It's that man again

My friend thinks Michael Gove will be axed at the next re-shuffle. I think he is a flag-bearer for old-Toryism and the darling of the bank-benchers and will survive - just like cockroaches survive atom bombs.

I don't normally take any interest in the fate of the likes of Gove - he has nothing to do with education in Scotland, thank heavens - but I'm a bit put out at his claim that my view (your view, awbiddy's view) of the first world war is shaped by TV programmes like Blackadder and films like O what a lovely war!

I don't need entertainments like Blackadder and O what a lovely war! to tell me about the so-called Great War. (And these are meant as entertainments, not documentaries*.) My grandfather fought in that war. The only photo I have of him from that time shows him at Trafalgar Square with my grandmother (on the right) just before he left the army:

She was a nurse and never talked about what she had seen but he had plenty of stories about his time in the war. These are what are referred to by historians as 'anecdotes.' Anecdotes are suspect. I used to work for a man who said: Don't tell me stories - give me the facts. But the facts are often hard to come by, especially in the confusion of wartime, and I have a theory that a whole lot of wee stories add up to a pretty good picture of history. 

So as a child I heard stories about British horse-drawn guns miles from the front being blown to bits by accident by their own side, leaving not so much as the horses' reins behind, never mind the men, just a hole in the ground. Or the poor bloody infantry in Gallipoli going hungry because someone in Whitehall had forgotten to send enough provisions. I should also say I knew just what the ruling classes of the time thought of the men who had served their country. As his reward my grandfather, a career soldier, was sent to Ireland after the war to be shot at by Irish nationalists. My grandmother bought him out of the army - the only way then he could be released other than as a casualty.  

This is all part of the social history of the working class. My father's generation - and here he is aged 20 the day he gave up his safe job in a Glasgow shipyard and joined the Royal Navy in 1940 - they added to my knowledge of the how working people are exploited in time of war. I knew exactly why people like him couldn't wait to kick out Churchill and move the country on to a better future. We owe this generation a lot: the NHS and the welfare state for a start.

All Blackadder and O what a lovely war! did was confirm what I knew. And when I get the chance, I tell the younger generation what their grandparents and great-grandparents did in these wars. Whether they want to hear it or not. 

*Similarly, I don't think Allo! Allo! gives a faithful picture of life in occupied Belgium in world war 2.