Skylon: British Maypole for a Brave New World?

I haven’t thought about the Skylon for decades. That is until a picture postcard depicting the Sussex village of my infancy fell from a stack of books I was on the point of clearing from the loft.

The photo depicts infant maypole dancers on the village green and I suddenly remembered the last time I too danced there with ribbons on my shoes: the Festival of Britain, May 1951.

Of course, many now will have forgotten the austere centre piece and symbol of this Centennial Festival: the Constructivist ‘floating’ column that was raised on cables at its base nearly 15 metres (50 feet) from the ground, with its highest point nearly 90 metres (300 feet) high. With its cladding of aluminium louvres, its frame was lit from within at night, a towering shaft of light reflected in the Thames between Westminster Bridge and Hungerford Bridge on London’s South Bank. 

Symbol of Peace or Passivism?

Was it due to the Skylon’s retaining cables – held taut and radiating from this festive totem – that the ‘maypole’ metaphor at once sprang to mind or, when viewed at night, did its pillar of light denote the birth of a new Zion from which a battle-scarred nation would re-proclaim her Pax Brittanica?

No. This insight of mine has a different animus so blindingly obvious that I can only assume that the glare of its truth must have struck me blind. Until now.

Consider this:  

May 1st 1707. The Act of Union came into effect, joining the kingdoms of England and Scotland and the principality of Wales to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

May 1st 1851. The Great Exhibition is launched in London as an imperial celebration of modern industrial technology and design, under the patronage of Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of the British Empire.

May 1st 1951. Under a Labour government, the Festival of Britain opens on the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and opens on a date recognised since 1891 as  International Workers’ Day, also known as Labour Day in most countries . . . and celebrated by all of them as May Day.

How ironic, then, that the propagandistic ethos that underpinned Soviet Constructivism – the Constructivist Movement, after all, was conceived as an extension of Russian Futurism to ideologically promote communist social purpose – would be seen to support the short-lived legacy of a socialist government about to topple, because the dismantling of the Skylon was swiftly to follow the election in 1951 of a Conservative and Unionist government with Winston Churchill as Prime Minister, the prophet of the Cold War and Coiner-of-the-Phrase, ‘The Iron Curtain’.

As it was, the Skylon was demolished on the orders of  Churchill, who saw this Futurist spire as a symbol of the previous Labour Government’s vision of a new socialist Britain. It would be an understatement to declare here he had an axe to grind.

Unforgotten: the Virtue of Bearing a Grudge

The very configuration of the Skylon must have been a personal affront to Churchill. In the heart of London, the target of V-2 rockets that – barely five years earlier – had killed and maimed over 9,000 Londoners, was erected a mockery of a ballistic missile, since surely the Skylon was a sly counter-cultural spoof of an intercontinental rocket with nose-cones fore and aft, held in equipoise with no visible means of support nor visible thrust chamber for lift-off. In short, a transfigured V-2 as token of World Peace.

 

In the 1950s, the Soviet R-7 long-range
intercontinental ballistic missile research was derived
from captured German missiles such as the V-2.

 

Let us remember the words of Churchill from May 1936: ‘The use of recriminating about the past is to enforce effective action at the present.’  These words were prominently quoted as the epigraph to Guilty Men (1940), the notorious exposé of Britain’s ineffectual rearmament policies and attempted appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the policies of ‘Ostrichism’ the guilt for which the book laid in greater part at the door of Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald.

 

While we, the British in the 1930s had succumbed to ‘Ostrichism, Hitler’s Germany had its own Operation Österreich in pursuit of a martial dream to see the annexation of an Eastern Realm

Of course, ambiguities abound: Michael Foot, Labour Party leader in the early 1980s, was co-author – under a pseudonym, Cato – of this polemic against his own party’s inaction in the face of Hitler’s transformation of ‘all Germany into one gigantic arsenal’ while Great Britain dozed. Michael Foot would later become (in 1957) a founder member of CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

 

My grandfather’s copy of Guilty Men (1940) with its epigraph
a quotation from Churchill, 1936. (The flyleaf is dated
August 21st 1940, ‘His Book’, and records with signatures
that the book had been passed for reading to four friends.)

 

In the echo chamber of history, last March (2021), the UK’s Five-Year Defence Review announced that Britain’s army, navy and air force would all be cut back, with the size of the Army set to be its smallest since 1714 .

