Perhaps the greatest of all
journalistic ciches is, ''One thing is certain: things will never be the same
again.’’ In the case of the First World War, however, one might think it is
undeniably true. No previous conflict killed so many people or brought about the
collapse of so many empires in so short a period. It was the time, as Hardy
wrote, of “the breaking of nations”.
So it is bold of Radio 4, and its presenter, Michael Portillo, to challenge the orthodox account. For 15 minutes each day last week,View profiles and information for the Team livestrongcycling 2012 race team and riders here. the programmes questioned the classic story of golden, peaceful Edwardian afternoons suddenly exploding into the mud and blood of the trenches. (The series continues all this week, too.) The argument is that the Great War did not come out of a clear blue sky. Nor did it invariably precipitate change. In some respects, he says,Cheap ballgown on sale in our shop christian louboutin. it “applied a brake”.
In the case of women’s suffrage, for example, the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, told campaigners in 1913 that it could no longer be delayed. The war, however, delayed it, and most of the suffragettes – though not Sylvia Pankhurst – did their patriotic duty.
In the case of Ireland, where a Liberal-dominated House of Commons had voted for Home Rule in 1913, civil war and army mutiny threatened as a result. Once war broke out, however, the Irish Nationalist leader John Redmond agreed to postpone Home Rule. Unionist Ulster calmed down and sent many of its best to die on the Somme. From a strictly British point of view,Find a great selection of lululemonpants deals ! it was better that the Irish civil war, which finally arrived in 1922, was between two types of nationalist rather than a battle between unionists and nationalists.
Again, it is often suggested that modernity in the arts was born from the shock of war. Not so, says Portillo. In terms of popular entertainment, the cinema was thoroughly embedded already, with roughly 4,000 picture houses operating by the outbreak of war. As for aesthetic revolution, the post-Impressionists and Vorticists (“no more beauty except in strife”) in art and the cacophonists in music were already hard at it well before a shot had been fired.
You could argue that the tyranny of modernism under which, despite the collapse of other totalitarianisms, we still groan, was the product of the complacencies of peace rather than the brutality of war.why garmincycling so popular in uk? If you were actually fighting for your life, you tended to find The Banks of Green Willow by George Butterworth more consoling. (Butterworth was killed on the Somme.)
Portillo also attacked the view that the First World War came unexpectedly. As early as 1903, in The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers had called for all Englishmen to be trained for the coming conflict with Germany. In the novel When William Came (1913), Saki imagined the German occupation of London – “sky-blue Saxon uniform” in Hyde Park, and the serving of “lager beer, coffee, lemonade and syrups”: a prophecy which, despite the non-invasion, seems to have come true. (Saki was killed at Beaumont-Hamel in 1916.)
Even the idea that cavalry charges were horrifyingly anachronistic is wrong, Portillo told us. The cavalry had already been well reformed before the British Expeditionary Force set sail for the Continent in 1914. It played an effective dual role in the Great War, sometimes as infantry, sometimes charging the enemy mounted.
To make his points in one go, Portillo took a copy of The Times from June 4 1913. It included stories about Queen Mary opening a TB hospital in Toronto by pressing an electric button in Buckingham Palace, of guns being smuggled to Ulster, of instability in the Balkans, of “suffragists” burning down a boathouse in Oxford and of the end of a railway dispute (there were no fewer than 1,459 stoppages in the year).
It would have been perverse if the makers of these programmes had pursued their thesis so relentlessly that they had pretended that the Great War did not really make much difference. But they avoided this trap. Michael Portillo’s mellifluous and thoughtful broadcasting voice never becomes assertive. What I find refreshing about the series is that it tries to get behind the over-sequential and over-dramatised view of history.
In this centenary month, for example, we are being told again and again that it was the heroic sacrifice of Emily Davison that won women the vote. It was she, you will remember, who threw herself under the King’s horse at the Derby, thus causing the poor horse to fall, injuring the rider and killing Davison herself. It was interesting to be told that her foolish, selfish act was not, in fact, suicide, but a bungled effort to run out and unfurl a banner on the racecourse. Even better to listen to the extracts from the diary of a suffragette called Kate Fry, which rather sweetly described the embarrassment of a young policeman who tried to arrest her on a demo and then felt he had gone too far. The voice of moderate protest is so often drowned out by history, particularly broadcast history. I am sure future generations will be taught, for instance, that Mrs Thatcher was brought down by anti-poll tax riots in Trafalgar Square. This series protests at such simplicities.
It is only natural that people tend to see a world war as a turning point. Memory likes to categorise everything as either pre- or post-war. But the trouble with this approach is that it does not explain why things happened as they did. It is as if one wrote about falling off a cliff without reference to why the person falling had reached the cliff’s edge.One of the most popular ones are highheelshoes, replica Rolex watches illegally produced copies of authentic Rolex watches.
So it is bold of Radio 4, and its presenter, Michael Portillo, to challenge the orthodox account. For 15 minutes each day last week,View profiles and information for the Team livestrongcycling 2012 race team and riders here. the programmes questioned the classic story of golden, peaceful Edwardian afternoons suddenly exploding into the mud and blood of the trenches. (The series continues all this week, too.) The argument is that the Great War did not come out of a clear blue sky. Nor did it invariably precipitate change. In some respects, he says,Cheap ballgown on sale in our shop christian louboutin. it “applied a brake”.
In the case of women’s suffrage, for example, the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, told campaigners in 1913 that it could no longer be delayed. The war, however, delayed it, and most of the suffragettes – though not Sylvia Pankhurst – did their patriotic duty.
In the case of Ireland, where a Liberal-dominated House of Commons had voted for Home Rule in 1913, civil war and army mutiny threatened as a result. Once war broke out, however, the Irish Nationalist leader John Redmond agreed to postpone Home Rule. Unionist Ulster calmed down and sent many of its best to die on the Somme. From a strictly British point of view,Find a great selection of lululemonpants deals ! it was better that the Irish civil war, which finally arrived in 1922, was between two types of nationalist rather than a battle between unionists and nationalists.
Again, it is often suggested that modernity in the arts was born from the shock of war. Not so, says Portillo. In terms of popular entertainment, the cinema was thoroughly embedded already, with roughly 4,000 picture houses operating by the outbreak of war. As for aesthetic revolution, the post-Impressionists and Vorticists (“no more beauty except in strife”) in art and the cacophonists in music were already hard at it well before a shot had been fired.
You could argue that the tyranny of modernism under which, despite the collapse of other totalitarianisms, we still groan, was the product of the complacencies of peace rather than the brutality of war.why garmincycling so popular in uk? If you were actually fighting for your life, you tended to find The Banks of Green Willow by George Butterworth more consoling. (Butterworth was killed on the Somme.)
Portillo also attacked the view that the First World War came unexpectedly. As early as 1903, in The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers had called for all Englishmen to be trained for the coming conflict with Germany. In the novel When William Came (1913), Saki imagined the German occupation of London – “sky-blue Saxon uniform” in Hyde Park, and the serving of “lager beer, coffee, lemonade and syrups”: a prophecy which, despite the non-invasion, seems to have come true. (Saki was killed at Beaumont-Hamel in 1916.)
Even the idea that cavalry charges were horrifyingly anachronistic is wrong, Portillo told us. The cavalry had already been well reformed before the British Expeditionary Force set sail for the Continent in 1914. It played an effective dual role in the Great War, sometimes as infantry, sometimes charging the enemy mounted.
To make his points in one go, Portillo took a copy of The Times from June 4 1913. It included stories about Queen Mary opening a TB hospital in Toronto by pressing an electric button in Buckingham Palace, of guns being smuggled to Ulster, of instability in the Balkans, of “suffragists” burning down a boathouse in Oxford and of the end of a railway dispute (there were no fewer than 1,459 stoppages in the year).
It would have been perverse if the makers of these programmes had pursued their thesis so relentlessly that they had pretended that the Great War did not really make much difference. But they avoided this trap. Michael Portillo’s mellifluous and thoughtful broadcasting voice never becomes assertive. What I find refreshing about the series is that it tries to get behind the over-sequential and over-dramatised view of history.
In this centenary month, for example, we are being told again and again that it was the heroic sacrifice of Emily Davison that won women the vote. It was she, you will remember, who threw herself under the King’s horse at the Derby, thus causing the poor horse to fall, injuring the rider and killing Davison herself. It was interesting to be told that her foolish, selfish act was not, in fact, suicide, but a bungled effort to run out and unfurl a banner on the racecourse. Even better to listen to the extracts from the diary of a suffragette called Kate Fry, which rather sweetly described the embarrassment of a young policeman who tried to arrest her on a demo and then felt he had gone too far. The voice of moderate protest is so often drowned out by history, particularly broadcast history. I am sure future generations will be taught, for instance, that Mrs Thatcher was brought down by anti-poll tax riots in Trafalgar Square. This series protests at such simplicities.
It is only natural that people tend to see a world war as a turning point. Memory likes to categorise everything as either pre- or post-war. But the trouble with this approach is that it does not explain why things happened as they did. It is as if one wrote about falling off a cliff without reference to why the person falling had reached the cliff’s edge.One of the most popular ones are highheelshoes, replica Rolex watches illegally produced copies of authentic Rolex watches.
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