Richard Lindsay – Page 9 – Richard Lindsay: Environment Arts and Letters

Nature sells – powerful proof of our need for Nature

Most of us now live in cities or urban environments because, since around 2008, the human species has transformed itself from Homo sapiens ruralensis into Homo sapiens urbanensis. The human population has moved the centre of its distribution from the rural setting to the urban jungle and our everyday links with the natural world are therefore, arguably, weakening. The Oxford Junior Dictionary has dispensed with the word ‘acorn’ (albeit to much horrified adult comment) on the grounds that words such as acorn, lark and minnow have much less relevance to young people today than terms such as blog, download and broadband. Fears for the health, welfare and safety of our children in urban settings combine with formal Health & Safety regulations to ensure that the favoured areas for play today are constructed areas of climbing frames, spinning poles and scrambling nets, sometimes outdoor, sometimes indoors in great warehouses, rather than the trees, bush-dens, and yes, even ponds and streams which were playgrounds for those of us who are now of a certain age.

Successive governments of all hues, not just in the UK but worldwide, have with a few notable exceptions tended to offer little more than lip-service to environmental issues and pursued the lightest-touch form of executive environmental action because they believe that what people really care about now is physical and financial security rather than butterflies, birds and wild flowers. They are almost certainly correct, at least at one level, but this attitude is based on the belief that Nature is an optional extra to be given consideration only when the important things in life have been sorted out. In other words, Nature is no longer believed to be important to the investment-fund manager in Canary Wharf or the tech-startup team in Hoxton or the hospital cleaner living in Manchester’s Moss Side because they all live, like most of us, in the urban environment. There is one industry, however, and arguably one of the largest contributors to the UK economy, which gives the lie to this belief and shows just how important Nature is even to the most hardened urbanite, though they themselves may not be aware of any positive feelings towards Nature.

To demonstrate this, I want you to do something for me – and no, I don’t want you to go outside and hug a tree. I just want you to sit and watch TV. A commercial channel. When a commercial break arrives, watch each advert and try to spot how many ‘natural’ references there are in each advert. It may be a floral pattern on wallpaper, or a flower-bed, or a mountain, or a zebra, or a flower in a vase, or a bird flying, or a wild landscape. Now consider what relevance that natural reference has to the product being advertised in each case. I am fairly confident that an astonishingly high proportion of the adverts you have just watched will contain one or more natural references. I am also reasonably confident that many of those references will be of little direct relevance to the product being marketed.

Now why should both these facts be? Advertising has no interest in Nature per se. It is a hard-headed industry in the business of making money for its clients. Ultimately, however, advertising is about making us feel good and therefore seeking to associate the product with a sense of well-being. If something makes us feel good, we are more likely to want it. This hard-headed industry knows precisely what, deep down, makes us happy. It is abundantly clear that a young futures trader who lives and works in Canary Wharf is deeply attracted to the idea of driving the latest high-performance car through wild rugged landscapes, through a scenery of lush green alpine meadows, along wild coastlines – in short, through Nature. This is clearly the case because this is what such adverts consist of, and the advertising industry understands the mind of our young futures trader better than anyone. Take almost any other product, even the most unlikely of products – the insurance market, or should I say the insurance meerkat? Meerkat?? What’s that got to do with insurance…?? It doesn’t have anything to do with insurance of course, but it has everything to do with the successful marketing of insurance.

As far as I’m aware there’s been very little published in this country about the obvious underlying attraction of Nature and the use of this by the advertising industry, but there’s an interesting pilot study by Rainer Brämer in German which looks at the phenomenon in Germany, and there’s also a German blog by Martin Rasper which makes a number of valuable and enlightening points. But does a viscerally, almost subconsciously positive, response to Nature mean that we actually want to engage with natural things, that we want more Nature?

