Patrick Hamilton, the English author and playwright, has now reached the curious position within the literary world of being best known for being overlooked. Hamilton wrote sad, cruel and intensely funny novels of what I’ve taken to calling the Oh-God-The-War-Is-Coming (OGTWIC) genre — a genre of rented rooms, gin and lonely, quietly failing people, usually based in London and the South East, striving grimly, dimly aware that something is going drastically wrong on the continent and their inconsequential existence is unsustainable in its current form (see also Nigel Collins, Julian McClaren-Ross, and George Orwell, to an extent).
Put simply, there are Nazis, and sooner or later there will be a war. In Hamilton’s Hangover Square, George Harvey Bone’s drinking cronies display fascist sympathies, the bullying Peter having actual served time in jail for Blackshirt streetfighting. Orwell’s George Bowling, in 1939’s Coming Up For Air, bemoans the machine world in the perfect line: “Everything’s streamlined now, even the bullet Hitler’s saving for you.”
Perhaps alone among the OGTWIC novelists, Hamilton found fame in Britain before Hitler. His thrilling play Rope debuted on the West End in April 1929, shortly after his 25th birthday, and was an immediate sensation. Rope, later filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, concerned a pair of students who decide to kill a friend, just for the hell of it. But, after the murder, as suspicion grows, their nerve dissolves.
The play was apparently based on the 1924 “Leopold and Loeb” case, in which two wealthy Chicago students, convinced by Nietzsche’s idea of the the Übermensch who live beyond humanity’s moral codes, decide to murder a young friend, Bobby Franks. In the lead up to the murder, Nathan Leopold had written to Richard Loeb that: “A superman … is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men He is not liable for anything he may do.”
The courts felt differently: Leopold and Loeb did kill poor young Franks, but far from committing the perfect crime, they made several clumsy mistakes and were easily caught and convicted. Only the brilliance of their defence lawyer, the famed Clarence Darrow, helped them avoid execution.
Hamilton was almost embarrassed by Rope’s success, perhaps irritated that his fame had come from a popular West End thriller rather than his novels. But, according to Hamilton biographer Nigel Jones, others gave it more credit. An article in the Times Literary Supplement after the war credited Hamilton with picking up on the Zeitgeist of 1920s and 1930s masculinity, specifically the “young men with the highest social pretensions and an almost mystical pursuit of violence” who would fill the ranks of Europe’s fascist movements. The TLS went on to praise the Rope writer, saying “[W]hether the author was conscious of it or not, his social sensitiveness had invested the thriller form with more than its usual significance. And he has shown himself at least concerned for human values and able to feel passionate indignation at their denial.”
Rope roared on to Broadway and round the world, providing Hamilton with a steady income for the rest of his too-short, drink-sodden life.
But, given its prescience, it encountered a particularly ironic moral panic when it was scheduled for broadcast by the BBC in January 1932.
The radio had been commissioned by BBC HEad of Productions Val Gielgud — brother of Sir John and of an equally theatrical leaning. Eagerly hyping his commission, Gielgud put himself forward to issue a statement on air, warning that the play was shocking indeed and that BBC listeners should “send the children to bed and lock granny in her room” before settling down to listen to the thriller.
Gielgud’s music-hall instincts worked a dream, and the newspapers and defenders of the nation flew into a fury. The Morning Post quoted a concerned correspondent who allegedly wrote: “The play had a successful run — there is, of course, a section of the British public which enjoys the degenerate; no one wishes to interfere with their pleasure. It is, however, quite another thing to broadcast this stuff into millions of homes.”
The aggrieved Morning Post reader went on to bemoan the “outrages and murders of little girls” that filled the pages of the newspapers, and suggested that the broadcast of Rope would only encourage “the morbid tendency which leads to these crimes. I submit that the BBC is making a gross misuse of its powers.”
The British Empire Union, a xenophobic, ultra-conservative organisation, picked up on the “morbid tendency” theme, protesting to the BBC that: “While not questioning the ‘cleverness’ of the play, or the undoubted dramatic ability of the author, we consider the broadcasting of a play of this description cannot but encourage in unbalanced and degenerate minds that morbid tendency which leads to the crimes depicted.”
Gielgud, by this point trolling the entire country, told the Evening Standard: “There is nothing disgusting or gruesome about this play, [but] it would have been unfair to broadcast it without letting people know in advance what they were going to hear. For example it might not be the most suitable thing to hear in a hospital.”
The broadcast was, of course, a roaring success, with millions listening in and critics (the Morning Post and the Daily Mail aside) wooed utterly.
The mechanisms of so many public outrages are tied up neatly in Rope: the tease of the promoter; the wilful misunderstanding of a work which explores a controversial issue rather than condoning it; the head in the sand refusal to look at the context of the work; the censorious impulse of those who, while not themselves affected by such things, fear for those lesser beings who may be; the intervention of the Daily Mail; and, ultimately, the fleeting, soon-forgotten nature of the controversy. Over 80 years later, in the age of the iPhone and the Twitter mob, how little we have changed.
For the last two decades the stubborn, powerful myth that the creative arts and the Protestant working class in Northern Ireland do not go together has been regularly proclaimed.
