Books I Listened To/Read In February

Fiction
'Siege of Heaven' by Tom Harper
This book covers the same phase of history, the 1st Crusade from after the fall of Antioch to the fall of Jerusalem that was covered by 'Prince of Legend' (2013) by Jack Ludlow, also the third book a trilogy: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-books-i-listened-toread-in-june.html However, in terms of quality Harper's book is in a completely higher league. Ludlow featured no real characters whereas Harper's story is from the perspective of Demetrios Askiates, a representative of the Byzantine Emperor travelling with the crusade, his friends and ultimately members of his family. Thus, while we see the same sieges and the same arguments among the crusaders we can engage with them far better than in Ludlow's book, which read as if a history text book had been simply transposed. Askiates has adventures, even travelling to Egypt and coming into scrapes with the leaders both military and religious, of the crusade. These come at a personal cost, so as with the best historical dramas, we see both the big and the small, sparking off each other. Harper has very good descriptions of, for example, pushing a siege tower and the streets of Antioch and Jerusalem, you feel much more that you are there rather than flying over it all. I am tempted to go back and find the previous two books and certainly if I see any other books by Harper, I will pick them up. The book might not be outstanding, but it is entertaining, and importantly for a historical novel, engaging on a personal level rather than like reading a decent textbook.

'The Death of Faith' by Donna Leon
This novel, the sixth in the Brunetti series is not as strong as the previous one, 'Acqua Alta' (1996) which I read in December: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/12/books-i-read-in-december.html  However, this is not on the basis on which it has been attacked by some readers who are resentful of its portrayal of Catholic institutions and by the way forgetting that this book, published in 1997, predated 'The Da Vinci Code' (2003). It also predates all the public revelations about paedophilia in the Catholic Church which actually make aspects of this book even more believable than back when it was published.

I feel that the characters, while possibly uncomfortable for co-religionists are realistic. The problem is that the book lacks the dynamic of its predecessor. The first half of the book is really just a sequence of interviews by Guido Brunetti that vary very little in nature. Added to that, the crime is not really a crime, but ironically triggers criminal activity. Having read the work of Leonardo Sciscia and Michael Dibdin, I know a time comes when any crime novelist setting stories in Italy has to face the power of the church in that society. However, while some critics feel Leon has gone too far and relied on stereotypes, for me she baulks at the last and lays the blame firmly on an individual rather than on the institution that permits the behaviours she highlights in the novel. In some ways I admire Leon from not feeling compelled to adhere to a standard resolution of the crime, something I always liked in Sciscia's work. However, I feel she held her hand rather than pressing right in, perhaps for fear of a more stronger antipathy to her books from Catholic supporters than has proven the case anyway.

'Guardians of Time' by Poul Anderson
This is in fact four short stories that Anderson published in 1955-60 featuring an American veteran from the 1950s, Manse Everard, who is recruited by very powerful people from the distant future to work in fighting back against those trying to alter our known history. This gives Anderson a chance not simply to highlight lesser known parts of world history but also ask moral questions about the right to tinker with the universe and who makes the decision over what is 'right'. In the first story he investigates radioactive material that has turned up in the 6th Century in part of England controlled by the Jutes in an attempt to prevent the start of what in the 1950s were called the Dark Ages. He also gets drawn into trying to stop a fellow guardian seeking to spare the life of his wife during the Second World War.

In the second story one of the guardians has accidentally ended up becoming Cyrus II of Persia in the 6th Century BCE. Everard not only has to rescue him but also find a suitable replacement. In the third story he works to prevent Mongol and Chinese explorers effectively taking over 13th Century North America before the Europeans arrive in large numbers. This leads him to question whether the USA he knows was the correct path for the continent. The final story has Everard going into battle to prevent people from the future overseeing a victory by Hannibal in the Second Punic War which leads to a Europe and North America dominated by Celtic peoples and a slower development in technology so there are still steam cars in the mid-20th Century.

While it has the earnestness of 1950s science fiction and very easy to use devices for both time travel and moving around in the past, the stories are not simplistic. It is also interesting that Anderson highlights alternatives that even now tend not to be explored very much in all the writing focused on the American Civil War and Second World War. For anyone interested in alternate history, I suggest this book. My edition only had 160 pages, so it is a quick read too, but packs a lot of ideas in.

