Tag: British History

In Perfect Harmony – Singalong Pop In 70s Britain – Will Hodgkinson (2022)

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Here’s a book from my “What I Should Have Read in 2022” list.  Its focus is 1970’s pop music.  Looking back from our 21st Century position when we think of the 1970’s we probably give greater importance to punk, glam rock and disco which certainly made a lasting impression in terms of visual style but did not last that long as a market force.  The music with the most longevity throughout the decade can be classed as singalong pop.

Will Hodgkinson studies an era where the first number one of 1971 was Clive Dunn’s “Grandad” and rounding things off so helpfully 10 years later was St. Winifred’s School Choir and “There’s No-One Quite Like Grandma”.  So did nothing change during the 1970s?  Still celebrating grandparents!  Why did singalong pop exert such mass appeal for the whole of the decade.  The author explores this and basically it is because Britain was so grim during this time that we needed pop music to lift the spirits!

Perhaps the inspiration for much of this came from an American song from the late 1960s, “Sugar Sugar”.  This was marketed as being by a cartoon group, recorded by anonymous session singers and was disposable bubblegum music at its finest and importantly, was a massive worldwide hit.  For a time, the song became more important than the artists.  The UK responded to this by session musicians recording singles and then considering the formation of a group to perform afterwards – take a bow Edison Lighthouse, Brotherhood Of Man, Bay City Rollers, the whole range of singles put out by Jonathan King, or 10CC in embryonic form.  One session singer Tony Burrows famously appeared in three (some say four) different acts on the same episode of “Top Of The Pops”.

And then came glam- stomping, singalong music geared towards and enjoyed by a younger audience- led by Marc Bolan, whose innovative influence on British pop has now been somewhat lost followed swiftly by Slade, Wizzard, Suzi Quatro, Mud, Sweet et al, with an even younger audience being feted by Messrs Osmond, Cassidy and Jackson.  Will Hodgkinson explores and analyses all this with interviews, contemporary views and what was going on at the time.  A sudden powercut plunging British homes into darkness could be enlivened by a family singsong of “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.”

This is a phenomenon mainly but not exclusively British and also had something to do with huge audiences for TV light entertainment shows, TV advertising jingles and theme tunes and pop music as a regular feature of children’s TV  but mainly a country that ricocheted between Heath, Wilson and then Callaghan as Prime Ministers in a time of strikes, inflation, high unemployment needed something to feel cheered up by.

Given all that can we expect a New Seekers, Boney M, Tony Orlando and Dawn revival in 2023?!! Just nobody mention Gary Glitter….

In Perfect Harmony was published by Nine Eight Books in 2022.

My Revolutions – Hari Kunzru (2007)

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I really loved the first novel I read by British writer Hari Kunzru, the 2004 comic novel “Transmission” which when I discovered it 6 years later it ended up in my Top 3 of the year.  Spurred on by this I’ve read another couple by him which didn’t quite make the same impact.  By reading his 2017 record-buying obsessives themed “White Tears” I bypassed this earlier novel, which was his third, now 15 years old.  Putting that right I have discovered his second five star work.

Thematically, it doesn’t sound that appealing to me which might have been why I didn’t seek it out at the time.  I don’t read many serious, political novels and so any description of this tale of radical activists in the late 1960s/early 70s might very well have left me cold.  But this is the man who made writing about a computer virus in “Transmission” laugh out loud funny so I was tempted to explore outside my usual comfort zone.

I’m so glad I did because away from the activism there is so much going on in terms of story-telling.  It all feels authentic.  It follows along a number of time-lines which are all equally involving and strong characterisation and a carefully structured plot just adds to the joys.  This is a serious work and yet the writing is not without humour and empathy.

Mike Frame is approaching his 50th birthday when he bails out on his partner and step-daughter.  We know that this is linked to an earlier chance meeting of a woman from his past in France.  We begin to realise that he has had a secret life and that his name is not even Mike.  When his secrets begin to unravel he has to take drastic action.

Within this first-person narrative he explores his past- of confrontations against the establishment, communes and squats and fighting for what you believe in and how easily idealism can become tainted so that the brave new world once thought possible goes increasingly out of reach.

