“In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. … History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes.” Those were Winston Churchill’s words in one of the greatest, though least remembered, speeches of his life, his elegy for Neville Chamberlain days after Chamberlain had died in November 1940. They remain singularly apt for the years before and after Churchill spoke. That story, of how the British found themselves at war and then how they survived it, is the subject of Alan Allport’s “Britain at Bay.”
The author of several books, including a valuable study of British servicemen in 1939-45, Allport begins with a chapter called “Shire Folk.” This allusion to Tolkien becomes a riff on which he then plays throughout the book, and an unfortunate one for this reviewer, who has since boyhood suffered from acute Hobbitophobia. But the point Allport wants to make is a good one: The British saw themselves as a kindly, gentle, puzzled people, like those cute little critters in the Shire, which was not how others always saw them.
In a sharp turn, when this unusually informative and stimulating book really gets going, Allport takes two snapshots of violence. Coventry was bombed by the Luftwaffe in November 1940, but it had already been bombed by the Irish Republican Army in August 1939, when five people were killed by an explosive planted in a shopping street. The English had tried to forget or ignore Ireland since 1921, as Allport reminds us in a chapter called “Ulster Kristallnacht” (he likes provocative phrases: Another chapter is called “American Lebensraum”). A second snapshot, of Palestine during the Arab Revolt of 1936-39, shows shocking reprisals by British soldiers.
If this sheds a sharp light on English complacency and self-esteem, Allport queries other myths as well, like “the Hungry Thirties”: By the end of the decade the country “was far more prosperous than it had been a generation earlier.” One man who could take much credit for that was Neville Chamberlain, as chancellor of the Exchequer from 1931 to 1937, and before that as minister of health from 1924 to 1929, when he had been responsible for much more of the system of public welfare than is usually remembered. Instead he is reviled for trying and failing to prevent war, and Allport joins in, calling Chamberlain “vain, mean … spiteful, obstinate.”
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