The Day Before Yesterday: Adrian Smith, modern historian

In mid-April a shared statue is to be unveiled outside the CBS Arena in Coventry, home of the city’s Championship football team, the Sky Blues.  The statue will be of John Sillett and George Curtis,  the duo of ex-CCFC defenders who were joint managers and masterminds of Coventry’s 1987 FA Cup triumph.  John Sillett died relatively recently, but George Curtis passed away nearly five years ago.  What follows is a longer version of a piece I wrote at the time of Curtis’s death for When Saturday Comes …

Which recently deceased footballer led his club from the Third to the First Division before masterminding its unexpected triumph in one of the great FA Cup finals – and in between ran a fish and chip shop?  For the people of Coventry George Curtis was a giant, in every sense of the word.  In another life he would have worked on the Kent coal field, marshalling the pit side and manning the picket line.  Instead, he moved to the Midlands in the mid-fifties to play lower league football.  At first Curtis appeared a journeyman centre-half, with work at the colliery merely on hold.  Instead, he matured as a player, readily adapting to a succession of fresh challenges.  Across the ’sixties Coventry City progressed to a place in the equivalent of today’s Premiership, with Curtis’s reliability and leadership key factors in the club’s success.

In 1961, when Jimmy Hill arrived at Coventry to initiate the ‘Sky Blue Revolution’, few saw George Curtis surviving long.  Instead he became Hill’s company sergeant major, embracing the tyro manager’s revolutionary approach as to how football should be played – and how it should be enjoyed, both on and off the pitch.  Hill changed the face of professional football in England, transforming Coventry as a club, and marketing football as a family-friendly sport watched in new or updated stadia.  Hill’s showmanship disguised his tactical nous.  As a revealing Pathé film from 1962 confirms, Curtis welcomed Hill’s new ideas, encouraging his team-mates to follow suit.  An exception was veteran Scottish international Stewart Imlach: the newsreel cameraman catches the winger’s undisguised contempt for his bearded new boss.  Imlach was soon gone as Jimmy Hill built a succession of teams around local talent and shrewd purchases; but always with Curtis at the heart of his back four.

Then suddenly, at the moment of triumph – a demolition of Derek Dougan’s Wolves having secured the 1967 Second Division Championship in front of more than fifty thousand fans – Hill was gone.  The master of invented tradition, having single-handedly created a Sky Blue mythology, Jimmy Hill quit to join London Weekend.  Hill now had a national audience, and an agenda for the further modernisation of professional football.  Curtis was left with the job of raising team morale, his task not helped by breaking a leg during Coventry’s second match in the top tier.  He returned a year later, but with a place in the team no longer guaranteed.  In due course he was transferred to Aston Villa, helping transform a moribund side into Division Three champions.

Curtis retired in 1972, and in due course a commercial post was found for him back at Coventry’s former stadium, Highfield Road.  What’s not included in his biography, and now his obituaries, is that he bought a fish and chip shop on the main road to Leicester.  My parents’ house was no distance from the chippie, and when visiting them I felt a mixture of awe and astonishment that the mighty George Curtis was serving me two fish and a treble portion of chips (‘No salt or vinegar please, Mr Curtis’).  Tradition has it that footballers of that generation became pub landlords, but in his masterly My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes Gary Imlach – son of Stewart – signals a variety of occupations for ex-pros of that era, few of whom made serious money after the abolition of the maximum wage in 1961 (Hill’s first great achievement, as chairman of the Professional Footballers Association).

In due course Mr Curtis hang up his apron and took a backroom role at Highfield Road.  Perennial under-achievers, in due course Coventry appointed Curtis co-manager with former team-mate John Sillett.  Against all the odds, in May 1987 the two men took their team to Wembley, and an epic confrontation with hot favourites Tottenham Hotspur.  The Sky Blues, courtesy of Keith Houchen, scored a stunning goal in a stunning victory.  For a further seven years Curtis was managing director.  Thus, the man who narrowly escaped a life at the coalface, and who had no hesitation in swapping top flight football for serving fish and chips six days – and six nights – a week, played a quiet part in establishing the world’s most lucrative football league.

George Curtis helped create the Premiership, managed a cup-winning side, and skippered a total of three championship-winning teams.  As the 2021 City of Culture, Coventry’s focus is rightly on the future, with scarcely a look backwards other than to acknowledge the legacy of Two Tone.  Yet, amid the celebration and excitement, I hope that everyone in Coventry, not just football fans, can pause and mark the passing of an extraordinarily humble man.  Someone who throughout the ’sixties, and then again twenty years later, brought enormous joy to the city – and yet still found time to run a really good chippie.

The Anglo-Irish novelist JG Farrell would have been ninety in January had he not drowned in August 1979 while fishing in Bantry Bay.  It was an anniversary that passed without comment.  The harsh legacy of polio, contracted in Farrell’s first year at Oxford, renders it unlikely that he would have reached old age, but what if he had?  Contemporaries of Farrell such as John Fowles, Paul Scott and the slightly older Angus Wilson all enjoyed critical and commercial success in the final decades of the last century, and yet today their fiction is scarcely read; the authors of ‘classics’ in print and on screen, such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Raj Quartet, are now deeply unfashionable, dismissed for projecting obsolete ideas and attitudes.  Farrell no longer enjoys a mass audience (did he ever?) and yet his reputation has survived into the twenty-first century, the likes of Salman Rushdie and John Banville lamenting the premature loss of a truly great writer.  In an era of ‘decolonising’ the canon and the curriculum a novel like Scott’s award-winning Staying On appears archaic in its depiction of post-independence India; and yet Farrell’s ‘Empire Trilogy’ still stand as key texts of postcolonial literature: in 2008 The Siege of Krishnapur came close to winning the ‘Best of Booker’ vote and in 2010 Troubles effortlessly won the ‘Lost Booker Prize’ [for 1970 when a rule change had meant no competition], while in 2020 a big budget serialisation of The Singapore Grip on terrestrial TV gained extensive media coverage.  Nor is this fashionable unfashionability a uniquely British and Irish phenomenon.  Farrell spent long periods in France and in the United States, loudly lamenting his failure to break through in either country; posthumously, French and American critics applauded his ability to convey with humour and lightness of touch the fractious nature of imperial pomp (each of the ‘Empire Trilogy is an NYRB Classic).

Ironically, Farrell’s earliest novels, particularly the Lolita-like A Girl In The Head, would generate fierce criticism were they still in print.  The same might be true of the man himself if his selected letters and diaries, and Lavinia Greacen’s 1999 biography, were better known: he was immensely popular, and yet his treatment of multiple girlfriends left a lot to be desired.  Those same girlfriends were generously unforgiving, even in his lifetime.  Shocked by his sudden death Farrell’s wider circle of friends swiftly memorialised him: in dedications (Olivia Manning), in state-of-the-nation poetry (Derek Mahon) and in novels (Alison Lurie, and most especially Margaret Drabble).  In 1981 appeared The Hill Station, an unfinished fictional return to nineteenth-century India complemented by insightful reflections on the man and his work.  Rereading Farrell’s ‘Empire Trilogy’ prompts a succession of questions.  How do surviving friends like Drabble and Hilary Spurling view him today – was he an English or an Irish writer, or distinctively Anglo-Irish, and what relationship if any does he have to contemporary Ireland’s astonishing array of novelists?  South Dublin and rural Cork are wholly different from the locales Farrell knew in his formative years and final days, so can we in any way speculate on how he would have adapted to the fundamental shifts in Irish culture and society witnessed across the past thirty years?  My gut feeling is that he would effortlessly have accommodated dramatically changing times, helped by his outsider status within Irish society (no having to accommodate a guilt-ridden Catholic upbringing, or sense of personal responsibility for the Church’s worst failings).

It’s also worth asking how Farrell’s novels have lived on inside and outside the academy; today are they better known courtesy of TV and radio?  Between 2000 and 2010 the BBC’s Radio 4 dramatised or serialised all three novels of the ‘Empire Trilogy’.  With David Lean and others keen to film The Siege of Krishnapur, Farrell confidently anticipated his books one day transferring to the big screen.  They never did, but in 1988 London Weekend recruited a stellar cast and production crew to make a well-received two-part adaptation of Troubles.  Thirty-two years later ITV commissioned an old associate of ‘Jim’, Christopher Hampton, to write a six-part screenplay of The Singapore Grip.  Why was this expensive prime-time production such an obvious failure; unlike Troubles, made at a high-water mark for British television drama?

Farrell’s publisher seized on the screening and streaming of The Singapore Grip to assert his relevance to an era of identity politics and global realignment.  Here was a carefully orchestrated revival of an ostensibly forgotten novelist.  Yet arguably he’s never gone away, both in the British Isles and in North America.  Since 1979 a succession of books and essays have examined Farrell’s work from every angle; yet few if any have considered his continuing presence in our national conversation when the likes of Scott and Fowles are more and more forgotten.  Here was a writer inspired by his lengthy stays in the United States, on easy terms with East Coast movers and shakers (he studied drama at Yale with Sam Shephard) and eager to observe America’s fast-fading presence in south-east Asia.  Farrell has a continued presence among British, Irish and American readers – a presence which, in what would have been his ninetieth year, deserves serious recognition and consideration.

