Cultural differences always make it a “little bit sticky”

An article by Ed Crooks and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in today’s FT points up the difficulty that BP has had in finding “the right tone to fit America’s emotional register”,

That climate of opinion [ where even Barack Obama has been attacked for failing to show enough emotion, and pushed by the US media to show how angry he is] makes it particularly damaging for BP to appear to be making light of the disaster.

Mr Hayward has been the target of many of the attacks on BP, becoming the “most hated and clueless man in America” according to the New York Daily News, after a string of inflammatory remarks.

Some of the comments for which he has been criticised have been entirely defensible, such as his admission to the Financial Times that BP lacked the engineering capability to tackle a blown-out well in deep water. Others have been crass and insensitive, such as his observation that “I’d like my life back,” for which he was forced to apologise on Facebook.

He has a British tendency to make a joke or smile to try to defuse tension, which has made it look as though he does not understand the gravity of the situation.

It was that last paragraph that really caught my eye.

Being a Brit I understand only too well that approach; after all, it is a stock-in-trade for most of us this side of the Atlantic.

But cultural differences have been a perennial source of misunderstanding for Britons when dealing with Americans. A telling example was at the height of the Korean War, in April 1951, when men from 1st Battalion, the Gloucestershire Regiment were holding a key ford over the Imjin River. They found themselves heavily outnumbered by the Chinese, who had sent an entire division of 10,000 men against their 650.

A day and a half into the action, surrounded and with ammunition and supplies running low, they were in imminent danger of being overrun. An American, Maj-Gen Robert H Soule, asked the British brigadier, Thomas Brodie: “How are the Glosters doing?”

As reported in an article in the Daily Telegraph on the 50th anniversary of the battle,

the brigadier, schooled in British understatement, replied: “A bit sticky, things are pretty sticky down there.” To American ears, this did not sound too desperate.

The Glosters lost 622 men and officers to death, injury or captivity.

Two very different days

Saturday afternoon and Celia (daughter #4) and I were on the 6th level of the Millenium Stadium, watching Wales lose a game to South Africa that they should have won, and which at half-time they were leading.

The noise from the 60,000 of us watching the game was such that at times it was difficult to think, with what was happening on the pitch mirrored seconds later by the response of the crowd. Warmed up by all that now accompanies a major rugby game in Cardiff, we had seen male voice choirs, the Lostprophets, three base jumpers off the roof, choreographed pulses of fire, before the gladiatorial entry of the teams, and the anthems: Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika, then Land of my Fathers. The final chorus, “Gwlad, gwlad, pleidiol wyf i’m gwlad” filled the stadium. Expectation rippling around the crowd, a sudden still, the referee’s whistle, and then game on.

Television delivers an experience stripped of passion, where the commentary and the camera angles shape how you see the game, and just in case you missed it, the replays. Very little is left to you. There is no sense of involvement, and your role is no more than a passive observer. Up close and personal, or as up close and personal as you can get on the 6th level, it is all very different. You see the whole pitch, and even if the the players are difficult to distinguish, there is movement: it is much easier to feel what is happening and to make sense of it. You can hear the stands opposite and at each end; and the bank of spectators behind you: to your front it seems little more than a wall of noise, with the occasional words of Cwm Rhondda suddenly heard; and yet behind and around there are the snatches of conversation overheard, laughter and groans, and “Wales, Wales”, taken up and echoed back.

And afterwards there are the crowds.

Arriving at the ground is easy: we were through the turnstiles at 1.00 and had an hour and a half, watching the stadium slowly fill. At the end of the game it is as if a plug has been pulled, and thousands are funnelled down the stairways, and out through the Gates. It has been a very long time since I found myself in quite such a crowd and making our way to the railway station, sometimes with and sometimes against the flow was not pleasant, even though he crowds were quiet: as if all excitement had been drained away.

This afternoon was a different world.

Caroline and I were on Mardon Down, bright sunshine and wind making ripples through the grass. The bluebells may be past their best but they still tint the shallow slopes where the bracken is uncurling, pale green- still only a hint of what will be a dense covering in little more than a month. In the air Skylarks, floating in the wind, with Swifts hawking insects and a lone Buzzard playing at being a Kestrel, holding position with hunched wings.

