Tag Archives: Britain

How the Great War Created the Modern State

26 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in History, Politics, War

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A.J.P. Taylor

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.

He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 percent of the national income… [B]roadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over it citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase.”

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Pulled from the opening chapter “The Effects and Origins of the Great War” in A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945.

In The New Cambridge Modern History: 1898-1945, there’s a substantial discussion of this link between the First and Second World Wars and the rise of the modern administrative state. A summary paragraph:

Until after 1847 direct income tax had been a device almost peculiar to Great Britain… During the 1890s, pari passu with the great expansion of governmental expenditures on armaments as well as on social services, Germany and her component states, as well as Italy, Austria, Norway, and Spain, all introduced or steepened systems of income tax. French governments repeatedly shied away from it, though they resorted to progressive death duties in 1901, and it was 1917 before a not very satisfactory system of income tax was introduced. The great fiscal burdens of war accustomed people to heavier taxation.

In 1920, Paul Cambon, France’s ambassador to Britain, told Winston Churchill, “In the twenty years I have been here I have witnessed an English Revolution more profound and searching than the French Revolution itself.” He continued, “The governing class have been almost entirely deprived of political power and to a very large extent of their property and estates; and this has been accomplished almost imperceptibly and without the loss of a single life.” Cambridge summarizes this: “If M. Cambon was exaggerating in 1920, he was perceptively prophetic, for his description became substantially true after the second world war.”

Read on:

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Winston Churchill: The Simple, Complex Man

27 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by in History

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winston-churchill31

“All who were with him then agree that the Old Man had more important matters on his mind than the sensitive feelings of subordinates. In any event, in time they came to adore him. Jock Colville later recalled, ‘Churchill had a natural sympathy for simple people, because he himself took a simple view of what was required; and he hated casuistry. That was no doubt why the man-in-the-street loved him and the intellectuals did not.’ Churchill, for his part, considered those on the left who anointed themselves the arbiters of right and wrong to be arrogant, ‘a fault,’ Colville recalled, Churchill ‘detested in others, particularly in its intellectual form.’ For that reason, Churchill ‘had dislike and contempt, of a kind which transcended politics, of the intellectual wing of the Labour party,’ which in turn despised Churchill. In 1940 the intellectualism of the left was inimical to Churchill and to Britain’s cause, which was simplicity itself: defeat Hitler.

Churchill cared little for obtuse political or social theories; he was a man of action: state the problem, find a solution, and solve the problem. For a man of action, however, he was exceptionally thoughtful and well read. When serving as a young subaltern in India, he amassed a private library that included Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Plato’s Republic, Schopenhauer on pessimism, Malthus on population, and Darwin’s Origin of Species. Reading, for Churchill, was a form of action. After a lifetime of reading — from the sea-adventuring Hornblower novels to the complete Shakespeare and Macaulay — he possessed the acumen to reduce complex intellectual systems and constructs and theories to their most basic essences. He once brought a wartime dinner conversation on socialism to an abrupt end by recommending that those present read Maurice Maeterlinck’s entomological study, The Life of the White Ant. ‘Socialism,’ Churchill declared, ‘would make our society comparable to that of the white ant.’ Case closed. Almost a decade later, when the Labour Party, then in power, nationalized British industries one by one, and when paper, meat, gasoline, and even wood for furniture were still rationed, Churchill commented: ‘The Socialist dream is no longer Utopia but Queuetopia.'”

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Excerpted from The Last Lion: Winston Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 by William Manchester and Paul Reid.

More of the Old Man:

Winston Churchill

Why Poetry?

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Interview

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Peter Hitchens

Questioner: I teach five-year-olds and we’ve been doing poetry — they love writing it. But making them sit down and recite poems would just be a waste of their time and a waste of my time.

Peter Hitchens: Well, I’ll recite you one a teacher taught me some 40 years ago:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

[Applause] And I’m very pleased that my head is full of things like that, and also lots of hymns, which I also remember — and I feel very sorry for anybody who hasn’t had the chance to learn them. And I think it is a great condemnation of our school system that so few people, and particularly only those whose parents are rich, can actually afford to have their children taught things like that, and have their minds furnished with beauty for the remainder of their lives.

And to pour scorn on it, and to say that it is unimportant, is to declare yourself a spiritual desert. Of course people need these things; and what’s more, they’re a profound part of being British. If you don’t know the literature and the poetry and the music of your own country, then you aren’t really fully conversant with its history and its character.