 

So, are we any clearer in choosing the truest defensive positions when today, from each side of the Iron Curtain, ideologies are in disarray and corruption and mendacity eat away at the certainties of rival world powers?

A New Ostrichism?

Only this week (March 2022), political scientist Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man (1992) stated on a British radio newscast: ‘I’ve believed right from the beginning there is no automatic mechanism that produces good stable prosperous democracy . . .’

 

September 11th Memorial Tribute in
Light, New York City. (Anthony Quintano.)

 

Well, never mind Liberal Democracy, equally, it appears, the Constructivists failed to leave a convincing memorial to the Great Illusion of a Workers’ Utopia they envisioned in their futurist blueprints of the 1920s. Somehow, unless we’re kidding ourselves as victims of a New Ostrichism, one hundred years later we must prepare for our tenuous grasp on peace and freedom to be fittingly represented by Conceptual Art, a despairing evanescence reflective of the moral relativity that recognises only the Great Uncertainty stretched out before us and its product, Solipsistic Materialism.

The Skylon . . . Forgotten, Dust-coated and Dumped in the Yard.

On May 1st 1951 there was erected on our village green not only a maypole but also a marvellous Skylon to call our own (on a somewhat reduced scale) fashioned from a telegraph pole, reshaped and coated in shiny metallic paint. A week later our Skylon reappeared, cast aside in the local coal yard. There it remained for some years, half-buried in one of the loading bays, gathering dust.
 

Now nothing remains of that colossal wreck but my memory of it and my own remorse.

 

Our local coal merchant was named Scutt. A scut is the hindmost extremity of a frightened rabbit seen when it runs away. 

 

Halcyon days. Village maypole 1934.
(Francis Poirier)

Peace . . .  a Polemical Rose.

Nor, in our brooding on imponderables, should we forget the polemical rose. A hybrid cultivar bred in Vichy France, the celebrated ‘Peace Rose’ has all the makings of a pathetic fallacy forestalled.

 

The defining features of this ephemeral symbol? Rather rhetorically overblown and slightly flushed at the edges. 

 

The polemical Peace Rose. ‘Rather rhetorically
overblown and slightly flushed at the edges.’

 

Field Marshal Alan Brooke – the British Army’s Inspector of Artillery in the mid-1930s and Chief of the Imperial General Staff during WW2 – was invited to have this symbol named after him. An officer no stranger to illusions that had been early bred out of him, he politely declined this supposed honour.

 

Skylon . . .  threatening to export the nationalisation of assets overseas?

‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’, or other correspondents of that ilk on the letters pages of our national newspapers, blamed the Skylon for a contagion of hostile nationalisation infecting Britain’s former overseas assets . . . in particular, it seems, the nationalisation of the BP controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and the expulsion of Western companies from oil refineries in the city of Abadan, Iran. See this news item in the Croydon Advertiser, circa 1951:

The Abadan crisis was caused by the Festival of Britain, claimed Sir Herbert Williams, Conservative candidate for Croydon East. (This England 1952, published by The New Statesman and Nation, 1952.)

 

 

Cold War Paranoia: the Real Thing . . . a Poisoned Brick Thrown from an Upper Window

As you may be aware from my occasional despatches from Stoneburgh Military Academy – the elite alma mater for generations of British Intelligence operatives – I have documented in a number of communiqués the insider’s view of our Applied Behavioural Science and Psychological Operations unit, PsyOps, and its analyses of notable Cold War players of the Great Game.
       Insights, for instance, into the politico-criminalistics of two legendary Cold War subversives, the profiling of MI6 double agent George Blake and the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, may be read here . . .  
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-3-religio.html

Cold War grandstanding:
Soviet ballistic missile paraded in Red Square, Moscow.

Lessons learned from ideological grandstanding by Cold War warriors.

Agreed, Stoneburgh’s preoccupations with its established I.n.t.C.l.e.a.r. Intelligence Clearance criteria for the integrity of trainees entering the Service would seem, at first glance, to suggest a narrow academic purview that precludes the wider socio-cultural landscape. 
       That this is not so, you may be sure, is due to the perceptive application of Predictive Investigative Psychology techniques by the IOC (Intelligence Operations Course) and its close observance of the socio-cultural context when examining the lessons the ideological grandstanding by Cold War warriors can teach us.
       As I have shown, in the Blake/Blunt profiling, it is through the behavioural patterns of both active counter-espionage operatives and those rogue agents suborned and bribed by foreign powers, that the fatal inherited weaknesses by which agents can be compromised are exposed . . . for it is in the subject’s childhood – well, particularly in childhood – that extreme ideological beliefs are found to germinate and, with them, ideological paranoia.