Again, the advertising industry gives us an interesting insight. Where do the captains of this hard-headed industry go when they wish to relax, or when they have made their millions and retire? Very often they head for the beautiful countryside or to the un-spoiled places of the World, as do so many other captains of industry. There is probably a direct relationship between how rich someone is and the amount of time they spend in surroundings which are full of natural references. Sometimes these settings can be quite literally manicured to within an inch of their lives (some Japanese shogunate gardens still have lawns and trees trimmed with nail scissors) because many successful people are also various degrees of control obsessive, but even so their evident need for natural contact is still strong. Edward O. Wilson wrote extensively about this strong link, which he called ‘biophilia’, but there is a tendency among decision-makers, policy makers and general movers and shakers to regard this concept as too nebulous to quantify and turn into something economically meaningful. Advertising does precisely this. It calculates the economic benefit to the client of using specific triggers within an advert. As a measure of what Nature means to us in hard monetary terms, advertising is something of a revelation. “Add a giraffe. Your sales will increase by 35%”. This is a powerful argument because it applies across the whole spectrum of society.

There is something of a downside to this, however – or perhaps at least an unexplored issue. When advertisements use actors they must be paid. Nature has no voice and cannot ask to be paid. In effect, one of the most powerful tools of the advertising industry can be used for free by anyone for any purpose. There are occasions where the use of Nature in order to sell a product ultimately may have a negative effect on Nature itself. It is rather like other industries 100 years ago which were able to extract water from river systems, use it for their industrial process and then pump the waste water back into the river with no thought or responsibility for the impact on the river system. That system has now been replaced by the ‘polluter pays’ principle, and industry has adapted accordingly to the benefit of everyone.

There is perhaps therefore an argument for the advertising industry to have its own version of this principle, whereby a ‘natural actor’ used in an advertisement ‘receives payment’ for its contribution to the creation of the advert. This could be achieved using the same type of mechanism as operated by the Landfill Tax Credit Scheme. Each advert and each broadcast/publication of an advert could pay a small supplement to a Natural Advertising Tax (NATural Ad) Scheme which would provide funds for projects which enhanced the natural environment of local communities and/or perhaps gave opportunities for those living in nature-deprived urban settings to get out and enjoy contact with the natural world. Given the pervasive nature of Nature, I suspect that the default position for all adverts would be that they should pay into the NATural Ad Scheme and it would be up to the advertising agency to demonstrate that a particular advert did not fall within the scheme. If the supplement were sufficiently small, such arguments would be largely pointless in any case.

Given what we receive from Nature, whether consciously or subconsciously, and its enormous contribution to the mass of advertising by which we are all bombarded every day, and the huge contribution that advertising makes to the national economy, a scheme such as NATural Ad would seem both reasonable and a small price to pay. Whether or not such a scheme were ever to be instigated, politicians, decisions, planners, policy makers and financiers would do well to look to the advertising industry for a real sense of how important Nature is to all of us. Advertising is here to stay, but just imagine advertising stripped of all references to Nature – what a bleak and rather soul-less world that would be…

Picture credits
Acorn: free photos – flickr creative commons licence
Canary Wharf: Richard Lindsay
Mazda MX-5 ND: Yarin Asanth – flickr creative commons licence
Meerkat: Van Corey – flickr creative commons licence
Giraffe: Peter Miller – flickr creative commons licence

Information sources

Oxford Junior Dictionary decision to drop ‘nature-related’ words: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/13/oxford-junior-dictionary-replacement-natural-words
UK Advertising Industry: http://www.statista.com/topics/1747/advertising-in-the-united-kingdom/
and http://www.theworkfoundation.com/downloadpublication/report/295_the%20contribution%20of%20advertising%20to%20the%20uk%20economy%20311011.pdf
Advertising contribution to the UK economy: http://www.thinkbox.tv/tv-at-a-glance/advertising-pays-how-advertising-fuels-the-uk-economy/
Nature and advertising study by Rainer Brämer: http://www.wanderforschung.de/files/natwerb1241108152.pdf
Nature and advertising blog by Martin Rasper: http://www.utopia.de/magazin/nature-sells-wie-puma-jaguar-co-die-werbung-beeinflussen
Edward O. Wilson and Biophilia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis

The amazing Sphagnum bog moss – from WW1 to the Climate War

At 07:30 on 1st June 1916, Private Tommy Atkins scrambled out of a forward trench in the British front lines and advanced across No Man’s Land towards the German trenches. He was taking part in the Battle of Albert, the opening phase of the Battle of the Somme. He had covered no more than 30 yards when he felt as if someone had hit him on the back of the head with a mallet. At the same time his rifle dropped uselessly to the broken chalky ground. Checking himself dazedly, he realized that he must have taken a bullet in the left shoulder because the whole shoulder area was suddenly bright crimson. Private Tommy Atkins had just become one of the 57, 470 British casualties on the now-notorious First Day of the Somme.

