Lest We Forget

By Michael Patrick O’Leary

Scouting for Boys

When I was  a stroppy teenager,  the epitome for me of the distastefulness of the whole charade of Remembrance Day was a man called Ralph Reader, who on an annual basis was the Master of Ceremonies of variety shows extolling the greatness of Britain (particularly England). Great prominence was given to sentimental and jingoistic songs such as “There’ll Always Be an England” sung by old troupers like Vera Lynn who had helped to win the Second World War.

Reader got started in show business producing shows for the Boy Scout movement and even had some success on Broadway. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Reader was commissioned into the RAF as an intelligence officer and was awarded an MBE in 1943. He got a CBE in 1957 for general services to the nation. Later he was mainly associated with Scout Gang Shows. In the 1970s, he was appointed to the post of Chief Scout’s Commissioner.

Poppies and a Threadbare Empire

Reader was no doubt an admirable  fellow and I was being terribly unfair to detest him. Call it a clash of generations. We baby boomers had a tendency to arrogance because we had a decent education and the ability to see the tawdriness of post-imperial Britain. The Suez crisis of 1956 is often seen as a significant symbol of Britain’s post-imperial decline, and 1956 was also the year when John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger was first produced and spawned a movement of “angry young men” disaffected by the state of the nation.

In the 1950s, I was a great fan of variety shows and saw many of the old comedians performing live. In his play The Entertainer, written at the request of Laurence Olivier and first produced in 1957, Osborne personified the decay of the British Empire in Archie Rice and aging comedian whose career has faded. Tony Richardson, who directed The Entertainer’s premiere season, described Archie as “the embodiment of a national mood … Archie was the future, the decline, the sourness, the ashes of old glory, where Britain was heading”

Britain’s decline probably resulted to a great extent from the bankrupting effort required to beat Nazi Germany. In spite of that, the Attlee Labour government was able to establish a welfare state that saved many from dire poverty, provided health care free for all and enabled working class oiks like myself to get a university education and access to high culture. Successive British governments, including nominally Labour ones, have worked hard to dismantle Attlee’s noble edifice.

Reader’s shows were already an anachronism in the late 50s and early 60s and unfortunately tainted the real meaning of Remembrance Day. They reeked of fly-blown nationalism and imperialism and seemed to me to glorify militarism and war-mongering. One year, I was forced to watch Reader’s show at the house of a school friend by his patriotic parents. They were typical of respectable, conservative, working-class people. Theirs was a small house but they owned it. By this time they were surrounded by families from the West Indies. The last time I was in that area, it was full of mosques and burkhas. Even in the 1950s, the Empire had landed on the white working man’s doorstep. Nostalgia for the old Empire became inextricably entwined with racism and resentment, which to me seemed to simmer under Remembrance Day.

The Empire Has Landed

It is ironic that (as I write) the UK has a prime minister of Asian origin who is richer than the monarch and is calling on citizens to tighten their belts to bear with the austerity measures felt by the government to be necessary to deal with the recession caused in part by the disastrous budget of a Chancellor of the Exchequer who was of Ghanaian extraction. Rishi Sunak’s mother was born in Tanganyika, his father in Kenya. Both parents are of Punjabi origin. Sunak has been adamantly pro-Brexit since his teens and has often made jingoistic pro-British utterances at the same time as retaining his US green card and a luxurious home in Santa Monica.

Sunak has embroiled himself in controversy by bringing back into the government a Home Secretary who was sacked or resigned because she was more anti-immigration than was the then prime minister, Liz Truss. Suella Braverman’s parents were from Mauritius and Kenya, and, she says, came to the UK “with an admiration and gratitude for what Britain did for Mauritius and Kenya, and India”. She describes herself as “child of the British Empire”.

She was chair of the European Research Group, a pro-Leave group of Conservative MPs. The parents of Braverman’s predecessor as Home Secretary, Priti Patel, were Gujaratis from Uganda. Patel was a long-term Eurosceptic and strongly opposed to the free movement of people. It was Patel who came up with the spiffing wheeze of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda (which was not part of the British Empire but is now a member of the Commonwealth).

