Sport: a game of two political halves

Hi everyone. Not much from me for the next couple of days. I'm off to London in an hour, ready for tomorrow's conference: Anti-Communism: Literature, Culture, Propaganda at the Senate House. Having worked on Communist literature and culture for so long, I'm getting interested in the right's cultural activities… something else to add to the list of Putative Papers.

This morning I've been thinking about some research my colleague Mike is doing into the political and historical origins of the Youth Hostel Association in Britain (all contributions gratefully received). He has access to their archives and the various publications the produced, but there's very little on the motivations for the YHA's foundation. So it's a matter of tracing the interests of the founders and any public debate on the subject. One potential impetus is the widespread fear of urban youths becoming a squalid, unfit underclass: WW1's conscription revealed widespread malnutrition, TB, polio and general unhealthiness associated with poverty. Another inspiration may have been the various German cults of Youth and the outdoors, from both the left and the right. Green's Children of the Sun records that Parliament sent a delegation to investigate the Strength Through Joy movement, and came back to pass a Physical Training and Recreation Act, and to found a Festival of Youth. Here's a little footage, with some very interesting commentary:

KING AND QUEEN AT FESTIVAL OF YOUTH

Note that the commentator carefully disassociates these well-drilled youths from the Hitler Youth and other fascist organisations: there's a degree of wishful thinking there. As well as fitness, the formation of organised groups of strapping young people was always going to be political. The Scouts, for example, were explicitly formed to bind young people to God, King (or Queen) and Country, and to produce the next generation's military. Other organisations worried that the urban proletariat were prey to 'cosmopolitan' (i.e. Jewish and/or Communist) subversion and, following the German 'Blood and Soil' ideology, believed that getting them out into the country would reconnect them to the 'real' England, which was held to be the countryside. Physical exercise was better than sitting around, either doing nothing or reading subversive books. The Festival of Youth commentary reminds me of a visit to the Bonn Museum of German History (1946-onwards, rather evasively). One on side, pictures of depressed East German teenagers with information boards explaining that they were 'forced' to join the Pioneers and were little more than slaves. On the other side, photos of cheery West German teens happily marching in Western youth organisation out of patriotic fervour. Truly, the victors write history.

And it's certainly true that all the leftwing people with whom I associate would prefer to read books than play rugby. However, there was a thriving leftwing sporting world. Cycling was always a stronghold of the left, affording cheap transport to pleasant places in the company of like-minded people: the Clarion Clubs formed in Birmingham and Stoke before spreading through the nation (still just about going) merged socialism with cycling.



Hiking was the ultimate leftwing sport: socialists organised the campaign for footpaths and open access, including the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, led by communist Benny Rothman.



Athletics was also a popular working-class sport, particularly the disciplines which required little equipment, such as long-distance running: events were held under the auspices of the British Workers' Sports Federation (largely Communist-inspired) and the British Workers' Sports Association, a centre-left splinter body after the CPGB's authoritarianism got a little too much. The BWSF was a leading light in the Mass Trespass.

As for my sport: very disappointing. Although Karl Marx was an enthusiastic fencer (epée, sadly), so were Mussolini and Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists.

He was a leading member of the British teams, based his shock troops' uniform on the fencing jacket (in black, of course) and used to put on fundraising fencing galas for his Nazi party, with the connivance of other senior fencers and – I suspect – the Amateur Fencing Association. Certainly Charles de Beaumont, after whom the previous national HQ was named, aided Mosley's exhibition matches at the unsavoury Gargoyle Club. Unfortunately, the archives have long since disappeared and there was no newsletter, so tracing the story requires a trawl through the sporting and aristocratic press. One day, perhaps.

Sports' political characteristics tend to divide between team/individual, and be influenced by their social backgrounds. Fencing, mountaineering motor sport and aeroplanes in the 1930s were associated with Fascism: the Übermensch proving his worth as an individual by solo achievement by going higher to look down on us vermin, faster or further (and they were expensive). Rugby League was the preserve of Northern working men. Rugby union split between posh privately-schooled English people and Welsh or Scottish miners looking for a chance to duff up the English without getting arrested. Football tended to be grass-roots and socialist, though many clubs were founded by companies or churches to improve their parishioners' fitness or simply to get them to behave. Tennis was utterly suburban and middle-class: see Sorrow For Thy Sons' damning indictment of social-climbing Herbert who joins the tennis club in his Welsh valley because that's where the (English) managerial class go to escape the grime of the mining village.

