London slang and dialect seem to change very rapidly. The old London accent described by Dickens and Surtees, with v for w and w for v and so forth, has now vanished utterly. The Cockney accent as we know it seems to have come up in the ‘forties (it is first mentioned in an American book, Herman Melville’s White Jacket), and Cockney is already changing; there are few people now who say ‘fice’ for ‘face’, ‘nawce’ for ‘nice’ and so forth as consistently as they did twenty years ago. The slang changes together with the accent. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the ‘rhyming slang’ was all the rage in London. In the ‘rhyming slang’ everything was named by something rhyming with it — a ‘hit or miss’ for a kiss, ‘plates of meat’ for feet, etc. It was so common that it was even reproduced in novels; now it is almost extinct1. Perhaps all the words I have mentioned above will have vanished in another twenty years.
The swear words also change — or, at any rate, they are subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the London working classes habitually used the word ‘bloody’. Now they have abandoned it utterly, though novelists still represent them as using it. No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says ‘bloody’, unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is ‘fucking’. No doubt in time ‘fucking’, like ‘bloody’, will find its way into the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.
1. It survives in certain abbreviations, such as ‘use your twopenny’ or ‘use your head.’ ‘Twopenny’ is arrived at like this: head — loaf of bread — twopenny loaf — twopenny
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933.
May 29, 2012
QotD: London slang of the 1930s
May 28, 2012
Three Jubilees, three different Britains
In The Economist, “Bagehot” looks at the three most recent Jubilee celebrations, to see what the events might show of the state of Britain.
The 1977 Silver Jubilee:
Celebrations in 1977 involved children’s food—sausage rolls and jelly, hot dogs and ice cream—and beer for the grown-ups. There were violent sporting contests, from tugs-of-war to free-form football matches. To conquer reserve, fancy dress was worn, often involving men in women’s clothing. From the West Midlands came news of an all-transvestite football game, with the laconic annotation: “all ended up in the canal.”
London displayed both patriotic zeal (flag-draped pubs in Brick Lane, big street parties in Muswell Hill) and hostility (cheerless housing estates, slogans declaring “Stuff the Jubilee”).
Scotland was a nation apart. A file reports “total apathy” in Croy. In Glasgow the anniversary was called “an English jubilee”. Snobs sneered along with Scots. At Eton College, a wooden Jubilee pyramid was smashed by old boys. At Oxford University, examinations were held on Jubilee Day, in a display of indifference.
The 2002 Golden Jubilee:
By 2002 and the Golden Jubilee, Britain comes across as a busier, lonelier, more cynical place. The royal family was “just showbiz”, sniffed a diarist from Sussex. There is angry talk of Princess Diana and how her 1997 death was mishandled by the queen. There are fewer street parties than in 1977, all agree. This is variously blamed on apathy, the authorities (whose job it is to organise events, apparently) and above all on health-and-safety rules. In 1977, in contrast, one Wiltshire village cheerfully let a “pyromaniac” doctor take Jubilee fireworks home to add extra bangs.
And finally, this year’s Diamond Jubilee:
Visiting Wimbotsham, Bagehot is shown elaborate plans: cake-baking contests, pony rides, a teddy bears’ picnic, a sports day, a pensioners’ tea. But there will be no tug-of-war (people might hurt themselves) and the face painters have liability insurance. Still, the festivities will dwarf those seen in 2002, locals say. The monarchy endured a “big lull after Diana”, suggests David Long, the driving force behind Wimbotsham’s Diamond Jubilee. As the queen grows older, she is “more highly thought of”. Linda Nixon, a Wimbotsham pensioner, credits Prince William’s royal wedding with reviving enthusiasm. Prince William and his brother Prince Harry are “like everyday people”, she says.
QotD: Don’t read this before lunch
In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spit in the soup — that is, if he is not going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment. When a steak, for instance, is brought up for the head cook’s inspection, he does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again, then steps back and contemplates the piece of meat like an artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it to the waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips his fingers into the gravy — his nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever running through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays more than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may be certain that it has been fingered in this manner. In very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same trouble is not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan and flung on to a plate, without handling. Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.
Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is simply ‘une commande‘ to him, just as a man dying of cancer is simply ‘a case’ to the doctor. A customer orders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, ‘This toast is to be eaten — I must make it eatable’? All he knows is that it must look right and must be ready in three minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why should he worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way upstairs the toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe is all it needs. And so with everything. The only food at the Hotel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staff’s, and the patron’s. The maxim, repeated by everyone, was: ‘Look out for the patron, and as for the clients, s’en fout pas mal!’ Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered — a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man’s body.
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933.
May 26, 2012
May 25, 2012
Herbert Hoover, far from a poster boy for laissez faire government
Steven Horwitz in The Freeman debunks the “high school history” notion that President Hoover was a proponent of laissez faire capitalism which caused the Great Depression. They’ve got the right culprit, but the wrong crime:
One of the most pernicious myths in the economic history of the twentieth century is the belief that the Great Depression was caused, or at least worsened, by Herbert Hoover’s dogmatic commitment to a “do nothing” laissez-faire policy in the aftermath of the stock market crash. This argument is part and parcel of the set of beliefs about the Great Depression that I have dubbed the “high school history” version of that event. (It includes the claims that laissez faire caused it, Hoover’s inaction worsened it, the New Deal did wonders, and World War II got us all the way out.) This claim about Hoover’s dedication to laissez faire is, as I have suggested, utterly false.
In fact Herbert Hoover was long known as a Progressive who favored much more government intervention in the economy. From his days with the U.S. Food Administration in World War I through his time in the 1920s as secretary of commerce, Hoover constantly pushed his beliefs that laissez faire did not work and that government must take a more active role. When the economy went south during his first year as president, it came as no surprise that he put those beliefs into action.
Hoover not only signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, as everyone knows, he also encouraged businessmen to keep wages up, expanded the real amount of government spending, reduced immigration to near zero, set up all manner of government lending facilities, and increased the budget deficit. Along with the Federal Reserve System’s failure to do its job, resulting in a 30 percent drop in the money supply, these Hoover interventions were responsible for turning what might have been a severe, but short recession into a Great Depression. So the “high school history” story is right to blame Hoover — but it does so for exactly the wrong reasons.
But it’s been a great way to tarnish free market advocates and effortlessly refute their arguments, because “everybody knows” that laissez faire doesn’t work. Our high school teachers wouldn’t have mislead us all about that, would they?
May 23, 2012
Review of Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II
Roger Moorhouse reviews the new book by Keith Lowe for History Today:
It examines Europe in the years immediately after the end of the Second World War, when the guns stopped firing. Yet, as Lowe clearly demonstrates, the absence of war is not the same as an outbreak of peace.
Savage Continent is a grim catalogue of humanity at its lowest ebb. Necessarily pointillist, given its broad scope, it ranges across much of the European continent, portraying a world where civil society and the rule of law were yet to be re-established and where revenge, antisemitism, ethnic cleansing and heightened political sensibilities gave rise to a renewed wave of inter-communal and political violence.
According to Lowe’s account, those immediate postwar years had a thoroughly unedifying air. From the Yugoslav partisans cutting off the noses of their erstwhile opponents, to antisemitic pogroms in Poland, to the massacres of Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, he shows a dystopian continent in which the all-pervasive dehumanisation of the war proved difficult to reverse, provoking a hangover of violence that would last, in some places, into the 1950s.
Alongside the now rather well-documented episodes of brutality from the period, such as the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe, or the expulsion of the German populations from the same region, Lowe does well to uncover some lesser-known examples of man’s postwar inhumanity to his fellow man. The story of the Lithuanian ‘Forest Brothers’, for instance, and their brave, futile resistance to the imposition of Soviet rule, is one that deserves to be much wider known and is outlined well. Similarly the ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians in postwar Poland is rightly placed alongside better-known events, such as the Kielce pogrom and the Vertreibung (expulsion) of the Germans.
I just started reading Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt, and he covers much of the same period of history as Lowe in the first part of his book. I’m moderately well-read on World War II, but the amount of violence and human misery in Europe for more than a decade after the war was “over” is indeed an under-covered and misunderstood aspect of that turbulent period.
