There is something about the cold month of November which has particular resonance in the annals of murky Cold War history. The Russian Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall both took place in November. The space race kicked off in November 1957 with the launch of Sputnik 2, carrying the ill-fated dog Laika. And in an event perceived by many to be of equal significance, on 21 November 1979 the government revealed that Sir Anthony Blunt, a seemingly unassuming Cambridge professor and member of the Royal Household, had been a spy for the Soviet Union.

Suggestions have been made that information passed on by Blunt between the 1930s and mid-1950s may have cost the lives of British agents. While these claims are firmly denied in almost all credible studies of the affair, there is good evidence that during World War II—notably during the period when Soviet Russia had entered into alliance with Nazi Germany—Blunt relayed intelligence to Russia from his position in MI5. He also used his post at Cambridge University to recruit students for Soviet espionage. “We do not know exactly what information he passed”, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told the House of Commons in an explosive statement revealing Blunt’s identity. “We do know, however, to what information he had access by virtue of his duties. There is no doubt that British interests were seriously damaged by his activities.”

The 30th anniversary of Blunt’s public outing comes hot on the heels of the publication of his memoirs, which remained classified at the British Library for the last 25 years. The resulting reinvigoration of debates over Blunt’s espionage has raised some thorny questions—not just about Blunt’s own story, but also about how we understand, recollect, and depict the Cold War.

The most obvious—though perhaps not the most pressing—question raised by the memoirs is the issue of Blunt’s motives. What led this academic, the son of a vicar and a distant cousin of Elizabeth the Queen Mother, to take such a treasonous course of action? Blunt explains himself in a handful of ways, most of them unconvincing.

First and foremost, he situates his decision against the background of British appeasement of Nazism during the 1930s.

I had come to believe – or to think I believed – that Marxism…supplied the solution to the political problems with which the world was faced in the mid-1930s…The rearming of Germany, failure to resist the occupation of the Rhineland and the policy of non-intervention in Spain [during the country’s Civil War] seemed to prove that nothing could be expected from the British or French governments and that the only force really determined to resist Nazism was Communism, based on Soviet Russia.

Then there was Blunt’s relationship with fellow spy and Cambridge undergraduate Guy Burgess, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1951. Burgess became notorious as the inspirational figurehead of the ring of Soviet collaborators popularly known as the Cambridge Spies. Blunt explains:

…Guy, who had extraordinary powers of persuasion, eventually convinced me that I could do most for their cause by joining him and working for the Russians.

Blunt also protests that his allegiances to Britain were, in any case, rather tenuous. Much of his early adolescence was spent in France where his father served as a chaplain to the British Embassy in Paris. As a result—in an explanation which raises complex questions about the concept of citizenship—Blunt argues that “my country” was:

not a principle that was deeply instilled. My loyalties were international as much as national, and above all they were directed to causes.

Reflecting on the fateful decision to spy for the Soviet Union, Blunt insists that the slaying of Fascism was his primary concern. However, subsequent developments, most notably his realisation that Stalinist Russia was “a tyranny as bad as Hitler’s”, gave him pause. “I made the greatest mistake of my life”, Blunt ultimately admitted.

Readers will not be fooled by this apparent volte-face. Blunt may have penned these words out of genuine remorse in the last days of his life; he may have struggled to live with the shame he felt at being stripped of his knighthood and becoming a social pariah (he was booed out of a Notting Hill cinema in 1980, and died largely cut off from the world three years later). Still, the general consensus among historians is that if Blunt intended his memoirs to serve as adequate explanation for his treason, he singularly failed. At best, his papers are an apology stunted by the Official Secrets Act which curtailed his freedom to speak frankly.

At worst the memoirs are a mealy-mouthed insult to the reader’s own intelligence. Blunt devotes pages and pages to his views on art history and self-serving reflections on the honours he received as art historian. More pressingly, he admits to continued contact with the Russians well into the 1950s, when Nazism had been defeated. Blunt explains that this continuing espionage was borne less from principle than a commitment to protect his friends—including Burgess and Donald Maclean, another Cambridge spy whom he helped escape to Moscow in 1951—still involved in espionage. Though we might acknowledge this loyalty to his friends, Blunt’s support for these defectors should earn him no sympathy.

The inadequacy of Blunt’s explanations raises a second, more pressing issue—that of how, in this month of remembrances, we remember the Cold War itself.

For one reason or another, our recollection of the Cold War has become—or perhaps always has been—remarkably ill-defined. The current fashion is for a fuzzy sort of nostalgia: film buffs chew popcorn while watching offerings like Goodbye Lenin! or The Lives of Others, while well-meaning lefties wear the Soviet red star or Che Guevara images as badges of honour. This commodification—how Marx would laugh—of the lifestyles and iconography associated with the Cold War seems relatively banal. But (as Hannah Arendt would remind us) what lies beneath is a far less light-hearted story in which Che t-shirts obscure outrage at the abuses perpetrated by the communist regimes of Europe. Unlike the sombre quality of our recollection of the Second World War, we remember the Cold War with frosty detachment.

