Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

English History, 1914-1945 by A. J. P. TaylorReview by: F. S. L. LyonsIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 15, No. 59 (Mar., 1967), pp. 351-354Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30004991 .

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REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 351

If this is extravagant pessimism, Professor Shaw provides ample evidence that within the narrowing limits of the convict system, there was horror enough. He himself is optimistic: 'socially it [transportation] did no great harm'. The wide dimensions of Professor Shaw's own study testify to the importance of convict transportation in the history of Australia. It is hard to believe that it left no scars.

P. J. O'FARRELL

ENGLISH HISTORY, 1914-1945. By A. J. P. Taylor. Pp. xxvii, 709. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1965. 45s. (Oxford History of England)

WHETHER or not the time has come to make an honest woman out of Clio as the muse of contemporary history is a question which has begun to exercise serious historians much more urgently than would have been conceivable even twenty years ago. Certainly, the movement for legitim- isation has been gathering way very rapidly. Mr David Thomson has preached-and practised-the virtues of contemporary history in several volumes; Mr Geoffrey Barraclough has written a small book full of large generalisations on the subject; more recently still, contemporary history has acquired an institute and a special journal to itself. And, more striking than any of these signs of grace, the movement has received a kind of pontifical blessing with the decision of the Oxford History of England to ignore the limitations of the fifty-year rule and to extend its frontiers from 1914 to 1945-

It was a bold decision and perhaps one not taken without misgivings or backward glances to the comfortably solid ground of the earlier histories. How else is one to explain the curious reaction of the publishers to criticism of the dust-cover which, as originally issued, consisted of photographs of Passchendaele and D-day, together with portraits of Churchill, Lloyd George, Hitler, Roosevelt and Stalin? This, it seems, was objected to by several reviewers who for some inscrutable reason thought it wrong that a book with no interior illustrations should have pictures outside. The publishers immediately withdrew the offending wrapper and replaced it with the sedate cover customary with the Oxford History, which reveals nothing more compromising than the title and the names of the author and publishers.

Presumably this absurd episode relates in some way to the publishers' anxiety to stress the continuity between this and the other volumes in the series. But if this was their main anxiety why did they ask Mr Taylor to wriie it? They must have known, surely, that however conservative the cover of their book, the contents would be radically different from anything that had gone before. Outwardly, it is true, he conforms as much as it is in him to do, and the chapters are equipped with headings for the various pages quite in the old style. There is a long and authori- tative bibliography which, on the surface, but on the surface only, resembles earlier bibliographies, and the biographical footnotes follow the practice of previous contributors. Yet, anyone familiar with the series as a whole, and especially with the volume most apt for comparison,

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352 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

Sir Robert Ensor's England, 1870-r194, will at once become aware of very great differences. What these differences are, how far they are inherent in the subject or peculiar to Mr Taylor's treatment of it, whether they add to or detract from the value of his book, are questions which have to be investigated. First, however, it is only proper to pay some tribute to the very real merits of this remarkable book.

To appreciate the magnitude of Mr Taylor's achievement one has only to glance at his bibliography. The amount of material-even though the archives were then mostly still fast-bound by the fifty-year rule-is vast, and merely to master it, let alone work it into a coherent structure of narrative and analysis, is a major feat of scholarship. But Mr Taylor has always been among the most widely read of English historians and perhaps one tends to take this expertise for granted. Nevertheless, tribute should be paid to the extraordinary skill and ingenuity which have gone into the construction of this book. His main themes, as he says in his preface, chose themselves. They were, inevitably, war, economic crisis and again war. In a book of 6oo pages of text, the first world war is treated with admirable concision in roughly I2o pages, recurring economic crises account for about 150, the second world war and its immediate antecedents for slightly over 2oo. The remainder is occupied by some more or less incidental political passages and by two chapters attempting to review social changes in the early 'twenties and 'thirties.

The most important departure here from previous convention is that Mr Taylor has deliberately abandoned the old idea of writing a full political narrative and then adding separate chapters on social, economic and intellectual themes. This is not a complete solution, for he, like his predecessors, is weakest in his efforts to deal with literary and intellectual trends, but it does have the great advantage that it ends the artificial divorce between economics and politics which distorted earlier volumes in the series and, if persisted in, would have made nonsense of this one.

A further break with past practice is also partly dictated by the nature of the subject, though one suspects it is partly a product of Mr Taylor's experimental technique. It is hinted at in the publisher's blurb, which states that the author treats 'the life of the English people' and 'shows how this took on new forms without conscious direction or often against it '. The effect of this treatment is to give a confused, almost kaleido- scopic, appearance to what is in reality a very deeply thought-out approach. What Mr Taylor is saying to us over and over again is, in effect, that in this or that situation the government has taken this or that step, intending to produce a particular result, whereas in fact the result which has emerged is something quite different and unforeseen. He demonstrates this most forcibly in his account of the conduct of the first world war; when he describes the National Government's groping efforts towards economic recovery in the depression years; and most of all, perhaps, in his analysis of appeasement between 1936 and 1939. In all these instances what he is anxious to convey-and does so with great skill-is that confusion and uncertainty are the normal conditions of politics and that the carefully-laid plans and clear-cut decisions on which historians are apt to dwell in loving detail are all too likely to be the

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REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 353

products of their own imaginations and quite untenable when you get, as with such nearly contemporary history you can get, close to stubborn and grubby reality.