'Masaryk Station' by David Downing
This is the final book in Downing's 'Station' series and takes events forward to 1948. I was given these books but there is a reasonable chance I would have bought them anyway. However, I would have done this on the basis of being misinformed. There are some small elements of thriller and spy story in these books, but primarily they are just 'slice of life' novels about people living in Berlin through 1939-48. Almost as soon as an adventurous element arises, Downing snuffs it out. We have a little bit in this book with the hero John Russell looking at how former Nazi collaborators are being smuggled out of Yugoslavia and getting a blackmail film from Czechoslovakia. However, repeatedly, Downing backs up from real jeopardy. He also dodges around important historical events. The coup in Czechoslovakia is over before this book starts and the Berlin Blockade occurs after the book finishes. Downing's obsession throughout has really been to provide a sporadic travelogue of Berlin and some other Central European cities in the mid-20th Century. The novels are very fragmented and real points of tension simply dodged. I had expected a very different book to this, something much more like the work of Philip Kerr and Alan Furst who Downing is wrongly likened to. I admire his research for these books, but they are really just vignettes bundled together lacking in clear direction and certainly in adventure even when there seems to be ample opportunity in the context he uses, for it. If you are looking for details of Berlin around the Second World War then this is fine. If you are looking for a follow-on to Kerr's and Furst's work, look elsewhere.

Non-Fiction
'How to Write Alternate History' by Grey Wolf
This book published in 2013, should not be confused with the 2019 book of the same name edited by Andy Cooke, though their approach is very similar. Wolf's book is a series of blog postings that have been made into chapters. This means that the book is brisk, but I did miss connecting narrative between the chapters and an overarching conclusion. The approach also leads to some repetition as Grey highlights the same aspect more than once in the context of different chapters. Rather than giving a structured masterclass in writing alternate fiction, Wolf, provides a series of prompts and encourages the author to think about things that are often neglected in alternate history fiction such as architecture and music as well as things such as common names and whether the technology available has also been disrupted by the divergence from our history, e.g. a political divergence might alter railway building. Grey is good on the importance of characters in alternate history, which surprisingly, is something that recently I have found have been absent not just from alternate history but even straight historical fiction I have read. Overall, I do not think this book will enable you to write alternate history fiction if you have not already been thinking through it, but for authors of the genre I think it provides a useful checklist of reminders of things not to overlook.

'The Edwardian Crisis, Britain 1901-1914' by David Powell
This is a brisk book that clinically highlights all the different elements of crisis that the UK faced in the 20th Century before the outbreak of the First World War including the cost of living, constitutional, female suffrage, labour unrest and conflict over Irish independence. He tones down the more excited portrayals as these occurrences and while he does consider how much worse things could have turned out, he certainly keeps to sober analysis. It does take some of the 'wind' out of the sense of crisis, but on the other hand it challenges the surprisingly resilient popular view that these years were some kind of golden twilight before the very modern horrors of the First World War. At times you feel he could give more details, but this is largely an analytical book rather than an account, so he steps in with detail when it adds weight to the points he is addressing rather than to bulk out the book. The book is also very good at looking inside political parties and the various movements, especially connected to female suffrage and the Irish question, highlighting that there was never a single viewpoint. Over all this is a very useful book if you want to look at what was actually happening in the UK at this time and also how much worse it could have been.

Audio Books - Fiction
'Bloodline' by Mark Billingham; read by Robert Glenister
Having finally waded my way out of listening to 'Death of a Charming Man': http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/01/books-i-readlistened-to-in-january.html I have been able to get into more audio books this month. I had been hesitant to return to Mark Billingham's work following listened to 'Death Message' (2007) which because the detective uses a serial killer to murder someone he feels has escaped justice, I found morally unsound. However, I had already bought this audio book so turned to listen to it. Though it features a serial killer, son of a serial killer, it is less morally dubious. It has the grittiness that Billingham does well though some of the regular characters, especially pierced, gay pathologist are almost turning into caricatures. Billingham balances the tension in seeking down the killer who is active across Britain with the 'hero' Tom Thorne dealing with his girlfriend's miscarriage. The book, published in 2009, feels modern and appropriate. Glenister voices not just Thorne excellently but also provides a good range of voices for both the female and male characters. This book has a very good twist and I certainly think the book was an improvement on 'Death Message'. However, given my concerns about Billingham's moral compass in his writing I will not be buying any more of his books.

