Winston Churchill – Blood and Porridge

September 11, 2022September 12, 2022

London Bridge is down

From wikipedia.org / © Joel Rouse / Ministry of Defence

London Bridge is down. No, I’m not referring to a movie that stars Gerald Butler. I’m talking about the code-phrase used to communicate the news of the monarch’s death to the British government, police, armed forces and broadcasters, triggering the start of an elaborate and much-prepared plan that oversees the monarch’s funeral, the period of national mourning and the coronation of a successor. Those words were sent to the British establishment earlier this week, for September 8^th saw the passing of Queen Elizabeth II at the age of 96.

Not long ago, at the time of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, I expressed my thoughts about the British monarchy on this blog. Namely that, while monarchies might work for other European countries, slimmed-down monarchies in countries with fewer historical neuroses and fewer modern delusions than Britain, the British monarchy just seemed to epitomise and encourage so much stupidity, unfairness and obsequiousness that it wasn’t worth conserving.

That’s been my view for most of my life. Admittedly, for a few years around the 2012 London Olympics I took a slightly more benevolent view of the institution: “…my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth. It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect.” This was “partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town. This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run….”

Furthermore, Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics had temporarily fooled me into believing “that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country. Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.”

By the time of her Platinum Jubilee earlier this year, however, and with the country infected by the jingoistic and backward-looking craziness of Brexit, which called to mind not Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony but Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zombie movie 28 Days Later (2002), my tune had changed. Britain had become such a basket-case that if it was to survive in any sane form, it needed drastic surgery carried out on its many, ridiculously-archaic institutions. This included the abolition of its monarchy.

And I’m afraid the Platinum Jubilee’s sequel to the Queen’s hook-up with James Bond at the 2012 Olympics, which featured her having tea and marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear, didn’t work for me. Paddington, after all, was an immigrant who’d arrived undocumented from Peru and, in the rabid atmosphere of 2022 Britain, Priti Patel would probably have stuck him on a plane and flown him off to Rwanda for ‘processing’. Also, I thought it must have been terrifying for poor Paddington to find himself in a palace guarded by men wearing the skins of his relatives on top of their heads.

From unsplash.com / © Anika Mikkelson

The next days – weeks, months – will showcase all the idiocies that afflict modern-but-monarchist Britain. The Queen’s funeral and the coronation of son Charles will be a never-ending ordeal of Ruritanian faff and ritualistic flummery. Many Britons, of course, approve of this and believe it represents threads of tradition that run back to the country’s distant past. Actually, much of this arcane pomp was devised by that randy old goat Edward VII at the start of the last century. I find it fascinating, incidentally, that one of Edward VII’s many mistresses was Alice Keppel, great-grandmother of a certain Camilla Parker-Bowles.

From wikipedia.org / © Udo Keppler 1901

There will also be tsunamis of sanctimonious and sycophantic drivel written and broadcast about the Queen by the toadies, grovellers, cap-doffers, forelock-tuggers and brown-nosers that infest Britain’s mainstream media. One of life’s great ironies is that the media currently churning out drooling eulogies about the wonderfulness of the departed monarch was the same media that made life hell for many of her family’s members. Her ex-daughter-in-law wouldn’t have died in a car-crash in 1997 if there hadn’t been a fleet of paparazzi pursuing her, desperate for photos to sell to the tabloids. Incessant media hounding and tittle-tattle was a major reason why Prince Harry chose to bail out of the royal circus. And who can blame him? If British journalistic hacks thought they could accuse his wife Meghan Markle of murdering the Queen and get away with it, they would.

And inevitably, the Queen’s passing will add a tankerload of fuel to the culture-war fires that have burned across Britain since 2016 and Brexit. Already, social media has been overrun by people, swivel of eye and gammon-pink of complexion, desperate to weaponise her death against the woke, lefty snowflakes they hate so much. Spencer Morgan, son of the dreaded Piers Morgan and a supposed champion of free speech, opined the other day: “Sad thing is there will be people in this country celebrating this. They’re the ones we need to focus on deporting.” Correction: a champion only of free speech he agrees with. In his case, obviously, the blighted apple hasn’t fallen far from the twisted old tree.

Meanwhile, Henry Bolton, embarrassingly short-lived leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (he lasted less than five months), expressed his disgust that “most British schools no longer teach their pupils the National Anthem, or fly the Union flag” and called on Liz Truss to “issue an instruction to all schools to rectify this omission, and do so prior to Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.” Funnily enough, I went to school in the 1970s and 1980s and I don’t remember being taught the National Anthem or seeing the Union Jack flying back then. And a couple of my schools were attended by Northern Irish Protestants, generally the most Queen-adoring, flag-respecting folk in the UK.