Previous coverage of the Blunt affair has been caught up in this process. In an otherwise worthy biography of Blunt in 2002, Miranda Carter sought to counterpoise Blunt’s defection with the inadequacy of British intelligence, which failed to unmask him despite suspicions of communist sympathies and even, rather embarrassingly, bestowed knighthood upon him in 1956. Reading Carter’s book, the Blunt affair appears more as a comedy of diplomatic errors than a single link in a chain of terrifying Soviet political might. As one reviewer commented, Carter’s coverage frame the Soviet spy games in which Blunt was engaged as “never much more than civil servants playing Cowboys and Indians.”

Thirty years ago, Rhodes James, MP for Cambridge, offered a more serious and damning reading of the Blunt affair. For James:

…a traitor is a traitor is a traitor. I ask those who try to exculpate Mr. Blunt to think just for a moment what their attitude would have been had he been discovered to be a German rather than a Soviet agent.

For those who may—inadvertently or otherwise—underplay the seriousness of Cold War espionage, this is a rather sobering reading of the case of Anthony Blunt.

James’s comparison with Nazism is illuminating. In the “hot” war against Nazism there were clear ramifications of combat—the deaths of millions of serving soldiers (also remembered in this month of November) and the chilling figures of civilian deaths from bombing raids, military action, and Nazi genocide. British collaborators with the Nazis such as John Amery or William Joyce were dealt the ultimate punishment after the war.

Though the Cold War cannot provide such simple lines of cause and effect, men like Anthony Blunt played their own part in supporting an oppressive, sometimes murderous regime. Commemorations of the collapse of the Iron Curtain ought to remind us of the many millions of people who suffered from the excesses perpetrated by Europe’s communist parties—not just the headline-grabbing events of the Ukrainian holodomor in 1932-3, the Hungarian Uprising, or the Prague Spring, but the daily privations experienced by normal citizens. One wonders whether it’s wholly unreasonable to cast the kind of opprobrium we levy upon Nazi collaborators upon Blunt—and, if it’s not, why we so rarely do.

Whether we credit Anthony Blunt with any role in the maintenance of the communist system, his name will forever be connected with it in the public mind. This is an insinuation his memoirs do nothing to allay. But while historians and commentators are quick to criticise Blunt in the wake of his memoirs’ publication, this clamour also—and perhaps more importantly—illustrates a double standard in our treatment of 20th-century history: where collaboration with Nazism is deemed a “war crime”, collusion with the Soviet Union is merely a feature of Cold War “spy games”.

It is not the job of the historian to decide which of these equally barbaric tyrannies of the 20th century was the more reprehensible. It is, however, a key part of the historian’s role to ascertain and maintain an appropriate sense of perspective on historical events. Remembering, as we do this month, Novembers past, we would do well to re-evaluate our bizarrely benign interpretation of European communist regimes.

James Appell graduated from St Antony’s College, Oxford in 2009 with an MPhil in Russian and Eastern European Studies. He is a travel journalist and freelance sportswriter living in London.

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Cheating in sport is a sure-fire headline grabber. Nothing has demonstrated this better than a few high-profile cases during the summer of 2009. As holidaymakers prostrated themselves on sun-kissed beaches, the murkier sides of professional sporting competition burst into the spotlight.

Most recently, Rugby Union—the gentleman’s game par excellence—came under the microscope after a particularly salacious story, popularly known as the Bloodgate scandal, rocked the foundations of the sport. During a quarterfinal match in European Rugby’s premier cup competition, Harlequin Football Club made a substitution, bringing off winger Tom Williams, who appeared to be bleeding from a mouth wound. It was later revealed, however, that Williams had used a capsule of fake blood—hidden inside his sock—to facilitate a tactical change for his team (the rules governing which, incidentally, would fox the average Oxford graduate).

Williams betrayed himself when he was caught on camera leaving the field, apparently bloodied and bruised, but winking at a member of the Harlequins coaching staff. The subsequent furore led to the suspension of the rugby club’s managerial team, as well as the player himself, and much soul-searching amongst devotees of the game. Apparently if a rugby player flaps his eyelids in West London, a whirlwind does indeed gather in Fleet Street.

Yet for all the epileptic handwringing in the media, one suspects that the general public—albeit secretly or begrudgingly—finds these stories of cheating appealing. It may be, as ESPN’s Pat Forde wrote in 2007, that we are simply too emotionally involved in sports, and that as a result we are relieved of our moral scruples.

But the fascination seems to go further. It isn’t so much that we tolerate cheating amidst the emotions of the game. Academics Ian Preston and Stefan Szymansi were overcautious when they argued that “there certainly does not seem to be any clear evidence that scandals related to cheating have reduced interest” in sports. The public interest is piqued—and an important aspect of fandom is satiated—by cheating. We are inordinately fascinated by it. We want more of it.

Part of this collective idée fixe is surely bound up in the human love of theater, the inclination to divide public figures into good and bad character types and to revel in the moments when sportsmen adhere to these roles. But sporting cheats, unlike, say, criminals, have a special type of attraction (the glorification of violence and crime notwithstanding). For though their rule breaking is taboo, sport stars’ willingness to sacrifice morality for victory can be seen as heroic, an all-consuming longing for glory. In short, we may not approve of a cheat’s methods—though hats off to something as ingenious as a blood capsule—but we often admire his motivation.

