Coronavirus: fighting the war and facing an enemy together

So it’s going to be war.

Soldiers from the Spanish 'Military Emergency Unit' (UME)
deploy outside the main station in Valencia

The leaders of nation after nation have assured us that what we’re going into now is war against Coronavirus. Which neatly covers two of the horsemen of the Apocalypse, War and Pestilence. Coronavirus itself provides us with Death, but since shops are still being restocked at the moment, Famine hasn’t put in an appearance yet. Long may it stay that way.

Curiously, that was a remark made by one of Danielle’s aunts, who lived through the Second World War. 

“We have enough food, but otherwise, it’s just like back then,” she told Danielle.

War. Both my grandfathers had their lives profoundly affected by World War One. Both served, in different ways: my paternal grandfather in the artillery, my maternal grandfather in gaol, as a conscientious objector. Both displayed admirable courage and both paid a high price – my paternal grandfather carried shrapnel in his hand until the day he died.

My mother Leatrice, my grandfather Nat and, well, me (a while back)
Nat served two years in Dartmoor Prison as a pacifist

Leaders have taken to using the vocabulary of war too. Pedro Sánchez, Prime Minister of our adopted nation, Spain, declared the other day that “we shall leave no one behind”. It’s an encouraging thought, especially in the light of the idea that Boris Johnson was toying with in the UK, of letting people become infected to build ‘herd immunity’, though his experts calculated this might leave up to 500,000 dead.

Rather a lot not merely left behind, but left in the ground.

It’s ironic, too, that the US is dragging its feet over combating the epidemic. The notion of ‘leaving no one behind’ is one I associate with the US marines. Odd to see that nation having to be dragged into awareness of the threat, against a spirit of denial to which Trump clung as long as he could.

The Spanish Prime Minister’s commitment to leave no one behind reminded me of my parents’ description of life during World War 2. My father served in the air force, my mother was secretary to a Labour MP. She told me how moved, and how strengthened, she was, by a speech of Winston Churchill’s. It included the words:

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

He made the speech in May 1940 at a time when the possibility of surrender was very much in the air. Hearing the Prime Minister declare that “we shall never surrender”, she said, stiffened her resolve and that of most of her compatriots. There were, of course, the profiteers and the black marketers, but overall the nation pulled together. A sense of solidarity for a time overcame extreme individualism.

My father Leonard, with his mother and his father, also Leonard
My father is in his RAF uniform for service in World War 2.
My grandfather served and was injured in World War 1.

The spirit of war. With grandparents who experienced World War One and parents who lived through World War Two, I had always expected as a child that I would, on reaching adulthood, have to face it myself. It’s been not just a pleasure but a relief that I never have.

Until now, at any rate. It’s a bit of a surprise, and not without a grain of excitement, to be facing my own war this late in my life. And, at least, it isn’t one in which man is being called on to kill man.

Which doesn’t mean it isn’t lethal. As with any war, we go in not knowing how many will die. We don’t even know whether we ourselves will make it through – any more than my father did. It took him a long time to understand how he survived when so many of his friends didn’t. 

This war, like any war, is a harrowing experience.

On the other hand, if we can recapture the spirit of solidarity, it won’t be entirely bleak. If we all pull together, if we show we can serve a common goal with at least patience and some courage, what a welcome change that will be in societies more divided than they have been for decades.

It strikes me that Italy, Spain, France and a number of other countries are beginning to get things right. Social distancing, unnatural and painful though it may seem for a species that thrives on social contact, is probably the best way to beat the epidemic.

We’re going into battle with an intelligent strategy. We’re going in together. We’re going to suffer losses, but may be uplifted by our sense of common purpose.

Because that too is part of war, probably the best part, as well as an essential ingredient of our top shared objective.

Beating this damn thing.

Remembering on Armistice Day

A telling anniversary: a century ago, the guns of the Western Front of the First at last fell silent.

We mourn 20 million dead and 21 million wounded on this anniversary. Well, quite a lot of us do, though I note that President Donald Trump only does so if the rain holds off. A fair-weather mourner I suppose we’d have to call him.

That multitude of dead included four I’ve mentioned before: George Edwin Ellison, Augustin Trébuchon, George Lawrence Price and Henry Gunther.