Meanwhile, at this moment, I’m sure social media accounts are being scoured the length and breadth of the country. This is as right-wing journalists, politicians and rabble-rousers search for any off-message disloyalty towards Her Majesty expressed by supporters of political parties they disapprove of (Labour, the Scottish National Party, the Greens), members of news outlets they disapprove of (Novara Media), fans of football clubs they disapprove of (Liverpool, Celtic), comedians they disapprove of (Joe Lycett), etc., intent on starting a holy war if they find something. Already on twitter, I’ve seen one right-wing gobshite fulminate at Jeremy Corbyn for, in a tweeted tribute to the Queen, reminiscing that he “enjoyed discussing our families, gardens and jam-making with her.” Clearly, it was okay for Paddington Bear to discuss marmalade with the recently deceased Her Majesty, but not okay for Jeremy Corbyn to discuss jam with her.

From twitter.com/jeremycorbyn

Thanks to all the patriotic breast-beating and blabber, this is a golden opportunity too for newly-anointed Prime Minister Liz Truss and her government, a government in which talent is not so much lacking as non-existent, to sweep under the carpet the multiple crises facing the country. Mind you, as those crises include skyrocketing energy bills and inflation, Brexit’s crippling of the economy, the war in Ukraine, the potential arrival of new, deadlier Covid variants and the climate-change emergency, the bulge created under the carpet will be pretty huge. The right-wing mainstream media will aid and abet this. Already, we’ve had the BBC’s Clive Myrie dismiss the energy-bill calamity as ‘insignificant’ compared to the royal news.

Personally, I won’t be grieving over the Queen’s departure, though I feel slightly sad to see her go. That’s mainly because I liked the fact that she’d been a living link with so much history. She was the last surviving world leader to have served (admittedly tenuously) during World War II – she’d been a member of the women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). She’d met 13 out of the 14 past US presidents, kicking off with Harry Truman, missing out on Lyndon B. Johnson for some reason, and surviving her encounter with the hideous, ignorant, orange-skinned one. She came face to face with Marilyn Monroe when, coincidentally, both of them were 30.

She also had to deal with 15 UK prime ministers, firstly Winston Churchill and finally Liz Truss, which doesn’t suggest there’s been any progress in intellect and ability in British politics during the last 70 years. Quite the reverse. By the way, I’m glad she managed to outlast Boris Johnson’s premiership by a couple of days. Perhaps it was her wish not to have that bloviating narcissist hogging the limelight as PM during her mourning and funeral that kept her going until September 8^th.

I should add that I feel that same sense of historical loss whenever someone very old passes away. When I was a kid in Northern Ireland, I knew an elderly lady who could recall the days when Victoria had been on the throne, and being around her when she reminisced was like being in the presence of a human time machine. (Despite being a Northern Irish Protestant, she’d hated ‘the Widow at Windsor‘.)

I saw Queen Elizabeth II in the flesh once, back in 1999, when she attended the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. I was among the crowds along the sides of the Royal Mile when she and Prince Philip scooted past in an open carriage with horsemen riding behind and in front of them. The crowd went, “Hurrah!” Then one of the horses discharged several big dollops of dung onto the street’s surface. While the royal cortege receded, two workers from the city council, a man and woman who looked near retirement-age, hurried onto the street and used brushes and shovels to scoop up the dung and put it in a binbag. The crowd promptly saluted the council workers by shouting “Hurrah!” again. Delighted, the workers accepted this with a gracious wave of their shovels.

Looking between those two humble council workers and the procession making its way up the Royal Mile, I knew where my sympathies lay.

From twitter.com/dalrymplewill

September 8, 2022September 8, 2022

Britain gets Trussed

From wikipedia.com / © gov.uk

In a just world, the folk belonging to Britain’s Conservative Party would have been forced into mass exile by now, after foisting upon us the morally rancid Boris Johnson and the three years of lies, corruption, incompetence, embarrassment and disaster he presided over as Prime Minster. They made him party leader and PM in 2019, long after his myriad character defects had become public knowledge.

But instead, the Tory Party members have just elected another leader who will govern Britain from No 10 Downing Street. This is the gimlet-eyed careerist, self-publicist, charisma-vacuum and fifth-rate Margaret Thatcher impersonator that is Liz Truss.

Truss’s ascent to the top has seen many, convenient swerves in policy, belief and principle. From being an atypically-radical Liberal Democrat (at the 1994 Lib Dem conference she called for the abolition of the monarchy, which turned Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown into Paddy Meltdown) to being a hard-right Tory (in 2012 she co-authored the notorious treatise Britannia Unchained, which described British workers as ‘the worst idlers in the world’). From being an enthusiastic pro-EU Remainer (before the 2016 Brexit referendum, it looked like the Remain side was heading for victory and Truss wanted to be on the winning side) to being an enthusiastic anti-EU Brexiteer (the Leave side won… Quick, Liz, get on that winning side!) I know it’s an old cliché, but Groucho Marx’s observation, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… Well, I have others,” has never been truer here.

