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The Treaty of Union of 1707 – Part 3

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Apr 152011

Voice’s Alex Mitchell presents the third and final part of an account of the key events which informed and influenced the Union Of Parliament between Scotland and England in 1707, and in doing so, impartially debunks some commonly held and perpetuated views on the issue.

The English certainly believed that the advantages of union would be “much greater for Scotland”, mainly in terms of an “Increase of Trade and Money”, and that England would gain from it only “the Security of its Northern Borders” and a “Source of Men for our Common Wars”.

Again, Seton of Pitmedden remarks that “England secures an old and dangerous Enemy to be their Friend”, and that, in military terms, England would also gain by “a considerable addition of brave and courageous Men to their Fleet, Armies and Plantations”, and that for Scotland: “We send our Commodities and Manufactures to them, and have Money or other Necessities remitted to us”.

The military aspect was certainly significant. The population of Scotland was then about one million compared with five million in England and Wales; Scotland thus had about one-fifth the population of England, compared with less than one-tenth nowadays.

Demographically, and in terms of its labour force and military manpower, Scotland was twice as important as a component of the British Union in 1707 than in 2007. In addition, a huge proportion of Scots had extensive campaigning experience in European theatres of war. The familiar image of “the Scottish soldier” rests on the historical fact that a great many Scots were soldiers, albeit in other nations’ wars. Thus, from an English military perspective, Scotland could be a useful ally, or a very troublesome enemy.

The 25 Articles agreed by the joint Commissioners were to be presented first to the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh in October 1706, then to the English Parliament in London. Of the 25 Articles, which were debated and approved one by one, no fewer than fifteen were concerned with economic issues, of trade, taxation and industry, and it was these which generated the most heated debate.

The Court made major concessions on Scottish access to the English market, and later put through a separate Act protecting the Church of Scotland. The indications are, therefore, that the Scottish side fought long and hard for the best possible deal for Scotland, and for one which preserved distinctively Scottish institutions – the separate and distinct church, and legal and education systems – such that Scotland was never to become a mere province of England, a kind of “Scotland-shire”.

The entire Treaty was passed by the Scottish Parliament on 16 January 1707, by 110 votes to 69. There was a clear majority in each of the three estates, being the church, the nobility and the burgesses, that amongst the nobility being greatest. The mass of the common people were violently opposed to union with England, but their views counted for little in 18th century politicking. The Scottish Parliament had voted itself out of existence, and was formally dissolved on 28April. The new Parliament of Great Britain came into being on 1 May 1707.

This doubtless contributed to the patronising attitude of the English majority towards the Scots in London

In retrospect, the least acceptable part of the Treaty was that the Scottish representation in the new Parliament of Great Britain was reckoned according to the ratio, not of populations – about 5:1 in favour of England – but of tax revenues, being about 40:1 in favour of England.

This suggests that tax revenues per capita in Scotland were only about one-eighth of those in England, which may be an indication of how much poorer a country Scotland was relative to England in the years before Union. Taxation, however, did not need to be as high in Scotland as in England, for the simple reason that Scotland consistently avoided getting into military conflict with other nations. At any rate, Scotland sent only 16 peers to join the 190 English peers in London, and 45 commoners to join the 513 from England & Wales.

This doubtless contributed to the patronising attitude of the English majority towards the Scots in London, and the widespread belief, in London as in Scotland, that the Scottish nobility had not merely “sold out”, but that they had sold out for a derisory price.

In the end, the Union was achieved largely because the wiser men on both sides dreaded the consequences of failure, and there were the basic elements of a bargain. England, at war with France, could not risk a hostile Scotland under a Jacobite king, and demanded a complete, incorporating Union and acceptance of the Hanoverian succession.

The Scots wanted free trade at home and abroad. They would have preferred a federal arrangement to the complete, incorporating Union, but could not insist on it because the English were adamant, and they knew that failure of the Treaty might result in renewed economic sanctions, civil war within Scotland and the possibility of military invasion by England to suppress a Jacobite uprising in support of the “Pretender”, the self-styled King James VIII, or his son, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, later known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

by this time the Union was largely accepted as a done deal. The centre of economic activity had shifted from east to west.

The economic benefits expected for Scotland took some decades to become manifest. This and other early disappointments contributed to the widespread support for the Jacobite Rising of 1715. But free trade and full participation in rampant English colonialism were of immense advantage to the Scots.

This became plainly apparent by the mid-point of the century – hence the comparative lack of support, especially in the Lowlands, for the last Jacobite Rising of 1745. And by this time the Union was largely accepted as a done deal. The centre of economic activity had shifted from east to west.

Glasgow was geographically nearer than any other British port to the English colony of Virginia and opportunities opened up in the trade in Virginian tobacco, Caribbean sugar and in the service of the London-based East India Company. Hence the spectacular expansion of Glasgow from the “pretty little town” described by Daniel Defoe of around 1700 to its (self-styled) eminence as Second City of Empire by around 1900.

Edinburgh, always a city of lawyers rather than merchants, had lost its Royal Court in 1603 and its Parliament by the Act of 1707 and was, to an extent, eclipsed by Glasgow; but its financial and legal expertise sustained it in the longer term.

Contributed by Alex Mitchell.

The Treaty of Union of 1707 – Part 2

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Apr 072011

Voice’s Alex Mitchell presents part 2 of an account of the key events which informed and influenced the Union Of Parliament between Scotland and England in 1707, and in doing so, impartially debunks some commonly held and perpetuated views on the issue.