Just the two of us, accompanied by birdsong and with views south to the Moor, caught in shadowed sunlight. And a slow drive home. Hawthorn in bridal white and campion splashing the green walls with colour.

Bookended by bats

It has rained on and off for much of today, and the temperature has dropped. It is hard to believe that this is the last Saturday in May. This time last week was so very different.

Then we woke at 4.30 a.m. and took our mugs of tea into the garden, sitting on the bench looking out over the pond. It was very still. As the sky lightened, we first heard and then watched bats skimming the top of the wall behind us, before dipping over the pond and away. Bird song was almost the only sound: Blackbird, Blue tit, later Jackdaws and Rooks waking up. In the distance we could hear the occasional sheep in the Sentry. No traffic. For a brief moment there were both birds – Swifts, Swallows, House Martins – and bats in the sky, before we watched the bats disappear, one squeezing between the slate and the wall on our gable end. And then there was a buzzing of insects, and the cries of Swifts pierced our sleepiness. Back to bed for a couple more hours sleep, and by that time the town was awake.

It was a day spent in the garden: tidying, planting, watering, pottering around and potting up, to say nothing of breakfast and lunch outside.

And then driving south and west to the north coast of Cornwall, and a 60th birthday party. A warm, shirt-sleeve evening, a barbecue and another meal outside, as we watched the sun set over the Atlantic. And as the Swallows and Martins were lost in the dusk, we once more saw and heard bats. A perfect day.

171st Field Ambulance, R.A.M.C at Dunkirk

My father’s war was, by and large, a quiet war. A Territorial, he was called up in the summer of 1939, and demobbed in late 1944. Birmingham born and bred, my father had trained in Birmingham, and in the latter part of the 1930s he shared a general practice with his father in Edgbaston. Just short of 29 on the outbreak of war, his first posting was to 143rd Field Ambulance. He was in England during the Phoney War of late 1939 and early 1940, in Northern Ireland from late 1940 until 1943, “somewhere on the South Coast” in the six months before D-Day, and then returned to civilian general practice in autumn of 1944.

But for seven days, 70 years ago, he was on active service at Dunkirk.

My father very rarely spoke about that week. As a young boy, eager to know what my father had done in the war, I asked a great many questions – and got very little by way of reply, other than that he had been sent to Dunkirk early in the evacuation, as they were running short of medical officers, and thought he had been on one of the last boats out. Years later, his batman Perry, visiting my father in his retirement, told me that as they reached the beach, and notwithstanding air attacks, my father had sat on a folding chair and checked the stores ashore, asking Perry to empty two large stone jars of rum to prevent temptation.

That was it. No heroics, no stories of derring-do: all very understated and, even if a cliché, very English.

When my father died we found a canvas backed notebook among the papers in his desk, that he had intended to be “The Private Life of the Officers Mess of 171st Field Ambulance R.A.M.C.”. The first entry is 17 November 1939, when his Field Ambulance was formed, spun out of 143rd Field Ambulance; the last on 5 June 1940, when my father and the four other officers who had been at Dunkirk with him returned to “Castleman’s” at Hare Hatch for a celebration dinner in the Mess. The menu, signed by each of them, is still in the journal. Nothing else follows: it seems that that week changed for ever the way he looked at the war. And even 40 years later he was reluctant to talk about it.

In this week when Dunkirk is back in our minds, I looked out the journal, and re-read the entries for those seven days. The account is sparse and the language rather formal: written up immediately after my father’s return. But its very ordinariness makes it all the more powerful. This is my father’s record of that week: the only record I have.

“May 25th

Bill, Charlie, Michael, George and Victor departed in full battle order complete with valises, ten N.O.s and a nasty feeling in the stomach bound for Dover and ultimately Dunkirk. On arrival at Dover we found that we were part of a collection of about 30 M.O.s who were to assist in the treatment of casualties during the evacuation of Dunkirk. Bill being the only captain present was put in charge of the whole under command of Colonel Blake and was responsible for the organisation and on successive days made five or six trips to and from and into Dunkirk itself.

May 26th

Charles, George, Michael and Victor sailed on the destroyer H.M.S. Verity and it being found impossible to land them in Dunkirk harbour owing to the excessive number of bombs falling in that area they were taken about two miles up the beach and landed from a flat-bottomed boat, having to wade the last 25 yards complete with full kit, stores, food etc.

