Ack-Ack Women of the Second World War - Katherine Langrish

Sorting through my mother’s bookcases, I came across this interesting little booklet published for the War Office and the Air Ministry, by the Ministry of Information in 1943. It’s all about the ‘static air defence’ of Britain, and is an account of Britain’s anti-aircraft (‘ack-ack’ in popular slang) defences from 1939 to 1942. As the War still had two years to run, besides supplying information the booklet would also of course have been intended to raise morale. The Foreword states that –

This book supplements and continues the story of how the R.A.F. defeated the attack of the German Air Force during the autumn of 1940. Much of the air fighting has already been described in “The Battle of Britain”. But the fighter squadrons never constituted the whole of our defensive system. It has therefore been thought worthwhile to tell the story of the static defences – A.A. guns, searchlights, balloons and the Royal Observer Corps...  Though their story is not dull, the life and the work of the men and women of the static defences very often contains every degree of exasperation. They have had to fight the canker of armies, monotony – often in isolated stations far from their own homes and from anybody’s home.  

Continuing, ‘It isn’t easy to shoot down a plane', and reminding readers of the weighty responsibility of the gun crews in determining whether an aircraft was in fact hostile or not, the book provides some statistics: 'During the first two years [of the war] just on 600 planes were shot down by A.A. fire over this country', from stations ranging from Dundee to Dover, from the Isle of Dogs in London to the Shetlands Isles.

Women played a vital part in these ‘static’ anti-aircraft operations. As members of mixed batteries, women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) operated searchlights, tracked enemy aircraft and controlled the direction of the guns. Though the official line remained that they did not fire them – ‘Women man everything except the guns themselves in Heavy A.A. units, and man them extremely well,’ declares the booklet – it seems highly likely that in actual fact they sometimes did. An officer commanding the first mixed battery to bring down an enemy plane is quoted thus: ‘The girls cannot be beaten in action and in my opinion they are definitely better than the men on the instruments they are manning. Beyond a little natural excitement which only shows itself in rather humorous and quaint remarks, they are quite as steady if not steadier than the men. They are amazingly keen at going into action, and although they are not supposed to learn to use the rifle they are as keen as anything to do so.’

The tone of the booklet is hilariously defensive about the involvement of women in this kind of active service. Someone in the War Office must have had the pragmatism and imagination to get it all going, but they clearly had to defeat a lot of scepticism. The need was felt, for example, to reassure readers that 'special regard' was being paid to 'the women's need for 'fresh fruit, salads and milk foods; and a balance was found between this and the spotted dog and cheese and pickles beloved of the old soldier'. Huh? Anyhow:

The first battery started training in spring, 1940. The A.T.S. members were picked from volunteers, and the men were newly joined recruits, the point being that men who had known no other army life would not find the atmosphere of a mixed battery so hysterically unorthodox. There was considerable anxiety as to how men and women would work together, but there need not have been. They took each other very much for granted; there was none of the musical-comedy-chorus atmosphere which had been anticipated, partly, no doubt, because such men and women had been working side by side in civilian life for years.

If your eyebrows rose as much as mine did on reading those words, maybe you, like me, will reflect on how much women still had to prove – how unusual it still was for men and women to do the same work – and to admire the common sense of those who, in charge of what was obviously seen as a daring experiment, took care that the men and women involved started on an equal footing of inexperience.  It worked.

The idea of men and women marching, eating, drilling and working together – all this under the auspices of the British army – was not without a certain revolutionary tinge. In a mixed battery, women drive and service the trucks, act as sentries and despatch riders, and, in fact, do everything but fire the guns... far from resenting the A.T.S., the men in the mixed batteries show a very real pride in the girls’ work and are the first to defend them against their critics...

 

It wasn’t only in the A.T.S. that women served in the anti-aircraft defences.  In 1941 the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force – the W.A.A.F.s. – began to take over the deployment of barrage balloons. These were used to protect targets such as ports, factories and convoys from dive bombers and low-flying aircraft, driving enemy planes to heights from which accurate targeting – especially at night – would be difficult or impossible.  Balloons were therefore often themselves targeted, and hauling them up and down was a physically arduous business.

