Category Archives: Britain

by Joel | 24 December 2025 · 3:54 am

Eisenhower’s Command, 7 May 1945

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 145-148:

US ARMY GENERAL DWIGHT D. ‘IKE’ EISENHOWER was where the buck stopped. And it was one hell of a buck. Because the buck stopped with Ike not just for his fellow countrymen, not just for the US Army, but for all of the Allied armies in Europe. He had his masters in Washington – who in the wake of the death of President Roosevelt on 12 April were in some disarray – and in London, but he also had his subordinates, millions of them.

SHAEF HQ itself reflected the size of the task Eisenhower had undertaken, numbering 16,000 personnel, the same kind of strength as an entire division. Aided and abetted by senior officers from the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, Ike was at the centre of the Allied effort. These senior officers helped to carry the load, but it was Ike alone who had the ultimate responsibility.

His armies were as numerous and vast as they were diverse. Under his command were three army groups: US 12th Army Group comprising the First, Third, Ninth and Fifteenth Armies, twelve corps, containing forty-eight divisions, 1.2 million men under General Omar Bradley; US 6th Army Group with the French First Army and US Seventh Army commanded by General Jacob L. Devers, a comparatively small 700,000 men in forty-seven different armoured and infantry divisions; as well as 21st Army Group under Montgomery – the DUKEX contingent of 1,020,581 officers and men at its height – comprising the Canadian First Army and British Second Army, with additional Polish and Czech elements; First Allied Airborne Army with its seven airborne divisions, Special Air Service brigades and troop transport aircraft. He also commanded the RAF Second Tactical Air Force and US Ninth Air Force, and for the run of OVERLORD had had command of strategic air forces too. No soldier had ever commanded armies so numerous, wielded so much power, or been of so much consequence. He had the ultimate power of life and death over his men, though only one, Eddie Slovik, had faced the firing squad for desertion. Armies this large, this complex, competing among themselves for resources, priority, victory, were necessarily engines of friction, and it was Ike’s task to run it all as harmoniously as possible. Eisenhower was the twentieth-century warlord supreme, the reach and scale of his power only to be eclipsed by the imminent arrival of the atomic age.

Eisenhower therefore didn’t just shoulder the burden of his immediate infuriating, frustrating subordinates, the American generals and the British Field Marshal who could, in arguing so passionately when making their cases for how the war should be fought and won, drive him to distraction. By the spring of 1945 he had a million more subordinates. Of course, not all were men at arms; the Allies had a vast logistical network behind them because they were fighting every step as an expeditionary force, but Eisenhower bore the weight of this responsibility. They were all answerable to him; he was answerable to his bosses.

Death was at the core of every decision he made, for his own men, for the enemy and for the civilians in between. Every opportunity taken or ignored centred on death, slaughter, destruction. Every moment that delayed the war, every hesitation offered the prospect of more death. Ike considered Napoleon’s approach to leadership as something to aspire to: ‘The great leader, the genius in leadership, is the man who can do the average thing when everybody else is going crazy.’ Self-control, harnessing his temperament to the task in hand, was Eisenhower’s key to managing himself while he managed everyone else. He felt sure too that whatever pressure he might be under, there was someone worse off: ‘The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.’ Ike shared none of the pressures of the subaltern in the foxhole or slit trench; his were of a different order. They were political rather than military.

If anyone was to take the surrender on the Western Front, it would be Ike. He was the tip of the spear: he symbolized the Allied effort, warts and all. And this was why, once Monty had got von Friedeburg’s signature on the Lüneburg document, he, for all the accusations of ego and glory-hunting he faced, had passed the question of the larger surrender immediately on to his boss. It would have been impossible, and indeed out of character, for him to do otherwise.

