Siberia and Luna. Whilst rather weakly worked out, this is of interest. Overall there are some good parts but it is inconsistent; probably better to read if you are an American.

'The Last of Philip Banter' and 'Devil Take the Blue-Tailed Fly' by John Franklin Bardin
Like 'The Deadly Percheron' by Bardin which I read in 2010, these stories live up to their billing of being unsettling. All three books were published 1946-8 and conjure up late 1940s New York very well. They are also strong on the characters they portray. In 'The Last of Philip Banter', Banter is a philandering, alcoholic advertising executive who finds a typescript apparently predicting the next 24 hours of his life and doing it pretty accurately. He grapples with his affairs, his relationship with his wife, his colleagues and his father-in-law and as in all three stories, with his sanity too. If it was not so bleak it could make a Woody Allen movie.

'Devil Take the Blue-Tailed Fly' steps up these traits (aside from the Woody Allen aspect) another level, focusing on a schizophrenic concert harpsichordist coming out of a mental institution where she has received electro-shock therapy which has damaged her ability to play and the deterioration which happens in her as a result of this, the murder of a former disreputable lover and finding her husband has been unfaithful. These stories come over as if John Updike had decided to write thrillers and given that I painfully remember battling to get through part of an Updike novel, you can imagine I was not really comfortable working through these, but once I have started I feel duty bound to finish. I am stunned how bad I am at selecting novels I see for sale. There must be thousands of better books out there than the dreary ones I seem to select. Maybe I should not venture beyond a small range of authors I can trust, because I always regret it. It is much easier for me to compile a list of books I would advise people not to read rather than ones I suggest they do read.

'The Lady Vanishes' by Ethel Lina White
Having seen both the 1938 and the 1976 movies of this story, I was interested to read the original book. There is less action in the book than in either movie, certainly no gun fights at the end and no appearance of the Charters and Caldicott characters seen in the movies either; their role in the novel seems to be held by the two Misses Flood-Porter. The basic premise is the same, that a young spoilt Englishwoman, Iris Carr, is travelling home from a holiday in Central-Eastern Europe and meets a kindly old spinster on the train, Miss. Froy. This woman then proceeds to disappear leaving Iris to try to both find out what has happened to Miss. Froy and in fact if she was ever real or just a figment of Iris's imagination as the other passengers on the train claim or a case of mistaken identity. Whilst the country in which the story is set is never revealed, given that the train only crosses one border to reach Trieste and the local residents do not speak German, it has to be Yugoslavia. In the 1938 movie the setting is again not revealed though appears to be Yugoslavia; in the 1976 movie it is more clearly Alpine southern Germany.

In the novel, Miss. Froy is not a British agent, rather she has simply witnessed a leading politician at his home so breaking his alibi for the murder of a Communist rival. In the movies, Miss. Froy is a British agent who has to bring a tune carrying secret information to British intelligence. Despite the dated manners and the very upper class orientated nature, I always enjoyed Dornford Yates stories of Britons on adventures in Central Europe. The style of the novel is a little like the John Franklin Bardin stories, with much of the narrative focused on Iris's thoughts, her concerns for her sanity and her thinking through how she can interact with the other passengers both British and Yugoslav. Consequently it has a claustrophobic feel, despite the fact that, unlike the movies, we see Miss. Froy's elderly parents waiting for news of her back in England. Certainly you feel the frustration and fear that Iris feels and given this focus, written by a female author in 1936 you can see why it made an impact and was taken up by Alfred Hitchcock to be released as a movie two years later, with a great deal of the story intact.

'Thanksgiving' by Michael Dibdin
This is one of Dibdin's stand alone novels. At 179 pages it is short for a modern novel, but the tightness of the story is a good characteristic. Dibdin writes some very effectively unpleasant characters (the two most memorable are American) and in this novel as in 'Dirty Tricks' (1999) he conjures up a believably unpleasant antagonist for the hero. The story revolves a man going to visit his recently killed wife's first husband, a really sordid American man who it is revealed stalked his ex-wife. The novel is around the consequences of that meeting. Dibdin experiments with different styles of narrative which come over in an interesting way and do not feel like gimmicks. He also plays around a little with time and with haunting, rather as he does in 'The Tryst' (1989).

Dibdin never seemed afraid to flirt with magic realism, ironically giving the novels in which he used it a shareper edge. Whilst in many ways very bleak and unnerving, the novel comes ultimately to connect you to the title. Dibdin was married three times and ultimately ended up living in Seattle in the USA where he died in 2007. I do not know if any of the story was autobiographical, but it has a raw, engaging style which lifts it above many of his Aurelio Zen novels. I do wonder why he was unable to bring over the strengths in characterisation and style into his more popular series; certainly the criminals in those stories could have benefited from having the nastiness of the antagonist in this story.

'And Then You Die' by Michael Dibdin
I was prompted by, 'Zen' the dramatisation of Dibdin's series of crime novels shown on BBC1 to finally get round to finishing off the final four books in the series. I read this 174-page novel in a single evening which I think emphasises how it sweeps you a long. Interestingly it has a very light tone especially when compared to the previous novel in the series 'Blood Rain' (1999) which was set on Sicily. In fact the plot of this novel leads you and the hero, Aurelio Zen to reinterpret what happened at the end of that previous novel and introduces a man bent on revenge who pursues Zen despite his efforts to hide out at the Italian resort of Versilia and to the town of Lucca, thus allowing Dibdin to explore another region of Italy as he does in each Zen novel, moving up and down the country with every story. Zen also takes an unscheduled jaunt to Iceland where Dibdin introduces the concept of ' fylgja' an ability in Icelandic folklore which is like a kind of second sight that allows 'gifted' people to see ugly sprite-like people, the 'huldufolk'. There turns out to be a rational explanation, but you feel that Dibdin would have loved to have produce a novel rather like Christopher Priest's 'The Glamour' (1984). I prefer Dibdin's grimmer stories over his light ones though perhaps with the deaths in this one it is a little darker, but certainly with a touch which contrasts to the bleaker outlook of 'Blood Rain'.

'Medusa' by Michael Dibdin
As I have noted before, in his Aurelio Zen series, Dibdin tended to alternate between light-hearted and more serious novels. The more serious ones, by far, are the better. 'Medusa' follows on from 'And Then You Die' but is very different in tone. Again it has Zen criss-crossing Italy as if Dibdin wants to ensure that every region in the country has been covered. This novel features both the German-speaking Alto Adige region where a thirty-year old corpse preserved in a tunnel system left over from the Austro-Italian front of the First World War, to the rural areas of the Po Valley and the Italian enclave in Switzerland, Campione d'Italia. The novel is more in line with much crime fiction written by Italian authors since the late 1920s, with a focus on the tensions between different interest groups within Italian politics and society, views of what was done correctly or wrongly for Italy in the past and an ambivalent conclusion. It also successfully mixes the motives of individuals with broader societal trends in a clever way, notably with reference to right-wing groups in Italy which sought to bring about or oppose coups in the 1950s-70s. At times you feel Zen is travelling too much and the final phase might have been better to have been trimmed down, but overall this is an engaging novel even if you have not read any others in the Zen series.

'Back to Bologna' by Michael Dibdin
In line with the pattern seemed to follow with his Zen novels, every other one in the sequence is more light-hearted and so it was time for one certainly less heavy than 'Medusa'. For the bulk of the novel, unsurprisingly set in Bologna, it is not as light-hearted as I had been led to believe. The inter-twining of the various characters could seem contrived, but if a darker tone had been adopted then it could have worked. I guess a lot of the humour in this novel is really satire and because I am not aware of the original people, notably the football club owner, the television chef and the academic that Dibdin is satirising, I miss the jokes and so it comes across as a more straight forward crime novel.  The private detective who features is another light character but primarily because of his own delusions and pretensions around being a 'hard-boiled' detective and again this could have been carried if the overall tone, especially towards the end was more serious.

Given that the novel features the break down of Zen's relationship which developed in 'And Then You Die' and seemed to be going fine in 'Medusa' it probably needed leavening. In addition, perhaps, like Ian Fleming with James Bond, the fact that this novel was published just two years before Dibdin's own death, the ill-health and bleak outlook of Zen may reflect what was happening in Dibdin's own life. In contrast to 'Medusa' the ending seems terribly rushed with everything coming together in a single restaurant and Zen effectively stumbling over a reasonably accurate outcome. It feels as if an editor demanded that the novel be brought to an end at that stage and on an upbeat note.

'End Games' by Michael Dibdin
This was the final Aurelio Zen book and the last book Dibdin published before his death. Of all his novels, I only now have 'Dark Spectre' a non-Zen book to locate and read. Dibdin went out neither with a bang nor a whimper. This novel was not his best nor was it his worst. Like many of the later Zen novels it is plagued by Dibdin's desire to include satire of particular trends in society both in Italy and elsewhere and to ridicule individuals in the public eye certainly unknown now even if they could be recognised at the time.

This novel, in contrast to the ones that closely preceded it sees Zen located in one town as temporary chief of police of a region in Calabria, on the 'toe' of Italy, investigating the murder of an American lawyer and attempts to locate the treasure of Alaric, king of the Goths who died in the region. It is reasonably well handled. Zen has married the girlfriend he met back in 'And Then You Die' and his mood is far better than in 'Back to Bologna' though the woman herself does not really feature. The story is effectively about Zen battling with Calabrian culture an thwarting the plans of a particularly nasty local gangster. If he had stopped attempting the satire then this would have been a taut crime thriller with some shocking scenes that jar the reader. Maybe at this stage in his career, Dibdin could not cope with the darkness. However, you are left feeling he never actually wrote his best crime novel, never being able to bring across from his non-Zen novels the painfully realistic and genuinely nasty characters. Of the Zen novels, the first four are the best: 'Ratking' (1988), 'Vendetta' (1990), 'Cabal' (1992) and my favourite 'Dead Lagoon' (1994). 'Cosi Fan Tutti' (1996) was utterly stupid and from then on Dibdin was never able to recapture his former greatness. Of the latter novels, 'Blood Rain' (1999) and 'Medusa' (2003) are not bad, but the desire for satire and weak humour damaged what could have been far better stories.

'Caravan to Vaccarès' by Alistair Maclean
This is a book I have been carrying around for years on the recommendation of my 'A' level Geography teacher. She believed in visiting every region that was focused upon in the 'A' level syllabus. This led her to recount her time in the Rub-al-Khalil, the so-called Empty Quarter, entirely barren region of Saudi Arabia and where you could get the best bacon and eggs on the edge of Kuala Lumpur. It also meant she had travelled extensively in South-East France, a region featured in the first year of the course. She seems to have fallen in love with the Carmargue region of historic towns and low-lying lakes with a very distinct culture. 'Caravan to Vaccarès' is probably one of the only novels set in the Camargue (if you discount the post-apocalyptic 'Kamarg' featuring in Michael Moorcock's 'The History of the Runestaff' series), consequently the teacher's encouragement that we read it.

I saw the movie of the same name (1974) about ten years ago and, like with many of the movies of Maclean's novels, its plot is stronger than the original novel. Basically the story is based on an annual pilgrimage of gypsies from across Eastern Europe to the Camargue for religious ceremonies associated with their patron saint, Saint Sara. This pilgrimage was permitted even while the Cold War was raging, allowing a unique opportunity for people and things to be smuggled between the East and West. In addition it provides a colourful setting with the gypsy and Camargue dress and culture, including bull fights which do not end in the death of the bull, though can end in the death of the human participants.

Though the novel is written in 1969 with an awareness of the Cold War, it almost feels like something that Dornford Yates could have produced in the 1930s, with the protagonists picking up beautiful young ladies that they patronise, banter amiably with and promise to marry; a character who is a duke, charging around in a lime green Rolls Royce (the colour is probably the only concession to the era) and the lead characters dressing up in traditional costume. Maclean always over-writes everything which I guess was what was favoured at the time to give a kind of air of sophistication, but I find really drags down the narrative. I guess his old world attitudes, the sense that the individual could still achieve something in the age of superpowers, added to extensive scenes of flight and violence, probably what makes the movies so engaging, really meshed with the audience. The portrayal of the region is well done.

'Prime Minister Portillo And Other Things That Never Happened' ed. by Duncan Brack and Iain Dale
Whilst, as the title shows, this is actually a collection of counter-factuals, the approach of many of the authors is more like a non-fiction book of modern history and politics. Aside from Helen Szamuely's chapter on what would have happened if Lenin had not reached Petrograd in the 'sealed' train in 1917 and Simon Burns's on the survival of John F. Kennedy, the other 19 chapters are about developments in British politics from the 1920s to the 2000s, looking at factors such as a stronger Liberal Party and its entire elimination; the timing of elections notably in 1974 and 1978; resignations by Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher; the survival of Aneuran Bevan and John Smith and different results in the 1964, 1970 and 1983 elections. Some of them are really like academic articles, not a bad thing, but lacking the spark you expect in counter-factual writing.

Some of the contributors write a fiction as if the counter-factual was real, others simply do a historio-political analysis. Some undermine the proposition they were presumably assigned by the editors. Robert Waller shows that given the British electoral system the SDP-Liberal Alliance needed vast shifts in support to even make minor gains and Dianne Harper paints a scenario in which even if Tony Benn had beaten Dennis Healey to become deputy leader of the Labour Party there would have effectively been a coup inside the party to emasculate him in that role. Irritatingly, in a similar vein, Sir Bernard Ingham's investigation of Thatcher resigning over the messy but insubstantial Westland Affair, exposes another hagiographical treatment of Thatcher; it reminded me of Simon Heffer looking at the counter-factual assassination of Thatcher in the 1984 Brighton bombing, in 'What Might Have Been: Leading Historians on Twelve 'What Ifs' of History' (2004). These men seem unable to envisage a society without Thatcher, seeing her as somehow vital for all the 'good' that has happened during and since her regime.

I agree with the view that the absence of Lenin would have made a large impact on events in Russia, but continue to contest that John F. Kennedy surviving his assassination or it not occurring would not have seen a significant scaling down of US commitment in Vietnam and would have seen steps taken more slowly in civil rights. However, I recognise that the latter goes against the 'standard' counter-factual view. John Charmley takes an interesting view on Lord Halifax becoming prime minister in 1940. I do not believe he would have signed a peace treaty with Germany, but again the standard counter-factual is that he would have done. Charmley's outcome is different to the usual line in that as a result of this peace treaty, Britain becomes stronger quicker and the war is actually ended sooner than in our world.

It is heartening to see contributors acknowledging that some alterations would not have led to much change in the long run. Neil Stockley on what if Roy Jenkins had joined the Liberal Party rather than the SDP is one example. For Stuart Thomson he has to beg tolerance for the scenario of Paddy Ashdown, Liberal Democrat leader and others from his party becoming members of Tony Blair's government in 1997 still assuming Blair won the huge majority he did; it seems illogical and so the chapter reads uneasily. Conversely, the Socialist fantasies painted by Robert Taylor seeing 'In Place of Strife' succeeding and Paul Richards with Callaghan going to the polls in October 1978 are nice in these times, but seem too extended. In terms of political commentary the best is probably James Parry on the Liberals challenging the Conservatives from the right rather than the left in the 1950s and David Mills on Arthur Scargill seeking a ballot ahead of the 1984-5 Miners' Strike are the most acute. Though, again, Mills might have a rather rosy perception of the outcome.

Overall this is a book which brings forth some less common counter-factual scenarios. The quality of each chapter varies considerably and many read like a politics text book rather than an entertaining read. Perhaps it is better to see the questions they set forward and go and discuss your own views of the potential outcomes.

'President Gore and Other Things that Never Happened' ed. by Duncan Brack
This, unsurprisingly is the sequel to the collection above. However, it is probably the weaker of the two books. Whilst in the first the British Liberal Party received possibly more prominence than might have been its due if viewed by more objective commentators, this second volume is weakened by being shot through with the views of Liberal partisans who make up the majority of the writers included. Almost no opportunity seems to be missed to state that the UK would have been better if the Liberals had never been so weak in the 20th century and commonly that things would have been far better if the Labour Party had never risen to prominence. Some of this is tolerable in things such as 'What if Robert Peel had not gone out riding on 29 June 1850?' [a ride on which he was killed] or 'What if the 1903 Gladstone-MacDonald Pact had never happened?' by Robert Waller. Even 'What if Joseph Chamberlain had married Beatrice Webb?' by David Boyle is tolerable though I feel Boyle over-emphasises Webb's influence on British Socialism. His hatred of Fabianism seems peculiar for a Liberal and his faith that political doctrines that did not include a view of a powerful role for the state stood much chance in the early to mid 20th century, utterly distort what he writes. However, we see such Liberal partisanship, not handled at all subtly in 'What if Franz Ferdinand's assassin missed in 1914?' by York Membery and even 'What if President Mitterand had imposed first-past-the-post instead of proportional representation in 1986?' by Byron Criddle.

I guess this volume highlights the 'wrong' way of going about counter-factual, the way it is abused as a propagandist tool rather than a historical one. The authors start with a conclusion that they desire then work back to see how they would make it come about. Working in this predestined way means that they push aside anything that jars and might send their path away from the intended outcome. Many of these authors see the current political system in the UK, especially the role of the Labour Party, as unhealthy and so drive through narratives that would have meant it never came about. To the ones listed above, add 'What if Ramsay MacDonald had lost the 1922 Labour leadership election?' by Jaime Reynolds, which is a fascinating question, especially given how close the election was, but the conclusions are devalued by Reynolds's view of current politics. 'What if the Liberals had formed the government in 1924' by David Hughes, is another feasible question, but you feel the possibilities are ridden roughshod over in the dash to mourn that the UK has not had a series of Liberal governments since 1922.

Rab Houston in 'What if the Scots had voted for devolution in 1979?' presents a similarly distorted view. Houston is clearly an opponent of any degree of devolution for Scotland and suggests a very dystopian development for the country as if local devolution could have somehow exacerbated the excesses of Thatcherism rather than provided any amelioration as the Scottish government is currently doing in terms of the coalition government's policies. He portrays a country overrun by American interests and becoming even more impoverished and dysfunctional than even the problems Scotland faced. He makes no recognition, even if such a state would have developed, that Scots would have become the cheap labour force Thatcher wanted to promote and consequently that if things had become so bad there would have been even greater migration of Scots to British towns than was even the case. As it is, at any time about 8% of the entire Scottish population is living in England. In addition, there seems no factors in his counter-factual that would allow the economy of Eire to boom before it did in our world. Overall, this comes over as a very sour analysis, distorted heavily in the assumption that even the mild devolution proposed in 1979 would have led to utter disaster for Scotland with no redeeming features.

Membery's chapter starts well, but is ultimately wasted. Whilst he rehearses the different explanations of the causes of the First World War, he ignores what we know of diary accounts of what Kaiser Wilhelm II was saying as early as 1912 about desiring a war, not least to bring about a political shift within Germany; that the most suitable time would be in the summer of 1914 when the Kiel Canal widening was complete and that it would be best caused by an incident in the Balkans. Yes, it is entirely feasible that Franz Ferdinand would not have been assassinated, in fact it was far more likely that he would not have been than what actually happened. However, the changing of that incident would have done nothing to divert the progress to war. Consequently Criddle skips over elements which are fascinating, notably him drawing to attention that even without the war the world would have been hit by the flu epidemic in 1918/19 which killed many millions across the world and what the consequences would have been if the war had still been running by then.

Criddle's chapter probably shows up the worst in counter-factual writing. He states more than once that Mitterand would have had no desire to introduce the first-past-the-post system to France, and that the electoral system he did introduce avoided having his party almost eliminated in the elections. Thus, there seems no reason why the counter-factual would ever have come about. It appears that Criddle is so wedded to the pattern of British politics since 1979, of a single party in power for over a decade (Conservatives 18 years unbroken; Labour 13 years unbroken) that he is intolerant of France which experienced an alternation of the kind the UK saw between 1959-79; and the fact that the President and the government were of differing political complexions at times even though this often happens in the USA. Consequently Criddle comes down simply to a highly Anglocentric view and one embedded in his time rather than being aware of the past and simply uses this highly unlikely counter-factual to criticise France for basically being insufficiently like the UK.

The most detailed chapter is by Brack himself, 'What If the Alliance had not quarrelled over defence in 1986?', this and the ones that follow, 'What if John Major had become chief whip in 1987?' by B.J. Briand, the one by Simon Buckby and Jon Mendelsohn on Yitzhak Rabin surviving the assassination attempt in 1995 and Michael Howard becoming Conservative leader in 1997 by Mark Garnett are reasonable enough, but as with the previous collection they are almost more use in putting the spotlight on aspects of political history which might have been overlooked. The Rabin counter-factual ultimately ends up minimally different from what happened in reality and shows that it is a rare situation in which a single person can alter the trends of history. The title chapter by John Nichols is interesting on how differently the 11th September 2001 terrorist attacks in the USA could have been handled to the benefit of the Democrats. As with the counter-factual on Tony Benn in the previous volume, this is based on a 'factual' because we know Al Gore won the presidential election, it was just the electoral mechanics that stopped it happening. The differences of a Gore administration are rather rushed through which is a pity.

The best chapters are Richard S. Grayson's 'What if Gustav Stresemann had lived beyond 1929?'; Helen Szamuely's 'What if Czechoslovakia had fought in 1938?' and John Gittings's 'What if Mao had met Roosevelt?' which not only provides a spotlight on an often overlooked occurrence in the Second World War but also a good quick survey of shifts in historiography on US-Chinese relations.  I am sceptical that a good working relationship would have been possible with Mao and it seems likely he would have come to power using the 'salami technique' used by Communists in East European coalitions in the post-war period if there had been some deal with Chiang Kai-shek to share power in the short term. However, the concept of a tripolar Cold War world is likely to have appeared in US policy 20 years sooner than it did. In addition, as Gittings notes, the most likely outcome would have been to prevent Chinese and in turn, possibly US, intervention in the Korean War.

'The Solitaire Mystery' by Jostein Gaarder
This was given to me by the brother of a friend of mine who seems to have a passion for buying what I feel are pretentious books, ones that are the centre of conversation at middle class dinner parties at the time. Of course, I get to them many years, even decades after they were the height of fashion. I think I received this book at the same time as he gave me 'Perfume' by Patrick Süskind (1985) which attracted renewed, extensive attention in Britain the late 1990s; probably around 1996 when the English version of 'The Solitaire Mystery' was published in the wake of Gaarder's highly successful guide to philosophy, 'Sophie's World' (in English 1995). Anyway, as with 'Perfume' I was very dissatisfied reading 'The Solitaire Mystery', both books seem to emphasise style over substance. This is particularly the case with Gaarder's book which has chapters named after different cards in pack of cards. The story is very simple, about an eight-year old boy and his father travelling from Norway (Gaarder's home country) to Greece to get their mother/wife back from her modelling career. On the way the boy is given a book which outlines adventures of his ancestors on a fantastical island inhabited by living playing cards, located in the Bermuda Triangle, so there are two parallel stories. The book would be fine for an imaginative ten year old, but for adult readers it is curious but never engaging. There are supposedly references to different philosophies and I am probably at a disadvantage as I am unfamiliar with even standard western philosophical tendencies so cannot tell these references apart from the simple whimsical ones. This book is presumably interesting if you are a philosophy student (the man who gave it to me had been a sociology student but is now a debt collector) looking for a rest or a pre-pubescent child who can read the book at face value. I would rather read a Harry Potter novel.

'The Gate of Worlds' by Robert Silverberg
I know little of Silverberg's work so cannot really compare this to other writing by him. However, it reads like a book aimed at adolescents rather than adults. It is a good adventure story for a 12-year old and easy to get through if you are older and want something untaxing. It features a young man in a counter-factual world travelling from England which has broken from the Ottoman Empire sixty years before, travelling to the Aztec kingdom and then adventuring in the southern regions of North America, having journeys over thousands of kilometres and a chaste relationship with the daughter of a tribal chieftain; the indigenous tribes basically untouched except for various Russian trading ports down the West coast of North America.

For me the greatest interest is the counter-factual background. In this world, three-quarters of the population of Europe rather than a quarter, were killed by the Black Death which basically by-passed the Middle East. Consequently, the Seljuk Turks have conquered Constantinople in 1420 and by 1490 have conquered England. Except in England, Islam is the dominant European religion. Without the West European explorers, the Aztec and Inca empires were unmolested until 1585 when Diogo Lobo discovered the Americas. Similarly even by 1985, when the book is set, the West African states like Mali and Songhay remain free of European interference. Russia is the dominant power in Asia, ruling both China and India. Turkish is the lingua franca for Europe and the language Shakespeare wrote in, not only 'Julius Caesar', 'Macbeth' and 'Hamlet' but his historical plays of our world have been replaced by 'Osman the Great', 'Suleiman the Magnificent' and 'The Fall of Constantinople'. Technology has advanced more slowly and the most advanced vehicles in this 1985 are steam-powered cars; there are no aeroplanes or even airships.