They were, respectively, the last British soldier killed, the last Frenchman, the last Canadian (and last Commonwealth soldier) and, finally, the last American. Indeed, Gunther is generally believed to be the last soldier on any side killed in that war: he died on 11 November 1918 charging a position held by Germans who were shouting at the attackers to stop, since the Armistice would come into effect a minute later.

Maybe it was all down to poorer communications than today, but it seems an extraordinary waste that five hours were allowed to elapse between the signing of the Armistice agreement at 5:10 am and its start at 11:00, however ringing a tone that ‘eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’ may be.

American soldiers celebrating the end of the fighting

As well as Ellison, Trébuchon, Price and Gunther, the time gap cost going on for 3000 lives. Which pretty much sums up the futility of the whole war.

Clearly, I know too little about the life of David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister of the time. I learned from the ‘Guardian’ that he, like US President Woodrow Wilson, argued that imposing excessively hard conditions on Germany would only mean that ‘we shall have to do the whole thing over again in 25 years.’

Harsh conditions were imposed, and indeed the whole thing had to be done again not 25 but 21 years later. With the additional spice of totalitarianism and a Holocaust.

I’m not quite sure what my relatives were doing on Armistice Day in 1918.

One grandfather may have been working with other members of his unit to dismantle an artillery emplacement, preparatory to heading home and demobilisation. He would be taking shrapnel with him, embedded in his hand, as well as the memory of falling victim to a gas attack.

His brother, on the other hand, would soon leave for Russia, to continue fighting, this time with the small British contingent supporting White Russian forces battling the newly-installed Bolsheviks. His experience provides a vivid illustration of the fact that fighting in Europe didn’t end on 11 November, it merely ended on the Western Front.

That great uncle of mine had joined up, illegally, at the age of 15. His mother wrote to his colonel to demand that her son, far too young to serve, be sent home. The reply came from a junior officer informing her that Private Beeson had assured him he was nineteen, so they wouldn’t be sending him back.

Next time you meet a fifteen-year old boy, try to picture him in uniform with a weapon he’s been trained to use to kill people.

As for my other grandfather, he must have been thinking that he’d be released from prison quite soon. He’d been sent there because he refused to fight, but with the war over he could get back to ordinary life, his career as a lithographer and even to finding a possible wife with whom he could start a family.

She, however, would not at that stage have been a potential life partner for him. She was already engaged. However, many of the men returning from the war barely had time to feel relief at having survived the carnage before they were caught up in one of the world’s worst epidemics, Spanish influenza. He’d survived the shelling and the gas, but my grandmother’s fiancé succumbed to the flu. So in the end she married my grandfather instead. Leading to several lives, including my own, which wouldn’t otherwise have been possible.

Like many others, they picked up the threads of a civilian existence. That meant facing different problems: finding jobs, finding housing, educating families. Barely over ten years later, with the great crash of 1929, that became a great deal harder. And ten years after that, each in their own way, my grandparents were doing it, as Lloyd George said, all over again.

An experience worth remembering as we celebrate the centenary of that Armistice. The war it ended wasn’t the war to end all wars. Just the beginning of a lot more problems that persist to today. And between then and now, there have been plenty more wars.

Which is perhaps the most important thing to remember on Armistice day.


Postscript: the First World War was by no means the first world war. Arguably, that would have been the Seven Years War (called the French and Indian War in America) of 1756-1763: it pitted European powers against each other, but alongside combat in their own Continent, it was fought in the Americas, West Africa, India and the Philippines, as well as at sea in many parts of the globe. That seems to fit any sensible definition of a world war, doesn’t it?

The other Grandfather

As I’ve said before, one of my grandfathers was Nat Bannister, a Jew, a lithographer, and a radical at least in his early days. He spent two years in Dartmoor Prison rather than fight in the First World War.

And then there was my other grandfather. He was far more conventional and definitely not Jewish. I knew him less well, but that makes tracking him down all the more interesting.

He was the son of Mary (or possibly Mary Anne) and Alfred Beeson. Since there's a lot of name-sharing to come, let me make it clear at once that Alfred (without a ‘Leonard’ to his name) was my great-grandfather, my father’s paternal grandfather. I think I would have liked him. The photo I have of him shows him with a winning smile, I find, and though I know this was a studio portrait, I like to think it reveals something of the man within.