Her victory comes after a summer-long leadership contest that felt as interminable and punishing as Johnson’s premiership did. The eight candidates confirmed on July 12^th were less than inspiring. They included far-right, culture-war-obsessed moon-howlers like Kemi Badenoch and the self-aggrandising Suella Braverman. There was Nadhim Zahawi, estimated to be worth between 30 and 100 million pounds, who once claimed nearly 6000 pounds in taxpayers’ money to light and heat the stables on his estate in Warwickshire. And there was Johnson’s former chancellor Rishi Sunak, who makes Zahawi look like a pauper. Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty – reckoned, thanks to her non-domiciled status, to have avoided paying up to 20 million pounds in British tax – allegedly sit on a fortune of 730 million pounds. During the leadership race, a 2011 video was dug up wherein a young Rishi boasted about having friends from all walks of life: “…friends who are aristocrats… friends who are upper-class… friends who are, you know, working class…” Really, Rishi? “Well, not working class.”

From wikipedia.com / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

Eventually, the field was whittled down to two competitors, Truss and Sunak, and on September 5^th, after a soul-destroying two months of never-ending hustings, debates and idiotic ‘I’m-more-anti-woke-than-you-are!’-type bickering, the results of the party-membership vote were announced. It worked against Sunak that, by resigning as chancellor in early July, he helped set off the events that led to Johnson’s downfall. Thus, he was regarded by many (obviously dementia-stricken) Tory members as the Judas who’d done for their beloved Boris. And while I’m absolutely not implying that anyone in the Conservative Party is racist, there’s a teensy-weensy possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, Sunak’s ethnicity might not have worked in his favour either.

Mind you, Truss didn’t win by the landslide that many people had expected. She secured just 47% of the support of those eligible to vote. Amusingly, days earlier, there’d been speculation that as PM she’d change the rules of any future referendum on Scottish independence, making it compulsory for the pro-independence side to get the support of half of all eligible voters to win – anyone not bothering to vote would be automatically counted as a ‘no’. If she’d applied that goalpost-shifting rule to her own leadership election, she’d have lost.

Now Prime Minister Truss has announced her new cabinet. Looking at the, er, talent that’s featured in the cabinet, the future for Britain – beset by a cost-of-living crisis, energy crisis, war-in-Ukraine crisis, Brexit crisis and climate change crisis – looks bleak indeed. Appointees include Braverman as Home Secretary, a post previously held by the demented Priti Patel, though Braverman has the potential to make Patel look like a bleeding-heart liberal in retrospect. She’s expected to take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights, whose founders in 1948 included that pathetic, woke snowflake Winston Churchill. Indulging in brazen, lefty virtue-signalling, Churchill declared, “In the centre of our movement stands the idea of a Charter of Human Rights, guarded by freedom and sustained by law.” This will enable Braverman to get on with the business started by Patel of sticking newly-arrived asylum seekers on planes and flying them out to Rwanda for ‘processing’.

Elsewhere, getting the portfolio of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is the cobwebbed, monocled, top-hatted Jacob Rees-Mogg, surely history’s most Dickensian villain not actually devised by Charles Dickens. In the past, Rees-Mogg, whose fund-management company Somerset Capital Investment puts money into oil extraction and coal mining, has vowed to squeeze ‘every last cubic inch of gas’ out of the North Sea; called fracking ‘an interesting opportunity’ and likened its damaging geological effects to ‘a rock fall in a disused coal mine’; deliberately misrepresented the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to back his claims that efforts to combat climate change are ‘unrealistic’ and ‘unaffordable’; and, yes, blamed offshore windfarms for the rising cost of fish and chips. With him in position, the likelihood of Britain honouring its pledge to achieve net zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 is about as great as the likelihood that the famously stuck-up, affected and pompous Rees-Mogg has ever tasted fish and chips.

From wikipedia.com / © Cantab12

Meanwhile, casting a rotund shadow over everything is Boris Johnson, who hasn’t gone away. It’s widely assumed that Johnson and his followers – in Trumpian feats of delusion and reality-denial – believe that the British public still love him. Also, they believe it’s only a matter of time before Truss slips up and Johnson, ‘a prince across the water’ like a not-so-bonnie Bonnie Prince Charlie, will return to the fray, become PM again, save the Conservative Party and save the country. I imagine Johnson and co. are already conspiring to facilitate Truss’s slipping-up, and sooner rather than later.

To conclude on a Scottish note… On September 5^th, in her painfully inept victory speech, Truss paid tribute to Johnson by claiming he was ‘admired from Kiev to Carlisle’. This was meant to elicit a round of applause from the audience, but Truss was so flat of tone and lifeless of gaze that the audience didn’t get their cue and several moments of tumbleweed-infested silence ensued. Carlisle is the most northerly town in England, which suggests that for once Truss had got something right. Beyond Carlisle is Scotland and no one there can stand the sight of Johnson – not even the Scottish Tories.

And the next morning, in Boris Johnson’s farewell speech as PM, when he wasn’t comparing himself to Cincinnatus (the Roman statesman who retired from office to lead a quiet life on his farm but then, when duty called, returned to Rome to lead again – as a dictator, though Johnson didn’t mention that bit), he compared himself to a booster rocket: “Let me say that I am now like one of those booster rockets that has fulfilled its function and I will now be gently re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down invisibly in some remote and obscure corner of the Pacific.”