'The Way It Wasn't: Great Science Fiction Stories of Alternate History' compiled by Martin Greenberg
The title is pretty self-explanatory. These are stories rather than analysis, published by a range of US authors 1968-92. They vary greatly in quality. One of the longest is 'Lion Time in Timbuctoo' which is set at the start of the 20th century in the world Silverberg envisages in ' The Gate of Worlds'. This story is set in the West African kingdom of Songhay at the time of the death of the king. The British have just broken from the Ottoman Empire rather like Balkans states did 1912-13. The different balance of the world powers has left the West African empires in existence rather than suppressed by colonial rule by European powers. It is an interesting story with the tensions between the different powers played out well, though the conclusion is rather too tidy. Pamela Sargent's 'The Sleeping Serpent' is similarly not bad. It envisages a Europe in the 17th century (bar England) controlled by the Mongols who have now started developing colonies in North America. The story involves the expulsion of the English from from the continent but also the Mongols coming to see the indigenous population as cousins. I have read 'Archetypes' by Harry Turtledove before, it is one of his Basil Agyros stories set in a world where Mohammed became a Christian monk and the Byzantine Empire is still prospering in the 14th century. This is not a bad story either.

'A Ship Full of Jews' is a very short story by Barry N. Malzberg about Christopher Columbus's voyage being used to deport Jews from Spain in 1492 to dump them in North America. Unfortunately it goes weirdly metaphysical at the end. Another story with a mystical/magical element but would bear being longer is 'Through Road No Wither' by Greg Bear about a witch encountering Nazi officers in a contemporary France in which the Germans won the Second World War and then sending them back in time to die in that conflict as a form of revenge.

A number of the stories mean little to non-American readers. Susan Shwartz's 'Suppose they Gave a Peace ...' envisages that George McGovern rather than Richard Nixon won the 1972 US Presidential election. The outcome is that the USA withdraws from Vietnam slightly sooner than happened in reality which it seems would have had minimal impact on the situation either for Vietnam or the USA. The only real difference which is not explored in the story is the fact that Nixon's involvement in Watergate would not have tarnished his standing. 'Ike at the Mike' by Harold Waldrop simply envisages Dwight Eisenhower having become a jazz musician and Elvis Presley having become a senator for Mississippi with minimal repercussions. 'The Winterberry' by Nicholas A. Dichario is told from the perspective of a mentally damaged President John F. Kennedy who survived the assassination attempt against him. However, given that he is confined to a house and has little grasp of events around him, this seems a real waste as if for Americans, 'wow, JFK survived' is sufficient to make it interesting.

'All the Myriad Ways' by Larry Niven envisages a world in which travel between alternate versions is possible leading to people to totally devalue life because there will always be somewhere where they survive. 'Over There' by Mike Resnick I have read before too and sees Theodore Roosevelt leading an irregular cavalry unit during the First World War again with minimal impact. I guess this is simply a device to explore the legacy of such behaviour. That type of approach is handled incredibly better in 'The Lucky Strike' by Kim Stanley Robinson who looks at the outcome of a different crew flying to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. The discussion of the weight on individuals responsible for using atomic weapons reminded me of a number of stories in the 'Astounding' anthology I read last year. Very well handled.

Two other stories with an American flavour which stand out are 'We Could Do Worse' by Gregory Benford set in a USA in which Robert A. Taft rather than Dwight Eisenhower became the Republican nominee for the 1952 US Presidential election after Richard Nixon (in our world Vice-President under Eisenhower) brought support of the California delegates behind Taft who was on his third attempt to be nominated. Taft in this story selected Joseph McCarthy as his vice-president. So, when in 1953, Taft died as he did in our world, McCarthy, the witch-hunter of Communists became President and was re-elected in 1956 with Nixon as his vice-president. Early in his career Nixon had worked with McCarthy and was seen as having strong anti-Communist credentials. This precise outcome seems unlikely because of the steps Taft took to rein in McCarthy's behaviour. What is more feasible is that Nixon would have become Taft's vice-president, become president in 1953 and then had McCarthy as his vice-president in 1956. The outcome might have delivered the kind of USA shown in the story with a secret police putting Adlai Stevenson the Democrat candidate in 1952 under house arrest and simply snatching other members of Congress as if it was a regime like Germany in 1933. It would be interesting to see this setting extended to a novel. However, given that counter-factual writing in the USA is typically used by the right-wing to show how much 'better' the country would be if things had gone differently, it might not find a publisher

Another strong story is 'Catch That Zeppelin!' by Fritz Leiber which is based on a number of minor differences to create an alternate 1939. Thomas Edison married Marie Sklodowska (better known as Marie Curie in our world) andheap electric power was developed as a result of their and their son's inventions. Germany was invaded following the breaking of the Hindenburg Line by the British in November 1918 followed by a thrust by Field Marshal Foch which drove the Germans to the Rhine and led to occupation of Berlin. The consequence was better relations between the Allies and Germany which became an immediate member of the League of Nations and the USA remained involved in global politics so Nazism never arose. Helium was made available to Germany and the 'Hindenburg' disaster was avoided; though there were airship crashes, by 1939 airship travel is still common with them docking at the Empire State Building in New York as was considered. Winston Churchill has become an American as his mother was, but has still written similar books. The consequence of these factors is a less polluted, more peaceful world.

'Diva' by Delacorta
I enjoyed the 1981 movie of this novel and its sound track. It is a short novel set in and around Paris featuring a young motorcycle courier Jules, an American opera singer Cynthia, a thirteen-year old girl Alba who shoplifts and the man, Serge, she lives with. They story revolves around a recording of a performance by the opera singer, the diva of the title and a recording made by the girlfriend of a gangster. The novel moves quickly, though these days it is difficult to read without feeling very uneasy about the relationship between Alba and Serge or even the one that develops between Alba and Jules. In the movie these relationships plus the one which develops between Jules and Cynthia, are much more clearly platonic than in the novel.

Jules is regularly chased by gangsters and record company representatives for the cassettes he ends up with. The movie is far more stylish than the novel, for example, in the book Serge drives only a Peugeot saloon, in the movie he drives a Citroen 11. In addition, in the novel, the police, both corrupt and clean are much more involved whereas in the movie it is Serge who sorts everything out. The novel is more brittle and in some ways nastier, especially the fate of the gangster's girlfriend, Karina. Perhaps this is because it was written in French and first published in 1979 and so it is out of step with a UK reader in 2011. Despite the twisting plot and the various chases, I would suggest not bothering with the book and simply watching the movie which is far more stylish, clever and wistful.

'The Secret Documents of Sherlock Holmes' by June Thomson
There have been numerous novels published since 1927 that have added to the Sherlock Holmes canon of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. What is interesting about Thomson's work is that unlike most subsequent authors, she has stuck to the short story format, which accounted for all but four of the original Sherlock Holmes stories. In addition, she has only written stories which are referred to in passing in the original stories. Conan Doyle included numerous 'off stage' stories that Dr. Watson refers to to give a context or a timing for one of his stories. Sometimes there are details about the particular cases. From these crumbs, Thomson has spun a good collection of Sherlock Holmes tales, very loyal to the original, though occasionally frivolous, but still both engaging in their own right and successfully adding to the scope of Holmes stories.

I thought wrongly that this was the fourth book in a series of such collections. However, now I have found it was the first and that five others have followed. The current series is 'The Secret Files of Sherlock Holmes' (1990); 'The Secret Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes' (1992); 'The Secret Journal of Sherlock Holmes' (1993); 'Holmes and Watson : a Study in Friendship' (1995); 'The Secret Documents of Sherlock Holmes' (1999) and 'The secret Notebooks of Sherlock Holmes' (2004); these others I will certainly now look out for.

'Unmaking the West' edited by Philip E. Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow and Geoffrey Parker
I have commented on the rigorous approach to counter-factual analysis introduced by this book in a recent posting: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/12/rigorous-approach-to-counter-factuals.html Though this book is even more academic in style than those involving Duncan Brack discussed above, if you are a counter-factual enthusiast it is worthwhile persisting with. Whilst you may not agree with some of the contributors, all of the chapters are strong and stimulate interesting debate.

Many of the chapters look at events for which there was a far greater probability that something other than what happened for real would have occurred. In Victor Davis Hanson's chapter on the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE he shows it was far more likely that the Persians would win that battle or even if they had lost, have gone on to defeat the Greeks and so snuff out Classical Greek civilisation, a foundation of our western society. Even Barry Strauss's response sees the Persians winning, the only difference is that he believes that Greek colonists in southern Italy could have ultimately defeated the Persians and so 'corrected' the history closer back to ours.

Carlos Eire similarly argues that there was a high probability that Jesus would not have been executed but rather imprisoned or banished or gone into exile and lived to die of old age. This would have meant that Christianity would have developed in a different way without the central element of his death, apparent resurrection and so his divinity. As it is, Eire points out it could easily have been the case that we ended up with different forms of Christianity to the ones which are dominant in our world. The key difference is that with Jesus not being seen as largely divine, dictators in Europe could have claimed they were the highest authority and even divine themselves the way the Roman emperors and rules in other parts of the world such as Japan did. The fact that there was always a higher spiritual authority, Eire feels, provided a focus for those opposed to authoritarian regimes. Eire goes on to look at a Catholic England brought about by Henry VIII choking to death on a mouthful of venison in 1531 or getting the divorce he wanted from Pope Clement. In the former case Queen Mary would come to throne 22 years early, marrying sooner and increasing the chance of having an heir probably by a Spanish king. Eire does seem differences for the development of England, but these are mainly political and he fortunately does not fall into the trap of assuming that Catholicism prevented economic or technological development.

Jack Goldstone sees a Catholic England appearing due to the death of William III and a limit as a result on scientific developments that formed the basis for later industrial revolution. However, as Carla Gestiana Pestana quickly contests, the death of William may have meant no strong links with the Netherlands and its defeat by Spain, but Protestant Mary II and then Anne would have come to the throne rather their Catholic brother James. To some degree Eire's view on Catholicism and industrialisation is implicitly supported by Joel Mokyr's essay on alternatives to the industrial revolution.  I was heartened to see that he suggests cultural and physical reasons why industrialisation may not have taken place or stalled at the first phase of water-powered machinery. He also shows why it was unlikely to take place in other parts of the world. This is a theme that Kenneth Pomeranz also looks at. However, Mokyr's work is stronger as he lays down a fascinating almost scientific approach to how knowledge and context need to be at a certain state to allow particular technologies to develop.

Sticking out a little, but still interesting are Robin Yates on a stronger Song Empire in our 13th century, reminding us that many countries outside Europe had a range of paths they could have gone down as a result possibly of simply a different outcome in some battles. Holger Herwig looks at a Second World War scenario in which the USSR is defeated by October 1941 as a result of the death of Stalin and this leads to a more extensive Holocaust and far more steps in Hitler's plans such as the resettlement of conquered territories and the construction of the architectural behemoths in Berlin that were planned.  However, the Third Reich is overthrown in 1945 by repeated atomic bombings by the USA.

Interestingly, lacking the Cold War imperatives, Holger sees the USA staying uninvolved in Europe after the war and not providing Marshall Aid. I think that is an incredibly flawed argument. Marshall Aid was more about restoring the European economies so that they could buy from the USA in the coming decades and not lead to the over-supply problems which had dogged the US economy after the First World War. In addition, the USA had to stay in Europe to feed many of its people and without the USSR taking over half of the continent then the USA may have been involved in far more states than it was in our world, notably ravaged Poland. In addition, in Holger's scenario, Hamburg, Munich, Augsburg, Bremen, Essen, Frankfurt, Hanover and Mannheim (presumably Ludwigshafen too as it lies just over the river) are all destroyed by atomic bombs. This would have not only destroyed major trade and industrial cities but left large parts of Germany radioactive with a major hazard to neighbouring states too. This would have created vast quantities of refugees and rendered large parts of Germany uninhabitable. Unless Germany as willing to tolerate mass starvation not only in Germany but most of Europe, then it would have had to have a sustained humanitarian mission which may have made Marshall Aid look small scale. If it had turned its back on Europe then the USA would have revived the Depression for itself pretty quickly.

'Girl With A Pearl Earring' by Tracy Chevalier
This is a simple story which imagines that the woman who appears in Johannes Vemeer's (1632-75) painting of the same name was a servant of Vermeer's. The novel traces the few years she spends as a servant in the Vermeer house and the friction with her family and her employer's wife and one of his daughter's. It is limited to certain districts of Delft but outlines the period and the city well. It is a model of how a story can be set in the past without the dialogue becoming cumbersome in an attempt to be 'historical', so having the correct feel and yet not being difficult for modern readers to penetrate. I suggest it is a model of a historical novel and has a 'clean' style which fits that of Vermeer's paintings which may have been deliberate, but it provides a good example for those thinking of writing historical novels.

Non-Fiction
'Sons of Heaven: A Portrait of the Japanese Monarchy' by Jerrold M. Packard
This does pretty much what the title says. A friend of mine questioned my motives for buying this when I did from a remaindered bookshop back in the 1990s. It was mainly better than he expected, detailing the part of Japanese society which tends to get overlooked in favour of the military. It showed the impotence of the emperors and their slide into poverty as well as the tortuous nature of court society. However, the last fifth to a quarter of the book was incredibly tedious. I had forgotten the obsessions of authors about monarchies and that is to explore the minutiae of the court and its personalities, assuming that their audience revels in these things too. Once he started giving immense detail of Emperor Hirohito's household in the 1980s I should have stopped reading: it was painfully tedious.

'Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War' by Bruce Lincoln
This is a very good coverage of an aspect of the post-Russian Revolution period that is often hurried over in general history books and even survey histories of Russia. In a flowing style which reminded me of William Shirer, Lincoln covers a very complex conflict, not only the battles but behind the frontlines of all the differing factions. I particularly welcomed the thumbnail sketches of the different protagonists and neglected areas such as the complicated situation in the Ukraine and the Baltic States; the role of cavalry and armoured train forces; the use of terror by all sides; the 'home front' of the different factions especially on aspects such as women and propaganda; the level of anti-Semitism which though not leading me to believe in the supposed 'causal nexus' for Nazism, did highlight what was clearly a context into which the advancing German armies could bring the Holocaust less than 25 years later.

Like too many historians, particularly Americans, Lincoln loses his focus when discussing the execution of the Tsar and his family. No-one looks on Louis XVI and his family in that way, so why is there this adherence to the Romanoffs? It is almost 100 years since they were executed and yet too many people seem to think their deaths somehow erased all that they had inflicted on Russia. When you read the millions of deaths in the civil war due to conflict and simple persecution, the execution of a handful more, however, illustrious jars with other more important points Lincoln makes. Certainly reading this book shifted my view of Lenin's use of terror. Whilst he may have lacked the paranoia of Stalin, it is clear he was utterly, explicitly, ruthless and developed a culture that was fertile ground for Stalin's purges in the following decades.

'The Killing of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich' by Callum MacDonald
I bought this book in 1993 at the Imperial War Museum and regret not having read it sooner. My copy is in the Papermac addition and some of their books focused on war history are not that impressive. However, this is an incredibly well written book which really draws you in. Whilst focused on the events of the assassination, one of the rare times during the Second World War that such an action was authorised, it is very strong on the background and answers many questions about why Heydrich was singled out, showing that it was not simply because of his abilities but also the politics around the Czech government in exile and its need to demonstrate that the Czechs were fighting back so that the country would not simply be left in the hands of the Germans if a negotiated peace came about. MacDonald is highly capable at writing the best kind of history which leaves you feeling you have learnt so much without even really being aware of it.

The book is as gripping as a novel and yet is a historical text. With his death in 1996 at the age of only 49, we lost a very capable historian. I will certainly search out the other books he produced especially 'The Lost Battle: Crete 1941' (1993) another location, like the Czech Republic, which for some reason has held an interest for me. Learning so much about the Czech experience during the Second World War did prompt me to think that I had never read anything on Slovakia which was divided off from Bohemia-Moravia (the Czech lands) in March 1939 and was an ally of Nazi Germany. Nor indeed have I read much about Hungary or Croatia, other allies of Germany in the period; there seems to be a dearth of English-language books on what went on in these states during the war.

'British Public Opinion and the Abyssininan War 1935-6' by Daniel Waley
This is another history book I wish I had read sooner rather than simply carrying from house to house. It reads like a published version of a doctoral thesis, though by the time it was published in 1975, Waley was a well-published medieval historian. There is a tight focus which makes very good use of the resources available. It is a model of what people doing PhD research should really do. Interestingly, perhaps given the time it was written, there are no sweeping statements, everything is supported and when elements appear that Waley feels counteract general trends he brings them out rather than ignores them, even though they may marginally weaken his line of argument. Overall a very interesting study of British society, especially single-issue activism and politics around an element of appeasment that tends to be neglected in general surveys.

'Off the Record. Political Interviews 1933-1943. WP Crozier' ed. by A.J.P. Taylor
This is a book I found I had been carrying from house to house for many years as it had my tutor group number from when I was at FE college in the 1980s written in the front. It is an interesting collection of notes taken by W.P. Crozier, editor of the 'Manchester Guardian' 1932-44 when he died. The newspaper is what is now 'The Guardian' and even in the 1930s and 1940s despite its regional publication was seen as the leading liberal newspaper. Crozier visited London and made erratic notes of his interviews with leading politicians and the occasional ambassador.

It provides interesting evidence for the views of members of the elite in the run-up to the war and through the early stages. Of course, it highlights errors made by many of these people, especially in terms of the likely actions of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and the leadership of Japan. The faith in the reasonableness of these dictators is pretty alarming. In September 1933, Labour MP Arthur Henderson and President of the Disarmament Conference and in November 1933, Norman Davis chief US delegate to that conference, both portrayed Hitler as 'entirely pacific'. In contrast, Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to London 1932-43 in December 1933, warned that Germany was already rearming; he was also aware of the internal politics of Japan and how it had been military commanders rather than the Japanese government who had ordered the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.   Sir Geoffrey Knox who had been the head of the governing body of the Saar region of Germany 1932-5, as early as May 1935 despaired that the British believed anything Hitler said, he was incredulous at the attitude of 'The Times' newspaper which was staunchly pro-appeasement during the 1930s and was seen overseas as the official newspaper of the British Government. Ironically whilst under-estimating some fears, these members of the elites over-estimated others. The fears of Labour peer, Lord Marley in January 1934 that Sir Oswald Mosley had formed a private airforce and planned to bomb London and to pull of a 'March on London' to establish a Fascist regime in the way Mussolini had done was fortunately not feasible.

A number of the mistaken views expressed form the basis of counter-factuals I have looked at on this blog. Some perceptions, in contrast, were highly astute though not generally accepted at the time. On a minor issue, Sir Herbert Samuel, MP, Leader of the Liberal Party 1931-5 accurately predicted in November 1933 the outcome of the election in Canada that came in October 1935 and saw Conservative prime minister since 1929 R.B. Bennett swept aside and the Liberals come to power in a reverse of the political situation that had endured for ten years.  Sir Joseph Nall, MP, a Conservative backbencher, as early as February 1935 expected Churchill to become prime minister ‘if there were a big political crisis’, ‘by virtue of his brains and personality’ and because Conservative Party would accept him. This proved to be precisely the case in May 1940, even though many commentators in Crozier's book never expected Churchill to prosper. Another example is Sir Samuel Hoare, at various times foreign secretary, home secretary, first lord of the admiralty and secretary of state for air, predicted in November 1939 that the Germans would use paratroopers to seize control of strategic points in the Netherlands, something that came true in April 1940. Similarly, as early as November 1933, Rex Leeper, Head of the Foreign Office News Department noted the impossibility of Britain defending Hong Kong from a Japanese invasion. The territory was captured in 18 days in December 1941.

The information in the book goes through two filters, first the interests of Crozier which sometimes put the focus on issues that now seem less important, especially reshuffles in government and then through the rather heavy handed selection, editing and commentary from Taylor. Most of the time he sticks to giving background details on the role the individuals being interviewed played but at other times he is very dismissive of statements feeling obliged to tell the reader that they are entirely imaginary statements. The book was published in 1973 and since then scholarship has moved on and has shown how mistaken Taylor was to be dismissive of some of the statements. In particular her regularly disparages Eduard Benes, president of Czechoslovakia, especially his views on developments within Nazi Germany. Now, of course we know that certainly well into 1942 Benes did have regular information fed to him from within the highest levels of the Nazi machine (cf MacDonald's book). Similarly Taylor dismisses the German resistance movements against Hitler, now making him look foolish for not taking these at all seriously.

Whatever the filters that Crozier and Taylor put on the information, what is apparent is the almost complete lack of talent among leading British politicians in the 1930s. They seem acutely aware of this deficit themselves, constantly speaking about how inadequate their colleagues and rivals are. One might blame this on the First World War for eliminating many of the people who otherwise most likely would have risen to prominence in the 1930s. However, many of those in post were of an older generation anyway. I guess it has to do with the attractions of business over civic life or of emigration over remaining in Britain; those people with 'get up and go' had gone by the 1930s. Those people who were left and perception appear to have been kept on the margins and their views dismissed. Given this context, it is in fact unsurprising that Nall could see as early as 1933 that Churchill would be the only option to run a war; there were so very few people who came close to him in terms of ability.

Another interesting aspect that the book highlights is how paranoid and controlling the government of Neville Chamberlain (1937-40) was. The movie 'Glorious 39' (2009) directed by Stephen Poliakoff was a fictional account of how Chamberlain's secret forces monitored private statements critical of Chamberlain's regime and stifled criticisms. However, this fiction is based on actual behaviour. Notable are the discussion of suppressing the left-wing popular newspaper 'Daily Mirror' and the treatment of Leslie Hore-Belisha, secretary of state for war 1937-40 and a friend of Crozier's. Even when he was unceremoniously removed from office due to dislike of him by military leaders he found the articles he wrote censored and articles written about him very disparaging. This may have stemmed from him being Jewish. Certainly reading this book has reinforced my view that the National Government which in various forms ruled Britain from 1931-40, with its unassailable position in parliament was a watered down version of the dictatorships seen on the continent. As ineffectual and deluded as he was, Chamberlain seems to have even aped those dictators in his paranoia and use of the secret state to eliminate criticism and this book certainly gives credence to Poliakoff's movie.

'Habsburg & Bourbon Europe 1470-1720' by Roger Lockyer
This is another book I have been carrying around for far too long without reading. When I bought it second hand in 1988 it was only 4 years old and now it is far older than that and seems rather dated in style. It does a good job of covering the entirety of Europe (bar the British Isles) and the European colonies around the world that developed in this period. It covers very complex issues such as the Reformation, the Catholic Reformation, the French Wars of Religion, the Eighty Years War and the Thirty Years War. It certainly does not neglect the periphery of Europe and there are good sections on Scandinavia, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. However, as Lockyer covers each phase geographically it does mean he goes back and forth in the chronology and you can find yourself reading about an incident three or four times from different countries' perspectives. There are maps at the end, but far more place throughout the book would really help clarify what was going on especially with the armies marching all over German states during the Thirty Years War and the constant ebb and flow of the borders of France, the southern Netherlands and the United Provinces.

Lockyer betrays a clear sympathy for an Erasmian humanist form of Catholicism which means that the text comes over as exasperating at how long it took for the Roman Catholic Church to reform itself and a disdain for Protestant sects including Calvinism but particularly the more extreme ones such as the Anabaptists. This means you feel as if you are reading a partisan account rather than a more objective one appropriate for this kind of general survey book.

'Toplis the Monocled Mutineer' by William Allison and John Fairley
I came to the factual story of Percy Toplis through the BBC television series, 'The Monocled Mutineer' (1986) based on this book. Toplis was a confidence trickster from the age of 11 and through his life which ended at the age of 23, when he was shot dead by police, he was involved in a string of crimes including theft, fraud, impersonation and murder. For a man who was adept at changing identities and playing on the social class assumptions of early 20th century Britain, the First World War provided him ample opportunity for crime and simply finding an easier life. He managed to socialise in high society and regularly trick money from people. Never higher than a private, he would masquerade as everything from a corporal to a colonel whatever the circumstances demanded. His ability also allowed him to be a very successful womaniser.

What led to the nationwide manhunt for Toplis which led to him being shot by police in Cumbria in June 1920 was his involvement with the Etaples mutiny in September 1917. Etaples was the location of a number of military hospitals for Allied troops and notably of the Bull Ring training base which new recruits and recovering wounded soldiers were trained in before being sent to the front line. The regime at the Bull Ring was so brutal that many men begged to be sent to the front line despite the horrific conditions there. The soldiers were exercised to exhaustion with minimal food and were threatened with barbaric punishments over seen by the loathed military police and trainers.