In September 1705, the Scottish Parliament agreed to authorise Queen Anne to nominate Commissioners who were to ‘treat’ or negotiate for Union. She naturally nominated persons sympathetic to that objective, thirty-one from each country.

The English Commissioners were almost all Whigs; the Scots mostly so, such as John Campbell, the Duke of Argyll; but including some critics of the proposed incorporating union, notably the Jacobite George Lockhart of Carnwath, who favoured a federal union such as would have retained the Scottish Parliament as a political institution.

However, the English negotiators insisted that an incorporating union was the only acceptable solution, that nothing less would secure England’s northern borders against foreign aggression; to them, a federal union was simply out of the question and was directly vetoed by Queen Anne herself.

Queen Anne was a Tory whereas King William III’s advisers, if not William himself, had been Whigs; the Union was essentially a Whig project. Queen Anne was herself popular and untainted by Glencoe and the Darien failure. She had, obviously, a familial affection for the Stuarts, being herself, as it turned out, the last of the Stuart monarchs; but she was strongly committed to the Church of England and could not for that reason support her much younger Catholic half-brother James’ claim to the succession. She could not form an alliance with the (Tory) Jacobites without effectively uncrowning herself. She therefore had to press ahead with Williamite (Whig) policies such as the Union. The clauses of the Alien Act which were more offensive to the Scots were thus repealed before Christmas 1705.

The Union of 1707 may be described as an exchange, or surrender, of Scottish parliamentary sovereignty in return for the benefits of free trade with England and her colonies; specifically, of access to English markets. The population of England was four to five times that of Scotland, and richer, with greater per capita spending power. The Union has thus been described as a political necessity for England and a commercial necessity for Scotland. The arguments presented for and against Scotland’s membership of the British Union were strikingly similar to the more recent debate concerning Britain’s membership of the European Union.

Over the 17th century, Scotland’s economy had become increasingly dependent on the English market. Half of Scotland’s exports, mainly of black cattle, linen, wool, coal and sheep, went to England; of this total, cattle accounted for 40% by 1703. The war with France disrupted trade with that country. There were severe grain harvest failures in the “Lean Years” of the 1690s which led to increased mortality, massive emigration to Ulster and an overall loss of about one-fifth of the population.

Although Scotland’s cost-base, mainly in terms of wages, was lower than England’s, it was feared that wealth would be drawn from Scotland to England

The failure of the Darien scheme in 1700 had consumed about a quarter of Scotland’s liquid capital. Scotland had no standing army and her navy consisted of two frigates. Scotland was poor, relatively backward and divided between Highlands and Lowlands, and suffered the many disadvantages of a semi-autonomous commercial and trading position within the context of the 1603 Union of Crowns in which the more powerful partner, England, was vigorously protective of its own trading and colonial interests.

The brutal fact was that, in an age of rampant mercantilism backed by military and naval power, the Scots could trade overseas only with English acquiescence and with access to English markets and colonies. William Seton of Pitmedden, who represented Aberdeenshire in the last Scottish Parliament of 1703-07, argued that:

“This Nation being Poor and without Force to protect its Commerce, it cannot survive, let alone become richer, ‘till it partake of the Trade and Protection of some powerful Neighbour Nation”

– and the only realistic partner for Scotland was England.

Free trade, of course, cuts both ways. Although Scotland’s cost-base, mainly in terms of wages, was lower than England’s, it was feared that wealth would be drawn from Scotland to England and that Scottish manufactures, which were often of poor quality would be unable to withstand competition from superior English merchandise – superior mainly in the sense that it was improving faster.

In general, the Scottish market accepted poorer, shabbier products than would the English or Continentals. The problem was one of low incomes, a stagnant population and a limited demand for luxury goods which Scots artisans could not produce or not to a competitive standard. Of the twenty five Articles comprising the Treaty of Union, fifteen related to trade and economic issues such as industry and taxation. Scottish interests were protected through reductions in taxes, e.g., on Scottish coal and salt, and various concessions were applied to Scottish exports of herring, beef, pork and grain.

It is often alleged that many of the Scottish parliamentarians who supported the Union did so for a variety of self-interested motives, were bribed and coerced, arms were twisted and so on.

Robert Burns famously wrote:

“Bought and sold for English gold … such a parcel of rogues in a nation”.

This may not have been Rabbie’s most insightful observation and it appeals more to a paranoid mindset than to historical fact. There is little evidence of outright bribery. More significant was a lack of unity amongst the opposition to Union.

The Tomb Of Adam Smith, Canongate, Edinburgh

In England, the final thrust towards the Union of 1707 came from Whig politicians who realised that, in a united British Parliament, their party would stand to gain from the arrival in London of Scottish MPs, most of whom would be Whigs, thus shifting the (narrow) majority in the House of Commons from Tory to Whig.

The evidence is, in both England and Scotland, of highly sophisticated arguments deployed by mostly conscientious people who voted according to what they perceived to be their best long-term interests.

Having said this, we do not have to go all the way with Adam Smith to argue, as he did, that persons motivated by self-interest may nonetheless serve or further a wider, national interest.

– Next week, Alex Mitchell presents the third and final part of this informative and fascinating story.

The Treaty of Union of 1707 – Part 1

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Apr 032011

Voice’s Alex Mitchell recounts the key events which informed and influenced the Union Of Parliament between Scotland and England in 1707, and in doing so, impartially debunks some commonly held and perpetuated views on the issue.

Recently, in 2007, we saw the tercentenary of the Act of Union of the Parliaments of Scotland and England.