Shock meant that he could still feel no pain, but his training meant that his actions in the next few seconds would ultimately save his life. He tore off the pouch sewn to the inside of his uniform jacket, ripped it open and applied the contents to his wound before making his way back to the Regimental Aid Post. Tommy Atkins was lucky, not merely because the bullet had not killed him. He was lucky because this was 1916 and not 1914 and therefore the nature of his First Field Dressing meant that he had a good chance of staying alive rather than subsequently dying of sepsis caused by infection of his wound.

Death as a result of even relatively minor injuries due to sepsis and gas gangrene had been a major problem in late 1914 and throughout 1915 because the appalling conditions in the trenches meant that wounds were generally accompanied by fragments of dirty clothing and the bodily filth liberally and literally plastered about trench and dug-out. In 1915, however, Lt. Col. Charles Cathcart of the Royal Army Medical Corps and a Senior Surgeon at the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary, recalled that in ancient times even quite terrible wounds had been successfully dressed on the battlefield using Sphagnum bog moss. He investigated further and, on the basis of some successful trials, instigated a nationwide programme of bog-moss collection to create what would become the standard First Field Dressing issued to all UK and Imperial land forces as an integral part of their uniform. People gathered the humble bog moss across the country, from Bodmin Moor to the far north of Shetland. In Shetland, indeed, they held a ‘Shetland Sphagnum Moss Day’ on 17th August 1917 when all schools were closed and folk from across Shetland were encouraged to go out and gather the precious moss. This was to be the first of many such days held in Shetland during the remaining period of the war.

It was established that the First Field Dressing provided a number of improvements over the cotton-based dressings of the early period of the war. Sphagnum could absorb more than twice as much blood and other fluid as cotton wool and thus helped to dry out a wound so that it could heal. It was also fibrous like cotton wool and thus helped to seal the wound, but unlike cotton wool it also appeared to prevent infection of the wound in some mysterious way. Consequently Private Tommy Atkins would survive the war, albeit with a left arm which never worked entirely as it had before his injury, but at least it had not been amputated as the first stage of a slow, grisly death from gas gangrene. His First Field Dressing had somewhat miraculously prevented any infection from setting in and the astonishing efficiency of the RAMC had then ensured that 36 hours later he was back in England with his shoulder being ministered to by a team of highly-trained medical staff in a hospital south of London.

Sphagnum bog moss is a plant no larger than one’s thumb, but what it lacks in stature it makes up for in numbers. It never grows alone but rather occurs en-mass, rather like gazing down on the canopy of a rainforest from an aeroplane. It is a wetland plant, adapted both to being waterlogged and to storing water – vast quantities of it – which is the key to its absorbancy. If we look at the end of a side-branch, we see a number of leaves. Looking closely we also see that each leaf resembles, to a remarkable degree, that much-loved material bubble wrap. Except that bubble wrap cannot store water because the bubbles are sealed; once popped, all the fun goes out of bubble wrap. In the case of Sphagnum bog moss, however, the ‘bubbles’ are large storage cells with a number of open pores. The difficulty with such a system is that when water enters the pores the cells can expand but when water leaves the cells the whole structure simply collapses and it becomes almost impossible then to re-fill these cells – not good news for the Sphagnum plant – or for Private Tommy Atkins and the dried Sphagnum in his First Field Dressing. Fortunately for him, however, these ‘hyaline cells’ of Sphagnum have a cunning trick, in the form of spiral thickening which goes round and round the cell wall. Consequently when water exits the cell in dry conditions the cell remains a large open structure just waiting to suck in any moisture within the general vicinity. In this way it could keep the wound of Private Tommy Atkins dry and, in its natural peat bog habitat, maintain waterlogged conditions to the benefit of all its surrounding fellow Sphagnum plants.