The situation was exacerbated by the fact that British soldiers were paid 1 shilling per day, a quarter of what soldiers from Dominion countries received. In addition, rations for Australians were greater and they did not face the death penalty in the way British soldiers did. The mutiny came at a time of unrest in the French forces and whilst there was reference to the revolutionary activity in Russia much of the demands were around practical things such as pay and leave. A mutiny among Chinese labourers, paid one penny a day, working some miles from the Etaples camp broke out at the same time. The soldiers' mutiny was ended through concessions being made, the labourers' mutiny was put down by brute force. However, after the mutiny, action was taken against ringleaders who were executed.

These mutinies were an embarrassment to the British Army and the government and they were hushed up immediately. Efforts were taken that no details of the mutinies leaked out. Toplis had been involved with a gang of deserters at the time and with his charisma and ability appear and disappear at will, became an leading character in the mutiny. Thus, there was a desire to capture and kill him so that he was not in a position to reveal what had occurred. In many ways he became a figurehead of the mutiny. However, given his extensive criminal activities he is not really a hero. Yet, the abilities he had that allowed him to be a reasonably effective criminal kept him alive for almost three years when there was a desire to kill him.

The desire to conceal the reality of the mutinies has persisted for decades and even Toplis's grave is unmarked despite efforts to rectify this in the 1980s. This continued desire to hide the truth led both the Conservative government and right-wing newspapers to attack the television series and the book it was based upon. It was used to give strength to the view that the BBC has a left-wing bias, which I always find laughable because in my view it is a bastion of the Establishment and too often peddles right-wing viewpoints. There are attempts to dismiss the mutinies as exaggerated and to say that Toplis was not involved, a line which is stated on Wikipedia. Toplis served under different names and never stayed in any army or RAF unit long and flitted between them regularly both in wartime and in peacetime, so to say he could not have been in Etaples because his unit was on its way to India is foolish.

In many ways, there is no need for Toplis to have been involved in the mutiny. He was a hardened criminal and while he was glamorous, what is more important is that an element of British history has constantly been dismissed as false. It involved ordinary soldiers sickened by the unnecessarily harsh regime that was imposed on them and the inequity of different treatment given to soldiers fighting alongside each other. For some reason this still troubles many in Britain. It is offensive to them to say that for six days in 1917, a few hundred soldiers mutinied. The files will open at the National Archives in 2018 (archives are opened 30 or 50 or 100 years, etc. from the 31st December of the given year so, in effect on 1st January up to an additional 12 months after the material was generated), but there will be no point searching them out. Given that there has been an effort to cover up the mutinies from the start, nothing of value will be in them.

The book is an excellent read and is reinforced with the rigour of an academic publication even down to giving the home addresses of the eye-witnesses interviewed in the 1970s. It touches on interesting elements such as volunteer groups that provided refreshments to soldiers, the inflation that Britain suffered during the war, the differences between Dominion and British troops, the ambivalence towards participation in the war which persisted in the USA through 1917, how ill-equipped the US Army was and how poorly demobilisation was handled in 1918/19 given the concern that Germany would refuse to sign the peace treaty. An important and interesting book to read.

My Best Cinema Experiences

2011-12-11T08:00:00.114Z

Maybe it is because I am not experiencing many new things at the moment, with my life very constrained by a severe shortage of money and working away from home 5 days out of 7 that my thoughts turn nostalgically to better times. This is a nostalgia posting looking back 20 years to when I lived in Norwich which I did for a year. In my view Norwich is a very much overlooked city, perhaps because it is stuck on the eastern end of Britain and the road and rail services to it have long been poor. Maybe that is a good thing as it spares the city the influx of literally millions of tourists that Oxford experiences. I know tourists are important for the local economy, but I guess selfishly none of us wants to struggle to get along the pavement or have to queue for an hour to get into a restaurant. For me, Norwich was just the right size, big enough to have the facilities I wanted but not so large that it took a 45-minute ride on a bus or train to visit friends who lived in the same city, for me a bicycle was more than sufficient to get me around to see people.

Norwich was a place where I had some of the best socialising of my life. Maybe that was in part down to my age, I was there between the ages of 23-24 and was fortunate to meet up again with a woman, a teacher, I had known while living in West Germany. Ironically another woman from the group of Britons I had been with in Köln was just leaving Norwich when I arrived and I was able to borrow her room as a base for looking for accommodation. Anyway, the teacher connected me into another group of socially active friends and to parties hosted in her house, which simply added to the social activity I am going to outline here. In addition, we had a kind of close relationship in which we rather behaved like a couple, but only for the domestic things like going to buy crockery and having tea in cafes and watching foreign language movies, that never manifested into a romance partly because I was over-awed by her self-confidence and the fact that she was on the pill. Looking back it seems ridiculous to feel that way at 23. Given the knock-backs that I had from other women and I do remember a beautiful Dutch woman called Saskia that everyone was attracted to and another hippie whose name I forget but with whom I would have had a relationship if money and the chance of work had not taken me away from Norwich.

This is turning into a wide-ranging nostalgia festival. I need to focus back a bit more tightly as I have not even mentioned cinemas yet. I will fill in the rest of the context. I am talking about Norwich in the early 1990s and unfortunately I have not been back since. However, from what I can find online, I do not think that my observations about the city would be terribly out of step with the place as it is now, so as well as reflecting on a bygone era, it may spark interest in the city now; interest I feel it deserves. Alongside the people I met in the city, the other key contributing factor for my good social life there were simply the number of reasonably-priced places you could go to.

I see that these days there are more big-name chain coffee shops, which did not exist there in the 1990s, but there seem to be a range of others remaining. Many of the names are unfamiliar and unfortunately I have forgotten many of them from the past. The Denmark Cafe selling Danish food, which I remember going to with a German Society, survives. However, I cannot find Linzer's Viennese Cafe (renowned for its 'traffic light' cheese cake with a strawberry, orange and kiwi fruit on) or the Elm Hill Cafe which had opened at the end of the 14th century, though I imagine it had not served tea or coffee back then. There was also a restaurant I think on the wonderfully named Tombland near the 'Edith Cavell' pub, with black and white tiles flooring the entrance way.

Norwich was and still is full of a wonderful range of pubs. I remember 'The Reindeer' attached to a micro-brewery, 'The Vine' the smallest pub in Norwich and probably much of the country, 'Adam & Eve' near the cathedral, 'The Lawyer' and 'Ribs of Beef' both still open in Wensum Street and nearby the 'Red Lion' where I drank once with a juggler and a Kurdish refugee from Iraq. I also remember the wonderfully named 'The Wildman' and further out from the city centre, the very Victorian style 'Belle Vue' unrelated to the cinema I am going to talk about in a minute. Nearby was 'The Alexandra' and 'The Mitre' though I see now it has become a Chinese restaurant though keeping the same name. Possibly favourite of the eateries was the 'The Waffle House' which did the most delicious milk shakes I have ever tasted though my brother, in a heavy metal band at the time, complained the food and drink in there was too healthy!

An important element of my life up until I got into long-term relationships in the mid-2000s was going to the cinema. I cannot really say it was part of my social life as literally nine times out of ten I would go to the cinema on my own. I was quite a regular visitor typically going to the cinema about 3-6 times per month. In Norwich was where I probably had my best cinema experiences. I am heartened to see that the two cinemas there I enjoyed the most are still functioning. Norwich had and still has a mainstream cinema, one which I would visit occasionally, but it was to Cinema City and to a lesser extent, Belle Vue that I would go. I would not call them 'art house' cinemas, though they did show an eclectic set of movies, but they showed mainstream stuff too. I remember seeing 'Cry Baby', 'Metropolitan' and 'Das Schreckliche Mädchen' at Cinema City. Both were small, with a single screen and certainly when I went in the 1990s the furnishings were respectively characteristic of the 1970s and 1950s. The Belle Vue was actually an arts complex with a cinema among a range of facilities offered by the venue. What was great about these cinemas was that they were on a human level. You could get to know the staff and they you. Only at the two independent cinemas in Oxford in 1992-3 did I develop such a relationship with cinema staff.

The human scale extended to other people in the audience. I remember on one occasion finding myself sitting behind the author Malcolm Bradbury (1932-2000) in Cinema City and chatting to him about upcoming movies. At the time he lectured (1970-95) at University of East Anglia on the outskirts of Norwich on the MA creative writing degree programme, the first in the UK and still running very successfully. You can find a list of the renowned graduates of the programme on Wikipedia.

Not only was it the human scale of these cinemas that made you feel rather that you were going to a club rather than a normal cinema, it was the events they put on. One I particularly remember was an evening with the historian, cultural commentator and crime author Mike Phillips to discuss the television movie of his novel, 'Blood Rights' (1989) which was shown at Cinema City. The star of the drama, Brian Bovell was also there to talk about the production. After the talk and the movie, we all retired to the cafe for a friendly discussion. Mike had studied at the University of Warwick about a decade before I did, but he never took up my suggestion to write a novel set in Coventry, which the university sits on the outskirts of, and, at the time was infamous for its violence. Rather he set his novels in London and US cities. Given that I remember that evening 20 years later suggests it was a good experience.

The Belle Vue cinema being in an art centre was also liable to run events and the one I particularly remember was two evenings in a single week when 'Jour de Fête' (1949) and 'The Lady Vanishes' (1938) were shown at the cost they would have been when the cinema opened, fifty years earlier, 3 shillings, i.e. 15p, though in 1951, 3 shillings was worth a lot more than 15p was in 1991. It was not the cheap cost of the evening but the fact that you were seeing classics in a cinema that suited what you were seeing, attracting an audience happy to discuss spotting Alfred Hitchcock in the movie and delighting in the simple comedy of Jacques Tati.

I do feel that I am suggesting that I only enjoy movies when among a like-minded audience. However, I think it is more than that. It was the context in which the experience occurred. It was in a city in which I could safely cycle to the cinema of an evening and watch movies that were not in the current top 10 list and that the cinema went to an effort to engage the audience with movies in a different way and the fact that I could stop on the way home for a waffle or a beer in an equally conducive establishment. Of course, the independent nature of the cinemas could cause issues. I remember cycling on one cold evening to go to see 'Metropolitan' only to find that the movie reel had not arrived in time and as a consequence, I ended up becoming doorman at a gig, the first time I had done that, but that is another story.

A Rigorous Approach To Counter-Factuals

2011-12-09T08:00:00.156Z

Getting a little more up-to-date with the books I have bought and am now reading, I came to 'Unmaking the West' by Philip Tetlock, Richard Lebow and Geoffrey Parker, published in 2004. It is a collection of essays about various 'what if?'s that would have seen another region of the world rather than the West, i.e. western Europe and North America become the dominant economic and political force in the world and some other region hold that role. It is interesting in the seven years since the book was published that the West's dominance no longer seems to supreme and it is pretty easy to envisage the kind of Sinocentric world that they feature as an example at the start of the book.

In this posting, however, I am not going to look at the specific counter-factuals discussed in the book, but at the extended essay which outlines the principles on which the editors asked contributors to use when producing their various chapters. The editors are social scientists rather than novelists and so the book whilst owing a lot to other what if? collections I discuss, has an approach which is far more academically based even than the counter-factual collections by renowned academics such as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts. Back in 1982, Nelson Polsby edited, 'What If? Explorations in Social-Science Fiction'. Whilst this attempted to approach counter-factual from a more rigorously social science approach, Polsby was insufficiently strict with his contributors with a consequence that some of them fell into writing the kind of counter-factual which was explicitly self-serving, outlining sometimes very precise turns in history which they felt were vital for the USA's healthy development in the 1980s. Some of the chapters were better than that, but others were too explicitly distorted by contemporary concerns to allow them to be engaging.

Given there have been few attempts at rigour in counter-factual writing, what has surprised me is that the Tetlock-Lebow-Parker method has not been adopted more widely, perhaps because it seems rather too dry for commercially-focused books though it does not seem vastly different, for example, to the political counter-factual collections that have included Duncan Brack as editor, which I will review in January 2012. Perhaps the rigour the editors demand means that the playful or self-serving elements of writing counter-factual analysis which draws many authors and historians is eliminated, so is discarded.

Since the demise of the BBC counter-factual discussion board I have not been a contributor to any other groups on a regular basis, so I confess I may have been missing out on the
discussion of this methodology, but I cannot say it jumps out at you as I dip into counter-factual groups so I thought a quick summary might not go amiss for those thinking of producing counter-factuals. As I have discussed with one commentator to this blog recently, this is not an academic site, but even I think there may be some things I will do differently in looking at counter-factual scenarios by being aware of the Tetlock-Lebow-Parker method.

The editors do a good summary of the broad trends of counter-factual writing as it stood in the mid-2000s a time of a high level of publication of this kind of book. They characterise the triumphalist right-wing writers and the 'bad loser' left-wing writers. I do wonder if more counter-factuals come from the right because of their stronger faith in the 'great men' of history and possibly for the left a sympathy for Marxist determinism and even for the Whiggish history attitudes which informed the labour movement, with their sense that 'things can only get better', but also that somehow the Western industrialised model was at least in need of tempering if not completely flawed. There is an interesting chapter at the start of the book about the critics of counter-factual approaches, notably E.H. Carr and Richard Evans. Both are strong historians, the latter more so than the former and both disparage counter-factual approaches. However, as the editors show, Carr in particular, kept on falling into counter-factual statements on many occasions in his writing, often provoked by the fact that in his life his preferences were to appease first Hitler and then Stalin, with all the consequences that such policies led to.

The editors also outline how commonplace counter-factual thinking is in our everyday life and why we are all what if? historians. They give both a philosophical (through the principles of the Polya urn game) and a psychological grounding to the use of counter-factual analysis, showing that after initial unpredictability there is a steady increase in inflexibility of options and the potential for inefficiency, i.e. that the alternate path may lead to a world which is 'worse' on the basis of how our culture addresses a 'good' society. The editors are not keen on cultural relativity but need to see that how we judge whether an envisaged outcome is 'good' or 'bad' is from a cultural perspective. Many historians see the development of technology in the 20th century as a 'good' thing as it has made the lives of millions longer and more comfortable, but those seeing such development from a Green perspective could argue that such technology has irrevocably damaged the planet and has led to the starvation of millions, so a 'bad' outcome. Imagine that we were ardent Maoists, then even the starvation of millions of people in famines and loyalty to a dictator in a Communist state could be perceived as a 'good' outcome if it was spread across the world, just in the way that most Western commentators would see the sacrifice of those who died fighting Nazi Germany in the Second World War and the fact that the US public had the freedom to elect George W. Bush as a 'good' outcome. Anyway, the editors are correct, that counter-factuals do allow us to see worlds that are, in our view and many of those we live amongst, as more benign or malign than our own. Of course, not to become too post-modern, but whether we see our world as malign or benign depends greatly on whether you are a Wall Street banker discussing such issues from your penthouse apartment or someone waiting for food aid in an Ethiopian village.

In terms of 'rules' for counter-factual analysis the editors begin with two principles. The first is the 'framing postulate'. They have the factual framing: 'when did the actual outcome become irreversable?' and the counter-factual: 'at what point did x outcomes become impossible?' In terms of logic there is minimal difference, but as they show, psychologically that these two 'framings' of the counter-factual analysis can trigger different approaches to the analysis. Though they do not take this step, I would argue that there is a further level, between asking 'why did the world not turn out as x' can differ from the comparative, 'why did the world become x rather than y'. , with the former pandering both to the triumphalist and the bad loser tendencies, i.e. that each has a gripe about the established system, Of course, the first approach is the one most used by counter-factual novelists.

Unlike me, the editors move on to the hindsight bias postulate, i.e. that there was no alternative but for events to turn out the way that they did. Of course, this is a common perspective of those who do not read history and can lead them to even question the point of studying history. Those with an interest in history know that rarely is anything 'inevitable' and in fact our views of 'what really happened' are constantly changing around any given incident in history, reflecting both our own context and more data coming to light through research and archaeology. They give good examples of people needing to be alert to hindsight bias drawing on an example of the Northern Ireland Troubles and taking a warning from analysis of the 11th September 2001 attacks in the USA that the 'brightness' of an event can throw into shadow (or in fact completely conceal) any alternate paths that could have been taken.

The editors also note how easy it is to reach a situation in which to even question whether there could have been alternate paths (or in fact there were but the history of these has been lost/hidden) becomes something that is too offensive to too many people to allow even discussion of it. I have even encountered this in terms of historical accounts of the Great Unrest of 1910-11, which have been denied as being fictional because our view of the 'golden age' of the pre-1914 era is so bright it encourages people to see any alternative perspectives on that time as false and worthy of vigorous challenge. If this applies to events that were real and documented, then you can see how much easier it is to censure counter-factual analysis.

The editors counter the attacks that Carr and others had laid at the door of counter-factual analysis, dismissing it as nothing but a 'game'. They see it as arbitrary because writers light on some particular event to analyse often with a desired outcome in mind and then ignoring that subsequent events could have 'corrected' the alteration. In fact, personally, as do some of the writers in this book, I enjoy realising that the change would not have been that great and finding myself getting back on track with the history we knew in this world. This happens in the 'Resilient West' chapter by Barry Strauss in that a defeat for the Greek allied force at Salamis in 480 BCE does not ultimately lead to any radical change in the modern world due to later 'corrector' events.

The next charge is that counter-factual is uselessly speculative as none of the propositions can be tested except in the imagination. Saying this it is typical for people writing counter-factual to look at comparative examples to give weight to the line they are proposing. Of course, much counter-factual fiction deliberately follows that path for the simple pleasure of the intellectual challenge. However, there is nothing wrong with historians as diverse as Niall Ferguson and Winston Churchill engaging in such activities, especially if they categorise different writings whether factual or counter-factual for what they are, i.e. a historical account/an intellectual exercise/fiction and academic/popular. Much the same can be said for a great deal of military history.

The third charge against counter-factual writing is that it is self-serving. I have noted before how US counter-factual writers of the past decade have often used the genre to make political points about the current context. However, this charge can be laid on factual historical, economic and political analysis, such as books on the British empire or indeed Niall Ferguson's factual programme, 'Civilisation' explaining the dominance of the West, pointing a select range of 'killer apps' some of which I have critiqued here before as being, in my mind, not suitable.

The Tetlock-Lebow-Parker Rules for Rigorous Counter-Factual Exercises
Having covered all the issues in far greater depth and with excellent examples, the editors finally come to some rules which they insisted all contributors adhere to when writing for the book.

Procedural Request 1: Address the 'Arbitrariness' Critique
The contributors were asked to outline why they had selected a particular point in history. In additional they are to adhere to the 'minimal rewrite' approach rather than 'miracle' changes. This was the approach I heard Eric Hobsbawn advocate at a lecture back in the 1990s. People are wrong to say Hobsbawn with his Marxist background does not use counter-factual tools, he is simply as rigorous with them as the editors, eschewing different weather on the day of a battle and only accepting different decisions made by people on the basis of the information they had available at the time, so countering the hindsight bias as well. In this book, the contributors actually focus on circumstances that were 'odd' for the norms of the time, and so on a likelihood basis, the alternative at the time would have seen much more the feasible path for history to take.

Procedural Request 2: Address the Objection that Counter-Factual History is Hopelessly Speculative
As the editors note, it is impossible to eliminate all speculation (this goes for factual history too), so what they ask is that the contributors are explicit about the connecting principles used to reach the conclusions that they make in their chapters. The contributors have also tended to stick to widely accepted historical details and 'regularities'; to well-established statistical generalisations and to accepted laws of cause and effect from biology, physics and social sciences (and one could add historical study, if they do not see that as a branch of the social sciences, which is something still up for debate). Overall, the probability of the outcome 'almost always less than, the probability of the weakest link in the chain of events'.

Procedural Request 3: Address the Objection that Counter-factual Thought Experiments are Hopelessly Self-Serving
Contributors were advised to be explicit about the benefits of using counter-factual analysis on the element of history they were looking at and note those schools of thought who might be irritated/annoyed/angered/infuriated by the presentation of the counter-factual scenario. The editors see this as valuable in exposing the gaps in currently accepted analysis of particular events and developments and shining light on history.

The work of Tetlock, Lebow and Parker really brings home the value of counter-factual analysis which I have highlighted here before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/05/usefulness-of-what-if-history.html I applaud them for presenting rules that should allow counter-factual analysis to enter the mainstream of history providing tools which can be used in an academic way alongside other more established ones. However, given how much time has past, I do wonder if the opposition to counter-factual from historians who pretend not to use it, but often do, has killed the project. I hope by summarising the Tetlock-Lebow-Parker method that others may see it as valuable and put it to use.

Password Pressure

2011-12-07T08:00:00.011Z

How many passwords do you have to remember? I have lost track of the ones I need not only to get into work systems but simply to shop online. Often I need one to access my account on the company website and then a subsequent one to actually pay for the system and then that is often backed up by a third verification from the company providing the card I am buying with. It is probably alright to remember the ones you use regularly, though I am no longer in the situation to buy CDs and DVDs with the frequency I might once have used. The greater difficulty is with those that I might visit only once per year, for example, to order vacuum cleaner bags or to apply for a job with a particular company. You need a password for almost every job application and yet there is little chance even if it is a company you really want to work for, that a suitable vacancy will only come up once every three months, perhaps only once in a year.

Of course, many systems now have ‘do you want to be reminded of your password?’ and for me that has almost become the default setting, hoping that I have remembered which email account I locked this particular company’s website too. Given that I applied for 80 jobs last year with about 70 companies, trying to remember so many different accounts was a real labour. What can be particularly frustrating is that ‘to increase security’ you can find that the reminder or more often these days the option to choose to reset the password only turns up an hour or two later. Thus, your window of opportunity for buying the item or filling in a lengthy job application has passed by the time you can get in.

One thing that irritates me is being told to alter my password just because a certain period of time has passed. The worst situation for this was in a job in the early 2000s where you had to change your password every month and were not allowed to repeat a password until you had used nine others. Trying to come up with things that you could remember was a really trick. Ultimately you end up writing them down or putting them in a file on your computer, so all of this fuss about security is compromised. My current job insists on a change every 3 months. I had the same password for my Hotmail email account from 1999-2010 and it was never hacked, yet this was felt by MSN to be too long a time without change and I was told to change it to one with greater ‘strength’. Having done this, a few weeks later, my account proceeded to be hacked for the first time. My password for my ‘World of Warcraft’ account now has 13 characters in it as the one 9 characters long proved too easy to break for hackers. YouTube insisted that I change the password I use to access that just recently. However, it kept rejecting my suggestions as too ‘weak’ and it was a battle to come up with a password and numbers that satisfied it and I can say that a month on I have forgotten what it was.

Passwords are supposed to be about security but generally they seem more effective at locking out the actual user than those attacking the account. Software can try millions of words even those in Japanese that I tend to use, in seconds and yet I can end up spending hours trying to get into my account and often abandon the attempt. It has never been so hard to buy something than in the 21st century. Most of what I have access to is of no interest to any criminal. I certainly have no belief that a hacker would alter my job application in order to reduce my ‘O’ levels. I suppose they could put their address in place of mine, and, assuming that I got an interview, go in my place, but even then, to get the job they would have to manufacture fake qualification certificates. If they are that skilled then they would not be going for the kind of jobs I am going for, currently not even at the level of middle management. I guess they could divert a DVD I have bought or buy lots of things on my cards, but I do not have the wealth that would make it really worth the effort. I guess this is the same for most people and yet we are subjected to a password regime which would suggest we all have access to state secrets. The last company laptop I was issued needed thumbprint verification to switch it on. No-one seemed to spot the irony when I asked whether we had ones equipped with the same facilities as those red boxes issued to ministers which measure skin temperature to check that the thumb has not been simply cut off the legitimate user.

It is not only ever changing passwords of sufficient strength that cause problem but the username or login name that goes with it that adds an extra dimension. Every company has a different protocol and I battle to remember whether they wanted my surname and initials, one initial, two initials, together or spaced with full stops; perhaps this one wanted my entire name or was it the email account or was it some other form of designation that they assigned me? Of course, often you can ask, if you know which email account you used, have the username reminder sent, naturally with the ‘security’ delay. Sometimes this is not possible and you reach the bind into which I have found myself slipping. Apparently not being known by the company I try to set up a new account and then are told that there is already an account in that name but they cannot tell me the password to it. This is one reason for having more than one email account as I am then compelled to start up a new account in a different email name all for one application to a job which at best I have a 3 in 8 chance of getting.

Sometimes systems are even more frustrating especially when combined with rapid ‘timing out’. I have commented before that job application sites are the worse for this. The extreme case was the one which timed me out between me deciding on a username and entering a password. Trying to re-access the system I was told there was already an account in this name and yet, of course, they could not send me the password to access it as one had not been designated. I abandoned online applying and rang them to be told that many people suffered this problem with their system. I felt it was futile to suggest they have it amended. In another case a company was charging me for virus protection I had not ordered. The bill sent me directions how to unsubscribe from the service, but going to the site it told me, as I already knew, that I had no account with the company, thus it was impossible to unsubscribe for the service which I was paying for! Trying to contact the company was almost impossible if you had no account as you had to log-in in order to send them a customer email and I was very fortunate to find a technical service email address on a discussion board that I used to get in through the ‘back door’ to reach customer services.

