Quite a lot of years ago now we holidayed with the boys, as they were then, in Yorkshire. On the way down we went through Corbridge. The town is now bypassed east/west by the A69 (it wasn’t then.) There was/is a lovely wee square in the centre where we stopped for a picnic lunch all those years ago.

Back then we had noticed a sign to Roman remains so checked it out. We didn’t have time to stay long so only peeked in to the site over the hedge.

This year, on the way from Durham, the good lady and I (on our own now) took time to visit and go round the site. We like to do a bit of culture. The entrance fee included the hire of a handset that gave descriptions of the various areas. After strolling through the very informative museum we went onto the site proper where the handsets were very useful.

The area is quite extensive and I took a few pictures. The first is from the museum. Then from northwest, northeast, southeast, southwest. You can see the museum building in the third and fourth photos. There are extra information boards scattered here and there.

The original fort grew to become a town. There were two large granaries. Their remains are just in front of the museum.

These are both from the north.

There was apparently a strongroom towards the south of the site. These are thought to be the steps down to it.

The excavated remains are under the aegis of English Heritage and well worth a visit if you’re into history.

The British and the Afrikaners 1815-1902. Blandford Press, 1988. 176p

After coming across two memorials to the “South African War” on my recent trip down south (see two of my five previous posts) I decided to read this book at long last.

While purporting to be a complete guide to the Anglo-Boer disagreements of the nineteenth century, which mainly focused on the differing attitudes of Boers and British to the rights of the majority population of the Cape, Barthorp merely sketches the early history and does not devote much space to the First Boer War – for a good account of which see the book of that title by Joseph Lehmann – and concentrates mainly on the military aspects of the Second rather than the political (which is explored more fully in Thomas Pakenham’s The Boer War.

Both of the conflicts were characterised on the British side by the usual early lack of troops, muddle, disorganisation and, typical of the colonial era, underestimation of the enemy. In both wars the courage of the rank and file British soldier was never in doubt while the Boers were always adept. The political will at Westminster to carry on in the first war was lacking and so peace – with independence for the Transvaal and Orange Free State – came quickly.

Due to the influence of Cecil Rhodes and Sir Alfred Milner the same was no longer true in 1899 and the second war was prolonged. After initial reverses the British began to prevail when Lord Roberts – not long from his triumphant march from Kabul to Kandahar (some areas of conflict never change) – took overall command. Eventually the greater weight of British numbers and materiél as well as increased ability to deal with their more mobile enemy pushed the Boers into avoiding set piece confrontations and to rely on guerilla warfare – at which they were particularly effective. Even Kitchener’s blockhouse system failed to contain them.

In this context Barthorp mentions the collection of Boer non-combatants into camps and the subsequent toll of disease and death but does not see this as a great influence on the morale or effectiveness of the Boer commandos, though it was a propaganda calamity for Britain. He notes the eerie similarity of the battles of Majuba and Spion Kop in the two wars – both eminently avoidable battles for the British and both bloody defeats. He also gives General Buller more credit than I have seen him afforded elsewhere.

The book has occasional maps but a few more would have made certain of the troop movements clearer than the text manages.

Like some Boers a few British officers fought in both conflicts. Many of those engaged in the second war (French, Rawlinson, Gough, Ian Hamilton, Smith-Dorrien, Allenby, Mahon, Haig) and one of the Boers (Smuts) went on to have prominent roles in World War 1, though perhaps failing to learn fully the lessons of the up-to-date weaponry employed. A photograph of the British dead in the enfiladed trench at Spion Kop is reminiscent of one of the sunken road at Antietam in the American Civil War. 21,000 of the 450,000 Empire troops who were engaged overall died (62% from disease.) This explains the war memorials. There were 52,000 other casualties. Estimated Boer troop numbers vary from a curiously precise 87,365 to a rounder 65,000, with some 4,000 dead. An additional 20,000 Boers incarcerated in the camps also died.

While gaining independence in 1881 and then losing it in 1902 the Boers could curiously be said to have won in the second case also since in 1910, a scant eight years after the treaty of Vereeniging which ended the Second War of Independence, as the Boers called it, the Union of South Africa (including not only the Transvaal and the Orange Free State but also the erstwhile British dominated Cape Colony and Natal) was granted full independence within the Empire. The Boers swiftly came to dominate it and in 1948 completed the process by leaving the Commonwealth.