Anyway, enough of this: I'm off to That London. More anon.

It's not all work, work, work

Well, actually it is. But the very best thing about being (or appearing to be) an academic is that sometimes you get paid for having the very same conversations with people that I would have for free, at length, in any situation.

Take today. I came in and did some incredibly tedious administration, the details of which I'll save for the day I contract writers' block and/or want to get rid of large numbers of you, dear reader. But as a reward, I had a tutorial lined up for one of my MA students. Not the one whose thesis is 'all popular culture is contemptible', another one. She's doing a dissertation on the Country House in 1930s literature. She's looking at Nancy Mitford's Highland Fling and perhaps one or two more or her novellas, Henry Green's Living, Loving, Party-Going trilogy, Waugh's Vile Bodies, Wodehouse's Summer Lightning and Agatha Christie's Seven Dials, and perhaps Michael Arlen's work.

Now that might at first glance sound like Downton Abbey Studies, but it's really, really interesting, especially for someone like me who thinks that the interwar period is the most interesting one in centuries. Once you've picked the country house as a setting – for comic capers, murders, political discussion, love affairs, dancing or whatever – you've got a focus for social, cultural and literary change. Why, for instance, is the country house a great place for a murder mystery? Partly because non-aristocratic readers would never have got in the doors of these places, and like to imagine toffs either bashed on the noggin or dragged down to the cells. They're on the front-line of economic and social change too: servants eyeballing their feudal masters while spitting in the soup. You've got the landed gentry gradually getting poorer as capitalism takes over, leading to the race for American heiresses, the generational slaughter of WW1, the battle to preserve 'heritage' and older modes of life while the kids indulge in suspicious 'cosmopolitan' pleasures (jazz, cocktails, motor-cars), and the ambiguous love-hate relationship between city and country. Politics rears its ugly head as bone-headed patriotism meets the harder-edge of Nazism (the British aristocracy was very open to ideas about blood and soil, and to the weirder mystical fringes of European fascism). And of course the end of Empire and the causes/effects of two world wars are played out over the snooker and bridge tables of the country house.

So there's a lot to say and I'm really looking forward to reading my student's take on it… and to getting back the books I've loaned her. I always feel nervous watching them leave the office. I've been burned too many times! But it's great to just talk about books and ideas, wandering round the office picking up 'just one more' to add to the pile, realising not only that someone else shares your particular enthusiasms, but that they'll have a different, interesting take on it. Though it's slightly embarrassing to realise that I actually own every single book that might be useful, like some kind of bookish magpie.

For all my moaning, this kind of thing happens much more than you might imagine. OK, it's true that one high-achieving student didn't know who the prime minister is and what party he's from, and that she thought Russell Whateverhisnameis's Good News and the bloody Mail Online is sufficient to keep her informed. And it's true that another good student from this city had never heard of Wales (which can just about be seen from the top floor of Vole Towers), but neither of them are stupid… just er highly-specialised. There are plenty of students around who are much brighter than I am, whether they know it or not. I've read more than they have because I've been using up precious oxygen for longer, but before long they'll be streets ahead.

That's why I like teaching. You can't relax or fake it. It's also why I like teaching here, where snobs wouldn't expect to find intellectual ferment. I'm really looking forward to teaching Ben Masters' Noughties in a couple of weeks. It's a campus novel which isn't nearly as clever as the author thinks, nor as progressive. In particular, I'm looking forward to my students reacting to these bits:

She doesn't go here – Oxford, that is – not being academic … Lucy had been accepted into the University of Northampton… to study Travel and Tourism.
In our epoch… curiosity and aptitude are irrelevant (not at Oxford, mind…). [Academic work outside Oxford is] one colouring-in exercise per semester supplemented by extracurricular binge-drinking and blowjobs
Anne, now studying Socio-Bio-Dance Studies with History at some uni up north.
John (a blond pretty boy studying applied Agriculture with Media Studies at some university down south)
Natalie (huge girl studying Golf Course Management and Experimental PE at some university out east).
Holly (tiny girl studying Fuck Knows at some university near Wales)
Rob (I've no idea what Rob studies: perhaps a BA in Throwing Up, or a short course on The Reception of STIs…)

And so, endlessly on: a narrator who professes not to be a snob while obsessively dividing the world into sensitive, troubled Oxonians and animalistic Others who spend their time having meaningless sex and studying for meaningless degrees in laughable places without (unlike our hero) dramatising their experiences with set-reading references, analogies, quotations and obsessive alliteration. The kids are going to love getting their teeth into this one.

