E.S. Turner

Louis Heren, the veteran foreign correspondent, had hoped to become editor of the Times in succession to William ReesMogg, when Rupert Murdoch bought the newspaper. Heren was told that, at 61, he was too old. Under Harold Evans he failed to flourish (‘Evans trashes me, to use the US Army expression, and most of my former colleagues in his book Good Times, Bad Times’), so he took his redundancy money and settled for writing books. His autobiographical Growing up in London was followed by Growing up on the ‘Times’ which concentrated on his overseas assignments. Both were vivid and zestful memoirs.

A reviewer faced with 1,155 pages about Robert Maxwell is entitled to look at the pictures first. Joe Haines’s biography contains over eighty photographs of his hero, many in colour. Mostly they show him hobnobbing with crowned heads, presidents or prime ministers, with a pop star or a footballer thrown in. One picture, more puzzling than some, is captioned ‘Maxwell and team, about to leave Ulan Bator in the Mirror jet’. What can conceivably be the Mirror’s interest in Outer Mongolia? Why does the Mirror need a globe-girdling jet? And is it not a bit tricky getting permission to fly a private aircraft across the more remote people’s republics? Then there is a picture of an uncommonly orgulous vessel captioned ‘Lady Ghislaine, Mirror Holdings’ ocean-going yacht’. Where is she normally berthed? (Not in Liechtenstein, that’s for sure.) On what missions is she normally employed? Is she ever used for Mirror works outings? Is she perhaps a ‘nice little earner’ when chartered to Arabs? A picture with a cosier domestic appeal shows the one-time home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, Headington Hill Hall, near Oxford, now the ‘council house’ seat of Robert Maxwell, lit up by rockets at night, with a huge illuminated sign saying ‘Happy Birthday Bob’ suspended from a tall tree. Perhaps because the picture does not show the full dimensions of Maxwell’s leased Escorial, there is also a view of Headington Hill Hall in the snow.

William Blake’s Proverb of Hell, ‘Sooner murder an infant in his cradle than nurse unacted desires,’ appears unexpectedly as a chapter epigraph in this autobiography by the once-notorious ‘Bomber Baronet’ of the headlines, Ranulph Fiennes. It is probably as good an excuse as any for indulging a compulsion to circle the globe by way of both Poles, a feat which Fiennes accomplished with the blessing of the Heir to the Throne and many hundreds of sponsors. In a life of turbulence he has shown a singular talent for getting others to subsidise his unacted desires, which is the secret of true happiness. Were all his commercial sponsors equally happy with their investment? Did some of them, perhaps, hope to see the names of their products perpetuated in the Polar landscape – Mount Weetabix, Cape Oxo and so forth? As it is, the natural features in those parts tend to be named after the more lowering emotions like Dread, Disappointment and Despair.’

How did the Great War – the first total war – affect the class structure of English society? An exhaustive answer, as Bernard Waites recognises, is probably beyond the power of any one historian. The difficulty is that class structure, or ‘social differentiation’, is something which, unlike crime or illegitimacy or whooping cough, defies both definition and statistical analysis. It depends on subjective attitudes, not on income or education or domicile, and is thus a most slippery concept on which to rear up an edifice of social theory. No one doubts that the Great War wrought changes in attitudes as between ‘Us and Them’, but many of these changes were already on the way. Dr Waites does not shy from the question: if the Archduke’s driver had not made the wrong turning in Sarajevo, would the class structure of England have been much different in 1924? He notes the belief of many that ‘England was about to experience unprecedented class conflict when the war broke out,’ and that Ernest Bevin declared in 1914, for what it was worth, that the country was on the eve of ‘one of the greatest industrial revolts the world has ever seen’. In the event, the fierce, class-rooted, industrial strife which had disfigured the early years of the century continued, intermittently, through the war, giving the impression, in the slightly bemused words of the Ministry of Labour, of ‘unrest paralysed by patriotism – or, it may be, of patriotism paralysed by unrest’. There were some bad moments: in the summer of 1918, thanks to a miniature general strike involving even the London Police, the dead lay unburied in England as well as in France.’

Three writers on the strength is a potential embarrassment for any fighting unit. In the Great War the Second Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers could muster Robert Graves (Good-bye to All That), Siegfried Sassoon (Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer) and Frank Richards (not, as some have supposed, the creator of Billy Bunter but the author of Old soldiers never die, an excellent view of the war by a Regular in the ranks). As many will know, Good-Bye to All That, published in 1929, erupted like a burst of mustard gas; much of the book turned out not to be the plain truth but the treacherous higher truth. Among those who took exception, on personal grounds, was Sassoon, to propitiate whom the publishers carried out last-minute surgery on the book. Another who objected to its ‘hyperbole’ and inaccuracies was Captain J.C. Dunn, the veteran and outstandingly fearless medical officer (a former combatant in South Africa) who had been attached to the Battalion. As a corrective to Graves, and perhaps as some sort of answer to war poets in general, he produced a magnificent tour de force, the length of three ordinary books, called The war the Infantry knew, which was published anonymously in a limited edition late in 1938, when people were preparing for the next instalment of Armageddon. Its reissue is most welcome, as is the well-informed Introduction.