It augured well when on the way to the cinema we passed a busker playing ‘The Wicked Messenger’ (how many buskers know John Wesley Harding, in advanced years my favourite Dylan album?).  This is not a review of A Complete Unknown, not least as there are so many out there by cineastes far better qualified than me (best I’ve read so far? James Parker in the January issue of the Atlantic); simply a series of random thoughts by someone for whom Bob Dylan has been an ever-present since next-door’s John Tilbury called me in at the age of ten to hear his new record.  Distant memories of listening to the first album and the early Joan Baez LPs came flooding back when, early in the film, Dylan sings ‘Song to Woody’ to the man himself – it sounds pathetic but I was genuinely holding back the tears: this was my music!  OK, so most if not all of the hospital scenes with Woody Guthrie weren’t as in the movie (the Guthrie family other than Arlo were initially suspicious of a post-adolescent Mid-Westerner seemingly obsessed with a half-forgotten folk singer brought down by Huntington’s Disease) – but a lot of the scenes are wholly re-imagined or didn’t happen in the first place!  This is a Bob Dylan biopic, so we wouldn’t expect a linear, largely accurate narrative.  The story has to be conflated, and events moved around or reinvented.  If reports are right then Dylan stipulated that there must be a big ‘joke’ (apparently the same was true for Todd Haynes’s brilliant I’m Not There nearly twenty years ago), hence the infamous shout of ‘Judas’ in the Manchester Free Trade Hall is heard at Newport a year earlier, with Dylan’s instruction to The Hawks to ‘Play it f……. loud’ duly replicated, sans expletive – there follows a storming delivery of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ but nothing as thunderous and malevolent as the version unleashed that night in May 1966.  That said the band put together for when Dylan ‘goes electric’ is terrific, but I doubt if Eli Brown, looking uncannily like Mike Bloomfield, is actually playing that Telecaster.  The choice of instruments is needless to say spot on, and the attention to period detail throughout the film is especially impressive – Greenwich Village is a more dynamic, action-filled environment than in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davies (where Dylan is a looming present, waiting not quite off-screen to sweep away the old guard and the ever hopefuls).  The conservative dress of most of the audiences is recognised, emphasising the continuity between the ’fifties and the ’sixties until well into the latter decade (reinforced early on by relocating McCarthyism and Pete Seeger’s congressional indictment to the eve of Bob’s arrival in New York).  Timothy Chalamet’s uncanny capture of Dylan the man – in so far as anyone can actually ‘capture’ Bob’s ever-changing persona – has been rightly acclaimed, and on Radio 2’s The Folk Show he explained how an unintended consequence of the film’s extended production, owing to the pandemic and the screenwriters’ strike, was that he had five years’ coaching in guitar and harmonica playing by the best in the business.  No coach, however brilliant, could have trained Monica Barbaro to nail Joan Baez’s voice in such a convincing fashion – that was instinctive, unforced and natural (is this the second movie depiction of Joan Baez, with Ronee Blakley playing her alongside the real JB in the truly awful Renaldo and Clara?).  One wonders what Joan Baez thinks of the film – and did Peter Yarrow get to see himself on screen before he died last week?  Mention of Peter, Paul and Mary recalls how their inauthenticity is assaulted from both sides in A Complete Unknown: by Dylan as he seeks a way out of the growing artificiality of ‘the folk revolution’ and the ultra-purist Alan Lomax, arguably unfairly demonised in the film.  Yet the trio was Albert Grossman’s biggest act pre-Dylan, with Baez – as shown in the film – refusing to leave the Vanguard label for Columbia.  Dylan of course eventually broke with Grossman, but the latter by then had The Band to line his purse (no place for Robbie Robertson in the later stages of the film, with Bob Neuwirth portrayed as a more positive presence in Dylan’s life than was actually the case, perhaps because drugs scarcely feature at all).  Scoot McNairy is wholly believable as a still wild and vibrant Woody Guthrie overwhelmed by incoherence and paralysis (an echo of the most moving scene in the otherwise very funny Alice’s Restaurant), but the revelation is Ed Norton as Pete Seeger.  As an echo of the man himself Norton’s performance is so good it’s almost eery, and if there is any justice then Norton will receive an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.  The myth of Seeger at Newport trying to cut the power cables with an axe while Dylan plays ‘Maggie’s Farm’ is acknowledged but not realised, the latter displaying a lighter touch than a clumsy scene early in the film where Dylan signals to Seeger that he’s instinctively a rocker and can’t be categorised.  Three cheers for Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, whose portrayal is every bit as fragile and revealing as Joachim Phoenix in James Mangold’s other music biopic Walk The Line.  In the latter Bob Dylan is off-screen and yet ever-present, driving Cash to embrace the new and to keep going even in his darkest moments; here the relationship is cemented and reversed, with Cash at critical moments suitably inspirational.  Walk The Line is a complementary movie, as is DA Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back, shot in London during Dylan’s last wholly acoustic tour – that’s the real record of how appalling Dylan treated Baez while embracing Neuwirth as his new bro, working his way through industrial quantities of weed and speed, and accelerating towards breakdown or total reinvention.  Ultimately of course he experienced both, culminating in his coming off that beautiful Triumph and retreating with his new bride Sara to Woodstock, Big Pink and the ‘Basement Tapes’ – and the rest is history (cue plug for my book Slouching Towards Big Pink and the Dylan, Guthrie and Roosevelt – the story of a song podcast: Dylan, Guthrie, and Roosevelt – the story of a song | Prof. Adrian Smith).  One final observation, playing the cantankerous bluesman Jesse Moffette is Big Bill Morganfield, son of Muddy Waters, whose performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1960 was arguably as significant as Dylan’s five years later, in recasting acoustic music as genuinely biracial and cementing the festival’s cultural importance.

I was asked to contribute to the 10th Anniversary Commemorative Volume of The History and Philosophy of Physics Centre at Oxford, drawing on a lecture that I gave at the annual HAPP conference about ten years ago:

‘Warfare and wind tunnel: engineers, physicists, and the evolution of combat aircraft 1914-1918’

Journal of Physics: Conference Series 2877 (2024) 012027

https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/2877/1/012027

I was privileged to deliver this year’s Wellington Lecture at the University of Southampton, and here’s the text of the lecture:

Introduction

Some time in the summer of 1945 Captain Alf Smith, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, staff officer 21^st Army Group, Brussels HQ, spent a day south of the city sightseeing.  He toured the battlefield at Waterloo, but it was some time after the 130^th anniversary commemoration on 18 June 1945.  I know my dad was there because he had his batman/driver take a photograph of him standing with a big grin on his face in front of the Lion Mound.  My father left school at 14, his prowess at cricket helping considerably to secure his commission.  The chances are that he knew very little about the Duke of Wellington other than that he gave Napoleon a bloody nose.  What he did know was that from the winter of 1944 the killing fields of Waterloo – and my dad knew all about killing fields – was, in today’s parlance, the go-to experience for any British soldier with a keen sense of history.

For many officers, especially regulars, Waterloo was a place of pilgrimage.  For veterans of the Great War, visiting the battlefield had been impossible until late 1918.  Why?  Because in August 1914 the Germans had so rapidly secured control of the Belgian capital and its hinterland.  In the winter and spring of 1939-40 a visit was out of the question: members of the BEF – the British Expeditionary Force – were strictly forbidden to cross the border into Belgium, a then neutral country.  The speed of the German offensive in May 1940 ruled out any British excursion to Waterloo until liberation over four years later.

How ironic that, while the British were denied access to the Waterloo battlefield throughout the First World War and most of the Second World War, the Germans for much of this time enjoyed easy access.

In German history the Battle of Waterloo is known as La Belle Alliance, named after the inn where the victors – Wellington and Blucher – met on the evening of 18 June.  The name is bitter-sweet given the pivot in British foreign policy on the cusp of the last century which led in due course to the 1904 signing of the entente cordiale.  For the next ten years Berlin endeavoured to disrupt the entente, using a mix of threats and promises to try and resurrect a belle alliance with London, the Wilhelmstrasse still seeing the British as Germany’s most natural ally.

Waterloo was a site which many if not all nineteenth-century Germans had treated with a reverence not dissimilar to that of their one-time ally and future implacable foe.  Many but not all Germans: for Hannover and Brunswick, with their close English connections, Waterloo was the great battle of the Napoleonic wars; whereas for other member states in the German Confederation and later the German Empire, the Battle of Leipzig, fought in 1813, was deemed the key moment in nation-building.

Nevertheless, career officers in Berlin recognised the significance of Waterloo as a coda to the succession of land battles which the Prussian general staff had been obsessed with since Clausewitz wrote On War.  On 18 June 1815 troops such as the Hanoverian Brigade and the King’s German Legion had performed heroically in resisting successive French assaults – incredibly, some 155,000 of the 209,000 Allied troops were German-speaking.

Had Blucher arrived earlier in the day then the Prussian and later the German Army would have hailed Waterloo as one of its greatest triumphs.

Kaiser Wilhelm II did precisely that in 1903 when praising Hanoverian soldiers for in his rewrite of history saving their British comrades from annihilation.  In 1915 Hannover was unique in marking the battle’s centenary.  A museum exhibition and a well-attended ceremony at the city’s Waterloo Column together confirmed the Kaiser’s version of events – without the brave Germans, Napoleon had the measure of Wellington.  The rest of the wartime Reich ignored the anniversary, reinforcing Leipzig’s precedence over Waterloo in the nation’s shared memory.  Hannover’s next collective engagement with the battle came half a century later.  In June 1965 citizens with long memories and an unease over offending their French allies inside the EEC and NATO watched uncomfortably as British troops marched through the city in a commemorative parade.

‘Wellington and two world wars – the German perspective’ is clearly a fascinating topic, but one I must leave for experts in the field like Brendan Simms and Jasper Heinzen.  Instead, I’ll focus on the British military, while noting the muted civilian commemoration of the 100^th and 130^th anniversaries of Waterloo in 1915 and 1945.

The centennial came at a grim moment in the early years of the Great War, with casualties mounting on the Gallipoli beachheads, and in Belgium where the original BEF had with great loss of life seen off a renewed German attack on Ypres.  The 130^th anniversary occurred at the start of the 1945 general election campaign, and with the initial euphoria of VE Day muted by the expectation that British forces, boosted by reinforcements from Europe, would be fighting the Japanese for months into years.

It’s easy to dismiss Wellington’s legacy when considering how Britain in the 20^th century twice adapted to the multi-faceted demands of what many label ‘total war’, but which – like Hew Strachan and others – I prefer to call ‘industrial war’: what relevance can a general from Napoleonic times, however great, have to the First and Second World War – very different conflicts fought on a vastly different scale and in very different circumstance and conditions?  I don’t want to over-state my case, but I would simply say, ‘More than you might think.’  To substantiate that claim I want to consider three over-lapping areas:

Firstly, and most straightforwardly, the visible legacy: Wellington and Waterloo in the landscape of war, whether on the Home Front or within the armed forces.

Secondly, I want to consider the legacy of Wellington with reference to military doctrine, and continuing areas of debate re morale and combat effectiveness in the British Army by the summer of 1944.  Time prevents me from going into great detail, but I can signal the continued saliency of these issues.

Thirdly, and most obviously, which generals in both world wars can be compared with the Duke – in what ways, and why.

Having addressed these three areas then I hope you will agree with me that examining multiple connections between the first Duke of Wellington and Britain’s involvement in the two seismic conflicts of the 20^th century is no idle exercise – so let’s begin.

The visibility of Wellington and Waterloo within a wartime environment

Reminders of the Duke of Wellington and his best-known battle were ever present in 1914-18 and again in 1939-45, not least in the capital.  Thousands of military and non-military personnel passed through Waterloo Station, the key transit point in both world wars.  For those not from the south of England this was often a novel experience, a crowded and unfamiliar concourse only adding to the mixture of apprehension and anticipation felt by all.  Perhaps they drank a last, pre-embarkation pint at the Wellington Hotel, across the road from the station.  Just across the river in Westminster stood Wellington Barracks, but even in wartime this was largely the preserve of regular Guardsmen – the impressive building’s significance once the Blitz began lay in the fact that Buckingham Palace still required guarding, the Royal Family having chosen to remain in London.

