Written by Henri Pirenne,
Professor of Medieval and Belgian History at the University of Ghent, this book
chronicles the history of Belgian democracy from medieval times to the
seventeenth century. Pirenne was a renowned medievalist whose nationalist
histories, as well as his arrest and internment during the German occupation, had
led to him being revered as a local hero. His son was killed during the battle
of Yser in 1914.
Belgium was central to Britain’s
war aims. Germany’s invasion of Belgium had led Britain to enter the war, and atrocities
committed by the Germans in Belgium became cornerstones of Britain’s argument that
it was fighting a just war. British families housed thousands of Belgian refugees.
This history of Belgian democracy was part of the propaganda war.
Although
it was written in 1910, this 1915 translation asked ‘May the English-speaking
public extend to [Belgium’s] early history a little of the sympathy which it is
lavishing on their present misfortunes!’ The Manchester Guardian’s review hinted that Pirenne’s scholarship had
been shoehorned into the question of ‘Belgian democracy’ when it was really
about ‘city commonwealths in the towns of the Low Countries, of which the
famous towns now in Belgian territory were only the most important’. The book
is a lively and accessible study of Belgian political history. The author does
not exaggerate the success of Belgian democracy and is keen to suggest its
piecemeal progress and regular stumbles. Nevertheless, Belgium is shown to have
provided some of the most potent instances of democratic governance in the
medieval and early modern eras.
It is
not a work of propaganda. Pirenne is interested in the conditions for the
growth of democracy. He argues that the dominance of merchants in the thriving
Belgian cities was fertile ground for a ‘democratic spirit’. This was
continually under threat as one interest sought to dominate others – the
Church, the Emperor, dominant traders, Calvinists, capitalists – and Pirenne
does not argue that the democratic spirit was inherently Belgian. The German
invasion was the greatest threat to this spirit, however, and this is why the
book had been translated into English.
A. S. Peake, B.
Bosanquet and F. Bonavia, Germany in the
Nineteenth Century (second series) (1915)
This book summarised
the achievements of German theology, philosophy and music in the nineteenth
century. The introduction by the historian T. F. Tout explains that it was
first published in 1912 in the hope that ‘appreciations by British scholars of
the part played by Germany in the development of modern civilisation might
serve to promote more friendly feelings between the two nations’. Given the
outbreak of war, ‘the writers can no longer take the optimistic line which they
so recently felt justified in assuming, yet they do not regret that, in their
anxiety to take a favourable view of Germany’s attitude, they under-estimated
the sinister influences which for the present have proved triumphant’. Tout is
clear that the current Germany is one of ‘militant aggression, of violated
faith, of cynical self-seeking and disregard of the honourable traditions of
civilised warfare’, but that it is still useful to offer this scholarship and
pay tribute to the more civilised traditions in Germany.
The
chapters detail important features of German intellectual life. A. S. Peake, a
theological scholar at the university, covered theology. The philosopher and
social theorist Bernard Bosanquet described philosophy. Finally, F. Bonavia contributed
a chapter on music. German cultural strengths are seen as biblical criticism,
Idealist philosophy and the music of Beethoven, Wagner and others. Bonavia goes
as far as to say that the ‘history of the musical development of the nineteenth
century is in the main the history of German music’.
The Manchester Guardian agreed that ‘there
has never been a time when it was more necessary to remember that the German
military class is far from representing the best thought of the German people’.
The Athenaeum doubted whether the
achievements described in the book were as distinctly German as the authors
suggested, citing non-German influences on Mozart, Schopenhauer and others.
They were in agreement with the aims of the book, however, sincerely thanking
the authors ‘for reminding us that there are great and good Germans and that,
when peace is restored, we shall do well not to stand aloof from those who
survive as if they were lepers’.
Ramsay Muir
(ed.), The Making of British India,
1756–1858, described in a series of dispatches, treaties, statutes, and other
documents, selected and edited with introductions and notes (1915)
This history by Muir is based on East India Company reports
and letters. The East India Company had begun trading with India in the
seventeenth century and, starting with Bengal, began to have increasing control
over the fragmented country until it was formally superseded by the British Crown
in 1858. Muir offers a picture of the enlightened British governance of India.
While it is based on primary documents, it is certainly one-sided and offers no
platform for Indian voices.
Prior to British control,
India was a mere chaos of warring
principalities; dynasties rose and fell; the patient peasant endured the
ravages and exactions of one plundering master after another; the waste and
carnage of war never ceased; and everywhere Might was Right, and the arbitrary
will of the strongest prevailed. At the end of the century, after one final
convulsion, war had altogether ceased … in every town and village, judges and
magistrates administered one fixed and unvarying law, without bribes and
without favour, to all who appealed to have their rights protected or their
wrongs redressed.
Muir claims that the move from trade to empire was ‘accidental’.
He praises the greater control taken on by Warren Hastings – perhaps the ‘greatest
Englishman who has ever laboured in India’ – in the 1770s, based on sound
principles, including no power without responsibility, respect for Indian
customs and peasants’ rights. He has particular respect for the ‘remarkable
group of men, perhaps the ablest group whom the Anglo-Indian service has ever
produced’ who reformed Indian institutions in the 1820s and 30s. While they
sought to ‘make the best of Indian usages’, they also worked to give India ‘all
that was best in Western civilisation’, including law, railways, irrigation ‘on
a scale unknown’ before, and a modern civil service, as well as eradicating
barbarous Indian customs such as sati (the
burning alive of widows, which was much exaggerated and criticised by the
British press).