Boris Johnson calls himself a rocket? At last, he’s said something that people in Scotland would agree with. He’s a rocket.

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Hammond, PM’s Office

July 28, 2022July 28, 2022

First men in the moon

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

One of the depressing things about being in your (later) middle years is that the people who were your heroes in your youth start to die with an alarming frequency. Yes, they’ve become old and this is to be expected, but it’s still depressing. This month has seen the departures of Alan Grant, the Scottish comic-book writer whose career took him from DC Thomson in Dundee to DC Comics in America, and who played a big role in shaping Judge Dredd, the signature character and strip of 2000AD, my favourite comic, as well as writing stories for Strontium Dog, Robo–Hunter and Batman; of the actor L.Q. Jones, who was best known for appearing in American western movies and TV shows of the 1950s and 1960s and was one of the very last, recognisable ‘cowboy actors’ still alive; and of the wonderful English character-actor David Warner, about whom I wrote this blog-entry on his 80^th birthday last year. By a sad coincidence, Jones and Warner were also the final survivors of the repertoire who worked with director Sam Peckinpah in a string of classic movies.

And July 2022 saw the death of director Bob Rafelson, whose credits include Head (1968), Five Easy Pieces (1971) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). By way of a tribute, here’s a slightly updated piece I wrote eight years ago about a Rafelson movie that, I felt, had unfairly disappeared under the radar – 1990’s Mountains of the Moon.

Some of you may be old enough to remember the heyday of Ladybird Books, a company that published children’s books emphasising the educational, the wholesome and the patriotic. The library at my primary school was stuffed full of them. Their historical tomes were given special prominence on the shelves. These dealt with famous figures in British history like Admiral Nelson, Captain Cook, Florence Nightingale and David Livingstone and painted glowing and sanitised portraits of them.

These historical characters, according to Ladybird, were fine, upstanding and virtuous, qualities that British people had traditionally prided themselves on having. Also, the establishment they represented, back in the days of British imperialism and the British Empire, was by extension a fine, upstanding and virtuous thing too. Needless to say, Ladybird Books didn’t trouble the minds of its young readers with such topics as Admiral Nelson’s dalliance with Mrs Emma Hamilton, or Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer’s orchestration of the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, or indeed Winston Churchill’s opinions of Afghans, the ‘feeble-minded’, women, Jews, Trade Unionists, the Irish, Indians and using chemical weapons.

And yet… I can understand anyone, at a young age, being enthusiastic about the damned things. In my childhood, I loved the Ladybird history books because they served up two things that were vital for a kid: heroes and adventures. Never mind the fact that they overlooked the moral complexities of character and the moral ambiguities of history. It was simply, viscerally exciting to read about people who were, supposedly, both incredibly decent and incredibly brave, setting off to perform feats of derring-do in a world that, a couple of centuries ago, seemed full of danger and mystery.

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

This brings me in a roundabout way to Mountains of the Moon, the Bob Rafelson-directed movie from 1990, which tells the story of Victorian explorers Richard Burton and John Speke and their 1857 expedition to find the source of the River Nile. I suspect the reason I like this film so much is because it lets me have my cake and eat it. On one hand, it offers a tale of British historical adventure that’s as thrilling as anything in the old Ladybird Books. On the other hand, it’s critical of the British Empire and the people who ran it. You can enjoy the exploits of the two protagonists as they battle their way past peril after peril but, simultaneously, you don’t have to feel guilty for doing so.

Mind you, I don’t ever remember seeing a Ladybird volume dedicated to Sir Richard Francis Burton, despite the fact that Burton, as his Wikipedia entry puts it, was a ‘geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, Egyptologist and diplomat’ and spoke 29 languages, including Icelandic, Swahili, Amharic, Sanskrit and Hebrew. The lack of a Ladybird biography on Burton may be down to Burton’s fascination with the sexual practices of the many cultures he visited, which ‘led him to take measurements of the lengths of the sexual organs of male inhabitants of various regions which he included in his travel books’; or to the rumour that during his military career he once went ‘undercover to investigate a male brothel reputed to be frequented by British soldiers’. Less salaciously, Burton was simply a loose cannon. His unruly reputation prevented him from being promoted to the very heights of the British establishment, either as a soldier or as a diplomat.

In the Mountains of the Moon, Burton is played by Irish actor Patrick Bergin. From the movie’s opening scenes – when we see Burton have a spear thrust his mouth by some natives in Somalia, a mishap that’d deter most other people from ever wanting to set foot beyond their front gate again, but with Burton seems only to enflame his passion further for travel and exploration – Bergin does a good job of capturing the man’s versatility, unpredictability and boundless energy. Indeed, if there’s one thing the film conveys beautifully, it’s the glorious insanity that propels Burton and Speke into the unknown, determined to make sense of it; whilst enduring hardships, indignities and degradations a million miles removed from the cosy, cloistered lives they led in upper-class Victorian Britain. During the 1857 expedition, Speke – who in Mountains of the Moon is played by Iain Glen – is almost driven mad by beetles crawling into his ears while Burton becomes crippled, his legs swelling up to the point where they need to be lanced. Come to think of it, the Ladybird books kept clear of stuff like this too.