Closer reading reveals a plethora of Protestant dramatists including, but not limited to: Sam Thompson, Stewart Parker, Ron Hutchinson, Christina Reid, Graham Reid, Marie Jones, and Gary Mitchell. This is of course a typically unfortunate sectarian head-count, but a necessary one in light of matter-of-fact declarations from Irish Republicans that Ulster Protestants have ‘no culture’, and – perhaps more damagingly – the identical conviction of a large number of working class Protestants themselves.
With this is mind it is worth distinguishing between ‘loyalist’ and ‘Protestant working class’ voices. The phrases have become interchangeable (despite the way the Protestant electorate has long given loyalists the cold shoulder), and many local and international commentators in the media and academia continue to refuse the distinction. On the other hand, with the exception of the lively 1982 community play This is It!, loyalists are indeed without any real lineage in the theatre.
It is therefore vital that Ulster loyalists take their place on the stage, a process which began on 1 May when Bobby Niblock’s play Tartan opened in East Belfast’s Skainos Centre before going on to close the city’s Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. A production of the recently-formed Et Cetera theatre company, this was an avowedly loyalist exercise in the sense that Niblock is an ex-prisoner depicting one of its stories. Initially the Tartans fought other gangs from within the same community but many went on to join loyalist paramilitary groups, a difference and tension the play explores.
At an Index on Censorship symposium held in the University of Ulster’s Belfast campus on 3 May, I was charged with leading one of four breakout sessions exploring why loyalist voices are under-represented in the theatre. The challenge facing the Et Cetera group was brought home when only one person from this comfortable set showed up, perfectly encapsulating part the problem. The one major complaint of loyalists in post-Troubles Northern Ireland is that their voice is simply ignored. I was initially apprehensive about spearheading a discussion even mentioning ‘loyalism’, as it is now a pejorative term of abuse. The way the conference attendees reacted typically reflects the complete unwillingness to engage with this disillusioned section.
Many loyalists have hitherto been convinced that the best way they can make their voices heard is to block roads and intimidate. They feel the ‘peace process dividend’ has nothing to offer them, while report after report pitches the Protestant working class male right at the bottom of the educational attainment table (only just in front of Irish traveller and Gypsy/Roma, according to the latest Peace Monitoring Report). These are the men who find themselves languishing in the back of police vans and holding cells at the end of an evening of rioting, as well as being the first target for the paramilitaries.
No-one would be so naïve as to believe that a play alone could stop violence, but seeing a play – like all art – can soften human beings as well as advance understanding. The late Seamus Heaney once said of his own medium that ‘It can eventually make new feelings, or feelings about feelings, happen’, and the creative process often leads to self-examination. In Tartan two young men reflect while they assemble a crate of petrol bombs: it’s their future they’re on the verge of hurling away along with the incendiaries. A diversity of viewpoints are similarly on show. Some of the boys are already hard-liners; others remind us that most Catholics don’t support the IRA. While empathetic to its young, exploited protagonists, it is also upfront about their mistakes and prejudices.
Tartan has flaws – including a noticeably stronger second half – but it is one hell of an opening salvo. The energy of these young males reverberates off the stage, giving speech and form to a violence which continues to scar the North’s streets, as well as highlighting the essence of the Et Cetera group itself: as an outlet for new stories and energies previously untapped.
The dangers of a loyalist underclass are unlikely to be apparent to an English or international audience. They remain rather less deadly than dissident republicans, but Tartan’s relevance – anchored in the perspective of misled young Protestant men – becomes especially resonant in the wake of the increased recruiting and activities of the most serious loyalist paramilitaries.
The Man Who Swallowed a Dictionary, a play about David Ervine – another ex-prisoner who died prematurely of a heart attack in January 2007 – is Niblock’s follow-up project. Earning this (provisional) title in real life for being articulate in a culture which does not value articulacy, Ervine served his sentence in the same prison as Niblock and had represented one of the few political voices for disempowered loyalists. The loss was enormous, but the return of this voice is next.
Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, arrives at a protest in June 2013 in Westminster. (Photo: Paul Smyth / Demotix)
BBC Radio Five Live’s Breakfast yesterday dutifully carried out its public service remit by interviewing Nick Griffin, the world’s most tedious Nazi demagogue, ahead of the European elections. Griffin’s British National Party does have some seats in the European Parliament, so is entitled to some airtime.
It was a dull interview. They always are. The BBC interviewers–in this case, Nicky Campbell–want to pick away at the BNP facade, but always somehow miss out on the really strange stuff. Long ago, I vowed that I would never write about Griffin without pointing out that he had written a pamphlet called “Who Are The Mindbenders?”, which is a catalogue of Jewish and Jewish people who work in the media. Griffin believes that these evil Jews (sorry, “Zionists”) are involved in an enormous plot to keep him–the saviour of the white race–out of the press and off the airwaves.
The conspiracist aspect of BNP policies is often overlooked, with the straightforward racism critiqued more heavily. So it was here. Campbell asked Griffin if he had a problem with black and mixed-race players representing England in the upcoming World Cup. Griffin, barely missing a beat, started complaining about BBC liberals smearing him and worse, denying him airtime.