Mary (or Mary Anne) and Alfred Beeson
My great-grandmother and great-grandfather

My great-grandfather had an ingenious idea. Britain, when he was a young man, prohibited the importation of live cattle. So Alfred moved to Brussels. He imported cattle from Argentina to Belgium, had them slaughtered there and then re-exported the carcasses for the British butcher’s trade. He did well at it until, sadly, the law in Britain changed and live cattle were allowed directly into the country.

It’s always dangerous to build a business on the current state of any law. It can be changed so easily…

Alfred died in 1903, before he’d even reached the age of 40. That left his elder son, Leonard Alfred, then just 15, as head of the family, still living in Brussels. A huge burden for a mere boy to take on, especially as his mother, grief-stricken, was unable to help.

He rose to the task and saw to the education of his three surviving siblings (one brother had died at age eight, some five years earlier). Though he didn’t believe in too much education, especially for women: his sister Irene told me many years later that she had hoped to go to university, but he had peremptorily forbidden her doing so. A university education? Unnecessary for a woman, he told her.

‘His decisions were final,’ she explained. ‘There was no appeal.’

Leonard Alfred Beeson in the Artillery
and his sister Irene Beeson, cheated of university

When grandfather Nat was in gaol for refusing to fight in the Great War, grandfather Leonard was in the Artillery, serving at the front in France. He was injured twice, once by gas. Yep. You know all the fuss our Western powers make, rightly, about the use of gas as weapons? It was, of course, our ancestors in those Western Powers who first made indiscriminate use of them in World War 1.

The second injury was from shrapnel, and he carried bits of it until his death. Surgeons decided that they couldn’t extract some fragments from his hand, so it kept slowly closing on him for the rest of his life. Keen golfer that he was, in his latter years he had to push the handle of his club into the affected hand because it could no longer open to receive it the usual way.

My father told me that Leonard Alfred’s wife came to visit him in hospital after one of his injuries. She was certain that he had lost a leg, and refused to believe him when he said he hadn’t, thinking he was merely trying to comfort her. Eventually, he had to pull the hospital bed sheets back to reveal two intact, working legs before he could convince her.

She was Eleanor Eileen, whose father was Serbian. He claimed to be a Prince related to the Serbian royal family, although most of us think he was probably a waiter who felt life might treat him better in Britain.

Leonard and Eleanor had to leave Brussels when the German Army invaded Belgium, but they were back there after the war and busied themselves raising a family of three boys and two girls. The last of the boys was called Leonard Alfred though, to distinguish him from his father, they tacked on a Malcolm as his third forename; Leonard Alfred Malcolm Beeson would eventually be my father and my brother’s.

Sadly for Leonard Alfred and his family, having had to flee Brussels once ahead of the Germans in World War 1, they had to do the same all over again in 1940, when World War 2 moved from its ‘phony war’ stage to something much hotter. So unlikely did it seem that things would turn so nasty, that Leonard had gone to England for a golfing weekend in May, only to find himself stranded there with only the clothes in his cae (and presumably his clubs) when Hitler’s troops moved in and Brussels fell again.

Eleanor Eileen Beeson
at 34 rue du Japon, Brussels in about 1936

My father had to get out with his mother on the last train before the Germans arrived. They packed as much as they could, but that wasn’t a lot. Their bags were in the taxi waiting to take them to the station for, I repeat, the last train out when my grandmother suddenly cried out for them to wait. She rushed back into the house and came out with the dustbins. Presumably, she didn’t want to find the house smelling of rubbish when they returned.

They did make it back, after the war, and there certainly wasn’t any rubbish in the house. In fact, there was nothing at all. The place had been completely looted while they were away.

My father was pleased they caught the last train.

‘The second-to-last train was strafed by German fighters,’ he told me, ‘and there were a lot of casualties on board.’