In the middle of January 1941, the Air Officer Commanding, Balloon Command, was asked to consider a suggestion that the flying of balloons could be completely carried out by the W.A.A.F. At first, this suggestion was received with dismay. ... The manning of balloons for 24 hours a day, frequently in the most appalling weather conditions, required physical strength not usually possessed by women...

Once again, given the chance, the women proved the doubters wrong. By May 1941 the first batch of volunteers had gone through ten weeks of intensive training, and – says the booklet –  

Every week since then the W.A.A.F. have taken over more and more balloon sites. They will continue to do so until a very large proportion of the Balloon Barrages in the British Isles will be manned by airwomen. ... The Balloon Operators of the W.A.A.F. will still have to endure the weather as well as attack from the air, but they have already shown that they can take it. Theirs is undoubtedly one of the hardest jobs undertaken by women in the war, but they have tackled it and succeeded at it.

Research: Goldmine or Dead End by Debra Daley

On a recent rummage through one of my research notebooks post-publication – looking for material for blog posts that a publicist needed me to write – my curiosity was aroused by the pieces of information that I had decided ultimately to reject while I was writing my new novel, The Revelations of Carey Ravine. There are so many discoveries that appear plump with potential as the writing process gets under way – Yes! How fascinating! I can really use this charming factoid! – but, of course, the remorselessly directional nature of a plot forces you to discard a good number of these historical gems.

It interests me though that one of the skills of being a historical novelist, a particular skill, in fact, lies in learning to negotiate forests of research. It is all too easy to stray from the trail – and yet, also, you know that sometimes you ought to stray. We’ve all wandered spontaneously into shady avenues of investigation that have ended in unexpectedly rich pickings, the kind that make a story shine; but it’s really such an art, I think, to know when to respond to a come-hither historical fact, some alluring little footnote in an unpublished thesis, say, and when to walk on by.

It’s not difficult when the research is essential to the topic. When I was writing long sequences of action aboard a smuggler’s cutter in my previous novel, Turning the Stones, I needed to know everything about that kind of vessel. There was hardly a detail that was not relevant. The same was true of the novel's descriptions of a family of kelp-makers in 18th-century Ireland.

Gathering kelp in Connemara. Photograph Philip G. Hunt c.1910

When the mise-en-scene is very particular, it is not hard to maintain focus in terms of research, but when I’m working on a broader canvas, that’s when I often find myself spoiled for choice and the what-if nuggets of historical info cause me to vacillate. 

The 4th Earl of Sandwich in Istanbul.
Joseph Highmore c.1740

Take the Divan Club in St James’s Street (1744-46), for instance, a dining club founded by the Earl of Sandwich for gentlemen inclined to the exotic. It caught my attention, while I was on my way to an understanding of the rules of hazard – which are damnably confusing, I can tell you. But look, hazard be hanged, someone has written a fascinating article about the Divan Club. Perhaps a great deal of hazard was played there, in which case it would hardly be a diversion at all for me to look into it. But should I go there? Is the Divan a dead end – or could it turn out to be a productive lead? A valuable scene-enhancer? I admit I lingered there, on its silken couches, for far too long.

Most of the time, on a first draft, at least, I don’t know if I am about to plunge into a rabbit hole or a goldmine when an Interesting Fact pops up its winsome head in the course of research. (I don't mean a rabbit hole in the Carrollian sense – I speak of Google and its portals to distraction, or any bibliography or tasty-sounding citation.) I remember one day in the British Library falling under the spell of a lengthy 18th-century pamphlet on managing pests in filberts, and the nut gall mite in particular. As I read through this text, which was set in a squint-inducing broken font, it seemed to make increasing sense to me to abandon the idea I had been researching – that of a Huguenot market garden in Bethnal Green – and devise something completely different. A country house in Suffolk, perhaps. Sans Huguenots. With a grove of horribly compromised filberts lurking in its grounds. I went filbert-mad for at least twenty-four hours, before coming to my senses and returning to my original perfectly sound market garden in Bethnal Green. But not before investing way too much time on something that I really did not need to know.

