Derek Turner

Vanished Kingdoms—The History of Half-forgotten Europe
Norman Davies. London: Allen Lane, 2011. 800 pp, £30 hb

When I visited the Naval Museum in Madrid several years ago, I took away as a souvenir a facsimile of a coloured 1756 naval manual illustration entitled Banderas que las naciones arbolan en la mar. It shows ninety different flags that might conceivably be met with upon the high seas by Spanish sailors—ranging from the personal standard of the Hapsburgs and the banner of the Papal States to the presumably more frequently encountered flags of Brabant, Corsica, the English East India Company, Flanders, Pomerania, Riga, Stettin, Zeeland and many other names now relegated to history’s footnotes.

Almost none of these once brinily-billowing banderas would now be encountered on any seas by anyone. The illustration is a piquant evocation of a looser and more colourful Europe—a hint of all that has faded into dull desuetude in the two-and-a-half centuries since. But it is also a salutary reminder of the complex counter-narratives that underlie accepted realities, and seethe beneath the veneer of the nations we think we know.

My maritime metaphor echoes Norman Davies’s introduction to Vanished Kingdoms:

This book . . . garners the traces of ships of states that have sunk, and it invites the reader, if only on the page, to watch with delight as the stricken galleons straighten their fallen masts, draw up their anchors, fill their sails and reset their course across the ocean swell.

Sometimes the most compelling history is the kind that falls between the cracks of the chronicles and subverts fondly-held foundational myths. The ‘official’ history of Europe is variegated enough to give any number of historians lifetimes of employment, but now the 72 year old Slavonic specialist Davies has produced fifteen case studies dating from the fifth to the twentieth centuries to suggest that a great deal of what we take for granted about Europe’s past is “narrative colonization” which ought to be unlearned. He ends with a short chapter, “How states die”, which seeks to formulate “a typology of vanished kingdoms”.

This all makes for an engrossing, evocative and original contribution to European historiography. There will be few who will not unearth some new insight to challenge conventional, convenient versions of events—the flattering histories which Napoleon famously dismissed as “a fable agreed upon”. The “Europe of a hundred flags” wished for by the Breton nationalist Yann Fouéré is more like a Europe of a thousand flags. “The past is not only a foreign country that we half-knew existed” Davies observes—“it is hiding another concealed country behind it, and behind that one, another, and another, like a set of Russian dolls”.

Davies is a melancholic and romantic, and his intellectual interests have been influenced by his Welshness, chapel-going and early encounters with Heraclitus and Gibbon. He also possesses a Polonism so pronounced that he has (unjustly) been accused of understating historical Polish anti-Semitism and downplaying Jewish suffering during World War Two. This may have cost him a tenured position at Stanford in 1986, something he clearly still broods upon, despite claiming on his (typo-full) website that

. . . he remembers the episode stoically—as evidence of academic small-mindedness and of [the] fate awaiting anyone who confronts entrenched opinions and prejudices.

It cannot have helped that he is strongly anti-communist. His website entry on his 2006 book Europe at War explains his view that communism was the moral equivalent of nazism:

[T]he war in Europe was dominated by two evil monsters, not by one . . . The liberators of Auschwitz were servants of a regime that ran still larger concentration camps than those they liberated . . . The outcome of the [war] was at best ambiguous. The victory of the West was only partial, its moral reputation was severely tarnished and, for the greater part of the continent of Europe, ‘liberation’ was only the beginning of more than fifty years of further totalitarian oppression.

The most recent of his shipwrecks of history is the Soviet Union itself. There were many factors responsible for the USSR’s dissolution, but the problems were fundamental:

[T]he Soviet system was based on extreme force and extreme fraud. Practically everything that Lenin and the Leninists did was accompanied by killing; practically everything they said was based on half-baked theories, a total lack of integrity and bare-faced lies.

He maintains that Gorbachev was probably taken by surprise by the events he expedited—and observes that glasnost, which was invariably rendered in the Western press as “openness”, actually means “publicity”. The subsequent inglorious events traumatized all Russians, and even now feed nationalistic dislike of the oligarchs and the Balt, Turkic, and Chechen separatists of Russia’s near abroad—and of course America. Putin’s rhetoric about the alleged glories of the USSR is coloured by “a strong sense of bafflement” and “pangs of corporate guilt” that he and other insiders did not forestall this degrading dissolution.

Davies leads the Western reader surefootedly across the little-known landscape of the eastern continent, making sense of entangled narratives and being fair to all. He commences each chapter with descriptions of these places as they look now, from their topography to the chief historical sites, before haling us back across the centuries with tales of ancient alarums, excursions, raiders, crusaders, forgotten wars, futile resistances, burned villages, slighted cities, and mounted tribes moving restlessly forever across that exhilarating vague vastness between Teutonia and Tartary, Europe and Asia. This area which has too few defensible frontiers for its own good has seen the most atrocious crimes, mountains upon mountains of skulls heaped up by successive tsunamis of Tartars, Mongols, Cossacks, Teutonic Knights, Communists, and Nazis powered by greed, ideology, religion, race-hatred, or sheer love of killing.

Other essays with an east European theme include one on Litva, the Polish-Lithuanian “Grand Duchy with Kings”, at one time the largest of all European states covering much of what is presently Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Poland, and that lasted more than five centuries. We are taken through Litva’s crepuscular chronicles from the time Viking (locally called Varangian) explorers started to hazard the region’s headwaters, pushing ever further inland through a primevally-forested country populated by wisent, konik, elk, and lynx, some of which still persist in a precious fragment of this forest along the Polish-Belarussian border. The Varangians conquered existing Slav settlements like Kiev or established new fortress-fords at places like Novgorod, and traded or fought all the way down to the Black Sea and eventually Byzantium, where for five centuries the Emperors of the East maintained an Anglo-Scandinavian Varangian Guard as both elite fighting regiment and personal corps. Semi-legendary kings ruled over a huge, indeterminate territory—Ukraina means “On the Edge” in Slavonic, and these wild steppes needed to be protected by self-defence communities of Kozaks (a Turkic word meaning adventurer or freebooter) because they were so prone to incursions. Although Orthodoxy made rapid advances from the 9^th century onwards, the ruling caste long remained pagan; Grand Duke Gedminas legendarily founded Vilnius after dreaming of an iron wolf howling from a hill overlooking three rivers, and when he died in 1342 his obsequies were entirely pagan, his body being incinerated along with his favourite servant, favourite horse and a group of German slaves. But they cleverly allied with Catholic or Orthodox dynasties according to the political winds, and this pragmatism, as well as Litva’s relative remoteness, helps to account for the Duchy’s durability. In 1386, Prince Jogaila was elected king by an assembly of barons on condition of accepting Christian baptism and permanent union with Poland, and for almost 200 years afterwards “Jagiellonians” steered their ship as a joint Polish-Lithuanian venture, now intermarried with the Angevin and Hapsburg European mainstream. Even after the Jagiellonians had gone, the Duchy was often fortunate in its statesmen, but by the early 17^th century it was trapped between Muscovy pushing from east and south and Sweden from north and west, and the king-grand duke was forced to flee into exile. There was time for one last great figure, in the shape of King John III Sobieski, whose hussars broke the Turks outside Vienna in 1683, but by then the Duchy was riven by internal disputes and weak leadership. The Great Northern War of 1700-21 between Russia and Sweden took place largely on the Duchy’s territory, and from then on it became the plaything of Russia, Prussia and Austria—the “international bandits” as Davies calls them, who carved it up between them while Voltaire and other “wisecrackers of the Enlightenment” chortled. There were last desperate attempts to assert independence and expel foreign troops, notably in 1794 in Warsaw. Russian forces under the leadership of Suvorov massacred the population of the Warsaw suburb of Praga, and the General sent a message to Catherine the Great reading simply “Hurrah. Praga. Suvorov”—to which she answered, equally laconically, “Bravo Fieldmarshal. Catherine”. On 25 November 1795, the last of the offices of state ceased functioning and the last king-grand duke, Stanlislaw-August, abdicated, after which he was exiled to captivity in St. Petersburg. This sad ending has been reprised severally since thanks to the area’s unlucky proximity to Germany and Russia. Time after time, even more than other areas of Europe, this unhappy region has witnessed what Zbigniew Herbert would call “the abrupt change of life / Into archaeology”. Even now, the former provinces of Litva—now Poland, Belarus and Lithuania—all claim to be the legitimate heirs of the legacy, even arguing over Adam Mickiewicz, whose 1834 epic poem Pan Tadeusz commences:

O Litva, My homeland, you are like health /

How to gauge your worth, only he can know /

Who has lost you. Today I see your full beauty /

And describe it, because I long for you.

Another equally engrossing east European-themed essay is “Borussia: Watery Land of the Prusai”, where we are introduced to previously unknown tribes emanating from what would one day become East Prussia, fleetingly recalled from the Mazovian memory-hole before sinking back into their immemorial lagoons, making us wish we knew them better—Varmians, Pomesgasanians, Natangians, Sambians, Skalovians, Nadruvians, Bartians, Sudovians, and Gallinians. We hear of the Wars of the Schmalkaldic League and the fate of the alchemist Conte de Ruggiero, hanged in a gilded gallows, wearing a toga made of gilt paper—and are tantalized by the possible fate of Konigsberg’s/Kaliningrad’s fabled Bernsteinzimmer (“Amber Room”), fifty-five gol and crystal-decorated amber panels weighing a total of six tons presented to Peter the Great, missing since 1944, according to assorted legends languishing in a Saxon mine, in a sunken German battleship, concealed in Moscow or concreted into the foundations of Soviet-era buildings. (German donations helped to pay for a new Amber Room opened in 2003 in St. Petersburg’s Catherine Palace.)

Then there is “Rusyn—The Republic of One Day”. That serio-comic “One Day” started at 5am on 15 March 1939 when the Wehrmacht rolled into the rump of Czechoslovakia and the Slovaks declared independence. The Ruthenian “Czechoslovaks” of Carpatho-Ukraine decided they might as well emulate the Slovaks, and by 6.30 pm they had declared a democratic republic, announced that the official language was Ukrainian, hoisted a flag of two horizontal blue and yellow bands and announced a touchingly vainglorious anthem, Shche ne vmerla Ukraina (“Ukraine has not yet perished”):

Ukraine has not yet perished, nor her glory, nor her freedom,
Upon us, fellow Ukrainians, fate shall smile once more.
Our enemies will vanish like dew in the sun,
And we too shall rule, brothers, in a free land of our own.

But the following morning, Hungarian troops had crossed the border and annexed the little country. Rusyn paramilitaries fought on for a few days in the mountains, with hundreds executed after capture, but geopolitics told against them. In 1944, the Hungarians were briefly replaced by the Germans before the Red Army swept through and incorporated Carpatho-Ukraine into the Ukrainian SSR, repressing its distinct culture (ironically, today’s Rusyn autonomy movement is sometimes said to be financed by Moscow).

Davies’ forays into western and southern Europe are equally diverting. We start with the myth-encrusted Visigoths of Tolosa (Toulouse), and are introduced to the minutely described 5^th century King Theodoric II, whose knees were “the comeliest and least wrinkled in the world”, who “prays with assiduity…but one suspects more habit than conviction” and was married to Queen Pedauco (“Goose-foot”—whose knees were presumably more wrinkled than her spouse’s).

We go to Spain before Spain ever existed, to pay our historical respects to the now-subsumed Aragonese, led by aristocrats like “Wilfred the Hairy” who defied fellow “valley viscounts” and the Moors from fortified hilltops.

We follow the meteoric career of Burgundy’s Charles the Bold, from the 1466 “high” of murdering all the inhabitants of Dinant to his 1477 downfall in what is now Switzerland, his naked corpse “frozen into the ice of a pond . . . split to the chin by a Swiss halberd, the body many times pierced by Swiss pikes”.

In the chapter on Sabaudia (Savoy), we are told of the time when the present Savoyard (and therefore Italian) royal claimant Vittorio Emanuele endeared himself to his virtual subjects by fatally shooting a man after shouting at him Voi, italiani di merda (“you Italian shits”).

In the discussion of Napoleon’s client state of Etruria, it is gratifying to renew acquaintance with Talleyrand’s citric aperçu on the judicial murder of the Duc d’Enghien, last of the French Bourbons—C’était pire qu’un crime; c’était une faute (“It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake”).