While the film celebrates the two men’s heroism – and heroic powers of endurance – it disdains a British imperial establishment that’s supportive of them because it hopes to enjoy the prestige of their achievements; but that’s also manipulative and untrustworthy. It’s a historical fact that by the early 1860s Burton and Speke had fallen out, due to a claim by Speke that the source of the Nile lay in Lake Victoria. This was something that the British press of the time was only too happy to believe and it led to Speke being feted and celebrated. Meanwhile, Burton’s role in the 1857 expedition was played down.

Mountains of the Moon would have you believe that one reason for this was Burton’s Irishness. His father was of Anglo-Irish stock, though Burton himself was born in Devon. Here, with Bergin in the role and displaying a recognisable Celtic brogue, Burton seems more Irish than he probably was in real-life. Speke on the other hand was an English gentleman of the stiff-upper-lip variety, whom the establishment found more palatable to sell as a hero of the Empire. Actually, it’s a bit ironic that actor Iain Glen is a Scotsman, from Edinburgh.

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

The feud between the two explorers came to a sudden and unexpected end in September 1864, one day before Burton and Speke were scheduled to debate the Nile’s source at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Hunting on a relative’s estate, Speke was killed when his gun discharged itself into him while he was climbing over a wall. This caused speculation that the controversy that’d soured things so badly between him and his old comrade had led Speke to kill himself, although a jury later ruled that it’d been an accident. Mountains of the Moon remains ambiguous about Speke’s death, but the door is left open for the possibility that, upset about how the establishment had set him and Burton at each other’s throats, Speke committed suicide.

Also indicative of British attitudes at the time is the neglect shown to the African guide Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who in Mountains of the Moon is engagingly played by the Kenyan actor Paul Onsongo. He proved invaluable to Burton and Speke, and later served with Henry Morton Stanley, and crossed Africa from east to west in 1873, and became the British Empire’s most travelled citizen in Africa. Eventually, he clocked up some 9600 kilometres, most of it covered on foot. Despite this, we learn in a postscript that nobody ever thought of inviting Bombay to Britain, presumably because of his lowly ‘native’ status.

The rest of the cast is good too. The distinguished theatrical actress Fiona Shaw turns in a lovely performance as Isabel Burton, the woman who manages to capture the rumbustious Burton’s heart. She doesn’t, though, capture it to the point where he stops voyaging off to the back of beyond for years on end. As Speke’s publisher, Richard E. Grant gives a performance of superciliousness that only Grant himself seems capable of. And Bernard Hill sneaks in an endearing late-minute cameo as Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone, who gets involved in a somewhat homoerotic duel with Burton. Desperate to impress each other, both men strip off to compare their Africa-acquired scars.

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

In retrospect, the only things that are regrettable about Mountains of the Moon are: (1) how overlooked the film is; and (2) how low-key Patrick Bergin’s film career has been since. Regarding the second point, although he made a stir as Julia Roberts’ psychotic husband in 1991’s popular but not-very-good Sleeping with the Enemy, Bergin’s fortunes took a tumble with a couple of unfortunate film choices afterwards. His performance as Robin Hood in the 1991 movie of the same name was buried by the success of the same year’s bigger, brasher, sillier, Kevin Costner-starring, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. Meanwhile he was unlucky enough to play a villain in 1992’s ignorant Tom Clancy / IRA thriller Patriot Games, or as it was known in Ireland, Patronising Games.

I suspect these days Bergin derives more pleasure from his music. He has a band called Patrick Bergin and the Spirit Merchants and they’ve made the Irish top ten. That said, a few years ago, I was delighted to see him turn up in Ben Wheatley’s tongue-in-cheek gangster / terrorist bloodbath Free Fire (2016).

As for the commercial failure of Mountains of the Moon, it certainly didn’t help that its production company (Carolco Pictures) was in the process of going bankrupt at the time and its distributor (Tri-Star) was more interested in promoting another historical drama, Edward Zwick’s Glory (1989), which it’d produced itself. Neither did the film’s lack of bankable ‘big-name’ stars help its fortunes. But the way the film has been critically neglected is harder to fathom. Maybe it had the bad luck to appear at a time when imperial-era British costume epics of the David Lean / James Ivory school were starting to out of fashion, although Mountains of the Moon certainly doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with such staid fare as Chariots of Fire (1982) or A Room with a View (1985).

Director Bob Rafelson, alas, has just passed away and the titles that’ll likely be inscribed on his tombstone are of his earlier films, like 1972’s Five Easy Pieces or 1981’s The Postman Always Rings Twice or even Head, that trippy 1968 epic featuring the Monkees. But at least Rafelson himself recognised the quality of his lost 1990 classic. “(W)hen people ask me, ‘If you were to come to our country and we will give you some kind of an homage, what movie would you want to show?’” he once told an interviewer, “…I always say, ‘Top of the list is Mountains of the Moon.’”

