Royle A Time of Tyrants

Scotland and the Second World War
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-85790-094-4
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten

Trevor Royle examines Scotland's role in the Second World War from a wide range of perspectives. The country's geographical position gave it great strategic importance for importing war materiel and reinforcements, for conducting naval and aerial operations against the enemy and for training regular and specialist SOE and commando forces. Scotland also became a social melting pot with the arrival of Polish and eastern European refugees, whose presence added to the communal mix and assisted post-war reconstruction. In addition to the important military aspects - the exploits of the Army's renowned 15th Scottish and 51st Highland Divisions in Europe and North Africa and the role played by the RAF and the Royal Navy from Scottish bases - Scotland was also hugely important as an industrial power house and the nation's larder. The war also had a huge impact on politics, with national centralization achieved through the creation of the Scottish Office and the Scottish Grand Committee. With the emergence of the post-war Labour government and the welfare state,nationalism went into decline and the dominance of socialism, especially in the west, paved the way for the command politics which dominated Scotland for the rest of the century. Based on previously unseen archives in the Scottish Record Office, A Time of Tyrants is the first comprehensive history of the unique part played by Scotland and the Scots in the global war to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Trevor Royle is an outstanding historian of war and empire. His books include Facing the Bear: Scotland and the Cold War, The Flowers of the Forest: Scotland and the First World War and A Time of Tyrants: Scotland and the Second World War. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a member of the Scottish Government's Advisory Panel for Commemorating the First World War.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Royle, Trevor

Leseproben

The Last Hurrah; Bellahouston 1938

To the casual observer with only a passing knowledge of Glasgow’s history, a visit to Bellahouston Park is not very different from a stroll in the park in any other municipal recreational area in Scotland or the United Kingdom The grassland is well manicured, the pathways are meandering and discreet, trees punctuate the rolling terrain, locals and visitors mingle or take their ease in the sun. Hanging over the acres there is an air of gentle if poignant contemplation. It is still used for civic and national events – the park has been the scene of two recent papal visits and masses, for Pope John Paul II in the summer of 1982 and again in September 2010 for Pope Benedict XVI – and it is well used by those who live on the south side of the city. Once part of the lands of Govan and surrounding Ibroxhill and Drumbreck, Bellahouston came into civic ownership at the end of the nineteenth century, and at one time its 175 acres made it the largest public park in Britain. There are the usual sports facilities such as a bowling green, a golfing pitch-and-putt course and modern all-weather pitches, but Bellahouston Park is not just a civic amenity in which the locals take considerable pride. It is all that remains of a short-lived monument to a year, 1938, when everything seemed to be for the best in the best of all possible worlds. As such, the park was a last hurrah for a way of life that might have turned out very differently had Scotland and the rest of the world not gone to war in the following summer.

Look again at the park and its contours, especially the central whaleback ridge which dominates the area, and let your imagination roam. That neat white building near the centre with the bold proclamation ‘Palace of Art’ gives a clue. Squat but angular, and book-ended by two small pavilions, its colonnaded front still catches the eye and it is as neat and robust as it was when it was first created all those years ago by Launcelot Ross, a well-known Glasgow architect with strong links to the Territorial Army. Today it acts as a centre of sporting excellence but it is also a reminder of one of the most extraordinary events in Glasgow’s history, a beacon of hope in a year when Scotland had put behind it the misery of the Great Depression, and national self-confidence was once again in the ascendant. Apart from the mirage of memory and a plinth marking the spot where over 140 buildings were thrown up between Mosspark Boulevard and Paisley Road West, it is all that remains of the Empire Exhibition of 1938, an event which has been described as ‘the last durbar’, a gathering place for an empire which would soon be swept away by the great storm of war. It is just possible to visualise other points of reference in the park, and a modern three-dimensional computerised project launched in 2008 has resurrected something of the original grandeur, but to all intents and purposes the Empire Exhibition is now part of the irretrievable past.1

In common with many other similar events associated with the city of Glasgow, the planning for the 1938 Empire Exhibition was replete with civic confidence and was certainly not lacking in ambition. The original motivation was to promote Scotland as an important commercial and industrial centre, but the overarching aspiration was to create a bold and brash event which would provide a lasting impression of what Scotland had to offer the rest of the world. Quite simply, its organisers were determined that the exhibition should be the best of its kind, not a parochial event in a post-industrial city, but a prestigious exposition that would place Scotland at the heart of the British Empire. That much became clear at the first meeting of the steering committee which was held in the Merchant’s House in Glasgow on 5 October 1936. The gathering was organised under the auspices of the Scottish National Development Council (SNDC), which itself had been founded on 8 May 1931 by the Convention of Royal Burghs, to promote the cause of Scotland’s industries at a time when they had been battered by the effects of the economic depression of the 1930s and to attempt to find solutions to the prevailing malaise. Amongst those involved in the creation of the SNDC were Sir Henry Keith, former Provost of Hamilton and a prominent Unionist MP, William Watson of Glasgow, organiser of the Scottish Trades Development Association and Edward James Bruce, 10th Earl of Elgin, a director of the Royal Bank of Scotland, who outlined what the exhibition should attempt to produce: ‘The effort must embrace Scotland as a whole, it must aim at expanding Scottish industry and employment and must not overlook the great asset Scotland has in its charms of scenery and opportunities for holiday, sport and pleasure.’2