Barthorp notes a final irony. That while the Boers’ attitudes remained unchanged those in Britain who were most against fighting them in the nineteenth century had political heirs who were most forward in condemning the Republic’s policies regarding the black population in the latter twentieth century. (The book was published before the release of Nelson Mandela and majority rule.) He fails to point out the corollary, though. Those in favour of fighting the wars had political heirs who were against any interference with, or even criticism of, the apartheid state.

I heard on the news yeterday morning of the death of Jimmy Reid.

He came to notice as one of the leaders of the work-in at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in the early 1970s during Ted Heath’s government. His speech to the workers was unforgettable, “There will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying,” for the world was watching.

That last bit is true. The world was watching. The good lady was in Germany at the time on an exchange visit. (I hadn’t met her yet.) She saw the speech on German television and heard the laugh when bevvying was translated into the German equivalent in the subtitles.

It is the word bevvying which makes the sentence resound. Without it, and Reid’s emphasis on it, the speech would probably have been less remarked. In retrospect it was a very Calvinistic piece of oratory for someone who was at the time a communist.

That in the end, despite a tactical victory in changing the government’s mind, the campaign to save all the UCS yards failed – they are all gone I believe and only Yarrow’s remains building ships on the Upper Clyde and that depends on Royal Navy orders – does not detract from the essential nobility of the effort to maintain the dignity of employment and prevent a descent into joblessness and the blight that follows. It was perhaps the last grand hurrah of the trade union movement.

Reid was the great example of the intellectual from the working class, possibly largely self taught. I remember him on a television chat show relating the typical argument between two such Glaswegians. As one is thumping the other he is saying, “Ah telt ye. There are 45 islands in the Indonesian archipelago.”

As a result of his new found fame he was elected rector of Glasgow University. I was a student there at the time and this was the one and only occasion till a local election some five years ago that my vote ever helped elect anybody.

Jimmy Reid 9/7/1932-11/8/2010. So it goes.

Macmillan, 204, 298p

This volume is a companion piece to What If? and More What If? and is the sort of speculative stuff which I just love. (I don’t much care whether it is as fiction or as historical rumination. Both illuminate how we got here and how it could have been different.) The professional historians call the medium counter-factual, while it is known in speculative fiction as Alternative History. (My preferred term is Altered History.)

This book concentrates mainly on the history of the US. So we have:-
The Mayflower landing in Virginia instead of Massachusetts and so less religious influence on the US.
Pitt the Elder avoiding the American Revolution.
George Washington being trapped by British troops in Brooklyn before the War of Independence gets fully into stride.
No incorporation of Texas into the Union – and no Vice Presidents automatically succeeding on a President’s death.
No loss of Lee’s cigar-wrapped orders before Antietam and hence a Union defeat in the Civil War.
No (possibly unjust) blaming of a certain Civil War Union general for a near catastrophe. (That circumstance eventually gave us Ben-Hur and all the cultural efflorescences that followed from it.)
A second secession (of Mid-West States) during the Civil War.
Andrew Johnson being assassinated along with Lincoln.
A class war in the 1870s.
A US-Britain war in 1896 (over a border dispute in South America!)
FDR delaying the Pacific War.
Eisenhower taking Berlin before Zhukov and Konev get there.
Joe McCarthy as a Soviet agent. (Not too big a leap for the imagination if you apply the old saying “cui bono” to that Senator’s activities.)
A thawing of the Cold War because Gary Powers’s U-2 mission is cancelled.
The Cuban missile crisis is not resolved safely.
An unassassinated JFK reconciling with Cuba (and resisting embroilment in Vietnam.)
Watergate as only a minor scandal.

All fascinating stuff – if perhaps sometimes the historians assume nothing too much would change thereby.

Secker and Warburg, 1957. 192p. Translated from the French Les Taxis De La Marne by Harold King.

I bought this book, sans dust cover and consequently of any indication of content, in a second hand book shop, expecting it to be a history book about the ferrying of part of the French Army in a commandeered fleet of Paris taxis to the River Marne in September 1914 in order to exploit the gap in the German advance (revealed by aerial reconnaissance) caused by a failure to hold tightly to the Schlieffen plan.

