‘Symbols of Power’ (open till mid-October) lets its visitors stumble into the street resolved to hold opinions, to be critical, to refuse to accept objects and sights and pageantry for ‘what they are.’ Charles Darwin said: ‘How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view, if it is to be of any service.’
[1985
The Means of Grace, the Hope of Glory
Work is a dull way to get rich. In spite of all Mrs Thatcher’s coaching, the people of these islands – the English in particular – remain attractively lazy. Even those who are still in work fantasise about a miraculous windfall of wealth allowing them to knock off for keeps. Although it’s a fact the middle classes prefer not to know, most people in this country have reached their earnings peak in terms of real wages well before they are 30. The rest is drudgery.
There are daydreams about winning the pools, about legacies from unknown Australian aunts, about (this affects mostly professionals) being monstrously and unjustly libelled by a newspaper. But the sweetest and oldest of these daydreams is summed up in two words which still accelerate any heart: Buried Treasure.
The imagined moment of discovery has a force equal to any fantasy about sex or glory. Yesterday, it was the ploughman who stirred with his boot the muddy discs in the furrow and suddenly – with suffocating excitement – saw the flash of gold. Today, it is the bulldozer driver who climbs down to inspect the heap of what seem to be old tin plates and basins, who sees through the oxidised crust the outlines of gods and nymphs playing their pipes and swinging their robes, and knows that he has become a rich man.
This is a venerable country, which has been hiding its treasures in the earth for some 4,000 years. Much has been found, and nobody can tell how much has corroded away to nothing. But under the turf and heather and even under the pavements of Britain, in undiscovered graves and hoards, in stone cists or clay pots or simply loose in the moist earth and peat, there is silver and bronze, jewels and gold in quantities beyond imagination.
Putting it in such a coarse, greedy, even lascivious way will have unsettled every reader who cares for genuine archaeology. But we live in the age of the metal-detector. Thousands of people all over Britain belong to ‘treasure-hunter’ clubs. Equipped with electronic detectors, they spend their free time sweeping the ground-surface until the detector’s murmur rises to a screech. Then they dig.
For over 10 years now, archaeologists and ‘treasure-hunters’ have been fighting a guerilla war. Professionals will tell stories of savage fist-fights in darkness, of shotguns discharged, of night ambushes over precious sites which end in wrestling in the clay and chases over the fields.
Some progress has been made towards an armistice. There are now clubs which have learned to work with archaeologists as a team. There are decent farmers like Simon Drake, of Dorset, who used a detector to collect a medieval coin hoard from his field and reported it to the coroner. But there are still cultural atrocities. Last August, gangs of treasure-hunters got away with over 2,000 Celtic coins from the site of a temple at Wansborough in Surrey, working by torchlight and leaving ‘a Passchendaele landscape’ behind them.
The law is on the side of the professionals. ‘Treasure Trove’ was defined 350 years ago like this: ‘When any gold or silver, in coin, plate or bullion hath been of ancient time hidden … whereof no person can prove any property, it doth belong to the King.’ However, if the Crown decides to keep the treasure, the finder is rewarded with its full market value – which, as far as I can see, is the only streak of truly reckless generosity in the entire practice of the British State. (But the generosity has limits. The family of the treasure-seeker who found the Thet-ford hoard of Roman jewellery in 1981 got only a third of its value, because the find was not reported for over six months.)
On the face of it, this is a straight moral issue between the ‘guardian of the national heritage’ and selfish, plundering vandals. And yet the row over treasure-hunting and detectors goes back deep into the historical consciousness of the nation. Professor E. P. Thompson’s idea of the ‘free-born Englishman’ and his unwritten rights is in play here.
It is striking that the treasure-hunting movement is very much a working-class affair. When the Council for British Archaeology began seriously to take fright at the damage being done, the clubs attacked the CBA with a revealing line of abuse. They alleged that archaeologists referred to them as ‘scum’. They asked by what right a so-called intellectual élite claimed to own Britain’s past, or used state authority to block the harmless pastime of ordinary folk out to make a few bob in the open air.