We are taken to Rosenau in southern Germany, to be regaled with just a few of the multiple ironies of Anglo-German history; during World War I the Britain ruled by descendants of Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha underwent night bombing raids from giant Gothas planes named in honour of the selfsame dynasty. Like a pawkily proud Welshman, Davies takes mischievous pride in underscoring just how German is the “British” royal family, infinitely more closely related to the un-Home Counties-sounding Anhalt-Zerbsts or Pfalz-Zimmerns than to William the Conqueror, Henry VIII or even the Stuarts.

Still on a Cymric theme, there are anecdotes of Sinn Féin’s negotiator Eamon de Valera being humiliated by the British PM David Lloyd-George speaking to his secretary in Welsh more fluent than de Valera’s Irish—and a revisionist view of the history of Alt Clud, the “Kingdom of the Rock” in what is now south-eastern Scotland, which was rather much more Welsh than it was Scottish. Closest to home of all are his reflections on the future of the UK, which he suspects is destined to fail as all other states eventually fail—and probably soon.

There are criticisms that could be made of Vanished Kingdoms. Davies arguably makes too much of the Aragonese selling as slaves the Moorish population of Menorca in 1287, which he calls “a milestone in the grim history of European slavery”. But while this was clearly not an edifying event, it was merely one example of a trade that had always existed, and in which the Moors joined with at least equal enthusiasm (the luckless Menorcans were themselves sold in North Africa’s slave markets, which operated until the 19^th century).

A few assertions seem over-confident, such as that Moors remained numerically predominant in much of Spain even after the Reconquista—but how can he, or anyone, know this for certain? The concluding chapter on “Why states die” feels curiously cursory after the richness and subtlety of the bulk of the book, just eleven occasionally banal pages that skim far too quickly over the musings of St. Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau, and more recent theorists of state death. He cites “implosion, conquest, merger, liquidation and ‘infant mortality’” as causes of collapse, but scants over some other threats, such as the gradual loss of a previously unifying culture or population replacement through immigration (for example, a recent Scottish survey suggests that one fifth of Scotland’s population does not regard itself as “Scottish”, which has implications for Scottish independence). There are some small typos and inconsistencies, but it is only fair to note that I worked from an uncorrected proof copy and doubtless most of these were later edited out.

Yet this highly original book is about editing in rather than editing out, and the effect is eminently addictive—revivifying Europe’s unquiet dead to walk and talk again for a time, salvaging their sunken vessels and sending them scudding briefly again across history’s charts, while we their inheritors plot our future course across a sea of troubles.

Lincoln Cathedral looms above its locus like a celestial city of its own, its three towers on top of its lofty limestone cliff drawing all eyes for miles in every direction to focus on its perfection and their abjection.

It is one of the great buildings of medieval Europe, a perfectly-judged coda to the Steep Hill up which city dwellers and visitors have struggled breathlessly for centuries to Iron Age and even older forts, the Romans’ colonia of Lindum where the Fosse Way crossed Ermine Street, and a piquant parade of counts and chevaliers, serfs and saints, merchants, moneylenders and mendicants living, working and dying in round-arched, herringbone-patterned houses so strongly built by Norman masons that a few are still in use, some of the oldest domestic buildings in the West.

Roman roads lead to and from the city, often ruler-straight, always ruthless—north through the still-standing Newport Arch to the Humber, Yorkshire and Scotland—westward to the Trent and Nottinghamshire—south to Sleaford, Grantham and London (part of the actual surface, complete with cart-tracks, preserved under the Guildhall at the foot of the Hill)—east through lumps of hills tumbling eventually into the verdancy of the Lincolnshire Marsh, through which the ghosts of tide-dependent trackways wend towards the shadows of salterns.

We had come along that eastern road that morning, swooping through wisps of mild mist, past prehistoric barrows and undulating pastures full of Lincoln Reds, always under the eyes of buzzards—seeing the Cathedral grow before us from distant spikes to dizzying stronghold, struck into silence as ever by the sight, doubly aware of it today because of the occasion.

Into the Cannibal’s Pot – Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa
Ilana Mercer, Seattle: Stairway Press, 2011, hb, 319pp

Ilana Mercer is a well-known controversialist on the American right, who writes a deservedly popular WorldNetDaily column and somehow finds time to maintain both a website and blog.

Her views are probably best described as paleo-libertarian. The book’s provocative title, which probably cost her potential readers, is borrowed from Ayn Rand, but the author tempers capitalist principles with respect for national identities and cultural traditions. Unusually amongst conservatives, she combines Israelophilia and dislike of Islam with trenchant opposition to American military adventurism. Unusually amongst libertarians, she is an outspoken critic of current US immigration policy as subversive of social order as well as fiscal responsibility. She has now turned her sights on her former homeland of South Africa – both for its own sake and because she feels its tenebrous present contains urgent indicators for America.

The author was born in South Africa, the daughter of a rabbi, but the family had to leave in the 1960s because of her father’s anti-apartheid outspokenness. They decamped to Israel, before the author moved back to South Africa in the 1980s to start a family. She was (and is) against apartheid; she recalls having tea with Desmond Tutu and being on the Grand Parade in Cape Town in 1990 to witness Mandela’s release. From there she went to Canada and eventually the United States.

Notwithstanding her anti-apartheid views, she feels duty-bound to show that the RSA reality was immeasurably more complex than the simplistic narrative which came to misinform the West’s policy towards its final African redoubt. In the old days, there were gross indignities and injustices, and yet in the African context the old SA compared favourably with its neighbours:

“When we departed, South Africa was still a country with a space program...gleaming skyscrapers, and department stores that rivaled Macy’s. The Central Business District in Johannesburg bustled. Crime was controlled, or at least confined. When mobs stoned cars en route to D. F. Malan Airport in Cape Town…a tough and competent police sprang into action. An equally impressive Western system of Roman-Dutch law, and a relatively independent judiciary, dished out just desserts.” (1)

By contrast, the “Rainbow Nation” so revered by postmodern moralizers is largely dysfunctional and becoming more so, in accordance with what has become a sad post-colonial African tradition. The consequences for South Africans of all races range from the inconvenient to the lethal.

The country which carried on space programmes now suffers regular electricity shortages. Once-reliable government services have become a kind of lottery, with even the wealthiest suburbs experiencing interruptions in basic services like postal delivery, refuse collection and sanitation, while one third of budget-administering municipal councillors are functionally illiterate. There has been an explosion of AIDS, thanks to tribal prejudices against science—to the extent that an estimated 20% of adults have the virus. The overall unemployment rate rose from 19% in 1994, immediately before the end of apartheid and at the end of a long period of economic stagnation, to 31% in 2003. It has subsequently declined to 25%, but this is still very high for a country so well-endowed with natural resources, and with much lower levels of debt than many other countries. Black household income shrank by 19% between 1995 and 2000—although it had started to recover prior to the global financial crisis. This is despite – or because of—Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policies which compel firms employing 50 or more staff to have a certain proportion of black employees and/or black investors. BEE has devastated whole industries, such as the mining sector (ironically, as Anglo-American was one of the chief instruments of ending apartheid) and have helped to force 10% of whites out of work and below the poverty line. Comparing past government performance with present, it seems as if the dearest wish of African National Congress MP Mario Rantho has already been realized:

“It is imperative to get rid of merit as the overriding principle in the appointment of public servants.”

There is less scope for wry humour when it comes to violent crime, although the author tries by entitling a section “Crime, The Beloved Country” in an allusion to Alan Paton’s classic anti-apartheid novel of 1948. Over 300,000 have been killed since the arrival of black majority rule as the erstwhile unjust but orderly regime became one which is theoretically just but with scarcely any order. Mercer cites BBC statistics from 2006 showing that on average, 65 people are murdered each day, 195 raped and 300 robbed with violence. Shockingly, she cites 2008 figures suggesting that more than 50,000 children under three years old are raped each year—10% of total rapes. By comparison:

“Few realize that during the decades of the apartheid regime a few hundred Africans in total perished as a direct and indirect consequence of police brutality. A horrible injustice, indubitably, but nothing approximating the death toll in ‘free’ South Africa where hundreds of Africans, white and black, die weekly” (author’s emphases)

So ungovernable are some places that private security firms have actually been hired by the police to protect…police stations. The South African Police Service’s acronym of SAPS seems highly appropriate. Even high-profile liberals, like writer Nadine Gordimer, historian David Rattray and former First Lady Marike de Klerk, are not immune from murderous assaults. Arguably more deserving of sympathy are poorer, apolitical Afrikaners, singled out for attack because some among them once oppressed and dispossessed blacks. Now all Afrikaners are being oppressed and dispossessed – except more rapidly and much more finally.

An economically and culturally significant subset, Afrikaner farmers (Boer of course means farmer), almost seems to be targeted for obliteration, with one tenth of them – over 3,000 – murdered since the end of apartheid, without anyone appearing to notice, let alone care. The author notes ruefully that “seals being clubbed to death on ice floes have garnered more attention” than what is widely accepted to be the actual genocide of these agriculturalists, often in circumstances of the most frightful cruelty. Statistically, farming in South Africa is more dangerous than mining. When Pretoria attorney Philip du Toit gallantly raised the unpleasant, unfashionable subject in his 2004 book The Great South African Land Scandal, he was brushed aside or condemned as the most verkrampte variety of bigot. The government, the semi-divine Mandela and the self-appointed “international community” all seem indifferent.

Many of the farmers who have survived thus far are quitting both the countryside and the country, defeated by physical assault, theft, sabotage and killing of livestock, incompetent police, corrupt officials and unjust land confiscations. By 2015, one third of farmers’ land will have been redistributed, and much of this acreage is already lying fallow or reverting to bush, because the new proprietors (often local tribal leaders or ANC party bosses) lack the interest or the skills to farm it. In 2009, South Africa became a net food importer for the first time. If or when famine strikes it will presumably be ascribed to the legacy of apartheid rather than the inadequacies of the nouvelle regime.

The white population decreased by 20% between 1995 and 2005, giving rise to the colloquialism of “packing for Perth” and causing even Mandela to snarl that they are “traitors”. Mandela’s Western worshippers may be surprised to learn that their demi-god would resort to such brusquerie, but after all he did lead the ANC’s terrorist wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) whose anthem contains the following un-neighbourly sentiment:

“We the members of the Umkhonto have pledged ourselves to kill them—kill the whites”

Even terrorists deserve a chance of redemption, but it is salutary to recall that Amnesty International—not generally considered a diehard conservative organisation—refused to recognize Mandela as a prisoner of conscience because of his continued commitment to violence, and that the country over which he hovers like some angelic presence early forged cordial links with the likes of Gaddafi, Castro and assorted Palestinian hardliners.

White flight has further skewed the imbalance between provider and provided for—today for every (disproportionately white) taxpayer there are no fewer than eleven (disproportionately black) voters. To add to this vast potential for class envy, many of these voters have been schooled to resent the whites on whom they depend. It is a volatile blend, fuelling radical redistribution policies and a sporadic ethnic intifada against whites—especially those who live on isolated farms far from police who might not come even if they knew what was happening, and would probably never catch the killers even if they did come.

I have used the word intifada because the Afrikaners always had an unusually intimate relationship with Israel. The author says of the Dutch Reformed Church to which most Afrikaners owe (or owed) allegiance—

“In their community they saw an extension of the covenant God formed with the Israelites.”

The material effects of this mysticism were decades of strategic co-operation between the two pariah-states, both hated for real or alleged racism, and both the objects of innumerable angry denunciations, UN resolutions and anguished editorials. Many in both condemned countries saw the situation as Mrs. Mercer describes it:

“It was SA and Israel against the world and against the forces of nihilistic liberalism intent on snuffing out civilized outposts at the tip of Africa and in the Middle East.”

Calvinist eschatological logic played a paradoxical part in South Africa’s trajectory—originally inspiring the Afrikaner expansion into the intoxicating-horrifying wilderness, then being used to justify and bolster apartheid before eventually turning in on itself, as the Afrikaners realized they

“…had become something they detested…the biblically blessed country became an Ishmael, an outcast.”

There was a consequent collapse of will in Afrikanerdom’s upper echelons. Big business always hated apartheid, there was little or no academic or artistic support, and when the church gave up in puzzled despair there was no more reason to resist—even though Afrikaners knew well that their quality of life would suffer. There is a revealing anecdote from the fraught final days of apartheid, when there were constant rumours of a military coup to forestall power-sharing. When General Constand Viljoen told General George Meiring that the army could take over the country in a single night, Meiring reportedly replied:

“Yes, that is so, but what do we do the morning after the coup?”

The author is particularly insightful on this subject, and en passant tells the little-known story of the slamse gevaar “(the Islamic threat”) in South Africa, as represented by the pro-Iranian revolution group known as People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, which almost unhindered carried out 80 bombings against civilians in 1999-2000 while the state security apparatus focused on a non-existent threat from white separatists.