Here are a few of the captivating possibilities that I did manage to resist, despite having introduced them to my notebooks with rafts of urgent underlining. They had little to do with what I was writing, but they so easily could have…

Protective Signs

I was poking around Rainham Hall in Essex a couple of years ago, when I came across a protective sign – a witch’s sign, they are sometimes called – on the wall of the back stairs that were once used by the Hall's servants. It is a device of raised plaster, so placed that you almost cannot avoid touching it as you put a hand on the wall just beside the door jamb to steady yourself, before mounting the narrow stairs. 

The vestibule of Rainham Hall, Essex.
Built in 1729 for Capt. John Harle

It was too dark in that space to make out the 
details of the sign, save that it was circular. Perhaps it was a 'daisywheel', a symbol sometimes carved or plastered in out-of-the-way places like rafters or door lintels as a general protection against ill-fortune or supernatural forces. Had I descended into the world of protective symbols and spirit traps in ancient houses, I would have ended up writing an entirely different novel.  
 

Shorthand

During the mid-18th century, Eliza Fay, an adventurer, businesswoman, correspondent and disappointed wife, taught herself shorthand. She was a woman of great intelligence and very limited means who was obliged by the deficiencies of her feckless husband to find ways to make a living. There were a variety of shorthand types in 18th-century England, all of which were arduous to learn. I liked the way Eliza applied herself to the task. She could see the potential to act as a recorder and it occurred to me that shorthand might be an advantageous accomplishment to add to the skills of a character who might veer between the occupations of stenographer and spy... in another novel on another day... 

John Wesley's writing in John Byrom's shorthand system, 1744

Nine sopping summers in a row

There was no end to the rain between 1763 and 1772 – and this in an age when the British held in disdain the effetely French habit of sheltering under an umbrella. Rain badly marred the summers in England and Wales, especially during 1763, when the Thames Valley was inundated. 

The Sopping Thursday. Edward Gorey, 1970

The following year, summer thunderstorms destroyed churches and naval ships. The winters were a nasty piece of work, too, in those years, with bitter frosts and heavy snowfalls. In 1768, summer brought record deluges to England and Wales, beginning in June, with rain bucketing down for 36 days without cease. Swathes of the south of England flooded in autumn and early winter of that year and the London-Exeter coach was carried away, when the Thames burst its banks near Staines, with the loss of all six passengers and four horses. In 1770 it snowed in London during May – and the floods went on. Weather, especially historically accurate weather, is such a fruitful reinforcer of mood and usefully complicating factor in a narrative, that I considered altering the time frame of Carey Ravine in order to take advantage of these endlessly wet summers and the endlessly damp laundry. Alas, they did not fit with the political events I also wished to include...  

The “disease” of nostalgia

In the very late 18th century, Thomas Trotter, medical writer and physician to the fleet, designated “scorbutic Nostalgia” a cause of scurvy, as well as a psychological disorder proceeding from melancholy on board ship that afflicted slaves and sailors pining for their homes. But incidents have been recorded of pilgrims, too, suffering from scurvy. In his Voyages and Travels in the Levant, an 18th-century naturalist named Fredrik Hasselquist, reported cases of scurvy at a monastery in Bethlehem, where pilgrims stayed. Were these wanderers also afflicted with nostalgia for home? In a Sanitary Commission Report from the American Civil War, published in 1862, nostalgia was considered a factor in the depression that was a symptom of scurvy in soldiers. I was very attracted to the idea of a wasting disease caused by wandering, and the idea of nostalgia as a source of torment, and thought to weave it into the Indian section of Carey Ravine, but it seemed a pity to treat it only tangentially. That rabbit hole has remained unroamed, at least for the present.

Printing women

I’m drawn to accounts of the roles historical women played in trades, especially if they have anything to do with machinery. My father was a car mechanic and I grew up knowing my way around an engine. (The very first heroine I wrote, in a short film called Universal Drive, worked at a panel-and-paint garage as a spray-painter.) But, before I began to write, I worked as an assistant film editor in Soho and at Lee Studios on thundering old moviolas. It drove me crazy that despite my constant applications to join the film union (ACCT), I was always rejected because it was a closed shop. And yet the male assistant editors all around me seemed to get their tickets without any problem.  I feel that those women in the printing trade in early modern England are kindred spirits. 