The Army’s most lasting link to the Duke of Wellington was the regiment named in his memory.  Formed in 1853 from a veteran unit of the Peninsular War, the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment spawned multiple battalions in both world wars.  They fought with distinction in Europe, the Mediterranean and the Far East; the 2^nd Battalion even fighting behind enemy lines in Burma as part of Orde Wingate’s Chindits.  The 6^th Duke of Wellington – killed at Salerno in September 1943 – had held a commission in his namesake regiment prior to joining the Commandos.

However, as we’ll see, the 6^th Battalion’s resilience under fire triggered a wider debate re the combat effectiveness of British troops endeavouring to break out of the Normandy beachhead.

The RAF boasted not one but two bombers named after the Duke.  Less well known was the Vickers Wellesley, a single-engine monoplane which saw action against the Italians in East Africa in 1940-41, during which time its vulnerability became obvious to all who flew it – never was an aircraft less appropriately named.  The Wellesley boasted a geodetic airframe, devised by designer Barnes Wallis from his work on the R100 airship.

The same principle of construction was employed on the Vickers Wellington, the twin-engine bomber which was the mainstay of Bomber Command until 1942.  In production from 1936 to 1945, more Wellingtons were built than any other bomber.  It’s Wellingtons that are seen being constructed in Humphrey Jennings’ 1941 documentary Heart of Britain, and it’s a Wellington that is shot down over Holland in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1942 feature film One of Our Aircraft Is Missing.  RAF propaganda freely associated the Wellington with the Iron Duke, ignoring the inconvenient fact that – like the Stirling, Lancaster, Halifax, etc – prewar Bomber Command named its aircraft after towns and cities.

The Royal Navy boasted an HMS Wellington and an HMS Duke of Wellington during the Second World War, but these were largely names of convenience, for an escort sloop and a converted landing craft.  HMS Waterloo would have been a large, state-of-the-art destroyer, but the order was cancelled in 1945.

The Senior Service’s most famous salute to the hero of Waterloo were the four Iron Duke-class Dreadnoughts laid down before the First World War.  The actual HMS Iron Duke was the flagship of the Grand Fleet.

In May 1916 Southampton’s own Admiral Sir John Jellicoe commanded the Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland from the bridge of the Iron Duke.  The battleship saw almost continuous action for eight years from 1914 to 1922, but unhappily spent most of the Second World War as a beached gun platform in Scapa Flow.  By comparison, HMS Nelson – a smaller battleship launched in 1925 – saw near continuous action.

For the Royal Navy Horatio Nelson was of course a regular point of reference in both world wars.  Sir John Jellicoe’s caution at Jutland as losses mounted earned begrudging approval postwar, but in 1916 his critics were insistent that Nelson would have kept fighting.  That criticism was given tacit approval by David Beatty, who as commander of the Grand Fleet’s Battlecruiser Squadron cultivated an image designed to draw parallels with Nelson, and whose remarkable capacity for self-promotion culminated in his appointment as First Sea Lord.

If the Royal Navy was sensitive over its surface fleet’s record in the First World War the same could not be said of the Second where admirers hailed Andrew Cunningham as Britain’s greatest fighting admiral since Nelson.  Cunningham’s morale-boosting victories in the Mediterranean ensured his appointment as First Sea Lord in late 1943: every year the Royal Navy commemorates the victory at Trafalgar, but in addition the Fleet Air Arm celebrates the devastating attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto in November 1940.

The power of the Nelson myth with the Royal Navy prompts comparisons re Wellington and the British Army.  One obvious question is: does Waterloo have the same centrality within the service psyche as Trafalgar, not least in wartime?

The simple answer is clearly yes, but not as in the Navy a service-wide commemoration year on year: recognition of the great day rests with those regiments whose battle honours include ‘Waterloo’.  Cavalry regiments enthusiastically celebrate 18 June, not least because their histories highlight the clearest lines of continuity.

However, it’s hard to imagine during the Second World War say the 1^st and 2^nd Household Cavalry Regiments finding time to toast their illustrious antecedents in the saddle – except possibly in 1943 between the end of the North African campaign and the invasion of Sicily.  If so, the future 8^th Duke of Wellington may well have orchestrated the Royal Horse Guards’ anniversary celebration.

For regular cavalry regiments in 21^st Army Group the end of the war in Europe meant that they could mark the 130^th anniversary of Waterloo in style – the same being true for the Guards and the Rifle Brigade.  One wonders how intense these celebrations were outside the mess, and beyond a now shrunken cadre of regulars?

Wellington and military doctrine

In August 1914 the Peninsular War was the last campaign the British Army could consider a clear victory.  The same could not be said for the Crimean War, where Wellington cast a long shadow, or for the Boer War.  Yet cavalry tactics honed during the Napoleonic wars, and severely tested in Crimea and South Africa, proved remarkably resilient; not least because it was largely cavalrymen who in the Edwardian era moulded military doctrine and training methods.  By October 1914 all these ideas were obsolete, albeit resurrected to a degree between the wars.  Trench warfare meant few if any British generals found themselves asking ‘What would Wellington do?’.  The same was even more the case in 1939-45.

Occasionally a military historian has asked ‘What would Wellington have done?’ – John Keegan, for example.  Not that Wellington’s legacy is always viewed in a positive light.  Brian Bond and David French both attributed an absence of initiative and quick thinking on the battlefield to an inflexible, top-down system of command and control that was traceable straight back to the Duke.  For the BEF one hundred years on from Waterloo, fighting on the Western Front consolidated an unquestioning adherence by subordinate commanders to the prevailing ‘master plan’.

David French paralleled the evolution of British military doctrine with nineteenth-century industrialisation, arguing that by 1915 Douglas Haig and his fellow generals sought to impose regularity and order on a chaotic battlefield, through strict adherence to certain overriding principles and practices of war, in the same way as industrialists ran their factories.

Today, former generals like Rupert Smith and Richard Dannatt argue that the reversals of 1940-42 confirmed the resilience of an ethos that penalised rapid response to changing circumstances.

Ironically, much of the historiographical debate over the morale and combat performance of British infantry in Normandy – where attrition rates significantly exceeded those of the Western Front – focus upon the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, and specifically the 6^th Battalion.  The Regiment’s other battalions all fought with distinction throughout the Second World War.  However, in July 1944 Montgomery disbanded the 6^th following a damning report on why command and cohesion of the battalion had completely collapsed.  In his 1984 bestseller Overlord Max Hastings focused on the 6^th Battalion fleeing the front line.  He saw this as confirmation of the German generals’ claim that raw British troops and exhausted veterans of the Eighth Army were demonstrably inferior to their adversaries – in other words, that victory for 21^st Army Group came solely through superior firepower and air supremacy.

A more nuanced view, by historians like David French and John Buckley, questioned Max Hastings’ readiness to generalise about the calibre of British infantry on the strength of one painful incident.  They pointed to:

• the battle-hardened forces facing the 6^th Battalion – a Panzergrenadier Regiment of the 12. SS Division ‘Hitler Jugend’;
• the Battalion’s 50% losses from 6 June to the end of that month, which included the commanding officer, his adjutant, every company commander, and the majority of subalterns;
• the 7^th Battalion was similarly untested in combat when deployed alongside the 6^th in Normandy, but it survived crippling casualties and kept fighting.

For these reasons the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment is no longer synonymous with a damning revisionist view of how well British infantry battalions fought in NW Europe in 1944-45.

Meanwhile modern bestsellers like James Holland’s Brothers In Arms have maintained the reputation of British armour.  A Yeomanry regiment of cavalry like Nottinghamshire’s Sherwood Rangers would have been instantly recognisable to the Duke in 1939. Yet within two years they had become a frontline force in the Desert War – and then reinvented themselves to fight in very different conditions from Normandy to the Baltic.

It was the Sherwood Rangers who were fighting alongside the 6^th Battalion of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment in Le Parc de Boislonde on 17-18 June 1944 when the DWR suffered its catastrophic baptism of fire – note the date.  Stanley Christopherson, the Sherwood Rangers’ commanding officer, wrote in his diary:

‘The Duke of Wellingtons, with whom we were holding this high ground, took a bad hammering and retreated without orders, leaving its anti-tank guns and equipment, some of which were captured in a counterattack.’

That counterattack involved the 7^th Battalion, which maintained the honour of the Regiment on the 129^th anniversary of Waterloo.  Stanley Christopherson had been promoted to lieutenant colonel and given command of the Sherwood Rangers on the eve of the battle, as everyone senior to him was either dead or wounded.

In North Africa, but even more so in NW Europe, tank regiments experienced a turnover of officers, NCOs and Troopers which even Wellington post-Waterloo would have found staggering.

Which British generals from the two world wars can be spoken of in the same breath as the Iron Duke?

As to generals mentioned in the same breath as the Iron Duke the easiest answer is to say none. Posing the question appears to presume a pyramid of British martial achievement which sees Wellington and Marlborough contesting the apex, with other victorious commanders – from Cromwell to Edward III, Wolfe to Haig – some distance below.  Crudely ranking military leaders across a millennium in this way is clearly absurd.

A more nuanced approach, limited to the two world wars, is to look for parallels between Wellington and those commanders in the field who displayed similar leadership qualities of:

personality, empathy, motivation, organisation, imagination, innovation, risk management, endurance, strategic vision, tactical nous and flair for alliance diplomacy.

Such a unique and comprehensive set of skills signals a very short list of candidates, with none of them matching the Duke’s claim to them all.

Wellington and Alanbrooke

Note my qualification of commanders in the field.  Unfairly, this discounts Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff 1941-46, a truly outstanding chief of staff who, to appease the Americans, was forced to forego appointment as Supreme Commander for ‘Overlord’ in favour of Eisenhower.  Like Wellington – and a number of generals in both world wars, including Montgomery – Alan Brooke was born into the Anglo-Irish ‘Ascendancy’.  His masterly control of II [Second] Corps’ retreat to Dunkirk in May-June 1940 has echoes of Wellington’s retreat from Burgos to Cuidad Rodrigo in the autumn of 1812.

The Duke would have thoroughly approved, in contrast to an earlier II Corps’ far more costly retreat from Mons to the Marne in August-September 1914 – Wellington would have condemned the losses sustained at Le Cateau while recognising and applauding the BEF riflemen’s sharp-shooting skills.  I’m sure experts on Waterloo would want me at this point to note the presence of an even earlier Second Corps, commanded by Lord Hill, on 18 June 1815.

