Society

Edinburgh is a very dog-friendly city. Go out at any time of the day and you will see dogs and their owners.

And the variety of breeds is huge. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the major breeds are represented here.

So with that in mind, picture me walking one misty evening after dark, and coming towards me is a dog and its owner.

The dog is on a leash and the leash is pulled taut. From where I am standing the leash looks like a solid metal rod. Suddenly I see the dog pinioned by the rod. I know it is just the gloom that makes the leash look like a rod, but it makes me see the relationship between the owner and the dog differently.

Tonight I think the idea of having an animal on a leash is bizarre. The relationship between the human and the dog is strange. Who thought of walking with a dog and a human tied together? Who thought this was normal?

I feel like a visitor from another planet looking at the strange behaviour of Earthlings.

The Enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries were a series of Acts of Parliament that changed the rural landscape of Britain and changed the relationship between the classes.

Before the Enclosures, each village had a patchwork of open fields totaling several hundred acres. The arable areas were divided into strips without any kind of fence or division between them.

And the community farmed them as a community – that is everyone who lived in the village as the owner or the tenant of a dwelling – deciding together when to plant and when to let animals in to graze.

Strip farming wasn’t an arbitrary idea. It reflected the fact that land is not as good everywhere. So the whole area was divided into strips. Every person would have some strips of the good land. Every person would have some strips of the middling land. And every person would have some strips of the poorest land. Fairness for all. And there were paths and rights of way so that everyone could get to their land.

From a purely economic point of view the paths reduced the amount of land available for agriculture. From a community point of view it meant continual contact and involvement of everyone.

Common land was common to the people of the community. Nominally it belonged to the lord of the manner, but the community had rights on the common land, including the right to take turf or wood or fruit from the trees or to keep and graze animals on the land.

With the Enclosure Acts, the legal title to most farm land and common passed from the community to one single man. That man was often the lord of the manor or a substantial farmer in the area. The Enclosures meant a change in the way the land was farmed. It usually meant the land was closed off and fenced – hence the term ‘enclosures’.

Some grazing rights over common land continued, but for the most part, the fields were enclosed, the strips ploughed up, and the owner took the benefit of all of it.

So was it robbery under the guise of law, as the historian EP Thompson said?

Was it a way to change the social and economic structure, as Karl Marx argued?

Marx said that the Enclosures created the industrialised working class and began the capitalist society. His argument was that in the pre-Enclosure days a man could be poor but free. He could live in a hovel. By exercising his rights over grazing land, he could have enough to keep body and soul together.

After the Enclosures, he had nothing but his labour – and so began the drift to the cities.

Were the Enclosures needed to modernise Britain and turn unproductive land to productive use? If so, for whose benefit was that done?

And assuming the changes were needed to modernise Britain, how did it come to be legally allowed and enforced?

It has been said that the class relationship in pre-industrial Britain was a relationship of obligation. The lord of the manor had the armed force to protect the village and the court to regulate relationships. For their part, the serfs and yeomen had an obligation to pay rent or to fight or to work in the Lord’s fields.

The new commercial class rose to dominate the British power landscape. And they saw everything as capital – money, buildings, people. Nothing had an intrinsic worth except in so far as it was useful to advance wealth. In capitalist Britain, everyone was interchangeable. No man had a place except as a commodity described by his ability to work.

But maybe the old way was all fur coat and no knickers. Maybe the ‘obligations’ of the established rural order were just a trick. Maybe it was a sleight of hand to keep the serfs and yeomen in place.

The First World War nearly ended in revolution in Britain. The Second World War nearly did the same. If the Welfare State had not been brought into being in 1948, it is possible that Britain would have gone that way. The Welfare State promised and delivered free medical treatment, secure housing, and free education.

And now in 21st-century Britain, the Conservative Government is intent on breaking up the Welfare State. It seems that no one wants rented housing if they can own their own property. Everyone wants to be a capitalist in their own home And we compromise on paying for education. After all, we say, won’t those clever enough to get to university get well-paid jobs? But we cannot stomach the destruction of the National Health Service.

I am impressed that the oil divestment movement is doing so well, but while I applaud the commitment to divest, I argue that for every stockholder that divests there must be a stockholder that invests. In other words, quite simply there must be a buyer as well a seller.

The risk is that the ones who step in to buy are the ones who don’t care what the companies do – so the worst traits and behaviour are given more free rein – more shortcuts – more Gulf Of Mexico oil spills.

In other words, the unintended consequences of oil divestment may be worsen the situation, not improve it.

Or perhaps the tack is different – make oil the bad actor and thereby make it easier for businesses that are already in the oil business to move to green energy. That might work.

Ernie Pyle was an American war correspondent during World War II. He was very well known across a great cross-section of the American public – a real celebrity in his day – and very well liked.

In his newspaper columns and in his book Brave Men that was published in 1944, he describes the minutiae of army life in wartime from the perspective of the common soldier.

He described the way the war machine works – from engineers pulling captured tanks off the line with giant earth moving machines, to bomb loaders preparing bombers for a mission, to cooks cooking up thousands of meals for the troops.

The book describes the push from North Africa and up through Italy, then the waiting period in England before D Day, and then the invasion and the battle through France.

One cute image that he describes is of the American soldiers stationed in London in the lead up to D Day, and how the US Army established rules for one-way foot traffic for soldiers when walking along the pavements.

It was done in order to minimise how often soldiers would have to meet and salute one another while approaching from opposite directions.

Apparently, there were so many soldiers that before the rule was in place soldiers were having to salute every five steps or so and getting sore arms from all that saluting.

Another scene that he describes is of captured German soldiers on D Day standing on the cliffs and staring in disbelief and resignation at the sheer number of Allied ships that stretched from horizon to horizon.

The final chapter of Brave Men was written in August 1944, and Pyle talks about the war being more or less over.

That was, of course, before the German counter-offensive in the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes in December 1944, which was the last major offensive against the Allied forces in Europe.

It’s hard to tell you exactly why or how the book is so touching and sad. Certainly the tone changes when Pyle goes with the invasion forces on D Day, and he becomes more sombre and in the end, lyrical.

I started the book Brave Men about a year ago, and then put it aside while I read some other books. I picked it up again a couple of weeks ago and I have been reading a few pages at a time, mostly over breakfast.

I finished it today.

One passage is particularly poignant. It is about the jeep ride that he and another journalist and the photographer Robert Capa took into a town near Cherbourg.

The Germans has only just been pushed out of the town, and there was always the risk of snipers or of Germans left behind – manning a machine gun somewhere by the roadside. So Pyle was nervous, and he talks about the fearless Capa, who would push on whatever the risk.

Robert Capa was one of the original Magnum photographers. I know his work well and I also know that Capa was killed in 1954 when he stepped on a mine in South East Asia, in what was then called Indochina.

What I learned a week ago when reading up about the background to Brave Men, is that Ernie Pyle was killed in 1945 by Japanese machine gun fire on an island off Okinawa.

There is something strange about reading in a book published in 1944, the author writing about his companion, Capa, who I knew would be killed in 1954, and knowing also that the writer himself would be killed even before that, in 1945.

And there they were in his book Brave Men, described as large as life and nervous as kittens – riding into a town during the Allied invasion of Europe.

Coda

After the war, the Takarazuka Theater in Tokyo was taken over by the US Army headquarters and renamed the Ernie Pyle Theater – which remained its name until 1955.