According to Muir, it was the too-rapid
introduction of such innovations by Dalhousie (the ‘maker of modern India’)
that offended ‘Oriental conservatism’ and led to the Mutiny in 1857. This was
nothing more than a blip and a misunderstanding in the story of British
tutelage, however. This paternalistic and patronising view would be strongly
criticised by Indian and Western scholars today, and indicates that Muir had an
extremely rose-tinted view of British rule. Muir is glowing in praise of
empire, suggesting that ‘The pax
Britannica has been a yet more wonderful thing than the pax Romana.’ In his view, British
governance of India had been an act of benevolence, not greed. In 1824 it was
officially stated that ‘the gradual preparation of the Indian peoples for
self-government ought to be the aim of those who had the direction of Indian
affairs, a view which, at this date, none but men of British race could have
entertained’. The Government of India Act of 1833 stipulated that no native of
India should be ‘debarrred by race, colour, or religion from holding any office
whatsoever under the British Raj’. Nevertheless, this progressive policy came
with the caveat that Indians as a whole had to be ‘sufficiently enlightened’
for self-rule – something not achieved until 1947 (when the Second World War
had exhausted British resources).
Writing in 1915, Muir was sanguine about
the ‘gradual substitution for the idea of dominion of the idea of partnership
in that great brotherhood of free civilised nations which make up the British
Empire’. We should remember that India was a key supplier of troops for the war
effort, a source of revenue for the British, and of employment for Muir, who
had had a visiting lectureship at the University of Punjab (1913–14) before
moving to Manchester. Germany had attempted to foment revolt among India’s
hundreds of millions of Muslims, and Muir’s history was therefore doing an
important job in justifying British rule.
1918–19: Massacre and Radicalism in British History
F. A. Bruton, The Story of
Peterloo, written for the centenary August 16, 1919 (1919)
F. A. Bruton (ed.), Three Accounts
of Peterloo by Eyewitnesses Bishop Stanley, Lord Hylton and John Benjamin Smith
(1921)
James Hindle Hudson, Peterloo: a
history of the massacre an the condition which preceded it … A story for
working people to teach their children. Written for the Peterloo Centenary
Committee, with a preface by J. Bruce Glasier (1918)
These three books
followed in MUP’s strong tradition of local history. Bruton was a teacher at
Manchester Grammar School and produced two scholarly accounts of the massacre.
Hudson’s was a more overtly political account, subtitled ‘a story for working
people to teach their children’, and written for the Peterloo Centenary Committee, which
comprised an array of left-wing groups.
Peterloo
was a seminal event in both the history of Manchester and the democratic
movement in Britain, and the massacre is still commemorated today. A peaceful
protest in favour of parliamentary reform attended by thousands was attacked by
mounted Yeomen and hussars, leaving 15 dead and hundreds injured. The
demonstrators at Peterloo were campaigning for wider suffrage and better
representation for Manchester. The immediate result was a crackdown on free
speech and assembly. Small improvements were gained in 1832, 1867 and 1884. In
1918, just before these books were published, property qualifications for
voting were removed and some married women over 30 were allowed to vote for the
first time. Manchester’s liberal and working-class movements played leading
roles in these developments, and the city as a whole can be said to have been
progressive throughout the nineteenth century.
The
Peterloo massacre occurred against a backdrop of economic depression and
political radicalism. Bruton quotes from a contemporary report sent to the Home
Secretary, warning of ‘deep distresses of the manufacturing classes of this
extensive population … when the people are oppressed with hunger we do not
wonder at their giving ear to any doctrines which they are told will redress
their grievances’. The working classes
and significant portions of the middle classes could not vote at this time.
Workers had no recourse during periods of economic depression or in response to
ill-treatment by bosses. Hudson noted that ‘All organisation for the
improvement of wages by collective bargaining or “direct action” was forbidden’
from the 1790s, though the ‘friendly societies’ were trades unions in all but
name and had 1 million members. From these came the Peterloo protestors. The
authorities, worried by the war with revolutionary France, cracked down on
political disturbances.
Hudson was positive about this form of
political expression. Leading up to Peterloo,
[t]he greatest propaganda effort was the
monster demonstration. For months before each demonstration, the people
prepared by drills and marches, holding regular communication with each other,
though separated by miles and miles of open country. Nothing could damp their
enthusiasm. For them the Pennine Chain no longer existed. Great bodies of men
swarmed over Blackstone Edge and Saddleworth Moor for the purpose of attending
a political demonstration, with an ardour that is not even to be imagined by
the man who to-day turns nonchalantly out from his home to listen to a few
words of a political speech in the next street. Large numbers of working men
gained great facility as speakers. They thundered against the rotten parliament
elected by the rotten boroughs.
As Bruton notes, the poet-leader Bamford instructed these
drilling parties to be pacific: ‘we would disarm the bitterness of our political
opponents by a display of cleanliness, sobriety, and decorum such as we never
before had exhibited’. However, the protestors’ rough treatment of government spies
meant that the authorities were soon ‘in a panic’. Bruton agrees with the
authorities responsible for the massacre that there had been plotting by some
of the reformers, in some cases ‘decidedly dangerous’. He places more emphasis
on a general estrangement between employers and workers and a mutual enmity.