It was a stirring call to arms but almost immediately the committee had a problem. Under the rules for regulating and staging international exhibitions agreed by the Bureau International des Expositions (International Exhibitions Bureau) there was no vacancy until 1947. This was clearly too far ahead for the organising committee and as a result it was decided to hold an exhibition which would be centred on the British Empire, similar to one which had been held at Wembley in London in 1924. Not only would such an event fall outside the international regulations but it would also commemorate an entity – the British Empire – which covered 25 per cent of the globe and was home to some 450 million inhabitants.

For Glasgow that had added resonance. Somewhat self-consciously it was styled the ‘Second City of Empire’ (Liverpool also laid claim to the title, as did Calcutta), Clyde-built ships helped to hold the empire together and the heavy industries of the Clyde valley looked to the empire for their main markets. The city was also home to the manufacture of a huge variety of goods, from marine engines and locomotives to carpets and foodstuffs, which were sold all over the world. There was also the experience of the recent past. Glasgow was no stranger to mounting this type of international exhibition: the first, held in Kelvingrove Park in 1888, was the largest to its kind since London’s ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations’ of 1851 with its magnificent centrepiece of the Crystal Palace, a great cathedral of iron and glass which dominated the open ground on the south side of Hyde Park between Queen’s Gate and Rotten Row. Glasgow’s effort was equally successful in promoting ‘the wealth, the productive enterprise and the versatility of the great people who flourish under Her Majesty’s reign’ and it was followed by two further events in 1901 and 1911, the latter of which had the laudable aim of raising funds for the creation of a chair in Scottish history and literature at Glasgow University. (In this it was successful.)

More than any other factor, though, the driving force behind the 1938 Empire Exhibition was the need to galvanise the industries of the west of Scotland in the aftermath of the recent economic downturn. By then twenty years had passed since the end of the First World War, and Scotland’s experience in those decades had been one of general decline and a gradual collapse in confidence. In the immediate aftermath of the conflict the economy had remained reasonably buoyant, mainly as a result of the wartime boom and the optimism generated by the end of the war, but by the early 1920s the alarm bells were ringing. Between 1921 and 1923 shipbuilding on the Clyde dropped from 510,000 tons to 170,000 tons as a result of cancellations, delayed orders and the effects of the Washington Treaty of 1921 which limited the size and extent of Britain’s future warship construction.3 Industrial unrest also added to the problems – a dispute with the boilermakers in 1923 and the effects of the general strike three years later affected production – but the Clyde was already beginning to pay for the artificial boom which had rescued it during the First World War. On 5 January 1931 the unthinkable happened when the last ship to be built at the huge Beardmore complex left the Clyde and the once-busy shipyard at Dalmuir was put up for sale.

Other heavy industries also suffered from the slump, with production at the North British Locomotive Company dropping off by two-thirds during the same period due to falling orders and a lack of confidence in the world markets.4 The railway company mergers of 1923 also affected the industry when the London Midland and Scottish railway absorbed the Caledonian and Glasgow and South-Western, while the London and North-Eastern took over the North British and its subsidiary companies. Direction of both new companies was moved to London, and there was a resultant scaling down of engineering work in Glasgow and Kilmarnock. In the steel industry the huge conglomerate Stewarts & Lloyds relocated from Lanarkshire to Corby in Northamptonshire in 1932, forcing large numbers of the workforce to migrate south; its departure left a huge vacuum in the Clyde’s industrial heartlands. But perhaps the most telling symbol of the decline was the looming bulk of Order Number 534 which occupied Number 4 berth at John Brown’s shipyard at Clydebank. Work on the giant Cunard liner had been suspended on 11 December 1931 and for almost three years the gaunt, unfinished hull had been a sorry symbol of the economic decline and the consequent loss of almost 5,000 jobs. When work was resumed in the spring of 1934 it was greeted with wild enthusiasm, and the eventual launch of the 35,500-ton liner two years later seemed to herald a turnabout in the fortunes of the Clyde’s shipbuilding industry. In the autumn...