This is not, as some might argue, merely gross titillation for Joe Public. Even sensible and erudite commentators get swept up in a quasi-romantic reaction toward a sporting cheat. To coincide with the 2008 Beijing Games, Simon Barnes, widely regarded as one of the Times’s best sportswriters, was asked to name his favourite Olympic moment of all time.

“The same image fills my mind”, Barnes mused. “It is burnt into my retina: that blazing day in Seoul, the light hurting your eyes and the yellow-eyed, shaven-head human bullet taking the stage to turn the world upside down.”

That’s right, Barnes chose the greatest cheat of them all, Ben Johnson, who ran a world-record 9.79 seconds in the final of the 100-meter in 1988 only to test positive for anabolic steroids days later. Add Barnes’s case to a growing list that includes the “Hand of God”, the 1919 Chicago Black Sox, Tonya Harding—all have gone down in history as infamous, and yet somehow fetishised, exponents of the art of cheating.

The question—which, for obvious reasons, nobody in sport wants to ask—is whether cheating is in fact good for sport.

There is no doubt that tales of intrigue and deceit help to keep sport top of the public agenda. Juicy stories of how far sportsmen are willing to go for victory turn heads and get tongues wagging, drawing in viewers picky about what they watch, read, and discuss. Particularly now, in an age of professionalism where money and audience share rule, sport benefits from the added exposure generated by cheating controversies, even if that means sacrificing some of the integrity of sporting competition.

It’s a tough moral maze to navigate: the desire to punish those who refuse to play by the rules pitted against the natural human tendency to marvel, however reluctantly, at acts of daring villainy. This paradox has led some in the debate to propose an amnesty on certain types of cheating. Ellis Cashmore, a professor of culture, media, and sport at Staffordshire University and a regular contributor to British sporting discussion, argues in favour of legalising performance-enhancing drugs in sporting competition: “There are no moral absolutes in sport”, Cashmore declared in a 2003 editorial for the Observer, for purity and fairness are anachronistic “amateur ideals”.

But as much as cheating constitutes a notable part of modern sport’s rich tapestry, there are good reasons for fighting this rather revisionist approach.

Never mind Tom Williams’s faked injury; in some cases, cheats actively put themselves in the way of physical harm. Take another episode from this summer, when Brazilian Formula One driver Nelson Piquet Jr purposely crashed his racing car to allow Renault teammate Fernando Alonso to win the Singapore Grand Prix. Executing highly dubious team instructions, Piquet Jr put himself—and the other drivers—at enormous risk.

Moreover, there are grounds for arguing that the sportsman vilified as a cheat is more justly understood as a victim. Both Williams and Piquet Jr can legitimately argue that they were following instructions. No matter how distasteful that particular excuse has become, it can be a persuasive one, confer Stanley Milgram’s research.

Demonstrating this point in horrific fashion, former communist East Germany fed its unwitting athletes potent cocktails of hormones and steroids. Shot-putter Heidi Krieger was so affected by the drugs she was forced to imbibe that she opted to undergo a sex change and is now known as Andreas. Swimmer Rica Reinisch, who won three gold medals at the 1980 Olympics, depicted the real sadness of the East German case when she told her story to the Guardian in 2005. “The worst thing was that I didn’t know I was being doped”, she said. “I was lied to and deceived. Whenever I asked my coach what the tablets were I was told they were vitamins and preparations.”

And then there is the point that, for all the hype generated by a cheat, there is nothing more glorious than a great winner. The sports story of the summer was undoubtedly Usain Bolt’s achievements on the track: smashing two sprint world records in times that seem, frankly, ludicrous. It is when these historic moments occur—sporting genius, and not of the evil variety—that people really sit up and take notice of sport, and the public profile of sport truly benefits.

Let’s all hope, therefore, that Bolt’s performances have been absolutely spotless. If not, cheating will have been proven, yet again, to be professional sport’s biggest crowd-pleaser.

James Appell graduated from St Antony’s College, Oxford in 2009 with an MPhil in Russian and Eastern European Studies. He is a travel journalist and freelance sportswriter living in London.

An exchange with sports writer Martin Samuel

Google “Martin Samuel” and, with some minor exceptions, you will find two types of result. The first is examples of his prize-winning journalism, spanning a career that his taken him from the Sun and the Daily Express to the Times and now the Daily Mail, and from the sports pages all the way to the op-ed columns. With the reams of column inches has come a raft of awards. He picked up the 2008 Sports Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards, and was Sports Journalist Association Sports Writer of the Year three years running from 2005 to 2007.

The second type is rather less flattering. Take these examples from an online forum for fans of Manchester United: “Samuel is a fat slug”; “a talentless scribe in a toss newspaper”; ”I cannot stand Martin Samuel”—and those are only the ones appropriate for publication. Some of the comments are positively eye-watering.

“That sort of thing can become a little trite,” Samuel said during an interview in his living room in a leafy London suburb. “The people who think you’ve got it in for their club, that gets very wearing. It’s like: Mate, I don’t hate Arsenal. They just didn’t play very well. You must know that, there were 60,000 people in the stadium and they were all slagging them off! I can’t have been the only one to notice.”