One other consequence of the huge size of the hyaline storage cells is that the living green photosynthetic cells of Sphagnum are tiny, squeezed into narrow strips between the relatively vast hyaline cells. Consequently there is little living tissue in the plant itself to nourish putrefying micro-organisms. This combination of waterlogging and resulting lack of oxygen, combined with the lack of available nutrients, also means that decomposer micro-organisms are unable to keep pace with the steady, if slow, growth of a Sphagnum carpet. The partially-decayed remains of the Sphagnum bog moss therefore accumulate, perhaps only at 1 mm per year, but over a period of 10,000 years this can lead to an accumulation of Sphagnum and other plant remains which may be 10 metres deep. This waterlogged accumulation of plant material is what we know as ‘peat’. Moreover, we now know that Sphagnum has one more trick to ensure such accumulation – a trick which explains the mysterious healing power of the moss.

As well as depriving decomposer micro-organisms from an adequate supply of living material on which to survive, Sphagnum further starves them by exuding a chemical called ‘sphagnan’ which prevents decomposer micro-organisms from taking up nitrogen. It actively starves them. This explains why Private Tommy Atkins was able to reach the medical ministrations of a hospital back in England without any sign of sepsis or the even more feared gas gangrene having appeared. The sphagnan in his First Field Dressing had immobilized the putrefying micro-organisms.

It is no great step to go from the blood and mayhem of World War 1 to the blood and mayhem of the Vikings, but it seems that the Vikings also knew a thing or two about Sphagnum. They are reputed to have wrapped fresh salmon in Sphagnum before setting off on long voyages – a fact which has recently caught the interest of the modern food industry. Having no recipe for how the Vikings did this I thought that it would nevertheless be interesting to prepare a Viking feast for the launch of the Moors for the Future Community Science Big Moss Map Project. Having bought two bags of fresh Sphagnum from The Range, and a fresh salmon steak from Waitrose (on the assumption that this would be pretty fresh), I then cut the steak in two, slit open the two bags of Sphagnum and placed half the steak in each, wrapped both steaks tightly round with Sphagnum before sealing the bags with good old duct tape and cling-film. I then left both in the garage for a month – during a relatively sunny warm spell…

On the day before I was due to go to the Moors for the Future I opened up one bag – to see whether I had a full-scale disaster on my hands. The results were – remarkable! I took the second bag on a hot train from Colchester to Hathersage in the Peak District for the Moors for the Future Launch. At the end of my talk I offered to open the second bag (outside the hall!) for anyone who was interested – as I had no idea what we would find. Would there be a green stinking salmon soup? The result (video thanks to Debra Wilson and Joe Margetts of Moors for the Future):

The sub-title of this piece is ‘- from WW1 to the Climate War’, so where does climate come into this? How is Sphagnum going to help us in the war on climate change? Well, it all comes back to the remarkable preservative powers of Sphagnum, as a result of which the peatlands of the world store more carbon than all the world’s vegetation combined, including the vegetation of rainforests. Many areas of rainforest, including the home of the orangutan, are first and foremost peatlands which happen to be dominated by trees rather than low-growing vegetation. The orangutan is, in effect, a peatland species, despite his nickname ‘Old Man of the Forest’. Indeed this precisely highlights the problem – the world’s peatlands are invisible – and because they are invisible we have damaged them and continue to damage them in countless ways, releasing in only decades or even just a few years the carbon which they have accumulated over millennia. Yet in terms of our opportunities to influence what happens to our global climate in the years to come, Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director, UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has this to say:

“Restoring peatlands is a ‘low hanging fruit’, and among the most cost-effective options for mitigating climate change.”

So, the 80% of our peatlands in the UK which are damaged to the point where they no longer support peat-forming vegetation, and in particular lack a Sphagnum cover, offer an enormous opportunity to prevent further carbon losses by re-establishing a peat-forming vegetation, and then to begin slowly accumulating carbon into new peatland carbon stores. Private Tommy Atkins was saved by a small pack of dried Sphagnum. Perhaps we can all be saved by the source of that Sphagnum, if we now bend our efforts to restoring peat-forming vegetation across the UK’s, and indeed the world’s, peatland ecosystems.