As a child at the time “My Revolutions” is set I was aware slightly of some of the issues raised here but it would have been through the then media’s pre-occupation with “long-haired layabouts” and the fear of youth challenging established views.  I found this filling in of many of the gaps in my knowledge of this time in British social history fascinating and well -told enough to keep me captivated.  This is a book so rich in events and ideas, there’s enough here for a whole bookshelf of novels.  I really wasn’t expecting to love it- but I did.

My Revolutions was published in 2007.  I read a 2008 Penguin paperback edition. 

The Village That Died For England -Patrick Wright (1995)

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December 1943- The sleepy coastal Dorset village, Tyneham, is taken over by the British Military for use as a firing range, incorporating it into neighbouring areas such as Lulworth and Bovington, already being used for manoeuvres and tanks.  The village, which included a school, church and post office is emptied of its residents who are relocated to other parts of Dorset.  They are told they can come back when the war is over.  They never return.

These are the bare bones.  It’s certainly not as simple as this idyllic bit of lost England being subsumed by officialdom suggests and Patrick Wright is on hand to tell this story which feels as British as an Ealing film comedy.

Having recently moved to Dorset after only ever holidaying here decades ago I’m finding myself stirred by long distant memories and back in the early 1980s I could recall a visit to a lost, abandoned village.  I hadn’t thought about it for years but moving here I began to wonder about it, I couldn’t even recall its name.  I saw this in Dorchester’s Waterstones and realised this was just the book to fill in the memory gaps.

I read the 1995 hardback edition from the library but it was reissued in paperback in 2021 by Repeater Books with a new introduction which brings the story up to date.

This is an unusual non-fiction choice for me and I wasn’t totally at ease with the author’s style, initially.  I found it slightly wandering to begin with and he didn’t bring me in  as a newcomer to his subject- I felt he assumed I’d know things I didn’t and with the passage of time there will be fewer of us who remember the national controversy over Tyneham which simmered from the war years onwards so a new edition would seem a good idea.

It is far less about the good, dislocated people of Tyneham than the reasons for the decisions made for them and the development of this part of the Dorset coast in National Defence.  There’s some memorable characters who made their home in this area before the war, including Rolf Gardiner, who promoted youth work camps and of whom there’s quite a bit here; the literary set of the Powys family as well as the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner and her same-sex partner Valentine Ackland; the fiery squire of the Lulworth Castle who may or may not have been tainted by the Curse of Tutankhamun and who sat and watched  his castle burn down in 1929 (I’ve just found out it was restored and is now an English Heritage site).  In his bringing these people back to life Wright’s account shines brightest.

There’s some mileage to be had in the rival associations aiming to repopulate Tyneham in the late 1960s-70s where hippy idealism both works with and clashes against the established order with young firebrand Rodney Legg taking central stage.

It is more than a story of lost England as within Tyneham’s takeover and the decades spent in trying to get it back for the residents there’s really a pocket guide to the shifts in values and priorities of the nation.  Class, unsubstantiated fears and prejudices and relationships with authority all play their fascinating part in this tale which is equally complex and straightforward.  A measure of the success of this type of book is whether it makes me want to read more about the subject and although I feel that most of the texts would be bucolic reminiscences from those who lived thereabouts at the time Wright has certainly piqued my interest.  I also think a visit to Tyneham might be on the cards.

I read the Jonathan Cape 1995 hardback edition but it would probably be easier to find the 2021 Repeater paperback reissue.

The Magic Box- Rob Young (Faber 2021)

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I can’t resist a chunky well-researched book about British television and Rob Young’s latest certainly ticked these boxes for me.  Subtitled “Viewing Britain Through The Rectangular Window” this is a thorough work within its scope even if it is not quite the book I had thought it was.

Young examines Britishness through what we have watched for entertainment over the decades but this is not the social history I was expecting – this is more a guide to folk history.  The focus is evenly on film and television and the author is happy to divulge plot spoilers occasionally to prove a point (I admit this grated on me even if the likelihood of me watching many of his examples is minimal).

