At the end of August, I spent a day and a half at the offices of the Air League, which very graciously had allowed me access to their archives. Their address on Tothill Street is not far from Buckingham Palace, which I hadn't yet seen. And I hadn't done Whitehall properly yet. So it was a good opportunity to do the tourist thing, camera in hand.
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If you haven't already, it's time to nominate for the 2007 Cliopatria Awards for the best history blogging in six categories: best group blog, best individual blog, best new blog, best post, best series of posts, and best writing. Nominations close at the end of November. I admit that I tend to wait until late in the month before thinking too hard about this, so that it's mostly a case of working out what the most glaring omissions are -- it's less work that way :)
Good luck to all the nominees!
No, really.
You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!
Leo Amery (paraphrasing Oliver Cromwell's dismissal of the Rump Parliament), in reference to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 7 May 1940.
Ron Austin. The Fighting Fourth: A History of Sydney's 4th Battalion 1914-19. McCrae: Slouch Hat Publications, 2007. Private Mulqueeney's unit, though the poor sod was with it in the field for only a couple of months before his death. It had earlier landed at Gallipoli, on the first day; and after the Somme fought at 3rd Ypres, Broodseinde, Polygon Wood and the Hindenburg Line, among other places. This is, surprisingly, the first history of the 4th Battalion AIF; it looks to have done it justice as far as writing and production quality goes (it's fairly sparsely footnoted, but I suppose that's not what unit histories are about).
After Newark and Cranwell, I returned to London, for the last couple of weeks of my stay there. No longer did the summer stretch out before me. This meant that I had to start making hard choices about how to spend my time, both in terms of my research and my sight-seeing. In my gawking tourist mode, I still had three major sites on my must-see list -- Hampton Court Palace, the Tower of London, and Greenwich -- but only two sight-seeing days left! The first of these was the summer bank holiday, which turned out to be a nice day, so I chose to head out to Hampton Court Palace, much of which dates to the 15th century. The present building was originally Cardinal Wolsey's palace; Henry VIII acquired it through not-entirely-honourable circumstances, and it was a popular royal palace up until the Georgian period.
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I can't say I'm terribly familiar with Lord Allenby, either the man or his career (and when I visualise him, he always looks like Jack Hawkins). But in my experience, retired field marshals are more likely to call for national service than a world state,1 so I was surprised when I came across Allenby's Last Message: World Police for World Peace, a pamphlet containing an address given by Allenby in his role as Rector of the University of Edinburgh on 28 April 1936. Sadly, he died only a few weeks later; in fact, the pamphlet contains a preface from Allenby dated 14 May 1936, the very day he died. It was published by the New Commonwealth, a society founded by Lord Davies to proselytise for an international police force (meaning an international air force, more or less, rather than something like Interpol), which would step in and stop wars, and hopefully deter them from starting in the first place. The speech is thin on practical details, being more of a call to (collective) arms directed at the rising generation.
First, Allenby outlined the danger:
There is danger in delay, for it seems likely that, unless an effort in the right direction -- a successful effort -- is made soon, the present social system will crumble in ruin; and many now alive may witness the hideous wreck. Then will loom the dreadful menace of the dark ages; returning, darker, black, universal in scope, long-lasting.2
'Recent progress in Science has now given to the machine the mastery over man its maker',3 Allenby claimed. Scientists everywhere were 'busily experimenting with new inventions for facilitating slaughter; [...] designing more monstrous methods of murdering their fellow men and women'.3 There would be no hesitation in attacking civilians with these new weapons in the next war. But science (by which he really means, technology) also gave him hope, for it enlarged people's horizons:
Man is now able to navigate the atmosphere, plumb the deep seas, travel in three dimensions of space, move anywhere at a speed unimaginable to our fathers. Willingly or unwillingly, he has become a world-citizen; and the duties of that citizenship cannot be evaded; duties calling for the whole-hearted co-operation of every man and woman alive, joined in mind and purpose to promote the good and the advancement of all.4
And his solution? A world state and an international police force.
Is it too much to believe that the human intellect is equal to the problem of designing a world state wherein neighbours can live without molestation; in collective security? It does not matter what the state is called; give it any name you please: -- League of Nations; Federated Nations; United States of the World. Why should there not be a world police; just as each nation has a national police force?3
It's somehow reassuring that Allenby could retain some measure of faith in the future after fighting the Battle of Armageddon!
Philip Williamson. Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Stan, me old mucker!
What was the first post-apocalyptic film? This is something I've wondered for a while. First, I should define what I mean by a "post-apocalyptic film". It's one which posits some great global catastrophe which shatters civilisation.1 It can show that catastrophe but the focus has to be on what happens afterwards: how do people survive, what problems do they face, can they rebuild civilisation in some form, or is it a struggle to hold on to what they've got? Nearly everything everybody took for granted has been swept away or changed out of all recognition -- social classes, political institutions, gender relations, fast food chains. People with guns have a big advantage -- until they start running out of bullets. And so on. Mad Max 2 and 3 are classic post-apocalyptic films (Mad Max itself is borderline, as it is interestingly set in a world sliding into chaos, but society is still holding together -- just). So is Threads, though it spends more time on the apocalypse itself. Children of Men arguably is; Dr Strangelove isn't, because it ends with the End.