Audio Books - Non-Fiction
'Dear Me' by Peter Ustinov; read by the Author
I got know Ustinov from movies such as 'One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing' (1975) - which unsurprisingly given that (von) Ustinov of German-Russian extraction plays a Chinese in it now has 'racist' appended to its search terms and 'Death on the Nile' (1978) in which he plays a Belgian, does not. He was a regular on chat shows which is where he probably came most into his own as a raconteur. This autobiography was published in 1977 and tails off about 1972, so covers his life before I was really aware of him. I have seen 'Topkapi' (1964) and 'Spartacus' (1960) - though was not conscious he was in it - from that period. However, a lot of the movies, let alone the stage productions he was in or had written were unknown to me.

The book, at times, has Ustinov speaking to himself as a dialogue between different facets of himself which comes out very well in an audio book. The story of his life which was international throughout and involved lots of eccentric people is witty and interesting, showing up the petty madnesses of school, the military and performance. I had not been aware that he had been married three times and his first two marriages, the first when he was 19, seem to have been unpleasant. Those aspects offer a bitter element which sets off the rather rollicking nature of some of the other parts. Overall, while I might have found this book interesting to read, it certainly works best as an audio book as it is like sitting down and listening to a rather peculiar old uncle speaking of his life. I do not know if there is an equivalent for the latter part of his life - he lived until 2004 - but if there is I would buy it as an audio book too.

The Great Unrest 1910-11. Part 1: Introduction

About seven years ago I became interested in the widespread strikes and numerous riots, known at the time as 'The Great Unrest' which occurred in the UK in the years before the First World War. Most people know of the difficulties faced by the Liberal Government of that era in dealing with the campaigns for women's suffrage and for Irish independence. However, the industrial unrest and the numerous riots which occurred at the same time, and were often related to the strikes, are far less well known. The extent that these events have been forgotten was revealed to me in when I was a regular contributor to the BBC 'what if?' message boards. When I wrote about the period of serious unrest across the UK especially 1910-11, people accused me of having made it up and asked, that given they were knowledgeable about history, why they had not heard of these events. I can only think the reason is because the image of a 'golden era' before the First World War is still pandered to. In the long run women won the vote and most of Ireland achieved independence so this upheaval can be seen as leading to an advancement of the liberal British state, very much in the Whig history pattern. However, the issues of the industrial unrest, provoked in part by conspicuous consumption and falling real wages, of the kind we are seeing currently, was an unresolved situation. For an introduction to 'The Great Unrest' I always advise people to read 'The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901-1914' by David Powell (1996) which also covers the Irish and female suffrage issues too. You can find a lot on the labour unrest of the period on local history websites about what happened in this period in particular towns; especially prominent were the events of South Wales, Liverpool and Hull.

Anyway, I decided to write a proper article on the unrest, looking at how the government responded to it. Partly this was because I had believed the myths that I had heard that Winston Churchill as a Liberal and Home Secretary at the time had ordered the shooting of striking coal miners. As I investigated, I found a very different picture to what I had expected and in fact heroes of mine in the labour movement came out of it in quite a bad light and stirring up trouble which led to the riots. There was an assumption by many labour leaders that workers had a legitimate right to riot and be violent, though in fact the people who suffered most in those riots were generally other ordinary people. This was connected to something else that annoyed me which was that many of the books had been written in the mid-1980s and were heavily influenced by the events of the Thatcher regime and especially in the governmental response to the Miners' Strike 1984-5. It annoyed me that these authors had not been able to be more objective and had let contemporary politics influence their analysis of the past.

To produce the article I spent months going to the National Archives at Kew in London and reading all the files from the time. I also read everything I could that has been written on the events. I produced the article with full academic footnoting of a British style. I tried to get my finished article published both in the UK and in the USA. The Americans thought my article was too parochial. The British felt it was not sufficiently analytical or they disliked me challenging the established 1980s perspective on the events or did not find the government policy aspect interesting. I did think of posting it on online history websites but the ones that seemed interested in this kind of topic seem to be hosted by extreme left-wing groups and they always want a particular language and perspective. I imagine they support a worker's right to riot and so would be unhappy with my conclusions and also the fact that I show that a lot of the rioting had nothing to do with the strikes occurring at the same time and was usually carried out by people unconnected with the striking industry. My views of the actions of the Army which seemed surprisingly measured would also not go down well in such contexts.