There were elements of an ugly, ‘know-nothing’ populism in this. And it felt like a populism of the Right. One hunter referred to ‘the smear campaign being conducted against us by the KGB – sorry, CBA … more fitted to publication in Peking or Moscow than in London.’
But behind this bluster there is the memory of a genuine tradition, of a poor peoples’ dream handed down from one generation to the next. For the man who finds a treasure is a free man. The ploughman who comes across a crock of gold can cock a snook at the lord of the manor, buy his wife a silk gown and depart. The stonemason who finds a Roman proconsul’s ransom of silver under the wall has escaped his foreman, his debts, his appointed station in life, for ever.
And in a static, class-bound rural society, in the centuries before football pools or labour mobility, what other escapes were there? One might run away, hoping to become more than a ‘sturdy vagabond’. One might join an army, with the thought of being made a captain for valour or sharing the plunder of a sacked city. None of these compared with the dream of buried treasure, the golden miracle. Tales of those who had found wealth at the end of their spade or between the roots of an oak tree circulated endlessly. This, perhaps, was what Mr Micawber meant when he insisted that something would ‘turn up’.
And it always has turned up. Our first chronicles show an almost obsessive interest in the discovery of buried treasure and the sensational ‘breaks’ in normal life which follow. The marvellous Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral is the result of a fourteenth-century marvel; the cathedral tower had fallen and money to build the new chapel had run out, when the holy Brother in charge of the works turned up a pot of treasure. A rain-shower came on; he prudently sent the other workers indoors to shelter while he dug the urn out of the soil and took it to safety. Its riches paid for the completion of the chapel.
The hope of treasure was also the idea of a right – if only the right to luck. But it also held a queer attitude towards the past. Nobody knew why riches had been hidden in the earth, although there was an assumption that there had been a distant age of gold. The past was something which – like grace – might suddenly and almost terrifyingly open itself to a humble person. And that grace should be accepted. When the ancestors gave, who would dare to refuse?
The hill under Richmond Castle opened to a potter named Thompson. In a cavern lay treasure, a sword and a horn. He fled in panic, and a voice called after him: ‘If thou hadst either drawn the sword, or blown the horn, thou’dst been the happiest man that ever yet was born.’
I am on the side of the archaeologists, and against the treasure-hunters – fewer, now – who rob us all of our history to fill their pockets. But the professional should not be priggish. He should remember that the man with the metal-detector is a member of the past he is defacing, and that his sense of a right to it can only be modified, never dismissed.
[1985
Secret Passions of the British
‘Except possibly for a few last shots, the Battle of London is over.’ (Duncan Sandys at a press conference, 7 September, 1944.)
‘On the evening of Friday, 8 September, 1944… at 6.34, totally without warning, a huge hole appeared in the middle of the roadway opposite number 5, Staveley Road, Chiswick.’ (‘Hitler’s Rockets,’ by Norman Longmate.)
The first V-2 rocket had landed on London, to be followed by something like a thousand ot
hers. They killed nearly 3,000 people, destroyed about 20,000 houses and damaged 600,000 more. The V-l flying bombs had caused over 6,000 deaths; ordinary Londoners were near the end of their tether already. Now this.
Or rather – now what? The luckless Duncan Sandys, appointed 18 months before to deal with the rocket threat, heard the unmistakable double crash of the missile from his office and knew at once what had happened. But the Londoners were not allowed to know. For two months, as chunks of London suddenly disintegrated, the Cockney bush telegraph tried to make sense of it; here it was a ‘gas main,’ there, ‘some secret war work’ had blown up. But the existence of German rocket missiles had already been published, and by the time the Government came clean in November, most people had guessed what was going on.
