37: The Year of Portent

'37:

the year of portent

A Bapton Books History Selection

Markham Shaw Pyle

Gervase MW Wemyss

Bapton Books

About the authors:

Markham Shaw Pyle, author of Fools, Drunks, and the United States: August 12 1941 and of Benevolent Designs: The Countess and the General: George Washington, Selina Countess of Huntingdon, their correspondence, & the evangelizing of America, holds, holds his undergraduate and law degrees from Washington & Lee. He is a past or current member of, inter alia, the Organization of American Historians; the Society for Military History; the Southern Historical Association; the Southwestern Social Science Association; the Southwestern Historical Association; the Southwestern Political Science Association; the Virginia Historical Society; and the Texas State Historical Association. He is the co-author of The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays & Observations; The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy; and When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic; and co-editor and co-annotator of The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated, and The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults).

GMW Wemyss lives and writes, wisely pseudonymously, in Wilts. Having, by invoking the protective colouration of tweeds, cricket (he was a dry bob at school), and country matters, somehow evaded immersion in Mercury whilst up at University, he survived to become the author of The Confidence of the House: May 1940 and of Sensible Places: essays on time, place & countryside; co-author of The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays & Observation; The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy; and When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic; and co-editor and co-annotator of The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated, and The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults).

Together, they are the partners in Bapton Books.

Praise for the prior When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic:

'What sank the Titanic? Its builders' belief that, when it came to building ships, the Science Was Settled. And, as this cool reassessment of the US and British Titanic enquiries shows, politicians and regulators in 1912 were just as bad as the current lot: they had a progressive political narrative to push, and their own secrets to hide. Sounds familiar.'

– James Delingpole, Daily Telegraph columnist, 2010 winner of the Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism, and author of, most recently, Watermelons: The Green Movement's True Colours

'In this sharply and eruditely-drawn account of the Titanic Inquiries on either side of the Atlantic, the authors warn: What lessons this may hold for Mr Cameron and Mr Salmond is beyond the scope of this work. Fortunately, their vivid reconstruction and analysis enable us to draw plenty of damning parallels. This is a parliamentary procedural as well as the re-creation of a vanished pre-War world; its political and intellectual processes as well as a sociology ranging from Trollope to Joyce. This is far more than another clever Titanic book.'

– Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Paris Contributing Columnist, The Sunday Telegraph

'37: the year of portent

Markham Shaw Pyle & GMW Wemyss

Copyright 2012 (First Edition), 2013 (Second Edition)

by Bapton Literary Trust No 1 (for Markham Shaw Pyle & GMW Wemyss)

All rights reserved

Published by Bapton Books at Smashwords for Markham Shaw Pyle & GMW Wemyss

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Parliamentary material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO on behalf of Parliament, licence obtained 2010, afterward supplemented by the Open Parliament Licence 1.0.

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A note to the reader: it is the aspiration of this imprint, small though Bapton Books be, to have as few errors and literals – 'typographical errors', misprints – as occur in any average Oxford University Press publication (which, alas, in these thin and piping times, gives us a margin of perhaps five or ten). Any obliging corrections shall be gratefully received.

Dedication:

For Clint, Carolyn, Grover, and Charlotte.

– MSP

For a lot of chaps at the House and at school in the days of our youth (Floreat, you lot).

– GMWW

'37:

the year of portent

Markham Shaw Pyle

Gervase MW Wemyss

Bapton Books

Contents:

About the authors

Praise for the prior When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic

Dedication

Straws in a mounting wind

The year of portent

First quarter: Weston Subedge detached, Chipping Campden, grid square SP1441

The shadow that events cast before them

1. The mastery of Nature

On the just and on the unjust

Fly, honesty, fly: seek some safer retreat

Our greatest mineral blessings

Second quarter: East Coker CP, Yeovil, grid square ST5312

The starry void of incomprehensible space

2. The Nemesis that on bold hubris waits

The prince of the powers of air

3. The search for authenticity

Crown Imperial

4. The Nemesis that on bold hubris waits (reprise)

Devices and desires

Third quarter: off Essex County, Massachusetts, 42°40'20N, 70°34'13W, Massachusetts Bay, Gulf of Maine