Bruton’s
1921 book is scholarly rather than celebratory. It sets out the accounts
provided by three eyewitnesses alongside short commentaries on the men and
their testimonies. Appendices show relics of the event, maps, pictures and
notes on the casualty figures. The book is therefore a valuable resource for
students of the massacre. The accounts, while not exciting, provide an
immediacy and a sense of the period that bring the reader closer to the famous
event. Bishop Stanley’s account serves to exonerate the demonstrators: ‘I saw
no symptoms of riot or disturbance before the meeting; the impression on my
mind was that the people were sullenly peaceful.’ John Benjamin Smith, the
first chairman of the Anti-Corn Law League which campaigned against the tariffs
on corn imports supported by landowners to raise the price of corn, agreed: ‘crowds
of people in all directions, full of good humour, laughing and shouting and
making fun’. Both concur in placing the blame on the inexperienced Yeomen.
Sir
William G. H. Jolliffe (Lord Hylton) was a lieutenant in the 15th Hussars, who
rode on the crowd. His account, given in 1845, describes the bad planning on
the part of the magistrates, which meant that when the horsemen were supposed
to advance at a walk, they were surrounded by the crowd and therefore caused
chaos and panic. The hussars used the flats of their swords but ‘sometimes, as
is almost inevitably the case when men are placed in such situations, the edge
was used’. Jolliffe reckoned the wounds received by protesters were few
considering the situation; ‘beyond all doubt, however, the far greater amount
of injuries were from the pressure of the routed multitude’. He detailed the
aggressive behaviour of some of the mob.
Bruton’s sympathies ultimately lie with the
protesters, showing the continued strength of the liberal tradition in
Manchester.
It all seems so unfair. They were inarticulate. They had come, with all
the hilarity of a general holiday, to ask that they might have a Voice. They
were met by the bungling of incompetent authorities, behind whom loomed the
great, strong, repressive Government, saying: ‘I am God, and King, and Law,’
backed by a House of Commons that was hopelessly unrepresentative. Yet their
blood, as has been well said, proved in the end to be the seed of some of our
most cherished liberties.
Hudson’s book is more directly political. He
is lyrical about Peterloo itself:
There is no time in the history of modern
democracy so moving as that hot summer morning of August 16th, 1819, when every
Lancashire town round Manchester sent its contingent of poverty dressed in its
Sunday best to Peterloo. The people, mainly, were weavers, spinners and
hatters. Their hearts beat high with hope, for they were sure the way to the
new heaven and new earth would be free to all, if only the gates of parliament
were open. Full of a peaceful intent, they brought their wives and children
with them as a proof that they neither expected nor desired riot and disorder.
Their enemies made the presence of those women and children, after they had cut
them down, a reproach against the people. To most of them Manchester was quite
unknown. In these days of trains and trams it is hard to conceive the
impressiveness of their great enterprise.
With respect to the time of writing, Hudson asked: ‘to what
extend is the ruthless repression of popular movements at the time of Peterloo
likely to be again attempted? How far, at the conclusion of a great war, can
the workers retain and increase whatever political freedom they possess?’ He
detailed the under-appreciated work of female reform societies, which was again
coming to prominence in the context of the suffragettes.
As Bruton writes, Peterloo prompted an ‘avalanche’
of tracts for and against the reformers. Continuity with contemporary
Manchester politics was suggested by the work of the Manchester Guardian’s founding editor in reporting the massacre. These books show the importance of Manchester’s history, and
the seriousness with which it was taken by residents of the city in 1921.
Mark Hovell, The Chartist Movement, by the late Mark
Hovell. Edited and completed, with a memoir, by Professor T. F. Tout
Mark Hovell was a local working-class boy who had won a
scholarship to Manchester Grammar School. Although he left at 12 to work as a
pupil teacher at Moston Lane Municipal School, he later won a Hulme scholarship
to attend Manchester University. At the age of 24 he became assistant lecturer,
in charge of workers’ education classes in Colne, Ashton and Leigh. Although a ‘slim,
quiet, unassuming and nervous young man’, he quickly won the confidence of his
audience as ‘one who sympathised with the sorrows and sufferings of the people’.
In 1914 Hovell joined the Officer Training Corps, before becoming a second lieutenant in the 1st Battalion Sherwood Foresters. Posted to the Somme, he died in 1916 at the age of 28 while
trying to rescue one of his men from an explosion. Overcome by fumes, he fell
down a mine shaft and died.
Hovell had written frequently to Professor T.
F. Tout about his MA thesis from the frontline. Tout made sure the thesis was
published and wrote a memoir of Hovell. Hovell’s main interest was British
social history, particularly Chartism. Tout wrote that ‘much of the vividness
and directness of his appeal was due to the fact that he was speaking on
subjects which he himself was investigating at first hand’.
Before the war more friendly exchanges
between Britain and the ‘other Germany’ of scholars and artists had been
possible (as was emphasised by Peake,
Bosanquet and Bonavia, as discussed above). Hovell had travelled to Germany to study social
history (kulturgeschichte) under the
innovative Professor Lamprecht. Even then German chauvinism was becoming
apparent, however, and Tout notes that although stimulated intellectually, Hovell
was unhappy at German militarism and ‘crass materialism’.
Tout also noted that when he began to work
at the university, Hovell had to pay back the costs of his teacher training, as
he was no longer teaching in schools. This, Tout said, put him in a similar
position to an ‘indentured coolie’. Tout hoped for better funding for university
lecturers and research and had hoped to set up an Institute of Historical
Research in Manchester, before being pipped at the post by London University.