To be honest, I realised quite early on, after the first few chapters, that most of the productions Young focuses on I hadn’t ever seen, and that was because, in a lot of cases they wouldn’t have appealed at the time they appeared.  I would have written a lot of it off as too weird or too rural or elemental, although with the passing of time many do hold a greater appeal to the me of now.

He is very good on British folk horror and cites three films as being vital in the development of this genre, “Witchfinder General” (1968), “Blood On Satan’s Claw” (1971) and,unsurprisingly, “The Wicker Man” (1973) all hugely influential in Young’s study.  I found the author’s observation about threats in horror film fascinating.  In British productions it often came from the ground whereas in the USA it was more likely to come from the air.

The land and our response to it is present from “Quatermass” to the recent revival of “Worzel Gummidge”.  As children we were often presented with the weird and Young cites cult and ground-breaking (often in more ways than one) programmes which offered dystopias, ghosts, alternate histories and parallel times set within our land which is not always , through the eyes of TV and film-makers, a green and pleasant one.

The author has sat through a lot of material to produce this work from slow-paced rural documentaries and information films to Plays For Today, which in itself has provided rich pickings.  This was a long running strand on television which I remember being so diverse that you always had to give it ten minutes or so to know whether you were watching a future classic or needed to change channel.  Its scope was broad in that it offered something for everybody although rarely within the same play. 

The book is tightly-structured and always readable and as I was reading it I was aware of the people I could recommend certain sections to.  I personally did not end up with a massive list of things I wanted to watch as I had anticipated when starting it but these are insights into our past the like of which we will never see again.  Young is right with his statement that in the times of streaming services, Netflix and viewer algorithms there is no way that most of the works featured in this book would ever be commissioned.  It felt good to be informed and reminded of them.

The Magic Box was published in both the UK and US by Faber and Faber in 2021.

Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race – Reni Eddo-Lodge (2017)

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This was our focus text for Black History Month at Sandown Library here on the Isle Of Wight where a number of copies were purchased and a special display created which reflected some of the impact this book had on publication. It has stimulated some discussion from people who have borrowed the book so I thought I’d better get round to reading it.

Reni Eddo-Lodge, an award-winning journalist, was shrewd enough for her first full-length publication to use a striking, emotive, even provocative title, which certainly makes an impact. In her Aftermath, an extra chapter provided for the expanded paperback edition I read she acknowledges that this was the case and quite a bit of the criticism she faced was from people responding to the title rather than what she actually has to say. I have no issue whatsoever with any of the points she makes in this assured and accurate assessment of racism in Britain. She states facts with the evidence to back them up.

She begins with a concise history of blackness in Britain and how that has led to structural racism which is deep-rooted in society. As a child she was told that in order to achieve she needed to work twice as hard as a white child and that tenet proved to be extremely valuable as evidence is clear that hurdles faced by black infants continues through childhood, higher education, in the employment market and parenthood. History and society has allowed this to be.

She explores difficult areas such as white privilege, feminism and class and is powerfully convincing throughout. Liberal-minded individuals may claim that racism is largely now in the past but the global right-wing shift over the last few years says otherwise. I think this makes for a powerful read which each individual needs to internalise and make their own sense from it depending on their own background. It’s not actually something I feel I want to particularly discuss myself. It reinforced a lot of what I suspected had and was happening and does so in a way which saw this book get shortlisted for awards and win prizes. This is not political correctness- it is an important thought-provoking British work.

fourstars

Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race was published by Bloomsbury in 2017. I read the 2018 expanded paperback version.

The Mitford Girls – Mary S. Lovell (2001) – A Real Life Review

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Mary S. Lovell’s sixth publication reads like a labour of love.  Her subjects are a biographer’s dream.  She must have been inundated with material for this thoroughly researched work.  The big decision must have been just what to include and what to leave out as the Mitford sisters have generated so much print over the decades.

 It would be a big enough job for a biographer to focus on one of the sisters but Lovell here tackles all six, not entirely forgetting brother Tom, the third of the seven children.  Read any account of British history of the period and at least one Mitford is likely to appear, even if on the sidelines, particularly anything which examines the upper classes of the first half of the twentieth century.  In fiction too, their influence can be felt as inspiration for characters in many novels as well as directly influencing English Literature through Nancy’s highly regarded novels published from the mid 1930s to early 1960s.

