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London Calling

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Part 1: Welcome to Seven Dials

This review has taken me a while to write. Matt Houlbrook’s Songs of Seven Dials: An intimate history of 1920s and 1930s London turns out to be so rich that I have had to split my responses to it into two posts. This first post will be a slightly more formal review alongside a discussion of the ways in which the book is shaping my thinking about The Return of the Soldier, my own tilt at a broad social and cultural history of the legacy of the First World War in Britain. The second, which I will publish in the next couple of weeks, half term permitting, will focus on how the book intersects with my own family history.

In Songs of Seven Dials, Matt Houlbrook sets out to write a social and cultural history of the tiny neighbourhood of Seven Dials which lies between Shaftsbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road and Covent Garden produce market.  Originally defined as a neighbourhood in the seventeenth century, Houlbrook focusses on this ‘shabby cosmopolitan working-class neighbourhood’ (p.3) in the 1920s and ‘30s, a period in which the area was represented as, variously, a crime-ridden slum, London’s ‘Black Colony’, an artistic Bohemia and an opportunity ripe for commercial development. Subtitled an intimate history, the book attempts to focus on the lives of those who actually lived in Seven Dials, alongside those who attempted to impose their social, cultural or economic vision on the area from the outside. Unfortunately, this only has mixed success. The voices of the latter tend to be much louder in the archives than those of the former, and the extensive naming of names can’t always balance the narrative in favour of the historically marginalised who called Seven Dials their home. Even the use of the historic present, which allows Houlbrook to tell the story of Jim and Emily Kitten’s libel case against John Bull with some immediacy, can only go so far in bringing the names of other Seven Dials residents to life, and, at least for this reader, too often got between me and the story being told.

The other stylistic technique that Houlbrook uses to support his analysis is the structure of the book through seven chapters, each one focussing on one or two of the streets radiating out from the central square which make up the district. This structure both emphasise the microhistorical approach that Houlbrook takes to the subject, as well as allowing him to employ circular imagery as a metaphor across the volume as  whole. While this is generally an effective strategy, the inclusion of Long Acre and the Strand in chapter four disrupts the pattern in problematic ways. Both these streets, chosen to represent the locations of the press and legal system that imposed an external narrative on Seven Dials through the Kittens’ libel trial, are not only outside the district itself, but aren’t even accessed directly by Shorts Gardens (Chapter 3) or Great Earl Street (Chapter 5). Subject-wise, the location of the chapter is equally confusing. Houlbrook begins his introduction with the statement ‘It starts with a libel trial, held over three days in the High Court of Justice in February 1927.’ (p.1) Yet it isn’t until Chapter 4 that the reader is given the story of the trial itself, making the background detail of the actors given in the preceding chapters somewhat hard to follow, not least because, while there is a very rough chronology at work, Houlbrook moves back and forth not only across the two decades between 1919 and 1939, but as far back as the 1890s and as far forward as the 1960s.

A key point that this chronological muddying underpins is that the ‘modernisation’ of London, so often associated with the 1920s and 1930s, was far from a tidy linear progress. Grand modernist visions, both economic and architectural, failed. Nostalgia for an imagined past and old stereotypes were evoked to dismantle progressive trends towards diversity and anti-colonialism. At the same time, ‘the foundations of the what would be called gentrification were laid in the 1920s and 1930s, when politicians, planners, and entrepreneurs tried and failed to raze Seve Dials an build a new city from the ground up.’ (p.12) The making of modern London was, as most history is, far more messy than all-too-often romanticised visions of the ‘interwar’ would suggest. Houlbrook makes a powerful case for the need to think about this period as more than just the clichés of ‘The Roaring Twenties’, ‘The Hungry Thirties’, ‘The Interwar’. Yet in titling this story as one primarily about the 1920s and 1930s, contradictions start to emerge. Whatever Houlbrook’s intentions, this categorisation marks the period as ‘a kind of caesura – space between, a time apart’ (p.10), implicitly reinforcing the First World War as a historic paradigm shift in the creation of modernity. At the same time, the war itself is only a tiny part of the story that Houlbrook is telling. Jim Kitten’s wartime internment at Ruhleben and the gunshot wound to his arm he received there echoed through his life and may even have contributed to his death in 1940 (p.230), but they are less important to the story of the years between than his place of birth in Sierra Leone, his marriage to a white Englishwoman and his work as a café owner.