One of the queer effects of the V-2s was the amount of dirt they dislodged. Soot jumped out of chimney-pots, like a row of black exclamation marks in the sky. Leafing through Mr Longmate’s new book, I was left not only with images of devastation and misery but with a fine, gritty coating of questions hard to brush off the mind. This apparently transformed London of 1985, this plantation of glass and concrete towers – how far have we really come from that grimy, class-conscious old city under fire, and how far from those times when government’s idea of the citizen’s first duty was that he should not ask questions?
The London I saw in glimpses as a wartime child was black, tremendous and above all silent. Standing outside Euston at dawn, I once heard die crack and rumble of a distant V-2, a sound made vast by the utter quiet of streets without traffic. From a train on a viaduct, I looked down on human beings: drab swarms among broken buildings. Yet they struck me as a collective creature with an awareness of its own identity, not a mass but a people. Where is that people now, or has it dissolved away into atoms of owner-occupying bliss, tower-block isolation, aimless pilgrimages down the aisles of Safeways?
At this point in reflections, many Socialists grow soggy and maudlin. Then there was a natural radicalism abroad; now, in contrast, the millions passively lap up their opinions from ‘the Tory media.’ The passivity and the indifference to politics as an instrument of change are real enough. But the opinions? If governments continue to keep secrets from the people, as they did in 1944, then the people have learned in retaliation to keep secrets from their governments.
And these are mostly secrets about their own emotions. When Eisenhower visited London around 1960, an ailing, uninspiring President at the end of his run, nobody expected that Londoners in their hundreds of thousands would quietly leave work and come to line the streets for him as he drove in from the airport. When John Kennedy succeeded him and was proclaimed as the young Augustus of a new Golden Age, I was sent out to sample the ‘vox pop.’ and found to my amazement that working men and women regarded his election with disgust: bad enough that he was a Papist, but worse – far worse – that he was the son of Ambassador Joe Kennedy, ‘that Yank who said we’d surrender to Hitler.’
In a north London shop, the other day, somebody barged a queue for cakes. ‘No gendeman!’ said the girl behind the counter loudly. ‘Never happen in Russia!’ added a customer, and suddenly I was surrounded by old ladies telling one another how Russian men stood up for pregnant women on the Moscow Tube, how the Russians knew what to do with muggers, how a Russian mum would never raise a hand to her kids.
So much for 40 years of Cold War. There is an obstinate dream here, the British insistence on feeling a deep, frustrated affection for the Russian people which is now almost unpolitical. And if it has lasted this long, in the teeth of so much, it is obviously here to stay.
And all of these buried emotions, transmitted across a change of generations, find their source back in the experience of war. After so long, they have weathered into disjointed prejudices; like a religion which has decayed into a cult of icons, the coherent view of the world which once gave rise to these passions has fallen apart.
But back then, as the rockets plunged down on London, people felt that they understood something, not just a sense of common cause against the enemy, but a recognition that victory was not enough. And that the enemy was not just abroad. It was an omen that the V-2s, by pure accident, avoided the West End and the districts of privilege more completely than the manned bombers or the flying bombs before them.
Even when Werner von Braun stopped his rockets and was served his first American breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, toast with real butter and proper coffee, the Londoners keeping the rain out with bits of sack and plastic sheeting continued to brood on what his ballistic missiles had taught them. The world was unsafe; it was unsafe because it was unjust; let’s make a new one.
Ferdinand Mount writes in the Spectator that ‘if the experience of the war had done anything, it was only to consolidate the belief… in co-ordination, nationalisation and the ability of civil servants to run anything.’
As a report from the bowler-hat zone of London, that remark might stand. As an account of the mood of 1945 at large – and it was very large – it is a joke. People did believe in ‘coordination,’ national and international, because the free play of bankers’ economics and extreme nationalism had produced poverty and war. But by 1945, the population had learned to put its trust in firemen and soldiers rather than in civil servants. Nationalisation? Public ownership was seen only as a step towards social ownership, in which industry would be controlled by its own workers.