Doing business online loses much of its appeal when it is such a labour to access what you need to get into. The obsession with security especially for services you only use once a year or even less, is a real irritation. Every site seems to assume that they are the only people you deal with. I wish we had the ‘single sign-in’ approach adopted by universities which allows students, once they have signed into the university system to access a whole raft of e-books and online journals without having to sign in again to each one individually as used to be the case in the early 2000s. Bank accounts are the systems which do need greatest security, but interestingly they have moved away from passwords towards the devices which generate one-off code numbers. I know ‘World of Warcraft’ have introduced these too, but maybe it is time for Amazon and eBay to follow likewise. Of course, then we will have a desk full of these devices and we will leave the vital one we need at home.

The whole issue of passwords stems from the fact that no-one ever envisaged the internet to be such a crime-ridden place as it has proven to be or that so many people would put effort into peddling so much junk across systems. The internet is the distillation of the worst in human behaviour and despite constant efforts to portray it as something worthwhile it is like opening a library in the most run-down part of a city that had a vast proportion of criminals waiting to leap on anyone going to that library. Despite all the efforts over passwords and their strength, it appears that this is more of benefit to the ‘job’s worth’ attitudes of those people (very numerous these days) who like to make a fuss about regulations simply to give themselves an iota of importance, rather than providing any genuine security. For the average user like myself, trying to recall a string of passwords (even if you try to keep to a familiar few) and precisely what username you selected or were given many months ago, these concerns are increasingly making doing anything on the internet slower than telephoning in an order and, on occasion, actually physically going to the shop or office.

Why Are British Managers So Bad?

2011-12-05T08:00:00.001Z

You would think that in a period of high unemployment that the person in a job would be the best that you could get. The government is keen to remove the ability for workers to bring a tribunal against unfair dismissal, but it already seems it is pretty easy to remove people from a job. With all these lists of competencies we each have to match, let alone set targets for each month and year, it is easy to find something that an inefficient worker is unable to meet and so remove them on those grounds. However, in terms of incompetent managers that seems to happen very rarely and rather these are tools for them to intimidate the workers below them with.

Time after time recently, meeting with people from within my own company and from others in the sector, I hear about bad managers. I am talking about the people at the level of managing a team or and office or two, something between, say 5 and 50 staff. I have no idea how many there are of them in the country, but certainly the places I have worked, they are numerous and for the large part very poor at their jobs. British business has always suffered from cultural problems. It has had a senior management content to take high pay for little work, with no interest in innovation and happy to add more than one job at a time to their activities. This is one reason why so many successful British companies have been run by people from ‘outside’, even if from Britain, they have not been part of the Conservative-Anglican mainstream, rather immigrants or the grand/children of immigrants or from different religious groups including Nonconformist Christians. It has had a middle and lower management which is terribly self-centred and at best paternalistic, but too often bullying. It has had a workforce with little interest in personal training and development and with a tendency simply to blame outsiders for their problems whilst also be unwilling, certainly since mass unemployment returned in the 1980s to risk challenging bad practices in the workplace.

In this structure, the average manager can behave how they like and this is what makes so many workplaces stressful and so inefficient. What has exacerbated the problem is the return of 1980s managerial style. I have seen managers walking around telling workers that they should be grateful for the jobs that they have. It is not sufficient simply not to complain about things, workers need to be seen to be lauding their managers at every given opportunity, a tendency which eerily is reminiscent of officials in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. To be passive is now to be disloyal. Loyalty has become a key trait that managers want demonstrated again and again by their staff. A key reason for this is that managers know that they do blunder and in the blame culture which permeates so much of British business, they know the only way they can escape from having to face up to the consequences of their actions is to conceal them and this can only be done if they have sufficiently terrified the workforce into keeping quiet, or, even better, taking the blame themselves.

Loyalty is vaunted as a necessary trait for keeping your job and is often associated with ‘professionalism’ no matter what the nature of the job. The sense that someone who is ‘disloyal’ to their boss, typically because they are ‘loyal’ to the wider company or the customers, is unprofessional is an attitude which managers perpetuate, to add additional pressure on workers not to reveal their manager’s shortcomings. Usually quickly added on top are descriptions like ‘unusual’ and ‘not fitting in’, to make it easier to remove any work who dares complain, or in fact, increasingly is seen as insufficiently vigorously supportive of the manager’s approach no matter how flawed it might be. The worst managers even begin chiding workers in other areas. In my company a colleague was shocked when my manager gate-crashed a meeting she was in because she believed it was discussing an area of work which she had an interest in. In fact she was mistaken, but that did not stop her redirecting the meeting to cover that topic. My colleague who had arranged the meeting, sat stunned at the gall of the manager and simply agreed with everything she said to bring the meeting to an end as quickly as possible. However, even that was insufficient for the manager, who, after the meeting was over, lectured the woman for whom she has no line managerial responsibilities for twenty minutes about how her attitude was wrong. It was not that she had not agreed with the manager it was she had done it in a sufficiently deferential style.

Deference and gratitude are two terms which come up increasingly when employers talk about what they want from their staff. You could have conducted a survey in 1811 and had much the same answer. These traits seem more valued than ability to use IT or organise meetings or any other skill necessary for an office of the twenty-first century. Deference and gratitude simply promote the status quo, they do not lead to innovation. Deference and gratitude are what meant that the Indian princes, the Japanese Shogun and the Chinese Emperor found themselves overwhelmed by the imperial powers who had allowed a little room for challenging and innovation and so had advanced technologically.

As I have noted before, there are major problems when no-one has the courage to challenge the statements a manager makes. It creates a vicious circle as the manager feels that without complaints they must be doing everything perfectly alright and they are encouraged to develop more and more outrageous projects. If anyone makes an alternative suggestion they are told that they are in a minority so their view cannot be legitimate and this discourages them and anyone else from ever raising a question again. This attitude is not a new one: it appears in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ first published by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837 in the third volume of ‘Fairy Tales Told for Children’.

The self-centred attitude of so many managers lead to ‘one-way traffic’ in terms of communication. Not only do the managers not listen to their workers, they feel obliged instead to lecture their workers at length. Again this seems characteristic of the Soviet system in which the ‘leader’ was lauded at length, from the head of the state right down to the leader of the unit. Under such regimes, it appears to have been necessary to keep telling the workers at length that they had such a great boss and that his/her boss was great too and so on. My current manager is the worst in this respect that I have worked for. Colleagues joke about ‘Songs of Praise’ (named after a BBC television religious programme involving lots of hymn singing) sessions held by my manager. In one two-hour meeting for which no agenda had been circulated, the manager spent 100 minutes going on about how everything she had done was so wonderful and successful. She made no reference to the success of the team or the efforts that had allowed her to receive praise from her bosses. This is incredibly demotivating, let alone simply a waste of time to have such a long meeting at which nothing was advanced.

The self-centredness and the belief that there is only one truth explanation for any situation, however temporary or ill-founded it may be, can be seen as stemming from the attitude that I regularly highlight as being endemic in British society, the 'me first' attitude. This was promoted during the Thatcherite era and causes harm to the UK everyday not least how people drive and use any public service. I guess I should not be surprised given people behave this way when simply moving around a town or going shopping or using a hospital or a school that they apply such behaviour to their workplace where they feel so much more vulnerable and in need of being in total control in order to ensure that everything turns out precisely how they want it, down to the smallest degree.

Aside from ensuring that every worker within their area is cowed, the main job for managers seems to be to kow-tow to their superiors. My current manager spends much of the day making friends with those above her. This causes many problems, because even though she is useless at management, the people you would complain to her about simply think she ‘is wonderful’. She massages their egos by constantly praising their initiatives and ideas. Networking is fine, but when it simply becomes about sucking up to people it uses up work time for something which provides minimal benefit to the company and in fact can be harmful. Of course, experienced senior managers can often see through this and make an effort to call on the views of a wider range of staff. However, in these circumstances, the worker who speaks up is liable to suffer later from their manager. The anger the manager unleashes comes from a number of bases. As they see any suggestions that differ from a plan as best irrelevant at worst insulting, they feel upset if you make a suggestion to a senior manager because in their view you are simply being blatantly rude. Second if the idea is a good one, they are irritated that they had not thought of it and so have, in their mind, lost ‘points’ to you, even if you are unable or unwilling to play in the ‘game’. In this second situation, they are liable to take on board the idea as their own or, at very least, say that the idea came about because of how supportive they have been.

With all of these concerns with keeping down their workers and buddying up to their seniors, it is no surprise that so many managers cannot see beyond their own personal concerns. This is not aided by the fact that they think that their view of the office and the wider world is the only true one. My manager told me recently that there was ‘my perception’ of how things were going and then there was the ‘truth’, which of course was her perception. She could not accept that there was my perception and her perception, let alone that mine had some legitimacy. This is the third manager I have had who has believe that their viewpoint is the only true one and this has led to ridiculous demands such as re-writing a report to remove the views tens of people had expressed in a survey because, in my manager’s eyes, these people were not speaking the ‘truth’ even though they had simply outlined their opinions and the information had been captured.

The sense of the ‘truth’ extends down to individual words used in print, orally or in emails. Poor managers waste ages complaining about individual words and phrases. Me saying that I was ‘trying to fit in’ with my manager led her to go on for 10 minutes about how that was an inappropriate phrase. There was apparently no need to ‘fit in’ with what she wanted because all that she wants is common sense and that is what should be driving everything that I do and I am ‘unusual’ in not understanding that. Certainly on the basis of a majority view of what was ‘common sense’ we would not be doing many things the way she compels us to do them.

Training is seen as the cure-all for any discrepancy between the manager’s view of the world and that of their workers. Alarmingly the perception seems to use the sense of training as ‘re-education’ is used in Communist China, i.e. a form of indoctrination. Bizarrely managers think that by sending their staff on some training course they will come back with the ‘right attitude’ rather than new skills or wider perspectives. Interestingly, the managers themselves seem to feel no obligation to attend any training. You soon find they have been on no managerial training courses and simply ‘learned on the job’ perhaps even at ‘the University of Life’ which apparently is fine for them, but utterly useless for developing effective workers. Funnily there is no recognition that sending someone on a decent training course is actually going to make them more confident, more perceptive, more skilled and so more liable to challenge the narrow-minded behaviour of their manager.

As managers see their perception of things as the ‘truth’ and often ‘common sense’ they see no need to actually tell anyone how they view things. To them it would seem a waste of time outlining anything that should be so blatantly obvious to everyone. This causes major difficulties and a lot of wasted effort as workers try to guess actually what their manager wants, fearful of making a mistake in their guesses for fear of being chided as discussed above. The manager is dismissive of the efforts, finding it difficult to comprehend that proposals do not match perfectly the vision held in their minds. This leads to repeated iterations, painfully slowly edging towards the model the manager desires as the feedback in the blame culture is only about what has been done wrong, not what needs to be done to make it right.

Another problem with this assumption that the manager’s view is common sense is that the manager feels t no obligation to remember what they have previously said. Thus their workers can get caught out by their capriciousness. My manager initially asked for one copy of a particular form to be submitted, then weeks later decided this had to be three copies. Some weeks after that she decided it had to be two copies. Her changing her mind would not have been a major issue, nothing more than rather irritating. What made it so much worst on each occasion she gave a new number she became indignant that we could have thought that the previous number she had demanded was acceptable. Not being able to remember her command she assumed we had taken the initiative and come up with that figure ourselves. Thus, we were harangued for daring to make a decision without reference to her, though this was precisely what we had done. The same applied for moving meeting days back and forth in the week. Again, it should not be a huge issue but she shouted that ‘I could never have wanted it on a Thursday, I do not think that way’ despite Thursday being the precise day she had ordered the meeting moved to. This capriciousness again seems reminiscent of the Soviet system with workers fearful of not complying with some industrial plan that was liable to change weekly without warning. I have been advised to save every email and even keep a notebook to log every instruction I am given. In addition to being time consuming, I am sure she would still challenge what I had recorded as being imagined or misunderstood by me, especially as she could not longer envisage herself ‘thinking that way’.

This short-sightedness of managers can have some incredible outcomes. I have worked with managers who have been oblivious to bullying occurring even though workers even a number of offices away have been aware of what was going on. My manager entered the league table for being so wrapped up in her own vision of the world to not even comprehend what was being said. I am not a rich man so lunch consists of a sandwich I have made eaten at my desk. Early on in this post my manager stormed into my office demanding I look at something and saying dismissively that she did not accept people sitting at their desks as having a legitimate lunch break and so she had the right to interrupt them. When I complained about the issue of my lunch break being ‘violated’, offering to have it at a set time if that was what was required, my manager made repeated righteous statements that she would strongly defend me from having my lunch break ignored. She did not understand at all what I meant when I pointed out that the only person doing that was herself. Of course, she has a different view of how she behaves and that view is the ‘truth’, so she appears unable to comprehend a different perspective on what has happened.

I have worked for numerous companies over the past two decades, in part due to short-term contracts and three turns of redundancy. However, what has struck me is how prevalent such bad practice is across business. I accept that I have not worked outside London, southern England and the south Midlands, but the managers I have had have come from across the UK, so I do not imagine they would be any much different if I worked under them in Scotland or Wales. I know I am not alone in experiencing such outdated, self-centred approaches to management that seem oblivious of modern methods. What we appear to have is a kind of 19th century attitude reinvigorated by trends of the 1980s and revived once more by the current Depression. Ironically at a time when British companies need to be working more efficiently, this corrosive managerial behaviour appears to be increasingly common. Too many people I talk to have the same anecdotes to recount as me. No-one appears to be challenging these approaches and so British business will continue to suffer in the face of strong competition all because too many managers cannot see that satisfying their egos is not what a company should be focused on.

The Movie 'Gorky Park' (1983)

2011-12-03T08:00:00.002Z

It is interesting where you can pick up unexpected movies. I guess this is nothing new, I remember petrol stations selling video cassettes in the 1980s and these days you can get DVDs not only there but from newsagents and supermarkets too. Sometimes it seems incredibly random what is available and especially for movies that a more than a couple of years old you do sometimes wonder how they were selected to be put on the shelf. It was through a supermarket that I recently picked up a copy of 'Gorky Park' (1983) for £3. Due to my love of crime authors like Leonardo Sciascia, Josef Škvorecký and to a lesser degree Philip Kerr, I have always been drawn to detective stories set in regimes which prevent the normal processes of 'standard' crime fiction, i.e. that the detective finds the criminal and s/he is brought to justice. In dictatorships with their vested interests and often competing factions, the resolution of the crime is often the detective's least concern especially when set beside staying alive in the internecine wars between different factions of the regime.

Thus, it is of no surprise that I was drawn to 'Gorky Park'. Around 3 million copies of the book, written by American Martin Cruz Smith and first published in 1981, were sold. It remained in the US book charts for 144 weeks in the 1980s in hardback and paperback editions. I do not know the sales figures for the UK but they must have been similarly high. Cruz Smith went on to write another six books featuring the same detective Arkady Renko down to 2010, however, the original novel remains the most successful book he has produced, though he has been publishing since 1970. It is difficult to place precisely why the novel was such a success. I think, in part, it was due to the setting of the USSR at the time of the so-called Second Cold War. For English-speaking readers it was an alien setting. In addition, the hero of the novel is a high-ranking Soviet police officer, Captain Arkady Renko, Chief Investigator in the Moscow Militsiya, which despite its designation (i.e. 'militia') and military ranks, was the police force. In this first novel the prime suspect is an American businessman, Jack Osborne, a dealer in sable furs, which at the time the USSR had a monopoly over. Thus, for the reader, the usual sympathies are over-turned even though Renko roots out corruption in the Soviet system rather than viewing it as an idyll. Ironically, in many ways he is purifying the crumbling USSR of its corruption. Unlike many Soviets, however, he views the West (he visits the USA briefly in 'Gorky Park') as similarly corrupt.

Aside from these perspectives which differ from most English-language detective stories, there is an interesting crime. Three bodies, two men and a woman are found in Moscow's Gorky Park with their faces and fingertips sliced off to prevent identification. Investigating the crime drags Renko not only into the business of Osborne but also KGB officers and high-ranking Militsiya officers, thus creating the kind of vested interest tension that you look for in such novels. Renko is at risk of his life for much of the novel and one of his men, Senior Lieutenant Pasha is shot dead by a KGB agent.

Anyway, when I saw the DVD I decided to buy it, to pass some time in my lodgings watching it on my laptop. I had seen it before, but cannot remember how long ago and in some ways it impressed me less than the first time. However, this does not mean it is not worthwhile watching. The movie was directed by British director Michael Apted (born 1941) who has directed numerous movies but is probably best known for 'The World Is Not Enough' (1999) and 'Enigma' (2002). The screenplay was written by British scriptwriter and playwright, Dennis Potter (1935-94), probably best known for his television dramas, notably 'Pennies from Heaven' (1978), 'The Singing Detective' (1986) and 'Brimstone and Treacle' (1987 adapted by himself from his 1982 play).

The movie has loads of British actors in it. Ian Bannen (1928-99) plays Chief Prosecutor (Lieutenant-Colonel?) Iamskoy, Renko's boss; Michael Elphick (1946-2002) plays Senior Lieutenant Pasha; Richard Griffiths (born 1947) plays Anton, a lawyer friend of Renko's; Ian McDiarmid (born 1944) plays Professor Andree,v an archaeologist who reconstructs faces from skulls something commonly seen in programmes nowadays but a novelty in 1983; Rikki Fulton (1924-2004) plays the leading KGB antagonist, Major Pribluda; and Alexei Sayle (born 1952) plays petty criminal Golodkin, interesting given his Russian heritage. I guess this fits in with the casting of British actors in Hollywood movies to play all kind of European roles. The stars: William Hurt (born 1950) as Renko, Lee Marvin (1924-87) as Osbourne and Brian Dennehy (born 1938) who plays New York detective William Kirwill who comes to Moscow seeking his dead brother were all American; the sole female character, Irina Asanova, was played by Polish actress Joanna Pacula (born 1957).

Given that the movie was filmed not long after it is set, it was unsurprising that the company could not get access to the USSR and instead it was shot in Finland (a number of Finnish actors appear in smaller roles) and in Stockholm, where the action of the movie transfers to in the closing phase, rather than to the USA as in the novel. In many ways this is actually a more feasible plot as Osbourne has been smuggling sables out of the USSR and it would be comparatively easier to get them overland to Sweden than overseas to the USA without arousing the attention of both the Soviets and US authorities.

The movie makes good use of the setting, showing both the dreary life of the USSR in the 1980s plus locations such as Iamskoy's dacha and the police headquarters. The different kinds of crime of the USSR such as smuggling out icons and dealing in Western electrical goods feature as do run down buildings and ugly apartment blocks. Of course, since the 1980s the market for furs has largely evaporated and it is interesting that this factor dates it a great deal more than if it had been icons or people that were the items being smuggled out. The motive of wanting to escape to the West is one that does not appear in most crime stories and is an interesting driver for the behaviour of Irina. Osbourne is driven in turns by greed and lust. Many of the Soviet characters are motivated by financial greed or fear of running into the KGB. Renko as all good detectives should do, stands for something more moral, even though though morals are seen through a Soviet lens. There is violence. The defacing of the three victims and the gutting of Kirwill are noticeable. However, they tend to generate a rather muted reaction from the audience, perhaps because we are aware that in such a totalitarian system life is pretty cheap and any murder can be excused if it fits political expediency. This is notable with the fate of Iamskoy and arguably Pribluda.

All of these elements could have made for an excellent thriller with particular piquancy at the time it was released when we were all aware of the issues of the Cold War and at least could have an idea of how the Soviet people suffered under their regime. The key problem is the acting. Many of the actors make a great effort. Bannen, Griffiths and Pacula are good, even Fulton in a limited role; Marvin does not do badly even though in large part he is acting himself; Dennehy is similarly capable given he is playing a role pretty familiar to him. Sayle is simply Sayle no different in manner really to his performances on numerous comedy shows and even advertisements. However, to some degree that is tolerable especially if you do not know his comedy work as he is playing a cocky 'wide boy' or spiv. However, it jars if you recognise the act as well as I do.

The thing that really brings down the movie is how wooden so much of the dialogue is. Hurt is very badly served in this respect. He comes over as cold and emotionless when in fact he should be twisted by the different drivers and fear. His affection for Irina seems particularly cold. Given that he is a man motivated by what he feels is right, so much of this weakened by him appearing like some kind of android. Elphick did not have a wide range as an actor, but he is served even worse in this movie than say in his television series 'Boon' (1992-5). I believe Apted was rather limited by how Soviets were expected to be portrayed in movies of the time. We can see a similar situation in 'Red Heat' (1988) in which Arnold Schwarznegger plays Captain Ivan Denko of the Moscow Militsiya. Whilst this is a much more light-hearted thriller, like Hurt, Schwarznegger in a similar role has simply to come across as almost a robot, with a fixed life and monotone delivery. Schwarznegger resembles his android assassin character in 'The Terminator' movies (1984-2003); Hurt should be nothing like that. In many ways the Soviet characters in 'Gorky Park' are shown as having a range of motives and many pressures on them, but they bear them with a lifeless stoicism which undermines their credibility as people we engage with. I guess at a time when it still seemed possible that the USA and USSR would engage in war, it would have seemed unpatriotic to actually show Soviets as human even in fiction.

Whilst I enjoyed revisiting 'Gorky Park', I am always going to be conscious that if Apted had been able to break away from the stereotypical portrayal of Soviets, it could have been an excellent detective thriller.

How Redundancy Became A Dirty Word Once More

2011-12-01T08:00:00.001Z

I remember during the last depression in the British economy in the 1980s when redundancy became commonplace, even for people in what had previously seemed ‘jobs for life’ that there remained an attitude ingrained from the 1950s and 1960s that people were made redundant as a result of something they had done wrong. I guess in middle class professions the attitude was perhaps even older because in the 1930s when mass unemployment first really hit national consciousness it was often very regionally and sectorally focused on heavy industries in northern England, Scotland and South Wales, whereas much of the Midlands and the South and new more technological and service sector industries did not suffer nearly so much. My father was only made redundant once in a career which lasted about 43 years and that was at an age when he was entitled to early retirement. My mother was never laid off, but that was because she was a nurse and it has only been in recent years that nurses have been unable to find work very easily.

Going back to the 1980s, my father had a friend he had known since childhood, who worked in the construction industry. I still remember the sticker he had in the back of his car which said ‘Don’t Nationalise Building’ and had a picture of a pair of hands one holding a brick and one a mortar trowel, locked together with handcuffs. The whole campaign these days somehow seems as alien as something that might have been run in East Germany at the time. Anyway, he was made redundant as happened to millions of middle aged family men in the 1980s alongside all sorts of people. I remember being told that his mother was so ashamed that he had been made redundant that she would not talk about it. She could no disassociate being laid off because the company had closed down or was ‘downsizing’ from being sacked for improper behaviour or laziness. Though it was her son, she could not shake the sense that he had done something wrong to be without work. I never found out if she changed her attitudes. My father advised his friend to train in computers which were just coming in on a large scale at the time. The friend took the advice and in his next job avoided further redundancy because of the skills he had and was able to continue working to a profitable retirement.

In my career which has spanned 20 years this year, I have been made redundant three times. In addition, for much of the time I have been on fixed term contracts, which whilst being set up that way have pretty much the same effect when they come to an end, especially if you are uncertain if the contract is going to be renewed or not, something you are usually only told late on. The similarity of the end of such contracts to redundancy is why in the UK since 2002 companies have had to pay redundancy pay if they do not renew the contract of a worker on a contract of 2 years or more. In addition, if the person has been on contracts for 4 years they have to be moved to a permanent contract. This was because previously there were cases of workers on contracts for 12 years with no security. While it might seem the same in terms of pay and condition, that threat of your job coming to an end through no fault of your own does prey on your mind and reduces your productivity.

Anyway, redundancy has been a fact of working life for at least thirty years and in certain industries it has been incredibly common. Now, always on the lookout for a new job, especially as I always seem to end up with the most appalling managers and working far from home, I subscribe to online services such as Monster and LinkedIn. As well as the job searching, CV listing and networking facilities these sites often send you articles about work. Many of these seem to be influenced by US tendencies, which Americans appear to believe are universal, at least for their English-speaking cousins. However, some of them appear to be quite comic to British readers especially when it comes to the precision about matters of clothing for the workplace. For a start we do not have Labor Day and no self-respecting businesswoman would ever wear white shoes to work anyway; for men black suits without a stripe have no such negative connotations that they seem to have in the USA. Setting such cultural differences aside, reading US workplace attitudes can be useful as British employers have a common tendency to follow their American counterparts sooner or later.