You’ve lost touch with what your ancestors knew, and you won’t be able to pass it on to your own children and grandchildren.

Of course these things should be taught. I wish our government actually had the power and the policies to make it happen. I really do think it’d be a good thing. I also think that people, particularly teachers, should not say these things don’t matter; they matter immensely.

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Peter Hitchens, appearing on BBC’s Question Time on June 14th, 2012.

Continue by memorizing for yourself the Housman poem, “Those Blue Remembered Hills”. Then take a look at Peter debating his brother Christopher — first on Nietzsche then on the motion “Can Civilization Survive without God?”. Watch Peter’s epic testimony here. Read the great David McCullough answer Why History?.

Drink like Winston Churchill

16 Friday May 2014

Posted by in Literature

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Winston Churchill

“He himself had always ignored dietary rules and rarely paid a penalty for it, and he drank whatever he wanted, usually alcohol, whenever he wanted it, which was often. Harry Hopkins (Franklin Roosevelt’s most trusted adviser and go-to man) entered Churchill’s bedroom one morning to find the prime minister in bed, wrapped in his pink robe, ‘and having of all things a bottle of wine for breakfast.’ When Hopkins commented on his breakfast beverage, Churchill replied that he despised canned milk, but had no ‘deep rooted prejudice about wine, and that he had resolved the conflict in favor of the latter.’ Furthermore, the Old Man told Hopkins, he ignored the advice of doctors because they were usually wrong, that he had lived almost seven decades and was in perfect health, and that ‘he had no intention of giving up alcoholic drink, mild or strong, now or later.’

His normal wartime regimen included a glass of white wine at breakfast (taken as a substitute for tea during the war, when only canned milk was available). Then, a weak scotch and soda, refreshed with soda throughout the morning. At lunch, perhaps a port, always Pol Roger champagne, a brandy or two (likely Hine, and bottled in the previous century), sometimes a beer. After his nap and before dinner he’d nurse another whisky (Johnnie Walker Red Label was his favorite brand). At dinner, more champagne during the meal, followed often by ‘several doses of brandy’ in the latter stages. He loved his meals as much as the libations that accompanied them… Another such drinker would recoil from food, but Churchill’s appetite was unaffected, and he rarely lost possession of his remarkable faculties…

Despite his prolonged, consistent, and prodigious consumption of alcohol, Churchill was not a drunk. But neither was he a moderate social drinker, as some of the memoirs and protestations of his close friends and private secretaries maintain… On occasion he would go too far, such as described in Jock Colville’s account of taking the Old Man up to bed at around 3:00 A.M. after a brandy-fueled evening. Both Colville and Churchill thought it hilarious when Churchill, attempting to settle into an armchair in order to remove his shoes, missed the chair entirely and fell onto the floor in a jumble of legs and arms. ‘A regular Charlie Chaplin,’ Churchill offered as he struggled to regain his footing…

The British essayist C. P. Snow encapsulated the paradox of Churchill’s drinking when he remarked, ‘Churchill cannot be an alcoholic because no alcoholic could drink that much.’ It could of course be argued that had he exemplified the ideal of moderation — more exercise, less drink, less reckless behavior, fewer cigars — he might well have lived a full and rich life for many years beyond the ninety he was granted.

Churchill once summed up his relationship with drink thus: ‘I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.'”

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Excerpted from The Last Lion: Winston Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 by William Manchester and Paul Reid.

More:

  • From the same biography: a stunning account of Winston’s energy
  • Christopher Hitchens’s golden rules of boozing
  • The greatest ever description of a hangover, from the inimitable Kingsley Amis

Winston Churchill

Churchill’s Energy

16 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in History

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Winston Churchill

“At No. 10 Downing Street everyone referred to the newly appointed sixty-five-year-old P.M. as ‘the Old Man.’ In many ways he was an alarming master. He worked outrageous hours. He was self-centered and could be shockingly inconsiderate.

Churchill cared little for obtuse political or social theories; he was a man of action: state the problem, find a solution, and solve the problem. For a man of action, however, he was exceptionally thoughtful and well read…

Afterward everyone who had been around him in 1940 remembered the Old Man’s astonishing, unflagging energy. He was overweight and fifteen years older than Hitler; he never exercised, yet ‘he was working,’ Kathleen Hill, one of Churchill’s typists, recalled, ‘all the time, every waking moment.’ Young Jock Colville marveled at ‘Winston’s ceaseless industry’...