In short, post-apocalyptic films show life among the ruins, and so should be distinguished from their near relations, apocalypse and disaster films, which don't attempt to show the long-term consequences of their particular catastrophes; though of course there is a grey area where the genres shade into each other.
I initially thought the first was H. G. Wells's Things to Come (1936), the middle section of which is unmistakably post-apocalyptic. Three decades after the start of a world war, fighting still continues, only now it's between the inhabitants of what's left of Everytown, and the tribes living in the hills, squabbling over a coal mine. An epidemic has killed half the population of the planet, but now that it is over, the town is recovering. Petrol is scarce, so a double-decker bus now serves as a butcher shop, and cars are drawn by horses, though people still wistfully remember how far they used to travel in them ...
But was there anything earlier? There's no reason why there couldn't be. Wells didn't invent the post-apocalyptic novel; that honour belongs to Mary Shelley. Her triple-decker The Last Man was published, anonymously, in 1826, and traces the fortunes of one Englishman as the rest of humanity succumbs to a plague. He ends up alone, wandering among empty museums and palaces, and then setting off in a boat down the east coast of Africa. As it happens, a no-budget version was filmed this year, though it appears to have traded the melancholy for large volumes of automatic weapons fire.
So, I turned to the venerable IMDb.2 This only has incomplete information for early films, particularly silent-era ones, but it's better than nothing; and it has a system of plot keywords, such as Post Apocalyptic and Last Man on Earth, which can be used to pick out likely candidates from before Things to Come. There are four in total, three American and one French. Actually, two of them, It's Great to Be Alive (1933) and El Último varon sobre la Tierra ('The last man on Earth'; 1933 -- though it's in Spanish it appears to be a US production) are remakes of The Last Man on Earth (1924). The catastrophe in these three films is a plague which kills only men; all men are wiped out, except one, who then has every woman in the picture competing over his affections. These three don't take the apocalypse very seriously, however: they are all comedies, and the later versions are musicals to boot. I doubt their makers were very interested in exploring what might happen to society should one sex die out (beyond suggesting that a female US president would allow the White House to be overrun by cats); they sound more like nudge-nudge wink-wink male fantasies of getting rid of all of the competition. (One link I found referred to the title of one of the films as It's Great to Be Alive When You're the Last Man on Earth, which says it all, really.)
The fourth candidate is Sur un air de Charleston (1927), a short film made by Jean Renoir. Here, the premise seems to be that a future war has wiped out Europe. An African airman lands in the ruins of Paris, sees a white woman, who proceeds to ... show him the Charleston. He learns to dance it as well. Then they fly away again. Oh, there's a chimp too. Well, I suppose it could be argued that it's some sort of commentary on the pervasiveness of American popular culture (not just the Charleston, but the African is played by an African-American dancer wearing blackface!) or an inversion of white anthropologists watching and recording indigenous dances, or something. But the indications are that it was just a bit of fluff which Renoir didn't even bother to edit into a proper film (that was done later). If there was a point, it was to show off his wife's dancing, and to play around with some film effects.
These all do appear to be post-apocalyptic films of a sort, but, at best -- and without having seen any of them, I must add -- they are amusing opportunities for seeing the world turned upside down, not serious excursions into the land of What If ...? In drawing such a distinction, am I just being a snob? Maybe it's just my own peculiar bias; for example in my own research I look for novels which treat the idea of city bombing seriously enough to have thought through the consequences of their suppositions. The authors think what they describe might really happen; so their readers might too. So I look for something similar in post-apocalyptic works too. But still, I'm happy to give the title of first post-apocalyptic film to The Last Man on Earth, for now; Things to Come can be the first serious post-apocalyptic film :)
PS To keep tabs on what's happening after the apocalypse, check out Quiet Earth.
Cranwell is a RAF base in Lincolnshire (not far from Newark or Grantham, or Lincoln for that matter). It was first established as a RNAS training station in 1915, and sortied the odd anti-zepp patrol in the next few years. In the 1930s, Frank Whittle did much of his work on jet engines here; indeed, the first flight of the Gloster E.28/39, on 15 May 1941, was from Cranwell. But it is best known as the home of the RAF's officer training college, RAF College Cranwell (but usually called Cranwell, just to confuse things). The College was founded in 1919, and the rather splendid College Hall, seen above, opened for business in 1934.
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The grave of Pte John Joseph Mulqueeney, in Courcelette British Cemetery, Somme, France. He was killed on 17 August 1916 near Mouquet Farm.
I am extremely grateful to Steve John for providing me with this photograph.