So, as a result, if you are interested in reading what went on in Britain 1910-11 to the extent that King George V feared he would ousted, I am going to post the article over a number of postings. I produced many various versions trying to appeal to different magazines and have picked the best from each. Rather than keep it as the integral articles I wrote, I am doing it as episodes looking at different features, for example, the establishment of government policy, the unrest in South Wales, the Liverpool General Strike, etc. The numbers refer to the pages in books, articles and government documents which I referred to and these are listed at the end of each posting.

This section is the introduction to the article and gives information about the level of strikes occurring at the time.

‘Cossack Action of the Tsar Liberals’?: the British Government’s Response to Strikes and Riots 1910-11

Introduction
This article explores the consequences of the juxtaposition of two trends in British politics and society in the years preceding the First World War. The first is the rise in violent unrest related to industrial action, particularly in the 1910s. This is set against the continuity in governmental policy, from the 1890s to the 1910s, towards serious industrial unrest despite the increasingly severe nature of the upheaval. The strikes and their associated riots led many to perceive a slide towards revolution or civil war. The apparently dire nature of the ‘Great Unrest’ meant that, whilst remaining with the framework for action that had been well established, exceptional responses were felt to be both necessary and justified in these particular circumstances.[1] However, despite the fact that many in the labour movement opportunistically used the rioting to exclaim virulent class-war rhetoric, in fact the riots had little to do with the strikes which in themselves were focused on bread-and-butter gains for workers.

Whatever the true nature of the strikes and the riots the government still faced a challenge in tackling their impact on the public. A study of the practical difficulties in dealing with this challenge forms the core of this article. Whilst the role of Winston Churchill as Home Secretary has been rehabilitated, a harsh attitude towards the application of the government’s policy on the ground remains unchallenged. This article challenges the view that became established in the 1980s, that there was a sharp break around 1910-12 to the approach to responding to strike-related riots is challenged. This article also explores, in an overarching way, the often neglected aspects of the upheaval such as the racial violence, the hostility to ‘imported’ police and the difficulties faced by local authorities. Finally the article outlines the overlooked area of how the experience of the immediate pre-war years shaped preparations for the anticipated wartime unrest.

Background: A Peak of Unrest
Unrest in the 1910s is seen as reaching a peak unmatched since the 1840s. Strikes rose from 389 in 1908, seen as a year of recession, to 872 in 1911 and 1459 in 1913. The scale of the strikes increased too. In 1909 only 170,000 British workers had struck, in 1911 the figure was 831,000 and the following year 1.23 million. The numbers of workers in a particular industry involved in the disputes was also high, 91 percent of transport workers and 62 percent of miners participated in the strikes between 1910-13. The scale of strikes grew away from locally-focused disputes, as shown by the first national rail strike in 1911 and the first national coal strike in 1912.[2]

Explanations for the upheaval vary, but there are a number of core occurrences which may help provide an answer. The period 1911-1914 had the lowest unemployment since 1901. It was 3 percent in 1911 compared to 7.8 percent just three years before, thus, workers felt themselves in a stronger position as there were fewer unemployed to draw on to work as blackleg labour.. However, real wages were not rising and up to a third of the population was on or below the poverty line. This impacted on living conditions, the infant mortality rate in 1914 being 139 per 1000 births, seven times the level today. Almost a third of men who volunteered for the Army in 1909-10 were rejected on grounds of ill-health.[3]

Historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Friedhelm Boll and James Cronin portray the outbreak of unrest as matching a pattern of strike waves that had occurred throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Such peaks were associated with growth in trade unionism. British trade union membership was rising in the years before and during this peak of unrest.. It climbed 60 percent 1910-14 and the growth was particularly strong among transport workers and general labourers. There were 2.02 million trade unionists in 1900 but 4.15 million by 1914.[4]