Summarising Hovell’s character, Tout wrote:
He had nothing of the bellicose or martial
spirit; but he had a stern sense of obligation and a keen eye to realities.
Like other contemporaries who had some experience in Germany, he fully realised
the inevitableness [sic] of the
struggle and knew that every man was bound to take his place in the grave and
prolonged effort by which alone England could escape overwhelming disaster.
Yet Tout emphasised that the book was being published for its
scholarly value, and not only for reasons of sentiment and commemoration.
Hovell contextualised Chartism in the long
history of radical thought from the 1640s on. After Waterloo, such thought attracted
working-class support. This radicalism aimed for natural rights as ends in themselves.
After 1832, however, these had become means to the ‘social and economic
regeneration of society’.
During the period 1815–40 industrialisation
began in earnest. Large fluctuations in the economy occurred and new industrial
systems meant the ‘social distance which separated employers and employed was
widened as capital seemed to become more and more impersonal’. There was ‘hideous
exploitation of women and children in mines and collieries as well as in other
non-regulated industries. Working men might with reason feel that they were isolated,
neglected, and exposed to the oppression of a social system which was not of
their own making or choosing, but which, as they thought, was not beyond the
control of their united power.’
The Chartist movement derived ideas from several
sources, including the French Revolution. Its immediate ancestor was the London
Working Men’s Association and Anti-Poor Law agitations. It was a nationwide
movement with ‘ideas from London’, ‘organisation from Birmingham’ and ‘vehemence
from Lancashire and Yorkshire’. The Charter was taken up with enthusiasm by working
men’s clubs, especially after the poverty of 1838. Yet for all its force, there
were splits in the ranks along class, regional and trade lines.
Although many see Chartism as one of the ‘lost
causes of history’, Hovell shows how its principles have ‘gradually become
parts of the British constitution’. Progress has been made and the ‘domination
of the middle class, prepared for by the Act of 1832, is at least as much a
matter of ancient history as the power of the landed aristocracy’. But while
the political aims of the Chartists have mostly been realised, the vaguer ideas
of ‘social regeneration’ behind Chartism have not. Indeed, Hovell argues that
social Chartism was a protest and not a full vision. It contained a variety of
views, from socialism to Jacobinism to individualism to a reactionary vision
wherein ‘a nation of small farms, a contented peasantry, rooted to the soil,
and capable by association of controlling its own destinies, was to replace the
sordid industrialism of the factory system’. These diverse currents
successfully made ‘common cause against some common and glaring evils’. Before
Chartism it had been the ‘duty of the common man to obey his masters and be contented
with his miserable lot’.
Hovell’s admiration for the Chartists is
clear: ‘Every Chartist was fiercely independent and eager that the class for
which he stood should work out its own salvation.’ It was the first modern
movement to be controlled by working men and ‘its modest success taught
elementary lessons of self-discipline and self-government that made the slow
development of British democracy possible without danger to the national
stability and well-being’. The current trend for state intervention, represented
by national insurance, pensions and free school meals, is a ‘response on
thoroughly Chartist lines for the improvement of social conditions by
legislative means’. Chartism has also had an immense effect on Continental
social democracy and has highlighted the importance of class war, now a prime
mover of history.
1916: Art, Literature and War
Lawrence Haward, The Effect of War upon Art and Literature: A lecture delivered at the University of Manchester, February 28, 1916 (1916)
In this 1916 lecture,
Haward probed the relationship between war and art in the hope of predicting
what kind of art might be produced by the war going on in Europe. He used
examples from Classical Greece to the present day to make his case. Haward was
director of the Manchester Art Gallery and amassed a significant collection of
war art directly from artists’ studios, such as the significant oil painting by
Henry Lamb, Advanced Dressing Station on
the Struma (1916) and Paul Nash’s Wounded,
Passchendaele.
At the outset of his lecture he notes that the artist’s primary function is to ‘give
expression to aesthetic emotion’, not to make moral or social comment. But
artists are not separate from society. Indeed, the artist is sometimes a
prophet, interpreter or spokesman: ‘His sensibilities being more acute, he
catches the meaning of what [others] only dimly apprehend and gives precise and
significant utterance to thoughts which they can only partially formulate or
clothe in vague and halting phrases.’
Haward
rejects Ruskin’s argument that war stimulates great art. For Haward, fighting
and art are different types of expression, and not necessarily related. He goes
further and suggests that art that explicitly seeks to portray war is often ‘stillborn’
and uninspired. Lady Butler and Eduard Dataille are given as examples of this
stilted war art.
An
existential war is more likely to affect the artist. Artists may seek to
re-establish the ‘spiritual balance’ of a nation put off-kilter by war. For
Haward, it is only poets who can express national feeling. Painters, sculptors
and musicians are generally too personal to be able to produce art that matches
the feelings of a nation. More generally, it is possible to produce good war
art, and he praises Goya, Vereschagin, Zola, Tolstoi and Walt Whitman for
turning their personal anti-war sentiments into meaningful works of art.
It was
Haward’s opinion that the current war was more likely to prevent than cause
masterpieces. He argues that as war is no longer a romantic adventure, as some
had thought, it is now more likely to produce ‘anger and bitterness’ than ‘heroic
emotions’. In consequence his audience should not expect to see any decent war
art until it was possible to judge events ‘dispassionately’.