Incidentally, staff officers of the BEF did find time on 25 October 1915 to commemorate with their French counterparts the five hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt.  I’m grateful to my colleague Anne Curry for pointing this out.  The village of Azincourt was roughly halfway between the Channel and Loos, where the failure of the recent offensive necessitated a symbolic reaffirmation of the entente cordiale.  The Allies’ absence from the plains of Waterloo had of course prevented a similar centennial ceremony of reconciliation the previous June.

Alan Brooke was a ‘Gunner’ and in the Great War too busy planning creeping barrages to take part in affirmations of la grande alliance, but as a bilingual product of the French education system he was uniquely qualified to celebrate the metamorphosis of historic adversaries into resolute allies.

Wellington and Montgomery

However outstanding Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke undoubtedly was, our exercise demands we look to frontline generals.  Bernard Montgomery, a brilliant self-publicist, clearly established himself in the popular consciousness as Britain’s most successful general in the Second World War.  From El Alamein in the autumn of 1942 through to his death in 1976 he enjoyed a unique level of popular recognition, and doubtless there are many who would maintain his claim to be the nation’s greatest general since Wellington – he certainly thought so!

Yet even prior to his death Montgomery’s decision-making in NW Europe, from ‘Operation Goodwood’ to ‘Operation Market Garden’, was subject to rigorous reappraisal, with often highly critical conclusions.  Has Wellington’s Peninsular campaign been subject to the same level of critique?  I suspect not.  Wellington wasn’t short of self-confidence, but he couldn’t boast an ego as big as Montgomery’s (or indeed Mountbatten’s), and crucially he displayed an aptitude for alliance diplomacy which the commander of 21^st Army Group demonstrably lacked.  In this respect the Duke’s political skills draw comparison with Alanbrooke’s – however contemptuous of your allies you take a deep breath and smile (and that night vent your feelings on paper).

In Brussels, Montgomery’s Intelligence Chief used the example of Wellington to warn his boss off pontificating on the postwar world at a time when the war was far from won:

‘…the fact that the Duke of Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo, just down the road, didn’t stop his windows being stoned when he turned politician.’

Monty took on board Brigadier Williams’ timely words. [H, 122-3] He also went off to tour the battlefield, drawing on the experience in December 1944: during the Ardennes counter-offensive he sent a delusional Brian Horrocks home on leave when the commander of XXX Corps wanted the Germans to advance as far west as Waterloo so that this time around they would find themselves on the losing side. [H, 232]

In Montgomery’s A History of Warfare, published in 1968, he attributed success in Spain largely to the endurance and fortitude of the ordinary British soldier, and victory at Waterloo to the negligence of an ailing Bonaparte ie not primarily to the quality of command.  Montgomery labelled Wellington ‘the best soldier Britain has produced for many a long day,’ but only a sentence later unequivocally nominated Nelson as the architect of Napoleon’s ultimate demise.

Of far greater interest to Montgomery was the Duke of Marlborough, his status as a military ‘genius’ not unconnected to the fact that the Field Marshal found parallels between his own experience on the battlefield and that of Churchill’s illustrious ancestor.

Wellington and Slim

To his credit, in A History of Warfare Montgomery was generous in his praise of Field Marshal Lord Slim, highlighting more than once ‘Bill’ Slim’s tactical brilliance in recovering Burma from the Japanese.

If any general of the Second World War can lay claim to Wellington’s mantle is it ‘Uncle Bill’, who from 1943 forged the 14^th Army – the ‘Forgotten Army’ – into a formidable fighting force?

Of the 13 divisions that comprised the 14^th Army, 8 were Indian, 2 were British, and 3 African (with a similar ratio for autonomous British and Indian brigades).

Consider Wellington’s composite army at the Battle of Assaye, which the Duke more than once spoke of as his greatest victory – on 23 September 1803 he commanded just three British regiments.  However, the complementary forces of the East India Company were overwhelmingly indigenous.

The then Major-General Wellesley: –

trusted and respected his Indian troops;

made shrewd appointments of commanders in the field;

laid out clear objectives to both officers and men;

focused on the well-being of his forces on and off the battlefield;

valued high quality intelligence;

and made himself visible on the frontline.

Here were the foundational principles on which he fought the Peninsular War, and on which Slim led his men – and women – from Bengal to Rangoon.  A further parallel is both generals’ reliance on irregular forces, whether Spanish guerillas or Chindits and Burmese nationalists.  Also, like Wellington and unlike Montgomery, Slim could serve as a team player if necessary – as in his partnership with Mountbatten, C-in-C South-East Asia Command.

Wellington and Allenby

In the First World War – unlike the Crimea or even the Boer War – Wellington was rarely seen as a guide for generals on the Western Front; if he could serve as a role model then it was in logistical operations and the maintenance of morale behind the lines.

How the Duke would have raged at the appalling consequences of poor leadership on the Dardanelles, albeit exempting colonial commanders like Birdwood and Monash; and yet how he would have loved to command the Allied offensive of 1917-18 designed to destroy Turkish power in the Levant and the Arabian peninsula.

Here again was a multi-national force, with extended lines of communication and supply stretching from the Suez Canal to the Beqaa Valley, and a commitment to reconciling speed and mobility with the deployment of maximum force.  Palestine was the last great cavalry campaign, but for gunners and infantry a further manifestation of ‘industrial war’ utilising all necessary components to secure absolute victory.

Overseeing this grand assault on Ottoman hegemony was the future Field Marshal Viscount Allenby, a cavalryman whose prewar CV Wellington would have found not that dissimilar to his own.  Like the Duke in the Peninsula, and Bill Slim in Burma, Edmund Allenby placed a premium on maintaining the morale and physical well-being of troops a long way from home and fighting in a hostile and alien environment.  Allenby was notoriously short-tempered, but the political acuity he demonstrated in Palestine, let alone his obvious capacity for supreme command, would surely have earned him Wellington’s approval.

Conclusion

By now it’s clear that, even if Wellington lacked the same mythical status across the Army that Nelson enjoyed within the Royal Navy, he nevertheless was an ever-present within service life – not least for regular officers and other ranks keenly aware of regimental history and tradition.  His name, like that of the battle for which he is best known, was a recognised part of wartime Britain; even if for much of the time civilians scarcely registered the Duke’s long shadow.  His name and image also of course had an imperial presence, which Miles Taylor explored in an earlier Wellington Lecture.  No previous general, including Cromwell and Marlborough, had experienced the same intensity of memorialisation as Wellington, and the only postwar equivalent is Mountbatten – like Nelson a sailor.

While generals like Bill Slim or Edmund Allenby would only look to Wellington as a point of historical reference, it’s hard to believe Montgomery did not on occasion look for comparisons with the Duke – even if, as already noted, after the war it was John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough whose campaigns he saw parallels with.

Unlike the First, the Second World War lends itself to imagining a modern Arthur Wellesley forging his reputation as a great commander:

earning his spurs in France, with plaudits for getting his division to Dunkirk intact;

proving a worthy foe for Rommel in North Africa;

and partnering the Americans in the great invasion of continental Europe and the long road to the Luneburg Heath.

No wonder Monty drew parallels, even if he and Wellington bore the burden of command very differently – as already suggested, the Duke’s dealings with the Americans and the other Allied commanders would have displayed a good deal more patience and political nous.  Wellington’s relations with Alanbrooke as Chief of the Imperial General Staff might have been more testy, as the CIGS would not have been as protective as he was towards Monty.

In Downing Street from July 1945 it’s hard to imagine veteran company commander Major Attlee having much time for the hauteur of Sir Arthur (‘Dukedom?  Out of the question!’), but what about before July 1945?

Imagine the late night brandy-fuelled conversations of the Prime Minister and General Wellesley: the martial feats of Churchill’s illustrious ancestor; the attractions of mutual female acquaintances; the hottest curry house in Calcutta; the finer points of polo; the soothing qualities of a good cigar; the hidden depths of the British working man and woman; the iniquities of socialism; the respective merits of Goya and Velasquez – the list would go on, and on.

We can only speculate on a fantasy marriage made in heaven.  One thing we can be fairly sure of: at Churchill’s darkest moments during the war, whether the surrender of France, the surrender of Tobruk or the surrender of Singapore, he surely drank deep the whisky and soda, inhaled hard on the Havana, and cried out, ‘Where is my Wellington?’.

There was no second Wellington, but in both the Second and the First World Wars the Duke’s finest qualities could be found in a myriad of different combinations in a variety of service men and women, from the most elevated general to the humblest private.

Similarly, in both world wars there were British and colonial forces who Wellington would have taken pride in commanding, from the BEF in 1918 to the Eighth Army in 1943, from the ANZACs at Suvla Bay to 6^th Airborne at the Pegasus Bridge.

Waterloo may have entered the national psyche, remembered if at all just once a year, but the leadership, courage and sacrifice displayed on 18 June 1815 was no less in evidence a century or more later.

