The Making of Modern Britain: From Queen Victoria to VE Day by Andrew Marr
Macmillan, £25
History is the bits of the past that the present finds interesting, or even useful, and always bears the fingerprints of its own time. Andrew Marr’s histories tell us very much about our own times. He tells us that his two books The History of Modern Britain and The Making of Modern Britain were written, relying on his own research, before he made the two BBC television series they accompany. And then he says: “Working with friends and colleagues, we reshaped the material to form the documentaries. The films and the books are not the same. There are many stories, judgements and characters… that do not appear on screen; and there are a few points covered in the TV series that are not described here because they were highlighted.”
This is revealing, for the books are indeed pleasurably readable and the television series have superb production values. They’re handsome, proficient media products with a excellent surface quality. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. But whose thousand words and whose pictures have we got?
Apparently, it was books first, television afterwards. Thus what we see on our screens is the result of the creative collaboration of writer, television researchers and production team. This doubtless accounts for the nature and quality of the television products and reveals fascinating evidence of the condition of modern historiography.
The TV version tells us that Adolf Hitler was elected German Chancellor in 1933. Not true. Hitler was appointed by President Hindenburg, to resolve the political crisis of the Weimar Republic, as a result of somewhat conspiratorial negotiations between former Chancellor Franz von Papen, General Kurt von Schleicher and several leading industrialists who bankrolled the Nazis. Hitler was to be their bulwark against the Communists. “We’ve hired him,” was the phrase von Papen actually used. The Nazis were never democratically elected to power. Hitler’s Enabling Act dealt with the Bolshevik threat and Schleicher, who represented the military’s distrust of Hitler, was murdered in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. But this sort of thing was probably beyond the scope of Marr’s jolly TV show.
Likewise, the account of the Nazi reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936. According to contemporaries, (Harold Macmillan, for example) this caused little alarm in British political or public opinion. The establishment seemed to think the Germans had a right to enter “their own back garden”. Marr bangs on about how prescient Churchill’s strong reactions were but his biographer, Roy Jenkins, says his views were adjusted in hindsight and that “Churchill was far from being rampageously strong on the Rhineland issue at the time”. Such inaccuracies shake one’s confidence.
Matters of little historical significance get good exposure because they have found interesting archive film to show. There’s something of the Rory Bremner and Marcel Marceau about Marr. He’s good at adopting various character voices (such as Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Stanley Baldwin) or donning various costumes and prancing about. He’s particularly fetching in a bathing suit as he wades into the sea during his account of one of Oswald Mosley’s political escapades and the next moment he’s in Dad’s Army. He certainly stretches the resources of BBC2’s dressing up box.
The narrative trajectory of The Making of Modern Britain – both the book and the television series – is clear enough, from Victorian certainties and the lingering Edwardian sunset through the crises, world wars and social change into modern times, we had (in Marr’s words) “the shock of our little lives”.
Nevertheless, the selection of characters, events and highlights seems arbitrary, reminding me of Clement Attlee’s suggested alternative title for Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples as Things in History Which Have Interested Me. But it’s all a bit of a ragbag. To pick a few examples, the causes of the Boer War get scant coverage and there’s no mention of the Whitehall whitewash that spared Joe Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes any embarrassment (cf Chilcot); the London Dock Strike of 1911 gets the full treatment (there’s nice film of Ben Tillett) but there is no mention of the troubling South Wales mining strike that lasted ten months, nor the British coal strike and national transport strike the following year; there’s little attempt to explore serious domestic unrest during World War One, including the Labour Party’s opposition to conscription, the Clydeside munition workers’ strike and the government’s taking over the South Wales coalfield under the Defence of the Realm Act in 1916, and so on. The scarcely remembered Maud Allan “Cult of the Clitoris” scandal gets the full Marr treatment (with some good bits of film of Pemberton Billing himself and enthusiastic commentary from our Andrew) and while there’s even mention of Modernism yet ne’er a word about The Waste Land or Ulysses.
Does any of this matter? People say it’s wonderful to have “history made so interesting” and, on the whole, television reviewers loved it. Today’s history programmes are an emulsion of historical narrative, evidence and show. Gone are the days when you could simply wind up AJP Taylor, say, and shove him in front of the camera. Some acknowledged experts were good performers (one thinks of Lord Clark, John Berger and Jacob Bronowski) but can you imagine any of them put in this or that costume at the behest of the production people?
Is Andrew Marr a journalist or a historian? There’s much we can learn from his histories. By a useful coincidence, the BBC recently showed the film of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys and I was reminded of the closing conversation by the teaching staff mourning the death of the beloved Hector. Mrs Lintott observes that “Hector had seen Irwin turning his boys into journalists.” Irwin retorts: “Hector said I was a journalist” making way for Mrs Lintott’s final thrust: “And so you were. Briefly at the school and then on TV. I enjoyed your programmes, but they were more journalism than history.” l
Robert Giddings