Western European countries (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and even western Germany) recovered faster in all senses because the Nazi occupiers did much less damage to the social structures in those countries. It’s rather eye-opening to find how few Nazi officials were needed to oversee the local governments in those countries: 800 in Norway, and only 1,500 in France (plus 6,000 military and civil police auxiliaries). Local governments continued to operate pretty much as they had before the war, under the control of a tiny group of German overseers. Economic demands meant the local industries were harnessed to the Nazi war effort (but largely kept under the control of their original owners).
Central and eastern European countries suffered far more disruption as the Nazi racial “logic” did not allow local governments the same relative lack of interference the western local governments got. Local industry was more frequently nationalized and run by German managers directly, not working through the original owners, and local labour was more readily drafted to work in Germany. And unlike in the west, the experiences of newly “liberated” countries in the east often started with a fresh purge of local governments, business owners, and middle class professionals.
What we’d now call “ethnic cleansing” was a frequent second act after the Soviet armies moved in: ethnic Germans were expelled, ethnic Slavs were moved into the cleared areas. Jews, Gypsies, and other groups that suffered terribly under the Nazis did not necessarily see much improvement under the Soviets. Former resistance fighters were hunted down and eliminated (except for those belonging to identified Communist movements … and not even that was guaranteed protection).
Under the circumstances, it may well be nothing short of a secular miracle that Europe recovered economically and socially so soon after the war and the post-war convulsions.
May 22, 2012
Bombing campaigns against Nazi Germany were remarkably inaccurate
An article in History Today recaps the huge gap between what the RAF was thought to be accomplishing in the first half of World War 2 and what they actually achieved in the bombing campaign against Germany:
By 1941, after the winter Blitz in which the Luftwaffe had relentlessly bombed the cities of Britain, the British people wanted to know that the RAF were ‘giving it back’ to the Germans. Later that year, as [Michael] Paris describes, Harry Watt directed his film Target for Tonight for the Crown Film Unit. Made with actual RAF personnel performing a script written by Watt, Target follows the story of a single raid on an imaginary railway yard and oil depot somewhere near a bend in the Rhine. The film sought to celebrate the quiet heroics of the RAF, which is shown to have the ability to mount a precision raid with great success. Audiences no doubt cheered to see the (models of the) target ablaze and to know — or, rather, believe — that the RAF was creating havoc in the enemy’s heartland.
[. . .]
According to a secret Cabinet report, which analysed aerial photographs in the summer of 1941, the RAF failed to get even one third of its bombs within five miles of its targets. The Strategic Air Offensive was published much to the chagrin of wartime RAF leaders such as Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris and generated intense and widespread controversy.
By the 1980s it was largely accepted that, before new navigational aids were introduced in 1942, the RAF offensive had been a complete failure. Although the moral debate about the rights and wrongs of ‘area’ or ‘indiscriminate’ bombing has continued ever since, there are no serious historians today who challenge the accuracy of the Webster-Frankland account. And so, in 1990, Paris was able to point out the gulf between what the RAF pretended had been happening and what, in reality, was going on.
Before the war started, the air force always claimed that the “bomber would always get through”. What they didn’t say was that it couldn’t be predicted where the bomber would get through to.
However, it must be remembered that even the US Air Force, which carried out daylight air raids against German targets in the latter half of the war, had an accuracy issue too:
Gladwell began with the story of Carl Norden — a Swiss engineer, born in 1880, domineering and narcissistic, “who had very strong feelings about alternating current” and much else. Norden became obsessed with finding a more precise ways to deliver bombs from aircraft — and invented the Norden Mark 15 Bomb Sights. Its promise: that a bomb could be dropped into a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet.
The US military was excited; in fact, Washington spent $1.5 billion in 1940 dollars rolling out the devices, buying 90,000 of them and training 50,000 bombardiers to use them. Yet when America was brought into world war two, “it turns out they were not the holy grail”. They could only hit a pickle barrel under perfect conditions — and life is rarely perfect, it proved. They were hard to use, broke down, could not function in cloud without direct line of sight of the target, and were inaccurate. Plus, Norden had hired German engineers — who gave Berlin the complete blueprint by 1938.
May 21, 2012
The perils of misreading
I saw a Twitter update from MHQjournal, linking to a brief news piece:
#Theater: One-Man Play Takes Controversial look at Robert E Lee http://goo.gl/news/SyBu Hope they did enough research to get the nuances right.