Fare forward

5. Ruining from heav'n

The iron law

Rumours of war

The shadow of the past

Fourth quarter: Little Gidding CP, Sawtry, Huntingdonshire, grid square TL1281

The tide of innocence

6. The search for authenticity (reprise)

Fire and sword

Harvest of death

The poisoned apple

Westlin winds and slaught'ring guns: the nine tailors of the year

A narrative of sources and notes

Notes

Straws in a mounting wind

Omen and augury, coronation and inauguration; deep, sub-rational, irrational, a-rational impulses, half-understood; and the spirit of the times

The year of portent

Nazis ruin – yes, everything, we'll take that as read: buggers always did and do and shall, if ever we should be fools enough to let them re-emerge from the muck that is their unquiet grave. Not for nothing was Tolkien to say of them that they had made the possession of a German surname infamous, and had ruined, perverted, and made forever accursed the old myths of the Northern Cycle. They could ruin even Wagner, not that old Dickie W wasn't perfectly capable of putting the 'evil' in 'evil genius' all on his little lone. Worse far, they managed, as Tolkien attested, to ruin Wagner's source material: as CS Lewis said, making high art to serve low politics degraded both: stripping all the fun and heart-catching thrill and cathartic sorrow from the Eddas and the sögur, the sagas: including those that were part of the Anglo-Saxon heritage in England and the Norse heritage of Orkney and the Isles and all those famous marches and debatable lands where Gael and Northman clashed, married, and feuded. Even the Kinder- und Hausmärchen collected by the brothers Grimm were corrupted by association: to the furious loathing and full-throated denunciation of such lovers of the old Nordic tales as Jack Lewis, Tollers, and young Auden. Nor did their corruptions amuse various Austrian-born scholars, amongst them one who was scribbling feverishly in notebooks amidst the fjords and glories of Lustrafjord and Sognefjord, in his beloved Nordic village retreat in Skjolden: Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Nationalism as such was one thing; its decay into National Socialism, another. And one of the greatest and most incisive of scholars of the Austrian diaspora was preparing to publish his Geneva lectures upon the dangers of monetary nationalism:¹ 1937 was a busy year for FA Hayek, at LSE, for he was also at work upon what should be published, two years after, as Profits, Interest, and Investments, and Other Essays on the Theory of Industrial Fluctuations.

Nor was Hayek alone in proving that economics, almost uniquely of the sciences and philosophies, was making uncompromised advances in that year of portent. Even as Wittgenstein wrestled with the angels of language, RH Coase was preparing, for publication in November 1937, his seminal paper, 'The Nature of the Firm', and tackling the issue of transaction costs in an efficient market enjoying sanctity of contract.²

These works made rather less noise than did Auden's Icelandic vignettes, written with Louis MacNeice,³ but they may last rather longer, as logic and maths and physics, in quiet anonymity, do outlast even the greatest of poets.

*****

That portentous year 1937 was the year in which the abdicated Edward, now duke of Windsor, married Wallis Simpson in France, and in which Mrs Miniver, in her first appearance in the pages of The Times,⁴ 'came home': Clem and Vin and Judy and Toby, Mrs Adie and all, the apotheosis of the bien-pensant upper-middle classes upon the eve of war. Apt, that, for the new reign in this Coronation year, with good, shy, stammering, valiant George 6th and his charming Scots consort, quite reliable and so sound, restoring simple, homely decency to Throne and Nation.

These were atavistic things, old threads of gold shot through the stuff of modern life, and themselves subtly modernised as well. Unfriendly though the new technologies of mass communication might be to the King and his stammer, he was a king, and did his best duty, as he was to do unto the end; there was portent enough in that.