The author’s father was against apartheid not out of Marxism or sentimentality but simply because he found the system to be inconsistent with the moral tenets he had imbibed from the Torah. Mrs. Mercer is at pains to explain his motivations, because it is her difficult duty to demonstrate that the country he and so many other well-meaning people helped create is in many ways inferior to the reviled Republic. Between the lines of the polemic there therefore crackles much unresolved tension, reflecting this balancing act between her loyalty to her father and her compulsion to attest to truths which will pain him. There is also a palpable sense of guilt—at fleeing from a once-beloved country, and leaving behind them fine people, black as well as white, who had not the Mercers’ good fortune of possessing a second passport and remittable funds.

“If only…” is her underlying refrain—if only the whites had insisted on minority safeguards—if only international opinion had supported the pro-Western Zulus rather than the pro-Third World “Xhosa Nostra”—if only the new reigning ideology had been capitalism rather than racial socialism—if only reform could have been achieved without this kind of miserable meltdown. She does not offer any SA solutions, although she quotes severally from the remarkable Afrikaner cultural activist Dan Roodt. She scarcely mentions contemporary Afrikaner parties like the Freedom Front Plus, or initiatives like the Afrikaner-only settlement of Orania in the Western Cape (which the new SA Constitution permits, and which Jacob Zuma visited last year).

Yet Cannibal is a klaxon of a kind—leaping frequently, if not always seamlessly, between the RSA and the USA. Mrs. Mercer seeks urgently to show how the perils of South Africa are being replicated in her new country of domicile. Both countries are roughly the same age, and both have frontier-taming, republican and Low Church traditions which are metastasizing into anxiety-utopian complexes. They also have large and mutually distrustful racial groups, a factor which militates against social cohesion and democracy because,

“A perquisite for a classical liberal democracy is that majority and minority status should be interchangeable and fluid.”

In America, as in South Africa, perplexed policymakers strive to address distrust through multiculturalism and affirmative action—perversely, because such policies all too evidently entrench rather than efface divisions. Both countries are wedded to what the author calls the “diversity doxology” and to globalisation; both are experiencing PC policy creep on social keystones like freedom of association (and dissociation), freedom of speech, strong families, self-reliance, fiscal rectitude, property rights and enforceable contracts. She feels that as some small recompense for America’s part in toppling the old balance of power, Washington should offer sanctuary to some of those whose livelihoods (and lives) they have ruined—one of her very few proposals, and one unlikely ever to make it into the US statute book.

The two countries’ situations are very different, and their destinies will therefore diverge—but there are strong similarities too, and she raises the powerful possibility what is happening now in South Africa is happening no less surely in her new beloved country.

NOTE

1. A rare and interesting cinematic idea of what the Cape Town of the 1960s looked and felt like may be found in the 1967 film The Cape Town Affair, starring Jacqueline Bisset and James Brolin

British children’s writers usually find favour in America—from A. A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame to J. K. Rowling and Nick Park—but one who has never quite captured American hearts is Richmal Crompton, author of the classic Just William stories.

Why this should be is unclear, because at their best the stories combine the period charm of The Wind in the Willows with the mischievousness of Roald Dahl and the wit of Wodehouse—while her hero has been likened (admittedly not entirely convincingly) to both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The 11-year-old likeable scapegrace William Brown is an imaginative institution in England and in many other countries; the Sunday Times said of the stories that they are “probably the funniest, toughest children’s books ever written”. Yet for some reason Hollywood has not come calling—although perhaps this is just as well (1).

As well as telling delightful tales, Crompton incidentally charts revolutionary changes in British life from the time the first story appeared in 1919 until the author’s death in 1969, as seen through William’s half-wise, half-innocent eyes. Although the stories should be read for their own sake rather than any philosophical content, they have therefore also attracted considerable interest from cultural historians, and occasionally even controversy.

Richmal Crompton Lamburn was born in Bury, Lancashire, in 1890, the daughter of a schoolmaster of Anglican and Liberal views. She had an older sister, Mary, and a younger brother, John, and some of William’s exploits would be based on her memories of John’s youth.

She won a scholarship to London’s Royal Holloway College, from which she graduated in 1914 with a BA in Classics. She taught Classics in Cheshire before relocating to Bromley High School on the southern edge of London in 1917. She beguiled her leisure time by writing, and the first William story appeared in Home Magazine in 1919, illustrated by Thomas Henry, who was to illustrate the stories until his death in 1962 (he died whilst working on a William picture). Henry’s perfectly-judged drawings have helped to define William as much as E. H. Shephard’s drawings fixed the public visualization of Winnie the Pooh.

The supposedly ephemeral stories swiftly overshadowed what Crompton always regarded as her serious work—40 novels and collections of short stories aimed solely at an adult audience, now virtually forgotten, while William eventually ran to 39 books (some posthumous) and still sells millions of copies worldwide, not to mention numerous TV and radio adaptations. (2) Yet although the stories are ostensibly written for children, they are perhaps best savoured by adults who can appreciate the author’s recondite references and “unsystematic satire” (3).

She was able to retire from teaching, which was fortunate because after 1923 she went down with polio, eventually losing the use of her right leg. Despite this, she led an active life, getting around in a specially adapted car and having all kinds of cultural and charitable interests (she was a noted campaigner for paralyzed children). She never married and died much mourned.

Her fictive force of nature is a middle-class 11-year-old living in a village between the fictional towns of Marleigh and Hadley, the location of which is a subject of agreeable but fruitless debate amongst keen Cromptonians. William’s village is clearly an amalgam of southern English Erewhons. In 1962, Crompton wrote “The village in which William lives is entirely imaginary…a small country village in Kent—or perhaps Surrey or Sussex, within easy reach of London” (4).

The earliest stories see William living with his parents and older brother and sister in a substantial Victorian or Edwardian villa, complete with library, morning-room, stables, cook, housemaid, and gardener. Later, the family is downsized by economic and social pressures and the domestic staff disappear, but the Browns always contrive to be comfortably off and stalwarts of community life.

Mr. Brown works in the City, and comes home every evening to sit aloofly reading newspapers and occasionally giving vent to unexpectedly vitriolic political reflections, such as “I tell you he’s bleeding the country to death. He ought to be hung for murder”. His outbursts contain a clever echo of his younger son’s purpler expostulations—and there are other occasional hints of a tacit understanding between the two that no-one else in the family can share. But most of the time, Mr. Brown is like a smoking volcano in the background of an ordered Italianate landscape—something to be tiptoed around, and which only comes to life at times of crisis—such as to pay some enraged neighbour for damage caused by his errant offspring.

By contrast, Mrs. Brown is not at all menacing; like most mothers she is the pivot of the household and the chief source of its respectability, stability, and comfort. Her chief roles are to darn socks and make excuses for William.

William’s sister Ethel is beautiful and always has a string of suitors—many of whom William irritates or frightens off, usually without meaning to or even while trying to ‘help’ them.

William’s older brother, the irascible and insecure Robert, is a mirror of the fashions and follies of every generation, from dancing the Charleston to toying with Bolshevism, and from experimental poetry to sports cars. He is always trying to find a girlfriend, and whenever he is making headway William usually ruins it—again often with the very best intentions. Like many 11-year-olds then and now, William regards girls as an utterly distinct (and generally inferior) species, and his lack of susceptibility can drive Robert to distraction. In “William the Intruder” (1922), Robert is telling his mother about his latest pash:

‘She’s different from everybody else in the world’, stammered Robert ecstatically. ‘You simply couldn’t describe her. No one could!’

His mother continued to darn his socks and made no comment. Only William showed interest.

‘How’s she different from anyone else?’ he demanded. ‘Is she blind or lame or sumthin’?’

There is also a plethora of aunts and uncles, most of whom find William wholly antithetical to their preferred pastimes of crochet-work, church-going, and snoozing off their lunches in the library.

Beyond the constraints of the family circle lies a huge world full of colour and adventure. William owns a devoted mongrel called Jumble and he also leads the Outlaws—a close-knit gang of boys, Henry, Ginger, and Douglas, similar in background and tastes but with slightly paler personalities. Beyond the Outlaws there are manipulative or adoring girls, and many other children more or less in thrall to William’s abounding personality. Inevitably, he also has enemies—ranging from epicene, immaculate, golden-curled, lisping sneaks with names like Cuthbert, to rougher would-be Williams with whom he has to physically contend for mastery of the village space.

Then there is the adult world, whose roster of characters alters as the stories dash through the decades—flappers, spiritualists, vegetarians, painters, academics, aristocrats, teachers, ex-majors, vicars, spinsters, nouveau riche businessmen, beatniks, burglars, protest marchers, pop-stars—most of whom seem to William to lead dull lives full of pointless rules. In “William Below Stairs” (1922), he muses that when he is grown-up,

“He’d have rooms full of squeaky balloons and trumpets in his house, anyway—and he’d keep caterpillars and white rats all over the place too—things they made such a fuss about in their old house—and he’d always go about in dirty boots, and he’d never brush his hair or wash.”

He in turn exasperates most grown-ups, which is scarcely surprising, because through sheer joie de vivre he exacts a heavy toll on their possessions—trampling their flowerbeds, ruining their lawns, scrumping their apples, falling through their roofs, shooting arrows through their windows, eating their food, tormenting their cats (twice actually killing them), covering everything with dirt, ruining their sleep, and leading their children astray. Some have even worse experiences, such as Aunt Emily, a generously-proportioned woman who disturbs the whole household with her deafening snoring, who wakes from an afternoon nap to find her bedroom full of wide-eyed local children who have paid William to watch her sleep, below an ill-lettered label reading:

“Fat wild woman

Torking Natif

Landwidge.” (5)

He may be noisy, unkempt, destructive, dictatorial, aggressive, opinionated and indignant—but he is also good-hearted, chivalrous, imaginative, brave and generous and has a strong sense of natural justice. In 1962, Crompton said William had:

“…the spirit of the inventor and pioneer…the stuff of which heroes are made…at the state of the savage—loyal to his tribe, ruthless to his foes, governed by mysterious taboos, an enemy of civilization and all its meaningless conventions…that threaten his liberty.” (6)

William is always prone to nostalgie de la boue. He is fascinated by ne’er do wells, real or imagined; he longs to leap his bourgeois traces and embrace what he sees as freer modes of living—down and preferably dirty amongst the working classes, the poor, criminals, subversives and exotic foreigners. William’s fascination with what she calls “horrid, common, rough boys” is a source of exasperation and incomprehension to the supremely class-conscious Mrs. Brown. Asked by her who he wants to invite to his Christmas party, he scandalizes her by replying “I’d like the milkman” then “I’d like to have Fisty Green. He can whistle with his fingers in his mouth”. She almost wails in reply, “But he’s a butcher’s boy! You can’t have him!” He listens enraptured to the Cockney accents of London children visiting the village on a day trip—

“He decided to adopt it permanently. He considered it infinitely more interesting than that used by his own circle.”(7)

William also envies “savidges”. Watching an amateur-dramatic production of Christopher Columbus with the Indians, he looks yearningly at the blacked-up white boys playing the Indians—

“…how different—how rapturously different. Browned from head to foot—a lovely walnut brown. It made their eyes look queer and their teeth look queer. It set them in a world apart…he saw himself, browned from head to foot, brandishing some weapon and dancing on bare brown feet in a savage land.” (8)

Like most boys then and now, he has fantasies of super strength and global domination—fighting his way out of ambuscades against impossible odds, consigning cities or countries to destruction with an imperious wave, being “Dictator of England” (9) or “World Potentate” (10)—accepting the imaginary homage of imaginary masses as he imagines multitudinous “stachoos” of himself.

Crompton is sometimes likened to the equally unsentimental “Saki” (Hector Hugh Munro, 1870-1916) whose short stories have been described as evoking “Pan beyond the drawing-room windows”. There is a similar quality in William. He may be fey, but he is safely fey. The solidity and stability of William’s background is the ideal backdrop to his adventures, which lampoon authority but never undermine it. He may be “Dauntless Dick of the Bloody Hand” out in the fields and woods, but every evening he is once again Master William Brown, subject to the iron dictates of what he calls contemptuously “Civilizashun”—obeying his parents, saying please and thank you, washing his face, wearing his Eton suit, and being forced to go to school and Sunday school. William has a disdain for education, as he tells his reform-minded Uncle George:

“When I was a boy, William, I loved my studies. I’m sure you love your studies, don’t you? Which do you love most?”

