David Bennett

The Kaiser’s Table

I am readingTravellers In The Third Reich by Julia Boyd. It is a book full of contemporary accounts by various people of their impressions of Germany from the period from after the First World War to the beginning of the Second World War.

The kaiser’s table is a minor footnote I will describe here for its oddity. One thing, though, that I have gathered from the book is that the reparations forced by France and the United States were doubly hated. They were hated because the Allies took over the means of production. They took over the coal fields of the Saar Region and the heavy industry regions of the Ruhr.

Therefore, felt the Germans, they were required to pay reparations without the means to earn the money to pay them.

The reparations were also hated because of the long period of uncertainty between the end of the war in 1918 and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1920.

Another thing I read repeatedly is the observation that Germany was clean and well tended. That is not so surprising given that the battlefields of Europe were in France and Belgium, and the countryside of Germany escaped comparatively unscathed.

Still, it’s an observation I made when I first travelled to Germany when I was fourteen. On the return journey by bus up the A1 in England to Leeds, I saw for the first time with new eyes how dismally untended the road verges and the central reservation were. It was an eye opener.

For the moment though, I just want to record here one of those little footnotes of history – about the Kaiser’s table at this castle residence, no longer occupied by him after the war.

The Kaiser’s Table

On Page 72 of Travellers In The Third Reich there is an extract from a letter that Lady Rumbold, wife of the British ambassador to Germany wrote to her mother.

She wrote after the Duke (later King George VI) and Duchess of York’s visit to Berlin in March 1929 en route to the wedding of Prince Olaf in Germany.

The extract from the letter:

The Duke and Duchess were given a private tour of the Kaiser’s former residence.

Even his tiny bedroom which is never shown, and which looked rather tragic lumbered up with: things, and wall paper very dilapidated. It was quite small and dark looking on to a courtyard, with a tiny dressing-room next to it.

In his study is the famous table on which he signed the order for the mobilisation of the Army on 1st August 1914.

This writing table is made out of wood from The Victory, and the huge inkstand is a model of it, with the famous Nelson signal ‘England expects etc.’ in coloured flags. Curious isn’t it?

The Trafalgar Campaign was a series of fleet manoeuvres by the French and Spanish fleets working together to force a passage through the English Channel, and thereby allow the French to invade England. The Battle of Trafalgar was the culmination of that campaign, ending in victory for the British.

HMS Victory was Lord Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. In 1922, the ship was moved to a dry dock at Portsmouth, England, and preserved as a museum ship.

So one wonders who made the writing table made out of wood from The Victory, and by what route did it come into the possession of the Kaiser.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

In Donald Maclean’s British Foreign Policy Since Suez 1956-1968 he discusses Britain’s relationship with Europe and the United States. He charts the changing fortunes of Britain and the history of the uneasy straddling of Europe and the United States that Britain has been pursuing since the Second World War.

Part of that relationship concerns the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan.

I knew that the pursuit of a viable weapon was a joint British and US effort. I thought, though, that the decision to drop the bombs rested solely with the USA.

What I learned from Maclean’s book was that there was an agreement between Britain and the United States that the bomb would only be used with the consent and agreement of both countries. In plain English, Britain gave approval to the use of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I found a 2013 article in Japan Times which said that according to papers recently declassified by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Britain supported the use of atomic bombs by the United States against Japan in World War II and did so about a month before the first one was dropped on Hiroshima.

This corroborates what Maclean wrote. On page 53 of British Foreign Policy Since Suez 1956-1968 he writes:

The presence of U.S. nuclear bases on U.K. soil and other aspects of the Anglo-American alliance exposes Britain to the risk of nuclear counter-attack should the United States use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. This remains true whether the US. fires its first salvo from British bases, from a Polaris submarine in mid-Atlantic from the United States or from some other quarter.

For an official account of the conclusion of this agreement, and its text, see Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945. London. 1964. pp. 164-171 

From the point of view of the British sponsors of the alliance, the logic of this situation requires that there should be a binding overall agreement that the United States will not in any circumstances use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union without British consent. Washington has not been willing to tie its hands in this way, but, besides the guarantees relating specifically to the use of bases in Britain, gave unofficial assurances of a wider character.

At the earliest stage of Anglo-American co-operation in nuclear matters—during the manufacture of the first, wartime, atomic bombs—such a binding agreement existed and was applied. From the signing of the Quebec Agreement by Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1943 until its disavowal by the Truman Administration at the end of the war, both countries had a clear-cut obligation, set out in the second clause of the Agreement, not to use nuclear weapons against third parties without each other’s consent. This clause was strictly complied with before the American atomic attack on Hiroshima.

The hiatus was subsequently partially filled by personal assurances from the President to the Prime Minister, given orally and requiring renewal with each change of President.

Brexit And The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

Brexit and the causes and possible consequences of Brexit have been on my mind. Brexit has been on everyone’s mind. There is a great divide between those who want Brexit at any cost and those who want Britain to remain in the EU.

One thing that interests and worries me is how much of a danger this divide represents to the stability of the social order.

It is not an idle question.

Nigel Farage, one of the architects of the desire to leave the European Union, has talked about blood on the streets if Brexit is not delivered to the British people.

