‘Around us, in the stands, beam the mild faces of the Fighters for Peace, faces that we have seen above a hundred platforms. Gold-rimmed spectacles misted with emotion, cheeks creased with years of well-meant service in this cause or in that, shirts defiantly open at the neck, badges in lapels, and there in the middle - could it have been? - an M.C.C. tie…’ (Hugh Casson)

 Forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 27 October 2010

Patrick Wright: In a way I’m very lucky, because most writers don’t get a chance to republish anything. Between about 1980 and the early 1990s I wrote three books concerned with national identity and the changing presence of the past in what we used to call ‘Thatcher’s Britain’: these two and The Village that Died for England (2002 [1995]). Through them I got involved in arguments with Raphael Samuel of the History Workshop project (see especially Samuel, 1994). Then Raphael got ill and died at the end of 1996, which was a great sadness, and it seemed inappropriate to do anything other than leave our unfinished dispute suspended.

Later, OUP took on a more recent book of mine and, in the course of putting it together, asked me what else we might do. At the time I was beginning to think that I must revisit these earlier arguments. I felt I couldn’t really make substantial changes to the texts, which belong, for whatever they’re worth, in their own time. I did, however, take seriously the business of reintroducing them.

A lot of attention has gone into the question of ‘heritage’ in the years since those books came out, much of it quite detached from the broader political questions that interested me and more concerned with questions of museum management. I don’t object to the practical or ‘vocational’ orientation, and yet some of the ‘heritage studies’ courses I’ve seen appear to be systematically uninterested in the cultural ramifications of their subject matter. So, I suppose, what I was trying to do in the new introductory material and the annexes I added to the books, was to review the wider context in which these questions of heritage and memory came to matter so much in post-war Britain: to indicate why the subject emerged as a major public theme in those years, and why it should not now be lost to courses exclusively concerned with resource management and the rest.

As for your question, ‘Why now?’, it is, I think, only an accident that the books, which trace the rise and, in the case of A Journey Through Ruins, apparent fall of the Thatcher project, should have reappeared in the midst of a recession that may, even without a change of government, mark the end of the New Labour sequel. 

(more…)

Britain’s former prime minister is slumbering in Hangchow (Hangzhou), a city in the Yangtze Delta known for its lakes, pagodas and temples. Though the famous West Lake was being energetically dredged of silt by the new authorities, the waters still abounded with lotus flowers and enormous goldfish: including, perhaps, the very ones that the American President Richard Nixon and his wife Pat would be shown feeding for the benefit of the world’s press (‘I never saw goldfish that big’) during their altogether more carefully staged visit of 1972.

Claude Roy, a French writer who passed through two years earlier, had been puzzled by the various temples of Hangchow, finding them filled with an apparently indistinguishable apparatus of joss sticks, bronze vases and gongs. He had deemed it impossible to ‘unravel the threads’ of the ancient Chinese religions that had long since become ‘stunted and adulterated into confused cults, monotonous rituals and the like’. Attlee, Bevan and the others had also been guided round this place of Taoist, Confucian and Buddhist residues, the latter represented by the Lingying temple, a large and very ancient Buddhist establishment which, as they discovered, retained a small community of monks. The British inspectors were left in no doubt that the temple was undergoing extensive restoration and that the repairs were being done ‘at immense cost’ too.

Hangchow had been laid on as a tranquil interlude in an otherwise busy itinerary, and the British politicians were generally content to boat on the lakes, wander in the hills, and, as Morgan Phillips would later attest, inspect the ‘Poets’ Corner too’. When informed, as was every foreign visitor, of the old Chinese saying: ‘Above is Heaven, below is Hangchow’, the Labour leadership could only agree that this was indeed ‘a place where one can go to rest and thoroughly enjoy the beauties that abound’. . .

The first iron curtains had nothing at all to do with geopolitics or international relations. Instead, they were anti-fire barriers installed in late eighteenth century theatres. Suspended between the stage and auditorium, these novel contrivances were proudly displayed to reassure audiences for whom theatre fires were an all too common horror.

The early versions were little more than props. By the late nineteenth century, however, these largely symbolic devices had been re-engineered. Hydraulically powered in many cases and made of asbestos as well as iron, the new versions actually worked. So much so, that actors and other who worked backstage began to worry that, while the audience might indeed now be saved in the event of a fire, they themselves risked being trapped behind the lowered curtain and burned alive.

How, then, did the iron curtain get converted into a geopolitical metaphor? Throughout the Cold War, it would be widely believed that the man responsible was Winston Churchill, who famously spoke of the descent of an iron curtain dividing Europe in the famous speech he delivered in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946.

In fact, the originator was not Churchill at all, but a Liberal and cosmopolitan British born woman named Violet Paget, who wrote under the pen name of Vernon Lee. Five or so months into the First World War, i.e. in the last days of 1914, she applied the phrase to the war between Britain and Germany – deploring how the conflict had cut off all communication between the opposed peoples, and surrendered them to the propaganda of their belligerent states. For Vernon Lee the iron curtain had little to do with any frontier or wall. It was instead a ‘psychological deadlock’ with which the warring states on both sides coerced their citizens into patriotic loyalty.

By 1920, Vernon Lee’s iron curtain, had been picked up by a number of her friends and associates – progressive, socialist, anti-war types - who removed it from its German location and applied it to the Allied blockade of Russia, where the Bolsheviks were still consolidating their seizure of power. It continued to be used to describe the western attempt to isolate Soviet Russia through the 1920s.

Why might it be useful to bear this prehistory in mind as we watch the endlessly replayed tumbling of the Berlin Wall? The iron curtain, in this earlier period, was never just another name for a frontier. It involved economic blockade and trade embargo. It entailed censorship and a state-driven use of propaganda to simplify the world into hostile camps – one of which, your own, was conceived as uniformly good while the other was imagined as wholly evil. The iron curtain also retained much of its theatrical origin, not least in the methods of scene-rigging and stage management that were found necessary to the maintenance of loyalty on both sides.

Did the iron curtain finally vanish with the Berlin Wall in November 1989? I fear not. Look at the false information and manipulated imagery with which George Bush and Tony Blair justified their invasion of Iraq. Look at the way their most aggressive policy advisors applied the same polarized way of seeing to the Muslim world, whether in the name of the supposed ‘Clash of Civilisations’ or of the ‘War on Terror’. Except for a few yards preserved in various museums around the world, the Berlin Wall may be well and truly gone. But, as we look at the recent interaction between the western powers and Iraq and nowadays perhaps also Iran, we may surely recognise that many of the capabilities and habits of thought that came with the iron curtain survive to tempt the world’s leaders still.