On starting it, however, I discovered it was a polemic, written by Dutourd in an effort, it would seem, to expiate his (and by extension France’s) guilt at not putting up more of a fight to prevent the later German victory in 1940.

He places the blame for this lack on complacency but also on stupidity, of both the politicians and the generals of the inter war years. He contrasts their pusillanimity and collective failure to inspire with Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches” speech and with the glories of the French army in WW1 and of Napoleon’s times. Only De Gaulle – who, of course, stood out against acquiescence in the defeat – meets with his approval.

Dutourd is not too enamoured of the post war equivalents of those generals and politicians either, referring to the defeat at Dien Bien Phu and obliquely to the Suez debacle. At the time of writing De Gaulle was out of government “in a house not even paid for by the state” and Dutourd hankers for his return. (Was he as in favour of his great man, I wonder, when De Gaulle returned and immediately proceeded to give Algeria away?)

Dutourd’s attitudes are firmly those of someone of his life and times – as he admits himself when he states he wants no part of a future that does not have French civilisation as its foundation. He fears France will never be glorious again and will become what he terms a “female” nation. He is also, in passing, disparaging to Egyptians.

One of his main theses is that private morality and that of the state cannot be equated. To my mind this comes far too close to suggesting that nations are perfectly within their rights to bully others. If that is so, then why is he complaining about France not fighting more energetically in 1940?

Dutourd highlights the enervating effect of the heroes of 1914-18 returning to homes dominated by the women they had left behind and allowing that circumstance to remain unchecked as a main contributor to loss of national backbone. The suffocating nature of those heroes’ tales of war on their children is said to be another source of debilitation.

That France had simply been exhausted by WW1 – bled white, as was Falkenhayn’s intention in initiating the strategy of attrition – and in no fit state to resist a determined war of revenge by the vanquished of that war, that disaster was maybe inevitable, does not seem to occur to Dutourd as a reason for the ennui.

Dutourd was, apparently, mainly a novelist. A Prix Stendhal winner, no less, and a member of the Académie française. I idly wonder what his fiction is like. I shan’t be seeking it out though.

Collins, 1974. 162p

I bought this book at a library book sale several years ago because I knew virtually nothing about the War Of The Spanish Succession apart from the names of the main battles involving the British* Army – Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet (some of which later came to grace Royal Navy ships) – and Southey’s famous poem.

The political and strategic options facing the Duke of Marlborough at the outset of his 1704 campaign are set out somewhat baldly. Marlborough’s boldness – bordering on recklessness – in making his march to the Danube from the Low Countries is emphasised. He was astute in making good provision for his soldiers and his order that they not ransack the countryside through which they marched but pay for any food they required was unusual for his times as were his pains to provide care for his wounded. It was his talent for misdirection, both strategic and tactical, – even to the extent of misleading his allies – which marks him out as an outstanding general, though.

The Battle of The Schellenberg at Donauwörth which preceded Blenheim is presented by Green as an example of Marlborough’s decisiveness as, rather than institute a long siege, he ordered an immediate assault on the fortification, which, though bloody, succeeded. The remainder of the opposition’s local forces being reluctant to fight Marlborough then ordered the plundering of his Bavarian enemy’s lands to force the issue, but this did not succeed in its aim and the French Marshal Tallard eventually arrived to link up with the Elector of Bavaria. But Marlborough’s decision to close battle early caught them off guard. His handling of the conflict also drew them into false conclusions about his intent.

The overall treatment by Green is a bit sketchy and sometimes assumes more background knowledge of the times than the casual reader such as myself holds. The Wiki article on the battle – not, of course, available when Green was writing – is as informative.

*Green refers to it as the English army (this was just prior to the Act Of Union, which occurred in 1707) but explains this point.

Christopher Brookmyre, one of whose books I am reading just now, says he has been a Buddy since 1976. Given that, I found it a little surprising that the novel contains an extended riff on the vicissitudes of being a Rangers fan (otherwise known as Bluenoses, Teddy Bears or – by the uncharitable – Huns.)