 I didn’t know a huge amount about them and was never sure who was who. (I haven’t read any of Nancy’s novels but intend to).  Six attractive high society girls (their father was Baron Redesdale) who between them spanned the whole range of political beliefs.  Nancy (1904-73) became a novelist known for her autobiographically based novels and waspish humour; Pamela (1907-94) was the most sedate of the bunch who lived a more rural-based life; Diana (1910- 2003) who became one of the country’s most notorious women when she fell in love with Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Fascists; Unity (1914-48) who arose stronger feelings in the popular press through her friendship with Hitler; Jessica (1917-96) who, at the other end of the spectrum, became a radical Communist and Deborah (1920-2014) who became the Duchess of Devonshire and regenerated Chatsworth House.

mitfordsThe Mitford Sisters

 Admittedly, it does take a while to get the girls sorted out one from another in their younger days but things become certainly clarified in the years leading up to World War II.  It is extraordinary that these six girls came from the same privileged family.  Lovell’s approach is largely non-judgemental which can seem a little odd but is probably the best way to deal with six such disparate characters.  In fact there are seven as we must count their mother Sydney (1840-1963) who manages to keep things together but must have been driven mad by the unpredictable antics of her daughters.

 It has been 17 years since this book’s publication and now none of the sisters are  with us (Diana and Deborah were both alive in 2001) maybe a new updated edition would make this work seem complete.  Since writing this the author has focused upon another major family of the period and relatives of the Mitfords- “The Churchills” (2011).  Her latest work (2017) focuses on the high society who frolicked at Cannes in 1920-60.

 Reading this fascinating biography has given me a taste for the fiction of this period – I must read Nancy Mitford and work my way once again through Evelyn Waugh at the very least.  This, however, is a tale of a family which is stranger than fiction and Mary S. Lovell does a great job at bringing these women to life.

fourstars

 The Mitford Girls was published by Abacus in 2001.

The Young Victoria – Alison Plowden (1981) – A Real Life Review

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Like many people my knowledge of the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign has been based upon what I have seen in the ITV drama series “Victoria”.  There were still things that I was unsure about, namely, how the line of succession played out so that she came to the throne in the first place.  For my second book in the Russian Roulette Reading Challenge at Sandown Library I pulled out of the hat “a book with a green cover” and I chose Alison Plowden’s non-fiction work because a) it had a green cover and b) I wanted to know more about the young Victoria.

 Plowden’s book was written in 1981 although I read a paperback reprint from The History Press which was published in 2016.  It falls firmly into the category of popular history, there are no references to get you leafing through to the back of the book, a shorter bibliography than one might imagine and an author’s note which credits especially two biographies, one from 1972 and one from back in 1964.  Plowden has synthesized this information into her very readable work which suited my purposes but may frustrate the more serious historian. 

 It does read like a novel, especially with its characters that we know from the TV series here being fleshed out and it was a little surprising to find that the ITV drama does not deviate too far from the facts as presented here. 

 The characters who feature strongly in Victoria’s early years and are brought to life well by Plowden are her mother, the Duchess of Kent, whose relationship with her daughter became strained during the teenage years largely because of the influence of Sir John Conroy, who placed himself and his family close to Victoria and her mother and who the Princess came to hate.  Victoria had the most time for her beloved governess Baroness Lehzen and for Dash her dog.  The book ends with Victoria’s marriage to Albert but the most fascinating relationship here (as it was in the early episodes of the ITV series) is the one between the young Queen and Prime Minister and mentor Lord Melbourne with Victoria demonstrating anti-Tory tendencies in her desire to keep him in power.

 I still haven’t totally got the succession to the throne bit as her grandfather had so many children that it all gets a little confusing and I could have really done with a family tree appendix to sort this all out in my head.  Inexplicably, the edition I read devoted two pages at the back to completely the wrong tree, that of the House of Tudor, which has no relevance whatsoever to Victoria’s time.  That is a bad mistake from The History Press that I hope was put right in subsequent editions. 

