THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT OLD BOOKS
The Internet is an enormous boon to those of us who love to scout and forage for half-remembered quotes, concepts and influences. It can confirm and extend a good memory most marvellously. But there is something about old books that the Internet cannot possibly replicate – personality. This is the personality that comes with authorship, ownership, use and dedication.
After my father was killed in the RAF in October 1943, my mother carefully archived the books that he had accumulated as a professional historian, by more or less sealing them in the Minty bookcase that had been given as a wedding present in 1934. This bookcase and its contents became my companion during long winter evenings on our farm in South Cheshire, and it has followed me through a chain of houses across the world.
You don’t have to be a psychologist to reflect that, with me having been born eight months after my father’s death, the books and the bookcase have a certain sentimental significance. Naturally, when I pick up the books, I look for clues about his character and the ideas that shaped it.
But not only that - many of the books are, as I am discovering in my pre-dotage, very good reads. Quite often now, I check to see what the Edwardians and the Inter-War generation were thinking about topics that still trouble us. Or to use what they have to say as a sounding board for my own opinions.
I also love books in the Oxford History series like E.L. Woodward’s ‘The Age of Reform – 1815 -1870’ [as I mentioned in my previous article] but these have monstrously long ‘adult’ paragraphs that sometimes exceed an entire page. The only concession to reader comfort is the titling of each page with pointers like ‘MAHMUD II AND RUSSIA’.
As you can see from this post, I am finally a convert to the short paragraph, though I will resist the seemingly inevitable trend towards cutting paragraphs down to the lengths of Tweets. And in retrospect, I wish to apologise to my American colleagues at the Asian Development Bank for my paragraphs - though in my own defence, I have to add that they were generally considerably shorter and less obscure than those of my German collaborators.
Where is all this leading? To the dedication that was made by my father’s headmaster L.S. Dawe when he awarded my father the Strand School’s Sixth Form Prize for History in 1927 – with the prize being of course ‘The Ordeal of Civilization’. And, thanks to the Internet, I can now pick up on two very interesting characters: Dawe and Robinson.
‘MONEYBAGS’ DAWE
Leonard Dawe was noted for being ‘a strict disciplinarian and man of extremely high principle’ as a schoolmaster; for having played amateur soccer at a high level in his spectacles; for being known by his pupils at Strand School as "moneybags", in allusion to his initials, L.S.D. (pounds, shillings and pence); and for having been interrogated by MI5 during WWII as a possible spy for Nazi Germany who was passing on secrets in 1944 about the impending Normandy Invasion by means of inserting tip-off clues in The Daily Telegraph cryptic crosswords that he used to compile as a sideline.
Strand School had been founded in 1875 as a training institution for junior civil servants, in association with King’s College, London. In 1909, the school moved from central London to Tulse Hill and its civil service classes were cut away from the secondary school functions. It then flourished as a grammar school, becoming noted for its high academic achievements and wide-ranging sporting prowess.
My father obviously thrived there and he went on to attend King’s College, London where he graduated with an MA in History and won a half-blue for cross country running. His younger brother Eric, who was less academically-inclined also attended Strand School and he talks about considering the possibility of a professional soccer career in his memoirs – no doubt under the encouragement of ‘Moneybags’ Dawe.
I’ll let Wikipedia pick up on the notorious crossword episodes:
‘In 1925, Leonard Dawe commenced compiling crosswords for The Daily Telegraph newspaper and was one of the first compilers to use "cryptic" clues. The first Daily Telegraph crossword, compiled by Dawe, appeared on 30 July 1925 – he continued to devise crosswords until his death in 1963.
‘During the Second World War, Strand School was evacuated to Effingham in Surrey.
‘Two days before the disastrous Dieppe Raid by the British Army, in August 1942, the clue "French port appeared in the Daily Telegraph crossword, followed by the solution ‘Dieppe’ the next day; on 19 August, the day the raid on Dieppe took place.
‘The Raid was a catastrophe and none of its objectives were achieved. 3,623 of the 6,086 men who made it ashore were killed, wounded, or captured. The Allied air forces also failed to lure the Luftwaffe into open battle and lost 106 aircraft.
‘The British War Office suspected that the crossword had been used to pass intelligence to the enemy and called upon Lord Tweedsmuir, then a senior intelligence officer attached to the Canadian Army, to investigate the crossword. Tweedsmuir (the son of John Buchan the author), later commented:
"We noticed that the crossword contained the word "Dieppe", and there was an immediate and exhaustive inquiry which also involved MI5. But in the end it was concluded that it was just a remarkable coincidence – a complete fluke".
But there was more.