And yet when the moment came, when Generaloberst Alfred Jodl signed the ‘Instrument of Military Surrender’ at 2.41 a.m. on 7 May 1945, Ike was absent. Rather than witness the German capitulation, as Monty had done, gleefully briefing reporters and dressing down the Germans sent to parlay with him, Eisenhower had instead decided that he would have nothing to do with the emissaries of the new Führer, that Dönitz’s men were Nazis like Hitler’s, and that was the end of it. Just as he had ignored General Hans-Jürgen von Armin when the Germans capitulated in Tunisia, so he would shun them again. As Ike saw it, this new government in Flensburg was no more legitimate than Hitler’s in Berlin had been, and no more entitled to try to dictate terms in the ruins of Germany than its predecessor.

Rather than treat with the Germans, he would leave it to his staff to handle them, get them to sign, dominate them in person and dictate terms. Ike – the diplomat soldier supreme within the coalition – had no appetite for any diplomacy with the enemy. On arrival at Eisenhower’s HQ, everyone on the Allied side divined that Jodl had been hoping to stall things for at least another twenty-four hours so that he could surrender not to the Soviets but the Allies, and buy more time for German formations to flee west and avoid the Red Army’s righteous fury. Ike’s staff were having none of it; they knew their chief believed in unconditional surrender, and they believed in their chief. If he was going to cold-shoulder the Germans at the moment of their surrender and add to their humiliation, then his staff were going to help him with it.

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by Joel | 23 December 2025 · 10:56 pm

Liberating Slave Labor Camps

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 135-136:

The 3rd Infantry Division might have been first to Berchtesgaden, first to be able to crawl over the Berghof and first to reach the dizzy 6,000-foot heights of the Kehlsteinhaus, but they were not allowed to remain for long. Colonel Heintges had expected to be there for at least a week, but the following day the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment reached the town, part of the 101st ‘Screamin’ Eagles’ Airborne Division, and much to Heintges’ disappointment the Cottonbalers were relieved, while Leclerc’s men moved in on the Obersalzberg.

Yet while capturing Nazis and vast numbers of German troops was very much the Allies’ ongoing mission and a key part of securing Germany’s surrender, so too was liberating the astonishing number of concentration and forced labour camps. Nordhausen, a vast slave labour camp that fed workers into the Mittelbau-Dora factory where the V-2s had been manufactured, had been liberated on 11 April. The stench had been so bad that the American and British liberators had nearly all started vomiting. Buchenwald had been liberated the same day. A few days later, on 15 April, British troops had reached Bergen-Belsen, where tens of thousands of Jews had been left to starve. The arrival of Allied troops at these places of human degradation, misery and death was a watershed moment. Most found it hard to comprehend that fellow humans could be treated with such untold cruelty. Photographs and film footage of skeletal survivors, but also of piles of dead between the disease-infested huts, were quickly shown around the free world and prompted understandable feelings of shock, outrage and, of course, revulsion against the people responsible for this. It was hardly surprising that feelings towards the Germans hardened further; the enemy had continued fighting long after Germany had lost the war. Needless lives had been lost. Anger had already been rising among Allied troops, who saw no reason why they should risk their lives in this pointlessness. Now they were coming across scales of inhumanity that few could comprehend. Anger, disgust, horror and diminishing compassion for a subjugated enemy were the feelings aroused in many of the liberators.

And there were just so many camps. Every day Allied troops reached another, invariably presaged by the noticeable absence of birdsong and the rising stench that filled the air. On 4 May, the same day that Lieutenant Sherman Pratt and his men reached the Obersalzberg, it was the turn of the 71st ‘Red Circle’ Infantry Division. In sharp contrast to the battle-hardened 3rd Infantry Division, the 71st was one of the newest units to arrive in the ETO, landing in France only on 6 February 1945 and not heading into combat until early March. They’d seen plenty of action since then, however, and done well too, first attached to Patch’s Seventh Army and then moved to join Patton’s Third Army as it swept on into Austria and Czechoslovakia on the northern flank of 6th Army Group. And it was into Upper Austria, on the road to Hitler’s home city of Linz, that the Red Circle Division came across the horrifying site of Gunskirchen Lager.

