The Black Gang and their hoods

I mentioned Sapper’s The Black Gang recently, and suggested that its hooded vigilantes might have reminded early readers not only of Mussolini’s black-shirted Fascists, but of the Ku Klux Klan whose vigilante heroes had recently become fashionable, thanks to D.W.Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Jessica questioned the word “hoods”, noting that the text usually referred to “masks”.

Today I took a look at the Sovereign Magazine for 1922, where The Black Gang first appeared, and found pictures like the one above, and this one:

A Day at OUP

I spent yesterday at the Oxford University Press, as a member of a graduate workshop about investigating publishers’ archives. It was a most enjoyable day.

We gathered in a smart conference room next to the Great Clarendon Street  reception area, taking our places at a long table. In front of each chair, as well as the predictable folder of course material, was an OUP letter book, a thick volume containing copies of  correspondence from the firm’s past. My volume covered 1884-5.

OUP is an astonishing institution. It has been in the publishing business for five hundred years, and its contribution the the country’s intellectual life has been incalculable. Yesterday we got a hint of how that has been subsidised by the company’s involvement in the highly profitable (but cut-throat) trade of Bible publishing (and more recently by educational publishing and children’s books). So the learned monographs have been made possible by the ESL material and Biggles.

We were taken to get a glimpse of the stacks where the OUP archive is kept. With rows of ledgers and mysterious boxes, it was a place to make any scholar’s nerve endings tingle with curiosity - even though many of the boxes would probably  have contained nothing more exciting than the sales figures for nineteenth-century devotional works.

Is “Blackshirt” a fascist?

A while ago I read with great interest A.M.Burrage’s “Captain Dorry” stories, in which an ex-officer becomes a gentleman burglar, with the twist that his victims are the standard villains of right-wing early twenties fiction – war profiteers, corrupt trades unionists and Jews. Especially Jews.
So I was interested to read in Mike Ashley’s excellent Age of the Storytellers that there was another gentleman crook around in the twenties, with the evocative name of Blackshirt. The stories appeared in the New Magazine from December 1924 onwards, and I’ve taken a look, intrigued to see if they had the same political agenda as Burrage’s stories.
The author, Bruce Graeme, was obviously aware of the connotations of the name, since he describes his hero/villain as wearing “no coat, only a soft black shirt and black tie, not unlike the Fascists wear.” However, when at the start of the first story, a character asks, “Blackshirt! Sounds to me like a Fascist!”

Marshall, the police officer who is on Blackshirt’s trail, casts doubt on the idea:
Marshall smiled. “You are on the wrong track, I am afraid, sir, for whereas the Fascisti stand for law and order, Blackshirt is responsible for many mysterious affairs which are decidedly against the law.

So the author is trying to distance himself from the Fascists, while at the same time hardly being critical of them…

Passchendaele - the movie

A new film about Passchendaele should be appearing soon. It is a Canadian production; the trailer has a husky voiceover spouting dreadful clichés, but the rain and mud look  authentic enough.

Wallinger’s Stones

I like Mark Wallinger’s design for a huge horse at Ashford, but his Turner Prize bear impersonation was silly, and I’m not sure about his latest effort, for the Folkestone Triennial exhibition:

Mark Wallinger’s Folk Stones will be placed on the Leas and pays homage to the role played by Folkestone’s Road of Remembrance in the 1st World War. 19, 240 numbered beach pebbles represent the number of British fatalities on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

I’m all for people remembering the Somme, but what does a heap of pebbles tell us? We will think “What a lot, how sad.” but then what?

Folkestone already has an eloquent war memorial, with names of local men listed.

Warwick Deeping’s “Valour” (and Siegfried Sassoon?)

Before the war, Warwick Deeping had been a doctor who was also a prolific writer, mainly of historical fiction. He volunteered for the RAMC and served in Gallipoli, Belgium and Egypt.

During the war he continued to publish historical novels, and short stories in the magazines – some of which were simple patriotic moralities like The Conscientious Objector (middle-aged pacifist learns the error of his ways when attacked by tramps and saved by the violent intervention of a naval officer) .