Professor Weissener (Stoneburgh Military Academy’s lecturer on politico-criminalistics), June 2015: ‘It is my belief that deeply embedded ideology from a subject’s formative years can be awakened (or, in today’s terms, ‘radicalised’) by the very real hostile intent of enemy powers, so the greatest vigilance must be maintained to identify telltale signs or detect unguarded disclosures.’

       And lest you imagine that Cold War Childhood Paranoia is a state of mind beyond the reach of my empathic identification, may I tell you that, five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was witness to an episode in the New York City borough of Queens that induced in me an authentic prickly sense of doom, revealed to me by a child’s-eye view of imminent annihilation falling from the sky.

‘Kids down the block say they wanna kill all the bad guys.’

In my view, then, those days of Cold War paranoia are not beyond retrieval.
       Which brings me to that day I set out with little Nathan for Corona Park, the day his mother was taken by his father to Mount Sinai hospital for her annual physical. Both second generation Polish-Americans, she was a store detective in the city and his father was the boss of a maintenance crew for Manhattan’s wooden water towers.
       So timid six-year-old Nathan was used to inclining his earnest bespectacled old-man’s face to study the New York skyline; an elevated inquisitiveness came naturally to him.

       ‘Them kids down the block.’ His small hand tightened in my clasp and he nodded in the direction of the apartment house on the corner of our avenue. ‘Real mean kids.’ He pointed to a third floor window and balcony. ‘Say they wanna kill all the bad guys.’

       ‘How’re they going to do that?’ I asked with a smile. (The two boys who lived on the third floor – Lee and Frankie – I knew to be aged seven and nine.) 

       Nathan pointed to the upper window.

       ‘Got stuff up there to be throwed down on the bad guys. Th’other day Frankie says as how he’s gonna fix ’em. The bad guys. Says as how them guys are gonna get throwed down on them eighteen hunnerd poisoned bricks.’

‘Weapons of mass destruction . . . satellites, celestial bodies, outer space.’

It follows, then, that I shall ask a not irrelevant quick question. Have you heard of the 1967 Titicut Follies (directed by Frederick Wiseman and filmed by John Marshall), a documentary masterpiece about the patient-inmates of Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Bridgewater, MA?
       Yes. A documentary film completed fifty years ago.
       Nineteen Sixty-Seven. A year I have cause to remember.
       1967. Churchill’s state funeral. Coffin borne on gun carriage. Muffled drums.
       1967. Communist China explodes its second atomic bomb.
       1967. The Vietnam War enters its twelfth year.
       1967. U.S. troop levels reach 463,000 with 16,000 combat deaths to date. 
       1967. Chinese shoot down two U.S. fighter-bombers outside Vietnam’s border. 
       1967. Massive pro-war and anti-war demonstrations in New York. 
       1967. The United States and the Soviet Union sign the Treaty on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. This agreement bans weapons of mass destruction from orbiting satellites, celestial bodies, or outer space.

‘Stockpiling nuclear weapons is like kids with toys.’

Theatre of Cold War Paranoia.

The extended soliloquies of the inmates (some Vietnam vets) in the Bridgewater Hospital exercise yard are Pure Theatre, that is, the Theatre of Cold War Paranoia . . . a crazed exuberance of prophets and the possessed.
       The ex-vet seer Borges (above right) pronounces: 

‘America is a female part of the earthworld and she’s sex crazy. Her sexiness brings on wars like the sperm that is ejected by man; it’s by a woman in her own body. It has the same influence. But this is a gigantic pattern . . . stockpiling nuclear weapons is like kids with toys, they figure they got to start playing with those toys . . . They’re no good. They’re Judases. They’re money-changers. I’ll tell you one thing. Even Pope Paul is not without sin. Believe in him and the cardinals! I say he’s unworthy of being the pope of the world and I announce that the rightful pope is now Archbishop Fulton Sheen and the other one, Cardinal Spellman, so help me God. I, Borges, say so !’

      ‘Stockpiling nuclear weapons is like kids with toys.’ 
      As six-year-old Nathan predicted in the same year: ‘Got stuff up there to be throwed down on the bad guys.’