The interesting trend I have picked up on at a time when we are facing high unemployment and redundancies, is how ‘redundancy’ is once again a dirty word as if we were back in the early 1980s. I received an article from LinkedIn about networking which advised you when speaking to people you should never mention you have been made redundant and should find some euphemism for the period that you were without work as if it was some kind of dirty secret rather than a fact of working life for people at all levels.

My view of why this attitude has reappeared is that it stems from other recent trends in business. I have heard from employers in my sector and others that two of the key things they value from employees are not their ICT skills or their ability to manage projects or speak a foreign language but ‘deference’ and ‘gratitude’. Employers, or rather managers at all levels, are leveraging the fact that jobs are scarce in order to compel a forelock-tugging attitude towards them from among their staff. They expect workers not only to be grateful for their jobs but to actually say this repeatedly. Of course, because there are recruitment processes in place, often the job is not a gift of your manager but once in post you have to behave as if it is and as a result, regularly thank your manager and support their view no matter how hare-brained or unethical it might be. To even propose a different approach is to be ‘disloyal’, not with a view to the company as a whole but to the individual who wields power over you. I have noted before that even commentators on business have observed that this attitude is unhealthy for a company that wants to survive let alone prosper in the current economic climate: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html

It is interesting that the Coalition government is seeking to reduce the opportunity for industrial tribunals and even remove the chance to protest unfair dismissal. Clearly their view is that all dismissal is ‘fair’. The government is aiming to reinforce this attitude that all workers, whether professionally qualified or not should simply keep their mouths shut and accept whatever they are told by their bosses and similarly to accept the prejudiced treatment which is once again increasingly common.

How does this connect to mentioning redundancy in your career history? Well, managers never like you hear you criticising your previous employers even if they are competitors. They assume that if you are critical of the previous companies you have worked for you can easily be critical of them, something we know they now have no tolerance for. Mentioning redundancy in a single word seems to be critical of the planning of that company and of their treatment of their workers. In addition, you are exhibiting ingratitude for not expressing how grateful you were that the company actually employed you in the first place and kept you there for as many years and months as they did. I soon noticed this three jobs back when I, along with 200 others (the first phase in a lay-off of 500 staff), were told we were being made redundant. I was criticised for any mention of the fact and my email account was shut down because my ‘Out-of-Office’ statement mentioned it. Despite that 10% of the staff were in line to be made redundant gave us no right to discuss it. Consequently it became impossible to even hand over work to the staff who were remaining and projects very close to completion were simply dropped, unfinished with the funds that had gone into them wasted as I was not allowed to talk with people who could have picked them up and finished them off as it would have meant me saying why I would not be around to do it myself.

In such circumstances reality begins to become distorted. Simply because of the criticism-phobia which is now permitted among managers, money is allowed to be wasted and no proper follow on from a period of large-scale redundancy can be implemented, further damaging the company. We have to face up to what is being balanced up here. On one side it is that some managers for a few weeks will be irritated that staff being made redundant talk about it, on the other side thousands of pounds is wasted and projects left unfinished damaging the funds and reputation of the company. Yet, in our distorted world it is the managers’ unease which wins out.

There is an additional way in which the person being made redundant suffers if they cannot mention that they have been made redundant and this is when you apply for other jobs. You have to come up with a range of more or less feasible excuses for why you left your previous employment. With fragmented careers it becomes increasingly difficult to produce good ones and interviewers become suspicious, assuming that you must be hiding something. Of course, it would be easy if you could simply state the reason as ‘redundancy’ but to do so would clearly damage your chances for the new job, yet often the alternatives are little better. Saying you left because you no longer fitted in, for family reasons, for better pay or conditions, to work nearer to home and so on all seem to provide reasons not to employ you in another post. It would be better if you could say I was made redundant, it had nothing to do with my abilities it was simply the company could not afford to employ me and 499 other people any longer.

The default assumption by interviewers that you are seeking to hide something just accentuates this problem. Too often interviews are coming to resemble police interrogations. Rather than trying to gauge what skills you have and whether you could apply them in a new post they cross-examine you to find any flaws in your story. Having read advice about writing a CV I had begun only listing jobs going back over the past 10-12 years. This was a big mistake at one interview. They spent the whole time asking me about my work in the 1990s and in the post-interview feedback said it was because they believed I had been serving a prison term at that time, not realising that at their company the form declaring that I had no criminal record was sent to their human resources department. It seems that other excuses used to conceal redundancy could open you up to a similar risk.

By making redundancy once again a taboo subject the myth that we have total control over our careers is promoted and the view that we are to blame if they are at all disrupted. In turn the view is perpetuated that companies are blameless for the hardships they impose on the ordinary worker even if, as if often the case in the UK, it is the result of bad planning, inertia or not being alert to changing conditions. It is particularly galling when your redundancy comes as the result of some development you tried to alert the company to but were choked off by the ‘I don’t want to hear that’ mentality which is so prevalent.

In the 21st century redundancy is going to be a factor for every worker no matter how illustrious a career path they take. Even members of the boards of multi-nationals lose their jobs. What we need is not to somehow brush it under the carpet but acknowledge it is a fact of working life and not make the person made redundant feel guilty for something that is imposed on them simply because it makes some managers feel a little uncomfortable for a short time. Compared to the worry and financial pressures the person losing their job faces, such unease is nothing and should not become the prime driver for workplace expectations of behaviour.

Howling For Vengeance

2011-11-11T08:00:00.004Z

I know that this is going to be a controversial posting, but it is something that is one of those issues that nags at me so that I need to get it out of my system. That was the prime purpose of my blog, which is why I need to write this posting even though I guess that, in turn it will irritate others. It is a factor which has come up many times certainly in my memory over the past 20 years, but the particular occasion recently that it has come to my attention is following the sentencing of Vincent Tabak for the murder of architect Jo Yeates in December 2010. Tabak received a life sentence with a tariff of a minimum of 20 years. However, for Yeates's parents this was not enough. I accept that they grieve for their daughter, but the statements they made after the sentencing suggest that the pair of them are very nasty people in themselves with an outlook which is barely different from Tabak. The couple are David Yeates aged 64 and Teresa Yeates aged 58. They seem symptomatic of the 'indignitary' approach which is so common in British society and is reinforced by the hysterical tabloid newspapers, notably 'The Sun' part of the Murdoch media empire of News International.

I have no sympathy for Tabak and certainly believe he deserves a life sentence in prison. What alarms me is the desire for the destruction of our legal processes, the move to arbitrary sentencing including execution and the fact that the language used in condemning the killer in fact help create an atmosphere which promotes such violence rather than seeks to reduce it.

The Yeateses, who have no legal training, complained that there was no death penalty in Britain and regretted it was not an option. However, in fact it seems as if even that would have been insufficient for them. Instead it appears they would have preferred to have Tabak tortured to death. In an official statement they said: 'The best we can hope for him is that he spends the rest of his life incarcerated where his life is a living hell, being the recipient of all evils, deprivations and degradations that his situation can provide.' They should be at least cautioned for trying to provoke fellow prisoners of Tabak from doing him harm. What they have no understanding of, is that the behaviour they are lauding is just the kind that excited their daughter's killer. To urge prisoners to visit such behaviour on the convicted man is simply to legitimise the kind of violence he carried out himself. In turn this will add to an 'atmosphere of permissiveness' in that others will things such 'deprivations and degradations' are acceptable for them to turn on any man or woman they feel is 'guilty'. Rather than doing anything to reduce future perpetrators, the Yeateses' language simply lionises such behaviour.

These days it seems entirely legitimate to wish for a 'lynch mob' approach to sentencing. You only have to sit in a pub when the news of such cases comes on television to know how many volunteer executioners there would be. In many ways all the legal reforms of the past three centuries seem to be forgotten and the average person in the street feels they are qualified to act as judge, jury and executioner for the person they believe to be guilty. The selection of the 'guilty' seems more based on the appearance of the person than any legal arguments. I am convinced that Amanda Knox is guilty of the murder of Meredith Kercher in 2007. The murder was a particularly perverse one and yet because Knox happens to be a beautiful American, she has to be innocent in the public eye and no-one is going around saying she should suffer the kind of 'deprivations and degradations' that were visited on Kercher. In fact, with her release on appeal earlier this year, she has mutated into a victim herself. This highlights how patronising the Americans are to other people's justice systems. Knox is portrayed as suffering at the hands of a foolish Italian court that somehow missed seeing her 'innocence' shining through.

A patronising attitude towards courts was seen in the Yeates case. It is clear that her parents had no faith in the legal system. Her father said: 'I always knew he was guilty but feel relief because I don't know how I would have reacted if the jury had come back with a verdict of manslaughter.' Again the father feels he should have been the judge, deciding on the sentence, not through the approach of law, but simply on his gut feeling. It is interesting, he probably felt the same about Christopher Jefferies, Jo Yeates's landlord who was an early suspect on to whom Tabak tried to shift guilt. I am sure if Jefferies had been charged, even though we now know he was innocent of the crime, David Yeates would be telling us how he should have been executed and how he knew that man was guilty.

The simplicity of this ability to sniff out guilt without any legal training, simply by looking at a person, leads the indignitaries to become exasperated with the legal processes. Teresa Yeates was disappointed that it took three days for the jury to decide on a majority guilty verdict (10:2) for Tabak. She said: 'It was the right verdict but it took so very long.' Of course, she sees the jurors as stupid for not being equipped as she clearly feels she is, to simply detect a guilty man and to sufficient level to satisfy the courts. Of course, the courts, juries and the whole legal system are disparaged by people like the Yeateses and organs like 'The Sun'. They self-righteously know the guilty and see any chance for the so-clearly guilty to have defence or to go through any legal process. Their favoured approach would take us back in Britain literally to the Middle Ages, to the kind of situation England had before Magna Carta of 1215. Such arbitrary execution characterises dictatorships of the kind the UK has helped to overthrow in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, but apparently for our own criminals, it is perfectly the kind of system we need to introduce.

Of course, for 'The Sun' even the Yeates's ostentatious statement about the punishments they want inflicted on Tabak are insufficient. The newspaper went further not missing the opportunity to slag off misguided foreigners, in this case, the prison system of the Netherlands, Tabak's home country on 29th October, appended to their article on the Yeateses saying: 'Dutch prisons are known for their luxurious hotel-style facilities, with each cell having its own heater, fridge and microwave'. The British are stunningly nationalistic, no other country, bar perhaps the USA, can be good enough in punishing criminals. Clearly they relish the overcrowded, insanitary conditions of British prisons which lead to murders and widespread reoffending. Much of the British public and the majority of the UK press have no faith in what our Victorian predecessors did, that there is a chance of rehabilitation. In their view as in the USA, guilty is guilty for eternity so the best thing to do is to kill the perpetrator, who will always be easily to detect, quite often because he is always going to be something like a 33-year old European man rather than a 24-year old American woman.

Infected by American culture the UK is now a society in which no emotion is sufficient unless it is taken to the fullest extent. You some how appear neglectful if you are not howling in sorrow or in anger or in calling for vengeance. Few seem alert to the actual words, most extreme so far in the Yeateses' statements, foster the kind of violent society which created the murder in the first place, a society with utter distrust in legal procedures so a society in which lawlessness in all its forms seems to be the only 'solution'. By being indignant, by howling in the media, you only foster more of the same kind of behaviour as that which distressed you in the first place. This is not civilisation it is a return to a barbaric age in all aspects.

The Strange Delight Of Lost Corners

2011-11-09T08:00:00.071Z

This is another of those postings of me thinking back over quirky things that have caught my attention down the years and probably mean very little to anyone else. However, perhaps I am wrong and my fascination with areas that I term 'lost corners' may intrigue others too. When I was a boy at secondary school I was once on a school trip to London. I was sitting in a coach somewhere like Wandsworth probably heading to the Imperial War Museum, maybe somewhere else. Anyway I was on board a coach which was stuck in a traffic jam. I was sat next to the window, uncommon for me as I generally sit in the aisle given the length of my legs and my concern about escaping from crashes. Anyway, I looked down at a metal railing fence that enclosed the garden of a large house. I was looking at the bit that came up to a post which marked the end of the wooden fence that surrounded the garden next door. The garden with the railing fence was terribly overgrown, I remember. Consequently I assumed that no-one ever went up to that corner of the fence, no-one picked up the litter there or did anything with the railings from that side let alone the concrete pole. However, there had to have been some day when all of this had been important to someone. Somebody had worked to erect the fence, to dig the hole and insert the concrete pole and yet now it seemed unlikely that anyone would ever set foot in that corner, perhaps for decades perhaps for even longer. Of course, someone may have cut back the rhododendron and demolished the railings and removed the fence post later that day. Even if they had, here was a space in which no human and probably few birds or other animals had been.

That was the day I realised that I had a fascination for spaces which were not invisible, but certainly lost to humanity for the foreseeable future. It made me think that even in cities where we believe that every corner is jammed full of people, there are many areas which are untouched by people. It reminded me of the UK as a whole. We have some of the densest populations in Europe but there are large swathes of the country, vast areas of Scotland, Wales, the national parks, much of the South-West and the northern English counties, that are in fact almost empty of humans. We are all jammed into quite restricted areas and there are these other spaces in which we do not go into. I think it would be fascinating to map areas, particularly in London, where no-one goes. I think this was one of the reasons why the Open House scheme has proven so popular. Every year buildings to which the public and in fact very few people in general have access, are open for free. I have been inside Marble Arch and down into Aldwych underground station plus various water pumping stations. Typically those places for which you see a door but one that presents a blank face, a door as a wall in effect.

I have often thought this too about television and movie dramas when people come to London or some other great city trying to find someone. Generally they do not experience how it is in reality. Even if you manage to find the person among the teeming millions, you might reach their building and simply be faced with a door that will not open, through which no-one will let you. So much of our cities are like this. Wherever you walk you go passed location after location after location into which you could never gain access no matter how hard you tried. I do wonder if one of the appeals of Neil Gaiman and Lenny Henry's 'Neverwhere' (series & novelisation, 1996) was that there was an entire 'London Below' (in fact, often above as well) that could be accessed by forming doors in those very blanks walls. I have a feeling that Gaiman and Henry saw such spaces, especially in London much as I have done, though saw a way through rather than for me, just feeling repeatedly rejected by them.

That silent rejection, I feel is different to the lost corners. Of course, someone may have had the intention to close them off; fenced them around. Yet, for me the best of them have become a lost corner because they have become overgrown or simply because they are no longer important. In the house I currently rent a room in, from the kitchen I look at the back of another house, set at right-angles as it opens on another road. I have never seen the residents, but the entirety of the back of the house, is overgrown and blocked from the side of my house by an old iron fence. Once that space was important, part of a building site for the house, perhaps a location where children sneaked around the house as I used to go between my parents' house and my neighbours' down the narrow gap. Certainly for many days people tramped around that space and at some time, maybe then, maybe later put and iron fence in, presumably along precisely defined lines. The space is still there and plants inhabit it, and yet whilst I can see it, without great effort I could never be in that space. It reminds me too, of the wonderful views you see while driving down the motorway knowing that however beautiful it is, there is no way you can capture that precise view certainly not without a severe risk of death and being arrested, perhaps in the reverse order.

I think it is that fact, 'so near, yet so far', like the eyots you see from the trains as you go over or alongside the Thames. You would love to go on to them. There would be very little on most of them and one or two are protected, but it would be that excitement of stepping somewhere no-one has been for so long. Maybe I am wrong and they would be full of leftovers of drunken student parties. I wonder if it is a little like what motivates people to climb mountains or explore jungles, to go into spaces which you feel are rather outside the flow of time. Reflecting on this interest of mine, I know that it is not restrained to overgrown gardens or disused yards. It also stems to those rooms you see on the top of old buildings, equipped with windows and yet with no-one to look out of them. You see them all over old cities, London, Oxford, Bath particularly among them. Does anyone go into those spaces and what do they contain, bar dust?

My feelings about lost corners is one of wistfulness, feeling perhaps because they are not entered and walked across, that they retain a small scoop of the past of some days when they were something that warranted the attention of people, even if just the workers sent to put in a fence. A teacher of mine explained how when he had gone to Arizona and saw so much of it as it would have looked many centuries earlier, he felt unnerved. Returning to Britain he realised it was the starkness of the American South West that alarmed him in the very fact that it was wild, it had not been softened, worked on by humans. Britain, in contrast, is very different. You can go almost everywhere in this country and see the trace of humans. Many rural fields have tumuli dating back millenia; others have Roman roads or forts or banjo enclosures or filled in quarries or torn up railtracks. As 'Time Team' has shown seemingly ever corner of Britain has been impacted upon directly by humans, not simply in terms of pollution but messing around with it. Archaeology programmes show us that not only has our back garden been part of centuries of structures but even on remote Scottish islands the trace of humans is there; the rolling valleys of the Yorkshire Dales were deforested before there was a written language. I have never been anywhere as untouched as my teacher, but I imagine I would feel as unnerved as him. This is why, I guess I am fascinated by these corners that show human intervention, but unlike the average stretch of pavement or even garden, that intervention has ceased and it is as if we are walking past a snapshot from some particular time, not out of time, but somehow on a parallel rather than bisecting path to the spaces we habitually go into. I have wondered whether to take photos of some of these places and put them up on this blog. However, I guess that is taking being a nerd just that little too far and instead will confine myself to the wistful enjoyment of such forgotten corners whenever I see them.

We Walk Straight So ...

2011-11-07T08:00:00.005Z

When I was a boy at primary school, one of the activities that we would do in the playground was stand side-by-side with a friend, always another boy and cross over our arms so that we were locked together. We would then march around the playground saying loudly in unison ‘we walk straight so you’d better get out the way’ (enunciated so it sounded like ‘we want straitsa you’d bettah get out tha-way!). Generally we did not actually walk straight we would simply march into other boys who would often pair up just like us so they could march into us and the whole thing would descend into what was then termed ‘a bundle’. Where this ‘game’ originated from I do not know, presumably from the place most physical games did especially for children for whom kicking a ball around was forbidden as none of the playgrounds that I used while at primary school had less than one side which was a row of windows and in some cases three sides were windows. Why I was suddenly reminded of this game which I cannot have witnessed in over thirty years was as a result of trying to walk down a street in London.

I heard on BBC radio that officially Britain has become more polite than in recent decades, but as yet I have to see any evidence of this and one case in point is how difficult it is to move around as a pedestrian. Places like Oxford Circus and Leicester Square in central London have always been difficult not only from the numbers of people but the fact that many people on the street have no idea where they are going and/or have their attention distracted by everything that is going on around them. However, even in suburban areas of London, places like Ealing or Harrow or Richmond, you find it difficult. This is because on the pavement, as on the roads, no-one seems willing to yield even a few centimetres nor to wait even a matter of seconds to allow someone else to pass. I suppose if I see people in cars forcing their way out of side roads into the main flow of traffic and bullying people out of lanes, I should not be surprised that I see the equivalent of such behaviour on the pavement, especially as unlike car drivers, many pedestrians are young people. A television advertisement for an insurance company shows pedestrians behaving like cars and says we would not behave like drivers when walking. However, they are in fact wrong and most people do behave precisely like that replicating the scenes they show in their advertisement.

I am not going to go on demonising children and teenagers. However, it is probably unsurprising that witnessing what their parents and other adults do it should seem to them to be ‘weak’ to move even a fraction of a step. It is exacerbated by the fact that unlike older people, children and teenagers often travel in groups, and all want to walk side-by-side. Going along the pavement, even walking through pedestrian areas I find myself being pushed to the sides, hard up against buildings. No matter how large the space is, groups of pedestrians spread to fill it. Where I live during the week has broad pedestrianised areas but I find myself dodging between four or five family members or students strung out for a couple of metres across the space.

When I have run out of space and am squeezed against a shop window, even this does not seem enough and I get a tut or a sigh as if I have done something wrong as one person for a matter of seconds has to expend the effort to step around me. My journeys are lengthened by this constantly being squeezed to the side, having to pull my jacket or shoulder bag in, even having to turn side-on so the people can get by without having to adjust how they are walking. Often rather than be pushed into the wall, I am compelled to step into the road with all the risk that that entails. The difficulty is not only that the people I encounter have an utter unwillingness to move even a little, but they seemed exasperated that anyone should be walking in the opposite direction to them; they also tire of people moving too slowly in their direction too as she witness from the complaints about the elderly and disabled or parents with the off-road pushchairs if they are not proceeding fast enough for the bulk of pedestrians.

It often not the case that the people who are unwilling to move are aware that you are liable to collide with them. I have written before about how people are cut off from the world by their mp3 player and their mobile phone: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/08/mind-out-that-child-might-be-wearing.html
Ever since mobile phones were invented no-one has seemed able to stand still while using them, I guess hence the name, it is not the phone but the user who is in fact mobile. The thing is now, with smartphones that there is so much to look at on the screen that using them takes the full extent of the owner’s vision. Yet, they do not stop, they keep ploughing on, gazing intently and fingering the screen of their phone, assuming that everyone will navigate around them. These people can be slow moving, giving you time to get out of their way. However, to me it rather seems an insult to the blind that people with sight do not use the faculty they have been blessed with. Maybe in the future mobile phones will be constructed with white sticks extending from them. Certainly someone needs to invent facilities that alert the user to other bodies within a certain proximity or even to allow the user to see in front of them as they are looking down at the screen, through having a camera in the top of the phone rather than on the back.

Despite all my ailments I can move freely and sufficiently speedily to avoid colliding with the ‘we walk straight’ pedestrians. However, this is not the case for all pavement users. The elderly, disabled people, people with small children or pets, are a lot less manoeuvrable and it appears that the message to them is simply that they should not be out walking at the times when ‘normal people’ wanting to walking in strict lines to get places. The issue of the we-walk-straighters is that they are symptomatic of a broader problem, the manifestation of the Thatcherite belief that there is no society just individuals and families (or their equivalent on the street, gangs of friends). Why it is so difficult to move around a British town on foot or by car is because so few people these days understand that to travel in an urban area is to become part of a machine or even an organism, one that has different components moving at different speeds.

I once saw an art installation which consisted of a video the artist had shot at a junction in Vietnam where five roads met. The range of traffic was incredibly diverse and included pedestrians, cyclists, mopeds, rickshaws, motorbikes, cars, vans and lorries all on the road rather than the pavement. The video was shot from an apartment overlooking the junction. What was startling was how soothing it was to watch. This is because despite all the variety of the traffic the different elements flowed so that no-one collided and no-one even held up someone else. To me it looked rather like blood flowing around the body. I am sure there are accidents and arguments in that city as anywhere but it is apparent that the Vietnamese in cities often far more crowded than London, had the necessary attributes to make such incidents rare rather than happening almost every minute.

To march through as a pedestrian is to disrupt the traffic ‘machinery’ to the extent that it causes jolts to the system, tensions and upsets. Things move far more smoothly when people look ahead, have patience and work in co-ordination with others. However, none of those attributes are now valued in British society so as a consequence we have all the huffing and puffing and the arguments, the need to squeeze against a wall to avoid a confrontation and the stresses that all this brings.

What If Gas Weapons Had Been Used in the Second World War?

2011-11-05T08:00:00.002Z

This is another posting prompted by having read a collection of interviews with politicians and ambassadors conducted 1933-43 by W.P. Crozier the editor of 'Manchester Guardian'.This one was reinforced by a statement made by Sir Robert Vansittart (1881-1957; Lord Vansittart from 1941) who served as Permament Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs 1930-38, the second most senior civil servant in the Foreign Office and then in the grandly titled role of Chief Diplomatic Advisor 1938-41 though it was a toothless post. Vansittart warned of the threat that Germany posed to Britain and the rest of Europe from the moment Adolf Hitler came to power and, in fact, saw danger in the survival of 'Prussianist' characteristics among the elites that remained strong in Germany even following the First World War. Ironically that trend, to an extent, was purged by Hitler himself following the failed assassination of him on 20th July 1944. Despite his high standing given the adherence to appeasement by the British government up until March 1939 his warnings and those of other leading men in British society such as Sir Geoffrey Knox, Rex Leeper, Winston Churchill and Sir Anthony Eden were ignored until the German invasion of Bohemia-Moravia.

Speaking to Crozier in October 1939 Vansittart warned that Germany would use poison gas weapons against the UK. One reason was a claim by German radio that the Poles had used gas weapons during the German invasion of their country in September 1939. In addition, Italy had used poison gas in its subjugation of Libya in 1929 and dropped mustard gas on Abyssinia during its conquest of the country 1935-6.

The Hague Conventions of 1899 and of 1907 (to which the USA was not party) and the Geneva Convention of 1928 both banned the use of poison gas weapons. Interestingly the 1899 Convention also banned the dropping of bombs from balloons, violated by Zeppelin bombing raids, and presumably by bomber aircraft as well. The convention additionally banned the use of so-called 'dum-dum' bullets with soft noses which flattened on impact to inflict greater damage on flesh.