The Treaty of 1707 was not the first attempt to unite England and Scotland. King Edward I of England tried to colonise Scotland in the 1290s. King Henry VIII embarked on another such venture, with his “rough wooing” of 1544-50.

Since the Union of Crowns in 1603, when King James VI of Scotland had succeeded to the throne of England, a single monarch had ruled the two nations, but this was not a sustainable situation, comparable with trying to ride two unruly horses at once.

The Union of Crowns made the Union of Parliaments almost inevitable. In 1650-51, Oliver Cromwell invaded and conquered Scotland, imposing a short-lived unified Commonwealth, with a single British Parliament. Scotland had benefited from the trading privileges this entailed, but the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in the person of King Charles II in 1660 had swept all these aside, specifically by the Navigation Act of 1670.

The geographical proximity of England and Scotland made some sort of accommodation essential.

But English ministers showed little interest in a closer constitutional relationship with Scotland during most of the seventeenth century. Their position changed for dynastic reasons. Under the 1689 Bill of Rights, the line of succession to the English throne was limited to the descendants of Queen Mary II and her younger sister Anne, the (Protestant) daughters of the deposed (Catholic) King James II/VII.

Mary died childless, aged 32, in 1694, and her husband (and first cousin) William III, William of Orange, did not remarry. On his death in 1702, the throne passed to his sister-in-law Anne, whose last surviving child out of some nineteen pregnancies, William, Duke of Gloucester, had died aged eleven in 1700, leaving no direct heir.

The English Parliament favoured the (Protestant) Princess Sophia, Electress of Hanover and granddaughter to King James I/VI, and an Act of Settlement was passed to that effect in 1701. It laid down that, in the likely event of Queen Anne dying without surviving issue, the English throne would pass to the Electress Sophia and her (Protestant) descendants.

The 1701 Act of Settlement was extended to Scotland as part of the 1707 Treaty of Union. To this day, only Protestant heirs of Princess Sophia can succeed to the British throne. Neither Catholics, nor those who marry a Catholic, nor those born out of wedlock, may remain in the line of succession.

In the event, Sophia died just before Queen Anne, in 1714, and thus Sophia’s eldest son George succeeded as Elector of Hanover and as King George I of Great Britain, commencing the long “Georgian” era, which extended until the death of King George IV in 1830.

But the English feared that the Scots would prefer Anne’s half-brother, James Edward Stuart (1688-1766), the Roman Catholic son of King James II, in exile since the “Glorious Revolution” of 1689.

A major factor pushing England in the direction of Union was her heavy military involvement in Europe, specifically in the War of the Spanish Succession, from 1702 until 1713. England and the Habsburg Empire were allied against Louis XIV’s France, which at this time had a population of about 19 million compared with less than 5 million in England & Wales, and the military struggle between England and France continued, on-and-off, until Waterloo in 1815.

The English feared that the French could open a second front by inciting Jacobite rebellion, threatening England’s security on her northern frontier. Thus in 1702, Queen Anne assented to an Act of the English Parliament empowering her to appoint Commissioners to “treat” or negotiate for Union.

Otherwise, Scotland had little to offer England. The Scottish state was effectively bankrupt.

English ministers suspected that Scotland would be a financial liability; that the country would cost more to administer, police and defend than could be raised from it in tax revenues. And although England and Scotland were both Protestant countries, opposed in terms of religion to Catholic France, it was feared by English Tories that the more radical elements within Scottish Presbyterianism would have a destabilising effect on the (Episcopalian) Church of England, with its hierarchical structure of bishops and archbishops, appointed by the Monarch.

From a Scottish perspective, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun favoured “nearer union with our neighbours of England”, but in terms of a federal union in which Scotland and England would retain their own Parliaments. He feared the loss of sovereignty an incorporating union would involve.

The Scottish Parliament passed a succession of Acts deemed contrary to English interests, notably the Act anent (concerning) Peace and War

Scottish opinion turned against union in the period after 1689, mainly because of the Glencoe massacre in 1692 and the failure of the Darien scheme, for both of which King William III was held partly responsible. The abolition of the Lords of Articles in 1690 – formerly a means of royal influence in Scotland – transferred substantial powers to the Scottish Parliament, newly elected in 1703, which began to act with new-found vigour and confidence, adopting a position of aggressive constitutional nationalism.

The Scottish Parliament passed a succession of Acts deemed contrary to English interests, notably the Act anent (concerning) Peace and War, which laid down that no successor to Queen Anne should declare a war involving Scotland without first consulting the Scottish Parliament; also the Act of Security, which asserted that the Scottish Parliament, twenty days after Anne’s death, should name as her successor a Protestant member of the House of Stuart.

To England, it seemed that the prospects of Union were slipping away.

With her forces now locked into the War of the Spanish Succession, and unable to risk the withdrawal of Scottish regiments from the north European theatre of war, plus rumours that arms from France were on their way to Scotland, London took the view that the unruly Scots had to be brought to heel and made to discuss the twin issues of the Hanoverian succession and the Union of Parliaments.

This resulted in the formidable economic bludgeon of the Alien Act of March 1705, which proposed that, unless progress had been made on the twin issues by Christmas – specifically that unless Scotland had accepted the Hanoverian succession by Christmas Day 1705 – all of Scotland’s exports to England, being linen, wool, coal, cattle & sheep, would be embargoed or banned, and all Scots would be declared and treated as aliens.

– Next week, Alex Mitchell presents Part 2 of this 3 part account.

Hollywood And The Bomb – Part 3

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Feb 252011

Hollywood And The Bomb – or Trivialising a Nuclear Holocaust 1945-1990 – Part 3.

