Citizenship Then

Clement Attlee was Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1945 – 1951. He defeated Winston Churchill in the General Election that immediately followed the end of World War II, having served under him as Deputy Prime Minister in the wartime coalition. Here are three striking things about him:

He had great integrity and was widely trusted by people across the political spectrum.

He could be forthright, decisive and was virtually charisma-free#.

He oversaw one of the most radical governments in our history, carrying through a programme of legislative reform that transformed British society and left a legacy still with us today.

This blog post is prompted by John Bew’s magnificent biography Citizen Clem. It charts Attlee’s life from a 14-year-old boy proudly joining the crowds celebrating Queen Victoria‘s Golden Jubilee in 1887 and basking in the ‘glory‘ of the British Empire (on which the sun never set!) through to the first major step in dismantling that empire with Indian independence in 1946.

Citizen Clem takes us through

Attlee’s years of service and brushes with death as a young officer in the First World War, at Gallipoli, in the Middle East and finally in France;

his long political apprenticeship between the wars, working with the poor and dispossessed in the ethnically-mixed districts of Limehouse and Stepney in London’s East End, riding out the challenges from the Fascists on the right and the Communists on the left;

his rise in the Labour Party culminating in his election as its leader in 1935;

his subsequent rejection of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and taking his party into the wartime coalition with the Conservatives.

It documents the strains and struggles of the fight against Hitler and his allies and, in particular, Attlee’s important role as Churchill’s Deputy and a firm but friendly critic; his unswerving support for Indian independence: his party’s surprise victory in 1945 with the first-ever overall Labour majority in Parliament of 146 seats; how he chose of the key figures in his administration: Ernest Bevin, Aneurin Bevan, Stafford Cripps, Herbert Morrison, Hugh Dalton, and so on, how he gave them their heads and managed their rivalries and egos.

I was a fairly mindless teenager at the time and the members of Attlee’s cabinet were simply names to me. I had no understanding of their politics, their personalities, or their achievements. My father was a staunch member of the Conservative Party and not surprisingly Labour politicians didn’t get a very sympathetic hearing in our household. So to read this lively, entertaining and intelligent biography has been a startling revelation about the history of my times and had given me a sense of pride in the values Attlee stood for that still resonate with me 70 years later. To explain Citizen Clem’s philosophy, I will end this post with some short extracts from its Prologue and first chapter.

   “One of the major themes of this book is that patriotism was the glue that bound together so much of what Attlee did.”

   “… the aim of this book is not to review and reinterpret all the decisions made by Attlee as a politician, to chart the ‘road to `45’, or to provide another critical assessment of his government’s programme.  …  Instead the goal is to get deeper inside his brain and his heart …  to unpack those contents and tell a larger story through them. This is to appreciate what Attlee himself called ‘ the importance of the human factor in society as against the mechanics’.

   “If something is salvageable from his government’s legislation, it is ethos rather than process. This unobtrusive progressive patriotism – built on a sense of rights and duties, malleable civic code rather than a legal writ, with its emphasis on the ‘common wealth’ above individual self-fulfilment – bound together everything that Attlee did. It has been scuffed and worn down over the years. It may live on in Britain, in some unfashionable form, but it does not have an Attlee to give it coherence.”

   “Above all, it was a sense of patriotism that underpinned Attlee’s socialism. It should be made clear that this was a worldview that rejected uncritical chauvinistic jingoism or imperialism – ugly by-products of nationalism that encouraged racism or undercut the fellowship of man. Such was the horror of the First World War that he once dreamed of a ‘world state’ in which individual countries would pool their sovereignty. Nevertheless, he believed that love of country could be a noble and unifying thing.

   Captain Clement Attlee, small in frame and thin in voice, shot in the buttocks as he carried the red flag over the top in 1916, may not be the greatest Briton of the twentieth century. This book argues that he has a good claim to be its first-ranked citizen.”

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^#Here is one of many jokes about him at the time: “An empty taxi drew up outside number 10 Downing Street and Mr Attlee got out.”

Citizenship Now

My wife is Australian and came to England 30 years ago. We were married in 1988 and have lived and raised our family in Warwickshire. When she returns from a visit abroad, she has to show the immigration officers an old passport, which bears a stamp allowing her to re-enter the United Kingdom.

In the early years of our marriage, Australia did not allow its citizens to hold dual nationality, so rather than renounce her birthright, she put up with the inconveniences of travelling in Europe on an Australian passport, for instance having to obtain a visa from the French Embassy in London whenever we crossed to Calais. Australia relaxed the rules in 2002, but by the time she thought about becoming officially British, the cost of applying for UK nationality was over £500; it seemed easier just to carry two Australian passports on overseas trips.