I wonder if Masters would like to visit us for a talk…

The Downton Manoeuvre: where DO the Tories get their ideas from?

You may have noticed that the Tories have floated the idea of letting the super-rich off some of their taxes in return for employing more servants. No, really! As if the rich don't already have enough money, most of it hidden from the Revenue in any case.

It's a mad idea economically: that a modern economy with 60 million citizens can be heaved out of recession by employing a few more maids and butlers. It's offensive too: it indicates that the landed gentry running the government really believe that Britain's salvation lies in returning to Downton Abbey, where contented servants tug their forelocks in gratitude to the Master's generosity. No doubt the sub-minimum wage salaries will be enhanced by a few eggs and the left-overs from banquets. The ultimate in thoughtless trickle-down economics.

However, there's more to this than meets the eye. Although the inspiration is supposed to be a stupid rightwing Swedish tax break, the idea rang a bell in the recesses of my weird little mind.

Come with me on a journey to the outer fringes of the confused, weird and sinister 1930s British aristocracy…

After the depression, most European countries spawned fascist or neofascist political groups: the New Party/BUF in Britain, the laughable Blueshirts and Greenshirts in Ireland, the Nazis in Germany, Action Française and others - loads of them, some successful, others not. We're familiar with the most famous groups, but there was a multitude of groupuscules out there, competing for ideas and space. In Britain, many of these anti-democrats rejected Mosley's fascism - too European, too violent, too political, too proletarian, too urban (according to some, too Jewish!).

Out on the fringes, an agrarian, environmentalist, medievalist movement stirred. Some of them were utopian idealists who fell in with the wrong crowd, amongst them the Kibbo Kift, whose themes of organic, 'natural' communities soon saw them associated with racial purity movements. Starting off innocently, their naive concern for stability, static communities, independence and purity led in small steps towards a much more disquieting set of beliefs.

The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift parade in their clan, tribe and lodge divisions

Others, like the Catholic-inspired Distributivists were concerned with social order and called for the return of Guild practices and a peasantry protected and nurtured by a true aristocracy. Democracy of course was out, but an organic link to the land (which implicitly excluded migrants, the urban and Jews in particular) and a total distrust of finance (those pesky Jews again). From these origins came the rightwing element of the modern environmental movement: members owned rather a lot of England and wanted it to stay green and pleasant.

Amongst the groups urging this return to a quietist English fantasy were the English Mistery and its successor, the English Array, led by Gerard Wallop, the 9th Earl of Portsmouth and Viscount Lymington. Like many of the hyper-nationalist English aristocrats of the day (including Churchill and the Astors), he was half-American and spent his early years in the US, a product of the Victorian-Edwardian aristocracy's importation of heiresses in return for titles.

Banner of the English Mistery

The English Mistery believed that only those who had a long-standing and large stake in English society truly possessed the wisdom required to organise a country - the landed gentry, who would protect an obedient peasantry and maintain the monarchy's prestige against foreign (ironic, given the monarchy's recent origins), Jewish, urban and socialist attacks - it was very similar to Action Française's authoritarian, hierarchical neofascism, though lacking the numbers to be anything more than a Tory ginger group.

Poster for the English Mistery - beautifully illustrating their concerns

Lymington's leadership meant that the Mistery had a degree of respectability: he gathered around himself a motley crew of peers, authors and environmentalists: Rolf Gardiner of the Kibbo Kift was a member, as was Colonel Seton-Hutchinson, later exposed as a Nazi spy. Amongst the ideas they promoted, funding the aristocracy to employ (or shelter, as they saw it) many more servants was a key idea: that way, the working classes wouldn't be subject to the vicissitudes of the coal market, for instance. Organic food and farming were also important: naturally better and requiring more workers - the movement refused entry to women and openly espoused the virtues of benevolent feudalism. They weren't the only ones either: the aristocratic, pro-Tory, pro-Mussolini British Fascisti - who viewed the BUF as upstart commoners - got there first (thanks for reminding me, Simon)