Voice’s Dave Watt lifts the lid on the somewhat shady influences at work at the highest levels of post-war US government when McCarthyism and ‘Commie plot’ paranoia was rife. Not even Hollywood’s cinematic art was safe, it seems.

This final section of the series concentrates mainly on Hollywood and the Bomb in the 1970s and 80s with occasional trips across the Atlantic to compare their treatment of the subject with British filmmakers.

The 1970s : An decade of détente, Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, humiliating end of Vietnam War for the US and the controversial deployment of short and medium range nukes amongst a largely unwilling European population but with the usual connivance of their governments.

The last instance of using nuclear war as a theme in the 1960s was curiously in the film Planet of The Apes (1968) where the human civilization is revealed to have been destroyed by a nuclear war thereby leaving the planet to the apes.

After this there was a largish gap in the 1970s until: Twilight’s Last Gleaming in 1977 starring Burt Lancaster and Richard Widmark. It tells the story of Lawrence Dell, a renegade USAAF general, who escapes from a military prison and takes over an ICBM silo near Montana, threatening to launch the missiles at the USSR and start World War III unless the President reveals the real reasons why America fought for so long in Vietnam. Control of The ICBM silo is duly recovered by the hero and some special forces sub-heroes although the audience are left in no doubt about the big business interests profiting from the US’s extended involvement in Vietnam.

The 1980s

With the appearance of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher on the scene in 1979/81 international relations took a turn for the worse with much sabre rattling, tub thumping and bear baiting of the mid-1950s variety (and the generation of an unpleasant ‘if you’re not 100% for us you’re against us’ mentality). Thatcher began this with Exercise Square Leg in 1980 despite huge protests by CND and other progressive organisations against it.

However, the campaigners against these chest beating exercises in fatuous optimism refined their strategies and Exercise Hard Rock in 1981 was cancelled by a massive CND campaign with 20 out of 54 county councils refusing to take part and many major cities declaring themselves Nuclear Free Zones.

It plays the devastation with a rather light hand – a bit like most US disaster movies with some photogenic survivors slightly mud and bloodstained

The next film with a nuclear theme was: The Day After (1983) which portrayed a fictional nuclear war between NATO forces and the Warsaw Pact that rapidly escalates into a full scale exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, focusing on the residents of Kansas and Missouri, as well as several family farms situated next to nearby nuclear missile silos.

It plays the devastation with a rather light hand – a bit like most US disaster movies with some photogenic survivors slightly mud and bloodstained in general although Jason Robards does develop an unpleasantly realistic radiation sickness near the end.

It was very lightweight (like most Hollywood offerings) – in fact, probably the most horrendous shots of a nuclear attack in a Hollywood offering is in Terminator 2(1991) where a children’s play area is shown during a nuclear blast. However in ‘The Day After’ this is pretty sanitised and one gets the impression that help will soon arrive and everything will be back to normal.

Slightly more thought provoking was the film Special Bulletin.which was an American made-for-TV movie first broadcast in 1983 The film has no opening credits Instead, the program begins with a promo for a typical daytime morning lineup: previews of various shows, and a catchy network jingle, “RBS: We’re Moving Up!” Suddenly, an ominous “Special Bulletin” slide appears on the screen, with an announcer saying “We interrupt this program to bring you a Special Bulletin from RBS News.” It shows how a local TV crew, covering a dockworkers’ strike, become caught in the middle of a firefight between the Coast Guard and some people on board a tugboat sitting at a dock in Charleston, South Carolina.

This extraordinary TV movie — shot on video, to make it resemble a news broadcast — shows us how network news might cover a group of terrorists holding a city hostage with a nuclear bomb and in doing so creates extraordinary tension while also getting in subtle and pointed digs at the media.

The government tries to fool the insurgent group and storm the tugboat. The attempt fails disastrously and there is a nuclear detonation.

Interestingly, when this was shown, despite a disclaimer on air there was a certain amount of panic in the Charleston area

The final shots are of a female reporter and her cameraman trapped on a nearby old aircraft carrier with huge fires blazing in the background and, clearly stunned and dazed, she is terrified of imminent radiation sickness. The cameraman then replays the detonation in harbour which contains nothing but a raging firestorm. At this, the TV anchor breaks down on air crying out and weeping.

There is a break and the next shots are from three days later where the news, with the typical banality of TV news, has gone on to cover all the other events around the world (strikes in Poland, a World Bank announcement) which have continued to occur despite the destruction of Charleston.

Interestingly, when this was shown, despite a disclaimer on air there was a certain amount of panic in the Charleston area when the film was originally shown on TV.

Back in the UK, the next film up was Threads (1984) – a BBC television play set in the city of Sheffield depicting the effects of a nuclear war and its aftermath on the United Kingdom. The premise of Threads was to hypothesise the effects of a nuclear war on the United Kingdom after an exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States escalates to include the UK.

The primary plot centres on two families: the Kemps and the Becketts — as an international crisis erupts and escalates. As NATO and the UK prepare for war, the members of each family deal with their own personal crises. Meanwhile, a secondary plot centered upon Clive Sutton, the Chief Executive of the City of Sheffield serves to illustrate for the viewer the UK Government’s then-current continuity of government arrangements. The balance of the film details the fate of each family as the characters face the medical, economic, social, and environmental consequences of a nuclear war.

Both the plot and the atmosphere of the play are extremely bleak with the UK ending up as a declining medieval society in the throes of a nuclear winter.