It is tempting, too, to speculate if the subtle changes in Mr Taylor's style may not also be part of his attempt to bring home to his readers the immediacy of the recent past. He avoids altogether the bland narrative -' mandarin academic' we may call it-which in the earlier Oxford histories often gave one the quite erroneous impression that all difficulties had been smoothed away and that everything was capable of neat and rational interpretation. Instead, he alternates between short, sharp, colloquial sentences of five or six words or less, and more sustained, but equally incisive. pasages of intense and often difficult analysis. The outcome is a strange but undeniably effective hybrid-by the Sunday Express out of the New Statesman-but owing much more to Taylor's friend Beaverbrook (movingly commemorated in the preface) than to Kingsley Martin.

All these breaches with tradition are more or less conscious, and quite justifiable, responses to the special problems of writing contemporary history. Some of the other innovations, however, are more questionable and seem to spring from Mr Taylor's highly individual approach to his subject. At the purely technical, but still important, level it is necessary to criticise his misuse of footnotes. Far too much important information (including, sometimes, qualifications of the text) is packed away in the footnotes. Footnotes, as the most callow research student knows, are intended primarily to indicate the sources from which statements in the text are derived. This does sometimes happen in Mr Taylor's book, but too often important statements are made without any reference at all being given. Thus, he repeats (p. 15, n. i) the injurious story about Asquith being the worse for drink on the treasury bench, without giving authority; he says of Churchhill during the general strike (p. 245) that he ' tried to provoke conflict by parading armoured cars through the streets', but does not tell us on what he bases this strange statement; on many occasions he cites figures which are essential to his argument without giving us the source. His reply to all this would no doubt be that in a work of this size, dealing with so much that is only recently past, a thorough-going identification of sources would have overburdened his book. It is a plausible but not a convincing argument. Surely, if contemporary history is to be an acceptable discipline it needs more not less authentication, and the very fact that much of the material is still inaccessible makes it all the more necessary for the historian to anchor his assertions to whatever verifiable facts he can bring together.

This technical criticism leads on to something more fundamental. Although the publisher's blurb credits Mr Taylor with the belief that 'even the most recent history can be presented with detachment', he does not in fact hesitate to throw out some highly personal opinions which the uninformed reader might easily be misled into taking more seriously than they deserve. The supreme example of this is his treatment of Hitler's part in the outbreak of the second world war, where he still maintains (as in an earlier book) that in 1939 Hitler was bluffing and did

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354 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

not want a full-scale war against the west. It is possible he may be right, but the unwary reader ought at least to have been warned that many other historians take a very different view and that this whole topic is still the subject of acute controversy. On a smaller scale, but still sympto- matic of a tendency general throughout the book, are numerous obiter dicta which Mr Taylor might find it difficult to justify in detail. Was it really true, for example, that Jews were treated as badly in other countries as in Nazi Germany (p. 419)? Is it in any sense meaningful to say (p. 233) that 'like all cultural dictatorships, the B.B.C. was more important for what it silenced than for what it achieved'? And what are we to make of an historian who solemnly assures us (p. 311) that 'literature tells us little when we deal, as we must in the twentieth century, with the people of England'?

It is not necessary to go on enumerating examples of this kind of thing although they occur very frequently. It is enough to make the point that Mr Taylor, being a man of strong views, finds it impossible to keep these views out of his book. Nor should we wish him to do so, for it would be a lot duller without them, provided the reader realises how subjective his most dogmatic remarks tend to be, and remembers that the historian who grew up during the period about which he is writing is himself a product of that period and cannot extricate himself from it. This caution applies to the bibliography as well as to the text. It must, indeed, be the raciest bibliography ever published by the Oxford Univer- sity Press and it is often very amusing, again provided one makes due allowance for the author's idiosyncracies. In one of his entries, indeed, he supplies a weapon that might be turned against himself. Of J. F. C. Fuller's The second world war, Mr Taylor remarks that it 'demonstrates that the author should have been entrusted with the conduct of the war'. One might easily retort that Mr Taylor's own book often leads one to suppose that only he could have run the country properly between the wars. But perhaps such sacro egoismo was necessary if his provocative, valuable book was ever to be written at all.

F. S. L. LYoNs

SOE IN FRANCE: AN ACCOUNT OF THE WORK OF THE BRITISH SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE IN FRANCE, I940-1944. By M. R. D. Foot. Pp. xxvii, 55o. London: H. M. Stationery Office. 1966. 45s. (History of the Second World War)

'SOE, the Special Operations Executive, was an independent British secret service, set up in July 194o and disbanded in January 1946. Its main business was the ancient one of conducting subversive warfare.' So Mr Foot tells us at the beginning of his absorbing book (p. xvii). This subversive warfare had two principal aspects: sabotage, and the raising of secret armies in the territories occupied by Germany. It was far from being confined to France, and this book deals only with a part of the work of SOE. This is the book's subject-matter. Its nature is described in the preface and appendix A, on sources. It is an official history,

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