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Filed under Austria, Britain, disease, Germany, industry, labor, military, slavery, U.S., war

by Joel | 23 December 2025 · 4:02 am

Forging Ahead for the Postwar

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 52-54:

While, on the face of it, Wolff appeared to be one step ahead of Kaltenbrunner in his contacts with the Allies, the RSHA chief had been stockpiling immense amounts of cash for a post-war world in which money could well buy him out of trouble. Twenty miles north-west of Bolzano, down a long Alpine valley, lay Merano, a small spa town popular before the war for its mountain sports, which had been home to a number of Jews, most of whom had since been arrested and deported. Since early the previous year, it had also been the headquarters of an outrageous money-laundering operation. In fact, there were warehouses next to Merano’s racecourse now stuffed with boxes full of counterfeit British and US banknotes.

The location of Merano – between Innsbruck and Austria to the north, Switzerland to the east, and with Verona, Lake Garda and Bologna all as local satellites – made the town the ideal place from which to run a money-laundering operation. To launder money, the ability to distribute it and spread it to the four winds was essential, but equally important was to keep the enterprise away from too many prying eyes. Kaltenbrunner was mostly in Berlin, but Merano was surrounded by mountains and isolated. Here another of his creatures could mastermind the entire operation with comparative impunity.

Forging British banknotes had originally been devised by the SD back in 1940, although the counterfeiters initially struggled and by the time of Heydrich’s assassination in Prague in June 1942 the operation had already been wound down. Under Kaltenbrunner, however, counterfeiting British notes was revived as Operation BERNHARD. The aim was no longer to flood the British economy but rather to use the money to finance secret intelligence operations. And this time the counterfeiters were of an entirely higher calibre: Jewish prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp to the north of Berlin who were superb at the art of forging banknotes. By 1943, some 140 prisoners were producing tens of millions of pounds’ worth of notes from six flat-bed printing presses. By May 1944, Kaltenbrunner ordered them to start producing US dollars as well, not exactly for intelligence operations but for his own personal use, whether that might be a last stand in the Alpine redoubt – certainly his cover story – or, more realistically, to accumulate a vast private fund for a rainy post-war day.

Running the laundering of this extraordinary counterfeiting operation was another unscrupulous rogue called Friedrich Schwend, part of the mosaic of corruption, criminality and deceit that marked the Nazi regime. Like Kaltenbrunner, Schwend had been only too willing to cast ideology aside in favour of looking after number one and was proving adept at adapting his skills to self-preservation. Schwend was thirty-eight, a former pre-war car engine salesman and a smooth-talking charmer who had been working for the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht’s intelligence service – rather than the SS-run RSHA – at the start of the war. Repeatedly getting himself into trouble, he was caught out by his superiors selling unauthorized but bogus German U-boat plans to the British for cash, captured by Italian secret intelligence agents, turned back over to the Germans at the Brenner Pass and flung in prison at Klagenfurt in the Austrian Alps.

Kaltenbrunner learned about Schwend from none other than Wilhelm Höttl, who suggested this canny rogue as just the man for overseeing a money-laundering operation. That Schwend had fallen foul of the Abwehr was no disqualification for working for Kaltenbrunner; quite the opposite, in fact. Releasing Schwend from his incarceration, the RSHA boss instructed him to run the entire laundering operation of forged banknotes, giving him, frankly, astonishing levels of latitude so long as he successfully and swiftly spread the notes as far and wide as possible. Incredibly, Schwend even negotiated for himself a 33.33 per cent cut of every pound sterling he brought into circulation.