The English Mistery collapsed in the mid-30s, to be replaced by the English Array, attracting plenty more well-known people, such as Edmund Blunden, AK Chesterton (who edited Lymington's New Pioneer) and his Catholic-Distributivist group. Lymington and his supporters, though never making a big impact as a group, utilised their aristocratic network to become leading members of the wider WW2 government, founded what became the now irreproachable Soil Association and other early green groups (alongside former fascists such as Jorian Jenks), and took political and administrative posts under Churchill. Lymington ended up in the pro-Nazi British People's Party and eventually emigrated with lots of other unpleasant aristocrats to Kenya.

The central tenets of the Mistery, the Array and their allies were: an essential link between 'pure' English blood and the soil (key to Aryan German politics too); feudalism; anti-democracy; distrust of finance (which they associated with Jewry); hatred of socialism; a deep and abiding faith in the inherited wisdom and benevolence of the aristocracy.

It's probably a coincidence that David Cameron, a multimillionaire aristocrat and George Osborne, a multimillionaire aristocrat who will inherit a Baronetcy, are proposing a silly policy first dreamed up by some deluded maverick toffs in the maelstrom of the Dark Decade. But that doesn't mean that there's no link between them. These two are directly descended from the circles which formed the Array and the Mistery. They share a deep faith in aristocratic values and contempt for the poor ('benefit scroungers'). Their political mission is to persuade us that they are indeed the 'natural' ruling class, in whom we should put our trust: this is why ideology is rarely mentioned in Conservative discourse. Instead, the narrative is about tradition and benevolence. Our role is to obey, not to question. Despite the modern finance-led economic positions they take (there's certainly no anti-Semitism left), the current Tory leadership is firmly within the tradition of aristocratic patronage.

Do your patriotic duty: become a butler.

Back into a Depression

No new Mac in the post today, damn it, but a very hefty book indeed: Juliet Gardiner's The Thirties: An Intimate History. I don't know her work so can't tell you whether it's any good. My field is 1930s culture, so I buy anything that looks vaguely relevant. If you want to make money, write something with …of the Thirties in the title and I'll order it. Teacups of the Thirties, Sock-Manufacturing in the Thirties, whatever. Mostly though, it's literary and popular culture I'm interested in.

Now we're living in a Depression, just like the Thirties, I recommend you learn to cook, sew and agitate like our forebears. Except for the Nazism and powdered eggs. They were both rotten.

Now I'm off home to cook a rabbit stew. That makes me a bunny-boiler.

Heil Spode, and other 30s capers

Did anyone else watch Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain last night? I'm not a huge fan of Marr, and didn't intend to watch this episode because I'm a 30s expert (the only thing I can claim to know much about), but I was captivated by it, partly because he started with some of the Mitford sisters (no mention of unpleasant brother Tom), and I'm a sucker for Jessica/Decca.

Sure, the Spanish Civil War took 3 words to cover and the organised left in Britain didn't get much attention, but he was very good on the British flirtation with uniformed groups and their swift failure - his thesis that Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts didn't get far because most Brits found them laughable was interesting. I'm not too convinced - there wasn't much to laugh about at that point - but it was intriguing and is supported by P. G. Wodehouse (who was very rightwing to the point of broadcasting for the Nazis during the war) depicting Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists as a violent dimwit toff (very accurately) and Fuhrer of the Black Shorts (all the other distinctive clothing had been bagged by other groups) in The Code of the Woosters and other books:

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"

Watch Spode address the cadre (embedding annoyingly disabled).

Those wonderful Mitford gels

Right now I'm reading Mary Lovell's The Mitford Girls and not enjoying it much. I've an interest in the Mitfords - Jessica (Decca) is a hero of mine, and the rest of the brood are an object lesson in the iniquities of the aristocracy. Unfortunately, Lovell's book is essentially a long paean of praise to poor misunderstood Diana (unrepentant Fascist, friend of Goebbels, wife of Mosley etc), an elegy for Unity (personal friend of Hitler etc. etc.) and an attempt to paint Decca as a liar and fantasist because she was a Communist (who lived most of her life in rough Oakland, California, fighting for the poor and black population). Lovell, it seems, divides the world between those who hunt (good) and those who don't (rotters).