I slightly misread the name of the play as “Robert E. Lee — 50 Shades of Gray”, and thought it was a very odd notion to have the very paragon of an upright, pious southern gentlemen reading from a modern erotica novel…
May 8, 2012
Celebrating the birthday of F. A. Hayek
And the sequel, which some think is even better than the original, Fight of the Century:
May 7, 2012
Royal Flying Corps, 100 years on
April 13th was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), which was merged with the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) to become the Royal Air Force in 1918. BBC Magazine has an interesting article about the early days:
In most accounts of WWI, mention of the Royal Flying Corps goes hand-in-hand with stories of the fighter aces, men like Albert Ball and James McCudden, who downed dozens of enemy planes.
The romance of gladiatorial combat in the air — initially firing revolvers at one another from the cockpit, and then shooting machine guns through the propellers of the aircraft — makes their adventures against such legendary foes as the Red Baron some of the most stirring tales of the Great War.
But as a division of the British Army, the main role of the Royal Flying Corps, with its hundreds of pilots and thousands of ground crew, was very different.
It was the eyes of the army.
For the first time in history, it was possible not only to get a detailed view of the enemy lines from above, but to see what was going on behind those lines — the trench systems, the support routes, the railways and road vehicles that manoeuvred troops and weaponry into position.
The real heroes of the war in the air were the pilots and observers who flew in all conditions to maintain British air superiority, and to keep the ground troops aware of everything that the enemy was doing.
During the First World War, Canada hosted a training unit for British aircrew, the Royal Flying Corps Canada (Wikipedia link), from 1917 onwards. It operated the following air stations in southern Ontario:
- Camp Borden 1917–1918
- Armour Heights Field 1917–1918 (pilot training, School of Special Flying to train instructors)
- Leaside Aerodrome 1917–1918 (Artillery Cooperation School)
- Long Branch Aerodrome 1917–1918
- Curtiss School of Aviation (flying-boat station with temporary wooden hangar on the beach at Hanlan’s Point on Toronto Island 1915–1918; main school, airstrip and metal hangar facilities at Long Branch)
- Deseronto Airfield, Deseronto 1917–1918 (pilot training)
- Camp Mohawk (now Tyendinaga Mohawk Airport) and Camp Rathburn — located at the Tyendinaga Indian Reserve near Belleville 1917–1918 (pilot training)
- Hamilton (Armament School) 1917–1918
- Beamsville Camp (Aerial fighting)
List sourced from the Wikipedia page on the RFC.
[Lt Col (later Brig Gen) Cuthbert] Hoare made several agreements with U.S. Brig Gen George O. Squier (US Army Signal Corps) and the US Aircraft Production Board. Squier had overall responsibility for the US Army’s air service, which was short of flight instructors. The RFC released five experienced American pilots to the US Army, where they became squadron commanders. The US Air Board acquiesced in the British opening a recruiting office in New York City, ostensibly to recruit British citizens, but in fact also soliciting US citizens, of whom about 300 were successfully signed up. The RFC would also train many US Army flight personnel: 400 pilots; 2,000 ground-crew members; and 20 equipment officers. These Americans would then collect aircraft and equipment from the UK, before coming under RFC control in France. Ten American squadrons would train in Canada during the summer of 1917, while RFC squadrons were allowed to train during the winter in Fort Worth, Texas.
During the last two years of the war 3135 pilots and 137 observers trained in Canada and Texas for both the RFC and the new Royal Air Force (RAF). Of these trainees, 2,624 went to Europe for operational duty.
May 3, 2012
Remembering the heroism and sacrifice of the defenders at Kohima’s Garrison Hill
A little-known battle had major consequences to the tides of Japanese expansion, and has been called “India’s Battle of the Somme“:
Nestled in the vast country’s north-eastern state of Nagaland, it is a place where two Victoria Crosses were won for outstanding bravery, where a 1,000-strong British and Indian force, outnumbered 10 to one, halted the Japanese army’s relentless march across Asia.
Blood-soaked battles in April 1944 saw the troops of the Royal West Kent Regiment, with their comrades from the Punjab Rifles and other Indian regiments, under siege on the top of Kohima’s Garrison Hill.
Troops fought hand to hand in torrential rain from rat-infested trenches dug on the then British deputy commissioner’s clay tennis court.