Suffering of Ordinary People

I see Remembrance Day differently now. With maturity, I have developed a better understanding of what my parents’ generation endured to make my life comfortable and secure. My mother worked in an aircraft factory helping to build the Gloster Meteor, the RAF’s first operational jet fighter. Her younger sister told me about running home from school during a German bombing raid. In 2006, I was at Heathrow Airport on Remembrance Sunday,  returning to Sri Lanka. Waiting for my plane, I heard a call for one-minute’s silence in honour of the fallen. Tears rolled down my cheeks as everyone respectfully observed the silence.

Cynical politicians continue to exploit the poppy and patriotism. David Cameron arrived in Beijing in November 2010 wearing a Remembrance Day poppy in his buttonhole. The Chinese asked him to remove it and the English right-wing press heaped praise on him for refusing. The poppy had a different symbolism for the Chinese. It stood for a particularly brutal phase of British imperialism, the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, during which British soldiers killed tens of thousands of Chinese,  pillaged, desecrated  holy sites, shot  prisoners and raped women. All in the interests of Scottish drug-pushers. Even in 2022, all politicians feel the compulsion to wear the poppy, although this year it seems to have taken the form of a small red button.

Pioneer Corps

My father’s Irish patriotism did not prevent him volunteering for the Pioneer Corps. Michael Young, in The Rise of the Meritocracy, (1958) took an unflattering view of the Pioneer Corps. He claimed that the morale of these “hewers and drawers  … these dull-witted men” was spectacularly increased  “when the stupid were kept together… and they were no longer daunted by having superior people to compete with”. In fairness to Young, it should be noted that his intent was satirical and his book was a prescient critique of how the cult of IQ measurement would create a dangerously smug ruling class and a profoundly demoralized lower class. That is true today as the British working class has lost its identity and has austerity and insecurity forced on it  by rich people who have never done a proper job.

On D-day, 6 June 1944, 13 Pioneer companies landed with the first allied wave and a further 10 companies with the second, making a total of about 6,700 men ashore by the end of the day. The first Pioneer party landed 20 minutes after Operation Overlord had started. Some were called upon to provide burial parties, for which they were given special clothing, equipment and transport. The men bivouacked in fields, in unusually bad weather, working extremely long hours with little rest. Owing to the extensive minefields, conditions were dangerous and there were casualties. Over 2,000 British personnel, serving with the Corps, and nearly 6,000 of other nationalities lost their lives.

This was when my father’s sense of smell left him. As well as triggering memories, the sense of smell has served us well as a warning of danger, for example the smell of gas, smoke suggesting that we need to take action to prevent harm by fire. The last thing my father remembered smelling was rotting corpses on the Normandy beaches. My father had no obvious wounds from the war but his anosmia was a real disability. Did Caen teach my father the flimsiness of the flesh, how fine is the mesh that binds muscle to bone, how temporary the breath? Despite his wit and humour, he lived, I now realize, with an unrelenting tinnitus of anxiety until his death. He died of cancer at the age of 56. He had no debts, but only six hundred pounds in the bank. There was insurance to pay for the funeral.

He was not complicit in the malignant forces of ideologies and systems of terror that crushed common people and swept them away. The great tides of history, of isms and empires buffet little people, hurt them, maim them, kill them, uproot them and inflict damage that lasts for years or generations. Today, in Ukraine the guiltless suffer from the delusions of the mighty.

Forgetting to Remember

We must contemplate the dangers of forgetting and also the dangers of remembering. Ernest Renan wrote that nationhood requires forgetting many things. He cited the massacre of Huguenots on St Bartholomew’s Day as a symbol of the kind of thing France needed to forget in order to be a nation. Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story Funes, the Memorious, describes a young man who, as a result of a riding accident, has lost his ability to forget. Funes has a tremendous memory, but he is so lost in the details of everything he knows that he is unable to convert the information into knowledge and unable, as a result, to grow in wisdom. Stephen Dedalus, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, said that history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake.

There comes a time when truth and reconciliation has to take the place of endlessly rehearsing grievances from centuries back. There are still riots all over the world as one tribe or another remembers its grievances.