“Me?” said William, “I love shootin’ and playin’ Red Indians.” (11)

He is aggrieved by the way his parents react to his school reports—

“I keep tryin’ to explain to them about that. What’s the good of us usin’ up all our brains at school so’s we’ll have none left when we’re grown up an’ have to earn our livings? I’d rather keep mine fresh by not usin’ it till I’m grown up an’ need it.” (12)

The other Outlaws are almost as unintellectual, with the partial exception of Henry who can always be relied upon to give informed opinions on even the most complicated subjects—

‘They were always killin’ people for one thing’ said Henry.

‘Who were?’

‘People.’

‘Why?’

‘They had to. How’d you think there’d ‘ve been any hist’ry if they hadn’t?’ (13)

Crompton was, remembered her friend Joan Braunholz, “a true-blue Tory…a temperamental Conservative” (14). She belonged to her local Conservative Association in Bromley—which was unimaginative enough to utilize the bestselling author solely to stuff envelopes with campaign ‘literature’. One cultural commentator has called Crompton “a species of conservative modernist” (15), while another has defined her outlook as “defending the private against the public and the individual against the demands of society and the state” (16).

Her conservatism is implicit but always apparent—in her High Anglicanism, pessimism about the perfectibility of human nature, ridicule of idealists, and belief in the necessity and durability of the class system. It was for this last reason that her books were removed from some libraries between the 1960s and 1980s by librarians trying, rather like Robert Brown, to be real and relevant. Today, the sensitivities more often surround race, with casual phrases like “rather more swarthy than the average boy” and “not an English cast of countenance” (17) causing consternation amongst the easily frightened.

Through William, Crompton constantly exposes the pomposity and hypocrisy of the complacenti. There are the advocates of “Higher Thought”, a coterie of sharp-chinned spinsters who hurriedly abandon their meeting when William’s cache of centipedes and spiders gets loose. Then there is the League of Perfect Love, ‘animal rights’ ignoramuses who have an instant change of heart when rats invade their living room (this 1935 story is rarely reprinted now, because it shows a rat-killing competition). There are the adopt-a-poor-family agitators who baulk at admitting the self-same poor into their own circles, or contributing financially towards these schemes (18). There is the teacher

“…with a startling taste in socks and ties, whose ‘modern’ methods of teaching had left the minds of his pupils completely but not unpleasantly befogged.”

Later, the same individual

“…transferred his gifts and his person to a small but exclusive repertory company that specialized in performing ‘experimental’ drama to a limited audience of leftwing intellectuals” (19)

“William and the Protest Marchers” (1965) contains the egalitarian students of “Newlick University”, marching to demonstrate against “those moth-eaten old relics of antiquity” Oxford and Cambridge—only to give up their march and forego their principles as soon as they get hot and they find a place to get a drink without having to mix with what their leader calls “riff-raff”. In the same story, an animal rights lecturer gets pushed into a lily-pond by a pig whose saintliness he has just been extolling.

William always reflected what was going on in the wider world (his creator often reminded herself in her diaries to “be topical!”) and the 1930s accordingly saw William setting up his own paramilitary formation after seeing a Mosleyite demonstration (20). Like (presumably) many adult Mosleyites, the Outlaws are intoxicated by “the salutes, the shouting” and fashion themselves green armbands, whereupon William harangues the townspeople:

“You’ve gotter have a dictator…you’ve all gotter to be Green shirts same as us…We’re goin’ to fight everyone that isn’t…We’re goin’ to fight everyone in the world…We’re going to conquer the world…We’re goin’ to be dictators over the world.”

This address and the subsequent clashes with a blue shirted gang over which will have the largest “col’ny” with the most doughnuts is a brilliantly funny commentary on contemporary Europe, already self-immolating at the hands of much less excusable orators.

The 1934 story “William and the Nasties” is frequently singled out for criticism and indeed it does leaves an unpleasant aftertaste, to the extent that it is no longer included in collections. Yet it is congruent with the fantasy psychology and immature knowledge of boys of that age. The Outlaws are talking about the new “Nasty” regime in Germany:

"They rule all the country" said Henry "an’ make everyone do jus’ what they like an’ send them to prison if they don’t."

"I’d be one of them if I was in that country’ said William.

"Jews are rich" explained Henry, "so they chase ‘em out and take all the stuff they leave behind. It’s a jolly good idea."

"Ole Mr. Isaacs is a Jew" said Ginger. They stared at each other with sudden interest.

(Mr. Isaacs is the unfriendly owner of the sweetshop whom they suspect of giving them short-measures of bulls-eyes and “cokernut lumps”.)

“’There came to him [William] glorious visions of chasing Jew after Jew out of sweetshop after sweetshop and appropriating the precious spoils."Henry explains the Nasties’ modus operandi—“They’ve got people called storm troops an’ when those Jews don’t run away they knock ‘em about till they do.”

They plan to break into Mr. Isaacs’ shop, but as they are so doing, their basic decency rapidly reasserts itself:

“A strange distaste for the adventure was creeping over the Outlaws.”

They never attack Mr. Isaacs, obviously, and in fact inadvertently do him a favour which brings about friendly relations between them and him. A recent study (21) acknowledges that Crompton was “probably trying to make pro-Jewish points”, but concludes that the story was unusually clumsily constructed. The story is genuinely disturbing, as if something hideous had briefly broken the surface of the still pond of English life, to sink again almost immediately but leaving behind a shivery memory. Needless to say, when war does come, William “does his bit” to ‘help’—and in “William Takes Charge”, which appeared in May 1940, our hero’s ineptitude is an obvious swipe at Neville Chamberlain’s disastrous diplomacy.

William is essentially apolitical. Long before being a Fascist, he had also been the sole member of the junior branch of Reformed Bolsheviks. He had to form his own organization because Robert will not let him join the Bolshevik club to which the Outlaws’ older brothers belong. Once again, William’s oratory ridicules fringe folly—

"All gotter be equal" he pronounced fiercely. "All gotter have lots of money. All ‘uman beings. That’s sense, isn’t it?... Well, then, someone ought to do somethin’!"

And William does do somethin’; he and the other Outlaws expropriate the belongings of their older brothers, who in consequence have a change of heart. As Robert admits ruefully to his father,

“It’s all right when you can get your share of other people’s things, but when other people can get their share of your things, then it’s different.” (22)

In “William—The Bad” (1930), there is a mock election between the Outlaws. Standing as the communist candidate, Ginger sets out his stall,

“Ladies an’ Gentlemen, Communism means havin’ a war against all the people that aren’t Communists an’ conquerin’ an’ killin’ them.”

In “William, Prime Minister” (1929), Henry explains more lucidly than many real-life commentators the true nature of politics:

“There’s four sorts of people tryin’ to get to be rulers. They all want to make things better, but they want to make ’em better in different ways. There’s Conservatives an’ they want to make things better by keepin’ ’em jus’ like what they are now. An’ there’s Lib’rals an’ they want to make things better by alterin’ them jus’ a bit, but not so’s anyone’d notice, an’ there’s Socialists, an’ they want to make things better by takin’ everyone’s money off ’em, an’ there’s Communists an’ they want to make things better by killin’ everyone but themselves.”

In a thousand such effortless-seeming asides, the wide-awake William and his chums unmask the pretensions not just of communism, but of all adult existence.

Yet howsoever revelatory about society, William is first and foremost the boy all boys wish they had been and who all girls adore—and we like to read about his escapades because they conjure up the intoxicating essence of childhood. Through Crompton’s timeless thaumaturgy, with a laugh and a pang we suddenly remember the texture of youth—the energy, the curiosity, the visions, the passing loves and hatreds, the resentments and rapprochements, the fears and guilt, the first times and sudden insights, the wonder and the acceptance, the long imaginative journeys inside one’s head or across fields of sun-striped grasses on afternoons when reality seemed contingent and time appeared to have no end. Like William, we have all lived “crowded hours”—and thanks to his immemorial ebullience, even now we can recover our pasts for a time.

Notes

1. According to the Summer 2011 edition of the Just William Society Magazine there have been three British films—Just William (1939), Just William’s Luck (1947) and William at the Circus (1948). Recordings are extremely rare

2. In her other novels, Crompton “sought to attack the cosy conventionalism of Victorian thought. Her novels are thronged with adultery, illegitimacy, divorce, suicide, child abuse, and homosexuality” (Classes, Cultures, and Politics, Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin, edited by Clare V. J. Griffiths, James J. Nott and William Whyte, 2011, Oxford: OUP). Ironically enough, Crompton’s brother John, the original inspiration for William, earned a reputation for ‘serious’ writing with his natural history works, especially 1948’s The Hunting Wasp, which was deservedly praised by John Betjeman, Harold Nicolson and others

3. Classes, Cultures, and Politics, op. cit.

4. “Meet William”, Collectors’ Digest Annual, 1962, cited by Mary Cadogan, in Richmal Crompton—The Woman Behind Just William, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1986

5. “The Show”, 1922

6. “Meet William”, op. cit.

7. “Not Much”, 1923

8. “The Native Protégé”, 1923

9. “William the Persian”, 1935

10. “A Present from William”, 1935

11. “William’s Hobby”, 1922

12. “William the Conspirator”, 1935

13. “William the Conspirator”, ibid.

14. Cited by Cadogan, op. cit.

15. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, London and New York: Routledge, 1991

16. Classes, Cultures, and Politics, op. cit.

17. “The Native Protégé”, ibid.

18. “William—The Showman”, 1937

19. “William and the Holiday Task”, 1965

20. “What’s in a Name?”, 1938

21. Owen Dudley Edwards, British Children’s Fiction in the Second World War, Edinburgh University Press, 2007

22. “The Weak Spot”, 1924

Under consideration: Jared Taylor, White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21^st Century, Oakton, VA: New Century Books, 2011.  

The late Sam Francis once observed that whereas during the Victorian age it was the subject of sex that was surrounded by taboos, today it is race that boosts sales of sal volatile. Objects of superstition may change, but love of mystique and a propensity for hypocrisy are omnipresent across centuries and cultures.

Luckily for us, if less luckily for himself, Jared Taylor specializes in examining this cultural no-go zone without fear—although with favour. Since 1991, he has edited and issued American Renaissance, a monthly journal which offers information and opinions on racial matters not readily obtainable elsewhere. It is, in many ways, a unique publication, both a gazetteer of present pathologies and a rare outlet for counterintuitive views on some of the chief questions of our age. Not only that, but its respectable (and clubbable) editor has suffered persecution and contumely as a result of his activities.

One might have imagined that leftists, with their frequently and loudly-expressed belief in a free press, would welcome the existence of a journal like American Renaissance, even if they did not agree with its views—that they might even nominate its editor for some kind of award, as they nominate dissidents in safely far-away countries. Not so. On the contrary, he is frequently caricatured as a suave Svengali whose erudition and amiability are mere hypocritical camouflage for the basest prejudices. His publications, conferences, associations, motives and modus operandi are minutely monitored and meddled with, to the extent that recent conferences have been cancelled and lucid, moderately-expressed books like White Identity simply cannot find a mainstream publisher (literary agents tried for two years to place it). 

White Identity is essentially an update of his 1992 book Paved With Good Intentions—The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America, the breakthrough work which simultaneously made his name and marked his banishment from mainstream to margins. As in 1992, the author expertly piles up a mountain range of awkward facts from the AR archives to demonstrate the flaws in the West’s presently preferred model of race relations. As before, but with even more evidence to draw upon, he tosses and gores such tired clichés as that there is no such thing as biological race, that immigration invariably benefits economies, and that immigration is necessary to preserve the welfare state. I had never heard of the so-called “Florida effect,” whereby elderly White retirees are notably reluctant to contribute to state welfare costs because the recipients mostly belong to a different race. It is interesting to consider whether there will ever be a Florida effect in reverse, whereby non-White taxpayers will be reluctant to support the burgeoning population of White retirees.

“Black people gotta lotta problems
But they don’t mind throwing a brick”

Joe Strummer’s longing lyrics to The Clash’s 1977 hit White Riot are a gross libel on a community, but they also contain a grain of truth. The diplomat’s son who always wanted to be a working class hero was waxing envious about what he saw as black willingness to rise up and take direct action against the ‘system’. He wanted both to join them and have a racially exclusive “White riot—a riot of my own”.

The long unheard song has been widely aired over the last four days, as Britons watched parts of their inner cities dissolve in partly race-driven unrest, in the worst rioting for over two decades.

The problems were sparked by the police shooting last Thursday of a 29 year old black man named Mark Duggan in Tottenham, north London. At first it was said the police had fired in self-defence, but now it seems both shots were fired by police. Duggan had been under surveillance, presumably because of his membership of the Star gang, which according to the Guardian’s Gavin Knight

. . . had a notorious reputation for being armed, dealing Class A drugs and intent on making money. It was affiliated to larger, older gangs in the area.