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

(where the counterespionage operations of Stoneburgh may be read in Red Coffee)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
(In the latter two volumes, Stoneburgh operatives feature in Lovesong in Invisible Ink, Listen Close to Me and Inducement)
see also extracts from the Stoneburgh Files here:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/oreville-spy-campus-introduction-to.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html
and for more insights on 
Anthony Blunt
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html

Stoneburgh Spy Campus (Pt. 5): Tyrants, Ideologues and Spies are ‘Stronger by Treachery’ says Weisse

‘Bones are strongest at their broken places,’ declared Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener (Stoneburgh Military Academy’s lecturer on politico-criminalistics), as he commenced his second lecture on Day Two of the Psychodynamics of Espionage conference, though, in my own view, his choice of expository text seemed to condemn his listeners to the aridities of a secular sermon.
      But, surprisingly, the Prof then darted off on a tangent to illustrate how his text provided a precise metonym for current breaches of border security by insurgents, namely the strengthening of incursion tactics at Calais, the point of Britain’s weakest offshore defences . 
      ‘The bones of a born survivor heal from a break,’ he explained. ‘They are strongest in the place where they were once broken.’ 
      He then planked down a pair of wire-cutters on the lectern with a rhetorical flourish.
      ‘Similarly, the clandestines camped in Calais (whose political allegiances are of the most troubling dubiety) are now known to be surpassingly inventive in exploiting a chink in the armour of UK-bound hauliers – in this case, literally – and it is by this weakness that they strengthen their tactics to traffick hostiles into Britain.’
      Weissener paused and flipped a switch.
      At once an x-ray view was projected on to the screen behind him, revealing a cargo of trafficked illegals, massed inside a curtainsider truck. (They were so crammed together that some unfortunates among the human freight had been forced to stand.)

      ‘I don’t think it has yet been observed by the international Press,’ Weissener continued, ‘that the desperate conditions in the illegal camps at Calais resemble in many ways the PoW camps of two world wars insofar as latterday camp inmates are driven to attempt astonishing feats of ingenuity in their pursuit of new means of escape.’

      He produced a length of cable and invited a conference delegate from the assembly to – stooge-like with a sickly grin – snip it with the wire-cutters.

      ‘Zapp! And that is how easy it is to get under the wire,’ Weissener told us grimly. ‘The wire in question is the high-tensile TIR cable [Transports Internationaux Routiers standard] that secures the curtainsider trucks transporting goods through the Channel Tunnel.

      ‘Yes, anti-slash armoured curtains may well be up to spec, and double padlocks clearly in evidence, BUT these are to no avail if would-be clandestine entrants to the United Kingdom have clipped the security cable and RECONNECTED IT WITH SUPER GLUE once they have penetrated the cargo space. This ploy means that – though the TIR cable is seen to pass through all fastening points and remains taut – the glued severed ends are actually concealed behind the curtainsider’s strap fasteners. 

      ‘And, yes, the vigilant driver may well re-test the tension of the cable, say, after he’s been occupied at the pumps, YET – to return to my original proposition – the vehicle’s defences “are strongest at their broken places.”  Or “strongest” certainly in the opinion of those clandestines whose deceptions have gained them admission to their free ride out of continental Europe.

      ‘Another thing. It is even known that padlocks are sheared off the tensioned TIR line then reassembled with super glue . . . the more easily later to prise them silently apart undetected.’    

Pregnable Embassies

 ‘Notwithstanding this . . .’ again the lightning of the Prof ’s darting mind seized on another aside, ‘. . . there is a complacency prevailing in the haulage industry that’s very similar to the reliance placed by security agencies on the impregnability of those impressively substantial, antiquated, square-cornered, steel-plated safes in which our embassies overseas continue to hoard classified documents.

      ‘Fact. The seams of such safes can be easily detected and forced open with basic workmen’s tools such as a heavy hammer and cold chisel . . . even the best examples of this Victorian construction can be ripped open by driving a wedge or chisel into the riveted seams, usually found at one of the top corners. Once the rivets are popped, the corners can be peeled back . . . however, forgive me, for those safe-crackers among you I am anticipating the instruction you’ll receive for the next addition to your crime sheet . . . your Advanced Peterman Course this afternoon.’ [Polite laughter] 

Outlawry Strengthened by Broken Pledges

At which point, I truly believed Stoneburgh’s most eminent theoretician had veered so far from his subject that he would find no way back. 

