Vol. 14 No. 20 · 22 October 1992
pages 24-25 | 2117 words
Over the top
Graham Coster
- Hell’s Foundations: A Town, its Myths and Gallipoli by Geoffrey Moorhouse
Hodder, 256 pp, £19.99, April 1992, ISBN 0 340 43044 3
Gallipoli has not lent itself to literature. The First World War on the Western Front has furnished a body of poetry, prose fiction and memoir so substantial, and so distinguished, as to equip any O-Level English student with at least an adequate historical knowledge of the campaign. But even if it were true, as Geoffrey Moorhouse claims, that ‘no battle or campaign fought between 1914 and 1918 has ever been remembered quite so tenaciously as the ill-fated Allied expedition to the Dardanelles,’ this would not be the result of any literary work. Rupert Brooke, setting out to fight at Gallipoli, died before he ever got there. One of Siegfried Sassoon’s brothers was killed in action there, but Sassoon himself went to France. Sir Compton Mackenzie’s Gallipoli Memories (1929) hardly ranks alongside Goodbye to all that. By default, the rare representations of the campaign in popular culture are elevated into distorting prominence, and it is almost certain, as a result, that most of us know even less about the Gallipoli campaign than we think. Those, like me, whose awareness of the disaster is limited to Peter Weir’s Gallipoli will have fallen for the biggest myth of all: that Gallipoli was primarily an Antipodean tragedy. In fact, as Hell’s Foundations soon makes clear, Britain lost 21,000 men there – twice as many as Australia and New Zealand put together.
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 1 · 7 January 1993
From Geoffrey Moorhouse
Soon after my most recent work – Hell’s Foundations: A Town, its Myths and Gallipoli – appeared last April, it was noticed with unqualified approval by, among others, Robert Rhodes James, Thomas Keneally, Dirk Bogarde, Ronald Blythe, Martin Gilbert, John Keegan, Terry Eagleton, Paul West and Jan Morris. All of these have substantial literary credentials. Two of them occupy chairs of Eng. Lit. Another is the greatest living authority on Gallipoli. Seven months later, along comes one Graham Coster to rubbish the book from end to end in your columns (LRB, 22 October 1992).
Coster gives the game away in his opening paragraph – ‘Those, like me, whose awareness of the disaster is limited to Peter Weir’s Gallipoli … ’ In short, he knows next to nothing of the event that haunts my narrative. He remarks on ‘the public pageantry and nostalgia for past heroism, of which Moorhouse is a cravenly enthusiastic supporter’. I challenge him to justify the use of that adverbial clause, not by waffle, but by quotation. He refers to my ‘reverence for, and satisfaction with, official public sources at their face value’. What official sources does he have in mind? They are infrequently used in my book, and where they appear they need no heavy put-down from me: they invariably condemn themselves. He sneers at my research, which ‘smacks of many days’ assiduous trawling through the local newspaper archives’, when it is plain from my source notes that those archives alone must have taken months to examine thoroughly, that my tape-recorded conversations with Gallipoli survivors date back to 1984, when I began work on the book, that my trawling also included the Public Record Office, the Liverpool Record Office, the Imperial War Museum, the Lancashire Fusiliers Archives and rather a lot of books: where would he have looked? He claims ‘we are not … given any clues to the personalities and prejudices of some of the town’s central opinion formers.’ Yet Chapter Seven is substantially about two Rectors of Bury and their powerful influence on the town; and throughout the book, MPs, mayors, grammar-school headteachers and other worthies speak and are characterised. He asserts that ‘we get to know none of the protagonists in this story.’ How about George Horridge, whose life is followed quite closely from his schooldays to his death at the age of 93, or Alice Mitchell, who was a child when her father was killed in the Dardanelles and whose life is similarly logged, or Bob Spencer, who is the last surviving Gallipoli Fusilier, or Lord Derby, who gets a chapter to himself, not to mention the two prelates mentioned above? Coster declares that I am ‘content with dewy-eyed homage’ at the passing of Lord Derby. You would have to be very obtuse not to gather from Chapter Eight that I think Derby was an old humbug with a lot of blood on his hands. I have acknowledged, however, that Bury regarded him with some justice as a benevolent landlord, even if he was a feudal one; and his last appearances in the town were sheer pathos, which I have recorded from my boyhood memories, corroborated by documentary evidence.
Geoffrey Moorhouse
Gayle, North Yorkshire