He kept hours that would stagger a young man. Late each evening, at midnight or shortly thereafter, a courier arrived in Downing Street with the first editions of the morning newspapers, eight or nine in all. The Old Man skimmed them before retiring, and sometimes, Kathleen Hill later recalled, he would telephone the Daily Mail to inquire about new developments in a running story.

The prime minister’s day began at eight o’clock in the morning, when he woke after five or six hours’ sleep and rang a bell summoning his usual breakfast: an egg, bacon or ham or chipped beef (when meat was available), sometimes a piece of sole, all washed down by his glass of white wine, or a pot of tea, a black Indian blend. Then a typewriter arrived, accompanied by a stenographer—usually Mrs. Hill or Miss Watson—to whom he would dictate a stream of memos as she rapidly hammered them out and he worked his way through a large black dispatch box.

When boredom struck, he could be depended upon to make a ‘ruthless break’ in pursuit of a more enjoyable source of entertainment. The balm might take the form of dictating a letter, singing off-key renditions of Gilbert and Sullivan, perhaps wielding his trowel to lay bricks in the gardens at Chartwell… He always kept his quiver full of possible activities: read a novel, feed his goldfish, address his black swans, parse the newspapers, declaim on England’s glorious past…

In relief of boredom, almost any action—short of the wicked—would do, with one prerequisite: it had to possess value, and Churchill was the arbiter of the value. There simply was none to be had by sitting through Citizen Kane or lingering in reception lines…

He possessed, John Martin recalled, a ‘zigzag streak of lightning on the brain.’… ‘If he hadn’t been this sort of bundle of energy that he was,’ recalled Martin, ‘he would never have carried the whole machine, civil and military, right through to the end of the war.'”

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Excerpted from The Last Lion: Winston Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 by William Manchester and Paul Reid.

In private meetings with his confidants, Hitler called Neville Chamberlain, Churchill’s capitulating predecessor, a “little worm”. The Führer would come to refer to Churchill as “a superannuated drunk sustained by Jewish gold”.

Amongst his advisors, Churchill, who had a considerable talent at the easel, also had a pet nickname for Hitler, a failed artist. He would call him, in a voice derisively deadpan, “The housepainter”.

Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens: What Country Would You Live In?

23 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in Journalism, Politics

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Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens

Brian Lamb: If you had to choose a country to live in, besides Great Britain and the United States–

Christopher Hitchens: India. I love India. It’s the only place I’ve ever felt sort of instantly at home. It must seem incongruous when you look at me.

Brian Lamb: And Andrew?

Andrew Sullivan: I would die. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.

Brian Lamb: You would not pick anywhere else?

Andrew Sullivan: No.

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Two British transplants, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens, reflecting on where they would live and their love for the United States during a joint interview with C-Span in February, 2002. Both men, though born in the United Kingdom, became American citizens in the last decade.

Watch the whole thing — but this particular segment is below.


Churchill in the Restroom

14 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by in Humor

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Winston Churchill

One day shortly after the Second World War ended, Winston Churchill and the newly elected Labour Party Prime Minister Clement Attlee encountered one another at the urinals in the House of Commons men’s washroom. Attlee had arrived first, and was standing at one of the stalls closest to the door.

Although Attlee was the only other man in the room, Churchill entered and walked to the farthest urinal — ten or twelve stalls away from Attlee. With a smug grin, Attlee said, “Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?”

Churchill replied: “That’s right. Every time you see something this big, you want to nationalize it.”

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This anecdote and scores of other hilarious incidents between Winston and Attlee can be found in Martin Gilbert’s definitive biography Churchill: A Life.

At Wednesday’s Bradley Symposium here in Washington, Charles Krauthammer mentioned Churchill in the restroom during his keynote address. He followed it with the proviso that it may in fact be apocryphal, though I’m inclined to believe it — and not just because I want it to be true. Churchill had a razor-sharp wit which he wasn’t afraid to brandish when needed, especially against political adversaries like Attlee. In fact, it’s just as hard to picture someone making this story up than it is to imagine Churchill actually living it.

In another classic, Churchill once referred to Attlee as, “a sheep in sheep’s clothing,” and later as, “a modest man with much to be modest about.”

Lady Astor, the American-born socialite and first female Member of Parliament was once so agitated by Churchill at a dinner party that she belted out, “Winston… if I were your wife, I’d poison your soup.” Churchill’s reply: “Nancy, if I were your husband I’d drink it.”

You can find these and other epic epigrams from Winston in the essential Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations.