–The New Statesman has posted an article about the influence of the General Strike on British history. This is by Alwyn W. Turner and is entitled “When Britain fought for revolution.” Here are the opening paragraphs:
A century on and still the definite article is used. The confrontation between the government and the trade unions that began on 4 May 1926 remains the General Strike, the only one Britain has seen. Perhaps that is its major legacy. The complete defeat of the strike, the capitulation of the union leaders after nine days, left a taste so bitter than there was a reluctance to repeat the experience. “It was as though a beast long fabled for its ferocity had emerged for an hour, scented danger, and slunk back to its lair,” wrote Evelyn Waugh 20 years later, in Brideshead Revisited.
Fictional portrayal of the Strike in Brideshead and Upstairs Downstairs tell it as a stories of posh chaps in plus fours volunteering to drive buses and lorries, and that largely remains the popular memory of the event. Even if this has faded in recent years – there was no depiction at all in Downton Abbey, for example – it has not been replaced by anything from the other side, that of the strikers. Instead, the most common image of the working class in the interwar period comes from a few years later with the pathetic dignity of the unemployed Jarrow Marchers, victims of circumstance, not active participants in events. All of which gives a somewhat distorted view of this turbulent period in British history, a moment of genuine revolutionary temper…
–A new book on Venice entitled “The Book Lover’s Guide to Venice” is being published. It is by Rachel Martin and is reviewed b Alexandra Lawrence. After discussing how the new guide compares with those previously printed and well established, the article concludes:
…I feel Evelyn Waugh put it best when he had his Brideshead Revisited protagonist, Charles Ryder, muse on his time in Venice: “I was drowning in honey, stingless.” And as [Rachel] Martin rightly says, somehow we know exactly what he means.
The full review is available on substack.com.
–In a Financial Times article focussing on what concerns are awakened by the Bank Holiday, Jo Elisson has written these opening paragraphs:
For most of Europe, this weekend is a bank holiday weekend. The traditional celebration that marks the birth of spring, May Day is rooted in the pagan festivals of Floralia (thanks to the Romans) and the Celtic Beltane. Fewer communities skip around the village maypole, or crown a May Queen, but the more subtle rituals beckoning summer are still indelibly part of our psyche. This weekend will see people putting on their gardening gloves, brunching on their balconies and more generally shifting into outdoor mode: I plan to enjoy a much overdue weekend hike in some verdant field somewhere in the countryside.
At the risk of sounding deeply pretentious, I cannot think of an English summer without recalling Evelyn Waugh. In the opening chapters of Brideshead Revisited the writer recalls “a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool’s-parsley… and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, such as our climate affords once or twice a year”…
—The Guardian has an editorial on the Festival of Britain which opened on 3 May 1951. Here’s an excerpt:
…In 1951, almost 8.5 million people visited the South Bank site alone. The festival was a triumph for the Labour government. But it was not without its critics. Some saw it as a declining-empire bread-and-circuses ploy; others as a sign of a changing of the cultural guard. Evelyn Waugh disapproved. Noël Coward wrote a satirical song called Don’t Make Fun of the Fair. A month after the festival closed on 1 October, the new Conservative government demolished everything, apart from the Royal Festival Hall…
The link will take you to a 2001 article which elaborates on Waugh’s feelings about the Festival.
–An article citing Waugh’s views on Pope Pius V was posted recently in a religious journal. Here are the opening paragraphs:
About a year ago, I was talking to a senior Dominican brother of our community in Oxford – I won’t say who – and I admitted to him that I thought I was ‘too worldly’. To which he responded, ‘oh good!’.
Now we remember one of the most unworldly Dominicans, Pope Saint Pius V, the observant Dominican and austere reformer, and the greatest of the four Dominican popes. You can see Pius V’s unworldliness in his uncompromising political decisions, the most famous of which concerned the Queen of England.
Evelyn Waugh wrote about this episode: “He confided in no one and took counsel from very few … he prayed earnestly about the situation in England, and saw it with complete clarity; it was a question that admitted of no doubt whatever. Elizabeth [I] was illegitimate by birth, … she had deposed her bishops, issued a heretical Prayer Book and forbidden her subjects the comfort of the sacraments. No honourable Catholic could be expected to obey her.”
Pope Pius therefore excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I and not only absolved her subjects of obedience to her, but threatened them with excommunication if they did obey her. This was of course a convenient pretext for her courtiers to persecute Catholics, one which they took full advantage of…
The full article is available here.