From imdb.com / © Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

January 21, 2021

Hanging around with Jim Mountfield

© Horrified Magazine

I’ve just had my first short story published in 2021. Where the Little Boy Drowned, which is attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pen-name I put on my horror fiction, is now featured in the ‘Stories’ section of the online magazine Horrified.

The story belongs to a sub-genre that I like to think of as ‘constant jeopardy’. The main character or characters spend the whole story, or most of it, stuck in a dangerous situation where the odds look stacked against them getting out of it alive.

Examples of constant-jeopardy stories include Jack Finney’s Contents of a Dead Man’s Pockets (1956) and Stephen King’s The Ledge (1976), both of which have their protagonist trapped on a narrow ledge high up the side of a towering apartment building. Two other examples are stories I’ve read by the Spanish writer Vincente Blasco Ibáñez and by Winston Churchill (who very occasionally wrote fiction when he wasn’t politicking) that are both called Man Overboard. As their shared title suggests, these are about someone falling off a fast-moving ship, into the middle of the ocean, without anyone else noticing that they’ve fallen off.

However, the most gruelling constant-jeopardy story I’ve come across is The Viaduct, written by Brian Lumley and first published in 1976. It’s about two boys who, for a dare, decide to cross the titular viaduct not by going along the top of it but going along underneath it – using 160 rungs, which for some reason the structure’s builders have installed there, as monkey-bars. The viaduct straddles a very deep valley and you can predict that this isn’t going to end well.

I don’t want to give too much away about Where the Little Boy Drowned, but one of its key plot elements is a length of rope. There’s also a supernatural element to it, with a faint nod to Japanese horror films – J-Horror – and particularly to Takashi Shimizu’s 2002 chiller Ju-On: The Grudge.

Where the Little Boy Drowned can be read here, while this link will take you to Horrified’s main page.

June 25, 2020

We need to talk about Winston

With his bronze statue in London’s Parliament Square getting daubed in some uncomplimentary (but to be honest, accurate) graffiti during the anti-racism demonstrations on June 8^th, and then being unceremoniously closed up inside a giant box to protect it from further protests, and then being the subject of a scurrilous and rabble-rousing campaign by the Daily Mail whereby people were urged to sign a petition to stop it being removed – as if there was actually one iota of political willpower in Britain to get rid of it – Winston Churchill and the question of whether he was a good guy or a bad guy are back in the news. In fact, Churchill and all things relating to the British experience of World War II seem more prominent than ever with the death on June 18^th of wartime ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’ Dame Vera Lynn. With impeccable timing, Dame Vera died 80 years to the day that Churchill delivered his ‘finest hour’ speech.

Therefore, it seems timely to dust down and repost this blog entry about Churchill, which first appeared here in January 2019 while a high-profile bust-up about Churchill’s moral standing was taking place between Green Party Member of the Scottish Parliament Ross Greer and Good Morning Britain presenter / gobshite Piers Morgan.

I know it’s wishing for way too much, but it’s a pity there hasn’t been less heated and more nuanced debate about Churchill, about the opinions he held and decisions he made, and about the influence he’s had since his death. This is especially so as Churchill has seemingly become a totemic figure for the half of the British electorate who in June 2016 voted to leave the European Union. Indeed, in this era of all-pervasive social media, when everybody seems to have a twitter and Facebook account, if not a website and a blog, I suspect there’s been more written about the man since the Brexit vote that was ever written about him before it.

So what to make of Churchill? A hero? A villain? Or something in between? Well, here are the facts as I see them for the prosecution and the defence. Those for the prosecution are numerous and varied. Those for the defence are brief, but weighty.

In his correspondence as a young man attached to the Malakand Field Force, which fought Mohmand rebels in the Swat Valley in Northwest India in 1897, Churchill comes across as racist and bellicose. He said of the Pashtun tribespeople: “in proportion that these valleys are purged from the pernicious vermin that infest them, so will the happiness of humanity be increased, and the progress of mankind accelerated.” Admittedly, the tribespeople were brutal towards anyone who antagonised them, but the British more than matched them for cruelty. In a letter in September 1897, Churchill wrote approvingly that: “After today we begin to burn villages. Every one. And all who resist will be killed without quarter.” Later, in his autobiography, he noted how “every tribesman who was caught was speared or cut down at once.”

A decade later, when he was British Home Secretary, one of Churchill’s more alarming enthusiasms was for eugenics. He wrote about his fear that the “unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes… constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate” and advocated sterilization as a solution. Writing in a departmental paper in 1910, he suggested the solution of labour camps alongside that of sterilization: “I propose that 100,000 degenerate Britons should be forcibly sterilised and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the British race.”

Predictably, Churchill’s views on sexual equality were no more enlightened. Of the suffrage movement, he once commented: “Nothing would induce me to vote for giving women the franchise. I am not going to be henpecked into a question of such importance.”