Recent stories of deportation threats to people who came over in the 1950s as children from the West Indies on the Empire Windrush, and the uncertainties surrounding the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, have caused us to rethink, despite the current fee of nearly £1400 to apply. (This disproportionate fee is presumably part of Theresa May's "Hostile environment" to discourage immigration.)  

One of the hurdles is to score at least 70% in the Life in the UK test. If costs £50 to enter and is taken at your nearest Test Centre, fortunately only 12 miles away in our case. There are 24 multiple-choice questions on the "British Way of Life" and you can buy a 180-page book containing all the relevant information you will be tested on.
  

I have had a number of goes at sample tests, and despite having been a UK national for 81 years, have failed several and struggled to reach a mark above 80%. Many of the questions seem to have little bearing on what it is to be a British citizen in 21st century. Here are some examples of questions from the online practice tests: 

• How old was Mary Stuart when she became Queen of Scotland?
• In which city is the longest artificial ski slope in Europe?
• Who directed the movie ‘The Killing Fields’ in 1984?
• To the nearest 10,000, how many years ago did the British Isles separate from the Continental land mass?
• Which two of Henry VIII’s wives were beheaded for adultery?
• On which day of which month in 1957 was the Treaty of Rome signed?

It reminds me of the written driving test, which involves learning a lot of information you will rarely, if ever, need in your driving career. Just another money-spinner for the government?

This week’s crossword “Clue of the Week” might be a better guide to being in tune with British life:

Wise selector of bonds (5 letters).

To answer it, you need to have heard of Premium Bonds and the comedians Morecambe and Wise.

Solutions to cryptarithms in previous post:  

HELP x ME = SIGMA is solved by 1782 × 37 = 65934  

TASTY = 12614

Hidden Figures

This is not a film review but a short introduction to verbal arithmetic. A word sum, or cryptarithm, is an equation, often involving a sum of two numbers, where the digits have been consistently replaced by letters. The object of the puzzle is to recover the digits from the pattern of the letters and the constraints of the equation.  Here is a famous example, which was published in the July 1924 issue of Strand Magazine by the mathematician Henry Dudeney, who had a great talent for devising interesting puzzles.

                        S E N D

                    +  M O R E

                     M O N E Y

So the solver must assign the digits 0—9 to the letters so that the equation holds true. It turns out there is only one solution to SEND + MORE = MONEY, and this is O = 0, M = 1, Y = 2, E = 5, N = 6, D = 7, R = 8, and S = 9.

Word sums usually satisfy three conditions:

1. The words used must be real and should involve at most (preferably exactly) 10 different letters.
2. The numbers may not begin with 0 (in the above example S and M are not zero).
3. Subject to conditions 1 and 2, the solution should be unique.

It is a bonus if the words form a meaningful phrase or have some obvious association, and SEND MORE MONEY satisfies all these requirements.

How about this one?

                        R E A D

                       +     M Y

                        B L O G

It has exactly 10 different letters, so the first requirement is satisfied. The second is OK if we rule out zero for R, M and B. It is the third requirement that fails because there are altogether 36 distinct solutions, which of course makes it easier to find one. Have a go!

However, I can narrow it down by asking that MY should be a prime number whose digits add up to 7. In fact, with this proviso, there is only one solution. Have another go!

A solution is determined entirely by the pattern of the letters and the arithmetic. So solutions to READ + MY = BLOG also yield solutions to HAND + IT = OVER, but not to GIVE + IT = BACK.

The equation can have a different format, as in MIND = THE + GAP. Unfortunately, this fails Condition 3 badly with 96 distinct solutions. Notice, however, that for any given solution, we can swap the numbers THE and GAP to get another one, so there are really only 48 ‘essentially different’ solutions.

The equation can involve different arithmetical operations. I used to work in a student support team called sigma and I set this challenge using multiplication instead of addition: HELP × ME = SIGMA. This has only one solution with non-zero digits.

The same idea can be applied to a narrative rather than an equation. For example, this appeared as a Sunday Times Teaser in 2016:

Which digits, consistently replacing the letters, make all these statements true?

                        TRIPLE is a multiple of three.

                        EIGHT is a cube.

                        NINE is divisible by nine.

                        PRIME is a prime.

Finally, since Christmas is just around the corner, here is a seasonal challenge:

XMAS + PUDD = TASTY.