Tottenham gossip has it that Duggan was “a major player” in the local demi-monde, who “lived by the gun” and caused “grief”. These associations seem reasonable grounds for keeping an eye on him, although of course any death at the hands of the police is unfortunate.

As always with these incidents, there will be an in-depth investigation and normally an accurate account of the circumstances eventually emerges—as happened in the recent cases of Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson. But there seems little appetite to await any such inquiry.

This is partly because there are especially painful echoes in Tottenham of previous confrontations between blacks (AKA “youths”) and police (called “The Feds” by youths who were playing computer games when they should have been doing homework—AKA “acting white”).

The most notorious incident was in 1985, when a white policeman called Keith Blakelock was macheted to death by youths on the Broadwater Farm Estate. The proximate cause of that violence was the death of a black woman during a police raid—and that raid had been designed to suppress rolling unrest after the police shooting a few days previously of Cherry Groce in Brixton, south of the Thames. In 1999, there was again unrest in N15 when Roger Sylvester died whilst being restrained by police.

And it is not only Tottenham which holds these memories, but large parts of black Britain. The idea that the Feds pick on the youths out of casual racism is endemic and ingrained amongst many whites as well as blacks, and is remorselessly fed by the political left.

Black-police relations are coloured (sorry!) by folk-memories of street battles going all the way to the first days of large-scale black immigration in the late 1940s. In 1958, there were the Notting Hill riots, when white Teddy Boys rocked and rolled along the streets in their blue suede shoes attacking random Afro-Caribbeans who quite naturally resisted, and since then there has been a sort of low level, sporadic ethnic intifada in parts of England’s inner cities, interspersed with outbreaks of worse violence exploited by the far Left, the mainstream Left and (counterproductively) by the far Right. The mainstream Right’s response has usually been to masterfully do nothing, trusting that the naughtiness will magick itself away.

While Conservatives alternately blustered and equivocated, and Labourites poured political petrol on all flames, inoffensive people (many black) were constrained to watch as their districts were periodically destroyed by youths AKA activists—Brixton, Toxteth, Handsworth, St. Paul’s, to name just a few once agreeable suburbs that have erupted before and have just erupted again.

Those who were (badly) paid to police these places were constrained to accept the blame for operational mistakes (rightly)—but also the far bigger mistakes made by politicians who expected them to do a Godawful job without giving them the tools they needed or even much thanks.

Not only that, but the police were accused of being at best indifferent to the needs of black people, or worse, having a “canteen culture of racism”. Anti-cop conspiracies cluster around any mysterious black deaths—like the 1981 New Cross Fire, when 13 partygoers were burned to death by a black man, which many in SE14 still believe was a police/National Front cover-up). Then there was Stephen Lawrence (which led to the 1999 Macpherson Report), Ricky Reel (Asian, but co-opted into African-ness for political purposes, who fell into the Thames and drowned in 1997) and Joy Gardner (a several times warned illegal immigrant who died in 1993 after struggling with immigration officials). The latter case inspired one of the great works of 20^th century protest poesy. Benjamin Zephaniah’s last lines are perhaps the best, and not just because they are the last:

I cannot help but wonder 
How the alien deporters 
(As they said to press reporters)
Can feel absolute relief.

Deaths of blacks while in police custody (and they are disproportionately likely to be in police custody for certain categories of crime) are especially controversial, even though 75% of such deaths are of whites. In these cases, the dead are always saintly and the police always guilty until they are proven guilty. So too with Mark Duggan – who somehow managed to combine being a criminal “major player” with being a model dad. 

There was a highly charged demonstration outside the local police station on Saturday, and afterwards vibrancy vibrated through Tottenham and adjacent areas, with what the media called “disaffected youths” setting fire to cars and buses, looting from and then torching shops. They were soon joined by shrewder others, using the “protests” as a cover to promote assorted adolescent agendas or obtain democratic discounts at JJB Sports.

On Sunday and Monday, the violence spread across London to encompass Camden/Chalk Farm, Bethnal Green, Peckham, Ealing, Deptford, Lewisham, Clapham, Croydon (a man found there with gunshot wounds later died), Bromley, Woolwich, East Ham and Stratford. Outside London, there were outbreaks in Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Nottingham.

Monday night was the London Fire Brigade’s busiest ever night (including the Blitz) and the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner admitted to the BBC “The Met was stretched beyond belief in a way that it has never experienced before.” The only good news was that several football matches were called off. London became quieter on Tuesday, thanks to the presence of 16,000 police, but there were problems in Birmingham again, and in Manchester and Wolverhampton—which could not even be headed off by the joyous news of David Cameron’s return from holiday.

The events brought in their train a half-horrible, half-hilarious farrago of fact and fantasy. There was the Russian reporter who claimed that the roaring of escaped lions and tigers from London Zoo could be heard in high streets. There was video footage of a gang of rioters who came to help a fallen man to his feet so they could go through his pockets more easily. There were stories of “vigilantes” tooling up with baseball bats to defend their families and premises. There were the girl geniuses interviewed by BBC Radio 4, sitting in the street at 9.30am drinking stolen rosé to refresh their maidenly parts after a hectic night of after-hours shopping:

It was madness, it was good fun . . . showing the rich people we can do what we want . . . it’s the governmen’s fault. The Conserva’ives, Yeah, wha’ever it is . . . who it is. I dunno.

Asked if these agreeable activities would carry on the next night, they reflected, with growing confidence.

Yeah, hopefully, definitely.

One tactician who criticized the police response seemed shy about revealing his alternative master-plan:

I don’ need to be talkin’ about wot they need ta be doin’

Another Napoleon put his finger on one of the inherent problems of “colour-blind” policing:

The police are bein’ abusive—they don’ like black people, they don’ like Asian people, they don’ like their own people.

There was an amusing disconnect between the widely quoted West Indian lady representing respectable Hackney opinion and the un-Bowdlerized Youtube actualité:

Why are you burning people’s shops that they have worked hard to build up?... Look at that shop over there, she has worked hard to make it work and you’re just going to go and burn it up?

Her impassioned addendum was less widely mentioned:

And for what, just to say you are warring and a badman? This is about a f***ing man who was shot in Tottenham. This ain’t about busting up the place. Get real, black people, get real…You lot piss me the f**k off.

There were small mercies, such as the Hackney shop-owner who found that the “feral rats” who had fingered through her stock had taken all the designer label stuff but left “the tasteful things”.

Behind this semi-comic carry-on lies a terrible story of decent people of all races besieged terrified in their own houses and waking up to find their homes, shops, streets scorched and littered with debris. On Tuesday, Channel 4 interviewed a Sri Lankan shopkeeper who had lost an estimated £30,000 worth of uninsured stock, and trembling young women trapped in Manchester city centre because their way home was blocked by hundreds of masked men breaking into shops.

And behind this again, the seriously irresponsible and unpleasant (and almost always white) hard left are at work. A leaflet entitled Don’t Panic; Don’t Talk! initially circulated in Bristol soon found its way to the Indymedia website, giving what must surely be illegal advice:

“Do think about changing your appearance…get rid ALL clothes you were wearing…spray cans, demo-related stuff, dodgy texts/photos on your phone. Don’t make life easy for them by having drugs, weapons or other illegal stuff in your house.”

The Socialist Workers’ Party (or should that be Worker’s?) jumped helpfully on the bandwagon, because “the state tries to discredit riots”. This cannot be allowed to happen, because “riots can win important gains”. They continued, with the brilliant reasoning we always hope for from this quarter:

It’s not about people smashing up their local area for no reason. It’s about them expressing their anger, wherever they happen to be.

After all, what is a riot compared with the violence dished out daily by the system?

The violence of riots is minor compared to the violence the system inflicts on a daily basis—like famines . . .  and wars that slaughter millions.

It’s all down to that Great Satan the “anarchy of the market” which As Any Fule No is “far more devastating than the supposed anarchy on the streets”.

Labour MP John McDonnell would seem to go along with some of this analysis, Tweeting sagely:

Reaping what has been sown over 3 decades of creating grotesquely unequal society with alienated young copying ethos of looting bankers.

Ken Livingstone, ex-London Mayor and again Labour candidate for that post, concurs:

[T]he economic stagnation and cuts imposed by the Tory government inevitably create social division . . . [the rioters] feel no-one at the top of society, in government or City Hall, cares about them or speaks for them.

Gavin Knight of the Guardian at least realizes there are serious obstacles in the way of rehabilitation for disaffected youths wanting to be disinfected from criminality:

Youth offenders who try to turn their back on a life on the streets are constantly hampered by prospective employers doing Criminal Records Bureau checks.

Perhaps he should lead by example, and give a few of them jobs at the Guardian. At least they’ll all have nice new trainers to wear to the interview.

Fragments of angels, segments of saints, pieces of people, broken birds, refracted sunbeams, tumbled landscapes, jumbled inscriptions, unidentifiable blocks of time-worn colour—I looked for a long time at the medieval glass so carefully but meaninglessly re-set in Holy Trinity church beside the Cathedral at Coventry.

These disjecta membra of former didactic decorations spoke of the violent iconoclasm of the Puritan revolution, when God’s self-appointed gatekeepers had smashed irreplaceable works of art in an orgy of ignorant glee. But because this was Coventry, it also hinted at much more recent ordeals—the Luftwaffe’s rawly-remembered raids of 1940-2, which killed 1,250 Coventrians, laid waste what had been a well-preserved medieval city, and gave rise to the dark slang “coventration” to signify indiscriminate eradication.

Seen in conjunction with the 15^th century “Doom” painting that stretches superbly across Holy Trinity’s chancel arch, with the just entering the Celestial City on Christ’s right and the damned going down to perdition on His left, while a bare-breasted Virgin intercedes in pity, the crazed glass seemed emblematic of deep dislocation—as if all of Coventry were a study in interrupted histories and partial reconstructions.

Dissatisfied with its own suffering, Coventry is twinned with Dresden, Warsaw and Volgograd (Stalingrad) and commemorates Hiroshima Day every August, while in the centre of the city is Lidice Place, to commemorate the mass murders that followed the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Even the radical rebuilds of the Fifties and Sixties that were supposed to refocus the city on the future look troubled to modern eyes—blank, brutalist cliffs as impersonal, impractical and impermanent as they are unpopular.

And beyond the tortured compactness of the city a ghostly hinterland unrolls to all sides. The ninth largest city in England is also the furthest from the sea, landlocked “far in the country of Arden”—the legendary super-forest of central England in which a squirrel could proverbially leap from tree to tree for the whole of Warwickshire’s length.

In England, woods once symbolized freedom, and their fastnesses are peopled by anti-establishment avatars—wodewoses, Wild Hunts, Queen Titania, Puck, Robin Goodfellow, Robin Hood and his Merry Men holding out for the return of the King. Medieval masons carved “Green Men” into thousands of ostensibly Christian churches—demonic faces forming capitals and roof-bosses, their eyes darting danger while their mouths vomit swags of oak, as if the forest was trying to break into the brash new buildings of this abstracter idol from the East.

Of all these archetypal forests, Arden was one of the greatest. Elm has the country-name of “Warwickshire weed” and into recent times the shire bore the soubriquet—part topographical description, part tourist attractant—of “Leafy Warwick”. Arboreal imagery even features in local heraldry, with the overreaching Earls of Warwick adopting the image of a bear supporting a tree as their armorial crest. This sparsely populated territory was attractive to opportunists as well as outlaws, and in 1540 John Leland found

“the ground in Arden is muche enclosyd, plentifull of gres . . . and woode, but no great plenty of corn”.

But despite economic depredations, Arden long remained a bosky wilderness evoked piquantly by Warwickshire writers Michael Drayton in his 1622 patriotic epic Poly-Olbion and his more famous contemporary William Shakespeare:

“Under the greenwood tree

Who loves to lie with me,

And turn his merry note

Unto the sweet bird’s throat.

Come hither.”