It was now seven years since Mr Eliot had published 'Ash-Wednesday'. In 1936, he had published it anew as part of Collected Poems 1909–1935 (Faber), which also contained his latest poem, not yet the first of four quartets: 'Burnt Norton'. His Murder in the Cathedral was now two years old; his Essays Ancient & Modern had come out in '36. Practical cats,⁵ family reunions haunted by the Friendly Ones,⁶ The Idea of a Christian Society (Faber, 1939): these played in his subtle mind in 1937 as four quartets⁷ began to take shape. Atonement, substitutionary love, sin, and madness: these were at large in the fictional suburb of Battle Hill as in every human heart, in Charles Williams' Descent into Hell,⁸ one of what Eliot was to call Williams' 'spiritual thrillers'.⁹ Jan Struther – Joyce Anstruther, Mrs Anthony Maxtone Grahame (an old school friend of the new Queen's) – had created Mrs Miniver from the comfortable certainties; Pauline Anstruther, Williams' heroine, faced – in the words that Tolkien was to use of those themes in The Hobbit¹⁰ that should in time emerge more starkly in The Lord of the Rings¹¹ – threats and demands 'higher, deeper, darker' than these surfaces (as indeed, over the next few years, Mrs Miniver herself was to do).¹²

In America, the poet of its national Iliad,¹³ Stephen Vincent Benét, had also seen a vision he was impelled to put to paper. There was perseverant hope in 'The Devil and Daniel Webster';¹⁴ there was, in the end, defiant hope in Benét's 1937 vision, 'By the Waters of Babylon' – then called, in its first publication,¹⁵ as 'The Place of the Gods': yet it is a vision of Manhattan destroyed by what only Benét, perhaps, could yet imagine, with blind prophecy's promptings, as the effect of nuclear weapons. 'They were men who were here before us. We must build again.'

1937 was a year of portent, and darkling portent at that. It was to see change and decay in all around; death and destruction potentiated or powered by technology, and destruction and death from the failures of technology – what Winston was to call, in time, the dread prospect of 'the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science';¹⁶ the remnants of hope; and, above all else, an inflection point in the long struggle to integrate the promises of science and technology with the deepest urges, for good and for ill, of the human soul.

First quarter: Weston Subedge detached, Chipping Campden, grid square SP1441

The first quarter of 1937: time out of joint, coulisses of time, words and meaningless noises.

The shadow that events cast before them

They called him, sometimes, 'Hobo': Brigadier Percy CS Hobart OBE DSO MC MiD (mentioned in despatches six times over, in fact), Inspector Royal Tank Corps, O/C 1st Tank Brigade, Southern Command: a Royal Engineer by background, turned tanker from the Sappers; Montgomery's brother-in-law, for his sins (Bernard Law Montgomery had married Hobo's widowed sister Elizabeth in 1927); innovative armoured theorist; and nuisance to the War Office. He dwelt in Chipping Campden – and in possibility. Before the year was out, he should be bereft of his sister, who was to die 19 October; be appointed Deputy Director of Staff Duties (Armoured Fighting Vehicles) at the War Office; and be thence appointed Director of Military Training at the War Office and appointed Major-General. By war's end, he should have received three further Mentions in Despatches, been created CB and then KBE, have raised and trained the Desert Rats of 7th Armoured Division, been forcibly retired, have made Chipping Campden a fortress with his Home Guard command, been recalled to service, have raised and trained the 11th Armoured Division, have commanded in Egypt and in Home postings, and have raised, trained, and created the 79th Armoured Division of specialised vehicles, 'Hobart's Funnies' – including the Sherman DD – without which the Normandy landings could not have succeeded, and have gone into Fortress Europe with them; between war's end and his final retirement on 31 March 1946, he was to be awarded the US Legion of Merit and to command the Specialised Armour Development Establishment (SADE), at Woodbridge, Suffolk.