There are only 9 letters, so let’s rule out the digit 7. In this case, it is your job to find the number TASTY, which is unique.

(I will include solutions at the end of my next post.)

The Loney

I have joined a reading group in Stratford upon Avon. It’s called Books with Friends, and its 45 members are divided into three smaller groups that meet at different times on the last Thursday of each month. And …, thanks to firm but good-natured guidance from our chair, who attends all 3 sessions,  we spend most of our allotted hour and a quarter ACTUALLY DISCUSSING THE MONTHLY BOOK !

This month’s book is The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley. It was published in late 2014 and in 2016 won the “Best Book of the Year” British Book Industry award, as well as the Costa First Novel award. Although this was his first full-length novel, Hurley had previously published two collections of short stories.

The novel is about a Catholic family from London and their teenage son Andrew (Hanny), who has not spoken since birth. His younger brother, who is nicknamed Toto and tells the story, is very close to Hanny and understands the language of objects Hanny uses to communicate his feelings.  The central narrative describes a visit the Smith family makes to an isolated house (The Moorings) on a wild and remote stretch of Cumbrian coast called “The Loney”. They are accompanied by some close friends and their local priest. The visit is a religious retreat and a pilgrimage organised by Hanny’s strong-willed mother, who desperately hopes her son will be ‘cured’ by taking the waters at a nearby shrine on Easter Monday. The novel’s setting is a familiar one, especially favoured by crime writers: a small group of people thrown together in enclosed and isolated surroundings facing uncertainty, unease and perhaps danger.

The Loney itself, and the local inhabitants, play a big part in establishing a brooding atmosphere of menace, superstition and hostile natural forces. A second focus of the action is a sinister house called Thessaly on Coldbarrow, a spit of land twice a day cut off by the sea and separated from the marshes around The Moorings by a treacherous stretch of beach with unpredictable tides and dangerous currents. The locals are a motley bunch, portrayed at once as superstitious, threatening, knowing, and somewhat dysfunctional. There are unpleasant goings-on during the Smith’s visit: an effigy of Christ is strung up at night in a nearby wood with a pig’s heart inside, vandalism at a local Church stops the family celebrating Easter mass, a mangled body of a new-born lamb is found near the house.

The book is beautifully written. The author has the knack of bringing scenes vividly to life by his observations of everyday objects, sounds and smells. He is also good at conveying his characters’ personalities through their dialogue and their actions and reactions. You gradually learn about them by what they say and do. The tender relationship between Hanny and Toto is sensitively explored, and the religious and philosophical musings of father Bernard, the priest, are cleverly woven into the plot and ring true. His predecessor in the family’s London parish, father Wilfred, had preached church dogma and moral certainties, sadistically chastising signs of human frailty in the young. But we learn that he apparently took his own life when he could no longer sustain the fiction of his own faith. By contrast, Father Bernard faces up to his moral dilemmas and works hard to fulfil his duty of love to the members of his flock, finding consolation in his hipflask when the going gets tough.

The dramatic build-up to the pivotal moment when Hanny is taken to the sacred well is shocking, but well controlled and convincing. Faith and prayer are not enough; miracles no longer happen. But sadly, from this point on, the novel descends into poorly-plotted melodrama. Having so painstakingly exposed the false hopes of a simplistic view of religion and the worthless points on its spiritual loyalty cards, the author then hands unbelievable miraculous powers to the opposition. Satan may often have the best lines but he surely doesn’t deserve a monopoly on instant magical cures. I could probably have coped with some subtle hints of black magic at large in the primaeval hinterland of The Loney, provided that they had been sufficiently ambiguous. But here the shenanigans in Thessaly’s dark cellar involving a sacrificial baby and a back story of a woman once hanged nearby for witchcraft more than just strain credibility, they descend into farce. At this point the short-story writer clearly felt that he had gone on too long and needed to round things quickly off. Fast forward of 20 years: Hanny is now happily married with his human faculties fully restored, while his brother Toto is having therapy to cope with no longer being needed. Where the absence of explanation worked so successfully in conjuring up the menace earlier, the same technique utterly fails to make the necromantic events on Coldbarrow, and the motivations of the people involved, even faintly believable, and my imagination certainly couldn’t make good the deficiency.

At Books with Friends we are each expected to give the book we have just been reading a score out of 10. Half way through The Loney, I was all set to award an 8 or 9, which are high scores for me, but by the end I was sadly reduced to a 3 or 4. A real let-down after such a good start.