Shakespeare set As You Like It in the Ardennes (the Celtic word-root “high place” is the same), but he clearly had in mind the southern fringes of Arden around his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon 20 miles south of Coventry. His mother’s maiden name was Arden, and she belonged to one of only three English families which can trace themselves back directly in the male line to the Anglo-Saxons (1)—so the name is freighted with more than remembrance of a vanished landscape. In the 17^th century, Arden was still at least partly forested; the antiquary William Dugdale recorded ruefully, presumably from personal experience of frustrated forwanderings, “the ways are not easy to hit”. The countryside surrounding Coventry—the name tellingly derived from “Cofa’s tree”—is therefore central not just to English geography but also the English imagination; it rustles not just with phantasmagorical foliage but also unnumbered dead. (2)

Warwickshire has existed as an entity since the tenth century, but it is first mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 1016, as under attack by Canute’s Danish marauders. The county claims to contain the centre of England at Meriden, between Birmingham and Coventry (3), and the Mercian dialect that was spoken in Warwickshire is the one from which standard English is mostly derived. It spawned the Anglo-Norman romance (circa 1300) of Guy of Warwick, who fought in the Holy Land, and killed the Dun Cow of Dunsmore (near Coventry) and a dragon in Northumberland so he could marry the Earl’s daughter—only to die in poverty outside the castle gates, but acknowledged by her before he died.

In 1312, Piers Gaveston, homosexual lover of Edward II, was murdered just outside Warwick, and in the following century the then Earl Richard Neville—“Warwick the Kingmaker”—played a history-changing role during the Wars of the Roses. For all these reasons and others, Henry James dubbed Warwickshire “unmitigated England”, but this city that has hummed for so long at the county’s core has been—to put it mildly—very much mitigated.

A nunnery was founded on the site by St. Osburga in the 8^th century, whose memory is perpetuated in the name of a local Catholic school. “St. Augustine’s arm” was presented to an unspecified local church in 1022, which hints at ecclesiastical importance. Then in 1043 Leofric, Earl of Mercia and one of England’s three most powerful nobles, and his wife Countess Godiva (Godgifu) founded a Benedictine priory whose walls were “enriched and beautified with so much gold and silver that the walls seemed too narrow to contain it.” (4) The Domesday Book (1086) only mentions agricultural holdings at Coventry, although there must have been a town because it became a bishopric in 1102.

Leofric’s black eagle helps hold up the city’s coat of arms, but his wife’s naked ride on a white horse to protest her husband’s oppressive taxation of the poor has become one of the great traditionary tales of the Middle Ages. Whether it really happened is immaterial, because Godiva embodies ancient attributes and imagery and, like Boudicca before her, became a potent symbol of self-sacrifice and the liberties of the English. Roger of Wendover, whose Flores Historiarum is the earliest account (around 1230), believed the ride had occurred and in any case obviously enjoyed visualizing it:

“The Countess, beloved of God, loosed her hair and let down her tresses, which covered the whole of her body like a veil, and then, mounting her horse and attended by two knights, she rode through the marketplace without being seen, except her fair legs, and having completed the journey, she returned with gladness to her astonished husband and obtained of him what she had asked.”

In his treatment of the legend, Tennyson evoked the shuttered but watchful town with its frowning gables and worked in the moralistic accretion of the tempted tailor “Peeping Tom”:

“And one low churl, compact of thankless earth, 
The fatal byword of all years to come, 
Boring a little auger-hole in fear, 
Peep’d—but his eyes, before they had their will, 
Were shrivel’d into darkness in his head, 
And dropt before him.”

In Hertford Street there is an early 19^th century head and shoulders effigy supposedly of Tom, a writhing and agonized image, its mouth open as if shouting in pain, set incongruously on a modern wall facing a newsagents with the appropriate name of Peeping Tom News.

While successive earls made war on successive kings, economic life carried on. There were a dozen mills by the 12^th century powered by the River Sherbourne that passes west to east through the basin of the city on its way to the Avon—now mostly gurgling sadly underground, although I found one exposed segment near Spon End that bursts with greenery, damselflies and yellow wagtails, crossed by a graceful 1850s iron bridge.

Wealthy trade guilds funded the building of Holy Trinity, St Michael’s (which became the Cathedral), St John the Baptist’s, Christchurch and St. Mary’s Guildhall. They sponsored the Coventry Mysteries, a cycle of miracle plays acted at Coventry for two centuries until suppressed by devout killjoys in 1591. The Pageant of the Shearsmen and Tailors, which recalled Herod’s “Massacre of the Innocents”, is the source of the Coventry Carol, one of the earliest extant pieces of English music, a lovely evocation of a mother’s love for her endangered infant:

“Lully, lullay, Thou little tiny Child,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.”

The 13^th century saw disputes between the “Prior’s Half” and the “Earl’s Half” of Coventry for control of the wool trade. (The expression “true blue” comes from the non-fading qualities of Coventry thread. In Michael Drayton’s 1593 Shepherd’s Garland, the pastoral hero wears “breech of Cointree blue” to symbolize his steadfastness.) In 1345, Coventry was freed from religious control to become the county’s first free city. The new Corporation promptly erected city walls in the local red sandstone—a small stretch of which still stand beside the Swanswell Gate, their eroded evocativeness marred by a recent foot-bridge that leaps arrogantly over, a wonder in structural steel sadly disfigured by blue glass panels.

The Bablake Free School for Boys was founded in the reign of Queen Isabella and, according to a believable tradition, endowed by an ironmonger who had ordered steel from Spain, but was sent by mistake a vastly more valuable cargo of cochineal and silver.

Isabella’s grandson (Richard the Lionheart’s son) Edward, nicknamed the “Black Prince” because of his black cuirass, stayed frequently in Cheylesmore Manor House, part of which survives as the city’s register office, a touching relic unhappily blocked in by ugly offices and a car park, where old confetti swirls sadly around in eddies of exhaust from New Union Street nearby. The rooms that once housed princes of the blood royal are heaped with teetering boxes of stationery and broken computers. Yet so proud was the city once of the connection with the hero of Crecy that its motto is still Camera Principis (“chamber of the prince”) and Edward’s heraldic “cat-a-mountain” surmounts the city arms.

In the 15^th century, Coventry acquired county status and even held parliaments—the Parliamentum Indoctorum in 1404, the “lack-learning parliament” which lawyers were forbidden to attend, and the Parliamentum Diabolicum of 1459, when the man who would become Edward IV two years afterwards was attainted.

Coventry’s loyalty to the Lancastrian cause persuaded Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou to set up court in the city during the Wars of the Roses—her strategic “secret harbour”, where her husband could manage the wars while she managed his mental breakdowns. Their sojourn here is marked by a stupendous piece of tapestry made in Tournai between 1495 and 1500 that still hangs on the wall for which it was designed in St. Mary’s Guildhall. Columns stitched in the tapestry align with real stone transoms behind, separating saints, symbols, monarchs and courtiers into six compartments patterned with interleaving diamonds, knots and leaves.

The Guildhall is one of England’s most miraculous medieval survivals, considering that is just a few feet away from the blasted Cathedral. When you go through its arched gateway, see the tapestry for the first time, stand in the Ante Room with its disturbingly sloping floor or look out of a leaded window into its courtyard you could be in Bavaria or Saxony. The Great Hall with its tapestry and oaken angels has seen three King Henrys and even played a joke on James II, who was splashed with custard when his table collapsed during a banquet. In an oriel window bay there is a 19^th century plaster statue of Godiva being disapproved of by 16^th century stone saints but surveyed with friendlier interest by a medieval glass man re-set in a strategic position, whose hand appears to be reaching out to take liberties.

The city dwindled and by 1520 the population had more than halved. Dissolution of the monasteries removed the principal employers, and John Leland recorded plangently, “The glory of the city decayeth”. Coventry had also long been a locus of Lollardism and this led to public burnings of those residents found guilty of the atrocious crime of having the scriptures in a language they could understand. Coventrians still take gloomy pride in this latitudinarian legacy.

Ironically, Warwickshire later developed a reputation for Catholic recusancy. Robert Catesby was an Arden as well as an ardent man, and in 1583 Edward Arden—distantly related to Shakespeare’s mother—was executed for plotting against Elizabeth I. Mary Queen of Scots killed time in Coventry in 1569 in comfortable confinement while Elizabeth wondered what to do with her inconveniently Catholic cousin.

Almshouses for the elderly poor were founded during the 16^th century, and two still function in the buildings in which they were founded—Bond’s Hospital and Ford’s Hospital. Other small patches of the Middle Ages have also survived, especially in Spon Street where there are facing rows of handsome shops and houses supported by frames of local oak, but as everywhere in Coventry these sit uneasily with the postwar period’s often hideous heritage. These sturdy buildings, once so workaday with their large families and weavers’ lofts, now give room to prissier businesses—boutiques, wedding planners, financial consultants—while just behind them smile the broken teeth of Sixties office blocks.

In the Civil War Coventry sided with Parliament, and even the city’s women helped to fill in quarries to avoid them being used as cover by Cavaliers:

“[T]hey assembled in companies, and marched in military array, with mattocks and spades, headed by an Amazon who carried an Herculean club on her shoulders” (5)

With civic sinews bolstered by such sisters, in 1642 the city refused admittance to Charles I. The Coventrians treated Royalist prisoners of war so rudely that “being sent to Coventry” passed into the language as shorthand for being neglected (6). The prisoners were kept in St John the Baptist church, whose banked-up graveyard leans conveniently on the walls of Bond’s Hospital. Bulbs burn in busy rooms that abut tombs topping centuries of Coventrians. Coventry paid for its democratic zeal after the Restoration, when Charles II cast down the city walls so they could never again be held against a King.

Coventry re-built its reputation for skilful workmanship and by the 18^th century it had become a centre for silk weaving and clockmaking. Textiles again became economically important, and the population more than quadrupled over the 19^th century. There was a burgeoning middle-class, whose lives and modern mores were captured by Mary Ann Evans—better known as George Eliot. (Coventry is thought to have been the model for Middlemarch.)

Engineering came because of good coal and connections (just 95 miles to London, and convenient for Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester, Liverpool, Wales and Ireland). The city was reamalgamated into its historic county (in 1974, it was taken out again and crammed against the locals’ will into the insipid “West Midlands”.) Coventry became a proto-Silicon Valley, the ideal place for local boy James Starley to make his patented Rover Safety Bicycle to replace the more dangerous penny-farthing. His nephew then designed motorbikes and automobiles under the brand name Rover. He rapidly had rivals, ranging from the Great Horseless Carriage Co. to more serious contenders like Humber, Riley, Standard, Triumph, Daimler and Jaguar.

Coventry became Car City, clever with its hands, in love with wheels, dependent upon and devoted to rapid transit, with the 20^th century even throwing up reports of spectral coaches and trucks to reflect modern superstitions, replacing the monks and nuns of the pre-engine past. Even in the pleasantest suburbs, or in attractive Green Belt meadows, one can always hear vehicles passing and re-passing endlessly on the ring-roads, roundabouts, bypasses and motorways. Because of the cars, there came aircraft and armaments factories—and because of them the Luftwaffe, dropping death and disaster on the high-tech city as the Royal Air Force would soon do in its turn on equally lovely cities in Germany.

An archetypal clever Coventrian was jet pioneer Frank Whittle, born in the suburb of Earlsdon in 1907 and captivated by seeing a plane on Hearsall Common in 1916. His bronze shades its eyes with an over-long arm below the Whittle Arch—a huge aluminium X in front of the Transport Museum, a suitable place to reflect on British car manufacturing then and now. Almost all the marques have gone, probably never to return. Jaguar’s design HQ is still here, but manufacturing has moved elsewhere. The last fully Coventry-made cars were the London black cabs made by LTI, but in March 2010 they outsourced manufacturing to China. The last major machine tool manufacturer was also foreign-owned and went out with a bang—Matrix Churchill, secretly belonging to the Iraqi government, which was attempting to supply a “supergun” to Saddam Hussein notwithstanding UK sanctions.

There was a final flurry of hopeful innovation during the short-lived “New Elizabethan” period, which lasted for about a decade until the early 1960s—a period in which romanticists likened the young Queen to her iconic predecessor and predicted a similar effloresence of Englishness, informed by technology taught in bright new schools just as the earlier Elizabethans had been informed by Reformed theology preached in clear-glassed churches.

Modern Coventry is a monument to their misplaced idealism. There is a list of the Redevelopment Committee on a building at Broadgate House, the first major building of the redevelopment, opened in 1953. It is slightly surreal to read Anglo-Saxon titles like Alderman and unvarnished surnames like Grindlay, Swain and Binks affixed to a dank office that has not resisted time half so well as Cheylesmore—and to imagine what utopian will o’ the wisp took hold of all these bowler-hatted Binkses. They were led by Donald Gibson, CBE, visionary author of the “Gibson Plan”, who combined the roles of Chief Architect and Planning Officer in what could be construed as a conflict of interest. Probably he saw himself as a chummy “Chris” Wren for the Britain of the beatniks.

The Council had been planning massive redevelopment even in the 1930s, and the Mayor said on the morning after the first raid:

“We have always wanted a site for a new civic centre, and now we have it.”