What the British got, of course, was indeed bureaucratic. The statutes of the Attlee Government achieved a huge stride towards equality and justice which stopped short of any real change in British institutions, and which gave away no real power to the citizens. But Mass Observation in 1947, among other polls, showed Labour voters ready for even greater changes and impatient at the Government’s caution. The nationalised industries seethed with discontent and unofficial strikes. The new boards proved as remote from ordinary workers as the old managements.
The mood of vigour ebbed. Gaps in the railings which keep us away from the State and its secret garden of knowledge were repaired. Those who ask too many questions are still considered unpatriotic – or, as we say now, ‘divisive.’ But somewhere underground there still flows a stream of mingled scepticism and visionary hope, its source far back in a ruinous city whose people discovered that their system of government was even more exhausted than they were.
Old V-2 combustion chambers still lurk in toolsheds, or serve as flowerpots. They helped to give Londoners dreams which are not all nightmares.
[1985
Druids The Politics of Unreformed Britain
A Spectator Sport
‘The Spectacle has effectively suppressed all genuine play. The desire to play … is returned to us as sport, toys, gambling and competition.’
So runs the argument of a pamphlet called ‘The Bad Days Will End,’ which I borrowed from a young woman the other day. For ‘play’ one can roughly read ‘free and spontaneous behaviour.’ The authors are Situationists, members of a perky old sect which, nearly 20 years ago, supplied a lot of the intellectual ammunition for the 1968 students’ revolt. They believe -roughly, again – that States maintain their power by mesmerising the people with an endless parade of changing ‘Spectacle.’ Politics become a variety of entertainment, which offers the individual a completely false picture of what is really afoot. ‘The Spectacle’ tells him what to think and – above all – trains him to loll back and watch the show rather than to take part in it.
But the tract is disappointingly vague about the remedy. The Situationists deplore technological toys, which you simply watch performing as ‘passive spectator.’ They recommend instead ‘play’ which is ‘bond-forming and imaginative,’ as long as it’s not too competitive. That doesn’t get us very far. The friend who lent this work to me recently went on a march which invited the City of London to come and play, but she wound up spending the night in a very overcrowded cell.
All the same, the ‘politics of spectacle’ idea remains alluring.
Washington provided a fine example last week, when Jane Fonda, Sissy Spacek and Jessica Lange gave evidence on Capitol Hill on the plight of the American farmer – as actresses who had starred in the latest wave of movies about the decline of family farming. The farmers themselves and their wives sat applauding in the audience. We are told the actresses had learned a lot on location. But this is the start of a road which ends with a peerage for Peter OToole for leading the Arab revolt, with Martin Shaw addressing the Royal Geographical Society on Scott’s Antarctica, and – of course – with a gibbet out in the sagebrush for the well-known cattle rustler Ronald Reagan.
Mrs Thatcher’s Britain uses the politics of spectacle in a very obvious way. Her public doctrine is an exhilarating call to the individual to ‘play’: get out there, grab the ball, ignore the restraints of team and rule and just start scoring. The reality, however, belongs to the unemployment figures. Every month, there are fewer players and more spectators.
You can see exactly this contrast in the industrial cities of northern England and Scodand. If they were totally derelict, they would be less interesting. But in their once-devastated centres, new and busy little cultures have sprung up as a fortunate few supply one another’s needs and tastes with boutiques, word processors and wine bars. And all around this lively nucleus stand the silent housing schemes, inhabited by thousands of human beings with little or no work, and with no apparent relevance to this ‘recovery’ in their midst.
They have television, which informs them that their rulers regard their plight with grave concern. But the game they watch, when it isn’t football or snooker, comes increasingly to resemble musical chairs at a late stage in the round. A few people are still dashing around, ears cocked to the music. But most of the players are out. Being British is becoming a spectator sport.
Games with Shadows Page 9