L. van der Essen, La bibliothèque
de l’Université de Louvain / Henry Guppy, Steps Towards the Reconstitution of the Library of the University of
Louvain (1915)
Louvain library was destroyed by the German invasion of
Belgium in 1914. The John Rylands library sought to ‘give some practical
expression of their deep feelings of sympathy with the authorities of the
University of Louvain, in the irreparable loss which they have suffered,
through the barbarous destruction of the University buildings and the famous
library’. The library offered a gift of books, and a catalogue of these was
published along with a record of the donors.
Leon van der Essen, a history professor at
the University of Louvain, offered a short history of the library. It was
founded in 1425 and grew through various legacies over the years. Although it
was not known for certain how many books there were before the library was
destroyed, it was certainly more than 230,000. The library’s catalogue was old
and uncatalogued books were being found all the time, which made their loss all
the more tragic. The library was particularly good on religious reformers and
politico-religious pamphlets and had more than 350 incunables. It had good
Jesuit and Jansenist collections, some recently found political pamphlets from
the period of the Thirty Years War and unique examples of eighteenth-century
polemical literature. There were more than 950 manuscripts including twelfth-century
post-Carolingian examples, lives of saints, psalters, books of hours,
liturgical manuals from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, magnificent
illuminations and miniatures. The university archives were housed there, as
well as cabinets of curiosities, maps from Mercator, signatures of famous
visitors like Victor Hugo and portraits of Erasmus and others. ‘On 26 August
1914, in a few hours, the German soldiers brutally destroyed these treasures,
which were not simply the patrimony of Louvain or Belgium, but of the civilised
world.’
Van der Essen concluded by categorically denying
‘the claim made by some, including the journal of Chicago, that German soldiers
attempted to save the library’. Again, here was an example of scholarship was
being used to emphasise German barbarism.
Catalogue of an exhibition of the works of
Shakespeare, his sources, and the writings of his principal comtemporaries,
Tercentenary of the Death of Shakespeare 1616, April 23, 1916
This is an annotated
bibliography of the early editions kept at the John Rylands library, with notes
on likely influences, other books in Shakespeare’s library, and schoolbooks and
other influential books of the time. The book aims to show ‘the unfolding of
Shakespeare’s mind as it is reflected in his works’. It provides a short
overview of his life and context, his predecessors who ‘fixed the form’ and
some outline of his contribution to world culture. The editor comments that Shakespeare’s
phrases, ‘only less numerous than those of the Bible, often the most plain and
artless, have grown into household words’.
It is
not a nationalistic book, except in a somewhat indirect way. The editor notes
the popularity of Shakespeare all over the world, including among famous German
writers such as Goethe and Heine. ‘Thus we see that it is in no narrow spirit
of insularity that we put our illustrious countryman amongst the intellectual
giants of the world. Who can deny that he stands incomparably the greatest
dramatic writer of modern times, perhaps the greatest the world has ever known.’
This comment might perhaps be aimed at German claims of cultural superiority,
which appeared in propaganda, including that attempting to get America to fight
with Germany.
1917–18: Understanding the Impact of the War on the Mind
G. Elliot Smith
and T. H. Pear, Shell Shock and its
Lessons (1917)
Written by two members of
the University of Manchester’s medical department, this work was published at
the end of the war, and drew on journals from Britain, France, Russia and
Germany. Elliot Smith had refused to join the Royal Army Medical Corps as a
military psychiatrist because he believed that military discipline was counterproductive
to therapy and even potentially fatal for psychoneurotic soldiers. For the
authors, shell shock was ‘perhaps one of the saddest of the many grievances
aspects of the war’, made worse because of the public’s ‘exaggerated’ distress
at mental illness.
The
book first defined shell shock. In it, the senses are not lost but rather
exhibit a ‘painful efficiency’. Shell-shocked soldiers are still rational – the
disturbance is purely emotional. The authors suggest that it is the same as
other nervous disorders in its essence, and assert that since soldiers are more
focused on bravery and precision, they feel the loss of emotional stability and
exaggerated fear more acutely. The book comments that, in the minds of many,
nervous disorders are imaginings of the ‘well-to-do woman living in the lap of
luxury … This war has, however, removed from honest peoples’ minds the possibility
of regarding these phenomena in such a shamelessly unscientific light.’ The
authors rejected the common view that shell-shock patients were malingering.
According
to Elliot Smith and Pear, there are three stages of shell shock. Following the
initial shock the patient will exhibit severe loss of senses, mutism and other
such symptoms. In stage 2, we see the residuum of these symptoms and subjective
symptoms such as stammering, insomnia and bad dreams. It is best to arrest the
disorder here, when it can be reasoned away. In stage 3 the sufferer
rationalises his symptoms, and the fact that he perceives these symptoms will
make him think he is mad.
The
authors focused on a treatment method using persuasion, but were at pains to
stress that this involved more than common sense. Knowledge and expertise of
the mind were needed in order to interpret dreams, slips and other signs of the
unconscious, as the disorder cannot be reasoned away consciously in stage 3. In
practical terms, they argued that the ‘history of the trouble can be unravelled
in conversation’ by a trained psychologist.
In
helping the patient, ‘firmness and sympathy’ were needed. This was not the ‘misplaced
emotion’ of ‘petting variety’ sympathy. Isolation and heavy-handedness were
also bad. A genuine insight into the problem was required, which could only be
gained by careful attention to the patient and knowledge of the mind. Hypnotism
could also be useful to break down certain resistances.