In the First World War poison gas is estimated to have caused 100,000 deaths (85% killed by phosgene) and injured a further 900,000 soldiers, including Adolf Hitler. Gas shells made up 25% of those fired but only 3% of casualties. Unexploded gas shells recovered from battlefields today, remain hazardous and there are sufficient recovered already to occupy those disarming them a further 80 years.

The French began with the use of tear gas in August 1914 and the Germans in November. From January 1915 onwards the Germans used chlorine as a lethal gas weapon on the Western and Eastern Fronts, arguing the 1907 convention only banned poison gas delivered from shells rather than from gas projectors. During the war over 93,000 tons of chlorine was produced to be used on the battle field.  Soon even the concern about gas shells was ignored and through 1915 both the Germans and Russians used gas shells; 56,000 Russian soldiers were to die of gas mainly because they lacked the counter-measures developed by their western Allies.

The British started using gas shells in September 1915 and the French developed phosgene a heavier more effective gas though it was often mixed with lighter chlorine to help it spread further. Over 36,000 tons of the gas was produced during the war with 18,100 tons used by the Germans who had the most developed chemical industry in the world and 15,700 tons by the French.   By the end of the war with the entry of the USA the Allies were the largest producers of poison gas and used it extensively in attacks in 1917-18; they generally had the advantage of the prevailing winds on the Western Front. The USA developed an improved version of mustard gas called Lewisite though it decayed in damp conditions so may have been useless on the Western Front.

By 1916 effective gas masks were being produced to counter gas weapons. In July 1917 the Germans began using mustard gas. This did not seek to kill opponents by asphixiating them the way that chlorine and phosgene did, instead mustard gas caused blistering and pain to the eyes, vomiting and stripping of bronchial tubes, inflicting great pain on those caught by it; they could take 4-5 weeks to die of the effects. The gas was heavier than air so could 'roll' into trenches and bunkers and would remain potent for up to months, remaining as a brown liquid on soil, so with the potential to injure soldiers long after it had been used.

After the First World War the Powers used poison gas across the world, the British in Russia in 1919 and in Iraq in the 1920s; the Red Army used it on insurgents in 1920; Spain against Moroccan tribespeople in the 1920s; the Italians in Abyssinia in 1930 and 1935-6; the Japanese used poison gas in their war in China 1931-45; the Germans dropped some on Poland in 1939. All the Powers had stockpiles, primarily of mustard gas: USA (which did not ratify the Geneva Convention until 1990) had 87,000 tons, the USSR 77,400; Britain 40,719 tons and Germany 27,597 tons at the start of the Second World War. Britain planned to use these weapons if invaded. Nazi Germany also developed the far more effective nerve agents which are made of organophosphates and block signals from the nerves to the organs. By the end of the war, Germany had produced somewhere between 10-30,000 tons of tabun and possibly as much as 10 tons of sarin. Germany assumed that the Allies had developed these nerve agents too and would retaliate in kind for their use, but in fact only knew of them when they captured German plants at the end of the war.

Given these statistics and the fact that during the First World War all combatants seemed content to violate the Hague Conventions it is unsurprising that Vansittart expected the Germans to use gas weapons. At the outbreak of war the UK government began issuing gas masks and by 1940, 38 million had been given out. Chemical detection squads of local chemists were organised and the tops of post boxes were painted with gas detection paint. In 1939 it was estimated that only around 75% of the population of London was carrying their gas mask and by 1940 despite the intensive German bombing the level had fallen away heavily.

What if Vansittart had been correct and the Germans had decided to bomb Britain using poison gas?  The Germans may not have decided to use poison gas immediately in the war. They seemed embarrassed by the dropping of gas bombs on Warsaw in September 1939 and methods such as blitzkrieg and Stuka dive bombers appear to have instilled sufficient terror into the populations of Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France and to have pushed back the defending armies for there to have been no need to use gas weapons. Gas weapons are unsuited for mobile warfare as they need the opponent to basically stay put and for your own soldiers not to be marching immediately into the zone which has just been gassed especially with agents as enduring as mustard gas. This is why poison gas was used less on the more fluid Eastern Front of the First World War than on the far more static Western Front. Gas weapons would not have combined well with blitzkrieg and those defending, primarily the French would know that they would be putting their own population in areas being over-run by German forces at more risk than the invaders.

It seems much more likely that gas would have been used in more static situations and Vansittart was probably aware of this in feeling it likely that Germany would use poison gas on Britain. The Blitz ran September 1940 to May 1941 and this seems to have been the most likely time that poison gas would have been dropped. The question is whether it would have been effective for the objectives set for this bombing. The Battle of Britain July-October 1940 had been about winning air supremacy in British skies to permit a seaborne invasion by the Germans. This has failed. However, the next phase of the air war on Britain was about both hampering its war output and demoralising its population to encourage Britain to surrender before Germany invaded the USSR in the summer of 1941. Gas weapons would have disrupted production to a degree by harming and killing workers. However, as noted from the First World War figures, high explosives were more effective not only in inflicting casualties on the British military and workforce but also on factories and their machinery, something poison gas would have had a minimal impact upon even if it had had to be cleaned off the way mustard gas would have done.

Given German objectives that required more than simply terrifying the British population, gas weapons would have offered little benefit. They would only have made sense ahead of an actual seaborne invasion to terrify to the population of southern England into clogging the roads by fleeing North and to potentially purge the coastline of defenders. Use of gas in these regions would have been aided by the daily shift between inshore and offshore breezes allowing a little more predictability over the direction of travel of the gas. Simply dropping gas shells in urban areas would have had a major terror effect even if casualties were low. The heaviness of mustard gas meant that it would penetrate into air raid shelters and even possibly down into underground stations, causing a mass panic and possibly driving people sheltering out into the streets where they could have been hit by a second wave of bombers using high explosives. Saying this though, anyone who knows the London Underground system knows how strong the breezes can be through it if the trains are moving and this and the typical winds Britain has always had would have made the use of poison gas as random as it had been on the Western Front. Air pollution in London, however, may have made it more hazardous as smog was not eliminated until the 1950s and of itself was harmful to citizens; mixed with poison gas, if the conditions were right, would have made a terrifying effect.

The British planned to use mustard gas as the weapon of last resort in case of a German invasion, presumably while the Germans were on the landing beaches, benefiting from winds over them. However, as with France the danger would be once invaders had landed that your own people would be at as much risk from the poison gas as the invaders. Perhaps it would have been used as part of a 'scorched earth' policy making ports and towns uninhabitable at least for a period in order to blunt the German advance. If Germany had used poison gas then the war would have had aspects that impinged on the ordinary public in a way that even high explosive bombing did not. Ironically it may have driven the British public to comply with the directions it received from its government, i.e. to actually carry gas masks and to get children away from the cities and to keep them away. The British would have faced a moral dilemma of whether to reply in kind or try to take the moral high ground and show that in not using gas weapons they were better than the Germans, ironically not drawing on the fact that the Germans were bent on genocide.

As in the First World War, the greatest opportunities for using gas weapons would have come where the frontline was static if only for some months. All of the warfare in western Europe moved too fast both when the Germans were invading and when they were being pushed back by the Allies. On the Eastern Front things were different particularly at the sieges of the three great Soviet cities: Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad that the Germans failed to take. The resistance of the Soviet forces and populations despite shelling, bombing and hunger was incredible and in many ways resembles conditions of the Western Front of the First World War. In such a context using poison gas to disable if not kill many of the defenders would have benefited the besiegers. Even mustard gas would have had an impact. Obviously the climate of Russia would have limited the opportunities but for the Germans may have rooted out the forces that they proved unable to bomb into submission. To some extent the Germans may have feared contaminating cities that they hoped to hold. However, even without poison gas weapons these cities were so damaged by the conflict that they would have provided minimal tangible benefit and would have been most important as a morale boost and a political victory. Gas is most effective with a static opponent without protection and this is why ultimately its greatest use during the Second World War was in killing people at death camps.

Hitler may have had an aversion to using poison gas in warfare as opposed to extermination because of the fact it had almost killed him on the battlefield in October 1918. There is a curious inhibition in that whilst Britain, Spain, Italy and Japan seemed content to use poison gas on indigenous peoples in Africa and Asia, there was a sense after the First World War that it was wrong to use it on 'civilised' peoples and the Germans despite them despising the Poles as sub-human Slavs, were embarrassed by the use of some poison gas, even though three years later they used poison gas in death camps which killed Poles alongside Jews and Russians. Despite this apparent 'colour bar' on the use of poison gas, Hitler may have believed that the British would have used it against the German population if the Germans had used it first.   That would have been a fair assumption given how in the previous war the Germans had initiated the use of poison gas but in the latter phase of the war the British had become the leading users. This fitted with the British approach which was to use technological developments as 'terror' weapons. The Germans developed the stormtroopers and personal flamethrowers, but the British developed the tank, utilised more poison gas and produced the vast Livens Flame Projector.   However, I think even if there had been a desire to use poison gas, the predominant style of the Second World War, i.e. mobile and fast moving provided few opportunities for its effective use. If it has been used then it is most likely it would have been on Russian cities rather than on London.

What If The USSR Had Invaded Norway In 1940?

2011-11-03T08:00:00.222Z

This is another counter-factual posting prompted by one of the interviews that W.P. Crozier conducted between 1933-43 with politicians and ambassadors that I have recently read in a collection. The concern that the USSR would overcome Finland and then advance into Norway, at least as far South as Narvik was expressed in December 1939 by Count Eduard Reventlow, the Danish ambassador to London 1938-47. Of course to reach Norway, the USSR first had to conquer Finland which the Soviets tried to late in 1939. In September 1939, in line with the Nazi-Soviet Pact, two weeks after the German invasion of western Poland, the Soviets had successfully seized eastern Poland. The Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania came increasingly under Soviet control; under Soviet military occupation in June 1940 and were annexed to the USSR in August 1940.

Finland had been conquered by Russia in 1809 and formed an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire until breaking away in 1917. In 1939, the Soviets demanded territorial concessions from Finland, including the ceding of the Finnish Karelian area North of Lake Lagoda and on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Finland; ceding of Salla farther North; the Rybachi Peninsula on the northern coast; islands in the Gulf of Finland and a 30-year lease on Hanko on the coast of South-West Finland. Finland refused and the Winter War began on 30th November 1939 with a Soviet invasion of Finalnd. It ended on 13 March 1940 with the Treaty of Moscow. In November 1939 the Soviets and probably the bulk of the world expected Finland with a population of less than 5 million against the USSR with 170 million, to be defeated quickly just as Poland (with a population of 35 million people) had been, i.e. just over a month. However, this was not to be the case. Partly it had to do with the climate, attacking in this region in the winter was going to be hard for any force. However, even in the summer of 1944 when the Soviets again tried to invade the country they were repulsed. In the Lapland War of September 1944-April 1945 the Finns expelled the Germans from northern Finland. Besides the Italians, the Finns were the only country to fight both sides in the war simultaneously.

The Finns fielded around 340,000 soldiers in 1939 with 32 tanks and 114 aircraft. The Soviets initially committed 450,000 soldiers and throughout the war somewhere between 2,500-6,500 tanks, certainly around 3,500 Soviets tanks were destroyed and the Soviets lost between 260-550 aircraft. Soviet deaths were around 125,000 compared to 70,000 for the Finns, this compared to 1,000 Soviet casualties in the Soviet invasion of Poland. The Soviets hoped to use blitzkrieg tactics, but the terrain with a lack of paved roads and fragmented by forests, lakes and swamps made this impossible, Good Finnish analysis of the few narrow routes the Soviets could proceed along made defence along the so-called Mannerheim Line (named after Field Marshal Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, Marshal of Finland, Commander-in-Chief of the Finnish Defence Forces, former Regent and later President of Finland) incredibly difficult to break, even though it was primarily made of log lined dugouts and trenches which would have looked unsophisticated even in 1918. There were 221 strong points along the Karelian peninsula but with only one concrete bunker per kilometre this was hardly the Maginot Line.

The Finns lacked ammunition and had few working tanks. With more equipment and supplies they could have inflicted even heavier damage on the Soviets especially through saturation artillery fire. The Finns proved innovative, using the frontal attack by Soviet tanks through the difficult terrain to their advantage and using logs and petrol bombs to disable the tanks. The Finns had camouflaged uniforms for the winter fighting but this was only introduced for the Soviet forces in January 1940 making them more obvious to the defenders up until then. The winter of 1939/40 was particularly cold with record low temperatures as low as -43oC in one location. The Red Army must have been aware of the potential conditions, but some units lacked sufficient winter clothing and Soviet soldiers died from frostbite. The icy conditions did allow Soviet vehicles to get over swamps rather than be bogged down in them.

The Finns sensibly used guerilla tactics on isolated Soviet units. Some of the units seemed to have been ill-trained and certainly lacking in experience. The Soviets' own propaganda undermined morale by portraying the Finns as killing any prisoners taken and the Mannerheim Line being an equivalent of the Maginot Line. The purges by Stalin in the late 1930s had removed experienced officers from the Red Army, though this does not seem to have had much impact on the success in Poland earlier in 1939. The key flaw on the Soviet side seems to have been over-confidence and not appreciating properly that the terrain of Finland was extremely different from that of Poland. To a great extent this was probably due to the purges too as no officer would be willing to challenge the view of his superiors without fear of being arrested. Even after the Germans invaded the USSR in June 1941, Stalin continued to purge high-ranking officers.

Despite the German-Soviet invasion of Poland, much of the focus of the British and French was on the Soviet assault on Finland. In part this dated back to their mistrust of the Communists that had led to the Intervention by both countries in 1918-19. Whilst the French made only a feeble invasion of Germany in September 1939 and withdrew in November, plans were made to intervene against the USSR in the Caucasus as a way to get back at Soviet aggression in Finland. The British considered intervening in Finland through cajoling Norway and Sweden to give access across their territories. The long-term consequences of a war between Britain and the USSR in Scandinavia was noted by Björn Prytz, the Swedish ambassador to London 1938-47, speaking to W.P. Crozier in January 1942. He felt that it had been beneficial for the world that Sweden had not permitted British forces to cross Swedish territory to aid the Finns during the Winter War, because this would have brought the British to war with the USSR making it far harder, if not impossible, for an alliance to be formed between the two countries when the Germans invaded the USSR in June 1941.

As it was the Germans had threatened to invade Sweden if the country permitted the transit of British forces. This would have triggered a general war across Scandinavia in one of the harshest winters that the region had experienced. Given the British experience in Norway it seems likely that the Germans would have conquered both Sweden and Norway by Spring 1940. However, a protracted war and a whole new front may have had repercussions for the German invasion of western Europe in May-June 1940. The Swedes would not risk their neutral position and the British and French were left not being in a position to support Finland. Around 12,000, primarily right-wing, volunteers did travel there in order to fight the Soviets; 8,700 came from Sweden, 1,000 from Denmark, 700 from Norway and even 350 from the USA. One British volunteer was a cousin of Winston Churchill who had already fought for the Nationalists in Spain. The change of the Soviet command and a focus on a small section of the Mannerheim Line from January 1940 paid off for the Soviets and by February the Finns were retreating. The war effectively came to an end in March 1940 though Soviet progress had been limited. With the thaw it is likely it would have been slowed further.

The Soviet advances in 1940 meant that they may not have conquered the country but they came out 'winners'. The failure in Finland was damaging the reputation of Stalin's regime despite its totalitarian control and it seems Stalin simply wanted out of the war. The Treaty of Moscow was face saving exercise though Soviet foreign minister Molotov claimed that the kind of territory gained by the USSR was all that had been sought as it gave protection to Leningrad, the USSR's second city. What was ceded by Finland was pretty much what the Soviets had demanded in 1939. Finland lost 11% of its territory and 30% of its resources. Despite Molotov's claim, the Soviets had formed a puppet government, the Finnish Democratic Republic in December 1939 and this was clearly intended to replace the Finnish government once the entire country had been conquered just as the Soviets were to do across eastern Europe 1944-8.

The defeat by the Soviets meant that Finland also became drawn more into Germany's circle so that in 1941 when the Germans invaded the USSR, the Finns did too. The relationship remained ambivalent and whilst the Finns were on the Leningrad front they would often not allow the Germans to attack from their zones and certainly seemed unwilling to advance any great distance from the Finnish border. The Soviets learnt from the Winter War and the Red Army reduced the role of its political commissars and reinstated the traditional army ranks. Winter tactics and clothing were slowly improved. In combating the German invasion, the Soviets initially seemed not to apply any of the lessons of the Winter War even in the regions with terrain like that of Finland. It was only with the arrival of the Siberian forces to defend Moscow and the work of the partisans that the Soviets used the kind of tactics that had enabled Finland to hold out so long against vastly superior forces.

Let us assume now, that in line with the original Soviet plans, the whole of Finland was overrun by the Red Army within two weeks. This may have been feasible with the use of paratroopers or amphibious landings combined with more sophisticated tactics and a proper recognition of the Finnish terrain which was very much like a lot of the country in western Russia anyway. With less arrogance and more planning perhaps the Soviets with their air and tank superiority let alone the greater numbers could have smashed the Finnish defences, especially if the invasion had come in September rather than the end of November. Let us assume that, say in November 1939, the Finnish Democratic Republic, effectively the first Soviet bloc satellite country is established. Finland now the friend of the USSR cedes all the territory that the USSR demanded and signs a military alliance, building on the non-aggression pact signed in 1934 anyway. Immediately this would have shifted the balance in Scandinavia with the Soviets now on the border of Sweden with its iron ore reserves vital for Germany and in the far North, with Norway, whose control is of great concern to Britain.

Count Reventlow believed that the next step would have been the Soviet invasion of Norway. This would have immediately brought tension to the Nazi-Soviet pact. The Soviets could invade by sea and with difficulty over the narrow land border, without having to cross Swedish territory. A deal may have been struck with the Germans to divide Norway, with the Soviets keeping Narvik and all regions North of that and the Germans having the rest. The trouble is that Narvik is at the head of the railway bringing Swedish iron ore, mined at Kiruna and Malmberget to the sea. The iron ore ships went along the North Sea coast to Germany not across the Baltic Sea, though it was possible to ship it out from the Swedish port of Lulea on the Baltic. However, Narvik was the location both sides wanted, the Germans to maintain the iron ore route, the Soviets to have a naval base effectively opening out towards the Atlantic. If the Soviets had quickly defeated Finland they may have simply rolled straight on to Norway. I doubt the Germans would have sat back and may have launched an assault of the country too and probably Sweden as well, given how sensitive they were about anyone going into Sweden. It also seems they had plans to invade Sweden in 1939/40 if the British and French invaded Norway in an effort to support Finland. On 5th February 1940 a Franco-British plan of sending 100,000 British and 35,000 French troops to Narvik effectively to seize Norway and much of Sweden too, was set out. Hitler had declared in December 1940 that Franco-British intervention in Sweden would bring an immediate German invasion. The British were still offering 20-50,000 troops to Finland up to the end of the Winter War.

Following the end of the Winter War Britain formulated plan R4 which was another invasion of Norway. The British hoped to provoke a German assault on Norway by mining neutral Norwegian waters and then sinking iron ore ships travelling to Germany. The Germans were pretty much aware of British plans and invaded Norway at the start of April 1940. The British plan was pathetic to the earlier one, with only 18,000 troops assigned to Narvik. As I have considered before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/01/what-if-german-invasion-of-western.html the British and Norwegians could have defeated the Germans in Norway or at least tied them down long enough to affect the invasion of western Europe. However, despite British handling and almost expelling the Germans from Narvik at one stage the intervention was a failure and was superseded by the German invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium then France; the last British troops left Norway on 8th June 1940.

It seems very feasible that a Soviet advance towards Norway would have provoked a stronger reaction. The British were aiming to send at least 20,000 if not 100,000 troops to fight the Soviets in Finland but for some odd reason seem to want to provoke a German invasion of Norway which by definition would have put the British on the back foot. This different treatment of the Soviet and the Nazi threats characterised so much of British and French thinking before the Fall of France. It is clear that fear of Soviet expansion was far greater, so a Soviet invasion of Norway would have led to the British to fight there. It seems feasible that conflict could have even broken out between Germany and the USSR over the control of Norway and we could have seen a three-sided war fought out in the country. What seems most likely is that Hitler would have yielded control of at least part of the USSR knowing that ultimately he would defeat the Soviets and would scoop up all that they had gained in 1939 as he was to do in 1941 with eastern Poland and the Baltic States. He may have been happy to see a conflict between Britain and the USSR for Norway. In such a scenario it seems most likely that Sweden would have been invaded immediately by Germany.

Thus, a feasible scenario seems that the Soviets invade Norway in January 1940, them not seeming to have much concern over fighting in the region in winter, especially if they had not had problems taking Finland. The British and French would have invaded Norway and there would have been bitter fighting around Narvik. Despite committing heavier forces than in our 1940, the British and French would still be compelled to retreat having only bought the Germans the time to seize Oslo and Bergen if not Trondheim as well. They would have also quickly conquered Sweden and then had no worries about controlling the iron ore. Given the Nazi-Soviet Pact the iron ore would probably still flow out through Narvik even if this was now in Soviet hands.

The German forces would be slightly more stretched, the Soviet ones much more. Not holding all of Norway would be exchanged for controlling all of Sweden. The interesting difference would come in 1941 with the German invasion of the USSR. Of course, the most effective route was to go through Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine, but it seems like, at least secondary theatres would develop along the German-Soviet line in Norway and across the Swedish-Finnish border. If Britain may have actually fought the USSR in 1940 an alliance between the two countries may have been harder to arrange than it was in our world. However, if we look at how the USSR effectively welcome Finland and Romania into its camp once the tide turned against the Germans, it seems likely that sooner or later the British and Soviets would have worked together. Once the USSR became an ally of Britain it is very likely that the British would have immediately supported the Soviet forces in Norway, opening up a second front three years earlier than happened. Of course, the Soviets may have been expelled from Norway but it would not have been an easy task; with British backing it would have been tougher for the Germans as the Red Army in Norway could have been supported across the North Sea rather than from Archangel and Murmansk. Very likely this would have shifted some of the focus of the war at sea from the Atlantic to the North Sea as the Germans tried to sever the British supply routes to the Soviets.

Even if the British and Soviets were unable to dislodge the Germans from southern Norway the region would become a focus for conflict, threatening to assault Germany through the 'back door' as it struggled towards Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad. It would also allow closer working between the British and Soviets which was something Stalin constantly complained about and it would undercut the complaints he had in our world about the opening of a second front. The focus on the Scandinavian front may have weakened Britain's position in North Africa, though conversely that may have been less of a challenge if more German troops were tied down in Norway. The conflict in Norway may have come to resemble that in Italy in our world with amphibious assaults on the southern Norwegian coast and certainly more naval battles than we saw in our world. Let us assume that by 1943 the British and Soviet forces have made progress against the Germans in southern Norway and have penetrated into Sweden with the aim of crossing the Sound to Denmark. It seems very likely that the invasion would have been focused on northern Germany and perhaps the Netherlands, supported by British and Soviet aircraft from Norway, rather than into France. With Soviet forces pressing the Germans back out of the USSR there would have been a choice to be made, but given with how few troops they potentially could have held Norway then maybe it would have not been a serious one. However, it is interesting to consider that D-Day might have involved an invasion of Jutland.

The Soviet invasion of Norway in 1940 would certainly have tilted the whole focus of the Second World War in western Europe. It seems likely that in the post-war era there would be Soviet pressure for at least a naval base in Norway. Rather than become a member of NATO as happened in our world, Norway is likely to have been treated as Finland and Austria were in our world, neutralised as a kind of buffer state between the western and eastern blocs. A conquered Finland would have remained part of the USSR just as the Baltic States were to do so, only becoming independent in 1991. The Winter War was a minor theatre in the Second World War but the stalemate that occurred during it, effectively meant that Scandinavia (i.e. Norway, Sweden and Denmark) only briefly became the focus of conflict in the Second World War with the fighting much farther South. German troops in Norway even at the end of the war were fighting resistance groups not Allied forces. A quick defeat in Finland in 1939 would have altered the role of the region and brought far greater conflict to it and more suffering to its people. Perhaps part of Norway would have come under Soviet control and Sweden, assuming the Soviets had not invaded it in 1944, may not have had its neutral status in the post-war world but have become a frontline state of NATO. Whilst Count Reventlow's prediction may have been unlikely, it is certainly interesting to see how it would have altered northern Europe if it had come true.

What If The Maginot Line Had Been Built Along The Franco-Belgian Border?

2011-11-01T08:00:00.151Z

Having read a collection of interviews with politicians and ambassadors conducted 1933-43 by W.P. Crozier the editor of 'Manchester Guardian' I have been provoked into writing a number of counter-factual postings about that period. Most of them I had thought of before, but reading that at least one leading man on the political scene at the period considered these developments to be feasible added weight to me writing about them.