Cronin highlights that, despite the stronger opposition from the employers, there had been a qualitative break-through in the way the unions organised themselves. Ironically the problem was viewed by ministers such as Sydney Buxton, the President of the Board of Trade, as being that union leaders had lost control over their rank-and-file members. Key grievances included non-recognition of even well-established unions by employers and the fact that in a time of conspicuous prosperity for the middle and upper classes real wages for workers were falling.[5] As discussed below, there was a widespread perception that the unrest had political objectives, but as Powell importantly notes though the break down of relations in a number of industries did threaten disruption, the strikes themselves were concerned ‘with specific grievances rather than with more millenarian ideas’. The TUC favoured co-operation over confrontation and even the Triple Alliance, formed in 1914, was seen as a method of maintaining industrial discipline rather than for syndicalist or other political goals.[6]

One key change was how involved the government was becoming in industrial disputes. Lloyd George in fact felt that the period if strikes and lockouts should be over and saw the future in a corporatist approach to disputes. In contrast the unrest drew the government ‘willy nilly into industrial conflicts’ facing it with embarrassing challenges. Whilst the Liberals’ social and industrial agenda have been portrayed as being ‘patchwork’, divorced from an overarching philosophy, the government had passed social welfare legislation covering a range of aspects from workmen’s compensation, an eight-hour day for miners and the creation of trade boards. In 1911 this was followed by the Health Insurance Act. This legislation, though aimed at benefiting workers meant that the government had had to have an interest in the industries covered by these laws.[7] This particularly applied increasingly to conciliation.

In 1896, the Conservative Government had passed the Conciliation Act to encourage boards of conciliation and by 1913 there were 325. Ronald Sires argues these enabled greater government intervention. Though voluntary conciliation remained the most popular approach, the government found itself drawn into strikes which impinged on the national infrastructure, such as in the transport and coal mining sectors. Seeing its role as protecting the nation’s economy, the government intervened to get talks established for the rail industry in 1907 and 1911 and in the national coal strike of 1912.[8] One can see a number of factors combining to provoke industrial unrest. However, this does not explain the level of violence seen during the strikes that broke out in 1910-3 and there were other aspects that have to be considered to obtain an overall picture of the volatile state of parts of British society at the time. It had been the government’s choice to become involved in encouraging conciliation between the sides in disputes, but it also faced a stronger, older, imperative in safeguarding law and order in the face of unrest.

References
[1] Anthony Babington, Military Intervention in Britain from the Gordon Riots to the Gibraltar Incident, (London, 1990), p. 142. Despite popular complaint about the imposition of ‘martial law’, the government's law officers stated that action by troops in suppressing riots was what was legally expected of all citizens in standard peacetime circumstances.
[2] James E. Cronin, ‘Strikes and the Struggle for Union Organization: Britain and Europe’ in Wolfgang J. Mommsen & Hans-Gerhard Husung, ed., The Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany, 1880-1914, (Boston, 1985), p. 56; Friedhelm Boll, ‘International Strike Waves: a Critical Assessment’ in Mommsen & Husung, p. 89.
[3] Henry Pelling, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain, (New York, 1979), pp. 149-151. Despite the title of the book it includes a chapter ‘The Labour Unrest 1911-14’; Noel Whiteside, ‘The British Population at War’ in John Turner, ed., Britain and the First World War, (Winchester, Massachusetts, 1988), pp. 86-7; Parliamentary Paper, Cd. 5477, ‘Report on the Health of the Army for the year 1909’, no. LI, p. 1 and Parliamentary Paper, Cd. 5599, ‘Report on the Health of the Army for the year 1910’, no. LII, p. 1, both collected in Parliamentary Papers. Accounts and Papers, 1911. Vol. XLVII (3).
[4] Cronin, p. 62; Boll, p. 83; Steve Peak, Troops in Strikes. Military Intervention in Industrial Disputes, (London, 1984), p.27.
[5] Cronin, pp. 65-6.
[6] David Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901-1914, (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 127-8.
[7] Michael Bentley, Politics without Democracy, 1815-1914, (London, 1996), p. 324; Alun Howkins, ‘Edwardian Liberalism and Industrial Unrest: a Class View of the Decline of Liberalism’, History Workshop, vol. 4, (1977), p. 157; G.R. Searle, The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration 1886-1929, (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 94, 99; George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, (London, 1966), pp. 186-7.
[8] Powell, p. 124; Ronald V. Sires, ‘Labour Unrest in England 1910-1914’, in Journal of Economic History, vol. XV, no. 3 (1955), pp. 255-6, 264.