He has an axe to grind, of course, but there is a question of what would or will happen if Brexit goes ahead and the economy tanks as badly as some say it will, or if Brexit is reversed.

There is something else. I wonder what those Brexit promoters in the upper reaches of the Conservative Party think? I am talking about those who have read history and who have a grasp of economics.

What on Earth as they thinking?

The Peasants’ Revolt

That brings me to a book – The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 edited by RB (Barrie) Dobson.

It is edited by him (rather than written by him) because the bulk of it is court records, Council records, trial records, ecclesiastical records, and the commentaries of contemporary commentators.

Most were written in Latin or Norman French and have been translated by Professor Dobson.

The Peasants’ Revolt is not unique. There were revolts going on in continental Europe throughout all this period. But England was a case apart.

English society rode the changes in economics, the changes in society, and sailed on. That is, it sailed on with just one major rip in the continuum, and that was the Peasants’ Revolt on 1381.

The reasons usually given for the rebellion are the poll taxes that were imposed. A poll tax is a straight tax. It does not relate to ownership of a property or a business. It is a tax upon mere existence.

Another reason given for the rebellion was a complaint about the high life that the church and the court hangers-on were living at the peasants’ expense.

What brought the situation to a head was that the population had been reduced – maybe by as much as 40% – by the Black Death that reached Britain in the 1350s.

With gaps in the towns and the countryside, prices rose and a new kind of tenant appeared – men who had the money to step in to take up tenancies from the rural landlords.

They did so as contractual tenants, a simple exchange of occupation of the land in the return for rent paid as money.

Villeins and Fedualism

Those rental contracts were completely different to the system of rights and obligations of villeins – those who held land from the Lord of the Manor under the feudal system. Those villeins, or peasants, were bound to the land and one step up from slaves.

That status put them at odds with the new breed of contractual tenants. That difference risked a wholesale breach in the social fabric in the countryside.

But the taxes also exposed another threat to stability, namely that rising prices meant things were going well for some, and that the poll tax hit them at a time of rising expectations.

Add to that another factor, the failure by the authorities to protect the population. Britain was at war with France in what is known as The Hundred Years’ War. The war was a war with gaps – a series of conflicts that lasted from 1337 to 1453.

On the English side was the House of Plantagenet, rulers of the Kingdom of England. They claimed the right to rule the Kingdom of France and were opposed by the French House of Valois.

The conflict is not so surprising. The English kings were originally Norman, and held lands in France. In some ways it was a family quarrel.

The peasants’ complaint was that French and Castilian ships came up the Thames regularly and carried out brutal tip-and-run raids, and seemingly without fear of reprisal.

And then came the poll tax, a tax imposed by the King to finance his wars. Not everyone was liable to pay (beggars, for example, were exempt), but with rising prices after the Black Death, people who had been outside the taxation net in earlier times were now caught in it.

So those were the complaints – rich people and the clergy living high on the hog, and failing to protect the populace. And just when things were getting better economically – along comes the poll tax to send them sliding to the bottom again.

When Adam Delved And Eve Span

During the Peasant’s Revolt, the priest John Ball asked, rhetorically, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” He meant, of course, ‘Who made you the boss?’

But of course, anyone who wants to grab the crown is free to do it if they can.

A Marxist would say that in the 1380s the clergy was the mouthpiece for the propaganda of the ‘proper’ order. Which is why the clergy and the local dignitaries were a prime target of the mobs that sprang up, simultaneously in different parts of England.

The revolt was bloody, with many killed by the mobs and many executed by the authorities. The duplicity of the King and Lords in promising an amnesty and then hanging the leaders of the revolt can be looked at two ways. On the one hand one could argue that one can use any ploy to outwit rebels and bring them to justice. On the other hand, one could argue that these rebels are the people of England and deserve fair treatment. Which way should a king behave?

Britain’s Opportunity To Declare Itself

Now when I think of Brexit, it sounds like we have been here before and the situation is ripe for exploitation. I see Jeremy Corbyn waiting in the wings like Lenin arresting the Provisional Government in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. I see Nigel Farage claiming the crown to the Right and calling for a mass uprising to deliver on the promise of Brexit.

I am no nearer to understanding why those grandees of the Conservative Party are pushing to bring about Brexit.

France and NATO

It might be a good time to remind myself of the sometimes fractious relationship between France and NATO, and in particular, France and the USA.

In 1966, President Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s integrated military command structure.

He cited the overbearing, overarching dominance of the USA – which no one could deny because the USA was and is the dominant partner in terms of muscle power and its contribution to the upkeep of NATO.

France banned the stationing of weapons, including nuclear weapons, on its territory.

NATO’s political headquarters and SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe) moved from France to Belgium.

It was not until 2009 that Nicolas Sarkozy negotiated the return of France to the integrated military command and the Defence Planning Committee, the latter being disbanded the following year.

France remains the only NATO member outside the Nuclear Planning Group and unlike the United States and the United Kingdom, will not commit its nuclear-armed submarines to the alliance.

That is not to say that France has remained outside NATO’s missions, but it shows how France could decide unilaterally against which countries it was going to take action.

It’s a good time to remember that Donald Trump has railed against the cost that the USA bears in NATO, and how he has said that the USA has been taken for a ride and that the European countries must to pay more or risk losing NATO.