Though Samuel is as affable in person as he can be in print, he is at his best when he directs his acerbic wit at the things (in both the sporting and political worlds) that annoy him. It is, as such, unsurprising that in cyberspace he is showered with praise and vitriol in equal measure. The two-hour interview he gave was punctuated by nuggets of opinion, expressed in a way that might have his audience either doubled up with laughter or on the phone to their lawyer.

On his profession: “There are a lot of journalists out there who you wouldn’t trust to write a note to the milkman.” On the perks of watching professional sport for a living: “I could not care less about what the cup of tea is like or whether you can get a decent sandwich at half time.” On secondary education in Britain: “I’m not saying 10 GCSEs is anything special. I wouldn’t trust some people who’ve got 10 GCSEs to find their back pocket with both hands.”

And yet Samuel combines these hammer-blows to propriety with a razor-sharp ability to observe and assess—one which has earned him a lucrative move from the Times to the Daily Mail. Why had he moved from Britain’s oldest and most esteemed newspaper to one that has the reputation for being rather politically reactionary?

“It was for all sorts of things,” Samuel begins cautiously. “I’m not going to pretend it was just ‘for the challenge’. There were all sorts of reasons. It was a better job. It was a better job financially, a better job in terms of what I was being asked to do. I never thought I would leave the Times, but the Daily Mail is a newspaper where when they want you, they make it clear in no uncertain terms that they want you.” In fairness to Samuel, he was so honest about his economic motive—rumours of a £400,000 per year salary abound—that you could hardly hold it against him.

But one wonders whether a move from the serious pages of the Times would necessitate a change in style.

“I haven’t changed a single word going from the Times to the Daily Mail,” he maintains. “I used to write for both the Times and the News of the World, and people used to say it must be strange to go from one to the other.

“All I found was that you had to get to the point quicker… you had to make the point a little bit sharper. But in terms of people thinking you change your vocabulary or things like that, I never found that. I think it would be patronising in the extreme to talk down to readers, and it would be very fake to talk up, to try and pretend you were something you weren’t. I once started a column with a Proust quote in the French but that was just a little joke because Simon Barnes [a former colleague at the Times] always quotes Proust and so I did it as a laugh, and not only that, but I did it in French.”

On leaving school at 18, Samuel gave himself a year to establish himself as a journalist, taking a job at Hayters agency. The job bore fruit, and he never made it to university. He admits that missing out on student life—he had planned to read English—was a difficult sacrifice to make.

“I always look back and think that [university] looked great, it looked like a lot of fun. But I spent my years 18 to 21 at Crystal Palace on a Tuesday night, stuff like that. Obviously not every Tuesday—some Tuesdays I’d go to Brentford.”

Clearly Samuel is passionate about journalism, and he retains great optimism for the future of his industry.

“The best value in Britain today is a good newspaper,” he says animatedly, before launching into a polemic about the price of coffee.

In addition, it is clear from the way he talks about sport that he adores his job, even despite some occupational hazards. A football stadium is not always the most comfortable office environment.

“I used to turn up to cover every event in collar and tie, but that went out the window long ago,” he says. “You used to ruin too many good suits—catch it on a nail, get covered in dust, stuff like that.”

So he has seen plenty of grim places? “They’ve got their own charm you see, even the small places. Sometimes it’s not the place, it’s the sport that’s awful, because you can be in the grimmest place, but if you’re watching Yeovil holding Liverpool to a 0-0 draw, it’s fantastic. You’re looking at it thinking ‘this is magnificent, and I know the roof hasn’t stopped leaking onto my table for two hours, but this is magnificent’. So it’s the sport that makes a place grim.”

A relatively uncontroversial conclusion maybe, but even the most opinionated people have to have some time off.

James Appell, the Sport editor at the Oxonian Review, is reading for an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford.

To mark the occasion of Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial, Oxford University will play host to a July conference on “The Global Legacy of Abraham Lincoln” at which, no doubt, British academics and cultural commentators will add their voices to the acclaim for America’s 16th President.

It might seem strange, then, that looking back on contemporary British attitudes to Lincoln, we find a host of rather unflattering opinions on the man. We also find opinions on his prosecution of the Civil War, which, in view of its ultimate accomplishment in abolishing American slavery, may make uncomfortable reading for the modern inhabitants of the British Isles.

Take this from Alexander Beresford-Hope MP from 1861, comparing Lincoln to Jefferson Davis in a lecture on the American Civil War:

Without relying too much on physiognomy, I appeal to the carte-de-visites of both Lincoln and Davis, and I think all who see them will agree that Jefferson Davis bears out one’s idea of what an able administrator and a calm statesman should look like better than Abraham Lincoln, great as he may be as a rail-splitter, bargee, and country attorney.

Lincoln’s distinctive features made him a favourite of satirical magazines and cartoonists in Britain, but there was also criticism of Lincoln’s politics. A Punch magazine satire of September 1863 featured an American conscript saying:

Fever, too, and gangrene I regard with infinite aversion,
I had sooner die at once, so let them shoot me for desertion!
Hearth and home I’d fight to guard, and consequences little think on,
Won’t go South to bleed and rot by order of Dictator Lincoln.

And then there was the Times’ verdict on Lincoln’s crowning moment, the Gettysburg Address: “Anything more dull and commonplace it wouldn’t be easy to reproduce.”