This question of periodisation and the way in which historians use time spans to organise and contain their arguments, particularly as it relates to the early twentieth century, are central to my own thinking about the arguments I am making in The Return of the Soldier. The historiographic tendency to position the years between 1914 and 1918 as not simply a time apart but as a paradigm shift – the end of the long 19th century, the birth of the modern era – has been something that I have tried to resist in all the histories that I have written.  Almost without exception, the men that I wrote about in my first two books were born in the 19th century. The same is true of the men who are the subjects of The Return of the Soldier. They survived the war and went on to live and work throughout the twentieth century. On the one hand, there is a story of social and cultural continuity to be told through these survivals. On the other hand, the very premise of the book is based on these men’s status as having served in the war. The war years were undoubtedly significant in shaping men’s lives and, as a total war, the lives of those who made up the society in which they lived. Bodies and minds were altered by the experiences lived through during the war – by wounds and illness, by separation and deprivation, by unanticipated opportunities for travel and work. The story of social and cultural discontinuity that emerges is a powerful one. How to explore the nature and meaning of the ruptures that war created without isolating the years between 1914 and 1919 as a time apart or the sole defining event in the lives of those who lived through it is the challenge I have been wrestling with since I first began trying to shape my research into  a coherent argument. If individuals lived their lives across the temporal boundaries historians attempt to impose, writing histories that do honour to those lives, and which, as is Houlbrook’s ambition, inform our present, forces us to rethink comforting historic periodisations.

My way of addressing this problem has been to rethink the subtitle of The Return of the Soldier as ‘British First World War Ex-Servicemen and the Making of the Twentieth Century’. The intention is to focus on a discussion of continuity and discontinuity in which the war plays a defining but not an exclusive role, and on the particularity of the lives of these men and those around them, rather than the more abstract categories of ‘the war’, ‘demobilization’ and ‘legacy’. The previous subtitle, ‘The Intimate History of Demobilization in Britain After the First World War’ tried to make this point by invoking the concept of ‘the intimate’, an idea that Houlbrook also uses in his subtitle. Yet I soon discovered that the intimate is a slippery historical category. For Bruno Cabanes it is the study of ‘the relationship of individuals to their own body, to their familiar haunts, and to their family and friends’[1], combining the history of the body with the history of the domestic, an approach exemplified in Joanna Bourke’s Dismembering the Male. Yet Bourke, in her own An Intimate History of Killing, uses the term to indicate as study of subjectivities, the intimacy that of the individual psyche. [2]

In Songs of Seven Dials, intimacy appears to be two-fold. On the one hand, in support of his argument that Seven Dials in the 1920s and 30s was a place of residence and work rather than simply the opportunity for improvement, development or entertainment that many imagined and represented it as, Houlbrook peoples his history with named individuals, located in specific places of residence and types of work. This is the intimacy of the reader with the specific historical actors. It is enabled by the digitization of the 1911 and 1921 census records, which Houlbrook uses, alongside local newspaper records, to great effect. The problem is that the level of intimacy achieved remains limited. While Houlbrook can give names and occupations to the residents of Seven Dials, these records don’t give deeper insight into their lives. Naming is, of course, vital to the process of remembering, but the only way that Houlbrook can give us more than government records offer in relation to people about whom there are few reflexive records is through speculation. He does this with care, and it is here that the historic present is most effective, but it remains speculation nonetheless. Like the tense, I found it got between me and the story being told, making it more distant rather than more intimate.

Where Houlbrook does convince with his claims to writing an intimate history is through the physical intimacy he evokes. Even without reliable images of many of the places he writes about, he conjures the cramped, noisy, sometimes squalid, always vivid nature of the streets, houses and businesses that make up this tiny pocket of London. As becomes clear in the conclusion, these are streets that Houlbrook has walked himself many times as he sought to understand how it transformed from a place ill-repute to the gentrified site of up-market commerce that it is today. It is the place, not the people, which makes this history feel intimate, pointing to the many forms of intimacy that the historian might seek to explore.

This multiplicity in meanings of the intimate is important for my thinking about ex-servicemen’s return for at least one chapter of The Return of the Soldier. ‘Returning Home’, which I am currently working up into my sample chapter for agents and publishers, is divided into two sections, ‘People’ and ‘Places’. Thinking of each as facets of an intimate historical appraoch is proving extremely helpful for working out how the chapter functions as a whole and what sort of evidence I need to support my argument about the long-term significance of ex-service return. At the same time, it is helping me to understand that some of my other chapters may not be intimate histories. Trying to force the ‘Returning to Work’ chapter into this conceptual box may be why I have been struggling so hard to make it work for so long.

So I return to the redrafting process with a new sense of direction having read Songs of Seven Dials. But first I need to grapple with the relationship between Houlbrook’s text and my own family’s history, a question which has been haunting me almost since I first picked up the book and which will form the subject of my next post.

[1] Bruno Cabanes, ‘Negotiating Intimacy in the Shadow of War (France, 1914-1920s)’, French Politics, Culture & Society 31(1): Spring 2013, 13.

[2] Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996); Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (London: Granta Books, 1999).

Taking Stock

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It has taken a week, but I have finally unpacked all the boxes of books and papers and accumulated office accessories that I acquired over 15 years at Leeds. So now that I am fully installed in my home office, it seemed like a good time to enumerate the projects I have underway and planned, and what I hope to acheive in the next 18 months.