Ordinary
wards are said to offer only ‘fussy solicitude, gruelling pity or suspicious
contempt’. Special clinics for the shell-shocked are held up as far more
effective in offering the right care and removing the stigma found in asylums.
More
generally the book is a plea to pay more heed to psychology. Current treatment
is claimed to be too focused on those already fully insane and therefore
ignores the many incipient cases which can be nipped in the bud. The
Medico-Psychological Association report’s findings in 1914 had been put on hold
by the war. The report suggested a need for more training of doctors, clinics
for the treatment of early cases and a reform of the lunacy laws, as well as a ‘vast’
amount of research in psychology. The views of Pear and Elliot Smith challenged
military psychiatry’s aim of returning ill men to the Front as quickly as
possible.
Bernard Hart, The Modern Treatment of Mental & Nervous
Disorders: A lecture delivered at the University of Manchester, on 25th March
1918 (1918)
In this public lecture for a lay audience, Bernard Hart set
out the treatment options for victims of shell shock. Thousands of British
soldiers were returning from the Front with this new disorder, leading many people
either to question their courage or lament the inhumanity of modern war.
Bernard Hart was a leading psychologist at the Maghull military hospital, along
with T.H. Pear, Manchester University professor Grafton Elliot Smith and 25
other doctors. Experimental psychodynamic techniques were used at the hospital to
treat patients with the most severe forms of shell shock.
Hart begins by explaining that ‘nervous
disorders’ are distinct from ‘mental disorders’ (madness). Nervous disorders
are not due to ‘demonstrable disease or injury of the nervous system’ but
rather to mental causes. They include neurasthenia, hysteria, nervous
breakdown, nerves and, recently, shell shock. He delves into history to show
that the stigma of the medieval witch trial was still attached to mental
disease. In the nineteenth century a ‘physiological conception’, which looked
for physical causes, held sway. Now a ‘psychological conception’ has come to
the fore as ‘mental causes are capable of exact scientific estimation’ – investigation
and treatment can be achieved by these means.
By 1918, shell shock was understood by
military medicine and the government as a major problem, although officers and
ordinary soldiers were often diagnosed with different illnesses based on class
assumptions. Psychology was still a fledging discipline and Hart and his
Maghull colleagues’ use of experimentalism to combat the assumptions that
military medicine made – about the origins of mental illness and that masculine
courage and obedience to discipline were therapeutic – was particularly
innovative.
Hart used the example of tears to explain
the difference between physiological and psychological causes. Tears can be
induced by an irritant or by emotions. The trick for doctors is to identify the
right cause so that it can be fixed. He used diagrams to show the ‘chains of
causation’ of physical and mental causes. In nervous disorders, it is ‘more and
more certain that “mental” factors constitute the most important link in the
chain of causation’. This emphasis on psychological factors was novel, and
contrasted with the dominant physiological explanation.
The final picture shows the cause of
nervous disorders: ‘mental causes’
Shell shock, although a new phenomenon, was,
according to Hart, ‘in every essential respect identical’ with neurasthenia,
hysteria and nervous breakdowns, but differed ‘in colouring due to the
particular circumstances’ of the war. The problem in nervous patients is that
parts of the mind are not in harmony. The shell-shocked soldier is ‘tortured by
memories of the terrifying events he has experienced … one force tends to drag
them into the full light of consciousness while another seeks to thrust them
into oblivion’. As the causes are psychological, so should the treatment be: ‘The
advice so often given to these unfortunate people, “Pull yourself together,”
expresses literally and exactly what is required. It is, however, absolutely
useless unless the patient knows what he has to pull together, and unless he is
shown how to do it, and helped to do it.’
Hart argued that the patient often cannot
describe the causes of his trouble – as indeed ‘most people do not fully
understand the workings of their own minds’. Therefore ‘knowledge of the
mechanisms of the mind’ was needed. The solution, according to Hart, was that
the patient ‘must learn to regard the memories as part of the furniture of his
mind, and as mere traces of events which are past’. He concluded by noting that
psychological treatments had been ‘eminently successful’ but that more
provision was needed.
1915–19: War and
the Lessons of History
T. F. Tout, Mediaeval and Modern Warfare: A lecture
delivered at the John Rylands Library on the 12th December, 1917 (1919)
Tout’s lecture makes thoughtful and lively comparisons
between modern and medieval warfare, showing his commitment to using history to
better understand the present. Using the fact that both the current war and the
Hundred Years’ War had largely been played out in northern France and the Low
Countries, Tout compared the style, destructiveness and morality of the two
eras.
The scanty resources of the medieval state
meant that battles never lasted for weeks and weeks. Moreover, medieval armies
lacked unity and organisation, being commanded by different feudal lords. This
meant that medieval tactics were much better than medieval strategy, which
could often see armies roaming around the countryside for months. Yet some
aspects of medieval warfare, according to Tout, had returned. Hand-to-hand
fighting, once supplanted by guns, was again prevalent. Poison gas and
flamethrowers had similarities with Greek fire and stink pots. Tout also
identified a similar mixture of speed through open country and ultimate
defensive advantage in both eras. He showed how militarism was not a new
invention: England in the fourteenth century shared features with the Prussia
of Tout’s time.