The British elites spent much of the American Civil War despising Abraham Lincoln and the Union, and some even hoped that the South, with its slaves and its whips, but also its lucrative fields of cotton, would emerge intact at the end.

If many in British government and high society had had their way, thousands of British troops would have crossed the Atlantic to aid the Confederacy against the Union. It was not just the cotton trade that they sought to protect—it was the potential for dividing in two the only nation on Earth which could challenge Britain’s economic and political might—the United States. The plight of the millions of black slaves in the American South, although “terribly frightful”, was purely incidental.

Initially the British establishment actively hampered Lincoln’s war effort while simultaneously insisting on their government’s declared neutrality. Neutrality allowed Britain to continue supplying the Confederate South with arms throughout the war, which, given the Confederacy’s lack of a domestic weapons industry, became a major contributor to the prolonging of hostilities. Had the North attempted to curtail the war by halting the British arms trade, properly enforcing the blockade around Southern ports, a major diplomatic crisis likely would have ensued, drawing the British into the war on the side of the Confederacy.

Precisely this outcome almost occurred in November 1861. The USS San Jacinto stopped the British mail ship Trent in waters off Havana and removed two Confederate diplomats, James Mason and John Slidell, from on board. The envoys were bound for Britain and France to argue the case for the Confederacy’s diplomatic recognition by Europe. For a number of weeks tensions mounted over whether the British would deem this an act of war, and Lincoln himself quickly realised the folly of violating the terms of neutrality, stating that “if Great Britain shall now protest against the act, and demand their release, we must give them up, apologise for the act…and thus forever bind her over to keep the peace in relation to neutrals”. Mason and Slidell were released after eight weeks and the matter was gone, if not forgotten. It was clear, though, that the British had come perilously close to entering the war on the side of the slave-owning South.

Putting aside the issue of slavery for one moment—no matter how distasteful that may be—the British had some reason to dislike the Union. Considering that the Union had declared war without an explicit commitment to emancipating the slaves, the British government felt it was hypocritical of the North to attempt to block Confederate secession, given that the northerners themselves had fought for independence against the British on similar terms nearly a century earlier. In addition, the anti-British tone of the Northern press after Britain’s declaration of neutrality had alienated the British ruling classes. The effectiveness of the Northern blockade, and the English cotton famine which resulted, had taken its toll on one of the most lucrative elements of the British economy, and furthermore, the aforementioned Trent Affair had aroused British military sensitivities.

Although Britain had drawn up plans for sending troops to Canada in case they were drawn into the war, the British never again came as close to declaring for the Confederacy as they did during the Trent Affair. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of September 1862 meant that British support for the South would be seen as a pro-slavery stance, one that could not have been abided in a nation where the practice had been abolished some 30 years before. Having found alternative sources of cotton in India and Egypt, the economic motive was no longer so strong.

Still, it took until the end of the war for the British elites to change their mind about Lincoln. Punch magazine, one of his cruellest detractors in the period 1861-65, printed what effectively amounted to a full-page apology upon his assassination, an act that historian Oscar Maurer has described as “perhaps the most drastic reversal of opinion, openly acknowledged, in the history of journalism”. Accompanied by a cartoon of Britannia mournfully laying a wreath on Lincoln’s coffin, editor Tom Taylor wrote:

You, lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln’s bier,
You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace,
Broad for the self-complacent British sneer,
His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face.
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You whose smart pen backed up the pencil’s laugh;
Judging each step as though the way were plain;
Reckless, so it could point its paragraph,
Of chief’s perplexity, or people’s pain.
…
The Old World and the New, from sea to sea,
Utter one voice of sympathy and shame!

By 1920, Lincoln’s reputation in Britain had been so completely revised that the British government built a statue in his image in Parliament Square. Accompanying it, another in Manchester commemorated Lincoln’s solidarity and support for the North West’s cotton-workers whose livelihoods were so imperilled by the Civil War. In fact the English working class was the one constituency where Lincoln consistently found favour throughout the war. Unfortunately this latter monument is rather less flattering to the 16th President of the United States, as it depicts him with his arms clasped across his stomach as though he had rather overdone it on chicken fricassee with biscuits (reportedly his favourite meal).

Such a progression in the British public’s perception of Lincoln’s memory to a certain extent mirrors the path of relations between the two states in general. Much of the bile directed at Lincoln during his lifetime can be ascribed to the Great Power rivalry across the Atlantic. As Lincoln’s legacy has been treated more generously by British commentators, so the rivalry between Britain and America has been remoulded into a partnership. While, in view of the Bush presidency, Brits have begun to question the value of such a close relationship, the fact that this re-evaluation has been accompanied by an appreciation of the cause for which Lincoln fought and died is a welcome development.

James Appell is reading for an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He is the Sport editor at the Oxonian Review.

“Football isn’t a matter of life and death,” former Liverpool Football Club manager Bill Shankly once said. “It’s much more important than that.”

Truthfully, though, we rarely attribute the kind of importance to sport that we do to, say, politics, history, the arts or any of the other themes that traditionally appear in the pages of intellectual reviews.