Men of War: A Modern History

Under contract with Polity Press, with the manuscript due in 2028, I currently have aproximately 10,000 words of a very, very messy draft of Chapter One and a detailed outline of all eight chapters. The goal is to have a completed first draft by the end of the calendar year. I anticipate this being a complete mess, with the aim of a serious edit the following year.

The Return of the Soldier: British First World War Veterans and the Making of Twentieth Century Britain

This one is now on is fourth or possibly fifth subtitle as my ideas have shifted through the drafting process. I currently have between 3,000 and 5,000 words drafted for three of the five chapters, with a plan for a conference paper for the fourth chapter in the works. These will then form the cores around which I will build the longer chapter, with a full draft of ‘Return Home’ next on the agenda so that I can send it out to publishers and agents for consideration. The goal is to have a contract for this one by the end of the year.

The Return of the Soldier: British First World War Ex-Servicemen and the Making of the Twentieth Century

This project is now on its fourth or fifth subtitle, but, after far too long, I think I finally have a central thesis and a sense of the voice for this book. I also have 3,000 to 5,000 words for three of the five body chapters, with plans for a conference paper that will give me another 3,000 words for the fourth. These will go on to form the cores of the longer chapters. What I don’t currently have is a publisher so, in addition to the conference paper, my next step will be to write up the chapter on ‘Returning Home’ for submission to publishers and agents. The goal is to have a contract for this book by the end of the year.

A chapter on the ethics of doing disability history, accepted subject to minor ammendments.

This is due in two weeks, so is currently at the top of my priority list.

An 8,000-10,000 word chapter on front-line battlefield medical care.

I still need to check with the editor what the temporal and geographic scope of the expected chapter is. Submission in June.

A history of Golden Age detective fiction and the two world wars.

I can’t really let myself commit to this one until I have the two on-going book projects much nearer completion, but I do want to get a proper proposal off to an agent. This is the one that has the most potential as a trade history, I think. Certainly, everyone I have mentioned it to has been very enthusiastic and encouraging. In the grand tradition of writing procrastination, this is, of course, the book I want to write at the moment.

The novel

I keep telling myself that this one is just for fun, that I have to prioritise the non-fiction because that is my bread-and-butter and where I am more likely to publish successfully. Really, I need to stop researching this one and just get on with writing it.

This blog

I am hoping to post on here once a week, but I am also aware that doing so risks taking writing time away from other projects. Indeed, this post has taken two days to write in what is an exceptionally busy week of family responsibilities and pre-existing commitments. So while a weekly post will be my goal, I will need to reassess this if either of the book projects start to suffer. In which spirit, I had better stop writing about writing, and get on with actually completing that chapter on ethics!

Oh Dear

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I was so looking foward to Juno Dawson’s Her Majesty’s Royal Coven. Modern witchcraft set in Hebden Bridge, which came highly recommended by both a friend whose taste I trust and the local bookstore that sold it to me? What could be better as escapist reading? In fact, I anticipated enjoying it so much that I bought the sequel before I even started the first volume and savoured my anticipation of losing myself in the West Yorkshire equivalent of Deborah Harkness’s All Souls series (recommened by another friend whose taste I trust and which I enjoy enormously).

So it is with great regret that I must inform you that Her Majesty’s Secret Coven is the lastest of my very rare ‘did not finishes’, and this was after I got over 150 pages in. Usually if I make it past page 50, I will keep going with a book, even if only out of pure bloody-mindedness. This, however, felt like too much of a slog. The characterisation was remarkably flat, particularly of the women who were portrayed as archetypes rather than indivuals. Given that this is a story predominantly about women, with a plot centring on female identity, this is a serious problem, one reinforced by a confusing plot with gaping holes in it. I spent most of the time struggling to understand what was happening or why characters were choosing to act in the ways described.

But the biggest disappointment was the aspect I had been anticipating most eagerly – the setting. As a Hebden Bridge resident, I freely admit to being an ‘offcumbden’. But the town and its surrounding villages have a unique enough personality for me to feel, even after only seven years of residence, that I know them at least a little bit. And they are definitely not the town depicted in this book. Yes, they form a small pocket of liberalism, not to say radicalism, enfolded by the Calder Valley in the more generally conservative rural West Yorkshire. And yes, the 1960s hippie vibe which is central to the town’s identity is being diluted by an influx of the professional middle classes (of which I freely admit to being one). Sitting halfway between Leeds and Manchester, even the vaguaries of Northern Rail cannot detract from the attraction of the town to commuters. But for all that, Hebden Bridge is still very much Happy Valley, not Nappy Valley. I don’t recall ever meeting a yummy mummy, as asserted in one description of a local café, and this is after five years of schoolgate attendance. Dawson appears to see Hebden Bridge as a version of Brighton in the north, which it is not. It is its own distinct place, with its own unique, often contradictory, always fascinating character, one which Dawson fails to capture.