Despite the apparent extreme bleakness Threads was actually based on the results for the previously mentioned (and almost unbelievably optimistic) Exercise Square Leg instigated by the Tories in the 1980 in which the Soviets obligingly decide to nuke bizarre out-of-the-way places like Eastbourne but not Central London. In addition, whereas a Soviet attack on the UK could engender up to 1000 megatons, Square Leg was based on an attack involving 239 megatons.

There’s an equally childish disposition towards happy endings despite the mega-deaths on display

Despite this the mortality figures were estimated at 29 million (53% of the population); serious injuries at 7 million (12%); short-term survivors at 19 million (35%) so even at Thatcher’s mindlessly optimistic best we’d all have had it.

The last film on the list is also a British film and is that unusual combination a rather harrowing cartoon.

When the Wind Blows 1986 depicts a nuclear attack on the UK by the Soviet Union from the viewpoint of a retired couple, Jim and Hilda Bloggs. [Voices by John Mills & Peggy Ashcroft] The Bloggs live in rural Sussex and are confused regarding the nature and seriousness of their situation which is sometimes used to generate gentle comedy as well as darker elements. As the film progresses their situation becomes steadily more hopeless as they suffer from the effects of radiation sickness. The film ends on an extremely moving note, with both Jim and Hilda dying as they pray.

CONCLUSION – Hollywood : There was a period of more thoughtful filmmaking in the 60s and 70s but as usual it’s been lots of glitz, glorious technicolour, wonderful special effects, very little in the way of plot lines with rather childish bipolar worldviews of the US as basically good and Johnny Foreigner regarded as rather murderous and irrational demons. There’s an equally childish disposition towards happy endings despite the mega-deaths on display.

British films of the period tended to be rather more thoughtful, socially realistic and less given to mindless flag wagging – in general, somewhere in between the more cerebral European mainland films produced on the same subject and the rather shallow US films made during this period.

Hollywood And The Bomb – Part 2

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Feb 182011

Hollywood And The Bomb – or Trivialising a Nuclear Holocaust 1945-1990 – Part 2.

This section concentrates mainly on Hollywood and the Bomb in the 1950s and 60s with occasional trips across the Atlantic to compare their treatment of the subject with British filmmakers.

Equally upbeat as per the Cheerful Charlie Reader’s Digest was the film Duck and Cover – a civil defence film/public guidance film which first shown publicly in January 1952.
Made with the help of schoolchildren from New York City who were, needless to say, shown ducking under desks and covering their eyes, it was shown in schools as the cornerstone of the government’s “duck and cover” public awareness campaign.

The movie stated that nuclear war could happen at any time without warning and U.S. citizens should keep this constantly in mind and be ever ready (presumably by carrying a school desk around with them).
This was followed up by another public guidance film called The House in the Middle [1954] which was a short documentary film produced by the Federal Civil Defence Administration, which attempted to show that a clean, freshly painted house is more likely to survive a nuclear attack than its poorly maintained counterpart. As it turned out, however, this film was actually sponsored by the US National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association so I’d take its nuclear protection advice with a large pinch of salt.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in 1950, the first British Nuclear protestor appeared in the film Seven Days to Noon (beating the first Aldermaston March by a clear eight years). Starring Barry Jones and Andrew Morell it showed a British scientist, John Willingdon, running away from a research centre with an atomic bomb which he has in a suitcase. He threatens to blow up the centre of London if the Government don’t agree to stop any further nuclear testing. Special agents from Scotland Yard try to stop him with help from his assistant and her fiancé. In a dramatic finish the scientist is accidentally shot a few minutes before the bomb goes off, the hero marries the heroine and everyone lives happily ever after. Nowadays it seems quite a thought provoking item for the time although in the original film blurb Willingdon the scientist was obligingly referred to as a madman.

Back to the US in 1951 there was a sci- fi film called Five which was a post-apocalyptic US film. The title refers to the number of survivors of an atomic war that wiped out the rest of the human race. Fortunately for the survivors they all lived in the US, spoke English and were within walking distance of each other – just how lucky is that? This was, however, something of a benchmark as it was the first ever film to depict the aftermath of such a catastrophe.

Next film produced by Hollywood with a nuclear war theme was Invasion USA (1952) – basically a pro-military pro-government propaganda film which starts off with a group of anti-government, anti-war people in a bar in Washington decrying the early military-industrial complex of those days.

However, the film goes on to show that while these misguided peaceniks are chewing the fat the evil robotic Soviets are plotting to attack the US with A-Bombs. The A-bombs duly arrive on American air force bases causing mayhem and after a series of horrifying disasters and the usual heroic resistance the few surviving peaceniks are predictably shown to conclude that their government and military were right after all.

their response to any military face confrontation with the Soviets would be a first strike nuclear attack

And I hope they were all thoroughly ashamed of themselves, too. The Soviets in this film were rather confusingly dressed similarly to Nazi SS men – Mind you it probably wouldn’t be too confusing to modern American audiences over 30% of who think the Soviet Union & Germany were on the same side in World War Two anyway.

There was a gap in Hollywood films involving actual nuclear war over the next few years but quite a few pro-military but specifically pro USAAF films. (Just keep remembering here those horrible, pro-commie, fellow traveller, pinkos in the US Navy have been defeated and the United States Army Air Force is the way to go.)

First of these was: James Stewart in Strategic Air Command [1955] , Stewart plays a USAAF Reserve officer recalled reluctantly to active duty to fly bombers for the Strategic Air Command. The film details the duties and responsibilities of being an Air Force strategic bomber pilot, and the strains such service places on family life. Happily, Stewart overcomes all these and goes on to enjoy his new military career defending the USA from the godless Commie threat.