Sport gets a rough ride in the heady world of intelligent and well-crafted journalism. In 2008 there was only one article specifically about sport in the London Review of Books, while the New York Review of Books carried an editorial about China and the Olympics and a review of Kasia Boddy’s Boxing: A Cultural History, but little else of overt sporting content. Meanwhile, the New York Times’ two-year foray into the world of sport with its quarterly title Play crashed and burned in November 2007, with falling sales and advertising revenues plunging the publication into the red. The New Yorker, barring a few exceptions, rarely prints feature articles dealing with sport.

Jumping to immediate conclusions, one might argue that this is purely intellectual snobbery—that the written world’s foremost thinkers, at home in the prestigious arenas of high politics, literature, theatre and the like, refuse to lower themselves to the less rarefied, more earthy atmosphere of the sports field.

But such a conclusion is probably unfair. Indeed, a number of studies indicate that academics and cultural commentators often neglect sport because they do not know how to treat it. In 2003 Lincoln Allison and Terry Monnington, lecturers at the University of Warwick, wrote a paper entitled “Sport, Prestige and International Relations”, which detailed the extensive reach of sport in the field of politics, national identity and world power relations. They found that international relations experts were too often guilty of neglecting sport as a discourse, simply because it did not fall into a failsafe explanatory category. “The most obvious hypothesis,” they conclude, “is that it does not fit into the traditional paradigms and debates of the discipline.”

Largely absent from the academy and intellectual periodicals, coverage of sport thus lacks the sort of depth and analytical rigour that commentators apply to other cultural phenomena. The majority of sports magazines on sale in the UK continue to target either adolescents or the kind of adult who thinks a football shirt is a fashion accessory. Reporters for these magazines write in a foreign language that includes impenetrable references to players’ nicknames, a labyrinth of statistics and complex game vocabulary (a particular favourite is “pinging it in with his left peg”, which I believe translates roughly as “playing a left-footed pass”.)

Anything that does not have direct bearing on the men chasing the ball does not appear on their pages. This inevitably leads to the lamentable proliferation of journalism in a vacuum, with writers treating sport as an inert entity unaffected by developments in the wider world. It is an approach that only reinforces the belief among the wider cultural intelligentsia that sport belongs in a category away from the “serious business” of current affairs, the social sciences and the arts—sequestered in a special place for the brutish writer and brutish fan alike. What a pity, because sport so often reflects and refracts the world around us just as art or politics does.

A handful of intellectual writers have tried, and continue to try, to integrate sport into complex political and sociological discourses. Cricket, which in the UK remains the natural home of intellectual sports writing, continues to inspire journalism of the highest calibre, particularly in the monthly Wisden Cricketer magazine. Football also has an equivalent publication, When Saturday Comes, which in recent months has addressed issues ranging from French national identity among young North African football enthusiasts to the controversial relationship between two footballers—one North Korean and one South Korean—in the Russian club Krylya Sovetov Samara. Across the pond, Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine are industry leaders, with ESPN winning an American National Magazine General Excellence Award in 2006, edging out the mighty New Yorker in the process. But these publications, aimed at the dedicated sports fan, are in many ways preaching to the converted. Mainstream intellectual journals continue to neglect these themes by and large.

It goes without saying that there are many eyebrow-raising examples of places where sport and society powerfully intersect. Books such as Simon Kuper’s seminal Football Against the Enemy, or Franklin Foer’s How Football Explains the World, show not only how sport reflects politics, but also how sport affects politics. For example, a handful of historians of the Balkans are now taking their lead from the world of sports in citing the rivalry between the football teams Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb as in part the root of the 1990s conflict in Yugoslavia. Historians of Weimar Germany long have suggested that the 1936 Olympics contributed, among many other factors, to the rise of the Nazi regime.

But sport not only serves as a telling historical lens; it has something to say about contemporary politics as well. Mark Bennett’s Russian Dynamo explores Russia’s resurgence under Vladimir Putin through the lens of her domestic football competition. The book’s message is clear: if you want to understand the oligarchs, you cannot neglect Roman Abramovich’s purchase of Chelsea FC or the control of football clubs Spartak Moscow and CSKA Moscow by oil and gas money. If you want to understand the intricacies of Russia’s regional politics, then try examining the meteoric rise of the Chechen team Terek Grozny, which, in the aftermath of a war that devastated the separatist republic, rather suspiciously constructed a football team that won the 2004 Russian Cup. If you are analysing corruption and the Mafia, the murky case of a young Russian striker, Dmitri Sychev, who allegedly asked for a transfer to Europe in 2004 after being leaned upon by a criminal gang, is a captivating one. In short, sport tells a story of Russia that is not always accessible to those who focus their research solely on the country’s tightly-managed political circles.

That is not to say that we should take our cues about politics and society wholly from sport. In the end, sportsmen and the people around them are focused solely on winning on the field, not on the more profound questions of human life, as demonstrated magnificently by former Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann when he said: “Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.”

To the astute observer, sport does have a relationship to matters of life and death, just as Bill Shankly suggested. Those involved in playing and watching sport shape and are shaped by the discourses within our society—local, religious or ethnic allegiances, as well as economics, crime and social unrest. Taking sport into account offers the potential for an alternative, often innovative perspective on these issues. With a combination of greater sympathy from the academic world, and a more rigorous approach from sports journalists and writers, we could well see this potential realised.

James Appell is reading for an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He is the sport editor of the Oxonian Review.