Gibson’s chief innovation was to introduce large pedestrian precincts with cars diverted onto an inner ringroad, which may make central Coventry more walkable but also encircles the centre in an unwelcoming envelope of steel railings, stained concrete and charging cars, with flyover supports co-opted for cringe-worthy artworks and messages of solidarity from Tito’s Belgrade.

Gibson wanted to remove most of the surviving old buildings, leaving little except Coventry’s landmark “Three Spires”—but some of these were saved because of protests, doubtless to Gibson’s disgust at such sentimentality.

The compromise city is full of surprises and strange juxtapositions, with sudden views of huge Perpendicular spires along half-timbered and sandstone streets—these giving way without warning onto motorized mayhem or raddled rectangles of flaking concrete and tinted glass. The apparent attitude of the Redevelopers reminded me of the name of a house I had noticed out in the suburbs—“Itlldo”.

An early Sixties film shown in the city museum shows BBC journalist Raymond Baxter interviewing one of these planners, perhaps Gibson himself—a stocky man in brown three-piece suit with a heavy moustache, like an Ealing Studios character actor. The film is a relic in itself, with its well-dressed and well-spoken participants looking at photos of new and nasty edifices while they shake their heads at the stuffiness of those “homesick for the overcrowded medieval city they knew” and nod approvingly at those who “thinking of their children, and the future, will say ‘It’s smashing!’” The results were indeed “smashing”, although not always in the way intended.

Some of Gibson’s schemes are now being put into reverse as the city undergoes another renovation, and some of this will be an improvement—because the council consulted the public, an approach the opposite of that which prevailed in the 1950s and 60s, when it was assumed that the man from Whitehall really did know best. The best idea is the re-opening of stretches of the Sherbourne right in the middle of the city. It is pleasant to think of the wrecking ball as possible liberator.

One building that will not be altered is Coventry’s most famous landmark—the Grade 1 listed St. Michael’s Cathedral, re-imagined by Sir Basil Spence to win a 1951 competition, filled with the products of some of the period’s finest craftsmen and consecrated in 1962 to the strains of Benjamin Britten’s specially-commissioned War Requiem.

Spence’s bold conception was to leave the 14^th century shell standing as its own grave-marker, and build beside it at right angles a whole new cathedral, connected to its predecessor by a concrete canopy. This structural syncretism is not wholly successful, but the ensemble is both evocative of the period and extremely atmospheric. Occasionally, the local newspaper even carries stories of impressionable visitors who say they have heard the droning of aircraft over the old building—memories of the first great raid of 14 November 1940, which the Germans called with gallows humour “Operation Moonlight Sonata”—yet more motorized ghosts to make the city twitch and grumble in its sleep.

Post-modern pilgrims enter through the western porch into the roofless skeleton of the old St Michael’s, with the miraculously surviving tower rising up and up—at 300 feet “a sight to make one’s eyeballs turn about”, as John Russell put it in his 1942 Shakespeare’s Country, repining for this place “where the air is singed with the sudden denial of adoration”. All around are imprints of calcined chapels, and the glassless ghosts of windows—just enough to give some idea of what was lost. Office workers eat lunches on benches and sparrows hop around in hope as school field trippers roam through the remains on their way to the Brave New future as visualized by Sir Basil.

If we follow them, we come into what feels like a 1980s conference centre, then past a desk where a cashier relieves each visitor of £7, and an indeterminate space of stacked chairs and vestment lockers. It is an inauspicious introduction, but then you climb stairs, passing the poignant crucifix of charred roof timbers that was placed defiantly on the high altar the morning after Moonlight Sonata, and pass into a 270 foot by 80 foot rectangle, crepuscular even by cathedral standards. The darkness is caused by the ‘saw-tooth’ shape of the walls and the abstract stained glass which transmutes even the strongest sun into subdued pulses and mood-zones. But at different times of day it is brighter, because almost the entire south wall, the one that looks out onto the ruins, is a huge window, the Screen of Saints and Angels, with engraved figures by John Hutton. With their ever changing background of sun and cloud beyond the old walls, these are ethereal but unconventional representations of heavenly beings, which the artist has made no attempt to render beautiful. With their empty eyes, gnarled hands and knuckles, and the sky shifting through them, they are striking and slightly troubling—ideal angels for an age of angst.

Facing them is the 75 foot high tapestry of “Christ in Glory” by Graham Sutherland that fills the opposite wall, a tiny and undifferentiated man standing straight but insignificant between Jesus’ colossal feet. Some of the fittings are bland or ugly, almost like shop fittings, but they are redeemed by reminders of suffering, like the iron “Crown of Thorns” made by the Royal Engineers that frames a giant silver-winged angel in the Chapel of Gethsemane. There are altar cloths embroidered with the names of World War 2 battles and thick books of remembrance, and the centerpiece on the High Altar has as its centerpiece a cross made of 15^th century nails from the bombed building. Coventry is the centre of a global network called Communities of the Cross of Nails, all 160 of which display a cross made of old nails from Coventry—and whenever the Royal Navy has an HMS Coventry it carries an identical cross. The last ship of this name was sunk during the Falklands War, and Navy divers went down especially to salvage the cross—which has since been seconded to HMS Diamond, a ship with links to the city.

For a building concerned with conciliation, outside on the east wall there is a surprisingly martial touch in Jacob Epstein’s large 1958 bronze of St Michael standing skinny but strong, with a giant spear in his clenched fist and trampling down the naked and cloven-footed Lucifer.

Like their city, Coventrians themselves have also been in a state of flux in their recent history. In a slightly preposterous but revealing 1968 book called British Tastes, advertising agent D. Elliston Allen takes time out from discussing the beer-drinking habits of the north-east and the body-shapes of women in the Home Counties to remark,

“In going out today into the streets of any central Midland town or city, the first reaction of any normally perceptive person can hardly fail to be one of momentary surprise, even shock. Almost everyone, it seems, looks remarkably similar.”

If that was true then—he was relying largely on a 19^th century book called Races of Britain, unlikely source material for an advertising executive even then—it is much less true now. Thanks first to industrial demand and more recently two universities (plus a higher birthrate) out of a total population of around 310,000 the city has an estimated ethnic minority population of over 25%—although some of these are members of easily assimilable white minorities. Coventry has a relatively low black population (just over 3%) and fewer Muslims than has become usual in English cities. Rather surprisingly, the largest non-Christian religion is Sikhism and I saw a Sikh road-mending crew, elderly men with long wagging beards and yellow turbans to complement their fluorescent safety tabards—although such anecdotal evidence is even less scientific than D. Elliston Allen’s saloon-bar sociology. It is not only bombs or wrecking balls that have changed the city; in a way, Coventry is all of England condensed and speeded up.

An atypical Coventrian was Philip Larkin, born here in 1922, whose father somehow rose to become City Treasurer, despite combining manic depression with literary sensitivity and an admiration for Hitler. The Larkins’ commodious family house in Manor Road (that name itself evoking vanished buildings and vanquished orders) was demolished in the 1960s to make way for some road ‘improvement’, and such casual vandalism could have coloured the poet’s controversial politics.

In “I Remember, I Remember”, he passes through Coventry in 1955 for the first time in years, on a train “coming up England by a different line”. At the station:

“I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign 
That this was still the town that had been ‘mine’ 
So long, but found I wasn’t even clear 
Which side was which . . .”

As the Binkses continued their ruthless work, in their way as zealous as the Luftwaffe or the Puritans, Larkin would probably have found it even harder to know “which side was which”. But then, as now, all such ‘judgemental’, ‘conservative’, ‘classist’, ‘reactionary’ concerns are generally dismissed as impossible, High Tory, quasi-fascistic fantasies of crowd control and ‘turning back the clock’.

Larkin’s poem ends on notes of self-deprecation and acceptance, with him settling back in his seat as the train pulls out of Coventry, smiling as he brushes off the subject with the mock-flippant line—

“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere”.

The “nothing” Larkin pretended to discount was an intense early life lived in places now largely vanished, and that is also Coventry’s special “nothing”—a history that is simultaneously unique to the place and representative of the whole of England. Despite all the travails of her history, despite the Puritans, planes, planners, and other progressives, Coventry has narrowly succeeded in holding onto some segments of herself—precious particular pieces, a sense of being somewhere rather than just an abandoned “anywhere”.

NOTES

1. According to James Lees-Milne in the 18^th edition of Burke’s Peerage, vol 1

2. Some historians have disputed the notion of huge expanses of unbroken ancient forest, pointing out that human habitation in Warwickshire go back at least 5,000 years and therefore there must have been extensive clearance early on. See, for example Terry Slater, The History of Warwickshire (1981). There is a commendable project to reunite central England’s relict tracts of forest with a scheme called the National Forest

3. Unhappily for Warwickshire loyalists, satellite mapping has identified the real centre of England as being near Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire

4. William of Malmesbury, writing circa 1130

5. Samuel Lewis, Topographical Dictionary of England, 1840

6. It has been surmised that the phrase, like so many others, has Shakepearean origins—cf. Falstaff on his scruffy foot-soldiers: “I’ll not march through Coventry with them, that’s flat” (Henry IV, Part 1) 

Oliver Goldsmith rose from provincial beginnings to become a literary lion by the time he was in his 30s, and at a time when the roll call of English arts contained such names as Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. Today, he is still highly regarded, especially for his often-reprised play She Stoops To Conquer, his poems The Deserted Village and The Traveller and his classic novel The Vicar of Wakefield. Like many others in this elite group, Goldsmith may justifiably be claimed as a writer of the Right.

Goldsmith was born in 1728 or 1730, either in Pallas, County Longford or Ardnagowan in County Roscommon, the fifth child of a Church of Ireland clergyman. In 1730, his family moved to Lissoy in Westmeath, where his father became curate. At the age of seven or eight, he suffered a serious attack of smallpox, which badly scarred him and made him self-con­scious about his appearance for the rest of his life.

He was a lazy and sensitive pupil, but always popular with his classmates (and later—Joshua Reynolds once remarked that “There is no-one whose company is more liked") because of his gregarious dis­position and generosity. Always lively, he was “foremost in all mischievous pranks” (1), and always ready to carouse, play games with children and sing ballads or play his flute. Even when impoverished, he would often give away his last bit of money, even to strangers. He had flashes of precocious wit, which promised future intelligence, such as the time when, being mocked for his ungainliness when dancing and called “Aesop” by the fiddler, the nine year old replied, “Heralds proclaim aloud this saying—see Aesop dancing, and his monkey playing”.

In 1745, he entered Trinity College, Dublin as a sizar, which meant that in return for board and tuition he had to do some of the College servants’ work (2). A restless stu­dent in restless times, he was often in­volved in scrapes, including a ‘Town versus Gown’ riot in which two were killed. After graduating BA in 1750, he found a job as a private tutor but found his position too servile to tolerate, and ‘borrowed’ £30 to pay his passage to America. But he got no further than Cork, returning home several weeks later without any money, on a horse aptly named Fiddle-back instead of the good animal he had taken with him.

His family despairingly sent him to Edinburgh to study medicine. After two mostly wasted years, he left for Leyden and then toured the continent for a year, sup­porting himself by flute-playing. Here he met Voltaire, about whom Goldsmith later wrote a Memoir that was surprisingly laudatory for someone of Goldsmith’s Tory tastes. Upon his return, penni­less, to London, he somehow got a medical degree (which he may have awarded to himself), became an apothecary’s assis­tant, taught at a school in Peckham (then a pleasant Surrey village, now one of London’s less salubrious inner-city districts) and corrected proofs for the novelist Samuel Richardson. Whilst working at the school, he met the editor of the Monthly Review, who gave him his first writing work, anonymous articles which did not give him any reputation, but much valuable experience.

Goldsmith did not really see himself as a writer until much later, and he did not even keep copies of his own works in his library (3). Even after the publication, in 1758, of his first sustained effort, a transla­tion of a French manuscript (4) he kept trying to obtain medical positions, in India and elsewhere. In 1759, he published his first substantial original work, the well-received An Enquiry bito the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, and began to contrib­ute to Smollett’s Critical Review and other periodicals. He was made editor of a weekly miscellany, The Bee, which he greatly en­joyed; but his first real success was the collection of diverting essays he wrote for an obscure magazine, published in 1762 as The Citizen of the World. He used the literary device of a visiting Chinaman, wryly describing and satirizing British life and customs.

Despite their popularity, Goldsmith made no money from these, and had to keep doing hackwork. He spent any money he earned on repaying old debts (despite his poverty, he was known to be honest and could always borrow more) and buying colourful clothes which, he hoped, would make up for his “short and clumsy figure, and his face pitted and discoloured with the smallpox” (5).