The geography also doesn’t make sense. The book is full of descriptions of characters’ homes, but I was unable to locate any of them in my mental map of the area. The actual map that forms the frontispiece is no help, drawing as it does on the imagery of maps in fantasy novels. By the time I gave up, I found I was lost, not in the story but rather in confusion. I kept longing to find my way back tot he real world, rather than continue to make my way through a fantastical vision of the placy I call home, peopled by unreal phantasms, not people with recognisable conflicts and motivations. My recommendation is, if you want to discover the complex magic of Hebden Bridge through fiction, try the work of Sally Wainright rather than Juno Dawson. Happy Valley is on iPlayer and Riot Girls is due for broadcast this year. Or better yet, come visit, and experience this darkly enchanting place for yourself.

Catching Up

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Carola Dunn, Die Laughing, 2003

Louise Penny, The Long Way Home, 2014

Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind, 2018

After several months (indeed years) of accumulation, over the summer I decided to make one of my periodic concerted efforts at putting a dent in my to-be-read shelf, which then stood at thirty-five books and counting. I started with wth collection of second-hand books from part way through various contemporary series that that have been recommended to me but which I have been motivated to buy unless I came across a used copy. I haven’t been entirely successful in completing this endeavour (a volumen of Sulari Gentil’s Rowland Sinclair mysteries is next on my list), but I did manage a couple of volumes from Louise Penny’s Armand Garmache series and a Daisy Dalrymple mystery by Carola Dunn.

The Dunn series is one that has been hovering at the edge of my consciousness for a number of years now. When I was reading my way through Frances Brodie’s Kate Shackleton series and Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series (recommended to me by the late, great Dennis Showalter, who knew whereof he spoke), Daisy Dalrymple regularly popped up in my on-line recommendations. So it was with interest, although not necessarily great expectations, that I started Die Laughing, the tenth book in the series. Unfortunately, these expectations were definitely not exceeded. One of the blurbs on my copy states that the book is ‘For lovers of Dorothy L. Sayers’, but like so many so-called ‘cosy’ crime novels with a British interwar setting, the only Sayers-like attribute that the book has is the fact that the detective (or at least one of them) is an aristocrat (although we are told multiple times that her title is ‘only’ an honorary one).

The problem is that the novel doesn’t work as either a classic detective novel, with a focus on the puzzle element, or as the sort of social reflection that makes Sayers (and many of the other classic queens of Golden Age detective fiction) such good source material for the social historian. By splitting the detective work between an amateur who doesn’t really want to be detecting and her professional husband and his team, the novel rejects the structural formality of classic detective fiction storytelling. Sherlock Holmes explaining his reasoning to Watson and Japp or Poirot collecting the suspects in the drawing room for the unveiling of the criminal may be the stuff of cliché, but such scenes work to construct a narrative with tension by making the unravelling the work of a single intelligence. Even where the sidekick or professional assistant makes as great a contribution to that unravelling as the detective, the sharing of information needs to be integral to both the plot and laying the evidence before the reader. For a masterclass in the approach, you only have to look at the conversations between Peter and Harriet in Have His Carcase (1932), which are used to convey any facts gathered separately as well as interpret them as part of the satisfying working out of the mystery. Not so in the world of Daisy Dalrymple and Alec Fletcher where each undertakes their own investigations and the sharing of clues is perfunctory, with little reference to either the plot or the character developments

So much for the structural form of the detective story. What about the novel as a reflection of society in the interwar period? Dunn has clearly done a certain amount of research into the period, but her representation of class is clumsy to the point of farce. The middle classes are almost uniformly snobbish and racist, with the exception of Daisy’s two female friends, who are only distinguishable from each other by the fact that one is Indian (and therefore the victim of racist prejudice). The working-class characters are distinguishable by their entirely generic vernacular, with a Scots policeman apparently speaking in almost exactly the same way as a Cockney charwoman. The theme of the ‘servant problem’ is shoe-horned into the book, with little relevance to the central crime or its investigation, and drawing on debates from the late nineteenth century, rather than those being articulated in 1924. The result is that, while the reader is told multiple times that the war changed class relationships, but we are never effectively shown this. I finally lost patience with the representation of a character, introduced to late in the book to be fully fleshed out, as a Second World War-style spiv, whose service with the Army Service Corps was used as shorthand for his not having served overseas during the war. Given the the extensive work of men of this unit as motor ambulance and lorry drivers on all fighting fronts, this misrepresentation smacked, like far too much else in this book, of superficial research and lazy historical cliché.