Treadwell's wooden-frame power press, 1822

Mercurius Somniosus. Printed by Jane Coe, London 1644

Of course, women did the drudge work – training schools existed in the 18th century that taught women how to set type – but there were women who printed books under their own signs. The rise of printers’ unions in the 19th century, however, was a blow to women's participation in the trade. Craft unions were closed shops, a boys' club, despite the socialist politics. But that's another story...

In Conversation with Alma Alexander, by Gillian Polack

Today I have a guest. Alma Alexander is a US fantasy writer. She has a deep and abiding love of history. I thought it might be interesting to have a conversation with her instead of the regular kind of post.

Alma Alexander, from her author page

Gillian: I've been working on how writers use history in their fiction recently. In your new novel, Empress, you use your historical knowledge in quite a particular way. Maybe we could start off our discussion with what you do and how you do it.

Alma: There is alternative history, historical fantasy, and historical fiction. While the first two are obviously fantasy, you might argue that "straight" historical fiction, the kind that literally takes an event or an era that actually TRANSPIRED in our real-life timeline, is the "true" one out of that pack of otherwise gilded lies.

But is it?

Isn't history always told from the point of view of the victors, isn't it always remembered from what has been told, isn't there a dark and dusty back room where the untold stories go to molder into ashes in silence and solitude? And if you tell THOSE stories - even if you're telling an otherwise absolutely "straight" historical narrative...aren't you already wading into fantasy?

So let's split this into "living memory" and "ancient tales".

With things that might have happened in living memory, you're telling a story which will be remembered by people who were there. Or by their children to whom the stories were told. There are histories that people hide from outsiders simply because the pain is still – will ALWAYS be - too close, too real, too much to share. Should a story be banned, then?

What if it is too important to hide?

I hit a wall similar to this with Embers of Heaven, a novel that takes place some 400 years after its predecessor, Secrets of Jin-shei. That first book was based on an Imperial China, but Embers... took place during the equivalent what we knew as the Cultural Revolution. And one of the characters in my fantasy tale was at the heart of that 'real-world' revolution. I treated that book of living memory history gently. I took the characters whose story I was telling and I focused on them. Without coming out with things that rationalized or justified anything that was ever done by anyone during that time, I had to find a way to tell the story. Tell it straight. Find a way to simply be the messenger, and to let the recent history take care of itself.

And then there's a book like Empress, a story based on a glittering moment in the Byzantine Empire. There was a real love story to end all love stories out there - Emperor Justinian, and his love and soulmate, the Empress Theodora. I grew up with these stories, I cut my teeth on tales of Theodora.

But I didn't want the "historical" Theodora. I wanted the woman underneath the history. And I did not want to tell the straight "historical" story because Justinian was a bookish little clerk who wasn't romantic or manly, nothing like the emperor I called Maxentius. He was all mine. My creation. Someone I wrought so lovingly – flaws and all - that I fell a little in love with him myself. Heh.

My version of the Empress Callidora was likewise grown in the story oyster from the piece of grit that was the historical Theodora. Some of the things Theodora did my girl did too. Other things she did without much input by me. She always knew her own mind.

The world my Maxentius and my Callidora inhabit is NOT the historical Byzantium. It is a place called Visant, which shares some of the same historical touchstones. But my absolute joy in writing these fat historical fantasies is that I can take those touchstones and make them mean something else in my world. I can write the stories I want to write, even those dusty abandoned ones from the forgotten back rooms.

This is what historical fantasy does - it frees me to look at history from above, a high-flying goddess on golden wings, and create a world that is both utterly real and historically grounded, and something rich and strange that I alone had the weaving of.

