A Time of Tyrants

by Trevor Royle

  The conscription of women was followed by the National Service (No. 2) Act 1941, which imposed on all persons of either sex a general obligation to service in the armed forces, civil defence or industry, and extended the upper age limit of liability to service in the armed forces to fifty-one years. As a result of this ruling, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, then aged forty-nine, was conscripted in January 1942 to work as a lathe-turner involved in the manufacture of shell bands at Mechan’s Engineering Company in Scotstoun in Glasgow. This meant leaving Whalsay in Shetland where he had been living since 1933, and it also entailed temporary separation from his wife Valda and son Michael. It was back-breaking labour, especially for a man who was not in the first flush of youth: working days were nine-and-a-half hours long and overtime was compulsory on a Sunday. His problems were exacerbated that August when he was badly injured in an industrial accident involving the collapse of a pile of copper plate, and was forced to take several weeks off work. The hard grinding nature of the work took its toll on MacDiarmid, and his situation was not helped by living in a strange city, for much of the time separated from his family. It also led to a rupture with his brother Andrew Grieve, and the quarrel was never settled.

  The case of Hugh MacDiarmid was not the only example of industrial conscription. From December 1943 onwards provision was also made for volunteers or randomly selected men aged eighteen to twenty-five to assist the war effort by working as coalminers, many of whose number had already been conscripted into the armed forces, thereby causing a labour shortage in the industry. They were known as ‘Bevin Boys’ after the creator of the scheme, Ernest Bevin, wartime Minister of Labour and National Service, and some 48,000 young men served in this way. After six weeks of training they were deployed to a coal mine to work, almost out of sight but not yet out of mind. Many of the chosen conscripts felt emasculated by not serving in the armed forces, and because they did not wear a uniform of even a distinctive badge in public, they were often given a hostile reception due to a widespread and wrong-headed belief that they were conscientious objectors. (This historical anomaly was not rectified until 2008 when the government agreed to issue a veterans’ badge to recognise their role following a spirited campaign by Gordon Banks, Labour MP for Ochil and South Perthshire.27) Once called up, the new workforce was housed in specially constructed barrack-type hutted accommodation close to the pits, and training was carried out at thirteen pits throughout the UK, the Scottish centre being Government Training Centre Colliery at Muircockhall near Dunfermline in Fife, with accommodation at the nearby Miners Hostel at Townhill.

  Some idea of the problem facing the coal industry can be seen from the contemporary productivity figures. In 1940 the industry employed a workforce of 749,000 miners who produced 224 million tons of coal, but by October 1942 this had fallen to 704,000 miners who produced 709,000 tons of coal.28 Conscription was therefore essential to the war effort and was considered a successful innovation, but as George Ralston, a Bevin Boy at the Lady Victoria Colliery at Newtongrange in Midlothian, discovered, it was not for the faint-hearted. ‘The men came from all walks of life. Many of them had lived in the cities and some were from the Scottish Highlands. Some had never seen a coal mine in their lives before. It must have been a terrible shock to them. Many of us were prepared and ready to do our National Service in one of the armed services and had some idea of what to expect. We were not prepared for the type of work we had been sent to do in the coal mines.’29 On the credit side, Ralston also discovered that the conscript miners were well fed and that his fellow miners were generally helpful, friendly and welcoming.

  Due to the exigencies of post-war shortages, the last Bevin Boys were not released until 1948, and unlike other service personnel, they were neither given demob suits nor accorded the right to return to their pre-war jobs – rights which were given by law to conscripts who had served in the armed forces.

  Elsewhere life went on as best it could under the circumstances of a global war with its attendant shortages, hardships and the ever-present fear of bad news from the battle front. The social mix was also altered, albeit in most cases temporarily. There is ample oral evidence to suggest that people often found themselves caught up in situations and in the company of those they might never have encountered previously in peacetime. For the first time they saw how others lived, especially in the rough democracy imposed by conscription in the armed forces or in the civil defence services where a female graduate might find herself sharing an ARP post with ‘lawyers or doctors, factory workers, strippers or dustmen’.30 There was also a natural tendency to live for the moment, and this was reflected in popular songs and other entertainments in which it was possible to contrast the constraints of war with the glamour of escapism. It was also reflected in the ways in which relationships between the sexes were conducted, with much contemporary evidence pointing to an increase in sexual activity between younger partners, especially between men and women whose lives were constantly in danger. Again, statistical evidence is flimsy but there seems, too, to have been a modest rise in reported sexually transmitted diseases, especially in the larger cities and ports where there was an increase in the numbers of service personnel in transit.31 There was another side effect: pregnancy. Although illegitimacy rates are an inexact indicator of sexual morality, the fact remains that across Scotland a significant proportion of illegitimate children were born to married, widowed or divorced women: in post-war Aberdeen, of the 282 women registered as having had second or more illegitimate births, 158 were married, widowed or divorced. These women accounted for almost half of the total of 359 illegitimate maternities in Aberdeen in the four years following the war.32 Equally, there is also ample contemporary evidence to suggest that, on the contrary, wartime did not completely break down existing social shibboleths and that natural sexual reticence or fear of pregnancy meant that abstinence continued to be the order of the day.33