So I will not be seeking out any more of the Dalrymple series. I am, however, more ambivalent about Penny’s Gamache series, although I can’t say I was overly enamoured of either of the two volumes I read. I know many people love this but, like Elly Griffith’s equally loved Ruth Galloway series, I found the tone too knowingly whimsical for my taste. These series are, apparently, part of a genre now marketed as ‘character-led’ mysteries (presumably as opposed to action-led thrillers) but, for me, the characters were oddly flat. The reader is told, over and over, who these people are, and even what they are thinking, but this is rarely matched by them then acting in psychologically convincing ways. The criminal in one of the stories barely registers as a character in their own right, and certainly not as the magnetic character that we are informed they are. There is also a dissonance in tone between, for instance, constant references to an aged, sweary, alcoholic poet who keeps a pet duck and is loved (inexplicably) by her neighbours, and plotlines around the distribution of carfentenil and its brutalising effects on the homeless population of Montreal, that is jarring to say the least.

Penny’s writing is good enough to make me mildly curious about how she introduced her recurring characters in the first novel in the series, Still Life (2005). However, I can’t say I feel compelled to read any more, certainly not at the moment when unregulated holiday browsing in second-hand bookshops has my to-be-read shelf to closer to forty volumes. I am glad that I finally gave these popular series a go, but equally glad that neither captured me to the extent that I will now be adding any more of their work to that shelf.

The breaking year

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This end-of-year reflection was originally going to be titled ‘The Half-finished Year’, a reference not only to my ever-expanding folder of started but unfinished blog posts and the 2500 words of my next book, but also the two sweaters and three quilts that I am currently working on, as well as the unpainted front hallway and bathtub sitting in the living room that await attention when I get home. But, as I sit in a hotel room in Italy with my leg in a brace while the rest of my family is out skiing, I have come to realise that the reason that this year has been shaped so profoundly by the unfinished is because of the time that ill health has taken from me.

The year started with a minor but mortifying facial disfigurement in the form of a failed dental implant. It is ending in a broken ACL, the aforementioned brace, and uncertainty about how long recovery will take and what it will mean for all the activities and projects I have planned so far for the coming year. In between came multiple trips to the dentist, the doctor and the hospital, diagnosis of three conditions, two chronic, one temporary, the consequent prescriptions (including two attempts for the chronic conditions which resulted in distressing and painful side effects) and more blood tests than I would wish on my worst enemy.

Through all of this, I have not taken time off of work. I have continued my roles as wife and monther and have kept reassuring friends and family that I am fine, or at least managing. And in many ways I am lucky. The dental work has provided me with a successful prosthetic for the lost tooth. The three of the four medications I am taking are preventative rather than therapeutic. None of the conditions I suffer are life threatening. And while my current physical impairment is disabling, it is also temporary, even if rehabilitation is going to be counted in months at minimum, not weeks as I might wish. As someone who both works in the fields of disability and medical history, and has lived through the terminal illnesses of both parents, I know how fortunate I am that my various forms of ill health are identifiable, relatively painless and highly treatable, and that I live in a country and society where I have ready access to the care and treatment I need, as well as a support network of family and friends.

But while resilience may be an admirable quality in some ways, not least in providing a sense of continuity which is itself therapeutic, it cannot be a permanent state of being, as any old rubber band will show. Something, somewhere had to give in this year that has done its best to break me, physically and psychologically. It may not have succeeded entirely, but it does seem to have robbed me of significant amounts of time and, with it, my ability to complete projects, particularly those related to writing.

Which is not to say that this hasn’t been a year of progress in some ways. Indeed, I am managing, with this post, to publish more than one post for this blog this year, an improvement on my output for 2022. I now have a very clear idea of both the shape and content of my next book, although the form will require the sort of concentrated writing time that I definitely haven’t had this year and probably won’t in the coming year. I will even have new publications in the new year, in the form of a book chapter which fell victim to Covid delays and at least one book review. And I have managed to steek a cardigan for the first time, a terrifying technique in knitting that involves taking scissors to a piece of work knitted in the round to create an opening.

These achievements, small as they are, remind me that, unlike an old rubber band, I may be damaged but I am not yet broken. But, as I enter the new year in a damaged state, I do so with the knowledge that I cannot simply bounce back to a state of full productivity, as much as I might wish to do so. I need time and space both to heal what has broken this year and, when I am strong enough, to give my many unfinished projects the attention they deserve. So I will start this new year not with resolutions but with the hope that I will be able to find or make the time and space for convalescence and recuperation and with them the ability and courage complete some, if not all, of my half-finished projects.

I wish you all a healthy, contented and hope-fulfilled new year.

This was the year

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This was the year that I was going to write every day. Just a little, to get into the habit. I failed (as this blog provides clear evidence). In fact, I have written less this year, either for work or my own amusement, than ever before. No, I do not count emails. I end the year continuing to battle what feels like ever-growing writer’s block, an unfinished article mocking me from my drafts file, while my book tantalizes me with exciting ideas that I never manage to get down on paper. I keep reminding myself that the excitement is worth the struggle – to make the time, to think hard, to find the order of words that satisfies. Maybe in the coming year I will find a way to make such reminders a reality.