The first dressing station of the 171st Field Ambulance under active service conditions was then opened in an abandoned ambulance just to the left of a Sanitorium.

May 27th

The four M.O.s moved up to Bray Dunes and placed themselves under the command of I Corps. During this move Michael returning to look for one of the N.O.s became separated from the other three and later in the day became attached to the 126th Field Ambulance remaining in the A.D.S. at Bray Dunes with only their commanding officer, finally leaving Dunkirk via the Mole on Saturday evening and arriving back in Dover on Sunday.

The other three moved about two miles inland where they established an A.D.S. under command of Lt. Babty in an estaminet on a cross roads. They remained there until the night of June 1st when having received orders to close the A.D.S. they drove by ambulance to the Mole from which they hoped to embark.

Having slowly progressed along the Mole during the early hours of June 2nd (Sunday) at day-break all troops on the Mole were told that no more could be taken off owing to the danger of attack from the air.

They then returned to the dock-basin and the whole party sticking together managed to obtain a rowing boat in which they proceeded to row out to sea.

Just as they got into the open sea they were picked up by a French Mine-layer, which to their horror returned to Dunkirk harbour; it remained there during the hours of daylight and finally at dusk slipped out of the harbour en route for Dover where they arrived on the morning of June 3rd.

June 5th

The five returned to Castleman’s where a special celebration was held, so much so that George gradually became quite inarticulate and finally retired gracefully to bed.”

I don’t know who Bill, Michael, George and Victor were. Charles/Charlie was my father. He and my mother were married on 18 May 1940, on his embarkation leave, and Bill, Michael and George were groomsmen. I have a photograph of them outside the marquee, all three in uniform, holding glasses of champagne and smoking cigarettes. The silver salver that the Field Ambulance gave my parents as a wedding present, engraved with all their signatures, was stolen 30 years ago.

H.M.S Verity survived the war. For much of the Battle of the Atlantic she was a convoy escort ship with the 18th Destroyer Flotilla. At Dunkirk, she came under fire from shore batteries near Calais and suffered casualties.

In the BBC -WW2 People’s War: An Archive of World War Two memories – written by the public, gathered by the BBC – the story told by my father in his journal is also told by John Larner, whom I have never met but who must have been one of the ten N.O.s with 171st Field Ambulance. His account is slightly fuller, the facts marginally different but I have no doubt he was in my father’s party. The differences may be because my father wrote his journal up in the week following the return from Dunkirk; John Larner told his story in 2004.

The BBC -WW2 People’s War archive can be found at bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar

Big Brother is still with us, but for how long?

The Telegraph had another story this morning about RIPA and CCTV intrusion (probably serves me right for reading this particular title). But like John Naughton on Memex 1.1 yesterday, I too wonder whether our new government will “deliver on the rolling back of the national security state”, standing by its commitment in its policy document “to implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour government and roll back state intrusion”.

The last government never admitted that it presided over the most authoritarian government this country has seen outside of wartime. Commenting on the plans to scrap ID cards, the National Identity register and the ContactPoint database, regulate CCTV, and restore rights to non-violent protest, a Labour spokesman continued to trot out the fiction that Britain was not a surveillance society.

The problem, as so often is the case, is the gap between intention and reality, and the insidious effect of policy creep.

A Surveillance Society? – The Government Reply to the Fifth Report from the Home Affairs Committee, given in July 2008, recognised the issues,

Ensuring the application of proportionality and maintaining the appropriate balance is key to providing the right level of safeguards for the public and providing the right level of service to the public. That approach will continue to be adopted in all that we do. The Government acknowledges concerns raised in some quarters that this balanced approach always starts out as the ideal but gradually, the balance between the rights of the individual and the powers of the ‘centre’ is severely tilted. That is why in successive pieces of legislation we have made it clear on the face of the Act exactly what can and cannot be introduced by secondary legislation and why there is a requirement for such secondary legislation to be put before Parliament for approval.

But what the Government said, and what it and its agent did, were very different. Will this government avoid this?

As John Naughton says, “I’m not holding my breath”.