Similarly in Bombers B52 [1957] Karl Malden plays a US air force sergeant who is tempted by a better-paying civilian job. After much moral deliberation Malden decides that he’s of more value in the service and goes on to enjoy his continuing military career defending the USA from the godless Commie threat.

The lack of films depicting a nuclear exchange is particularly significant during this time as the US military was irrevocably committed to the first use of nuclear weapons under the 1951 New Look Strategy -the concept being that the considerably more powerful Soviet forces represented such a world wide threat to US hegemony that their response to any military face confrontation with the Soviets would be a first strike nuclear attack.

In fact, the next film on the subject was produced well after McCarthy’s decline and is the bleakly realistic 1959 film On The Beach which is set in 1964 in the months following World War III. The conflict has devastated the northern hemisphere, polluting the atmosphere with nuclear fallout and killing all human life there while global air currents are slowly carrying the fallout to the southern hemisphere. The only part of the planet still habitable is the far south of the globe, specifically Australia but as the film ends it becomes apparent than everyone is either dying about to die.

Predictably the U.S. Department of Defence refused to cooperate in the production of this little item, refusing access to their nuclear-powered submarines and the film production crew was forced to use a non-nuclear Royal Navy submarine, the HMS Andrew.

The US contrived to lose seven nukes in the years after the WW2 which means that they’re lying around somewhere rusting quietly away.

Despite the loan of the HMS Andrew this did not indicate an anti nuclear stance by the British Government and, in fact, the then Foreign Secretary and future Tory Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas Hume stated in June 1961 that in their commitment to NATO and the US that “The British people are prepared to be blown to atomic dust if necessary” which must have been news to most of the population.

Following the the international concern over the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the groundbreaking film of’ On The Beach’ and there appeared a reaction to this within the US establishment which contradicted the previously held view characterised by the Rand Corporation’s Herman Kahn ‘On Thermonuclear War’ (1960) which postulated the idea yet again of a ‘winnable nuclear war’.

This public outcry engendered by the Cuban Missile Crisis caused Kahn’s to amend his following books ‘Thinking About The Unthinkable (1962) and On Escalation (1965) backpedalled a bit and produced such delights as his Escalation Ladder (seehttp://www.texaschapbookpress.com/magellanslog41/escalation.htm) which ranges from Ostensible Crisis and Political, Economic & Diplomatic Gestures for 44 stages up to Unmodified Counterforce Attack or Spasm and Insensate War – which apparently means firing off everything nuclear you’ve got in the general direction of the enemy. According to Mr Kahn, 24 of these 44 stages involve a ‘nuclear exchange’.

Next film up was A Gathering of Eagles [1963] a movie about the Cold War and the pressures of Air Force command. Rock Hudson plays a USAAF Colonel, Jim Caldwell, who despite his misgivings is promoted to be a Strategic Air Command B-52 wing commander –. Needless to say Hudson predictably overcomes all the tribulations and pressures of command and like Karl Malden and Jimmy Stewart goes on to enjoy his new military career defending the USA from the godless Commie threat.

This film was heavily supported by the USAAF and SAC commander Curtis Lemay in particular as it showed SAC in the most promising light imaginable as intelligently led, competent and relentlessly efficient whereas they had been receiving a fair bit of flak for several major nuclear accidents. The US contrived to lose seven nukes in the years after the WW2 which means that they’re lying around somewhere rusting quietly away.

the last poignant scene is of nuclear blasts all over the globe as Vera Lynn sings ‘We’ll Meet Again’.

Curtis LeMay may be a name familiar to some of you as a rather deranged US superhawk very keen on using B52s in Vietnam and was extremely miffed when LBJ stopped him dropping a nuke in front of the threatened US marine base at Khe Sanh in 1967. His alter ego, General Turgidson, was played by George C Scott in the next film which is:

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb which is a 1964 American/British black comedy film directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, and featuring Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn and Slim Pickens..

The story concerns an unhinged US Air Force general Jack D Ripper who orders a first strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and follows the President of the United States, his advisors, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an RAF officer as they try to recall the bombers to prevent a nuclear apocalypse, as well as the crew of one B-52 as they attempt to deliver their payload. The situation is made more critical by the Soviet Union having created a Doomsday Machine which will fire off a huge cloud of radioactive dust which will envelop the earth if a nuke hits the Soviet Union. The bomber eventually hits a tertiary target within the Soviet Union and the last poignant scene is of nuclear blasts all over the globe as Vera Lynn sings ‘We’ll Meet Again’.

A similar theme appears in Fail-Safe (1964) Sidney Lumet’s original 1964 film employs a stylized and heightened dramatic structure in its nerve-crushing moral tale. When an off-course commercial airplane triggers the Pentagon’s complex “fail-safe” maneuver, leaving an arsenal of nuclear-bomb-carrying jet fighters at the ready, a mechanical error puts the entire world in danger of destruction.

Walter Matthau gives an uncharacteristic turn as an unpleasantly cold and contemptuous political scientist Prof. Groteschele, apparently based on Herman Kahn. Henry Fonda plays the American president who manages with the Soviet Premiere to navigate the complex and urgent political trauma and prevent total destruction. As one of the American bombers makes it through to drop an A-bomb on Moscow the only concession the US President can offer to prevent all out war is to drop a similar bomb on New York.

This duly happens (thus incidentally invoking Mr Kahn’s Stage 29 of his Escalation Ladder ‘Exemplary Attack on Population’) and the countdown to the bomb hitting New York involves a series of movie stills taken in the streets of the city.