This was the year I was going to run a bit further than I ran last year. Just a little, maintaining the distance I had achieved over a few more days. I failed, running just over half the distance I covered in 2021. I try to excuse myself by pointing out that I caught Covid, rapidly followed by a truly dreadful non-Covid cold. But it is an excuse; my distance was well down on the previous year by the point I fell ill. A combination of the ridiculous summer temperatures, a return to travel which saw me attend two conferences overseas and visit my family in the US three times and an insanely busy autumn term all conspired to throw me off course. All I can do is try again next year.

This was the year I achieved a significant professional milestone and have come the closest I have ever been to simply walking away from my job. The academic environment is increasingly unpleasant to work in, with the space for the aspects of the job that I love (the research, the writing) ever more squeezed by demands of bureaucracy which take no account of disciplinary norms or the level of expertise that academics bring to the job. For the moment, I am committed to my students, my colleagues, my collaborators. But I am coming to recognize that this is unsustainable for me personally and I need to find an exit strategy in the near-to-medium, rather than the distant future.

This was the year that I swam – in the North Sea, off the south coast, in rivers in Colorado and the Lake District. I swam with friends, with family, on my own. Each swim brought me a moment of solace missing from the rest of my year. I will write about them soon.

This was the year that I read less than I hoped, but what I did read was, more often than not, what I needed. Two series in particular – Sarah Moss’s trilogy of Night Waking, Bodies of Light and Sign for Lost Children, and Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet – spoke to me in the moment that I read them in ways they could have done at no other point in my life. My only sadness is not to have been able to share the joy of Smith’s novels with my mother, a Dickens scholar. She would have loved them. With a to-be-read shelf now topping the 30-book mark, I am determined to make more time for reading. Of all my identities, I have been a reader longest, something I perhaps forgot at points this year. I will try to remember it in the coming year.

This was the year I found the greatest joy in making and creating. Most of my projects are yet to be finished. The quilt for my niece, pieced together at a rate of 10 patchwork blocks a month still remains without its five borders, backing or sashing. A cardigan I have been working on for myself continues to grow but slowly towards the neck and the terrifying challenge of steeking. But I won first prize for both my bread and my marmalade at the village fete this year, undoubtedly my proudest achievement of the 12 months. I will continue to make time for this work in the coming year.

This has been an odd, confusing year of extremes, of weather, of emotion, of accomplishment. I end the year in as hard a place as I have ever been, but there is promise for the future. I do not know what sort of year next year will be. I can only hope there will be more writing, more running, more swimming, more reading, more making.

Wishing you and yours a happy and healthy new year.

1917 and All That

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After a week of reading (and commenting on) reviews of 1917, I have finally had a chance to see it. And yes, it is good, very good. Not perfect, but very good indeed.

*Spoiler alert hereon in*

So, what works? The device of the ‘single continuous shot’ (which isn’t actually) is engaging and hugely propulsive, linking and driving the different episodes of the narrative to gripping effect. The depiction of landscape is visually impressive, particularly in its range and variety. The narrative allows for movement through a huge range of different spaces, each of which is beautifully evoked. In particular, the two transitions from the area behind the lines into the trenches, with the communication trenches rising organically from the land, are incredibly moving, while the nighttime scenes of Écoust lit by flares are, quite simply, works of art.

Some of the incidental (and not so incidental) details are lovely, and attest to the level of research undertaken. The ubiquity and size of rats, the visceral horror of crawling over the bloated bodies of the drowned, men’s ability to sleep where they drop, the importance of rumour as the way in which soldiers understood their situation, the humour they employed to wile away time, are all evocative, effective images and references which give the film a sense of emotional authenticity.

Many of secondary characterisations are also beautifully done. Impressively, while all are brief, almost none are black-and-white. Even the Germans are shown as humans with agency, neither solely evil nor solely victims. Of the recognisable cameos, while both Mark Strong and Benedict Cumberbatch are very good (the latter in particular capturing once again something ellusive about the paradoxical nature of British martial masculinity in the period), Andrew Scott’s turn as a lieutenant awaiting his relief after a long night in the lines, stands out as pure Journey’s End.

And that characterization is important for understanding what makes this film such a good film about the First World War. Because its basis is not in the history of the war, but rather in the history of its cultural representation. Yes, the script writers have read soldiers’ memoirs (and possibly also letters and diaries) as well as, I suspect, more historical analysis than they have admitted to. Yes, the costume and set designers have consulted with all the right historical consultants. But the film makers as a whole have also clearly been influenced by the films, fiction and poetry that have so profoundly shaped our understandings of the war over the past century. So, in addition to Journey’s End (1928), we get references to the visual trope of going over the top that has defined First World War films since The Battle of the Somme (1916), to the unheimlich of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (1918), and to the final dramatic scene of Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981). This is a film as much about, and as rooted in, the artistic interpretation of the war as it is the war itself.