James Appell

Last March, over 60 years after World War II, Prime Minister Gordon Brown recognised 27 men for their service during and after the war in a ceremony at Downing Street. Given the intensity with which Britain has remembered and commemorated World War II veterans, it hardly makes sense that men who served their country had to wait more than half a century before the government acknowledged their contribution. Yet this has been the fate of the Bevin Boys. Tom Hickman’s new book Called Up, Sent Down describes their peculiar wartime fate. Unlike Britain’s other veterans, the Bevin Boys served their country without ever leaving the United Kingdom or seeing military action.

World War II presented the opportunity for young men of fighting age to do for their country what their fathers and grandfathers had done in the Great War: to serve in the Armed Forces, to wear the uniform of the British Army, and to fight for King and Country. Month by month, those who reached the age of 18 registered, underwent medical examinations, and within weeks received their instructions to report for conscription. In December 1943 hundreds of young men, like those who had gone before them, anxiously awaited their assignments. They received an unwelcome early Christmas present: they were to be the first of 48,000 or so ‘Bevin Boys’, sent to mine coal in Britain rather than to fight the enemy in greater Europe. They would wear blackened overalls and steel toe-capped boots rather than military uniforms, and they would wield picks rather than pistols. They became Britain’s forgotten conscripts.

The minister of labour and national service, Ernest Bevin, devised this scheme in response to a severe shortage of both coal and coal workers. The declaration of war in 1939 saw a surge in the demand for coal, as industries at home and abroad mobilised. But export demand tailed off considerably by May 1940 with the fall of France and Italy’s decision to side with the Axis Powers. With around 5 percent of the mining workforce losing their jobs virtually overnight, Bevin dropped the protected status of miners, allowing them to seek employment in the construction and munitions industries. Former miners could now help the war effort rather than remain idle.

This was to be the fatal mistake with which Bevin’s name is now popularly associated. Miners streamed out of the pits in far greater numbers than he had anticipated, and coal production screeched to a halt. The government tried to convince miners to continue working at the pit-face, but to no avail. In the end Bevin settled upon compulsory conscription into the mining workforce to sustain production. Young men who had prepared themselves for war were picked by ballot, allegedly out of Bevin’s own hat, to prepare to go underground.

The shocked recipients of conscription papers in late 1943 and early 1944 reacted with disbelief. Some refused to report and went absent without leave, even on pain of imprisonment. Others sought to appeal on medical grounds or simply argued for their greater suitability for the Armed Forces. They wrote to national newspapers, campaigned publicly, and generally made a nuisance of themselves in their efforts either to shame the government into improving their lot, or simply to express their disappointment at not being able, like so many of their peers and family members, to ‘do their Duty’.

Many continued to serve down the mines until 1948, long after those serving in the Army had been decommissioned. Bevin’s reputation suffered and MPs began calling the experiment a failure. Unlike soldiers, the Bevin Boys received no medals, no benefits and no pensions; while soldiers could return to their old jobs, the Bevin Boys, who had been forced out of previous employment by law, had no such provision. This was all the more damaging given the post-war demobilisation of industry, which brought the 5 million men and women who had served in the forces back into the civilian labour force. Many conscripts returned from the mines bearing physical and mental scars from work that was as demanding on the body and senses as war. Though many were injured or killed in combat overseas, miners suffered a considerable number of casualties underground. At the time, however, the government did not see merit in such a comparison.

Tom Hickman’s book charts the lives of the Bevin Boys in their own words, an oral history of the forgotten conscripts. Hickman marshals the individual testimonies of some 70 former Bevin Boys, who came from all parts of Britain to serve in coalfields in Wales, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Durham, the North East, Scotland, and Kent. These testimonies form the basis of Called Up, Sent Down, the author’s voice taking a backseat to the words of the men themselves. Hickman’s real skill has been to present the words of his interviewees both thematically and chronologically, giving the book a genuine narrative structure while allowing the conscripts plentiful focus.

Hickman’s subjects underwent such varied experiences in their host communities that Called Up, Sent Down maintains a pluralism in the story it tells. Some of those interviewed continue to look back in anger at their period in the mines. Ken Tyres’s story is perhaps the hardest to read in this respect. Tyres was injured after getting trapped between two tubs full of coal at a mine in County Durham:

The pelvis healed but never the internal injuries. I’ve never been able to travel far because of urinary problems, never more than a few miles. And since that day I’ve never had a full night’s sleep. Being a Bevin Boy wrecked my life.

Tyres received no war pension, despite having made a claim for one. The War Pensions Agency turned it down, explaining that he was ineligible either as a conscript or a civilian. As a Bevin Boy he had been ‘called up and allotted a National Service Registration number [but] was not enlisted and therefore remained a civilian’. As a civilian his ‘physical injury [was] not caused either by the enemy or in combating the enemy’.

But the book contains contrasting recollections. Other conscripts, initially critical, turned out to be grateful for the experience. One Bevin Boy may have spoken for many when he noted that ‘mining was a risky business, but I wasn’t shot at or shot down. Would I have survived as a ship’s stoker or if I’d taken part in the D-Day landing?’ A notable number continued in the mining trade after being decommissioned. Ian McInnes’s experience in the mines helped him obtain a first-class degree in mining at university in Nottingham, leading to a lifelong career as a consultant.