      I was wrong.

      ‘And now, you may ask, to what purpose do I mention these breached defences so easily penetrated by the exigent guile of self-taught outlaws “riding the rails” to Dover?
      ‘The lesson I adduce and which I wish our counterespionage agencies to take most to heart is: A successful law-breaker is strengthened by transgressive acts.
      ‘Being outside the rule of law, the “incursionists” crossing borders bound for this nation have no code of conduct to observe and the ease with which they evade international law-enforcers makes them stronger in their defiance of the polities of our hard-won democratic way of life.’
      The effort of this peroration caused Professor Weissener to pause and reach for a glass of water. He was clearly troubled by the extreme complexity of his own circuitous argument.
      He wiped his forehead and resumed, wandering off the point (judging by the response of his listeners) to cite any number of political and martial acts of treachery to substantiate his views. 
      ‘The future historian will, no doubt, describe the present-day incursions upon Britain in an allegorical vein, and it’s true that no more striking example of deception by would-be insurgents is the sublime instance of the Trojan Horse, the symbol of a broken pledge since the ‘gift’ to the Trojans was dissembled as the Greeks’ offering of atonement to the goddess Athena.
      ‘Some of you may take this interpretation to be visionary, but the insidious peril I am combating is an actuality and one that may turn a foot soldier into a rebel leader, and make a declarant of broken promises stronger by treachery. 
      ‘Hence arises a grave mischief.
      ‘Tyrants, ideologues and spies are stronger by treachery.
      ‘Modern history is replete with examples: Hitler and the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (by his treacherous invasion of the Soviet Union Hitler reclaimed territories gained by the Soviets); Churchill and the forced repatriation – at the end of WW2 – of Cossacks (including women and children) to the USSR and their certain execution (an act of betrayal that has not tarnished Churchill’s reputation as revered ‘Saviour of the Nation’); the ambiguity of de Gaulle’s seeming promise to Algeria’s pieds noirs – “Je vous ai compris!”– and his subsequent u-turn did nothing to constrain his high-handed presidentialism during the succeeding decade of his politique de grandeur; Horatio Nelson’s betrayal of Neapolitan revolutionaries in 1799 in violation of the terms of an armistice has not toppled the admiral of ‘Immortal Memory’ from his pedestal nor impugned his gentleman’s ‘code of honour’; the posting to Washington of the master-spy Kim Philby as chief British intelligence officer at the capital served only to raise his espionage activities to a new level of treachery and strengthen his hand . . . and so on  . . .’

A Trojan Horse Assumes Many Guises.

Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener glanced at his watch and gathered together his lecture notes.
       ‘But here I must end my illustrations. My subject is treachery. Your job is counterespionage. Major problems of vital national security continue to confront us and your goal is to identify those who break the sacred bond of trust before they assume the false integrity that can make them seem unassailable despite the denunciations of whistleblowers, as was the case with that arch traitor and double agent, the odious dipsomaniacal snake in the grass Kim Philby.’
      I smiled to myself, and such was the sustained impression of a secular sermon that I expected him to add, ‘Here endeth today’s lesson,’ but, instead, Weissener again flipped a switch and a final image was projected on to the conference screen above him.
       ‘Before I close I would earnestly impress upon you particularly the notion that a Trojan Horse can assume many guises, and we should heed those doubters who, like the seer Cassandra, saw through the incursionist deceptions that threatened Troy but were ignored, and hence had to face defeat and submission to a hostile occupation.’

Re. The trafficking of ‘incursionists’.
‘I would earnestly impress upon you particularly the notion 
that a Trojan Horse can assume many guises.’
Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener
(The limitless ingenuity of bootleggers in the Prohibition Era.)

•

Calais Stowaways:

Penalties for hauliers caught with clandestines on board are variable, according to levels of negligence, with a maximum level of £2000 per stowaway.

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

(where the counterespionage operations of Stoneburgh may be read in Red Coffee)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
(In the latter two volumes, Stoneburgh operatives feature in Lovesong in Invisible Ink, Listen Close to Me and Inducement)
see also extracts from the Stoneburgh Files here:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/oreville-spy-campus-introduction-to.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html
and for observations on double agent George Blake
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-3-religio.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-archive-pt-4.html
see also extracts from the Stoneburgh Files here:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html
and for more insights on 
Anthony Blunt
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html