In very swift order, Schwend established his small operation under the entirely fake name of ‘Stab. 4 Deutsches Panzerkorps’, initially at Abbazia and Trieste before realizing that Merano offered a considerably better, more discreet location. Taking over the Schloss Labers, a grand – but not too grand – villa perched among vineyards on a hill overlooking the town, and protected by a small squad of SS police troops, Schwend got down to building a fortune. With the forged notes he bought houses, hotels, ships, cars and shares in a number of companies. Some of it was used for bribes and he also sent plenty to vaults in Zurich. He developed a dense network of couriers and agents, including Jews. Jack Van Herten, for example, was a Dutch Jew operating under the cover of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In reality, he was smuggling Jews to the Middle East but at the same time passing on laundered money for Schwend. And Schwend also took over those warehouses at the Merano racecourse, hiding counterfeit notes in race boxes that were then distributed to Holland, France, Denmark and elsewhere. It was a huge operation and Schwend was making millions. But Kaltenbrunner was making even more. And right under the nose of the Höchster SS und Polizeiführer in Italy, Karl Wolff.

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Filed under Austria, Britain, economics, Germany, Italy, military, Switzerland, U.S., war

by Joel | 22 December 2025 · 9:45 pm

Prominenten, VIP Nazi Hostages

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 67-68:

Kaltenbrunner, meanwhile, had also decided that hostages might offer a little bit of leverage in these days of the crumbling Third Reich. Throughout Germany were a number of high-profile prisoners, Prominenten, as they were termed. At the beginning of April Kaltenbrunner drew up a list of 139 men, women and children and ordered them all to be brought together. They were of seventeen different nationalities: there were Germans, French, British, Soviets, Czechs, Danish, Italians, Hungarians and even Greeks among them. They included the former French Prime Minister, Léon Blum, Admiral Miklós Horthy of Hungary, Colonel ‘Mad Jack’ Churchill, a British Commando officer, and even General Franz Halder, the former Chief of Staff of the German Army and the architect of the Blitzkrieg in the west back in 1940. General Georg Thomas, the former head of the Economic Department of the OKW, was also on the list, as were a number of those now categorized as Sippenhaft – family members of disgraced Germans, such as the wife and children of Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who had attempted to assassinate Hitler the previous July.

It was an astonishingly eclectic bunch of VIP prisoners, now brought together by Kaltenbrunner. They were to be sent first to Innsbruck and from there to South Tyrol, where they would be hidden away in a remote mountain resort and guarded by the SS. And from there they could be used as a bargaining chip under the threat of execution, which, if necessary, Kaltenbrunner fully intended to carry out.

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by Joel | 22 December 2025 · 8:56 pm

Path to Unconditional Surrender

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 9-12:

Roosevelt’s call for unconditional surrender accepted the challenge that Hitler now offered the world. It acknowledged that there could be no negotiating with the Nazis. Ten years of the Nazi regime had shown that with crystal clarity: the bad faith that Hitler had exhibited in the 1930s, blazing his way through the Versailles settlement while the West dithered about his intentions; his betrayal of his Soviet ally; the total disregard for human life, for institutions, the repression of so many, and the grotesque ideology that was the evil counterpoint to the ideals Roosevelt had proposed in the Atlantic Charter. Everything Hitler and the Nazis had done and stood for told Roosevelt there could be only one outcome in this war: the complete, total and unconditional surrender of Germany. The irony was that within Nazism, a core aim, a bitter principle, was to avoid any repetition of the end of the First World War. The myth of betrayal, the so-called ‘stab in the back’ of 1918, could never be allowed to gestate and fester in Germany again. Unconditional surrender would ensure that it did not, that this time the war would come to the centre of the Reich, to Berlin, to the Reichstag, to within mortar range of the Führerbunker; that however the Allies chose to fight following the Casablanca Conference, the end of this war would be nothing like 1918. The generals would not be allowed to blame politicians, capitalists and unseen dark forces such as religious minorities. Ulysses S. Grant’s defeat of the Confederacy forces at Donelson in 1862 would come to the Brandenburg Gates.