Today marks the end of the Evening Standard in printed form.  Outside London no-one cares, and within the capital the paper’s absence will be scarcely be noticed by the end of the week, let alone the end of the month.  London’s last surviving multi-edition newspaper has been on a downward spiral for years, and its chances of survival online must be slim.  In today’s Guardian Zoe Williams’s column contains an amusing portrait of the Evening Standard‘s newsroom in the early 1990s, not that different from fifty years before.  Back in the middle of the last century the Evening Standard boasted a stellar line-up of journalists, columnists, free-lancers and cartoonists – the latter was a major selling point, with the paper employing David Low in the 1930s and 1940s, and Vicky in the 1950s.  The Daily Express was Express Newspapers’ cash cow, but the Evening Standard was in many ways its flagship newspaper.  Lord Beaverbrook was unscrupulous in his weaponisation of the Daily and Sunday Express, exerting a tight editorial control, but took perverse pleasure in allowing the Evening Standard to maintain a left-of-centre even radical profile, in both content and personnel.  Beaverbrook cultivated his image as a maverick, respecting the Evening Standard‘s editorial independence was seen as on a par with his cultivating the friendship of AJP Taylor (Max Aitken’s eventual biographer) and Aneurin Bevan.  Frank Owen and Michael Foot, successive editors before and during World War 2, pursued an aggressive anti-appeasement line, culminating in the blistering polemic from the summer of 1940, Guilty Men.  Foot became acting editor in 1943 when Frank Owen accepted Mountbatten’s invitation to set up the newspaper SEAC, soon compulsory reading in Burma for Slim’s 14th ‘Forgotten’ Army.  At the end of the war another Beaverbrook stalwart, Tom Driberg, travelled east to report on Lord and Lady Mountbatten’s post-surrender efforts to repatriate POWs and to temper the European colonial powers’ response to nationalist demands across India and south-east Asia.  Driberg’s relationship with Beaverbrook never recovered, the press baron having switched from prewar intimacy with the Mountbattens to sworn enmity (reasons include a jibe at the Daily Express‘s pro-appeasement line in In Which We Serve, the loss of so many Canadians at Dieppe, the suspicion that Dickie had slept with Beaverbrook’s mistress Jean Norton, the recruitment of the Standard‘s energetic manager Mike Wardell to Combined Ops and then SEAC, and the justified belief that Dickie and Edwina sympathised strongly with Congress over early independence for India – the latter also fuelling Churchill’s break with his one-time protege).  The Mountbattens, especially Edwina, provided regular copy for ‘Londoner’s Diary’, the other reason along with David Low why the Evening Standard‘s sales were so much greater than its historic rival, the Evening News.  ‘Londoner’s Diary’ boasted a remarkable range of contributors, including a youthful post-FO Harold Nicolson and another former diplomat, Robert Bruce-Lockhart.  With expenses no object and an astonishing list of contacts Bruce-Lockhart in the early 1930s traded off his adventures in revolutionary Russia to chase stories and interviews across Europe – the first volume of his published diaries see him interrogating the Kaiser in Dutch exile and quizzing the Prince of Wales on the fairway.  Arguably it was Bruce-Lockhart who made ‘Londoner’s Diary’ a must-read for the capital’s devotees of high society gossip.  He went on to combine a career as a freelance writer and journalist with wartime service as chair of the Political Warfare Executive and then shadowy Cold War activities consistent with his reputation inside Russia as Lenin’s failed assassin.  Were the bulk of Bruce-Lockhart’s papers not held in a Midwest university a Ben McIntyre figure would have written a best-selling biography years ago.  It’s sad to compare the Evening Standard of the past few decades with Britain’s most interesting newspaper in the middle of the last century.  Fleet Street in its heyday had many faults, and there’s no need for nostalgia, but within the ‘Street of Shame’ there were remarkable writers (and cartoonists) producing remarkable copy, and the loss of a newspaper with such a noteworthy history is to be lamented by all of us whose priority for news and comment remains the printed page.

A much shorter version of the following will appear in a future issue of the bimonthly magazine, the Idler:

These days Breton folk music rarely travels east of Rennes or south of Nantes, let alone north of Roscoff.  Radio 2’s flagship folk programme devotes airtime to francophone artists from Louisiana and Quebec, and yet it ignores cutting-edge musicians in France itself.  Too often Breton folk music is only heard in a bland commodified form best suited to tourists.  In stark contrast, fifty years ago Breton artists were headlining rock festivals and selling out concert halls.  This was their moment, partly attributable to the prevailing political climate but primarily because one man came to embody Brittany’s centuries old struggle to reassert its cultural, ethnic and governmental identity.  The self-assuredness, relative prosperity and unique regional autonomy of Brittany today is largely attributable to tectonic shifts in Breton culture half a century ago, with music driving fundamental change inside Brittany and across France as a whole.

On Quiberon some twenty years ago I saw the folk group Tri Yann.  They looked and sounded like the superannuated incarnation of a once cool band, all beer bellies, tired gags and pointless reworkings of one-time crowd-pleasers.  It was hard to imagine these guys once raising the roof at the Fête de Lutte Ouvrière, their audience of pogoing Trots planning permanent revolution to the thundering sound of heavily amplified bagpipes.  Back in the second half of the ’seventies Breton music was on a roll, matched only by the surge of creative energy in Ireland that saw Planxty and the Chieftains enjoy rock star status: the more sensitive musicians both sides of the border endeavoured to transcend sectarianism, locating an instinctive nationalism in the patriotism of the past.  Conversely, Welsh language songwriters embraced the here and now, albeit addressing only a tiny audience.  The Scots folk scene fused a focus on historic grievances with trenchant social commentary on the contemporary urban experience.  In England folk rock was a spent force, obliterated by punk.  Pioneers like Ashley Hutchings and Richard Thompson were nursing their wounds and recharging their batteries.  In a turbulent decade they and their peers had no overt political agenda other than what might loosely be termed a progressive nostalgia.  English folk rock had for the present run out of options, but the same was clearly not the case in Brittany – enter the musician, folklorist, campaigner and poet Alan Stivell.

Now in his eighties, Alan Stivell grew up in the Finistère town of Gorin.  As a child Stivell learnt to play his father’s creation, the ‘Celtic harp’, and other genuinely traditional instruments.  Teenage exile in Paris left him a man with a mission, intent on resurrecting the music of his native Brittany.  Stivell recorded on local record labels, became a familiar face on the French folk club circuit and surfed the zeitgeist of ’sixties change, but with little success – in Paris and London a harp, an over-serious stage presence and an impenetrable language left fans bemused and indifferent.  Breton audiences applauded one of their own, but few found Stivell’s respectful interpretations in any way unique.  In England Stivell listened to amplified folk rockers like Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, but chose not to go fully electric when forming his first band.  Instead, he fused acoustic instruments – Celtic harp, fiddle, pipes and bagpipes (bombarde and biniou) – with drums, bass, organ and the Fender Stratocaster of virtuoso guitarist Dan Ar Bras.

Stivell’s first record on a major label sold well in France, but the following two albums transformed his career.  Renaissance de la Harpe Celtique is an artistic tour de force.  Enduring and endlessly revealing, the LP accords healthy respect to the indigenous music of the ‘Celtic nations’ while at the same time embracing modernity in its arrangement, instrumentation and production; not least Stivell’s ‘Gaeltacht’ synthesis of Irish, Scots and Manx tunes, which takes up all of side two.  The record fixed Brittany on the global musical map, fired up successive generations of Celtic harp players, and signalled a fresh form of fusion music within an established folk tradition.  From a quiet, reflective, ambient beginning Renaissance de la Harpe Celtique becomes an extraordinarily powerful piece of music – in short, it rocks.  Stivell now had an impressive body of work to take on the road.  Ar Bras was a thrilling foil to Stivell’s mastery of the harp and assorted pipes, although ironically this was not evident on the second transformative album, À l’Olympia.  From Jacques Brel onwards, recording a live album at the 9th arrondissement’s Olympia Hall was obligatoire for every serious chanteur.  On 28 February 1972 Stivell and Ar Bras turned the volume down, let the music do the work, encouraged polite applause not rock’n’roll frenzy, and in performance and choice of material (notably an English language rendition of Ireland’s paean to the 1916 uprising, ‘The Foggy Dew’) set out to attract a wider audience.  Astonishingly, sales of À l’Olympia were soon well over two million, with the rousing ‘Tri Martolod’ quickly established as a signature anthem for Alan Stivell and for every high-profile Breton singer since.

Stivell hastily released two further albums, both well received, and then set out to replicate the commercial and critical success of À l’Olympia.  E Dulen/À Dublin was recorded at the Irish capital’s National Stadium over two nights in November 1974 and released early the following year.  The dynamics were very different from the previous live album, with loud audience appreciation, stronger vocals, organ and electric guitar high in the mix and a six-piece pipe band filling out the sound as the set reached its climax.  Stivell still played and sung alone, and his band sounded like no other mishmash of plugged-in folkies, but the appeal to mainstream rock fans was obvious.  This was evident from the large venues Stivell performed in to promote his new record: in London he played the Royal Festival Hall at the start of 1975 and the Royal Albert Hall at the end.  On both occasions stewards failed to stop Breton flags being draped from the boxes and arm-in-arm crowds dancing in the aisles.  At that summer’s festivals Stivell enjoyed top billing in a final hurrah for progressive rock before punk swept aside the pomp and dry ice.  In the decades that followed Stivell’s appeal to prog rockers appeared more obvious, his compositions and performances becoming ever more elaborate, extended and pretentious.  But back at the National Stadium late in 1974, Alan Stivell offered a unique blend of excitement, protest, musicianship and gravitas: a cerebral folk singer with hard-rocking sidemen articulating the concerns and preoccupations of young Bretons, and embracing a radical agenda rooted in environmental activism and the presumption of Celtic subjection to metropolitan colonialism.

In Brittany, as in Corsica, Québec, Ulster and the Basque Country, the 1970s was a turbulent time.  Unlike Spain and Northern Ireland political violence was episodic not endemic.  Breton separatists railed against Gaullist government initiatives to redefine Brittany’s historic boundaries and capital.  The tactics of a small militant body like the Front de libération de la Bretagne generated scant support, but not the complaint that Brittany was penalised by a French state indifferent to traditionally low levels of income and investment.  Successive oil spills and the construction of a pressurised water reactor in Finistère fuelled large and often violent demonstrations by young environmental protestors.  Language was the other key issue, addressed only when Brittany secured genuine autonomy and a sympathetic regional administration could take concrete measures to assuage local concerns over bilingual education, signage and media. In due course a traditional dependence on fishing, farming and tourism would recede as accelerated public and private investment sought to kill with kindness incipient nationalism and eco-activism: twenty-first century Brittany is one of France’s most prosperous regions.  Not that separatism has ever wholly disappeared, rooted as it is in Breton exceptionalism.  Separatists have always defined themselves as internationalist, identifying strongly with post-colonial nations in the developing world, and above all, as pan-Celtic.  Thus FLB militants in the 1970s maintained close contact with Irish Republicans, while extending Celtic solidarity to their Corsican comrades and to ETA.

Alan Stivell kept advocates of an armed struggle at a distance, but he found himself in the unique position of presenting Breton nationalism to a global audience.  Brittany was experiencing a cultural renaissance, embracing literature and the visual arts as well as music.  Stivell’s record sales and sold-out concerts made him the voice of a new and powerful message: that a proud and freshly confident Brittany could assert itself as a beacon of hope for oppressed nations in the global south as well as either side of the Iron Curtain.  This was Brittany as the epicentre of pioneering environmentalism, cross-border solidarity with the dispossessed and a worldwide struggle against injustice and inequality.  The emphasis was on positivity, with no thought of recrimination and revenge: ‘We shall keep our friendship with the people of France/But we shall break down those shameful barriers which prevent us from looking across the sea/Those boundaries which keep us away from our closest brothers/In Wales, Scotland and Ireland.’

The words were from ‘Delivrance’, a poem deliberately chanted in French not Breton and replicated in English on the back sleeve of the British release of E Dulen/À Dublin (the cover simply stated Stivell, as if no more was needed than his name and a blurred shot of him leading dancers around the National Stadium).  ‘Delivrance’ was a promise to the downtrodden of Spain, Mali, Chile, Indo China, and indeed all ‘the peoples of the planet Earth’ that out of the Breton skies would come a ‘cleansing rain’ to purify a ‘devastated world’ and sweep away all totems of injustice.  In Dublin soaring anthemic guitar chords from Dan Ar Bras and a powerful riff from organist Pascal Stive prefaced Stivell’s crowd-stirring vision of universal freedom and Celtic emancipation.  It’s clear the crowd went wild, even if only a handful understood what he was saying.  The gist of Stivell’s message was clear, and this was after all Ireland in 1974, a year of appalling violence north and south – for the crowd of two thousand an implicit call to sweep away the border was bound to go down well.