‘In early May 1944 ‘Utah’ appeared as a solution in The Daily Telegraph crossword and this was to have major repercussions. Utah was also the codename for the D-Day beach assigned to the 4th US Assault Division in the D-Day Landings.
‘On 22 May the clue for 3 down, "Red Indian on the Missouri" gave the answer ‘Omaha’. On 27 May, "Overlord" was the answer to 11 across; and again, three days later on 30 May the answer for 11 across was "Mulberry" - giving a total of four top-secret code-words being given as answers in less than a month.
‘In previous months, answers for clues also included ‘Gold’, ‘Juno’ and ‘Sword’ [the landing beaches for British and Commonwealth troops] and the pattern continued ending on 1 June, with the solution to 15 down being ‘Neptune’ – codeword for the naval assault phase’.
MI5 became involved again and called on Headmaster Leonard Dawe for another gentlemanly chat at his home in Leatherhead, Surrey.
It seems that the Dieppe and Normandy episodes simply reflected absolute coincidences that reflected the large size, intricate nature and regular publication of the crosswords. One of Dawe’s pupils also reported that he occasionally invited pupils into his study and encouraged them to help fill in the blank crossword patterns with ‘solutions’ that he would later furnish with clues.
And there is some possibility that the kids may have been influenced in their choices of words by listening to the gossip of Canadian and American soldiers, as they hung around them hoping for gifts of gum and chocolate. The troops were camped nearby in preparation for the invasion and may have let their guard down on ‘careless talk’ in the presence of the youngsters.
JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON AND THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH
In October 1917, in a wave of jingoism and wartime hysteria, Columbia University passed a resolution that imposed a loyalty oath to the United States government upon the entire faculty and student body. The Board of Trustees then dismissed Professor of Psychology and Head of the Department James McKeen Cattell for having sent a petition to three US congressmen, asking them not to support legislation for military conscription.
Several senior academics resigned in protest, including James Harvey Robinson, who was Professor of History at Columbia. He commented: "It is not that any of us are pro-German or disloyal. It is simply that we fear that a condition of repression may arise in this country similar to that which we laughed at in Germany."
In 1919, Robinson was one of the founding staff of the New School for Social Research in New York City. The New School aimed to spark independent thinking by setting America’s radical tradition within the context of the various strands of Continental Philosophy developed in Europe. It has an illustrious history of intellectual endeavour, a magnificent roll call of teachers that includes people like Hannah Arendt, and a petition length list of famous alumni that includes people like Marlon Brando.
In essence, the New School challenges nationalism with humanism, and not surprisingly most of its staff and students are sceptical about descriptors such as ‘Anti-American’ and distrustful of global ‘Americanization’, preferring to assess problems and opportunities in a much wider context.
As James Harvey Robinson explains in The Ordeal of Civilization: 'as the years went on, history had come to seem to him a more and more vital matter; that should not be regarded primarily as an accumulation of information about the past, but as a means of cultivating intellectual freedom and sagacity.
‘One of the great obstacles to a free consideration of the details of our human plight is our tendency to regard familiar notions as ‘sacred’ – that is, too assured to be questioned except by the perverse and the wicked.
‘This word to the student of human sentiment is redolent of ancient, must misapprehensions. It recalls a primitive and savage setting-off of purity and impurity, cleanness and uncleanness.
‘The French retain the double meaning in their word sacré, which means at once ‘blessed’ and ‘damned’. Blest is he who agrees with me and let others be damned.
‘Partisanship is our great curse. We too readily assume that everything has two sides and that it is our duty to be on one or the other.
‘History should be studied as to undermine prejudice – which means anything of which we are not quite sure – and especially the savage survival of ‘sacredness’.
Some more quotes from his work:
• Curiosity is idle only to those who fail to realize that it may be a very rare and indispensable thing.
• We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposed to rob us of their companionship.
• Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.
• One cannot but wonder at this constantly recurring phrase getting something for nothing, as if it were the peculiar and perverse ambition of disturbers of society. Can the most complacent reactionary flatter himself that he invented the art of writing or the printing press, or discovered his religious, economic, and moral convictions, or any of the devices which supply him with meat and raiment or any of the sources of such pleasure as he may derive from literature or the fine arts? In short, civilization is little else than getting something for nothing.
• Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster.
• We find it hard to believe that other people’s thoughts are as silly as our own, but they probably are.
So I have developed new respect for L.S. Dawe in his choice of a Sixth Form History Prize for my father at Strand School in 1927.
And a renewed resistance to national historical syllabuses that teach the ‘sacredness’ of 'Our Nation’s Story' as a supposed means developing civic virtue and loyalty to the state, as opposed to developing a commitment to independent-minded historical analysis.
See also, for example:
See also, for example:
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