Gillian: For me, as someone who looks into how writers use history, it seems that you're putting up three categories so that you can argue about inner truth. We can talk about the categories of alternative history, historical fantasy, and historical fiction, however, they're not at the heart of what you're arguing. This is an excellent opening to the sort of fiction you write. Describing people in terms of their relationship to historical counterparts shows the depth of emotion you bring to your fiction and to the history behind it. For me, however, fiction can't actually show us the person behind the story. What it can do (brilliantly) is lead us into different stories from different approaches. It can expand our understanding about the world around us and give us more narratives about history. Most of the time, story is story, and the path you follow to create your characters was purely your path: history in fiction is always a construction by the writer, for the writer and the reader. It's always shaped by our narratives.

Stories are at the core of novels for me, not reality. However, I'm a historian (always and ever) and I always need a bridge from what I see and argue as a historian and the stories I tell as a fiction writer. This is why, in my fiction, I always have one character who sees the story. This is clearest in Langue[dot]doc 1305 and in Illuminations, where I have characters who argue the way historians argue. Artemisia and Rose are both concerned with what's happening in their lives (and, in Illuminations, in the manuscript Rose has found)  and their doubts mean that if there's a reader like me, who sees history as narratives we construct to understand our past and ourselves, that reader has something to hang onto. In my other novels, these characters are less obvious. I always give them a moment, however, and they look at what's happening and say "This can't be real" and often explain why. One of those moments for Ms Cellophane has been quoted by a few people: a character points out that they can't be in a horror novel, and gives reasons. Readers often ask me which character am I in my fiction. I'm none of them. That moment of clarity about narrative, however, that's me peeking in and saying "Boo!" to the reader.

Alma: I remember talking about the writing of battles with someone and what took shape is simply that you cannot WRITE A BATTLE if you've got a POV character in the middle of one. That's because the POV character in question is simply not in a position of knowing what the battle is doing. (S)he isn't IN the whole battle. The only concern of such a character is what is going on *right around them* in the heat of the moment. Their concern - their story - is their own survival. If a battle is won or lost - well, that is a larger question, and one that is decided cumulatively, and not by any single moment. But while a straightforward history might describe such a battle from the perspective of hindsight and of God, looking at it from a dizzy height and discerning tactics (if any) and the shape of the whole battle... if you're in the thick of it you don't see any of that. You're living the battle, not observing it. And it is so with a story, too.

A character can tell their own story - a story that might be nested inside a larger one, to be sure, as all personal stories in the end are because we all live in a shared larger world. But it is the individual story that we can see through the prism of any individual person's life, and it is through their eyes that the bigger story is seen, and shaped, and told.

I don't think enough is ever said about the very real fact that we are all, right now, LIVING IN HISTORY. It just hasn't become history yet, but with every passing moment it is closer to the past than it is to our present or to the future. Minute by minute our own stories drip off the ends of our lives and merge into that larger, shared, historical background that is the tapestry of human existence.

And writing a historical tale (they're all pretty much historical, except proudly futuristic science fiction) is essentially the distilled art of fiction. You're weaving a single golden thread in and out of a larger picture, and making that single thread meaningful within the context of a wider and more encompassing history...

Gillian: My inner historian argues that , using that approach, you can never write a battle. We see different things from the scrum to those we see from a nearby mountainside or from a chronicle written afterwards, but each of the things we see contains inherent bias. We bring ourselves to our writing and colour the scene with our thoughts. The difference between historical non-fiction and historical fiction include the boundaries (things like how far we may colour, what we may colour, which colours we have at our disposal) and whether or not the reader expects to be able to critically evaluate the text by retracing the research that went into it (scholarly apparatus).

As a reader, I expect to be drawn into the story if it's fiction and to be able to critically evaluate it if it's a historical study, but there is significant overlap and our humanity shows in every word we write.

Alma: You can write *A* battle, with any battle you choose to write. But could you write *THE* battle, something specific, something that pertains directly and in-tight-focus to a particular combatant within that battle? You correctly say that our humanity shows in every word we write - how could it be otherwise? We put so much of ourselves into everything we do, every story we tell, or at least we should, and it's the mark of the very best storytelling that the humanity of the writer has to shine through somehow (without being pedantic and preachy about anything, of course). And when fiction touches history it's so easy to slide into the accepted history pageant and forget (as always) the humanity of the under-history, the one never written, the one lived by the "losers" in any given conflict. And telling the untold story... isn't that what every writer dreams of doing...?