Back across the Atlantic, The War Game was a 1965 television film on nuclear war. Written, directed, and produced by Peter Watkins for the BBC’s The Wednesday Play strand, its graphic depiction of the impact of a Soviet nuclear attack on Britain caused dismay within the BBC and in government.

It was scheduled for transmission on 6th of August 1966 but the effect of the film was judged by the BBC to be “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting” and it was not actually transmitted for 19 years and eventually appeared on the BBC in 1985, Presumably, following this timescale they’ll get around to broadcasting the appeal for Gaza in 2038.

Back in Hollywood the forces of good were still battling for God & Profit but a lot of public questioning was going on about US involvement in Laos and Vietnam and the next film revealed a certain ambivalence in US society.

In The Bedford Incident (1965) Richard Widmark plays the stern and unforgiving skipper of an American destroyer on peacetime patrol in North Atlantic waters as an element of the NATO fleet. He develops an obsessive determination to hunt down a Soviet submarine and as the danger in his compulsive chase develops a fatal incident occurs with the US destroyer firing off its missile and the Soviet submarine retaliating with its nuclear weaponry and both are utterly destroyed.

Part 3 (The 1970s onwards) -next week.

Hollywood And The Bomb – Part 1

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Feb 112011

Hollywood And The Bomb – or Trivialising a Nuclear Holocaust 1945-1990

Part 1. Setting the scene – Government and film

First, let me say that films aren’t made in a vacuum. In a way they reflect the needs and desires of the society in which they’re made.

Sometimes they are made to reflect the interests of the ruling elite in that society and sometimes, rather more rarely, they’re made to challenge that elite and its world view.

Hollywood, and to an extent the British film industry produce, in general, films without an overt political message but this does not mean there is no political influence.

In the US, the military’s influence on Hollywood has been increasingly pervasive since the establishment of the Committee of Public Information in early 1917 to present the US’s entry to the First World War as a noble crusade and not as a desperate prop for that country’s massive investment in the failing Allied cause.

Following the Second World War, the Pentagon formally established its ‘film approval’ process and in 1948, set up a special Movie Liaison Office. With the onset of the Cold War, the US military demanded even greater control over the movies it ‘assisted’.

Producers and directors seeking access to military equipment, locations or personnel, or even Department of Defense archival footage, are required to have their work vetted by the Pentagon. Those prepared to reshape their movies in line with Pentagon directives are given substantial financial and technical help; those unwilling to accept its dictates are denied any assistance.

Since then, plot and character changes and outright historical falsification have been the most common demands made by the military, its stated aim being to encourage movies which boost ‘recruitment and retention programs’. Filmmakers are told that excessive foul language, alcohol and drug use, sexism, racism and other bigotry in the armed forces must be toned down and replaced with ‘positive’ portrayals. In fact it is not unusual for the Pentagon to demand entire scenes, even central characters, be deleted.

There’s a very good David L Robb book on the subject, Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies.

So, bear this in mind as you read on.

Hollywood and the Bomb

My delving around revealed that the first nuclear war film made in Hollywood was a gem called The First Yank Into Tokyo, rushed out in September 1945, which featured a rather large American boxing star Tom Neal being parachuted into the land of the Rising Sun disguised as a Japanese soldier – honestly – to rescue a captured nuclear scientist.

two nuclear bombs have gone off in Japan and very few people in the West know that much about them

Predictably, he rescues the scientist and wins the heroine before the film ends with stirring music and an approving gravelly voice narrating over film of the mushroom cloud at Hiroshima – presumably engendered by work of the rescued scientist.

Washington Post film critic Jeff Hill described it as:

“Not only the most racist movie I have ever seen, it is probably quite simply the worst film I have ever seen in any category of any motion picture ever”

Needless to say, the real films taken by the US military showing what had actually happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were confiscated by the US government and locked away for 25 years, whilst any reports of the attacks were systematically discredited.

For example, within three days of Wilfred Burchett’s shocking dispatch on radiation sickness, The Atomic Plague appearing in the Daily Express on September 5 1945, the US military had a front page story in the New York Times disputing the notion that radiation sickness was actually killing people. Their news story included this remarkable commentary, “The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and thereby obtain milder surrender terms”.

John Hersey’s 1946 film Hiroshima, which moved beyond generalised images of a destroyed city to offer sharply-etched narratives of six survivors’ experiences, was also predictably rubbished and concealed by the US government as best it could.

So here we are; it’s the late 1940s – two nuclear bombs have gone off in Japan and very few people in the West know that much about them or their effects, and those who do go to great lengths to conceal the facts.

On the other hand, some who did know about the effects of the bombs did act and here we find the first and most unusual band of nuclear protestors.

The Admirals’ Revolt 1948-49

Ofstie’s evidence to the hearings was particularly crucial as his post war assignment was to the US Strategic Bombing Survey of Japan

Admirals are in an unusual position as far as military command goes. Whereas an army commander can be thirty to fifty miles behind the lines and his air force counterpart can be three thousand miles away from the action, an admiral is generally there with the fleet, taking the same risks and seeing the same carnage as the crews of the ships, possibly engendering a greater sense of social realism to war’s horrors.

Whatever the reason, in 1948 and 1949, during stormy congressional hearings on the US Air Force’s ill-fated and unbelievably expensive nuclear white elephant, the B-37 bomber, there appeared what was to be called the Admirals’ Revolt – a group of US senior naval officers consisting of Secretary of the Navy Sullivan, Admiral Denfield, Rear Admirals Ofstie and Radford, and about a dozen others supported by James Forrestal, the then US Secretary of Defence.