Leonard Alfred Beeson in the Fleet Air Arm

My father never understood how this happened, but Leonard Alfred Beeson, with his artillery background, somehow managed to join the Fleet Air Arm in World War 2. That’s the air branch of the navy. He was 52 in 1940 so he was in an administrative position, but had plenty to do. When my father visited him on his air base in Scotland, he found that he’d laid out a nine-hole golf course on a patch of waste ground at the back of the aerodrome.

In their hurry to get out of the house in Brussels, one of the belongings my grandmother and my father left behind was my grandfather’s manuscript of the great book he’d written. Its subject? The solution of the ‘Jewish Problem’.

As kids, my brother and I saw little of our paternal grandparents. Certainly far less than of our maternal ones. It may be that they weren’t that interested in their grandchildren; they may have seen just as little of my cousins. But might it have been because my father had contributed to the ‘Jewish Problem’ by marrying a Jew?

Who knows? There’s certainly no way of finding out now. Leonard Alfred died in 1967, Eleanor Eileen in 1971.

All I know is that when a non-Jew, particularly in that era, proposed solutions to the ‘Jewish Problem’, they were seldom of a kind to bring much comfort to the Jews…

Still, I suppose it’s sad his book was lost, a tragedy I’m told he always felt. Sad, for him I mean. I’m not sure it was such a loss for the rest of us.

LAM Beeson, my father, with his mother Eleanor and his father LA Beeson
The warrior torch handed on a generation.
By sheer good luck it didn’t reach me

Progress of a rebel freed from gaol

The young man who was released from Dartmoor Prison at the end of the First World War, and who would later be my grandfather, had been a radical even before he went in. It was what led him to the pacifism for which he was gaoled. And he emerged, after a year or two in the company of such men as the philosopher Bertrand Russell, even more radical than he went in.

Radical Nat on the right. On a postcard from
'yours rebelliously Henry B Offell'

A radical though not quite a Communist. My grandmother, Yetta, had joined the Party and had become quite an activist. My grandfather, Nat or Norman, did attend some meetings though he never joined. One of the meetings he went to was chaired by Yetta. She was an attractive young woman and he decided he wanted to get to know her better.

She had, however, emerged from the aftermath of the war a woman saddened well beyond her eighteen years. She’d been engaged to a young man who managed to survive the entire war, only to come home and succumbing to the terrible flu epidemic that followed. So,  when Nat approached her, Yetta was still recovering from a devastating loss. 

Did that make her more or less open to his advances? Perhaps a little of both. They were engaged relatively soon, but the road to marriage was a stormy one. She told me that on one evening they had such a row in a street on the way home that she tore off her engagement ring and threw it on the pavement at his feet, before storming off.

He, instead of following her at once, got down on his hands and knees and searched for the ring. It was a good ring and he wanted her to accept it. He could settle the argument later.

They were married in 1921. On 8 September, just one week before Yetta turned 21. A week later and she wouldn’t have needed her parents’ consent, but she insisted on getting it, though they were more than a little reluctant: Nat was from a far poorer background than hers, daughter as she was of a skilled craftsman, a shoemaker specialising in orthopaedic shoes for injured or otherwise deformed feet.

Yetta and Nat at their wedding in 1921

He’d picked up the profession in which he’d started before the war, lithography, and had reached a level of expertise such that his company asked him to go into sales and represent them to clients rather than simply do the lithographs himself. It meant that he was able at last to emerge from the backbreaking poverty in which he’d spent his childhood. He still got off his bus from and to home a stop early to save a penny on the fare, but he was soon earning enough to be able to clear the mortgage on a house within four years, something that’s practically unthinkable in England today. He moved his family into a modest house in the new outer London district of Hampstead Garden Suburb, where many Jews entering a middle-class existence were moving.

A Jewish boss of mine once said that to make a man a Conservative, you had to give him something to conserve. Rebellious Nat may once have been, but as the years rolled by, he found himself in ever greater sympathy with the British Establishment. Besides, when it came to the Second World War, he felt that the nature of an enemy led by Hitler meant that a Jew had to abandon pacifism and do what he could to overthrow that violently anti-Semitic regime.

He was too old for combat, but he could volunteer for the Air Raid Protection service, which he enthusiastically did. He knew what Air Raids meant, if only as a result of attempting to travel in to his office in the City of London one day, only to be turned back four stops before his on the Underground. The city had taken a pasting the night before and most of the buildings had been burned out, his company’s included. There was no way through to it.