This positioning of the film does not detracted from its quality as a work of cinematic art in itself. But it does help to explain some of the problems with it, because it is not a perfect film. Yes, there are inconsistencies and inaccuracies of detail which, for someone with a deep familiarity with the war and its history, can have the effect of breaking into any suspension of disbelief. As a historian of medicine and the war, while I cheered the use of first field dressings, both to bind wounds and staunch blood, I was always going to notice the continuity error where a bandage disappears and then reappears, complete with a hastily tied knot that apparently managed to survive some pretty extreme activities. (I’m not sure what it is with continuity editors and First World War hand wounds, but referencing the disappearance and reappearance of Thomas’s hand wound in Downton Abbey was probably not the the effect they were aiming for.) And having a man put his wounded hand into a corpse without any reference to the heightened risk of infection (even when he ends up at a medical unit a day later) feels like a wasted opportunity for an otherwise striking historical detail.

As for the final scenes, while it nice to see so many stretcher bearers (not orderlies, as per the script), both regimental and RAMC, represented, did they really all have to be two to a stretcher with no harnesses? Bearer units were four to a stretcher for reasons. Equally, their negotiation of the trenches rather defies belief, particularly in the year when the British Medical Journal was publishing articles about the difficulties bearers faced in moving standard stretchers around the corners of trenches. Oh, and that medical unit? It is a dressing station, not a Casualty Clearing Station (CCS), as claimed by Major Hepburn.

Are these niggly little details which won’t affect the viewing enjoyment of those who haven’t spent nearly ten years researching the history of British medical care provision in the war? Yes, of course they are. Even as they affected my ability to suspend my disbelief, they didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the film as a film. And, if nothing else, they have given me a very good argument to present to a publisher of the need for a good accessible history on this subject. But they are not the only, or even the main reason why I call this a very good but not a great film, although the classification of a dressing station as a CCS is symptomatic of the wider problem.

That wider problem, bluntly, is the necessity for films to compress historic realities. There isn’t the time for the film to portray the slog of several hours, over relays between multiple dressing stations, that was the reality of evacuation to a CCS. So dressing stations, and the work of Field Ambulance bearers and orderlies disappear, with space and time collapsed to represent an over-simplified image of the medical evacuation process.

As I say, this won’t be a problem for the vast majority of viewers, but it isn’t a narrative issue limited to medical evacuations. Unfortunately, it also effects the relationship between the two central characters in ways that are confusing and ultimately problematic for the film itself. On the one hand, Blake and Schofield are part of the same regiment, comrades in arms under the authority of the same chain of command from their sergeant on up. They know each other and they know (a bit) about each other. On the other hand, their partnership is presented as accidental, a result of proximity as much as of intimacy. This allows their backstory to be told through their conversation, which is a useful dramatic device, but it robs the relationship of any sense of the intimacy that developed between men who shared lives in the trenches. [1] The result of this apparent lack of connection between the characters is that it undermines the emotional connection forged with the audience. Ultimately, I found myself unmoved either by Blake’s death or Schofield’s contemplation of his family photographs. The importance of these men as individuals, with emotional lives beyond their immediate surroundings, was never developed enough for me to care about them as anything other than carriers of the film’s driving adventure narrative.

This, of course, is a key difference between the time-limited fictional representation of a film and a historian’s engagement with the historical sources which underpin. Reading a collection of letters or a diary covering months and years of war can demonstrate the development of a man’s (or woman’s) character over time, but it can, at times, be incredibly dull. Much of war is extremely boring, and that is reflected in the source material. Most men who served in the war were not great stylists. Their diaries and even many of their letters home are filled with in jokes, family gossip relating to unknown individuals and endless quotidian details about what they had for dinner or how cold the weather is. Films, particularly commercial films, cannot afford to be boring in this way, and 1917 is anything but boring. The compression of the narrative into just under two hours means that choices have to be made, and in this case the choice was made to flatten characterisations for the sake of narrative propulsion. It is, I think, a valid artistic choice in this case, but it has to be acknowledged as that, an artistic choice about how to represent the war. The history, and the men who made it, are inevitably more complex and complicated than any single film can capture.

So, a very, very good film rather than a great one and one which tells us more about the way in which we remember the war than about the war itself. However, as well as enjoying the film, I remain fascinated by the way in which it is being used by reviewers to project their own ideas about the history and meaning of the war, with The Guardian characteristically identifying it a pacifist film (it isn’t) and Variety locating firmly in the history of Hollywood films. And I think it has a great deal to say about the way in which our reading of the war has evolved over time, not least over the course of the centenary period. In fact, I would suggest that this film marks a good moment for Dan Todman to update The Great War: Myth and Memory (2005) to include another generation’s worth of interpretations of the war.