“The BBC owes me 12 Question Times,” he declared, bemoaning his lack of invitations to appear on the BBC’s Thursday night festival of shouting from and at the telly.
It might have been interesting to delve into why Griffin felt he was being kept off Question Time, to see how long he would be able to maintain a line before going full Doctor Strangelove. As it was, we got only the superficial whine. The whine of the martyr-bully.
It is the background sound of our time. There is absolutely no one engaged in modern public life at any level at all who has not complained that they’ve been silenced, denied a platform, bullied into submission by a cruel cabal of agents of reaction or “the liberal agenda”, take your pick.
That is not to say people are not censored, even in the lovely modern 21st Century. It happens, quite a bit. People get locked up for saying stupid things on the internet that affront public sentiment. For years the libel laws restrained reporters, reviewers and the man on the Clapham Omnibus from saying what they really knew, or thought, or thought they knew. And no reader of this site needs to be told what happens in the less than democratic countries all over the world.
But there is actual censorship, and there is the claim to being censored, which are often two separate things. The BNP’s Griffin, UKIP’s Nigel Farage, and every Blimp all the way to Westminster delights in telling us, at length, the things that nobody, least of all them, is allowed to talk about anymore.
Meanwhile, on the left and the pseudo-left, there is an obsession with “platforms”; who has one, who deserves one, who is denied one. Editors and writers who do their best to represent as many diverse views as possible are denounced routinely for the articles they haven’t published rather than the ones they have. Every oversight is evidence of a conspiracy rather than a cock-up. The right people are always being excluded by the wrong people. If only, if only everyone shut up and let me speak, we think, then I could sort everything out.
It’s ironic that many of those who argue most vehemently that they are being censored are the exact ones who demand everyone else shut up. Intersectional feminists who insist they are being excluded from debate demand that radical feminists be “no platformed”. Ukipers who claim they’re not allowed talk about immigration want the police to arrest their opponents in anti-racist movements. All of them, simultaneously, noisily, will end up invoking Niermoller’s “First they came for…” (with the possible exception of the BNP, who, stopping short of displaying sympathy with Communists or Jews, instead content themselves with calling their opponents “the real fascists”, as I once heard Griffin do at Oxford Union).
Why is this? Why does everyone want to be censored?
It’s possible that the simple reason is that we are constantly improving as a society. Triumphalism and privilege are pretty much taboo for many. On the face of it, most of the people reading this, and certainly the person writing it, are probably the luckiest sons of bitches to ever have walked the earth. But a combination of our still-relevant horror at the great wars of the last century, plus a greater ability to learn about the ideas and experiences of others, make most of us wary of revelling in our role as the victor. Instead, we prefer to be the underdog, because underdogs are more virtuous–victims rather than perpetrators. Martyrs, even.
The Nazis and Communists of the 20th century also believed they were more sinned against than sinning, but the difference was that they were certain they would show the world who was really boss. Now, no one outside the most extreme movements – Al Qaeda; or North Korean Juche – really wants to state that aim openly. We want to remain oppressed. Censorship is considered almost universally as a bad thing, so people on whom it is inflicted are good.
The background whine of censorship, emanating even from the powerful may just be the tiny price we pay for a world that is generally better and kinder.
Rt Hon Theresa May MP
Home Secretary
Peel Building
2 Marsham Street
London
SW1P 4DF
Dear Home Secretary,
We are writing to ask that you launch an urgent investigation into why Cambridgeshire Police called on a Twitter user at home and demanded he remove a tweet about a political party– even though he had committed no crime.
We understand from Michael Abberton that police visited him without warning at home following a complaint from a UKIP councillor over a tweet in which Mr Abberton mocked the party. We believe that the actions of the police are a direct affront to freedom of speech, and represent a worrying trend in the UK towards freedom of speech on social media in particular.
The case of Mr Abberton is particularly disturbing because of the political involvement in the complaint. Free speech is vital in a functioning democracy and must be protected at all times, but its importance is often felt most keenly at election time. We believe that the actions of the Cambridgeshire Police set a troubling precedent.
We ask that you investigate this matter immediately and further call on you clarify to police all laws relating to free speech and to elections. That the police saw fit to take this complaint any further than the police station is troubling enough but two further aspects of this case also require address. The first is that the police visited Mr Abberton – who it was clear had committed no crime – at his home, without warning. No one should have to fear a knock on their door by police for simply exercising their legitimate right to speak freely.
Secondly, we understand that the police who visited Mr Abberton asked him not to tweet about their visit. Such behaviour would not look out of place in a totalitarian regime and is a further affront to free speech and expression in a country that has often led the way in condemning such behaviour elsewhere.
These questions need answers swiftly. We call for any investigation to include clear recommendations on how such incidents will be prevented in future and look forward to hearing from you on how you plan to deal with this matter.
Yours faithfully,
Jodie Ginsberg, Chief Executive
Index on Censorship
For the last two decades the stubborn, powerful myth that the creative arts and the Protestant working class in Northern Ireland do not go together has been regularly proclaimed.
