Letter from London: 100 Years Ago

I’ve always been interested in time tunnels. I should explain. The benefit of hindsight. The clarity of now from the knowledge of then. Bumping into someone not seen in years and gleaning in seconds what time has done. I began thinking about this in the context of the Stones album Goats Head Soup and the even older sentiment of the song 100 Years Ago: ‘Went out walkin’ through the wood the other day / And the world was a carpet laid before me / The buds were bursting and the air smelled sweet and strange / It seemed about a hundred years ago.’

It is 100 rain-sodden years since the UK’s Meteorological Office first broadcast a Shipping Forecast, though it was called something different back then, also the BBC ‘pips’ or hourly Greenwich Time Signal. The Shipping Forecast has gone on to become one of the great abstract phenomenons. For the seaworthy, it is a godsend but for those unfamiliar with names like FitzRoy, Trafalgar, German Bight and Fastnet, it still unleashes the imagination. I remember listening one windy night at a friend’s isolated cottage in landlocked Perthshire to ‘Dogger, Wind, Southeast, becoming cyclonic later, 4 to 6,’ and excitedly tossing a log on the fire. Not to mention the inherent surrealism of having a former maritime power fading out in a kind of fog of seeming non-sequiturs. None of which had anything to do with the tragic loss 100 years ago of a submarine in the English Channel with 43 dead.

For many of us, 100 years is a lot of water under the bridge. Power has been dissipated even if occasionally people remain upbeat. A talented nuclear start-up company in London has just had to migrate its headquarters across the Channel to Paris after complaints of a lack of support from the UK Government. We have a crocked Russian cargo ship with 20,000 tonnes of highly explosive ammonium nitrate stranded on the edge of the aforementioned Channel, which we would appear incapable of doing anything about. The ship is critically damaged and what one observer has described as ‘suspicious’ after being seen previously lingering close to a NATO base in Tromso, and by oil and gas installations in Bergen, Norway. Its explosives are nearly 10 times the power of the famous ammonium nitrate blast in Beirut.

Is this as good a time as any to remind ourselves Russia has just told all Russians to leave Israel? As it happens, it is 100 years since Russia’s old friend Ramsay MacDonald after 24 years of struggle finally became the first ever Labour prime minister. This followed Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin’s resignation after a vote of no confidence. Labour’s Lossiemouth-born Scot won an overwhelming landslide, not so unlike present Labour incumbent Keir Starmer this year, even if MacDonald would later lose to Baldwin again lthat year, though not without having recognised the Soviet Union, a recognition of course subsequently cancelled by Baldwin.

Today, 100 years since King Vidor’s film Happiness flickered brightly across cinema screens, one well-known text and short-form video hosting service really has it in for Starmer. From both the global east and global west, never mind internally, Blighty still seems under constant online attack. Even gatherings in London with foreign nationals are peppered with anti-British grunts. Though often unfazed as a nation, the UK remains one of the favored targets of the bully. For 50 years, Ramsay MacDonald would be castigated by his own party for being a turncoat who danced with the enemy, though this view would change in the end. What, over time, will be the legacy of Starmer? Will he—like MacDonald—hold the UK together through the bleakest of economic times, or will his many detractors have their way?

In 1924, Mussolini said no to any kind of non-fascist work union and annexed the free port of Fiume (four years after James Joyce left nearby Trieste). 1924 was a bigger one for Italian fascists than German. This refusal by Mussolini was before his fascists received as much as 65% of the vote that year in parliament. Hitler meanwhile was sent to prison in 1924 for the Beer Hall Putsch and while there learned of the German fascists and communists doing quite well in elections, though badly one election later that year. Having served only nine months of his five-year sentence, Corporal Hitler was then freed early, this is still in 1924, and we all know what happened next.

In Europe right now, many continue to see more than just spikes of right-wing activity, though some argue Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is now inching towards the centre (where she may no longer find a Trump-drunk Elon Musk). At the same time, with its deep Nazi roots, Austria’s Freedom Party recently experienced what was a blow to the EU with a landmark win. As for Germany, the only migrant group their far-right seems to embrace is the Russian German one. Interestingly, one of the strongest anti-fascist voices in the country today is Christian Kullmann, head of Evonik, one of the country’s largest chemical companies. ‘Number one: be tolerant,’ he said, speaking out. ‘Number two: perform.’

Is it really 100 years since E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, arguably the most important English novel to cover the Indian independence movement towards the end of the Raj? Based on Forster’s own experiences, it took as its title a poem from American Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Lambasted then for what was seen as an unsettling closeness between characters such as Dr Aziz and Cyril Fielding, it is lauded today for its subtle portrayals of essentially sexist, imperialist and racist characters. Furthermore, an affirmative Indian community today is the largest ethnic minority group in the whole of the UK.

However, it would still be another four years back then before English, Welsh and Scottish women were given the vote on the same terms as men. Less than ten years ago, it was still the case that a UK woman receptionist was fired for not wearing high heels. A petition attracted enough support to be considered by the UK Parliament, but was then rejected on the grounds that existing legislation was adequate. As a musical footnote, by the way, it is also a century since Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey first sang The Mother of Blues with its punchy lyric: ‘I walked in my room the other night / My man walked in and began to fight / I took my gun in my right hand /  ‘Hold him folks, I don’t wanna kill my man’ / When I did that he hit me ‘cross my head / First shot I fired my man fell dead.’ A song about a woman doing time for killing in self-defence an abusive husband. It was also the same year that well loved London-born children’s novelist and political activist E. Nesbit—Edith Nesbit—died.

Finally, as we peer back one last time through our tunnel of time, we discover that this country while at the zenith of its power was holding a vast British Empire exhibition at Wembley here in London to celebrate the power and opportunities within the Empire, though novelist Virginia Woolf was quick to call it antiquated. Compare that with today when thousands of pounds of stock has just been stolen from a nearby food bank, even if quickly followed by an immediate rush of replenished goods from people with so little themselves. Down but by no means out.

Peter Bach lives in London.