So, as a historian and teacher of history, would I recommend 1917 to students of the history of the war? Only in conjunction with primary sources to illuminate and deepen understanding of its representation. Would I use it as a source for teaching the history of the memory of the war and its cultural representation in Britain? In a heartbeat. It has earned its place in the canon of great Great War fictions.

[1] Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), Chapter 3.

Beginnings and Endings

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Just over five years ago, I posted the first post on this blog, beginning what I thought would be a process of recording the researching and writing of a book about the men of the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War. Just under two weeks ago, I submitted the completed manuscript to the publisher, on the final day the university was open this calendar year. It was a climax, a culmination. But it wasn’t an ending.

There are several reasons why I say this with some confidence, about both the book and this blog. As far at the book is concerned, there is still a great deal left to do – permissions to be sought, images to be sourced, indexes to be completed – and the manuscript itself is to be sent to yet another reader. And this blog has, in the past five years, wandered into all sorts of byways unrelated to the project it was set up to chronicle.  In spite of my neglect of it over the past few months as I’ve concentrated on finishing the manuscript, it remains an important outlet for me, and I will continue to use it to chronicle the ups and downs of academic life, my new research project, my eternal struggle to create an acceptable work/life and, inevitable, a range of thoughts and responses the commemoration and memory of the First World War in British culture.

Yet, while this has been a moment of transition rather than ending, there have been points of ending and new beginnings along the way. The direct funding for this project ended two years ago. In its place, I’ve started on new (related) research , as well as gaining two new job titles. Intellectually and personally life has interwoven, overlapped, bled into itself.

Which, particularly at this time of year, doesn’t stop me looking for tidy endings and new beginnings. Even as I am aware of the chaos of books all over the floor that awaits my return to the office, along with all the projects I’ve been putting off for the past three months, I am also hoping that having given myself permission not to work for two weeks over the holiday period will give me the energy to start if not anew in January, then at least afresh.  There is the blog post I’ve been meaning to write since the summer which, with space from other deadlines, I hope to finally complete; there is the pile of books I’ve been collecting, looking for the time and space to engage with them properly.

There will, I hope, be more, and more definite endings in the coming year, with the final completion of the book. There will also, I anticipate, be beginnings – of ideas, projects, collaborations – as well as the new beginning marked by moving to a new home in the spring. All have looking forward to the near future in ways that hasn’t been true for the past couple of years.

So, at this turning of the year, I wish you all successful endings and hopeful beginnings for the new year.

Happy new year, one and all.

 

What I do

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Over the summer I wrote a piece sort of in response to the furore surround Andrew Adonis’s attack on higher education. I returned to it this morning, after this weekend’s renewed attacks in the wake of the National Audit Office’s report on the supposed ‘lack of value’ in the higher education ‘market’. Based on what I have read and heard, in the print media, on Twitter and on national radio, I am starting to wonder, however, if it is not so much that academics aren’t very good at explaining what it is they do, as that those who enjoy pontificating on the subject don’t want to listen. Radio 4’s Today programme, for instance, managed to interview one lecturer that I heard in the entire course of a 3-hour programme focussed on the subject (a second presented Thought for the Day). Sonia Sodha’s dismissive response to Peter Mandler on Twitter is sadly symptomatic of this attitude.

Anyway, I’m sure Lord Adonis, Ms Sodha, Jo Johnson, Jeremy Vine and the editors of the Today Programme are far to busy to read what I wrote, just as I am rather too busy to repeat myself in another blog, but here it is again for anyone who might be wondering why academics are quite so angry about the implication that they have enough time to properly teach two- rather than three-year degrees. Now, if you will forgive me, I have work to do today (numbers 1, 4, 8 and 9, if you are wondering).

Jessica's avatararmsandthemedicalman

This isn’t going to be a response to the recent Andrew Adonis discussions, at least not directly.  I’ve put in my direct tuppence ‘orth on Twitter already. It is, however, going to be a response to one of the more obscure byways that the discussion trickled into over the course of the day arising out of two comments. The first, from an academic, pointed out that academics really aren’t very good at communicating what it is we actually do. Listing all the jobs we have to do in a way that can give an impression of competitive business, yes; actually communicating to non-academics what our job entails, not so much. Which was reinforced by the second, from an anonymous Twitter user who, agreeing with Adonis’s argument about the laziness and unproductiveness of academics who don’t teach during the summer, stated that academics had never done a ‘real job’.

So the…

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Bread and Roses

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As I have said previously, poetry is currently serving as a huge source of solace and consolation, something that I feel very much in need of at this moment. But it is also enabling me to articulate my anger and defiance, particularly the two poems that follow, which have been reminding me that, whatever the next four years may bring, I am proud to be a woman, a scholar and an American.

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

James Oppenheim, 1911

Still I Rise – Maya Angelou

We march on – and still we rise.