With hindsight it’s clear that 1974-5 marked the apotheosis of Alan Stivell’s long career.  Younger, more adventurous musicians took advantage of a changed dynamic within Brittany.  Stivell, the one-time pioneer of fusion music, ignored rock’s remarkable capacity to keep reinventing itself.  Instead, he double downed on the music that had brought him so much success; but in so doing he failed to rediscover the subtlety and freshness that marked recordings like Renaissance de la Harpe Celtique.  His compositions contrived to be both epic and formulaic.  The next generation embraced punk and rap, refashioning Breton music for a wider audience.  The likes of Stivell and Ar Bras appeared old and anachronistic, and so did their fans.

The 1960s and 1970s grew ever more remote from the Brittany of a new millenium, and yet those decades had proved vital for an assertion of regional – national – identity: Breton nationalism had been reclaimed from the right and refashioned as a progressive force for good in the world.  Stivell and his fellow musicians articulated that fundamental shift in how Brittany saw itself relative to France and to the wider world.  If this was a revolution then, as in Québec, it was a quiet revolution: over time once powerful separatist forces were deradicalized by a central administration no longer instinctively hostile to an assertive périphérie.  A taming of Breton political ambition was paralleled in the arts, now seen as complementing not challenging metropolitan cultural life; here was a new norm of parallel identities, as in Québec, to which Alan Stivell had made a unique and powerful contribution.

With Labour securing only 34% of the popular vote despite the party’s huge parliamentary majority, and Reform securing 14.3%, the tide of populism this side of la manche still seems high – with the potential to rise a lot higher.  Nevertheless, we can now place the UK alongside Portugal, and to a degree Spain, in keeping the flag flying for social democracy in power.  In a year of elections worldwide Labour’s seamless succession into government can be seen as a positive development, alongside Donald Tusk’s electoral success in Poland, the moderate Masoud Pezeshkian’s securing the presidency in Iran, the Congress-based alliance in India clipping Modi’s wings, and the hegemony of the ANC and Erdogan tempered in South Africa and Turkey respectively.  Add in last year’s result in Estonia and a few other election successes for grown up politics, and the global populist surge is by no means overwhelming.  However, let’s not get carried away by this weekend’s second stage result in France.  This is not like, as previously, a broad brush coalition of ‘defenders of the Republic’ united solely to counter Jean-Marie or Marine Le Pen in the second round of a presidential election.  Previously, any Fifth Republic coalition of the left was built around the Parti Socialiste, or until the post-Cold War demise of the PCF, the Socialists and Communists (the former arising out of the ashes of the SFIO in the 1960s as Mitterand challenged de Gaulle’s grip on the presidency; and the latter historically attracting around a quarter of the vote, even without ever wholeheartedly embracing Eurocommunism as in Italy).  The famous  Front Populaire from the mid-1930s was built around the PCF (Stalin having abandoned the Comintern’s isolationist policy towards European social democratic/socialist parties) and the SFIO, with crucially a common enemy in fascism.  The 2024 so-called equivalent of the Front Populaire – the New Popular Front – is far more diverse, including the Greens, a Communist rump and Trotskyist veterans of Lutte Ouvriere within the far left La France Insoumise, with the Parti Socialiste and the breakaway social democratic Place Publique a small if once-great element.  Place Publique‘s high profile leader, Raphael Glucksmann, has repeatedly clashed with  La France Insoumise‘s leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon.  The latter is wholly opposed to French support for Ukraine, urges French withdrawal from NATO, and, as someone unrepentantly hostile to Germany, is anti-EU.  It’s tempting to suggest that as a populist politician Melenchon has more in common with Marine Le Pen than centrists like President Macron (a bit like those ex-members of the PCF such as Jacques Doriot who embraced fascism in the late 1930s and became collaborationist supporters of the Vichy Government; except that the parallel with Le Pen is in method not ideology).  So yes, it’s terrific to see Rassemblement National [National Rally] stopped in its tracks, but the election result is confirmation of how polarised France has become – like so much of the world as if reverting to the 1930s, and in this case the final years of the Third Republic.  The Front National‘s core was originally in the south, based around working/lower middle-class colons exiled from Algeria in 1962 (the minority European population in the coastal cities, known colloquially as the pieds noirs), angry veterans of the Indo-China and Algerian conflicts (Jean-Marie Le Pen had been an army sergeant in Algeria), and former Poujadists whose representatives following the 1956 elections were for the final two years of the Fourth Republic a disruptive force inside the National Assembly [many working class Reform supporters resemble the southern based supporters of Poujade, who was originally a butcher and by no means as effective a political operator as Nigel Farage].  The FN soon embraced a much older tradition of anti-republicanism that was rooted in historic anti-semitism (a continued insistence even a hundred years after the accusation against him had been disproved that Dreyfus was a traitor) and support for the Marechal.  From this post-Petain/anti-Gaullist power base the renamed, detoxified, but still fundamentally anti-immigrant and racist Rassemblement National expanded nationwide, fuelled by inequality, rural resentment, and poor race relations within and beyond the banlieu, to the still largely provincial and petty bourgeois – yet nevertheless formidable – political force it is today.  I used to say to students, in the 1930s would you have preferred Hitler or the ‘boring’ Stanley Baldwin?  In securing power just five years from a disastrous election Keir Starmer most closely resembles the Liberals’ Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in 1906, but in office the stark contrast with extremist politicians in continental Europe suggests Baldwin.

Today is the eightieth anniversary of the death of the poet and memoirist.  What follows is the piece I wrote ten years for the New Statesman to mark the seventieth anniversary:

Keith Douglas was just 24 when killed only three days after landing in Normandy. As 8^th Armoured Brigade sought a breakout south of Bayeux, Captain Douglas was hit by mortar shrapnel.   Fatalistic, the young poet had crossed the Channel convinced he was going to die.  Before his tank regiment, the Sherwood Rangers, left for France he wrote ‘On a Return from Egypt’.  A prescient final stanza announced:

The next month, then, is a window

and with a crash I’ll split the glass.

Behind it stands one I must kiss,

person of love or death

a person or a wraith,

I fear what I shall find.

The writers of the Western Front – the generation of Sassoon, Owen, and Graves – have cast a long shadow, all but obscuring Britain’s soldier-poets of the Second World War. Yet Ted Hughes was insistent that Keith Douglas’s verse warranted comparison with the best of Wilfred Owen.  Siegfried Sassoon – ‘Mad Jack’ – is arguably a more obvious figure of comparison.  In the verse tribute ‘Bog Cotton’, Ulster man of letters Michael Longley used a floral leitmotif to connect Egypt’s ‘sandy soldiers’ with the fallen ‘poppy petals’ of Flanders fields. In a neat piece of inter-textual referencing, Longley echoed Douglas’s 1943 poem ‘Desert Flowers’ in name-checking Isaac Rosenberg.  That fascination with flora and fauna surviving against all the odds may be resonant of Rosenberg, but it recalls another Great War writer, Edmund Blunden, in his uniquely lyrical memoir, Undertones of War.  When Douglas went up to Oxford in 1938, Blunden was his English tutor.  Here was a direct link with the poets of the Western Front, and Blunden was sufficiently impressed by Douglas’s undergraduate poems as to pass them on to T.S. Eliot at Faber.  By then his student had quit Oxford for Sandhurst.

Dying when he did Douglas became a writer defined solely by war.  Yet someone who went to war so young could of course still be with us, had he survived the Allied campaign in north-west Europe.  Not that his chances of staying alive were high given the Sherwood Rangers’ almost continuous fighting through to May 1945; by which time the regiment had lost 344 officers and 213 other ranks.   With a much fuller oeuvre of work would esteem for Douglas’s wartime poetry and prose have become tarnished, or would many still acclaim him as the finest soldier-poet of the ‘People’s War’ – a worthy successor to Sassoon, Owen, et al?

Alamein to Zem Zem, Douglas’s memoir of the North African campaign, was published in 1946. It appealed to contemporary readers because here was a unique theatre of operation where popular and national mythology could resurrect the ostensible glamour and chivalry of a certain kind of war.  At the time – and later, courtesy of the British film industry – the desert war was projected as a throw-back to a better age, with mutual respect between enemies.  Yet Keith Douglas spared no detail in demonstrating that death and mutilation is every bit as bloody, devastating, and screamingly traumatic if you are dressed in silk scarf, waistcoat, and suede boots as when you are huddled in a ditch defending Sedan or Stalingrad.  His letters and verse confirm that from the moment he joined the Army in 1940 he had no illusions about the nature of war in the middle of the twentieth century.

On 6 June 1944 Douglas found himself in the vanguard of the Allied invasion of Europe.  Nearly two years earlier he had missed the start of the last great battle fought by the massed forces of the British Empire and Commonwealth.  He was serving as a camouflage officer in Palestine when the Sherwood Rangers, having finally swapped horses for tanks, survived a baptism of fire at Alam Halfa and then lead the break out at El Alamein.  Six days later their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel E.O. Kellett, welcomed Douglas back to frontline service when in desperation the poet stole a truck and returned to his regiment.  Within hours of arrival he was leading his tank troop westward into the Libyan desert.

‘Flash’ Kellett was a master of foxhounds in his native Nottinghamshire and a Tory MP.  As ‘Gentleman Jim’ the colonel dominates the narrative in Alamein to Zem Zem, very much an account of English men at war: anyone from elsewhere in the British Isles is scarcely mentioned, and women feature only as part of a vague back story that hints at unrequited love in Cairo.  In Douglas’s memoir ‘Tom’ – another pseudonym – is second in command by virtue of having spent his life working with horses, whereas the unattractive personality of ‘Raol’, the next most senior officer, is attributed to his being half-French.  Douglas duly records such prejudice with neither endorsement nor disapproval, albeit displaying both bemusement and amusement at the survival of this feudal structure.

It’s obvious that these volunteer gentlemen soldiers are an anachronism.  Having so recently dismounted their horses they endeavour to retain the routines, rituals, and language of both mounted cavalry and the hunt.  This language, recorded in a mixture of affection and incredulity by Douglas, is idiosyncratic and firmly rooted in rural life, most obviously fox hunting and cricket.  In that great tradition of the wartime middle and upper classes, understatement is everything.  This is understood throughout the regiment, with no Americans present to assume that all is well when the real message is one of crisis.