Once, his landlady had him arrested for non-payment of his rent, and he was constrained to ask Johnson to sell a novel of his (possibly the Vicar) to a publisher for £60. Ultimately, he died in poverty, notwithstanding his considerable fame. As his semi-auto­biographical character, “The Man In Black” says “ . . . we were perfectly instructed in the art of giving away thousands before we were taught the more necessary qualifica­tions of getting a farthing.” (6)

He often spoke laxly. Boswell said Goldmsith was always “too eager to be bright” (7). Although Boswell was undoubt­edly jealous of Goldsmith’s influence on Johnson, this is consistent with others’ descriptions. Horace Walpole called Goldsmith “an inspired idiot”, and supposedly friendly Garrick made up an unkind mock-epitaph:

“Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness call’d Noll

Who wrote like an angel, but talk’d like Poor Poll.”

This must be set against spasmodic flashes of verbal dexterity. Goldsmith said the influential (and still unidentified) political commentator who wrote under the pseudonym “Junius” was “. . . like a flower upon a dunghill. He appeared in a newspaper in which the writing was so bad that his seems very good” (8).

Or, again, when decrying Johnson’s conversational roughhousing:

If Johnson’s pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it” (9).

Annoyed by Johnson's pre-eminence during meetings of the Club, he once said that Johnson was “for making a monarchy out of what should be a repub­lic” (10). 

Goldsmith was also notoriously gullible; he was once fooled into believing that a squire’s house was an inn. The squire went along with the joke and pretended to be the landlord until the next morning, when he revealed his true identity after Goldsmith had just ordered him peremptorily to bring a hot cake. (This idea was later used in She Stoops to Con­quer.)

Although Goldsmith sometimes wrote ironically, and had no interest in party politics, evidence for an intrinsic Toryism is easy to unearth.

[Goldsmith’s] impulse is to believe in the capacity of people to sort themselves out in the world in which they live (11).

It is significant that many of his closest friends were arch-conservatives – most notably Johnson and Burke. He was also renowned for his romantic Jacobitism, something of a defining mark for Tories of the period. So was his support for monarchy, expressed thus in The Citizen of the World:

...the people of Rome, a few great ones excepted, found more real freedom under their em­perors though tyrants, than they had expe­rienced in the old days of the common­wealth, in which their laws were ever more numerous and painful, in which new laws were every day enacting. (12)

He distrusted the universal panaceas being propounded by Whigs:

It is impossible to form a philosophic system of happiness which is adapted to every condition of life, since every person who travels in this great pursuit takes a different road (13)

He was wary of abstractions and wish­ful thinking, which again he saw as Whig characteristics:

Every wish therefore which leads us to expect happiness somewhere else but where we are…lays a foundation of uneasi­ness, because it contracts debts we cannot repay (14).

Rather like the Prince of Abyssinia in Johnson’s conservative novel Rasselas, Goldsmith’s Traveller wanders for years in the wilderness looking for political perfection, only to realise towards the end of the poem

“Why have I stray'd from pleasure and repose,

To seek a good each government bestows?

In every government, though terrors reign,

Though tyrant kings, or tyrant laws restrain,

How small, of all that human hearts endure,

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!” (15)

He was, of course, a ‘sexist’:

I can no more pardon a fair one for endeavouring to wield the club of Hercules, than I could him for attempting to twirl her distaff (16).

He delineated the foolishness of undiscriminating benevolence in The Good Natur'd Man, in which the over-altruistic hero belatedly recognizes that in order for charity to be effective, it must be directed carefully. This is not to say that Goldsmith was not generally altruistic. The frustrated universal sympathy of his essay A City Night Piece resounds down the years:

Why, why was I born a man, and yet see the sufferings of wretches I cannot relieve? Poor houseless creatures!

Goldsmith believed that the welfare of Britain depended on preserving rural life (and the landscape of memory) and keeping com­merce in check. His suspicion of urbanism and regret for passing bucolic pleasures, typically conservative traits, are expressed magnifi­cently in The Deserted Village. In the dedication to Joshua Reynolds, he ex­plains how “In regretting the depopulation of the country I inveigh against the increase of luxuries”.

The most famous couplet of the poem manifests a truly Tory suspicion of the new capitalism and its apparent effects on rural communities:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

The rise of new agricultural methods—notably the enclosure of livestock which had formerly roamed freely, and Jethro Tull’s efficient new seed drill – drove people off the land and into the cities to find work, leaving behind a melancholy landscape of shrunken or deserted villages, lumps in the ground where there had once been houses and churches, grassed-over grooves which had once been busy lanes:

Where once the cottage stood, the hawthorn grew /

Remembrance wakes with all her busy train /

Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain...

There in the ruin, heedless of the dead /

The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed. 

His political philosophy is realistic with­out being cynical:

The polite of every country have several motives to induce them to a rectitude of action...the vulgar have one – the enforcements of religion (17)

Although never hidebound, he had vast respect for tradition:

The simplicity, con­ciseness, and antiquity of custom, give an air of majesty and immutability that inspires awe and veneration; but new laws are too apt to be voluminous, perplexed and indis­criminate (18)

He was of course an “elitist” –

…just experience tells, in every soil,

That those who think must govern those that toil;

And all that Freedom's highest aims can reach,

Is but to lay proportion'd loads on each. (19).

The Vicar of Wakefield can also be seen as “a Tory comedy, a satirical parody” (20). The Vicar, Dr, Primrose, is kindly, unworldly, and the father of six children. He is bankrupted, and a squire seduces and abandons one of the girls, then has the Vicar imprisoned for non-payment of debts and one of the his sons imprisoned for trying to avenge his sister’s honour. The vicarage is destroyed by fire, and another daughter is abducted by an unknown villain. The family bear all these misfortunes with fortitude and humility and all ends well, with honour and fortune restored. Moral rectitude and family solidarity have allowed them to prevail.

Apart from his sartorial extravagances, Goldsmith led a moderate, reasonably happy life, surrounded by friends, although he never married. In the last few years, his life was overshadowed by ill health (he died of nervous fever) and, as ever, by debt. His last recorded words are poignant. “Is your mind at ease?” asked the doctor in atten­dance on his death-bed, noticing that his patient's pulse rate had increased. “No, it is not” replied Goldsmith, and he never spoke again. He died in the early morning of the 4th of April 1774, and was buried in the Temple.

Upon hearing of his death, Burke burst into tears, and Reynolds put down his pencil and left his studio for the day, some­thing he had never done before and never did again. Many poor people thronged around his house sorrowfully when they heard the news. “Was ever poet so trusted before?” asked Johnson, when he heard that “Nolly” had run up debts of over £2,000, and wrote the Latin epitaph which is etched beneath Nollekens’ sculpture of Goldsmith in Westminster Abbey, in re­membrance of a good man and natural philoso­pher who “touched nothing that he did not adorn” who was “Of all the passions . . . A powerful yet gentle master.” 

Principal works

1759 An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe

1762 The Citizen of the World

1764 The Traveller

1766 The Vicar of Wakefield

1768 The Good Natur’d Man

1770 The Deserted Village

1772 Threnodia Augustalis

1773 She Stoops to Conquer

1774 Retaliation (posthumously)

Notes

1. Oliver Goldsmith, Washington Irving, first pub­lished 1849, my edition George Routledge & Sons, London, 1890

2. With such an inauspicious entry into Trinity life, Goldsmith would probably have been amazed had he foreseen that one day there would be a full-size bronze statue of him in front of Trinity College, adjacent to one of Edmund Burke

3. Eighteenth Century Vignettes, Austin Dob­son, my edition Thomas Nelson & Sons, London, 1896

4. The Memoirs of a Protestant, condemned to the Galleys of France, for his Religion by J Marteilhe de Bergerac

5. The Citizen of the World, Letter XXVII

6. Oliver Goldsmith, op. cit.

7. Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-63, first published 1950, my edition Reprint Society, 1952

8. Boswell In Search of a Wife, 1786-1769, first published 1957, my edition Reprint Society 1958

9. Life of Johnson, first published 1791, my edition National Illustrated Library, 1851

10. Ibid.

11. Essay by Thomas Kilroy, in Goldsmith – The Gentle Master, edited by Sean Lucy, Cork University Press, 1984

12. Citizen of the World, Letter L

13. Op. cit., Letter XLIV

14. Ibid.

15. The Traveller

16. Citizen of the World, Letter LXII

17. The Bee, No. VII

18. Ibid.

19. The Traveller

20. Essay by Michael Tatham in Conservative Thinkers, edited by Roger Scruton, Claridge Press, Lon­don, 1988

The Vietnam War has been the inspiration for several fine films, but the best-known (and arguably the best) is probably Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Academy, Palme D’Or and Golden Globe-winning Apocalypse Now (the best version of which is 2001’s Apocalypse Now Redux). The film’s status was recognized in 2000, when it was selected by the US Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Apocalypse is one of the great cinematic experiences for all who have ever doubted the cults of progress; or wondered about the durability of civilization.

The production of Apocalypse was notoriously difficult and protracted (leading one commentator to ask “Apocalypse When?”), running grossly over budget—which in retrospect seems curiously appropriate for a film of its theme and scope. Martin Sheen plays Benjamin L. Willard, a traumatized but proficient US Special Forces captain. We meet him first in a seedy Saigon hotel, where he has been spending his R&R time get­ting drunk (during the filming, Sheen was a self-described alcoholic, and also suffered a near-fatal heart attack), in a vain attempt to erase the horrific im­ages that are playing on constant loop in his head—women screaming in perpetuity, men forever falling dead, forests and villages eternally erupting in napalm Technicolor. He is dragged forcibly back into the present for an­other unorthodox, unacknowledged mission.

Colonel Walter E Kurtz (Marlon Brando) is a brilliant soldier who has gone permanently AWOL, not just from the US military but also from conven­tional morality, secreting himself in the remote jungle on the wrong side of the Cambodian border with a troop of fa­natically loyal soldiers who apparently treat him as a demi-God. Like Conrad’s original (Apocalypse Now is based loosely on Heart of Darkness), Kurtz has set himself up as an absolut­ist arbiter, a man-who-would-be-king, earning a reputation for casual cruelty that has shocked even the Pentagon. The military establishment and the CIA have decided that Kurtz has be­come a liability and they want him “terminated with extreme prejudice.” A previously dispatched assassin has apparently thrown in his lot with Kurtz, so it is up to Willard to take a Navy boat up the Nung River into dan­ger from more than just the Viet Cong. While Willard is receiving his orders, the camera dwells for a moment on a recent newspaper, with headlines about Charles Manson.

A film made as recently as 1993 may not yet perhaps be called a classic, but Les Visiteurs, the highest-gross­ing French-made film ever made, is at least a classic in the making.

Les Visiteurs was co-written by director Jean-Marie Poire and Christian Clavier. The action starts in the France of 1123. A French knight, Godefroy de Papincourt, the Comte de Montmirail (played by “Jean Reno” who is incidentally a Spaniard, Don Juan Moreno y Jederique Jimenez, and a friend of Nicolas Sarkozy—perhaps a hint of where his political sympathies may lie) saves the French king in battle. He is rewarded by being granted the hand in marriage of the beautiful Lady Frénégonde (Valérie Lemercier). But he is drugged by a witch, and accidentally shoots his fiancée’s father—after which, understandably enough, she declines to marry him. In desperation, he consults a sorcerer, who says he can send de Papincourt back in time to stop the fatal arrow. But the sorcerer makes a mistake, and instead sends the knight and his squire, Jacquasse (played by Clavier) forward into the 20^th century.

This signals a rapid-fire series of vulgar, vastly amusing incidents with cars, fast-food “restaurants,” telephones, toilets, toothpaste, cling-film, and light fittings—all of which prove that the French have as much of a genius for slapstick as for Molièresque wit. One reviewer described the film justly as “a lunatic blend of Time Bandits, Tati and Benny Hill.”

Accompanying the visual jokes, there are frantic encounters with mod­ern French people—a black postman (who is set upon immediately as a suspected Moor), clerics, policemen, the incompetent sorcerer’s descendant and both Montmirail’s and Jacquasse’s own heirs. Understandably regarded as a dangerous madman by all the people he encounters (except, even­tually, by his present-day relative, Béatrice de Montmirail, also played by Valérie Lemercier), The Comte is des­perate to escape from what he sees as an ugly and diminished future. He is also outraged to discover that the fam­ily castle is now a luxury hotel owned by Jacquard, a superficially gentrified descendant of Jacquasse (also played by Clavier).