Was medieval war more civilised? To
illustrate the best traditions of medieval chivalry, Tout provided an anecdote
from the Hundred Years’ War. The English army was on the offensive, but the
French had holed up in a walled city. The English demanded that they come out and
‘fight like men’. The French agreed to meet to fight fairly on a field, but
then reneged and remained within the walls. The English were
bitterly disappointed when the French did not
keep their promise, and angrily retired to their starting point, convinced that
even if they had failed to conquer a rood of French land, they had proved
themselves to be the better men. Their attitude reminds one of the boasts of
German spokesmen nowadays that Germany had not been beaten. The French derived
a more reasonable satisfaction from the retirement of their enemy. They may
have defeated the invasion without having to fight for it, just as French and
English have occupied western Germany by reason of the greatest military
collapse in all history.
Thinking about his own time, Tout noted that the age of
chivalry had died slowly. The Hague convention of 1899, which had sought to
codify the laws of war, was largely in vain as the ‘refusal of our enemies to
regard it as binding on others, has destroyed, perhaps for ever, the
time-honoured conventions that made war tolerable to the moral consciousness
because they mitigated some of its horrors’. War was now ‘infinitely more cruel
and inhuman’ because atrocities like the use of poison gas are done ‘deliberately
and consciously’.
Tout lamented that the distinction between
combatant and non-combatant, observed since medieval times and reinforced by
the Red Cross, was being ignored by the ‘glorious Teuton whose higher
civilisation makes him a law unto himself’, meaning that the ‘other side was
practically compelled to follow the example’. More optimistically, in air
fighting ‘something like single combat is still possible; here courage,
imagination, and individual initiative still have full play … [it shows the]
best traditions on both sides of the ancient spirit of honourable rivalry’.
Tout concluded by saying that peace was
needed now, based on a true ‘change of heart’. The middle ages had ‘truces of
God and its leagues of peace … real internationalism in the Church and sham
internationalism in the Empire’. Now we faced ‘fierce national jealousies’ in
East Europe, anarchy in Russia and ‘German ascendency claims’, meaning that it
was simplistic to talk solely of either progress or decline. He hoped that the ‘good
sense of the average man, the general will of civilised humanity, will find a
sound solution to all of these problems’.
T. F. Tout, The English Civil Service in the Fourteenth
Century: A lecture delivered at the John Rylands Library on the 15th December,
1915
Tout’s lecture began by noting that we are not in a
democracy, but a bureaucracy: ‘our masters are the demure and obscure gentlemen
in neat black coats and tall hats who are seen every morning flocking to the
government offices in Western London at hours varying inversely with their
dignity’. He then moved on to weigh the merits of the old and new systems.
Although the professional civil service came into being under Gladstone, it had
existed without the name in Anglo-Saxon and Norman England. It began as part of
the King’s household, meaning there was no clear line between domestic and
public administration. Most civil servants were clergy. Tout wryly notes that
then as now:
diplomacy was the genteelest of
professions. To this day the Foreign Office is spared the disastrous results on
its manners and tone that might have followed had its officials, like those of
less dignified departments, been selected by open competition. Perhaps brains
and social graces do not always go together, and even nowadays a little more
brains might have its use in diplomacy. But the practical mediaeval mind
secured the happy mixture of good breeding and capacity necessary, let us say,
to persuade or coerce a Balkan prince of German origin, by putting a great
nobleman at the head of a foreign embassy, while associating with him a bishop,
who had, perhaps begun life as a chancery clerk, to help out his intelligence,
and a chancery clerk or two still on the make, to supply the necessary work and
technical knowledge.
And given that for medieval men a lay clerk was the ‘last
word in radicalism’ it ‘goes without saying’ that no women were admitted as was
beginning to happen in Tout’s time.
Positions were sold and there was
widespread nepotism. Yet even in Tout’s day, seven out of nine of the King’s
Bench were related to judges, and ‘it would be impossible to draw from
contemporary politics a more happy and complete survival of the mediaeval mind’.
Tout saw the medieval system in context, however, noting that patronage was at
that time the best surety of fidelity. While they ‘did a lot of business on
their own account’, there was no outrage because this was normal and accepted.
Tout ended by sketching the lives of three
ordinary clerks, arguing that a ‘good system makes the average man competent’
and that the personal is often unstressed in history. John Winwick was small
gentry from Lancaster who rose to become keeper of the privy seal. His was the ‘prosperous,
successful, public spirited though not particularly startling career of a good
official who throve in all his undertakings and made the best of his chances in
both worlds’. Geoffrey Chaucer could not make a living from writing in the days
before copyright and printing. He thus used his literacy to work for the king
in France and Italy. He absorbed the culture, and his good connections got him
promoted. Despite the distractions of his writing, he worked hard and did well
in the service. Thomas Hoccleve, a poet, was less successful. His writing tells
us about the hard work of the clerk and the aches and pains and solitude. He
frequented taverns and took his fair share of bribes, but worked hard.
Tout concluded ‘I cannot but record the
impression that the business methods of the mediaeval official were not much
worse than those of more recent and more self-complacent days.’ Of course they
were corrupt, but ‘we have every reason to believe that even a modern
government department might learn something from the wide knowledge, long
service, corporate feeling, kindly indulgence, and sufficient devotion to the
task in hand that are illustrated by the self-revelations of this obscure and
unlucky public servant of the English state who died nearly 500 years ago’. He
praised the neatness of the calligraphy, the correctness of the sums and the ‘respectably
high level of general competence’ revealed by medieval records that he had
spent many hours poring over.