The two sides were so close that they could lob grenades into each other’s strongholds barely 50 feet away and, according to chroniclers of the battle, Allied troops sometimes woke in their monsoon mud trenches with Japanese troops sleeping alongside them.
When the siege of the hill was finally relieved some 45 days after it had begun, British officers were appalled at the conditions in which both Japanese and allied forces had fought and compared it to the Battle of the Somme. Some of the Japanese soldiers had died of starvation and disease. By then end, more than 4000 allied soldiers were dead, and 5764 Japanese troops had been killed.
May 1, 2012
The Duel at Blood Creek, a short film
A lovely little film that works well on several different levels.
April 23, 2012
Shakespeare’s plays as Soviet samizdat
An interesting bit of Soviet history in the BBC’s post on Shakespeare in the former Soviet Union:
In Soviet-era Lithuania, there were productions of Shakespeare for which people queued through the night for tickets. Shakespeare was culture with official approval, but as one of the few alternatives to tales about earnest Soviet heroes, it was also a way for theatre directors to symbolically address forbidden issues. Going to the theatre had an excitement it perhaps lacks nowadays, says Mamontovas.
“I miss those secret messages… there were always little secret messages from the artist to the audience. But there’s no need for that now because you can say what you want openly — it’s more entertainment now.”
[. . .]
Then there is the history of Hamlet in the Soviet Union. An early landmark of Lithuania’s professional theatre was a production of Hamlet by Mikhail Chekhov, nephew of the playwright Anton.
But Hamlet then fell out of favour. Stalin, it was understood, had turned against the indecisive Prince of Denmark. The uncomfortable comparisons between the setting of Hamlet, the dark world of Elsinore and the Kremlin, was perhaps too close.
Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, had usurped the throne, depriving the young Hamlet himself, and there were parallels — for those who wished to see them — in Stalin’s seizure of Lenin’s leading role and his demolition of rivals such as Trotsky.
There was also another layer of symbolism. Stalin, a keen theatregoer, took against the renowned director Vsevolod Meyerhold and had him arrested and tortured, and executed.
Meyerhold dreamed all his life of staging Hamlet, his favourite play, but somehow never managed it. He was renowned for having said, with bitter irony, that he wanted his tombstone to read: “Here lies a man who never played or directed Hamlet“. From the day he was killed in 1940, Hamlet and the death of Meyerhold became intertwined in the public imagination.
Stalin’s death in 1953 prompted a series of new Hamlet productions that tested the boundaries of how far the post-Stalin thaw had gone, and so the play gained a symbolic status of freedom of expression.
April 22, 2012
Protecting the Turkish identity should not include ignoring history
Ayşe Kadıoğlu is a Turk who went to university in the United States. Part of the experience was meeting Armenian-American students in Boston and learning about events in Turkish history that have been rigorously suppressed in aid of bolstering “Turkishness”:
I grew up in Turkey, where the prevailing education system still conceals certain historical facts in primary and secondary school curricula lest they harm the “indivisibility of the state with its country and nation”, an expression that is used several times in the current Turkish constitution. Perhaps the fear about deeds that can harm the unity of the state and nation is best symbolised in the Turkish national anthem, which begins with the lyrics “Do not fear”.
When fears nurture and sustain taboos, the ability to retain experiences declines. Enduring an education that is laden with either false historical facts or an eerie silence makes it impossible for people to exit the state of self-imposed immaturity.
[. . .]
There are many taboos in Turkey that mainly concern the protection of the “indivisibility of the state and nation”. There are also many laws that make it a crime to break these taboos. When taboos are sustained by law, the minds (and, many times, bodies) of citizens end up being imprisoned. One such taboo involves the founder of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In Turkey, it is a crime to insult his memory and harm his statutes. Another taboo involves the sacredness of the armed forces. This is sustained by a law against discouraging people from performing their compulsory military service.
[. . .]
Taboos, enforced by law, are fetters in front of the ability to reason. It is possible to be released from the spell of taboos and strengthen the ethos of democracy by upholding the realm of public debate and deliberation. Therefore, yes, I agree with Free Speech Debate’s fourth draft principle, “We allow no taboos in the discussion and dissemination of knowledge”, because we try not to be trapped in a state of immaturity and want to do our utmost to fulfil our capacities as reasonable human beings.