  One of the best fictional portrayals of the highly charged romantic atmosphere of the home front in Scotland is Ronald Duncan’s erotic ghost story ‘Consanguinity’, which explores a sister’s incestuous love for her soldier brother when he comes home on leave in Edinburgh in the middle of the war. The plot is relatively straightforward. Two Scottish officers, one a Seaforth Highlander (Alex Maclean), the other Black Watch (Peter Buckle), find themselves on the overnight train to Edinburgh. Both have recently been in action, respectively in the Far East and North Africa. Finding that Buckle has nowhere to stay, Maclean invites him to spend his leave with himself and his sister Angela. The inevitable happens – Buckle falls for the sister and they decide to marry immediately because as Duncan explains, war has changed all the rules.

  War alone releases our personal relationships. It is not a necessary evil but a necessary pleasure. If we were honest, we would admit that all the slaughter, cruelty and suffering which war entails remain for us merely a matter of regrettable statistics. What means something to us is that war provides us with that sense of insecurity which is life, when peace has seemed as respectable and as dull as death . . . In war, we can release ourselves without guilt; indeed, our excuses become duties and any behaviour is condoned under the blanket of the great sacrifice that we curse privately but enjoy privately.34

  Duncan was born in Southern Rhodesia, and his literary career was closely bound up with Ezra Pound and the composer Benjamin Britten, for whom he wrote the libretto The Rape of Lucretia (1946). Even though he was not a native-born Scot, Duncan showed a sure sense of touch in describing Edinburgh’s literary scene and the Rose Street pubs with their ‘coterie of affable but garrulous cadgers’ whom the two soldiers meet, and one of whom is introduced as a nationalist – it has already been explained that Maclean has literary ambitions. Then something inexplicable happens. Following the marriage ceremony and the first night Buckle disappears completely, leaving no trace of his presence, and when his new wife investigates at the War Office it transpires that he had been killed at Tobruk six months earlier. The reader is
left with the supposition that Buckle was either a ghost or a figment of Angela’s imagination, or that she and her brother are in fact lovers enjoying a physical relationship. Lying in her bath in the honeymoon hotel in Brighton where Alex has also been staying, Angela, a self-confessed virgin, revels in the feeling that ‘her limbs had drunk from her own desire’ and that it was the first time that she ‘had been aware of her own body as an instrument of pleasure’.

  Duncan’s story is matched by Bruce Marshall’s novel The Black Oxen which was published long after the war had ended. However, its author was no stranger to conflict having served on the Western Front during the First World War when he was taken prisoner and lost a leg. After living in France he returned to the UK in June 1940 and volunteered for further military service. Latterly he served with SOE, and one his most notable works is The White Rabbit (1952), which told the harrowing story of the capture and torture by the Gestapo of Wing Commander F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas who was parachuted into France in 1943. His nom de guerre was the book’s title. However, it was as a novelist that Marshall was best known. Born in Edinburgh in 1899, he was educated there and at Glenalmond before progressing to St Andrews University where his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1914. A convert to Catholicism, some his best fiction was inspired by his religious faith, and one novel, Father Malachi’s Miracle (1931), became an international bestseller.

  Marshall regarded The Black Oxen as his ‘Scottish epic’, and it is fair to say that many of the concerns and interests of his family background came together in the novel. It is set in middle-class Edinburgh in an instantly recognisable social milieu – professional, privately educated and closely interlinked – and follows the main protagonists and their ever-changing gallery of lovers from the end of the war in 1919 through to the 1970s. The period dealing with the Second World War is also astutely drawn, from the desire of the main characters to get back into uniform at the outset (particularly poignant for the old soldiers), through the ambiguities of the phoney war period to the sudden cosmopolitanism which suffused Edinburgh in the latter half of the conflict. Interspersed with a weak sub-plot involving a Soviet military mission and the security of the Russian convoys, some of the scenes involving senior officers of every nationality are particularly revealing, and demonstrate Marshall’s ability to recreate the essence of that period. His central character, and presumably Marshall’s alter ego, Neil Duncan, acts as a detached observer of the action and casts an acerbic eye over his fellow citizens as they refuse to let the war get in the way of their lives and their myriad love affairs: ‘Was it any more absurd to fight for Utopia which would never come about than for a new misery which certainly could? A Canadian private at the far end of the [tram]car moaned that he was dreaming of a White Christmas and an Air Force plonk vomited over a corporal’s puttees.’35 Marshall died in 1987, and novels like The Black Oxen have been unjustly neglected, but he remains one of the few literary observers of Edinburgh middle-class life in the twentieth century.