From britishbattles.com / painting by Charles Dixon

Churchill saw World War I, when he was in charge of the British Admiralty, as an opportunity for glory: “I have it in me to be a successful soldier,” he boasted. “I can visualise great movements and combinations.” Unfortunately, the great movement he visualised – sending the fleet up the Dardanelles and grabbing Constantinople and the waterways that linked the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean, thus enfeebling the Ottoman Empire, improving access between the Allies and Russia and drawing Greece, Romania and Bulgaria into the war on the Allies’ side – resulted in the bloody, nine-month stalemate of Gallipoli in 1915. This ended with a death toll of 65,000 Turks, 26,000 Britons, 8,000 French, 7,800 Australians, 2,445 New Zealanders and 1,682 Indians. Churchill stayed unrepentant about what he’d tried and failed to achieve at Gallipoli: “The Dardanelles might have saved millions of lives. Don’t imagine I am running away from the Dardanelles. I glory in it.” However, the site historyextra.com gives his scheme a damning assessment: “…far from being a brilliant, potentially war-winning strategy, it was a piece of folly that was always likely to fail.”

One thing I’ll give Churchill credit for. After the Gallipoli fiasco, he joined the British Army, became a battalion commander and served with the Grenadier Guards and Royal Scots Fusiliers. According to his Wikipedia entry, this included 36 ventures into No Man’s Land. If only every politician who made a military blunder was forced to pay for it by becoming a soldier in a warzone. There’d surely be fewer military blunders by politicians. In fact, there’d be a hell of a lot less military adventurism by them in the first place.

1917 saw the Russian Revolution and no sooner had the 1918 Armistice been signed than the British establishment had something new, Bolshevism, to worry about. Churchill was dismayingly inclined to blame this on a Jewish conspiracy: “With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders… Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews ever whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.”

In February 1919, the fear that Britain was on the cusp of a workers’ revolution helped Churchill, as Secretary of State for Air and War, and his cabinet colleagues decide to send 10,000 troops into Glasgow to deal with striking workers. Churchill already had form in this area. As Home Secretary in 1910 he’d sent in troops to deal with striking miners in Tonypandy in South Wales. Unsurprisingly, today, Churchill is not quite as widely revered among the Scots and Welsh as he is among his fellow Englishmen. His disdain for the labour movement hadn’t abated by the time of the General Strike in 1926. While the Prime Minister Lord Birkenhead tried to reach agreement with the Trade Unions, he was strongly opposed by Churchill, who was desperate for an all-out fight with them.

Elsewhere on these islands, Churchill is not remembered with much affection in Ireland. In 1920, he oversaw the deployment in Ireland of the Black and Tans, the police force who soon became notorious for their unrestrained brutality and whose memory poisoned Anglo-Irish relations for decades afterwards. Churchill ignored warnings that the damage that the Black and Tans were doing. Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson commented: “I warned him again that those Black and Tans who are committing very indiscriminate reprisals will play the devil in Ireland, but he won’t listen or agree.” As for the Tans’ habit of killing suspected troublemakers without bothering to arrest them and put them on trial, Wilson said, “Winston saw very little harm in this but it horrifies me.”

From historyireland.com

Unsurprisingly, Churchill is better thought of among the pro-British Protestant community of Northern Ireland. But this wasn’t always so. It’s said that in 1912, when he visited Belfast, thousands of Protestant workers from the Harland and Wolff shipyard lined the streets wanting to pelt his car with rivets, on account of his support for Irish Home Rule. And though Ulster Protestants often express pride about Northern Ireland taking part in the UK’s war effort from 1939 to 1945 while southern Ireland opted to remain neutral, it must rankle that Churchill offered Eamon De Valera a united Ireland if he agreed to bring his country into the war on Britain’s side.

Churchill also found time to leave his mark on Iraq: not in a good way. As convener of a conference in Cairo in 1912 to draw up the boundaries of Britain’s Middle Eastern mandate, he unwisely lumped together three warring factions, Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, within the borders of the new country. And when Shiites and Sunnis rebelled against British colonial rule there in 1920, Churchill ordered military oppression and retribution on par with what he’d seen in the Swat Valley 23 years earlier – villages burned, civilians as well as combatants killed – and employed some deadly new technology too. He approved the use of chemical weapons against Iraqis, having opined earlier: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes… It will cause great inconvenience and spread a lively terror.”

Also causing great inconvenience and lively terror was his use of ‘aerial policing’, i.e. getting the RAF to bomb Iraqi villages. Unsurprisingly, these bombings, still within living memory, didn’t put the Iraqi population at ease when in the early 2000s British troops arrived again in their country thanks to the actions of Tony Blair and George Bush Jr.

Churchill also sent planes and chemical weapons to attack Bolsheviks in northern Russia in 1919. Again, he was unrepentant about waging chemical warfare: “Why is it not fair for a British artilleryman to fire a shell that makes the said native sneeze? It is really too silly.”