Rear Admiral Ofstie’s evidence to the hearings was particularly crucial as his post war assignment was to the US Strategic Bombing Survey of Japan, where he interviewed many surviving Japanese officials and civilians. In 1946 he was detached and was reassigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff Evaluation Group and served at the Bikini nuclear tests.

So, here we have a fighting admiral who has seen death and destruction at close hand and knows about indiscriminate bombing and the effects of nuclear bombs. On October 11, 1949 he and Rear Admiral Radford testified before the Combined Services Defence Committee on the effects of nuclear warfare and concluded, ‘Strategic air warfare, as practised in the past and as proposed for the future, is militarily unsound and of limited effect, is morally wrong, and is decidedly harmful to the stability of a post-war world.’

Cue major uproar in the US armed forces and government.

President Harry H Truman, faced with this revolt, had a great deal of soul-searching to do. However, at some point, it was presumably pointed out to him that among the companies who were profiting massively from the B-37 fiasco and would benefit from future huge USAAF contracts, were those who paid his election expenses. The President and his cabinet predictably came down on the side of the USAAF and set the scene for half a century of nuclear brinkmanship.

the deranged and murderous Commies could start a nuclear war any minute

Defence Secretary Forrestal was hounded out of office, suffered a nervous breakdown and later committed suicide in rather suspicious Kelly-esque circumstances. The admirals involved in the revolt were either eased out of service or remained unpromoted until their retirement.

Truman’s eventual decision may also have been influenced by the events of August 1949 when the first Soviet nuclear bomb, codenamed Joe One, was tested in Kazakhstan.

In addition, the setting off of Joe One generated huge levels of paranoia and hysteria in the US which the government and the embedded media tried to use by generating two rather contradictory notions:

– the deranged and murderous Commies could start a nuclear war any minute.

– don’t worry, your government will show you how to survive it.

This dichotomy was to result in a recurring theme in the 1950s and such august publications as Reader’s Digest produced upbeat articles such as You Can Live Despite The A-Bomb and How US Cities Can Prepare For Atomic War, whilst nuclear bunkers were routinely referred to more prosaically as ‘air raid shelters’.

Next week: Part 2 – Films of 1950s and 60s

A Strange Day Out At Durness

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Nov 192010

By John Russell.

I had gone with a friend up to Durness for a day out, and decided to show her Balnakeil Bay, which, in my opinion, is the most beautiful beach in Scotland.

I had walked along here previously and my plan was to go to the army station at the end and watch the sea birds. Having seen the watch tower before I knew it was related to the Cape Wrath firing range, but never before had I seen it in use. However I noticed a red flag flying on top of the tower and there were people in attendance which presumably barred us from approaching the station.

Consequently, we decided to walk to the right to a cliff that was looking across to Cape Wrath. Bathed in sunshine, on approaching the cliff, we went down a small dip which brought us close to the cliff face.

As we arrived in the dip, there was a strange shock wave came over us, followed by the sound of an almighty bang. We reached the top of the cliff and saw smoke coming from a small island (Dulcis island) which was about a mile away from where we were and about five hundred yards off the Cape Wrath peninsula.

We realised that this was a jet doing target practise, Cape Wrath being the only place in Europe where armies or navies from all over Europe can fire live ammunition. What shocked me was that we could see all round us and in the distance an eye can see there were no jets within visual range.

Now, I have a limited knowledge of how it would be to be bombed, but from movies I would expect to hear the planes flying over which would give people time to run to the bomb shelter. However, this was just so scary, the missile was fired, hit the rock and exploded, and only then did we hear it. This was followed by a shock wave which I physically felt it going through my body.

Where we were sitting was approximately a mile away from where the bombs were exploding and it was nothing like the movies at all. I then tried to imagine what a family would feel if they were sitting at home with the building next to them being targeted – or even a house in the next street. Remember, we were about a mile away…and still felt the shock go through us. Overhead, an empty sky and no early warnings of noisy planes.

we could hear the rat-a-tat of the gun, then saw the bullets running in a line up the rock

After a few moments, three Tornado jets, (the ones you have no doubt seen on television programmes about the Lossiemouth base closures) flew past at a tremendous speed and quickly disappeared into the sky again.

As we settled back down to have a cup o tea and a sandwich, another round of explosions went off and once again there was the shock wave, black pillars of smoke rose to the air, then you heard it, then the shock wave again.

The jets then returned speeding past us and, looking across at the rock, we noticed that a machine gun was now being fired, we could hear the rat-a-tat of the gun, then saw the bullets running in a line up the rock, each mini explosion was, from our spot, about the size of a football – but bright enough to be noticed on a sunny day.

A single plane then flew over us, and when it was approaching the rock, there was a largish splash in the sea, which I assumed was something that had either missed its target, or failed to go off. Whichever it was, there is, I assume, now a live missile on the sea bed (look out any crab fishermen in the area). On my last visit to Cape Wrath, I met a group of people from the MOD who were going up to Cape Wrath to retrieve the unexploded ordinance, and detonate them.

The planes then flew past us for a final time then disappeared. This whole episode, although quite exciting at the time (Jake pointed out it was November the 5th), left me feeling really uneasy about the whole incident and again my mind went back to Iraq and Afghanistan and to people who are not really part of the whole war issue. Just people trying to get on with their lives and the only reason for being in danger is their proximity to some unsuspected target which could potentially have their families killed and their homes ruined.

After all the jets had gone there was a lingering smell of sulphur in the air, like the smell a match makes after it had been blown out… A strange day altogether

Johnny R

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