What comes through most of all is Tout’s
sympathy with the clerks’ lives and work. He is not blind to the merits of the
antiquated system, or to the defects of the modern, professional one.
S. E. Maltby, Manchester and the Movement for National
Elementary Education 1800–1870 (1918)
Maltby’s book charts the movement for educational improvement
in Manchester. Throughout the period 1800–70, ‘no other single place was so
much the focus of educational interest and the hotbed of educational proposals
as Manchester and its neighbourhood’. The town’s rapid growth, the presence of
child labour and the public-spirited citizens hoping to end this prompted an
active movement. The Lancashire Public Schools Association, the Manchester and
Salford Committee on Education and the Manchester Education Aid Society were important
voices whose ideas were eventually taken up in the 1870 Education Act, which
gave compulsory primary education to all.
There was very basic regulation of child
labour in 1819, agitated for by Coleridge, the Manchester Board of Health and
others. Yet until 1870 there were no publicly controlled schools or obligation
to attend. Schools were either endowed schools, day schools, private
schools or Sunday schools. Manchester educationalists were either voluntarists,
religious or non-sectarian. Dissenters who wanted the disestablishment of
Anglicanism were worried that state education would force Anglicanism on
children. In addition, the Chartists had called for national education, meaning
that it was associated with ‘godlessness’ for many middle-class reformers.
Finally, free trade dominated the attention of many reformers until the 1850s.
Voluntarism and the religious question
remained the biggest obstacles to state education. If the state was to provide
education, how much scope would local interests have to shape that education?
The Act was carried in 1870 under a liberal government, with a victory for the
secular vision of education. Throughout the agitation the condition of
Manchester – the first industrial city – was a reference point. Manchester men
like Cobden were hugely influential. In Maltby’s words, Manchester was
responsible for the new England and consequently ‘Manchester men felt their
responsibility to make that new England good.’
Eventually a bill was passed,
providing all the factors which Manchester
men had chiefly contended – viz. a system by which schools could be provided
over the whole country, by a local rate aided by government grants, under local
management but under state guidance and general regulation; by which all
children could be brought to school without the excuse of either poverty or
violation of conscience; and which was calculated to enlist in its support all
parties equally despite the grave dissatisfaction of most of the Radical
politicians.
Like many other authors, Maltby ends by linking the struggle
against Germany with the subject of his book:
One would fain hope that England’s proud
boast that she is fighting (albeit side by side with centralised and secular
France) for right and liberty is but another aspect of that refusal at once
either to allow the State to dictate without local control, or to exclude
religious teaching from elementary schools.
1915–18: The University at War
From 1915, the
Vice-Chancellor’s annual statements recorded the effects of the war on the university.
He noted that ‘immediately on the commencement of the session [war] a large
number of students had received commissions’. This significantly decreased the
number of male students and the revenues of the university. So as not to put
soldiers at a disadvantage, the university allowed scholarships to be deferred
and teaching posts to be resumed after the war. The VC listed Manchester
University staff and students who had died. He noted the charitable activities
of female students, including Red Cross work and other social service. The
university set up a committee to help Belgian refugees, and allowed them to use
university facilities. The John Rylands’ University Library offered books to
the destroyed Louvain library.
The university
continued to function, but was geared towards the war effort. Lectures on
Wednesdays and Saturdays were cancelled to allow for military drill. In
addition, many departments dropped their research for war work. Economics
students starting gathering statistics for the Board of Trade. Chemistry,
electro-chemistry, metallurgical and engineering departments helped to develop
explosives, materials for aeroplanes, work for the anthrax committee and
treatments for shell shock. Although the VC was often coy about what this work
actually entailed – saying, for instance, that Sir Ernest Rutherford was
working ‘for the Admiralty’ – he was undoubtedly proud of the university’s
contribution. At the war’s end, he noted: ‘one effect of the war has been to
reveal to the official world the great intellectual and scientific resources of
the Universities, and to show how they might be utilised for public benefit’.
Henry Spenser Wilkinson, Learners as Leaders: An address delivered on 26th April, 1918, at a memorial service for members of Manchester university who have fallen in the war
Henry Spenser Wilkinson
was born in Hulme in 1853 and was Professor of Military History at the
University of Manchester and then the University of Oxford (1909), and a drama
critic for London’s Morning Post.
During the First World War he was an outspoken and influential critic of the
British government’s strategy and policy.
‘Learners as Leaders’ was a patriotic and
stirring lecture on the value of education and Manchester University in
particular. The author praises the lecturers who have ‘made our community’. He
makes general points about the value of learning: to ‘accustom the growing will
to the habit of attention’ and help students ‘to take hold of the common stock
of human knowledge’.
The lecture was given in honour of those
who had fallen and emphasises the importance of duty: ‘we are Englishmen and
our duty is to England. To the service of our country our University is
dedicated, and its mission is to quicken our spiritual life, that we may be
good and faithful citizens of the land which is our home, of the nation in
which we live.’ The community and comradeship learnt at a university was
suggested to be a vital stepping stone to a wider, national sense of duty. Wilkinson concluded by suggesting that the secret of
leadership is the will to learn, and that this would be required for the ‘new’
England after the war.
For further information on First World War titles from Manchester University Press, please contact Simon Bell (simon.bell@manchester.ac.uk)