Like they would know anything about the trials and tribulations of being a football supporter. When was the last time they went decades without winning anything? When were they ever in danger of relegation; or suffered such a fate? Their only contact point with the perennial disappointment of being a fan is in the European arena – and even there they mostly refuse to acknowledge the fact that they usually punch above their weight.

Brookmyre gives himself the best excuse by making his main character a season ticket holder at Ibrox. Perhaps making her a St Mirren supporter would have been too much of an exposure of private grief. And it does give him the opportunity to lampoon the less analytical supporters of both of Glasgow’s ugly football sisters.

But did he perhaps fear the book’s sales would be smaller if he’d made her a fan of a wee team?

A film by Ken Burns. 1989 (remastered 2002.)

The titles on the actual films of course say just The Civil War. Still if they’ll forgive us our parochialism we’ll forgive them theirs.

In any case, the series is nothing short of exemplary. It is a magnificent blend of eye witness account, anecdote, written and printed sources, photographs, paintings, panoramas and music; all of which complement each other and add up to more than their sum. The haunting theme tune, Ashokan Farewell, – a relatively recent composition, though resolutely in keeping with the subject nevertheless, and which resounds throughout the series – is an inspired choice.

While not neglecting the battles – how could it? – it does not dissect them with a military historian’s scalpel. Its preferred use is of individual testaments from soldiers and civilians on both sides – including that of slaves – which grounds it superbly. It never loses sight of the human cost of the USA’s national tragedy, an understanding of which is probably essential to any understanding of that country. One of its consultants, Barbara Fields, makes the point in the last episode that the Civil War is still ongoing, not just in the US but anywhere where injustice and lack of freedom persist.

While watching it I was trying to think if anything in our national narrative approaches this conflict. In social effects, along with its attendant trail of corpses, graves and memorials, the grinding sense of endlessness, the hope for a higher purpose, the nearest would be World War 1. But even that, in its worst battles, did not achieve the casualty rates of the war between the States, which were horrendous and way, way beyond what any western army or its public at home could tolerate now.

The star of the films is undoubtedly Shelby Foote whose knowledge of the Civil War seems to be close to encyclopædic. In the eleven or so total hours he appears most frequently; always with telling anecdotes. In one, he describes waving Nathan Bedford Forrest’s sword above his head; about which his delight was obvious. He then relates giving that general’s granddaughter his opinion that Forrest had, along with Lincoln, been one of the two genuine geniuses of the war. There was a long pause before she replied to him, “We didn’t think much of Mr Lincoln in our family.”

His ability to inhabit the mindset of both sides is superb as are his analytical skills. Towards the end he says of Americans as a whole (I paraphrase a bit but this is the gist,) “We like to think of ourselves as a superior people. If we were a superior people we wouldn’t have fought that war. But since we did then it has to be the greatest war and our generals the greatest generals. It’s very American to think like that.”

Speaking strictly as a non-American I still say The American Civil War is probably the greatest war documentary you’ll ever see.

Those of you who know me know my birthday lies about as close to Christmas as you can get.

This means I get presents two days in a row. A downside is that I then have to wait a whole year before getting any more.

It also makes things difficult for my family in getting me cards and such for my birthday. In particular, the shops seem not to stock birthday cards in December.

I mentioned last year I have a collection of tins. I got two new ones this year; both nice examples – with biscuits in them!

My eldest son was stuck for a birthday present. The good lady suggested The American Civil War documentary series from a few years back on DVD. He thought it wouldn’t be very festive but the good lady assured him I’d be delighted. I was. (I did videotape it when it was first on; but the DVD is more durable.)

Since it hasn’t been the weather for gallivanting – unusually heavy snowfall and unusually persistent frost and ice for Kirkcaldy – a lot of my holiday has been spent (re)watching the series. Review will follow.

Back to work tomorrow. Ridiculously early in the year. I’ve never before been back on a January banks’ holiday.

“This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11.00 a.m. that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.

I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”

- Neville Chamberlain, 3rd September, 1939.
(The above link also leads on to the BBC audio file of the speech.)

Don’t you just love that use of the word “note?” (Chamberlain’s pronunciation made it sound more like “nit.”)

Not demand, not insistence.

Note.

How British, how understated, how public school. How ineffectual.

That note certainly put the wind right up the buggers, and no mistake.