The announcement that the Allies would be pursuing unconditional surrender was made by President Roosevelt at Casablanca without prior consultation on the morning of 24 January. The President, sat beside the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, on the lawn of his villa, smiled benignly for the fifty pressmen assembled cross-legged like schoolchildren before them, waiting for their remarks at the conclusion of the ten-day conference. Roosevelt spoke first, reading from notes. ‘The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power’, he said in his precise, patrician and clipped East Coast accent, ‘means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan.’ He paused for a brief moment then added a caveat. ‘That does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy or Japan,’ he continued, ‘but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.’

Roosevelt later claimed that the phrase had just ‘popped into my mind’; Churchill was certainly wrong-footed by it, although he immediately supported the President. Yet while the announcement of this war-changing policy might have been unrehearsed, the two men had discussed it beforehand; Churchill had even written a long memo to the British War Cabinet four days earlier in which he specifically told them he and Roosevelt were anxious to announce their intention of pursuing unconditional surrender. FDR had also discussed the issue in Washington ahead of the conference. The President’s son, Elliott, even recalled Churchill making a toast to ‘unconditional surrender’ at a dinner ahead of the press conference that Sunday. Sitting there, in the sunshine of that warm January day in Morocco, Roosevelt may have told the press that his policy was the same as General Grant’s at Appomattox in 1865, but he was far from being the only person in the American establishment familiar with Civil War history, and besides he had misremembered Grant’s victory at Donelson.

All of this was neither here nor there, of course. The world now knew that the Allies would only end the war against the Axis Powers when they accepted unconditional surrender. Arguments raged at the time and have done so ever since about whether such a policy was too rigid and whether, ultimately, it extended the war longer than necessary. But by demanding unconditional surrender the Allies were offering moral clarity in clear political terms; it forged the Allies in agreement, and spared them the complications that trying to treat with Vichy France had thrown up. It was definitive yet at the same time vague: a plain demand that was short on detail but heavy with intent. Unlike the Fourteen Points President Woodrow Wilson had proposed back in 1919 – which had come to little – there were no matters of argument to engage with and twist, no promises made that could be misinterpreted or regurgitated at a later date. The Germans, the Japanese and the Italians must surrender, without any conditions whatsoever.

Then the Allies would dictate terms.

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by Joel | 20 December 2025 · 6:25 am

W. E. Clarke’s Misspent Sunday

From The Misspent Sunday, by W. E. Clarke, in Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections, ed. by R. C. Terry (Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 164-169:

Abstract: From ‘Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa’, Yale Review, X (Jan 1921) 275–96. The Reverend William Edward Clarke (1854–1922) was the London Missionary Society’s representative in Samoa. About as knowledgeable a mentor as Louis could have hoped to meet, Clarke knew the people and their customs well, and took the new arrival around schools and communities on the island. A simple, devout man, Clarke had to keep Stevenson up to the mark where Sunday worship was concerned. For his part Stevenson, the one-time agnostic, probably benefited from Clarke’s practical Christianity. Louis wrote of Clarke: ‘A man … I esteem and like to the sole of his boots. I prefer him to anyone in Samoa, and to most people in the world’ (quoted in Field, This Life, 332). When Louis lay dying, Clarke was at his side. He accompanied the cortège to the burial place on Mount Vaea and recited Louis’s own prayer at the interment, part of which reads: Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken, have us play the man under affliction. Be with our friends; be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns, return to us, our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts — eager to labour — eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion — and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.

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by Joel | 19 December 2025 · 8:05 am

RLS First Encounters Polynesia

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 534-537:

Continuing in a southwesterly direction, the Casco made its first landfall after three weeks at the island of Nukuhiva in the Marquesas, thirty-five hundred miles from Hawaii. Melville had lived there in 1842, and made it the setting for the semi-fictionalized memoir Typee, to which Louis had been introduced by Stoddard. Melville’s other South Seas book was Omoo, a Marquesan word meaning someone who wanders from one island to another. Louis was an Omoo now.

In the travel book he did eventually write, In the South Seas, he described this moment: “The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a virginity of sense.” When the Casco dropped anchor “it was a small sound, a great event; my soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up.”