Information sources
1. Casualty numbers for the Battle of the Somme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Somme#First_day_on_the_Somme.2C_1_July

2. Role of Lt. Col. Charles Cathcart in promoting the use of Sphagnum for First Field Dressing: http://rbg-web2.rbge.org.uk/bbs/activities/field%20bryology/FB110/FB110_Ayres_Sphagnum.pdf

3. Shetland Sphagnum Moss Day: Sinclair, D.M. (2014) The gathering of Sphagnum Moss. Shetland Life, November, pp. 34-35.

4. Global peatland carbon store: Scharlemann, J.P.W., Tanner, E.V.J., Hiederer, R. & Kapos, V. (2014) Global soil
carbon: understanding and managing the largest terrestrial carbon pool. Carbon Management, 5:1, 81-91

Background to the poem: ‘Home Leave’

Home Leave was that most peculiar of things – always longed for yet, once obtained, often something to be endured and ended as quickly as possible. The shock of seeing London to varying degrees still lit up and enjoying itself (at least until the Zeppelin and Gotha raids began in earnest in 1916) often triggered a sense of dislocation, incredulity and even anger as troops on leave passed through the capital en route to their homes. Adding to this, the sheer normalness of being home contrasted so bizarrely with what those on leave had just come from that many appeared to find it difficult to adjust in the few days available. There are stories of officers insisting on sleeping out in the garden under groundsheets, men inventing spurious reasons to return early, and, in memoirs, a frequently-expressed reluctance to talk with anyone about anything they had just seen or experienced. Jingoistic comments about ‘our brave boys beating the Boche’ appear to have particularly grated, and there is often an underlying sense of ‘wondering how your pals were doing’, and a desire to return to them as quickly as possible because they were the only ones who truly understood how you felt.

For those left at home, ‘Leave’ was a blessed relief from worry and was usually (though not always) a brief moment of joy, but for the individual on leave it was often a painful experience because there was rarely a chance to unburden themselves. Sometimes quite the reverse, because there was inevitably pressure to play up to the image of the ‘brave conquering hero’ – probably the last thing that anyone fresh from the muddy murderous hell of Passchendaele felt like doing.

Background to the poem: ‘The Skull’

Although life in WW1 trenches is now invariably linked with the word ‘mud’, in fact the River Somme runs through a chalk landscape for much of the setting for the eponymous battle. True, the riparian margins of the River Somme were peatland, making the going challenging in these parts, but during early parts of the Battle of the Somme the weather was dry and the chalk was hard. A better picture of the conditions associated with early stages of the battle is given by William Orpen’s paintings of the same area in 1917, where white bones of the dead blend with the white bones of the chalk landscape. Indeed Orpen’s “Thiepval 1917” may have been the subconscious trigger for this poem.

Only when the rains came in late July and August and barely seemed to stop did the battlefield begin to descend into a muddy hell. Anyone who has walked across a chalk field in the rain will know how cloying and sheer glue-like the chalk and clay-with-flints (usually found together) of such a landscape can become. During the warm days of July, however, the Somme Battlefield was often bone dry and splattered with the startling while lesions of shell holes and trench lines, as though the very bones of the Earth were being exposed.

Should we use the term ‘moorland’?

It may seem odd to question the use of the term ‘moorland’ when the word is so well established in English literature, being used in both Lorna Doone (1869) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) though not, interestingly enough, in Wuthering Heights (1847) despite the fact most people today would, in their mind’s eye, set Emily Bronte’s tale against a ‘wild moorland’ backdrop. In the inter-war years of the last century, however, Prof. A.G. Tansley used the term just three times in his magnum opus “The British Islands and Their Vegetation” (1939), considering it only within the linguistic complexities of describing peatland habitats using common parlance. In contrast, Prof. W.H. Pearsall’s ‘Mountains and Moorlands‘, published in 1950 as one of the earliest classic volumes of the New Naturalist Series, waved a large eponymous flag for the term ‘moorland’. Nonetheless, he was obliged to admit that: “There is no good definition of moors and moorlands“, identifying it pragmatically as open, wild uninhabited country. This absence of a ‘good definition’ continues to the present day. Despite the title, ‘The Moorlands of England and Wales‘ (2003) by Prof. I.G. Simmons in effect provides no more specific definition of ‘moorland’ than did Pearsall half a century earlier. The word also continues to appear in accounts of ‘moorland’ habitat from such disparate parts of the former British Empire as Uganda and New Zealand, whereas the term is almost unknown outside former Imperial territories.