  As has been noted in the passages dealing with the war in North Africa, most of the notable Scottish war literature was written by poets who served in the Mediterranean theatre (see Chapter 10), but there was still a substantial body of work by writers who were primarily novelists.36 In that respect perhaps the greatest novel of wartime life written by a Scottish author is Eric Linklater’s Private Angelo (1946), a superbly fashioned picaresque satire set in the Italian campaign which he dedicated to the Eighth Army. Linklater had left Orkney in 1941 to take up an appointment in the War Office’s directorate of public relations and was then sent to the Italian front in 1944 as the British official historian. Out of this experience came a love affair with the country which Linklater described as ‘a state of idealistic adultery’37 and a novel which can be compared to Jaroslev Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik (1923). By any standards, the novel’s central character is one of the great creations in the literature of the Second World War. An Italian soldier who ends up serving in three armies, Angelo believes that he lacks the gift of courage, and with his desertions and his pusillanimity shows that he might be right in his assertion. But as the novel proceeds and the campaign reveals seemingly unending horrors – Angelo and his fiancée are both raped, and civilians are killed indiscriminately – Linklater leads the reader towards a belief that there is more to courage than simple bravery; nobility, too, is part of the equation. Angelo might be a holy fool, but he is also astutely aware of the ultimate folly of war, saying on one occasion before an Allied bombardment of an Italian town, ‘I hope you will not liberate us out of existence’, an utterance that could also have found its way into other anti-war novels such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961).

  Also worthy of note is Robin Jenkins’s The Cone-Gatherers (1955) which traces the bitter enmity amongst a group of workers on an Argyllshire estate set against the wider mayhem of modern war. Although it is not strictly a work about the Second World War, Jenkins explores the dynamics of violence as the gamekeeper Duror vents his disgust on the hunchbacked Calum whose job is to collect pine seeds so that the woods on the estate can be renewed after the war. Protected by his brother Neil, young Calum arouses equal amounts of pity and revulsion in the small community which is overseen by the unfeeling patrician Lady Runcie-Campbell. Everywhere the war intrudes – warships sail down the nearby sea loch – and with its presence humanity is tarnished. When the cone-gathering brothers refuse to rescue Lady Runcie-Campbell’s son – trapped at the top of a high tree – because they are ‘not her servants’, their overseer reasons to himself, ‘in a world that’s at war we can’t expect sanity from every man we meet in a wood’. Inevitably perhaps, the novel ends in tragedy with the murder of Calum by Duror and the keeper’s subsequent suicide. Jenkins also wrote a number of other novels connected with the war, including Guests of War which deals with the evacuation of children and A Would-Be Saint (1978) which presents the issue of conscientious objectors through its main character Gavin Hamilton.

  Before leaving the Scottish literary scene on the home front it is worth noting the final days of the poet William Soutar who had served in the Royal Navy during the First World War, and who later succumbed to ankylosing spondylitis, a form of chronic inflammatory arthritis which mainly affects the spine and the sacroiliac joint in the pelvis and can cause eventual fusion of the spine. By 1930, and for the duration of the war, he was bedridden at the family home in Perth. Fortunately his parents were in a position to look after him, and his room was transformed so that he could read and write with some ease. He received the best available medical treatment for his condition (for which there is no cure) and he entertained a steady stream of visitors, including fellow poets Maurice Lindsay, Douglas Young and Hugh MacDiarmid who edited the first collection of his poems. Best of all, he was able to concentrate on his own writing, not just poetry in Scots and English, but also the poems for children or ‘bairn rhymes’, for which he was perhaps best known, and a remarkable diary in which he recounted the facts of his everyday bed-bound life. As his condition worsened he became more of a pacifist, and was horrified by incidents such as the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. By the time that war broke out he had also moved towards a new self-sufficiency and acceptance of his lot, writing in his diary on 6 October 1943, a few days before his death: ‘So much can wither away from the human spirit, and yet the great gift of the ordinary day remains; the stability of the small things of life, which yet in their constancy are the greatest.’38 He died nine days later, on 15 October 1943, having been increasingly weakened by an earlier attack of tuberculosis.

  The other great poet of the period of the war was Edwin Muir who had lived in St Andrews since returning to Scotland in 1935 after his decisive visit to his native Orkney. With his wife Willa he had earned his living writing book reviews and translations of European fiction. He had also produced his major study Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (1936) and in so doing had quarrelled bitterly wit
h Hugh MacDiarmid over the viability of the Scots language as a vehicle for serious thought.

  In 1942 Muir was rescued from his intellectual exile by being appointed to the staff of the British Council in Edinburgh where he joined its director Henry Harvey Wood in organising a brilliant succession of exhibitions, poetry readings and lectures, taking advantage of the fact that Scotland’s capital had become home to thousands of exiled service personnel from all over Europe. Out of this came International House in Princes Street which became an intimate gathering place for all manner of events, and quickly established itself as the centre of Edinburgh’s cultural life in wartime. One of the British Council’s first initiatives was an exhibition in the National Gallery of Scotland entitled The Art of Our Allies which was mounted in May 1941. A large section was contributed by Poles, whose higher command had released known artists from military duties to contribute to an exhibition which the Scotsman was moved to describe as ‘undoubtedly . . . one of the most interesting ever held in Scotland.’39 Following its success the British Council promoted further exhibitions of Polish, Czech, French, Chinese, Greek, Dutch, and Norwegian art, for which British collectors also made generous loans, thereby enabling displays of an exceptional standard to be put on public display. At the same time, and throughout the war, lunchtime concerts were held in the National Gallery, and these were considered to be the equal of Dame Myra Hess’s concerts initiated at the National Gallery in London in October 1939.