War was coming. War had been; war was; war should be. In dry, cracked-earth, dusty Spain, the Soviet Union and the Axis Powers were conducting a proxy war, in which the Republicans, captive to the Communist Party and the Comintern, were an irrelevance, and Franco and his Nationalists forever on the brink of becoming so. Both Spanish sides resented the foreigners, including Orwell (who was to be vexed with himself for ducking when first under fire),¹⁷ and the Irish poet Charlie Donnelly, who with not a few others in the International Brigades, was to die at the end of February, at the Battle of Jarama, leaving behind the line, 'Even the olives are bleeding':¹⁸ when, in March, the Republicans were to win the Battle of Guadalajara against Italian forces – poor forces, paramilitaries trained only to street-brawling and regulars habituated to colonial butcher-and-bolt tactics (and clearly regarding the Spaniards of both factions as 'natives' little more worthy of Italian regard than Libyans or Abyssinians) – it was to be Franco's forces who should sing mocking songs about the Italians: 'Spaniards, even Red ones, are valiant; you Italians want fewer trucks and more bollocks',¹⁹ the Italians blaming their performance on logistical lacunæ.

In bleeding China, Japan and its puppet-state Manchukuo were already edging ever closer to a renewed hot war; in the buffer provinces, low-intensity brushfire conflict crackled and smoked, waiting to catch and become a conflagration. Peking, as it then was, was already confronted with Japanese-controlled areas to its east-, north-, and westwards.

Japan and China, like both factions in Spain, enjoyed, for all their technological stature in armaments at least, a political and civil culture inferior to that of the late Roman Republic at the time of Publius Clodius Pulcher, Titus Annius Milo Papiaenus, and the First Triumvirate of G Julius Cæsar, Gn Pompeius Magnus, and Marcus Licinius Crassus Dives. The Spanish Republicans, even before falling into abject submission to the Comintern, were far too often authoritarians of the Left, whose vengeful attacks upon the Church were such as to dismay Ortega y Gasset; the irreconcilability of the steadily-radicalising Left to the result of the 1933 general elections led to the fall of that coalition and the election of a Popular Front government in 1936 that was deeply penetrated and compromised by the far and undemocratic Left; after 1936, amidst assassinations and counter-assassinations, the democratic Right was extruded, the domestic Left captured, the syndicalist, modernist Falange and the Nationalist militarists empowered, and civil war made inevitable. By 1937, there was no real Republic any longer, and the fight was no longer between a democratic Left and Right, but between fascism with all its corporatist heritage from the Left, and totalitarian Communism: a fight co-opted and won, in the end, by the undemocratic authoritarian Right, Franco having absorbed the Falange and used the Fascists and National Socialists from abroad simply as cat's-paws.

The situation was little different in Japan and China, two nations that between them recapitulated all the misery of Spain. China, proclaimed a republic without any civil tradition to support republicanism, was torn between authoritarian warlords of the Left, and the primitive, almost pre-political, Right – although the KMT was itself thoroughly compromised with and by fascist leanings and Soviet training. Japan, in form a parliamentary democracy but bereft of a truly constitutional monarchy, was wholly in the hands of the militarists, who were engaged in all the intimidation and assassinations of a running coup; and was frankly bent upon conquest.

On 19 February, 12 Yekatit in the Ethiopian calendar, in Addis Ababa, an attempt by the conquered against the conquerors was made – and not indeed by Abyssinians, but by two Eritreans, who had had longer experience of the glories of Fascist Italy as a colonial power: the attempted assassination of the occupying 'viceroy', the genocidal butcher Marshal Rodolfo Graziani. It failed, and the response was fearsome: a general massacre, an Abyssinian Kristallnacht, in which tens of thousands of Abyssinians, including monks and clerics, were beaten, killed, and or put into concentration camps to die more slowly. It wants a considerable, and considerably un-Italian, lack of self-knowledge and of irony to murder and beat conquered civilians whilst screaming, 'Il Duce! Civiltà Italiana!',²⁰ but, then, it wants those limitations to mention Mussolini and civilisation in the same breath to begin with.