The biggest stain on Churchill’s record is surely his role in the Bengal Famine of 1943 that claimed three million or more lives. Let me quote the Indian writer and politician Dr Shashi Tharoor: “Not only did the British pursue its own policy of not helping the victims of this famine which was created by their policies. Churchill persisted in exporting grain to Europe, not to feed actual ‘Sturdy Tommies’, to use his phrase, but to add to the buffer stocks that were being piled up in the event of a future invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia… Ships laden with wheat were coming in from Australia, docking in Calcutta and were instructed by Churchill not to disembark their cargo but sail on to Europe. And when conscience-stricken British officials wrote to the Prime Minister in London pointing out that his policies were causing needless loss of life all he could do was write peevishly in the margin of the report, ‘Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?’”

Another charge against Churchill during World War Two is that in 1944 he basically threw the Greek resistance movement, i.e. the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS) and the National Liberation Front (EAM), under the bus. Previously, they’d fought alongside the British, against the Nazis. However, afraid of the Communist Party’s influence within the resistance, and wanting to restore the monarchy and general pre-war status quo in Greece, he opted to abandon the partisans and place British support behind elements who’d collaborated with the Nazis. These included officers in the Security Battalions and SS-affiliated Special Security Branch and they were soon incorporated into the post-occupation army, security forces and judiciary. The result was the gunning down of unarmed protestors in Athens on December 3^rd, 1944, which marked the beginning of the five-week conflict in the city known as the Dekemvriana; which in turn helped lead to the three-year Greek Civil War, estimated to have cost some 158,000 lives.

From greekreporter.com

Churchill was voted out of office in 1945 but returned for a second term as Prime Minister from 1951 to 1955. It was on this watch that he responded to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in a characteristically sledgehammer manner. By the uprising’s end, it was calculated that colonial forces had killed 10,000 Africans, roughly four times the number killed by the Mau Mau. Indeed, if you were a white settler in Kenya, you stood a better chance of dying in a road accident than at the hands of the rebels. The techniques employed by British troops for dealing with the Mau Mau included mass arrests, mass trials, mass hangings, torture, whippings, mutilations, the burning of villages, ‘free fire zones’ where any African person could be a target, forced labour and huge detention camps where disease and maltreatment were rife and conditions were scarcely any better than they’d been in German and Japanese camps a decade earlier.

It’s no surprise that when Barack Obama became US president in 2008, a miniature act of statue removal was carried out in the Oval Office. Obama, whose Kenyan grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama had been among those arrested and tortured during the Mau Mau uprising, saw it that Churchill’s bust disappeared from his workplace.

That’s a damning charge-sheet. What’s to be said in Churchill’s defence? Well, it’s a trite observation, but though the man’s opinions and decisions were frequently rotten, they weren’t as rotten as those offered by the opposing side between 1939 and 1945. No doubt Churchill’s idea of utopia was a British Empire where the sun never set. There’d be a catastrophic famine here, and a bloodily put-down insurgency there, but he’d regard that as the regrettable but unavoidable price of the White Man having to shoulder his civilising burden… And the White Man continuing on the side to fill his pockets with the trade and plunder of his colonies. Among the Empire’s ‘subjects’, life for many would be humiliating and wretched, and for some pretty hellish. But compare that with Adolf Hitler’s idea of utopia, which frankly doesn’t bear thinking about.

And he was in possession of good qualities – courage, determination, intellect, a rhetorical flair – that enabled him to galvanise the British population to make a stand against Nazism and prevent all of Western Europe from falling under Hitler’s influence. Of course, saying he won the war for Britain is different from saying he won the war full stop, which is what many of his modern-day fans in Britain seem to believe he did.

As the saying goes, cometh the hour, cometh the man. That the man happened to be an asshole in most other ways doesn’t denigrate his achievements during the hour itself. I’d like to think that if I’d lived in Britain during World War II, and I’d known about Churchill what I know about him now, I wouldn’t have let the old git into my house. But I’d have been secretly and grudgingly relieved that he was running the country at the time.

A while ago, the Times columnist Alex Massey penned an article on the subject. Though I find Massey a bit right-wing and fogeyish, I agree with his article’s title: CHURCHILL WAS A GREAT BRITON, NOT A GREAT MAN. I don’t, however, agree with some of Massey’s sentiments. He claims that it’s wrong to apply the value judgements of the 21^st century to a historical figure whose views were typical of and acceptable among the British ruling class of his time. But in fact, there were plenty of people alive when Churchill was alive who detested him too. However, they tended to be Indians, Kenyans, Greeks, Irish, Iraqis, etc. People whose opinions rarely get much coverage in British history books.

Come to think of it, Britons would find it enlightening if they got their history from sources in a wider and more international pool than they do now. In these Brexiting times, unfortunately, with World War II the only bit of history that many British people seem to care about, and with British politicians talking misty-eyed about creating a trading ‘Empire 2.0’ after withdrawal from the EU, I don’t think British awareness of history is going to get any wider.

It’s going to get even narrower, which won’t be good for Britain’s future place in the world.