Hickman clearly is enthused by his subject. His previous works on National Service and the BBC during wartime demonstrate his preoccupation with the interaction of individuals and state institutions in the context of war. In this book he has collaborated with the Bevin Boys’ association, and he has integrated material from the published memoirs of Bevin Boys. This seductive technique allows the reader to become acquainted with the Bevin Boys themselves, through hearing their stories first-hand. But it also becomes very easy to be uncritical. The reader needs little invitation to recognise the dichotomy between the state’s crass treatment of the conscripts and the Bevin Boys’ stoicism. Such highly personal histories inevitably run the risk of becoming celebratory, lionising the efforts of ‘heroes’ in the face of huge obstacles. Yet the more one immerses oneself in the testimonies of the Bevin Boys, the more one cannot fail to be impressed by their story–irrespective of one’s academic reservations.

Called Up, Sent Down in fact offers much more than a portrait of the Bevin Boys’ courage in adversity. For one, it puts into perspective the popular aversion to war today. The choice between serving on the battlefield or in the mines would doubtless be unenviable in any age, but would the draftees of today be as disappointed as their predecessors in the 1940s if told they would not serve on the front? No doubt the combined weight of twentieth century conflicts and the unrelenting and often graphic news coverage of them has taken its toll on the romanticism of war. Moreover, the imperatives are different. Times have changed since adolescents 60 years ago ‘entertained the…hope that the war would last until they were old enough to get into the fight’. That, perhaps, is a good thing.

Hickman’s study also hints at some fascinating patterns in the sociological map of Britain. The North-South divide at times reads as a gaping chasm, with Bevin Boys from London and the South East posted up to the coalfields of the North seeming to enter a different country, where regional dialect ‘might just as well have been a foreign language’. The mining communities come to life through the eyes of the interviewees as distinctive social entities, with idiosyncratic cultures, languages, manners, and rhythms. To one London Bevin Boy posted to Staffordshire ‘it was…like living in a time warp’. One gets the feeling that Britain’s mining communities were a world apart from the Britain that was busy at war.

Indeed, Hickman makes few references to the ongoing war which the Bevin Boys were helping to power. Notwithstanding the odd meeting with soldiers on leave, or the encounters with civvies that left many Bevin Boys ashamed of their status (they were often mistaken for conscientious objectors or shirkers), Hickman barely mentions the action on the battlefields over the Channel or the nightly bombing raids suffered by many across the country.

Is this an oversight by the author or his demonstration of the all-consuming nature of mining work? The latter suggests an important undercurrent of the book, perhaps one not anticipated by Hickman. That miners and their communities were so integral to the war effort and yet so removed from the war, almost forgotten by it, may be the most valuable conclusion one derives from Called Up, Sent Down. Although the book tells the story of the forgotten conscripts, it is the unheralded local career miners–those who worked alongside the Bevin Boys–who take centre stage.

Coal-mining in Britain during the 1940s was quite literally a matter of life and death. The coal that miners hewed fired the factories and fuelled the troops to keep the war effort going. It was the fuel that kept the home fires burning (especially during the famously bitter winter of 1947-1948). Conscripted or not, the miners faced daily threats to life and limb. Rock-falls, dust, low ceilings, flammable gas, and the grind of manual labour all threatened lethal consequences, making mining ‘the industry with the worst safety record in Britain’. One miner told Bevin Boy Tom McGuiness: ‘Son, you have a worse job than a rear gunner.’ Presumably he was fully aware of the irony of his comment. For Bevin Boys mining was a hazardous, but ultimately temporary, form of employment; for the men of the mining communities, it was their life.

Miners have had a tough time in recent years in the British popular consciousness. The mining industry in Great Britain has dwindled considerably since the war. UK Coal, Britain’s largest mining company, has only 12 mines in operation today, employing only 3,500 workers. The dark days of the 1980s, when Arthur Scargill led unionized mineworkers out on strike, formed the iconic image of British mining. The wounds from the year-long Miners’ Strike, as well as the subsequent closure of the pits and destruction of the very communities about which Hickman writes, have reconfigured Britain, making British miners an endangered species. In the popular mindset, the Bevin Boys are to be pitied for having had to live and work in such places, when 40 years later the miners drew ire for striking or leaving the mining profession.

As if to underline this disparity, the Bevin Boys are no longer ‘forgotten’. Former Bevin Boys such as Warwick Taylor (The Forgotten Conscript) and Reg Taylor (The Reluctant Miner) have published their experiences. School curricula on the Second World War make mention of the Bevin Boys. Since 1998 they have been allowed to march to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. And in March 2008 Gordon Brown presented a number of former Bevin Boys with commemorative badges in honour of their service.

The Bevin Boys have been acknowledged, and rightly so, for their employment in the mines was without choice. They most certainly ‘did their Duty’. But Called Up, Sent Down also highlights the contribution of the men who worked alongside the Bevin Boys and, though sometimes as hostile as they were helpful to the young conscripts, shared in the hard, dangerous but vital work. Now their industry and way of life have largely disappeared. Perhaps Hickman has missed the ‘scoop’ here: are they not also forgotten?

James Appell is reading for an MPhil in Russian and East European studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.