Douglas chronicled the dying days of a paternalistic social structure in which the original officers, scions of the East Midlands landed classes and their squires, deem the well-being of their men paramount and espouse a gentlemanly set of values.  They may be amateurs at the game compared with proper armoured regiments, but they learn fast: on 5 November 1942 no less than 26 enemy tanks were destroyed at Galal, with Douglas playing a prominent role.  The likes of ‘Gentleman Jim’ and ‘Tom’ are respectfully portrayed as leaders of men – yet both were dead by the time the wounded writer rejoined his regiment in the spring of 1943.  While in hospital, Douglas drafted ‘Gallantry’; a poem whose Sassoon-indebted satire displays bitterness tempered by regret and even quiet remorse.  It begins:

The Colonel in a casual voice

spoke into the microphone a joke

which through a hundred earphones broke

into the ears of a doomed race.

Into the ears of the doomed boy, the fool

whose perfectly mannered flesh fell

in opening the door for a shell

as he had learnt to do at school.

Douglas is clearly not one of the old guard, but neither does he conform to Orwell’s ideal of the progressive technocrat.  His 1943 poem ‘Aristocrats’ is a moving panegyric for the chevaliers of the shires who took the Sherwood Rangers to war four years earlier, the final stanza recalling how:

The plains were their cricket pitch

and in the mountains the tremendous drop fences

brought down some of the runners.  Here then

under the stones and earth they dispose themselves,

I think with their famous unconcern.

It is not gunfire I hear but a hunting horn.

Such poems confirm Douglas as the bridge between old and new, shouting ‘Tally ho!’ and yet comfortable with the technology and tactics of mechanised warfare; the hearty, killing time in his tank reading Tit-Bits, and the intellectual, a handy copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets in his battledress pocket.  He was thus well placed to record changes taking place within the regiment; a microcosm of more profound social developments behind the front line and on the Home Front.  Back in Britain during the first half of 1944 Douglas noted how much the country had altered; and wartime London’s literary life exposed him to an agenda for change singularly absent from the social chit chat of the mess.

Douglas’s keen sense of national identity – of what it means to be English – may to a degree have absorbed a leftward shift in attitudes.  Yet on the whole he retained the values and prejudices of his class, not least a veiled anti-semitism.  ‘Cosmopolitan’ was often coded language for being Jewish, but Douglas was genuinely cosmopolitan – he had travelled in Europe, and was almost unique among his comrades in being a Francophile.  His linguistic skills stretched to basic German, and he shared the 8^th Army’s healthy respect for the Afrika Korps.  On the other hand he loathed Italians.  Why?  Because unlike the Germans in the desert the Italians refused to play the game and respect the rules, witness their booby-trapping the corpses of British soldiers.

Yes there was respect for Rommel’s men, but any code of behaviour transgressed by Italians constituted no more than a crude and elementary means of mutual survival in a deeply hostile environment.  The war in North Africa was fought across vast spaces, with the odd nomadic tribe the only civilian intruders on an empty battlefield.   Douglas contrasts the stark beauty of the desert with the ugly detritus of contemporary warfare.  Evidence of death and destruction is everywhere, with the ubiquitous wrecked tanks emblematic of ‘industrial war’ at its apogee.  Death is similarly on an industrial scale, and Douglas spares few details; his graphic prose descriptions matched in verse. ‘Dead Men’ is a truly disturbing poem, its extended image of the wild dog devouring dead comrades in shallow graves prompting speculation as to the writer’s state of mind had he survived the war.  ‘How to Kill’ recalls Orwell’s reflections in Spain on finding frozen in your rifle sight a fellow human being, but one cruelly ignorant of his imminent demise: ‘And look, has made a man of dust/ of a man of flesh.  This sorcery/I do.’  Those last words seem Shakespearean not Orwellian, as does the final stanza of ‘How to Kill’:

The weightless mosquito touches

her tiny shadow on the stone, and with how like, how infinite

a lightness, man and shadow meet.

They fuse.  A shadow is a man

when the mosquito death appears.

Douglas spotlights the horror, the tedium and the stupidity, but he also signals the moments of pure delight – the heightened pleasure experienced in a variety of different circumstances linked only by the absence of mid-century Britain’s prevailing rules, conventions, and social mores.  Thus poems such as ‘The Knife’ and ‘Cairo Jag’ are located in the Egyptian capital’s raciest and most exotic settings, carrying a sexual sub-text that reinforces the impression of a complicated love life.  ‘Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian Tea Garden’, a witty and bitter-sweet short story in seven stanzas, is sufficiently black as to suggest its author would be better off back in the front line.  Keith Douglas was no saint – far from it – but he was scrupulously honest, if cruelly so.  Nowhere more so than in his much anthologised and best known poem, ‘Vergissmeinicht’ – the ‘forget-me-not’ of the dead German’s girlfriend:

.But she would weep to see today

how on his skin the swart flies move;

the dust upon the paper eye

and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled

who had one body and one heart.

And death who had the soldier singled

has done the lover mortal hurt.

Here surely is someone who stands comparison with the steeliest soldier-poets of an earlier conflict.  Not that Douglas resurrected the futility of fallen comrades’ sacrifice – for all his fatalism, he deemed himself to be fighting a very different sort of war: justified if not unreservedly just.  Too often Douglas’s poems are seen in terms of what came before, and yet more striking is their modernity.  This after all is the writing of a young man, albeit as a consequence of combat one older than his years.  Naturally they prompt the question of what was still to come.  What does survive is an evocative, elegiac, and exceptional account of the desert war.  The attractiveness of the author comes across strongly: the intelligence, the quiet courage, and the good humour.  As such, the last word should surely rest with Captain Douglas’s batman: ‘I like you, sir.  You’re shit or bust you are.’

SWAY AND THE SHERWOOD RANGERS, SPRING 1944

This was the basis for a talk I gave in Sway village hall on 4 June 2024 as part of the village’s impressive array of D-Day anniversary events, partly organised in conjunction with St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery in Lymington.  My thanks to fellow St Barbe trustee and Sway parish councillor Neil McClocklin for inviting me to speak.

Introduction

By the spring of 1944 the residents of Sway had seen pass through their village hundreds into thousands of soldiers, drawn from a variety of regiments and corps.  Billeting service personnel became the norm for families with a spare bedroom or two.  Nor were these troops all British.  For most villagers this was their first encounter with Canadians.

It was almost certainly their first encounter with an armoured regiment, the noise, exhaust fumes, dust, churned up mud and sheer physical presence of the Canadian tanks leaving an indelible impression. After the Canadians left calm returned to the village, but in late April 1944 the tanks returned.

This time they were mostly Shermans, or their more lethal version the Firefly – state-of-the-art tanks fresh off a ceaseless production line in Detroit.  Shermans would spearhead the invasion of Europe.  Not that the Sherman was an untested tank.  Its arrival in North Africa in 1942 was a key factor in the Eighth Army’s reversal of fortunes after El Alamein and the Allies’ final victory in the spring of 1943.

Nor were the two tank squadrons posted to Sway untested.  They formed part of Nottinghamshire’s Sherwood Rangers, a Yeomanry regiment which had fought its way across the Western Desert.  The Sherwood Rangers had been in training at Chippenham Park near Newmarket, but they were now encamped across the New Forest and the Test Valley.  In early June they would relocate to Lepe and Southampton for embarkation to France.

For the next 11 months they would time and again find themselves in the vanguard of 21^st Army Group’s advance from the Normandy beaches all the way to the Baltic.  In April 1944 the Sherwood Rangers was already renowned as a tried and tested tank regiment.  By VE Day it would be one of the most decorated units in the British Army, albeit at appalling cost.

To keep its tanks in the front line an armoured regiment required a large and well-organised logistical and mechanical back-up: out of around 700 men, only 210 would be inside the 50 or so tanks that made up the three main squadrons.  Throughout May 1944 the Sherwood Rangers’ support echelon was based in Sway – as the numbers suggest, this was a sizeable presence.

For much of May also based in the village was the Sherwood Rangers’ most experienced and most decorated veterans of the desert war, A Squadron.

The presence in the village of the regiment’s support echelon meant Sway was host to the regimental padre, Reverend Leslie Skinner.

The presence in the village of A Squadron meant a temporary home for its commander, Major Stanley Christopherson, and his second-in-command, Captain Keith Douglas.

Here we have three remarkable men in the heart of the New Forest on the eve of Operation Overlord (probably billeted in Sway House, in South Sway Lane).

Why were these three men remarkable?  Furthermore, why should Sway take pride in, if only for a few short weeks, hosting this particular regiment – a Yeomanry regiment which on the cusp of war constituted a motley collection of Nottinghamshire horsemen, in peacetime its officers sharing their spare time between fox hunting and obsolete cavalry manoeuvres?

The Nottinghamshire Yeomanry Regiment (Sherwood Rangers)

Booted and spurred, with heavily polished Sam Browne belts and riding boots, the interwar Sherwood Rangers rode on manoeuvres at their annual summer camp as if the Great War had never taken place.  Like other counties’ Yeomanry regiments these were amateur soldiers firmly rooted in rural life and a semi-feudal, paternalistic social hierarchy.  An ageing aristocrat, Lord Yarborough, was the colonel, and among his officers were no less than three Masters of Foxhounds.  Subalterns from less privileged backgrounds, NCOs and troopers invariably boasted a lifetime of handling horses.

When in mid-1942 these men finally went to war as an armoured regiment they took with them the language and culture left behind in the villages and country houses of the rural East Midlands.  For example, radio communication was rooted in cricket and hunting analogies.  Keith Douglas’s memoir From Alamein to Zem Zem provides colourful examples of RT exchanges, along the lines of a tank pulling out of the line ‘returning to the pavilion.’  A further example involves Lord Yarborough’s successor as CO: another local landowner, the MP for Birmingham Aston Lt-Colonel E.O. Kellett, known to one and all as ‘Flash’.  On the eve of Alamein ‘Flash’ Kellet informed Captain Patrick McCraith that his troop of tanks would be first to navigate the German minefields, telling him to “Put on your white flannels…You’re batting first for England.”

Yet these same amateur soldiers adapted very quickly to the harsh realities of mechanised warfare, not least because the overwhelming majority – officers and men – was keen to learn.  Crucially, they were keen to keep on learning, right until the end of the war.  In consequence, they evolved into a highly efficient and effective fighting machine.