 Alison Plowden was best known for her non-fiction on the Tudor period so that suggests that the family tree here was intended for another of her publications.  She wrote around 25 books mainly on female historical figures.   She died in 2007.

 threestars

 

Young Victoria was first published in 1981.  I read the 2016 History Press edition.  The History Press have republished a number of her books.

The Young Oxford History Of Britain & Ireland (OUP 1996)- A Real Life Review

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I have gaps in my historical knowledge.  It’s likely that most of us educated in England would admit that.  At school I studied certain periods of history (some more than once).  I went on to study History at college but the eras largely overlapped with what I had done at school, leaving gaps of time about which I knew very little.  And I’ll admit that my knowledge of Scottish, Welsh and Irish history is even sparser.  This 500 page book is written for a young audience (although not that young, given the demands it makes on the reader, so probably early/mid-teens).  It seemed to offer an ideal overview of British and Irish history.  The general editor is Professor Kenneth O Morgan and it has been put together by five authors with distinguished historical backgrounds.  It spans from the time when the land mass which became Britain and Ireland was still joined to looking ahead to what the new Millennium might bring.  The text is generously broken up with pictures, photos, maps and diagrams.

On reading it I can confirm that it provided me with a good overview and showed me how our history fits together.  Obviously, given its scope and audience it’s all rather fleeting.  I can’t claim to be that more knowledgeable about the periods I knew less about (Medieval and The Georgians, for example), but what is impressive is the range of subjects covered both within the text and through the illustrations.  Photos, portraits, diagrams and maps are used very effectively and they do enrich the text and can often give little snippets of information not included elsewhere.  At the back there is a list of the English Royal Line Of Succession and Scottish Kings  & Queens (I was largely unfamiliar with this particular list) and UK Prime Ministers up to, because of the publication of the book, John Major.  Obviously, this type of book dates easily but twenty-one years on it does not seem jarring.  Here, the vast scope and range of the book is to its benefit.

The index looks pretty comprehensive and this would most likely provide most readers’ introduction to the text.  I’ve read it from cover to cover, but probably most would dip in and out.  This is going to last me a little while, until once again I start chiding myself about how little I know about the country in which I live and then I’ll no doubt seek out something similar.

threestars

The Young Oxford History Of Britain and Ireland was published by the Oxford University Press in  1996.

The Making Of Modern Britain- Andrew Marr (2009) – A Real Life Review

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After the great success of Marr’s 2007 publication “A History Of Modern Britain” (my third favourite book when I read it in  2009) and its accompanying TV series, Marr decided to go with a prequel of sorts as this book tells the story of Britain from 1900 with Victoria still on the throne until the end of World War II.  Another TV series was made, but this is, as Marr points out, not the book of the TV series but very much a history in its own right.

It was a great period of change from the “imperial island, with essentially aristocratic values” to the victorious, but almost broken nation of VE Day,  but Marr guides us through, providing a history largely taken from the stories of individuals concerned who provide the starting points for Marr’s retelling of events.  This makes his work very readable.  The interest level is also kept up by his tendency to jump from one subject to another, but for me, this style of writing does have the effect of not having things stick in my mind as much as I hoped they would.

Given the scale of the time-span this can be little more than a general reader and Marr has whetted my appetite to find out more.  I’m nitpicking here but a bibliography would have been very useful, although some of the important references can be gleaned from the notes.  If there is a main character in this piece of non-fiction then that is surely Winston Churchill, whose influence comes and goes until he is elected the wartime Prime Minister and becomes lauded as the man who led the nation to victory.  He comes across here as more fascinating than I was expecting, with a lot of career ups and downs and I’m keen to read more.  The other “characters” who stuck in my head, played just a minor role, and these were the Mitford sisters, whose different obsessions could also be seen as a symbol of the troubled times in the between the war years.  Luckily, I have an unread copy of Mary S Lovell’s biography of the Mitfords on my shelves so have an opportunity to find out more.

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Andrew Marr

This is another very good work from Marr.  If I’m not as enthusiastic it might be because I have now got used to his style which seemed so refreshing in the previous book, but he’s certainly given me a lot to ponder on.

fourstars

The Making Of Modern Britain was published in the UK by Pan in 2009