October 29, 2008 – 10:50 am
A while back I speculated on whether Simon Templar – “The Saint” had fought in the war, and came to the conclusion, based on the first “Saint” novel, Meet – the Tiger, that he might have done, or at least that Charteris surrounded him with military imagery.
The third “Saint” book to be published (if you [...]
October 26, 2008 – 12:03 pm
At the Almeida in Islington yesterday afternoon, I saw a rock-solid production of Granville Barker’s terrific play about the destruction of a politician. This was originally written in 1909, but banned by the Lord Chamberlain. Barker rewrote it in 1924 (and that was the version shown at the Almeida) but it was not allowed to [...]
October 22, 2008 – 4:56 pm
As well as the lurid Battle of London, I’ve been looking at another paranoid Red menace story of the twenties, F.Britten Austin’s They Who Laughed, in his future-war collection, The War God Walks Again.
Like Hugh Addison’s novel, this places the Red hordes in control of London landmarks. It begins with socialist leaders looking down [...]
October 22, 2008 – 12:23 pm
I heard an excellent talk at Birmingham yesterday by Andy Robertshaw, who is part of a team researching the film The Battle of the Somme, credibly described as the most historically important documentary ever made.
The team has been researching the film in detail, finding the locations where it was shot (mostly around Beaumont Hamel), identifying [...]
October 21, 2008 – 9:53 am
Recently I’ve been investigating fiction about the fear of Bolshevism in the twenties, and how this encouraged a certain way of writing about soldiers in the run up to the General Strike. Yesterday I called up a couple of forgotten books from the depths of the Bodleian, both of them containing lurid accounts of an [...]
October 19, 2008 – 5:34 pm
There’s an interesting piece in today’s Observer about Dan Snow finding about an ancestor – Sir Thomas D’Oyly Snow, who was apparently one of WW1’s less distinguished generals.
Basically the piece is a puff for a telly series that will come on in the lead-up to Remembrance Day this year, with several people discovering their ancestor’s [...]
October 12, 2008 – 5:47 pm
Richard Aldington’s 1930 collection Roads to Glory, there is a rather grim story called The Case of Lieutenant Hall. This is in diary format, and traces the gradual disintegration of an officer (promoted from the ranks) after the Armistice.
At first he is keen to be out of the army and to get home, but soon [...]
October 12, 2008 – 4:01 pm
The big exhibition to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice is definitely worth seeing, though I have a few reservations about it.
It mostly consists of ninety boxes, each one containing mementoes of someone connected with the war. Each box is lit by electric bulbs on the end of long white stalks – so the [...]
October 6, 2008 – 9:59 pm
In popular fiction of the early twenties, I’ve found plenty of examples of stories based on a contrast between the ex-soldier and the alien (often Jewish) profiteer. Sapper’s Black Gang and Burrage’s Captain Dorry took it on themselves to deliver punishment where they thought it appropriate, and Dornford Yates’s heroes were forever dishing out humiliation [...]
October 4, 2008 – 7:15 am
My wife went to York recently and, in the shop of the City Art Gallery, found this postcard, which she knew I would like.
It is Return to the Front:Victoria Railway Station, 1916 by Richard Jack, and seems to capture the mood of 1916 very well. These are not the naive volunteers of 1914, going off [...]