We thus find ourselves in Britain in particular with a concept of a ‘typical moorland landscape’ well understood at least in Pearsall’s and Simmons’s terms by the public at large, but one which lacks any sound, rigorous definition for scientific use – as Tansley so clearly illustrated by his decision not to use the term when describing the range of British and Irish habitats. Indeed hereby lies the nub of the issue, because Tansley was describing natural and semi-natural habitats, while the prime focus of Simmons is moorland and its history as land-management units. We thus find that D. McVean and D.A.Ratcliffe’s NCC Monograph “Plant Communities of the Scottish Highlands‘ (1962) refers to moorlands only in the context of muirburn, an approach also largely adopted by Averis et al. (2004) who use the term ‘uplands’ as the focus of their ‘An Illustrated Guide to British Upland Vegetation‘.

This distinction between habitat types and management units matters because ‘moorlands’ typically consist of several quite different habitat types, yet management parcels often make no distinction between these types or even deliberately seek to embrace a variety of types. In particular, given the increasingly high profile being afforded to peatlands within national and international community most notably because of their enormous carbon stores (more than all the world’s vegetation combined) and their role in water management, the distinction between peatlands and non-peatland habitats within the upland landscape is crucial because peatlands are wetlands. The only reason they are able to store so much carbon is that they are waterlogged to an extraordinary degree – typically peat soils in their natural state have a moisture content of more than 90% and often have a ratio of water to solid matter similar to that of a jellyfish. This contrasts markedly with the soils of other habitats typically rolled up within the all-embracing term ‘moorland’, yet for management purposes these very differing habitat types are often conflated under the term ‘moorland management’. Such conflation means that while a given management technique for upland grass heath, for example, may be appropriate, it may be completely inappropriate for an adjacent area of peat bog.

An area of particular concern is the use of the term ‘moorland’ in scientific publications which describe research in upland habitats and which then either explicitly or implicitly highlight policy implications for such ‘moorland’ areas without also highlighting the distinction to be made between peatland habitats and non-peatland habitats within the upland expanse. Indeed use of the term ‘moorland’ when describing habitat management in the uplands merely continues to muddy the waters of land-use policy and serves to add an unhelpful level of ambiguity to any scientific results obtained from habitat research in these landscapes. For the moment, it is necessary to be aware that any literature which uses the term ‘moorland’ requires the most careful examination to tease out what is relevant to peatland management and what is relevant to other upland habitats.

It is worth closing with the observation that ‘moorland’ still has a role to play, for example in the study of mobile species such as birds because they may make use of differing parts of the landscape during differing times of the day and differing times of the year. The concept of ‘moorland’ is thus arguably valid and helpful here, and the technique of ‘Moorland Breeding Bird Survey’ pioneered by Andy Brown and Kevin Shepherd remains in essence the standard approach for the survey of moorland birds – it is just worth highlighting the title of their 1993 defining paper: ‘A method for censusing upland breeding waders.’

References

Averis, A., Averis, B., Birks, J., Horsfield, D. Thompson, D. and Yeo, M. (2004) An Illustrated Guide to British Upland Vegetation. Peterborough : Joint Nature Conservation Committee.

Brown, A.F. and Shepherd, K.B. (1993) A method for censusing upland breeding waders. Bird Study, 40 : 189-195.

McVean, D. and Ratcliffe, D.A. (1962) Plant Communities of the Scottish Highlands. Monographs of the Nature Conservancy No.1. London : HMSO.

Pearsall, W.H. (1950) Mountains and Moorlands. London : Collins.

Simmons, I.G. (2003) The Moorlands of England and Wales. Edinburgh : University press.

Tansley, A.G. (1939) The British Islands and Their Vegetation. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.