I try to do it, at least, with every tale that I tell. I like to think of fiction as a light, something that chases away the shadows from the dark places of the world, and I never forget the power and the privilege of being the hand that wields the torch...

Gillian: And on that note, I will leave Alma to her torch and me to my rather different light. I love it that there are so many choices for narratives and that we can all have valid views. It adds a richness to fiction, not knowing how far that we are going to agree or disagree as readers with the story that unrolls before us.

The Palace of the Grand Master in Rhodes by Mary Hoffman

I'm a sucker for palaces. And castles. Forts, fortresses, towers, anything with crenellations, machicolations, battlements, arrow-slits, moats and portcullises. It's one of the great advantages of being a European that you don't have to travel very far without being in reach of one of these edifices.

As it happens, I was holidaying on the island of Rhodes this summer, so I course, I had to visit the Palace of the Grand Master in Rhodes Old Town. It was the second time I had been there but it was still a shock to be reminded just how big it is and how massive its walls.

Credit: Bernard Gagnon, Creative Commons

Rhodes Old Town is a medieval walled city and the Palace takes up about a third of it. In that respect, it's a bit like Carcassonne in the Languedoc, with its chateau comtal at the heart of it. It resembles it in one other aspect: the repairs done to it over the years, particularly the most recent one in the late 1930s when the palace became a holiday home first for King Victor Emmanuel lll of Italy and then the Dictator Benito Mussolini.

Much as I love castles, there is a line which is easily crossed into Disneyfication and what Eugène Viollet-le-Duc did to Carcassonne in the mid nineteenth century teeters awkwardly on it. But Vittorio Mesturini, the Italian architect who worked on the Palace of the Grand Master, didn't go too far.

Credit: Sailko, Creative Commons

Here is the massy entrance, the towers exhibiting both crenellations AND machicolations! The palace was first built in the late 7th century, as a Byzantine citadel.(The city had been there since four centuries before Christ).  It's in the north-west of the city, overlooking the little harbour of Mandraki, with its ship-building yards that endured till the end of the 20th century.

Five hundred years after it was built, the Knights Hospitaller took over Rhodes and some other Greek Islands and wasn't long before they decided that the citadel of Rhodes would make an ideal headquarters (and who could blame them?). 

Photo: author's own

It's built on the highest point of the island's north west region and makes an excellent fortified fastness. Then, as now, the area south of the citadel and between it and the outer walls was full of winding, narrow streets, where goods of all kind were sold. There were also gardens, workshops, warehouses, taverns and a market square. Orthodox and Catholic churches were scattered throughout the town.

The Knights Hospitallers captured the island in 1309 and remained in charge till Rhodes fell to the Ottomans (Turks) in 1522. They were the knights of Saint John of Jerusalem. They were the seemingly oxymoronic "religious-military Order" that had been going for about two hundred years before they became dominant in the Dodecanese.

It seems to have been founded by a man called Pierre Gerard in Jerusalem and named for John the Baptist. At the beginning, they were just Hospitallers and it was his successor, Raymond de Puys, who organised it into a miitary body. (They are not to be confused with the Knights Templar, beloved of Dan Brown and his followers - 377K of them on Twitter).

The Order was divided into three: knights, who were nobles; chaplains, who were priests and sergeants, who were the sons of free men. Grand Masters were always chosen from among the knights; he held the post for life. 

Credit: Piotrus, Creative Commons

The vast palace is arranged in a rectangle around a courtyard. Then were ten silos of grain sunk into the courtyard. Three are left, with well heads on top of them. The upper storey of the building bears no relation to anything that was there before 1937. This is what the Great Hall looks like inside Now:

Credit: Szilas, Creative Commons

And this is one of the fabulous mosaic floors, with the head of the Medusa, from Kos:

Credit: Wimpearl, Creative Commons

And a lovely leopard:

Credit: Sailko, Creative Commons

Do tell us your favourite castle or palace in the Comments.