This posting was one I had considered myself when looking at the alternatives around the French and British resisting the German invasion of France in 1940. I found this speculation reinforced in an interview between Crozier and Leslie Hore-Belisha, secretary of state for war 1937-40. Speaking in either November or December 1939, Hore-Belisha advised that France should be encouraged to extend the Maginot Line to run along the Franco-Belgian border (and in fact the Franco-Luxembourg border too). Of course, only 5-6 months before the Germans invaded France it would have been too late to put effective defences in place, though when the British Expeditionary Force landed in France in September 1939 they worked with the French to extend defences from the end of the line East of the border with Luxembourg right to the Channel coast. However, the option of the line running along the borders of Luxembourg and Belgium could have been implemented when the Maginot Line was originally constructed from 1930 onwards.

The Maginot Line is named after was André Maginot, French Minister of War 1922-4 and 1928-31. The line was in fact a long, sometimes patchy, chain of defensive fortifications stretching 20-25Km deep, running the length of the Franco-German border with a similar scheme along the Franco-Italian border known as the Alpine Line. It had forward border posts often disguised as houses where troops would detect invasion and seek to slow up the advance, particularly of tanks, using emplaced explosives. There were 17 fortified observation posts on hilltops providing good views of the landscape with high quality optics. They were equipped both with telephones to the fortresses and wireless transmitters.

About 5Km behind the border posts were 5000 block houses of the Outpost and Supply Line, again focused on stopping the advance of tanks and allowing the troops of the main Ouvrage line to prepare. Ten kilometres back from the border was the Principal Line of Defence, six lines of anti-tank obstacles and a line of anti-personnel obstacles with gates that could be moved to block roads. Behind this line were the 352 infantry casemates equipped with crews of 20-30 with two mounted machine guns and an anti-tank gun. In this zone, about 0.5-1Km behind the Principal Line of Defence were 78 Infantry Reserve Shelters equipped with their own electricity and accommodation for 200-250 soldiers. These were to be used to halt any advance against the Principal Line of Defence and act as headquarters for counter-attacks against the presumably stalled invaders.

The infantry casemates were reinforced by the 97 ‘Petit Ouvrages’ which were a series of connected infantry bunkers with their own accommodation, generators, hospital units and stores. They were connected by a tunnel network and housed 100-200 soldiers. The 142 full-scale Ouvrages were self-contained fortresses with heavy armament and units of 500-1000 soldiers. The Ouvrages had Safety Quarters in their proximity, basically barracks to allow soldiers to get to the Ouvrages easily in case of a surprise attack. The Ouvrages were connected by an underground narrow gauge railway stretching to supply depots up to 50 Km back. Over 100 Km of tunnels connected the various fortifications. In addition to generators in the casements, shelters and various ouvrages, the Ouvrages themselves were connected to the national electricity grid by underground cables and two separate telephone lines ran between all the various fortifications.

In particular areas there were Flood Zones which along the lines of the Dutch plans for defence, could be deliberately flooded to slow up the invaders’ advance. Behind the Maginot Line, heavy railway artillery was deployed with a longer range than the 10-12 Km of the fortresses’ guns.

As France and Belgium were allies 1920-36, the French did not build the line along the Franco-Belgian border and the idea was that the French forces would move to support Belgium, which is in fact what happened in 1940. However, following the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936, which France could have contested, as I have discussed before on this blog, Belgium broke the alliance and became neutral. The Belgians vacillated 1936-40 and on the eve of the German invasion seemed almost ready to let the Germans into the country without fighting back; the Belgian King Leopold III did not flee Belgium in the way other monarchs did when their country was invaded in order to carry on the fight from Britain and he oversaw Belgium’s surrender.

Following the end of the Franco-Belgian alliance, France did take steps to fortify along the mutual border, but far weaker than the construction farther South. Part of the problem was the low lying nature of this region compared to Alsace-Lorraine and the high water table which meant a risk of flooding of the extensive tunnel systems. Even by 1936 the enthusiasm of 1930 seemed to have waned and so the necessary funds to overcome this problem were not as forthcoming. However, other approaches such as the mobile defensive tactics favoured by De Gaulle and Paul Reynaud were not introduced even in combination with the weaker defences along the Franco-Belgian border. As noted above more impetus was put into strengthening the line in this region when the BEF arrived in 1939, but by then it was too late.

The Maginot Line is seen to sum up the flawed mentality of the elites in French society in the inter-war period. This includes a very defensive mentality, seen as stemming from the experience of the First World War that Maginot and many others in the government and military had seen first hand. It can be argued that the whole idea of the Maginot Line was based on the experience of the battles for the fortresses of Verdun, February-December 1916 which sucked in so many German troops in trying to seize it that it did have an impact on the German Army. Ultimately the death toll was 163,000 French to 143,000 German but it did distract units from other parts of the front and did not lead to significant German progress despite 11 months of fighting. Interestingly General Nivelle’s 1916 slogan of not letting the enemy pass was taken up by the units who staffed the Maginot Line.

Certainly the Maginot Line defences look like what had been seen as sophisticated in 1918 taken the next level. Both sides on the Western Front, but especially the Germans had developed extensive bunkers and other fortifications to a degree that they resembled 20th century castles, able to withstand ‘siege’ even when assaulted by high explosives. Similarly the inclusion of the narrow gauge railway mimicked what had been developed behind the front line during the First World War. Perhaps more importantly the Maginot Line seems to be an embodiment of the perception of the French elites that they were under siege from not only the renascent Germany even before Hitler’s rearmament, but also from extremists within France. William Shirer’s account of the final two decades of the Third Republic shows the paralysis which gripped so much policy in this period and among many in French society somehow a desire for victimhood, that rebirth of the ‘proper’ France could only come from defeat; a line which the Vichy regime in fact took following the defeat of 1940. The obsession with ‘sitting tight’ within France and not taking active steps was shown by the pathetic ‘invasion’ of Germany by French forces September-November 1939. It seems that there was almost a fear of potential victory and given how debased many elites in France saw republican society I guess this is no surprise, they certainly would not such a society and political situation re-invigorated by even the mildest of victories against Germany.

Whilst one can certainly argue for the Maginot Line manifesting a broad ‘Maginot mentality’, the perception that the Line itself had the nature it did because French commanders and politicians did not understand the nature of mechanised warfare and were easily caught out by the German blitzkrieg in 1940 is only partly accurate. It must be remembered how unreliable most tanks had proven during the First World War and that Britain with its combination of tanks and infantry had made best use of them especially when compared to the Germans who at best had created over-engineered tanks that added nothing and in their complexity caused errors; to a degree, an error Hitler’s designs for tanks in the latter half of the Second World War were to repeat. If we look at the tanks that were used by the Germans in 1940 the bulk were Panzer Is and IIs which could have easily been halted by decent French infantry units let alone French tanks which at that stage were superior to the average German tank. The German forces would have been weaker still if they had not been able to draw a third of their stock from the Skoda works in Bohemia. Another assumption is that the invasion of France followed the plans that the Germans had laid out. In fact, certainly the rapid penetration of tank units into France was often done purely on the initiative of unit commanders at times against the wishes of their superiors. If German tank generals had been more obedient then blitzkrieg would not have looked as effective (or as risky) as it proved to be.

The Maginot Line can be seen as only enhancing First World War technology rather than engaging with that to be found in warfare as it was anticipated to be in the 1940s,even though the invasions of Poland, Denmark and Norway cannot really be classified as blitzkrieg, partly due to the terrain. However, the approach of the defence in depth aimed at slowing up an advance through the need to penetrate levels of defence, combined with the combination of a unified network which retained autonomy (for example, an Ouvrage was able to shell another Ouvrage in the line if it had been over-run by invaders) was a sound static response to tank warfare. In addition the deployment of the heavy artillery on railways gave the opportunities for a flexible response in case of break-throughs in the line. What was missing was the mechanised units with sufficient weight of tanks to snuff out salients that would develop once a breach had been made. This would have been a weakness defending the Maginot Line as it was in defending Belgium and northern France without such defence.

One interesting point to note is that one reason for not building the Maginot Line along France’s border with Belgium was the sense that it could inhibit the planned French intervention in Belgium. You then must ask why during the period of the Franco-Belgium alliance, six years of which coincided with the construction of the Maginot Line no attempts were made to build a line along the Belgian-German border. Of course there were defences but as the fall of the flat-roofed fortress of Eben-Emael showed such fortifications could be captured. In addition, simply having a defensive line does not mean there cannot be offensive moves. In fact such attacks have the advantage of the artillery barrage behind them. In many ways Ouvrages especially if built up would have been more powerful in the flatter lands of northern France and Belgium, because as the First World War had shown even controlling a low ridge in such territory could allow you to dominate a battlefield and be unassailable without heavy loss.

Paratroopers could have overcome such challenges especially if the French lacked the mobile forces behind the frontline to snuff out paratroop assaults. However, as shown on Crete and at Arnhem, with speedy concentrated action it was feasible to eliminate such attacks. The British Army was one of the most motorised forces in the war at the time and would have been suitable for such a role if anyone on the Allied side had felt it was appropriate. In addition, stalling the German forces at the Belgian border would have opened up the chance for shelling from Royal Navy battleships and potentially from an amphibious flanking attack by British forces along the Belgian coast. Either of these actions would have had the benefit of the longer Maginot Line's guns to provide support.

Whilst the Maginot Line may have used the best technology of the First World War, its location was rooted in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. That had been the last time that the Germans had invaded into Alsace-Lorraine. In 1914 when these provinces were in German hands the French made a tentative attack, Plan XVII into these regions, where the Germans were able to resist. The main German attack in 1914 as in 1940 came via Belgium. In 1940 forces came through the Ardennes mountains of southern Belgium which had deemed by the French to be impassable for armies. This is despite France and Belgium being allies for 16 years and having been able to make military manoeuvres in the region. Whilst the exact focus was different between 1914 and 1940 in both cases the Germans came across the Belgian border into northern France. In 1914 it was the ability to move French armies quickly as the Germans approached Paris, just the fast mobility that Reynaud and De Gaulle sought in the 1930s, that had saved France with 'The Miracle of the Marne'. Yet the lesson was not learnt from that success nor was a lesson learnt from the direction of the 1914 invasion. It was appropriate to defend the industry of Alsace-Lorraine, but what about the industry of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais which was quickly swept up by the German invasion of 1940?

The failure to anticipate that, as in 1914, the Germans would come through Belgium and in the 1930s to have tested whether the Ardennes were the natural defence it was assumed, made the Maginot Line, even as it existed by June 1940, immediately obsolete. The Maginot Line held 36 divisions in 1940, a third of the French Army they faced 19 divisions of the Wehrmacht along their front. The ouvrages around Mauberge were effectively outflanked when the weaker defences along the Belgian border were overrun. Interesting the first break-through of the Maginot Line did not occur until 15th June, the day Paris fell to the Germans. The break through owed much to the rout of many French units which characterised the German advance into France. Weak sections such as at the Vosges could be broken, but in contrast the line at Wissembourg held. Part of the problem of the Maginot Line was in certain areas such as the Vosges, where there were only observation posts to summon forces rather than fortresses and along the Rhine, there was an over-dependences on the uplands and the river to do the work of defence for the French. This severely weakened the line and it was particularly in these areas that the Germans were able to penetrate.

Despite the flaws, the bulk of the ouvrages even those attacked from the rear held out and it was only the armistice signed on 22nd June which ended their defiance. The value of such modern fortresses was revealed again to be effective in 1944-5. This time the bulk of French ports, places like St. Nazaire, La Rochelle and Lorient held out under German occupation until May 1945 despite the liberation of Paris in August 1944. The Germans were as great fortress builders as the French as can still be seen along many locations on the French coast.

Let us assume, that perhaps France and Belgium could not come to an agreement in 1920 and the ambivalence between them seen after 1936 was apparent through the 1920s too. In such a context the expansion of the Maginot Line along the Belgian border would have been feasible. Given the innovation, such as the pop-up turrets that the Maginot Line introduced, it seems unlikely that French engineers would have been unable to resolve the issues of constructing defences along the Belgian border, after this was a region in which French military engineers had gained a great deal of experience 1914-18 and as can be seen even today sophisticated structures were constructed if predominantly on the German side. The Belgians may have felt uncomfortable with such defences along the border, but there is little they could do about it. In addition the Maginot Line was not like the Berlin Wall and the other border defences that were to separate the Communist bloc states from West Germany and Austria. Traffic still flowed across the Franco-German border before the outbreak of war. In addition, even though the French invasion of Germany in 1939 was pathetic it was in no way inhibited by the presence of the Maginot Line. So, an expansion of the line along the Belgian and Luxembourg borders with France would not have prevented French and particularly British forces penetrating into Belgium if this had been seen to be appropriate.

The border of France with Luxembourg is 73Km and France with Belgium 620Km compared to 450Km bordering with Germany; there was also a stretch of Maginot Line along the northern border of Switzerland. Thus, ironically the defence along the Belgian border would have been greater in length than that around Alsace-Lorraine. Given the way in which the Vosges was treated it seems likely that the line face the Ardennes would have been left weak too. This would have undermined the whole defence and it can easily be argued that despite the sophistication of the defences and the 3 billion Francs spent even on the Maginot Line we know, it was insufficient. Whilst a longer Maginot Line would have been a heavy burden on the French government expenditure it would have formed an even greater public works project and as rearmament in Germany reduced unemployment, work on the greater Maginot Line would have made an even larger contribution to stimulating the French economy through the workers it employed and the incomes they could spend. Notably it was a form of regional redevelopment that in our world brought benefit to the peripheral regions of the Alsace-Lorraine and Alpine France but could have brought this into the northern regions of France with their urban industrial areas that had suffered both between 1914-1918 and the Depression of the 1930s.

Of course, if the Ardennes had been weakly defended it would have formed an very narrow channel through which if not as impassable as the French had assumed, was far harder to progress through than the flat roads farther North. In fact the traffic jams of German military vehicles trying to get through in 1940 put them at immense risk. If the French bomber force had not been so dispersed and used so ineffectually, the attack through the Ardennes could have been easily stymied. Even observation posts and heavy artillery on railways behind the French frontier with the Ardennes let alone some ouvrages, would have severely delayed any advance this way.

The Maginot Line was never envisaged as blocking an advance entirely, simply slowing it up by 2-3 weeks to permit full mobilisation of France's forces. It was well designed in those regions with ouvrages for severely slowing the advance of tanks. This would have certainly have fouled up blitzkrieg. Much of the German victory in France came from the success of the speed of the advance in terrifying not only the French population but vital units of the French Army who fled South to avoid being surrounded. Interestingly the troops of the Maginot Line generally did not flee. Thus, we can easily envisage that British and French forces have advanced from behind the Maginot Line into Belgium but have been repelled and flee back behind the defences. This gives them breathing space to regroup and reinforce those units held in the Line's fortresses. Being much longer than in our world, perhaps as much as half of the French regular army is housed in these frontier fortresses.

The first difference is that unless Maginot Line fortresses surrendered, and the evidence suggests that even when surrounded they did not, then blitzkrieg would have ground to a halt. In some ways the situation would have been like the Lines of the Torres Vedras used by General Wellington during the Peninsular War, defences outside Lisbon against which French forces failed to penetrate and ultimately were compelled to withdraw. With modern supply lines the Germans would not have done that but all the tanks that had rushed from Germany would have ended up sitting in a killing zone pummelled by the guns of the ouvrages, the railway artillery behind and the bombers that the Germans could put into service. Of course, the Germans would not be passive and would use paratroopers and bombing raids to try to smash through. Break-throughs are likely to have been more narrow than happened when France was invaded in 1940 and would resemble much more those from the 1914-18 conflict. The question remains whether the French and British would be ready to react quickly enough to snuff out salients and paratrooper landings. Quite possibly given much of the disorder shown in 1940 in the face of the German invasion they might not have been able to do so.

Whilst blitzkrieg was an effective approach to waging war especially in western Europe, the belief in the power of blitzkrieg can be seen as having been more effective. The collapse of French forces so quickly in 1940 emphasises this. The over-stretched break-throughs could have been cut off if there had been a calm, organised response that proved to be lacking. In contrast as the experience of Maginot Line fortresses proved, engaging with the conflict on the basis that the French had developed to a high art by 1940, would have entirely shifted the balance. Yet, just where such a situation was needed, along the Belgian border it was largely lacking.

Ultimately the Maginot Line running along the Luxembourg and Belgium borders probably would not have prevented the conquest of France, but it would have altered the subsequent course of the war a great deal. Rather than those who felt that it had been a mistake to fight the Germans coming to the fore as they did both in occupied France and the Vichy regime area, there would have been greater pride that at least the advance had been halted and the time it bought would have been recognised as important. This would have meant a different attitude in the period 1940-45, especially when options such as the government relocating to Algeria were being considered in 1940. It would certainly have had an impact on the retreat of the BEF. At best the Germans would have penetrated through narrow slots and would not have had the opportunity to surround the British as effectively, particularly with islands of resistance in the ouvrages still held by the French. This would have allowed a more effective retreat by French forces and probably by the British so not leading to the abandonment of heavy weapons at Dunkirk, rather these being taken off in a more orderly way, perhaps from Le Havre, Cherbourg or Brest.

The biggest impact would have been on German war materiel. The tanks which invaded France were not the best quality, but the men inside them would go on later in the war to be among those who invaded the USSR and fought in North Africa, notably Rommel. If they had died in large numbers butting against the Maginot Line, the Germans would have been far less well staffed and equipped for their battles into those two theatres. Of course, the relative success of the Maginot Line may have led to faulty conclusions being drawn about the value of powerful static defences. Such an approach was impossible in the vast spaces of the USSR but maybe the British in Egypt would have moved to creating some kind of fortress line rather than engaging with mobile warfare to counteract the German advances in North Africa.

Unless the Franco-British response to paratroop drops behind the Maginot Line on the Belgian border had been entirely ineffectual, and of course there was a chance that they might have been, Hitler may have come to disregard the use of paratroopers as in our world he was to do following the invasion of Crete in 1941. The British learnt a very different lesson from Crete and ramped up the use of paratroops notably on Sicily, Arnhem and for D-Day, really only in the latter case can they be deemed to have succeeded. With the failure of German paratroopers to continue the success they had had in the Netherlands and Belgium once they came to trying to break the Maginot Line, subsequent uses, most notably on Crete may have never occurred. The attack on Crete might have been restricted to a seaborne invasion and this may have favoured a more successful defence by Greek and British forces.

When looking at the role of the Maginot Line in the history of the Second World War one cannot detach it from the difficulties with the mentality of the French elites in the 1930s. No defensive fortifications or tactics could work without the political will to make them work. Without such political will it would be unsurprising if, as happened in 1940, many ordinary soldiers could see no point in trying to put the tactics into effect. What is interesting is whilst the Maginot mentality seemed to hamper French commanders and politicians reflecting on different options for defending the country and ignoring those advocating a mobile defence based on tank units, the mentality did foster and esprit de corps among those manning the Maginot Line which meant morale remained higher and the units far more effective than among the standard infantry. The problem was that these units generally were not put to the test as they were by-passed and the armistice signed before most of them had faced combat.

Overall, whilst a greater Maginot Line may not have saved France from invasion, it certainly would have blunted the German advance providing opportunities both for the French and British. The slowing of the advance and the time and resources that the Germans would have had to expend to break the line would have been lost to Germany in terms of its subsequent battles and the war would have definitely unfolded differently.

Beginning To Live Like An Old Man

2011-10-11T08:00:00.002+01:00

Back in October 2007, when I turned 40, I noted that unlike the old saying 'life begins at 40', it seemed that the reverse was the case and you began to feel that your life was clearly running down towards its end: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/09/life-begins-to-end-at-40.html Almost three years on, my prophecy seems to have been borne out. In the last couple of months I have heard that officially 'middle age' runs from the age of 36 to the age of 59; after that you are 'elderly'. Thus, I have actually been middle aged longer than I had realised back in 2007. It also appears that, on average, from the age of 41 your body generally starts to deteriorate. This is no surprise really if you think that the average working man just a century ago had a life expectancy of 41 and a woman of 45. If I had been 43 in 1911, then I would be an old man in my community.

This analysis has reassured me. For the past year, if not longer, I have felt old. Now I know that that should not be surprising, because by the measures of when my mother's father (a man I knew in his 70s and 80s) was a boy (he was born in 1900), I am in fact an old man. There has been no sudden deterioration, but a steady accumulation of ailments (as opposed to diseases or even conditions) and with them a changed outlook on life. Of course, I have suffered from diabetes for over twenty years and that is accelerating the decay of my body, but there are other aspects which seem to stem simply from ageing. I think you can tell you are old when doctors say they can do nothing more for whatever mild condition you are suffering from.

Two years ago my left knee swelled up; it was blamed on me carrying too much shopping (I invested in a shopping trolley as a consequence, adding to my sense of ageing) and all the creams I was offered have had no effect. It is not painful, it is just still swollen and squidges when I kneel down. My joints, limbs and other parts of my body now ache even if I happen to run a short distance, something it is hard to avoid when you have a 9-year old boy living in your house; throwing a ball to him for 20 minutes left my right arm in pain the next day. Cycling now leaves me nauseous and dizzy; travelling on an aeroplane leaves one ear and the skull around it in pain and me with partial deafness for days afterwards. Driving about 200Km is enough to leave my hands and calves aching for days after. Even one quick session of sex, with my established partner, with me on top, leaves my chest and arms aching as if I have been pressed under heavy stones.

My digestive system has suffered most. I have become incredibly flatulent and also belch a great deal. In the past few weeks constipation has come to give me a variant from very loose bowels, often ringed by haemorroids and faeces so large that they jam the toilet (I have to keep plumber's equipment by the toilet; no domestic version will work). I have no appetite and very little taste, my tongue now being furrier by far than my head. This has helped me loose weight as I always feel full, which I guess has to be a plus, because apparently from 41 onwards you naturally begin to become heavier. Eating food is often not a pleasant experience, which is a shame as I used to really enjoy good food. Now I can get heartburn even before I have eaten a mouthful and it gets worse as the food goes down. I have been told this may be due to 'acid reflux' which means stomach acid now randomly decides to bubble up towards my throat. Often after a meal no matter how small, it feels as if someone has jammed a stake with the diameter the size of my palm, between my lungs and then out through my back. I had to abandon drinking coffee as doing so made swallowing every mouthful of food painful.

I guess a definition of old age is that you are no longer physically capable of doing the things you have always enjoyed, not least without paying the price in subsequent discomfort. Mentally I am less active too. My writing of fiction has dropped away severely as has my reading of any books. Partly this has been due to a sustained period of unemployment, but nothing seems to be able to stimulate my interest again, even having got a job. I struggle to concentrate to follow an 2-hour episode of 'Foyle's War'. I must say, however, that my manner has improved, I get far less grumpy with bad drivers, lost documents and my computer going wrong. That, however, may simply stem from the resignation of getting old: you know there is no point in getting angry as no-one will pay you any attention and you can change nothing. One consolation is that I have lost important things right throughout my life and this does not seem to have increased now I am getting older, so I can probably cope with this far better than people coming to it anew. My memory has deteriorated. I know that I was never good at remembering names, foreign words or martial arts moves, but now I am finding that I am mis-remembering things. Scenes I thought were in a particular movie turn out to be very different to how I remember them and buildings in very different places. I am fortunate that my current girlfriend is far more forgiving of these flaws than her predecessor who was angered if I forgot even the tiniest detail she had mentioned once in passing.

Above all, I am very tired. It goes beyond simply needing more sleep. Like many people, in the past, I hoped that I would live to a certain age and see certain things or achieve certain things in my life. However, now, I realise that if death came to me now and I had not read a particular book or had not visited a particular place then I would not feel disgruntled in the way I would have done a few days ago. I certainly understand now how people see death as a rest. However, I had a premonition that I will die aged 57, so I will have to hang around for a bit more yet, with more decay and ailments to put up with.

Other consolations for my physical and mental decay is that I am beginning to enjoy things that older people do. My parents, madly, have become far more active in their old age than when my age. My father now cycles 35-50 Km per week; my mother has joined a gym which she visits every week to work out in and walks 11 Km; they are both 73. However, I have found I am enjoying more leisurely pursuits. At the park with the 9-year old boy from my house, I found rather than playing with him, I got far more pleasure simply sitting on the bench and watching the activity around me. I did not need any other physical or mental activity to be content.

I accept that my medical condition has made my body older than my age would typically warrant. I do worry that given I feel as if I am twenty to thirty years older than I am, how bad will I feel when I am actually 65. It seems highly unlikely that I will be as active as my parents and in fact, by then, may simply be bedridden and ready for a nursing home. In some ways, though, in contrast to two or three years ago, my mind seems to have caught up with my body and that is a great relief. It would be incredibly frustrating if I still had the desire to travel or start up new things only to find my body was constantly complaining. I am glad I have found the contentment to fit with the age of my body and that now, I can quite happily sit and watch life go by.