In early 1918 he published his first novel about the war, Valour – in many ways a remarkable book for its time. It is not a good novel – partly because it is pulled in several directions. As a medical officer at Gallipoli, Deeping had seen the worst results of war, had experienced military failure, and knew the effects that these had had upon soldiers. On the other hand, he was by instinct a romantic and melodramatic writer, and he was passionately committed to the project of the war.

At one point, Deeping considers the difference between historical romance and the reality of the trenches:

Your maker of picturesque and thrilling descriptions flirts with war; he does not go through the grim ceremony that ties him to the trenches.
Romance and colour are apt to vanish out of life when a man is thirsty, or underfed, cold and wet, or sick with the sun-glare, tormented by flies and lice, or damnably afraid.

More from Fromelles

The Telegraph reports further excavations at Fromelles, revealing British soldiers as well as Australians among the 400 bodies in the mass graves.

“Two British Army buttons, a collar fastener and a British matchbox” are all that remain to identify over two hundred British soldiers who died with the 173 Australians. The Telegraph gives an impression of the six pits:

The grave site - pits 10 yards long by 2.5 yards wide, which were hastily dug by German troops - was located last year after painstaking research into German records and thanks to aerial photography and ground penetrating radar.

German troops were under orders to treat the dead with respect and not to loot their possessions.

However, in all six pits examined, archaeologists found two tiers of tightly-packed bodies - a sign that the Germans were forced to work fast due to the searing heat and decomposing dead.

A Muse of Fire

A neat formulation would be that for the French the First World War was something they survived, for the British something they handled, for the Italians something they proved themselves at, for the Austrians something they lost, for the Hungarians something the Austrians lost, for the Germans something that taught them to be stronger.

That is just one of the aphorisms in A Muse of Fire: Literature, Art and War (1998 ) by A.D.Harvey. It is a survey of art and literature about war from the Renaissance to 1945, but with a major emphasis on the Great War. It is a most engaging, and sometimes unorthodox book, full of digressions - did you know, for example, that:

Twenty-two soldiers in the British and British Empire forces won the V.C. by their prowess with the revolver or automatic pistol; ninety-seven won it by their skill with that coarsest of weapons, the hand grenade.

For me, the most useful parts of the book are those in which British literature is compared with that of other countries. Harvey writes confidently about work in French, German and Danish, and seems to have a sound command of Russian literature, too.

Highly recommended.

Waterloo Bridge

I’ve just been watching a DVD of the 1931 film version of Waterloo Bridge, directed by James Whale  a year after he made Journey’s End. It’s adapted from a play by Robert E. Sherwood; I don’t know how faithful it is, but there are long stretches of slightly stagey dialogue.
It’s the story of Myra, a chorus girl turned prostitute, who picks up soldiers on Waterloo Bridge during the war. One evening there is an air raid; she meets Roy, a Canadian soldier who falls for her without realising what business she’s in.
He takes her home to his posh family, but she can’t bear to deceive him, and it becomes one of those stories where each character is trying to outdo the other in nobility.

“Black ‘Ell” and the censor

Last week I mentioned D Company and Black ‘Ell, the 1916 plays by Miles Malleson that were published by Henderson at The Bomb Shop. The shop was raided, and the military authorities, invoking the Defence of the Realm Act, confiscated all copies.
This week I called up a folder of the Lord Chamberlain’s papers from the depths of the British Library,to see what the censor made of Black ‘Ell when, having been republished, it was submitted for a performance licence in 1926. There is a folder of correspondence about the play that is quite revealing about official attitudes and practices in the twenties.
The reader was G.S.Street, who wrote:

When this play, with “D Company” by the same author, was published in 1916 the volume was confiscated by the authorities under the Defence of the Realm Act as a calumny on the British Soldier. It does not appear if they thought both plays equally blameable. The volume is now reprinted.

The report summarises the play, describing Harold, the soldier who:

expresses – violently and hysterically – his hatred of the war, his sense that the enemy had the same feeling and views as our own men, his wish that statesmen and journalists could be made to fight themselves, his determination not to go back.