So, at the end of the Second World War, unlike the First, Nat was far closer in sympathy to the mainstream of British society. And the process continued, notably after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. My grandparents were never practising Jews (a more religious uncle refused to visit them because they’d allowed bacon into their house), but their sympathies were with the Jews of Israel nonetheless. The result was a continued drift away from the radical Left to which they had both belonged at one time.

A good grandfather with his grandsons in the fifties
Just a bit more staid...

‘I’ve given up reading The Guardian,’ Yetta once told me to explain why she was taking the Conservative Daily Telegraph, ‘because the Guardian keeps writing pieces so critical of Israel.’

I haven’t the hard data to support my view, but it feels to me that this has been a trend in the Jewish community. Radical in the 1920s, strongly pro-Labour in the fifties and sixties, its centre of gravity is with the Tories today – perhaps their more liberal wing, but Tory nonetheless.

I’m not sure where they would stand on the scandal over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party today. I imagine it would only have been the last straw for them. Among those of us who remain linked with the Jewish community, however tenuously, only a minority stay loyal to Labour.

For my part, I wish we could recapture the time when Jews like my grandparents could be counted on to support the Left. But I regret still more that many Jews no longer feel comfortable in the Labour Party. I’d like to see the first problem solved, but I believe something will have died in Labour’s soul if it can’t solve the second.

From Hard Labour to London Transport

Bureaucratic records are dry to the point of dullness.

Record of a condemnation

Some poor fellow, 27 years old, appeared before a court martial on 13 April 1917. He was resisting mobilisation on the grounds of conscientious objection (in other words, pacifism); he was condemned to two years gaol with hard labour.

From 16 April to 14 July he served at Wormwood Scrubs, still a high-security prison in West London. My work involves hospital visits and I’ve frequently been to Hammersmith Hospital. It’s right next door to ‘the Scrubs’ and seeing that huge wall would make me think of Oscar Wilde, “all that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong”.

But this prisoner didn’t stay long at the Scrubs. In July 1917 he was transferred to an even grimmer destination, Dartmoor prison in England’s South West. I was at school near Dartmoor and one of my best memories of my time there was walking on the moor, which occasionally led us to Princetown where the prison stands.

This story all sounds a little dire, doesn’t it? What makes it more powerfully personal is that it happened to one Norman Bannister – also known as Nathaniel Bernstein – who was my grandfather.

Nor does the record wholly reflect his experience, as he would tell it, about the transfer to Dartmoor. They went by train and with him were an officer and a private soldier, both armed, with a uniform laid out on the bench beside him. All the way down, and the train trip took some four hours then, they threatened him with their weapons and demanded he put on the uniform.

He refused. It’s a decision for which my admiration only grows each time I think of it. And it all came back to me again the other day.

No need to ask a policeman
Poster promoting the classic Underground map

The object that reminded me of the story may seem wholly unrelated to it. It came from a book we rescued from clearing out our former flat in Germany. It was a collection of London Transport posters put together by an architecture historian, Harold Hutchison, in the 1960s. Not, in itself, a particularly significant book, you may feel, but it includes a dedication from its author:

To N. Bannister who has served London Transport so well and so long

My grandfather left school at the earliest moment after the end of the obligatory (and free) period of schooling – at 13. He was apprenticed to a lithographer and, by the time he was 24, when the First World War broke out, he was a fully qualified master of his trade. But war interrupted all that, taking him eventually to prison.

Striking view of Charing Cross station

However, with peace he was released and returned to his career. The skill he had developed was an ability to look at a painting and determine, by eye alone, how many colours it would take to print a good copy of it. He spent the majority of his career as a salesman for a lithography company one of whose major customers was London Transport.

The Underground to greenery

I don’t imagine my grandfather contributed much to society with his hard labour at Wormwood Scrubs or Dartmoor. But he did defend a principle that matters as much today as it did then. On the other hand, in peacetime he contributed to the production of art – popular art but art nonetheless – that brightened the lives of millions of commuters and produced some iconic images.

Glorious sketch of Chiswick to the west of London

Which I was delighted to leaf through when I came across the book.