What If The Industrial Revolution Had Never Taken Place?

2011-10-09T08:00:00.003+01:00

roughout history there have been a number of industrial revolutions. One that always interested me was that of the 12th century when the halter was invented allowing horses to pull ploughs, these cut deeper into the soil than the ploughs that oxen, who cannot wear halters, could pull. The wheelbarrow and the water wheel were other new technologies that helped the growth of ‘industry’ in the period. However, when you say ‘The Industrial Revolution’ most people assume you mean the period from about the 1780s to the 1830s though it can run on right through the Victorian period, summing up the vast growth in industrialisation and technologies through the 19th century. It can even be argued that with the almost unabated advancements through the 20th century that we are in a latter phase of the industrial revolution now. The focus on the fifty to eighty years from the 1780s is because even though newer technologies came in subsequently, notably the rapid growth of steam engines from the 1830s and the vast development of transport infrastructure, many of the principles of what we associate with industrialisation had been laid down in the preceding decades.

The key principles were associated with the factory system. The bringing together of hundreds of workers into buildings housing machinery, working to a rigidly fixed timetable, housed in the vicinity, were things that had not been seen before bar in very specific professions notably ship building, mining and in some cases armaments. The big change came with the introduction of the factory system for producing textiles. Previously this had been outsourced with agents going from village to village buying in textiles made by farm workers. Of course, that made for erratic production in terms of scheduling and quality and was not able to match the almost doubling of the population of Britain 1700-1800. Whilst by the end of the 19th century Britain had seen a move from water-powered machinery to that driven by steam engines and whole towns full of factories rather these located individually typically in river valleys, the principles of behaviour laid down at the start of the industrial revolution were now the basic patterns for the lives and employment of millions of people. In many ways they still shape our working lives today.

No matter how long we feel the industrial revolution persisted it is apparent that in the late 18th century saw an irreversible change in the British economy and society. Those living in towns rose from 20% in 1801 to over 50% by 1851 and around 65% by 1881. Not all of these people were factory workers, but we can deduce that by the 1850s more people were working in industrial manufacturing than in agriculture or handicrafts. Then, until 1974, when service sector employment in the UK first exceeded manufacturing, Britain was an industrial country. Britain famously was the first industrial nation, but by the mid to late 19th century industrial production was found across Europe; in North America, China and India. Industrialisation was always located in pockets in every country. Being small, it probably appeared as if Britain was more industrialised than larger countries, especially Russia and the USA, but like Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, there are regions of Britain that have not been touched by industrialisation or urbanisation even up to today. Britain benefited from its comparative small size and the fact that almost all regions could be reached by sea as well as overland. It was harder in countries with political fragmentation as in Germany and Italy until the 1860s, with more hostile terrain as in Spain and Italy or vast distances to cover between resources, factories and consumers as in Russia. It does seem possible, however, that even if Britain had not industrialised, the process would not have been halted even if it had been delayed and that we might see Saxony or the Prussian Rhineland as the first industrialised country/region.

Looking at this question we might see two strands: what if Britain had not undergone its industrial revolution and the one which I will focus on here which is what if the industrial revolution had not occurred at all. It seems possible that for various socio-economic reasons that Britain may have been slower to industrialise. However, it seems likely given what was already developing across Europe in terms of ‘proto-industry’ that assuming other states of Europe did not face the same difficulties then they would have industrialised and, as with peripheral states such as Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, at least some degree of industrialisation would have come to Britain, perhaps in the 1860s-70s, driven on by the approach of unified Germany. In some ways this may have been of benefit to Britain in the long run as by the late nineteenth century its lead had rather been spent, but the attitudes and approaches of industrialists that had brought its early success were left unchallenged, you could argue to the detriment of British industry in the 20th century.

What would have prevented an industrial revolution from occurring? One factor would have been the lack of the preceding agrarian revolution. In Britain a series of improvements in farming from the 1750s onwards not only increased food production which enabled a large urban population to be fed and reduced the numbers of people needed to work in farming but also drove people off the land in search of other employment. The creation of a labouring class cut off from their traditional work, to a greater extent than we have seen in developing countries in the 20th century where there can be seasonal rural-urban migration rather than this being permanent, but with sufficient cheap food available to feed them was vital for the establishment of the factory system. The technological gains that enabled millions of unskilled workers to be employed as simply machine minders, will be considered below.

Interestingly the agrarian revolution may have been slowed if the gentry and the aristocracy had less power. This may have come about if the monarch had owned more land directly or if the upper classes of 18th century England had been unable to enclose the arable open fields that made up 50% of Britain’s land. If, for example, rioting and violence which did occur dissuaded further enclosure, or if the late Stuart and Georgian royal courts had been more like those of France with an emphasis on art and luxury rather than efficient farming, then maybe this would not have occurred as actually happened in France so slowing rural-urban migration and increased agricultural production, some would argue, into the 20th century. While it can be seen as taking a view too far, it could be argued that the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, the coup which deposed King James II and replaced him with King William III & Mary II.

The control of the monarch by parliament as a result of the installation of William & Mary, plus their characters and that of the successive monarchs, Anne and the George I-III, owed more to Dutch and North German attitudes to behaviour and the role of booming merchant and gentry classes. The combination of Britain with the Netherlands a very ‘middle class’ state due to its urbanisation and its throwing off of Spanish control, was important for both in terms of developing modern mercantile behaviour such as the stock exchange and even consumerism. Whilst I have no desire to appear as a Whig historian, if Britain had retained a monarchical system or had monarchs, more like those of France, then perhaps Britain may not have moved towards agrarian changes (I do not want to term them all ‘improvements’ as for many people they result in the precise opposite) and the industrialisation this enabled.

We can envisage a very different approach if, say, James II had remained in power. He died in 1701; his son James lived until 1766 and his grandson, Charles, until 1788; his great-grandson until 1807. This with James III, Charles III and Henry IX ruling through the 18th century, one assumes, on an absolutist basis, then innovation could have been choked off. For this counter-factual which I have discussed before, the coup of 1688 would be defeated and not only its implications not imposed on the political system but perhaps reversed. Now, one could imagine that innovators in farming technology, especially those not of noble birth like Jethro Tull, William Coke, Arthur Young a

If Britain and other neighbouring states had not permitted or had no interest in the overhaul of farming, not only the concentration and enclosing of land but also the development of new crops in the 17th and 18th century, things like turnips, greater cultivation of potatoes, growth of red clover, even liquorice and selective breeding leading to better livestock production, might not have come about. If Viscount Townsend (in our wold nicknamed 'Turnip' Townsend) had been more concerned by how he was to impress his king at court with his sumptuous clothes and ornaments rather than increasing the yield from his farms through four-crop rotation, then, like France and much of Germany, we would have seen the continuation of farming that pretty much resembled that of the Middle Ages. Even enclosing may not have turned out in the most productive way. You only have to think of the latifundia of southern Italy, the haciendas of Spain, the large Junker estates of Prussia and their equivalent in Russia, to know that large farm holdings do not guarantee efficiency, especially if the land owner is an absentee. Large enclosed estates without reform in agricultural methods would have restricted the move to industrialisation as much as the maintenance of fragmented strip-farming approaches. It was the fact that the British had medium-sized farms and seemed to embrace new technology that began to increase food production significantly.

One prompt for increase output was the attempt to shut the British out of trade with continental Europe by Napoleon. This forced up prices in Britain and made it profitable for farmers to produce a surplus and to reinvest income back into better production. With Napoleon less successful in imposing the so-called ‘Continental System’ or more successful in conquering Britain then this impetus would not have come about. As noted above, even if it had done, then other pressures in British society, for example, the use of share cropping or prices fixed by the monarch, could have altered the impact, in those cases, probably leading to famine which would have done the opposite of what the agrarian revolution did, instead reducing the pool of labour that in our world would be taken up by the factories.

The restriction on innovation through a different culture among the elites and/or a need to buy a licence would not have been limited to agricultural changes, but also to those inventions that enabled mechanisation especially of textile production. Spinning and weaving had been limited to hand and foot operated machines. A spinner could work on a single bobbin at a time; a weaver had to thread the shuttlecock in between the different waft and weft threads and tamp the weaving down in order to produce a piece of cloth.

The invention of the spinning jenny by James Hargreaves in 1764, which began with eight spools but soon rose to 120 at once increased the amount of yarn a single individual to could produce. Based on work by Richard Arkwright who patented the water-powered spinning machine the water frame in 1769 and by Samuel Crompton on spinning machines in the 1770s, in 1825 Richard Roberts patented the spinning mule, by the 1890s each of these machines would have 1320 spindles. In 1779 John Kay introduced the flying shuttle that enabled the mechanisation of weaving with the patenting of Edmund Cartwright’s power loom in 1785. The men who invented these devices were businessmen but not nobles (Cartwright was a clergyman); they were able to patent and then sell their inventions without fear that someone would exploit them or suddenly ban the use of them. Imagine if Charles IV (assuming that Henry IX had become king rather than a cardinal and had a son) had responded to Ludditism (1811-16) by restricting the use of mechanised textile machinery so as to keep employment for skilled spinners and weavers alive.

Naturally there would be business people somewhere in Europe or America who would want to make use of these technologies, but if in addition to popular resistance, there had been established a culture as in China, that new technology was only introduced when the monarch said so and inventors faced punishment if they persisted or if culture had been as in Japan, looking down on the ‘merchant’ class as being well below even farm labourers, then even if people had thought of these inventions then they might have got no further than prototypes and certainly not adopted on the scale that was soon to prove the case; by the late 19th century there were 50 million spinning mules operating in Lancashire alone. Inventors may have found refuge in some court in Europe or in America, but unless the country had the established economic strength of Britain, which even by the early 18th century had an extensive overseas empire and was able to import cotton, the raw material that rapidly replaced wool, then it is unlikely these developments would have been more than a curiosity.

The first stage of the industrial revolution was literally powered by water. The factories developed in the late 18th century and early 19th century had machines driven by the flow of rivers. To some degree this combined apparently with a damper climate in Lancashire and Scotland which kept down the lint produced by textiles machines, was why the first British industrial areas were in the North of Britain which is hilly and has suitable valleys with the drop to provide the water flow. The use of water power was nothing new and dated back at least six centuries to a time when Paris had had over 200 water mills. Water, tide and windmills were part of the medieval industrial revolution. In particular, water mills with their constant availability of power had not only been used for grinding cereals but for fulling and operating forge hammers. Thus, the factories of the first phase of the industrial revolution were really this approach on a large scale with water-powered drive transmitted by belts to each machine.

Whilst steam engines were developed at the end of the 18th century, it was really not until the 1810s that they gained sufficient power and could be reduced in size to be used to drive factory machinery rather than for pumping water from mines. However, with break-throughs by Richard Trevethick in Britain and Oliver Evans in the USA steam engines advanced rapidly so permitting the explosion of railway building from the 1840s right through the nineteenth century in all countries not only those which were in the process of industrialising. Steam power in factories freed up the location of these away from river valleys and the construction of many more factories in close proximity. However, the investment in steam engines was up to four times higher per horsepower than with water power and especially small factories and those already using water-power were loath to change over. Boulton & Watt’s active protection of their patent, using low steam pressure also restricted some innovations. These are reasons for a gradual adoption. By 1838, however, water only provided 27% of the power in the textile industry. The development of steam powered trains meant the movement of the heavy resource notably coal and iron ore was made far easier as was the transportation of people over long distances. The advent of steamships from the 1810s onwards altered global trade as ships were able to sail no matter what the wind conditions and more accurately determine how long it would take to reach a destination, though they could still be hampered by storms, they could never be becalmed.

Again, these developments may have been hampered by a different socio-political pattern in Britain. After all, in China they had paper and gunpowder centuries before the West and yet by 1850 they were utterly lagging behind in technological development. Similarly Islamic states of the Middle East had been leading in sciences up until the Renaissance but by the 19th century had moved on little in a whole host of fields compared to the 16th century. Europe could have become stultified in much the same way, especially if there had been more restriction over inventors and entrepreneurs. The relative freedom that they enjoyed, notwithstanding patent protection, meant that new technology could not only be theorised and prototyped but customers for it among a growing class of industrialists could be found and exploited.

One great advantage for Britain and other states of North-West Europe was the access to coal and iron ore, the key components for any economy built on steam power. Those countries such as Italy, Spain and the Ottoman Empire which lacked such resources or those with large differences between these and the factories that needed them notably Russia though also, but to a lesser extent, the Austrian Empire and the USA, lagged. It was a quirk of geology that Britain had access to so much coal and sufficient iron ore to make the manufacturing of machinery and especially steam engines and ships, economical. The region of the so-called Lotharingian Axis running from northern Italy up through western Germany and eastern France out into Belgium benefited from access to coal and iron ore notably in the Ruhr, the Saarland, Lorraine and south Belgium. Along with Britain this was to be at the heart of mid to late 19th century industrialisation. Industrialisation in North-East USA similarly benefited from the relative proximity of such raw materials to the growing East coast cities.

Imagine if coal and iron ore had not been located in these regions but in very mountainous regions or so far out under the sea as not to be feasibly reachable from land or had been far deeper under the ground making it impossible to access with the technology available in the early 19th century. The world could easily have had more coal and iron ore than it actually did, but if rather than in Europe, a lot of it had been in the high Alps, just in southern Russia, beyond the Arctic Circle, in the Atlas Mountains, the Sahara Desert or the jungles of Central Africa, then we would be in a chicken-and-egg situation with the technology needed to access these resources not available because development to provide such facilities would not have come about.

Assuming that either socio-political restrictions and/or a lack of easily accessible industrial materials had stymied the industrial revolution not only in Britain but across Europe, how different would the world have become 260 years on from when the agrarian revolution did not start or 180 years from when the first industrial revolution was not followed up by the era of steam power? We can look to a couple of examples, China and Japan of the mid-19th century. These were societies in which technology had remained much as it had done one to two hundred years previously. However, once exposed to new technologies, Japan modernised incredibly quickly to the extent that it beat China in a war in 1895 and Russia in 1905. China did not progress in this way and industrialisation tended to be from factories and railways built by European powers and the USA rather than the Chinese themselves. This shows how strong socio-political factors can be in preventing technological change even when innovations are available.

Without the industrial revolution, in many ways Britain and its neighbours, the USA as well, would have continued to look like what they did in the 1780s. Even without the agrarian revolution, even with limits on new technologies, almost everything was in place for textile factories before the mid-18th century. The spinning jenny and the power loom could have been developed by people in the 1680s if not before. Of course, though this would have increased production but factories would have been confined to locations with suitable water courses.

Unless there were the farming innovations then there would not have been the ability to release people from the land or to feed them when they worked in factories. Of course, there is a good chance that enclosures would have gone ahead even without better farming techniques. This would have led to a situation similar to what happened in southern Italy, Russia and Sweden, a pressure to emigrate. People in Britain especially, but also parts of Germany rather than going to work in factories in cities would have left for the Americas to continue as farm workers there. There is a good chance that the population would have not risen so fast. In our world the population of Britain rose from 22 million in 1801 to 40 million by 1901 and to 58 million in 2001. France had a population of 28 million in 1801 but 38 million by 1901 and 53 million in 2001; the more rural country had a slower population growth. If we looked at Japan in the 18th century, we can see an almost zero increase in population primarily due to famines there were 20 'great' famines 1645-1837 and many lesser ones. Now ,industrialisation was not necessarily a benefit to people in terms of longevity as they were exposed to industrial illnesses, contaminated water and adulterated food. However, the scientific advances that accompanied industrialisation began combating many illnesses.

It is an interesting question, whether, without industrialisation science would have advanced as fast as it did. In the 18th century there had been numerous discoveries and it seems that this would not have halted. However, if we are envisaging a society less hospitable to innovation then science may have lagged compared to our world too. In addition, without the pressures of mushrooming urban areas and the ability of scientists to keep in contact and to travel hampered then maybe the advances would have been slower. Perhaps we would have only seen the population of Britain continue to rise in the 19th century as fast as it had done in the 18th so reaching only 33 million by 1901 and maybe only 44 million today. If, however, agriculture had not advanced, then maybe there would have been a slow in the growth as people found food expensive and starvation remained a common occurrence. You only have to look at the Irish potato famine of the mid-19th century and the famines that China experienced in the 19th and 20th centuries. Such trends in Britain and neighbouring states again would have prompted greater emigration, primarily, I imagine, to the Americas. Remember that it was not only the USA but also Brazil and Argentina which had mass immigration from those countries with over-population, notably Ireland and Italy, but also Germany and Sweden.

It seems certain that even if the population was not significantly smaller, and perhaps in Britain it could now be two-thirds or less of what the figure is in our world, the countries of Europe would certainly be less urbanised. I imagined the urban living percentage would have risen from 20% of 1801 but probably not up to the 80% that it is now. Without the vast structures based on cast iron which we associate with Victorian Britain, the towns and cities would look different. Naturally there would be a shift in styles, but buildings like St. Paul's Cathedral in London would be the largest that they grew. London's skyline would be far lower; certainly no Tower Bridge and none of the skyscrapers that you see today. Other cities around the world would see even greater differences, no Eifel Tower and none of the vast multi-storey buildings of New York. There would be nothing like the Clifton Suspension Bridge or the other great rail and road bridges that were built in the 19th century. Though the overall population would be smaller, cities would probably be spread out more, perhaps in Europe and North America resembling those of south Asia and Latin America in our world, with large slum/shanty town areas. London might have a tenth of the population it has in our world but might cover much the same area, as with no refrigeration and poor transport links more food would have to be grown in and around the city and market gardening would dominate the Thames Valley. Similar developments rather than ribbon industrial growth would be found around cities across Europe, they would look more like Berlin though with surrounding agrarian areas like Paris.

Without industrialisation travel would be far harder. The fast vehicle would be a horse or a sailing ship. Horse-drawn canal boats would be in place of the juggernauts on the motorways and the post carriage would be the coach service. People would move around for work and migration, but there would be no commuting. More people would be involved in farming just because it would be less efficient than it is in our world and certainly there would be no tractors, probably no fertilisers (the result of the 'third' stage of the industrial revolution in chemicals and electricals from the 1880s) and certainly no GM crops. The fastest form of communication would remain the post carriage unless we had adopted the semaphore signalling towers favoured in 'Pavane' (1968) though I could hardly see them being used for private messages.

The countries of Europe would have well-established cities and probably newer ones. London had 959,000 people in 1801, 1.65 million in 1831 and 2.363 million by 1851 with industrialisation in full flow, so I guess in 2011 of this alternate world it would be somewhere between the 1831 and 1851 figures of our world. Whilst there would be imports of luxury foods and items from around the world, they would not impact on the lives of most people. Diet would depend more on seasonal foods and without refrigeration or canning you would have to eat it pretty quickly. There would be a form of consumerism as there was as far back as 17th century Netherlands but not the mass consumption that we know today and especially certainly of items from outside Britain. Unlike today and probably bar some factory produced textiles most things would be hand made even if 'production line' techniques had come into water-powered factories. We would all own fewer clothes, they would be more robust, fashions, bar for the very wealthy, would not change rapidly. It is possible that you would have the kind of ornamentation we see in the Georgian world, though I guess at times there would have been Puritan style backlashes against such decadence.

Given that by 1801 whilst Britain had been expelled from the Thirteen Colonies it retained Canada, islands in the Caribbean, British Guyana in South America, the Gambia in Africa and of course India, though in the hands of a private company rather than the government and would soon be taking over the Cape Colony from the Dutch, it appears that colonialism was already set in place. Given what I have noted about population pressure even in countries which experienced it less than they did in our world, emigration and settlement in colonies is likely to have occurred far more than was the case. This is likely to have caused problems in the long run. The white population of South Africa is 4.5 million people, 9% of the population and it seems feasible with no industrial revolution that that figure would have become higher. Other countries would have seen similar issues, notably France if more French had moved to Algeria and Indonesia. Of course, many of these locations would have been far less accessible to colonial powers without technologies developed throughout the 19th century.

Steamships, refrigeration, canning, vaccinations, railways even the machine gun were seen as vital for penetrating especially tropical regions. Thus, whilst the veldt of South Africa is still likely to have been exploited, it seems unlikely that the Congo would have emerged as a colony and the French may have been restricted to the coast of Indochina and the Dutch to various ports across Indonesia. Connection between the colonies and the metropolitan country would be seasonal and erratic. In addition, when encountering countries that would later become 'informal' imperialist locations, i.e. open to commerical exploitation but not settlement, notably the Ottoman Empire, China, Japan and the states of Latin America, there would not be the technology imbalance that allowed 'gunboat' diplomacy certainly from the 1840s onwards. The Chinese Empire and Shogunate Japan could have resisted interventions by British, French and Americans if their technology remained that of 1750.

It seems very likely that imperialism would have been a feature of the non-industrial world, but on a different basis to what we saw in our world. Other political trends might have still occurred even if slowed down. It seems likely that steadily Germany and Italy would have united but this may have been slower with less ability for groups to meet and communicate without trains and the telegraph. However, saying this, Napoleon was able to reorganise both countries without these technologies. Other tensions, for example, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the tension between the North and South in the USA are likely to have remained. Of course, without technology of the later 19th century it is very likely that the USA would have expanded far slower especially into the interior. It seems very feasible that you would have had separate East and West coast states. The Amerindians would have been constantly pressed back but without the ferocity that came with railways, telegraphy and repeating rifles. The population flowing into the Americas would have been greater but communication would have been focused on the rivers rather than burgeoning railway links. It seems very likely that New Orleans would be the gateway to an American state based on the Mississippi whether that belonged to the Spanish or the French. It would, however, be difficult to link it to the Eastern state however much they may have wanted it.

The history of North America is liable to have been very different when the 1860s were reached. Perhaps without industrialisation, the economic arguments for the continuation of slavery would have seemed stronger (not simply in the USA but in Russia which retained serfdom until 1861, too). In addition, with weaker transport links the tendency of states that wanted to break away would have been much easier. The American Civil War can be seen as one of the first industrial wars in which railways, ironclad battleships, submarines, land and sea mines, machine guns and modern artillery, even the use of trenches, foreshadowed the First World War. Reduced to horse-borne supplies and armies, sailing ships and flintlock rifles, the war is likely to have gone on longer and would have been less imbalanced towards the industrialised North.

One interesting thing is the difference in culture. We would not have the mass culture that we have today. The closest would be popular novels. However, assuming no mass urbanisation there might be no move toward universal education and illiteracy in western Europe and the USA is liable to have been as high as it was in Russia at the start of the 20th century; in 1897 it was 72% and even in 1913 it was 60%; higher among women than men. Saying this, however, in the capital city of Japan, Edo (population 1 million) in the mid-19th century illiteracy was reckoned to be as low as 20%. It seems likely that without the advent of technological entertainments such as the cinema, radio and television and the poorer distribution of books, that we would have witnessed culture of the kind we saw in the 18th century. It is fascinating to consider what novels, plays and music may have been produced in such a circumstance. Work may have become rigid and stylised in the way it did in China and Japan during the centuries when their societies were not evolving very much. It seems that you need change in society in order to stimulate new directions in culture. Saying this, though, perhaps ideas and their exchange would have been much more active. If you compare how politically vibrant 18th century Europe was compared to today, with politics involving all classes in different ways, you can imagine that debates and pamphlets would be numerous and engagement with politics active certainly among the literate and when times bit, on the mass of the population too.

Overall, it seems quite feasible that an industrial revolution might not have come about. In 2011 of this alternate world I would probably be writing a political or fantastical pamphlet by oil lamp light in a house heated by open fires and with small window panes. I might be unable to read and be in a hovel passing my time before I awoke to try and get some labouring work or to try to tame some part of the North American plains. There would be fewer cities, a lot less pollution and probably a much shorter life for most. We would wear hand-crafted clothes or, if lucky, something from one of the water powered factories of Lancashire or New York made to a uniform design, finer than homespun and brought to the nearby town by canal boat or waggon. Certainly, I would know that any of my children who made it passed infancy would face a hard life unprotected by any social welfare, competing with the ever-growing population, for work and food to survive through the regular famines probably only to be struck down by cholera, diptheria or scarlet fever. There would still be parts of the world only explored by a few Europeans and the maps would still retain unknown areas in the interiors of the great continents. We might fear another conflict with the Chinese imperial forces seeking to snatch our colonies in Asia and even the coast of Africa. A hard life but one of clean air.nd William Cobbett, might have not only received any attention, but perhaps would have been restricted from promoting their ideas. Perhaps you would have to apply to the king to introduce any farming innovation, or, in fact, any invention and would not be able to use it without a licence. If you think of the attitude of the system of China or even France, plus what we know about Charles I seeking any way to raise funds, it does not seem like an extreme proposition. One could envisage these innovators heading towards the Netherlands or America rather than bringing a series of changes to British farming.