‘Poems of love, blood and death’ – background to the World War 1 poems

For anyone interested in first-hand experiences of World War 1 and the material which has inspired my poetry about this period, there has been a recent flush of such accounts, many published decades ago but now made more easily accessible through the medium of e-books and the likes of Kindle and Amazon. The classics are volumes such as ‘Goodbye To All That‘ by Robert Graves, ‘Memoirs of an Infantry Officer‘ by Siegfried Sassoon and ‘Undertones of War‘ by Edmund Blunden, while Lyn Macdonald has compiled a huge number of first-hand descriptions for her much acclaimed accounts of the Somme and Passchendaele.

Perhaps less well known is ‘The War the Infantry Knew – 1914-1918‘ which gives a day-by-day account of the activities and experiences of the Royal Welch Fusiliers spanning the entire war, painstakingly assembled by Captain J.C. Dunn, the RWF Medical Officer for much of this period, from accounts given to him by colleagues and from his own diaries. Both Sassoon and Graves feature briefly in the accounts but although Dunn and his contributors rarely stray from the principle of restrained understatement, the conditions and experiences they endured, month after relentless month, come through all too clearly. John Lewis-Stempel has meanwhile pulled together a particularly moving account of the youngest, most junior officers, who shared the experiences of the men most directly, felt responsible for their men and led them into battle from the front. As a consequence they had the shortest life-expectancy of any in the trenches, as Lewis-Stempel’s title suggests: ‘Six Weeks – The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War‘.

Another feature of the recent crop of accounts now emerging – or re-emerging – is the number of autobiographies or biographies giving the perspective of the common private soldier or the NCO. The majority of the best-known autobiographies were written by junior officers, subalterns mainly, and have an air of ‘public school duty’ about them, whereas accounts written by the rank-and-file Tommy often have a different, more dogged, feel to them. For some, life in the trenches was only marginally worse than the life they had left back in Britain, with the added benefit of the undoubted camaraderie which developed within a platoon, although the steady loss of one’s ‘pals’ and the grinding nature of the work sometimes led to a shutting down of the emotions and an avoidance of new friendships, typified by “With Innocence and Hope” by Mike Williams.

There are, of course, also famous accounts from the other major combatants in this war, most notably ‘All Quiet on the Western Front‘ by Erich Maria Remarque for the German perspective, and ‘Le Feu‘ [Under Fire] by Henri Barbusse for France, but for an understanding of just what both French and German troops endured during the battle for Verdun, Ian Ousby’s ‘The Road to Verdun‘ is essential reading.

Furthermore, while the humour of the Wipers Times and the Bruce Bairnsfather cartoons are now somewhat legendary, it should not be assumed that the British had the monopoly on humour within the trenches. “The Silence of Colonel Bramble” by André Maurois shines a gentle Gallic light on the British approach to war.

What is perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is the way that so many men, and women, went back to live a normal life at the end of the war as though they’d just been away somewhere for a few weeks, the only thing betraying the scars they carried inside being the fact that many refused ever to talk about their war experiences with anyone. Pat Francis never learned anything about the war from her father Jack Watson apart from a nursery rhyme which he wrote in her autograph book and which he then enigmatically dated ‘Abbeville 1916’. She never learned why, but her subsequent meticulous research into her father’s war record resulted in ‘A Quiet Life – a marine in the Great War‘. He had been in Gallipoli, through the worst of times in that ill-fated venture, and then Salonika, the Somme and finally Passchendaele – worse even than the worst of times – and yet he never, ever, spoke a word about it…

FirstSite Open Exhibition

Fowey hinterland — View north across Cornish countryside from Fowey, Cornwall.

Having just discovered that FirstSite, Colchester’s major arts centre, is hosting an Open Exhibition for East Region artists and that today was the final day for submissions, a flurry of activity led to submission of a limited edition full-sized print of my “Fowey Hinterland” oil painting. It shows the view from the upper car park in Fowey, Cornwall, looking out across the Cornish countryside to the north. It was the only picture I had ready-framed and strung. Even the original oil painting isn’t yet framed. It’s a bit of a cheat to claim it as my first work chosen for public exhibition because the Open Exhibition guarantees to display every work submitted (an estimated 750 works), starting from 2nd October until 22nd November, but nevertheless good to be exposed to public gaze and scrutiny.