By the time the Sherwood Rangers arrived in Sway the character and composition of the regiment had changed markedly, not least because so many prewar personnel had been killed, seriously wounded or taken prisoner.  288 would die across the course of the Second World War, including 34 officers.  For example, in the first six weeks of fighting in Normandy no less than 40 tank commanders – a staggering 80% of the total number – were killed in battle.  ‘Flash’ Kellett and his successor as CO Donny Player were both killed in North Africa, following which command of the regiment was held by outsiders.  The CO when the Sherwood Rangers embarked for France was badly wounded on the evening of D Day, after which command of the regiment passed back to one of its own, Stanley Christopherson.

Christopherson was not a Nottinghamshire horseman, but he rode well and in 1939 he fitted into the mess courtesy of his upper-class background (a colonial background, Winchester College, and a lawyer in the City).  From 1942 to 1945 many of the incoming officers were ‘temporary gentlemen’ from an urban middle-class background, initially ignorant of the regiment’s roots and tradition.  A cadre of veterans provided continuity (if fully recovered from their wounds junior officers and NCOs would return to the regiment).  In due course the old hands recognised the need to integrate new arrivals as quickly as possible, not least as the turnover in personnel was so great.

Remarkably, the Sherwood Rangers’ tally of 30 battle honours between 1939 and 1945 was unmatched by any other unit in the British Army.  The achievement is that much more remarkable as the regiment’s tanks first saw action as late as June 1942: 8^th Armoured Brigade was formed in August 1941, but it took ten months to have a full complement of tanks delivered and for its regiments to be fully trained in mechanised warfare.  The Sherwood Rangers had carried out policing duties in Palestine in the spring of 1940 before packing away their sabres, saying farewell to their horses, and retraining as battery gunners.  Cavalrymen turned gunners served with distinction in the fall of Crete, from where only two escaped, and in the siege of Tobruk.

The Sherwood Rangers’ baptism of fire was the Battle of Alam El Halfa in late summer 1942, and evidence that they were quick learners was the 26 enemy tanks destroyed in one day on 5 November that year.  The regiment was in the vanguard of the initial advance at El Alamein, later being singled out by Rommel for its success in penetrating the Afrika Korps’ forward line.  That role of punching a hole in the enemy’s advanced defences was repeatedly undertaken in the 1942-43 advance across Libya and Tunisia, at an appalling cost in tanks and men.

The regiment’s dubious reward was to return to England to train as one of the four British armoured regiments chosen to land on D Day.  It went on to fight on 50 of the Normandy campaign’s 60 days duration.  The Sherwood Rangers continued to provide infantry with an armoured punch through northern France, Belgium, Holland and into north Germany, taking part in both Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge.  Somehow, despite the appalling casualties, Christopherson’s regiment avoided the fatal fatigue and decline in morale of so many units Montgomery brought back from North Africa to fight in NW Europe.

The Sherwood Rangers’ achievements from the regiment’s landing on Gold Beach on 6 June 1944 can be summarised thus:

• first British troops to enter Bayeux after D Day;
• first British troops to enter Germany and break the Siegfreid Line;
• provided front line support for every single British infantry division and for three American infantry divisions, including the 82^nd Airborne at Nijmegen.

Taken with the regiment’s earlier successes in the Mediterranean, this was an astonishing set of achievements.  It’s little wonder that the Sherwood Rangers are today recognised as the British Army’s finest tank regiment of World War Two – and in the spring of 1944 they could be found here, in the village of Sway.

Lt-Colonel Stanley Christopherson

Stanley Christopherson died in 1990 aged 77, in a village not that dissimilar to Sway – Wye, near Ashford.  He was best known for founding a local prep school with his wife, with older villagers vaguely aware that he might have had ‘a good war.’  He was an unsung hero, even for his children.  That changed when James Holland edited Christopherson’s diaries for publication in 2014, followed seven years later by Holland’s exceptional Brothers In Arms One Legendary Tank Regiment’s Bloody War From D-Day to VE-Day.

Ironically, Christopherson had featured in several books previously, as over the decades after 1945 several members of the regiment had published memoirs.  He also features in From Alamein to Zem Zem, where Keith Douglas renames his squadron commander ‘Edward’.  In the book some comments about ‘Edward’ are quite hurtful, but when Christopherson read the manuscript in early 1944 he only insisted on one change: he took exception to being described as a ‘deplorable’ dancer when Douglas had never actually seen him inside a ballroom.  Douglas did acknowledge that Christopherson was a very good rider, as demonstrated on D Day when A Squadron landed at Le Hamel: Christopherson had to liaise with the CO of the Essex Regiment, and he did so by commandeering a stray police horse and riding under fire to the agreed meeting point.

Christopherson wrote of A Squadron’s time in Sway that it was obvious D Day was imminent:

We spent our time waterproofing and de-waterproofing our tanks, and partaking in various amphibious exercises, working in close cooperation with the navy and infantry.  All embarkation leave had been completed, and each time we went on an exercise nobody knew whether we would return to our billets again.  One day in the middle of May we left Sway, never to return, and ended up at Hursley Park, near Winchester, which turned out to be our assembly area preparatory to the invasion.

Major Christopherson had by this time held a commission for just over 3½ years.  Five days after landing in Normandy he found himself in temporary command of the regiment.  A shell had landed on the Regimental Headquarters, killing all of the Sherwood Rangers’ surviving senior officers from prewar – including the acting CO Michael Laycock.  Stanley Christopherson’s appointment was made permanent on 15 June 1944 and as a lieutenant-colonel he commanded the regiment until its final dispersal in early 1946.  Remarkably unscathed, he directed every operation right through to the German surrender.

Christopherson’s surviving comrades, his commanding officers from Montgomery down, and his diary entries together testify to someone whose capacity for command was based on a unique combination of: quiet authority, resilience, calmness under fire, remarkable courage, good humour, common sense, humility, open-mindedness, diplomacy, psychological strength, and a keen sense of humanity however dark the circumstance.

That courage and that ability to lead from the front however dangerous the conditions had been shown time and again in North Africa.  It was displayed once more in NW Europe, but this time with responsibility for a fully operational armoured regiment.  Christopherson ended the war with the MC and Bar, the DSO, and the United States Silver Star.  (It’s worth noting that in 1944-45 the Sherwood Rangers’ awards for valour included 18 Military Crosses and 24 Military Medals.)

The demobbed Stanley Christopherson went off to work in South Africa before returning home in the late 1950s to enjoy married life and fatherhood.  We don’t know if the Christopherson family holidayed at any time in the New Forest and on the Solent, but it would be nice to think they did, and that they came to Sway.  If they did visit Sway then we can be sure Stanley would tell the children that he had been here before, but nothing more.  That was the sort of chap he was…

Reverend Leslie Skinner

Stanley Christopherson’s wedding was conducted by Leslie Skinner, the Sherwood Rangers’ regimental padre in 1944-45.  The loneliness of command and the loss of his closest friends left Christopherson increasingly reliant on the Methodist minister as a trusted confidant and counsellor.  In his diaries he wrote of Skinner:

The padre was a short, dark man with a very pronounced North Country accent, which advertised his Yorkshire descent of which he was extraordinarily proud, and he always exuded energy and humour.  I shall always remember the opening words of the first service which he found time to conduct after landing in Normandy.  He said, ‘There are no atheists in a slit trench.’

Skinner was also extremely good at disguising his profound deafness, as evident by his status as senior chaplain in 8^th Armoured Brigade.  From D Day onwards the padre was resolute in rescuing the severely wounded and retrieving the dead, often climbing into a tank that had suffered a ‘brew up’ to recover body parts.  Determined that no member of the regiment would be left on the battlefield he displayed enormous courage and emotional resilience.  He shared with Christopherson the almost daily task of writing letters of condolence.  Together, the two men are the absolute heroes of Wood’s Brothers in Arms.

On A Squadron’s last Sunday in Sway Leslie Skinner celebrated communion among the tanks lined up outside the village.  The service was organised by Christopherson’s second-in-command, Keith Douglas.  At evensong that night in St Luke’s Skinner was surprised to find Douglas in the congregation.  After the service the two men went for an all-night walk in the Forest.  Douglas told Skinner of his ambitions for after the war, but his firm belief that he wouldn’t make it.

Only a few weeks later, on 9 June 1944 near the village of St Pierre south of Bayeux, the padre buried Keith Douglas in a temporary grave (today he lies in the CWGC cemetery at Tilly-sur-Seulles).  Running along a ditch back to his tank Douglas had been hit in the head by mortar shrapnel and died instantly.

Captain Keith Douglas

As we’ve seen, Keith Douglas wrote an extraordinarily vivid account of tank warfare in the Western Desert, From Alamein to Zem Zem.  Douglas had joined the Sherwood Rangers in 1940, and he was – in Stanley Christopherson’s words – ‘a complete individualist, intolerant of military convention and discipline.’

In his memoir and in poems like ‘The Aristocrats’ Douglas chronicled the passing of all those huntsmen from the shires who had ridden to war in September 1939.  Christopherson felt his number two had nothing but contempt for the Yeomanry’s landed gentry, but From Alamein to Zem Zem and the poems suggest a more nuanced and more sympathetic view of ‘Flash’ Kellett and all the other foxhunting, cricket-loving officers who lost their lives in North Africa and Normandy.

Ironically for someone so short-sighted, Keith Douglas was also a very good illustrator.  However, Douglas’s reputation today rests primarily upon his poetry.  Postwar champions of his work like Ted Hughes argued that Douglas was the finest poet to emerge from the armed forces during the war.

When stationed in Sway Douglas was often absent without permission in London, seeing a new girlfriend, overseeing the last stages of publication for his book, and seeking out magazines for his poems.  Fellow officers, even Christopherson, tolerated Douglas breaching security because in North Africa he had been severely wounded and had displayed great courage – but also because his mood was ever more fatalistic.

Time prevents consideration of why Keith Douglas was such a remarkable poet, so let’s simply conclude with his final, retrospective poem ‘On a Return From Egypt, completed in Sway.  It’s both lyrical and full of foreboding.  Sadly, it acts as a testimony to all those Sherwood Rangers who passed through Sway in the spring of 1944, but were denied the chance ever to do so again:

To stand here in the wings of Europe

disheartened, I have come away

from the sick land where in the sun lay

the gentle sloe-eyed murderers

of themselves, exquisites under a curse;

here to exercise my depleted fury.

For the heart is a coal, growing colder

when jewelled cerulean seas change

into grey rocks, grey water-fringe,

sea and sky altering like a cloth

till colours and sheen are gone both;

cold is an opiate of the soldier.

And all my endeavours are unlucky explorers

come back, abandoning the expedition;

the specimens, the lilies of ambition

still spring in their climate, still unpicked:

but time, time is all I lacked

to find them, as the great collectors before me.

The next month, then, is a window

and with a crash I’ll split the glass.

Behind it stands one I must kiss,

person of love or death

a person or a wraith,

I fear what I shall find.