In the British Mandate of Palestine, the Arab Revolt, savage, bogey-ridden, as uncivilised as fascism, the response of barbaric fear clinging to guns and religion, flared on, driven not by nationalism but by hatred of the firinjīyah and the burning desire to make the Holy Land Judenrein, free of the 'contamination' of Jews making aliyah to their ancient homeland. Fear of the Jews, hatred of the British and their Balfour Declaration, drove them.

It is not war that is the health of the State: it is war's father, fear. The people will surrender their liberties to Leviathan when they are afraid. Some States inculcate such fear so as to expand their powers; others expand organically, responsively, blindly, when circumstances cause the people to fear.

On 1 January 1937, Anastasio Somoza García formally took power – the power he wielded already, de facto – as president of Nicaragua. The first science-fiction convention, on 3 January, at Leeds, could hardly imagine the coming dystopias – and those already operating – in all the round world's imagined corners.

On 20 January, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, soundly re-elected to the Presidency, was inaugurated for his second term. The new magazine, Look, first published on 11 January, was there to chronicle the event. FDR's Second Inaugural Address was more revealing even than he knew, or than was then observed:

When four years ago we met to inaugurate a President, the Republic, single-minded in anxiety, stood in spirit here. We dedicated ourselves to the fulfilment of a vision.... Instinctively we recognized a deeper need – the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilisation. Repeated attempts at their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and bewildered. For, without that aid, we had been unable to create those moral controls over the services of science which are necessary to make science a useful servant instead of a ruthless master of mankind. To do this we knew that we must find practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men.

We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable.

This year marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Constitutional Convention which made us a nation. At that Convention our forefathers found the way out of the chaos which followed the Revolutionary War; they created a strong government with powers of united action sufficient then and now to solve problems utterly beyond individual or local solution. A century and a half ago they established the Federal Government in order to promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to the American people.

Today we invoke those same powers of government to achieve the same objectives.

Four years of new experience have not belied our historic instinct. They hold out the clear hope that government within communities, government within the separate States, and government of the United States can do the things the times require, without yielding its democracy. Our tasks in the last four years did not force democracy to take a holiday.

Nearly all of us recognise that as intricacies of human relationships increase, so power to govern them also must increase: power to stop evil; power to do good.

Our progress out of the depression is obvious. But that is not all that you and I mean by the new order of things. Our pledge was not merely to do a patchwork job with second-hand materials. By using the new materials of social justice we have undertaken to erect on the old foundations a more enduring structure for the better use of future generations.

It is not war, but, rather, war's father, fear, that is the health of the State. The people will surrender their liberties to Leviathan when they are afraid; and States expand organically, responsively, blindly, when circumstances cause the people to fear.

In 1936, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and more than a dozen others had been put through show-trials in Moscow and executed for 'Trotskyism'; 1937 began with the show-trials of Karl Radek and others for the same thought-crime. Radek had been the Secretary of the Communist International, the Comintern, and been also for far too long, for his wit and his wavering, a thorn in Stalin's pillow. He bought his life – for a time – by implicating Marshal Tukhachevsky and other Red Army commanders in a fictive plot against Stalin and the Party: the useful precondition for Stalin's deep-laid plans for the Great Purge. The US ambassador, Joseph E Davies, himself a lawyer and the worst US diplomatic envoy in that service's occasionally-chequered history, was to distinguish himself as the Walter Duranty of the diplomatic corps by acclaiming the show-trials as fair, and the accused, as self-evidently guilty.

The politics of fear were not restricted to totalitarian states or failed nations; they wafted through FDR's address, and tainted the air in Britain. In February, British cinemas exhibited Fire Over England, a fantasia of Armada year that first paired Vivien Leigh and Larry Olivier, with Flora Robson as Good Queen Bess: an anxious and fading figure, resentful of the loss of youth and the shadow of death, knowing that even the triumphs of earthly power – and there was no assurance that England should triumph – were fleeting: the paths of glory lead but to the grave. Parliament had shown its teeth in 1936; on 8 March, the abdicated Edward 8th was created duke of Windsor. The coronation should go forward as planned, but with a different monarch: Stanley