This was Louis’s first encounter with Polynesian culture, and the beginning of his sympathy with the islanders at a time when that culture was being destroyed; the Marquesas were nominally independent but by now controlled by France. He recorded a conversation with a teenage mother nursing her little baby. When she questioned him about England he described, “as best I was able, and by word and gesture, the overpopulation, the hunger, and the perpetual toil.” She sat for a time silent, “gravely reflecting on that picture of unwonted sorrows.” And then,

It struck in her another thought always uppermost in the Marquesan bosom, and she began with a smiling sadness, and looking on me out of melancholy eyes, to lament the decease of her own people. “Ici pas de kanaques [there are no kanakas here],” said she; and taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to me with both her hands. “Tenez—a little baby like this; then dead. All the Kanaques die. Then no more.” The smile, and this instancing by the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood, affected me strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair.

Foreigners sometimes used the term kanaka as a racist put-down, but it wasn’t originally negative. In the Polynesian languages [via Hawaiian—J] it simply meant “people,” and Richard Henry Dana had observed in Two Years before the Mast that islanders everywhere called themselves by that name—“they were the most interesting, intelligent, and kind-hearted people that I ever fell in with.”

Louis was struck by the matter-of-fact way in which the islanders referred to cannibalism, which had been practiced until very recently. He was introduced to a chief who was notable as “the last eater of long pig in Nukuhiva.”

Not many years have elapsed since he was seen striding on the beach of Anaho, a dead man’s arm across his shoulder. “So does Kooamua to his enemies!” he roared to the passers-by, and took a bite from the raw flesh. And now behold this gentleman, very wisely replaced in office by the French, paying us a morning visit in European clothes. He was the man of the most character we had yet seen: his manners genial and decisive, his person tall, his face rugged, astute, formidable, and with a certain similarity to Mr. Gladstone’s—only for the brownness of the skin, and the high-chief’s tattooing, all one side and much of the other being of an even blue.

Kooamua enjoyed a tour of the Casco, and commented that as a chief he had to observe exact sobriety, but a few days later they encountered him hopelessly drunk “in a state of smiling and lopsided imbecility.”

Margaret was open-minded about everything she was seeing, including the exposed skin and tattoos that missionaries denounced. “Two most respectable-looking old gentlemen wore nothing but small red and yellow loincloths and very cutty sarks [short skirts] on top. There were even some who wore less! The display of legs was something we were not accustomed to; but as they were all tattooed in most wonderful patterns, it really looked quite as if they were wearing openwork silk tights. . . . Fanny and I feel very naked with our own plain white legs when we are bathing.” Margaret had no prejudice concerning skin color, either. She mentioned one man who wore a garment “leaving an ample stretch of brown satin skin exposed to view. What wonderful skins they all have, by the way!”

It amused her that the Marquesans invented new names for the visitors.

Louis was at first “the old man,” much to his distress; but now they call him “Ona,” meaning owner of the yacht, a name he greatly prefers to the first. Fanny is Vahine, or wife; I am the old woman, and Lloyd rejoices in the name of Maté Karahi, the young man with glass eyes (spectacles). Perhaps it is a compliment here to call one old, as it is in China. At any rate, one native told Louis that he himself was old, but his mother was not!

The name “Ona” was important. That implied that Louis was a rich man traveling solely for pleasure, as contrasted with the unscrupulous traders who were constantly trying to cheat the Polynesians.

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Filed under Britain, France, language, literature, migration, nationalism, Polynesia, travel

by Joel | 8 December 2025 · 8:34 pm

RLS’s Highlanders

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 472-477:

However Louis’s best fiction may have originated, it sprang from long-meditated themes. His love of tales of piracy was waiting for Treasure Island; his dread of interior conflict was waiting for Jekyll and Hyde. The roots of Kidnapped reached back to his earliest days, when his family spent extended vacations at Bridge of Allan, a popular health resort northwest of Edinburgh. Nearby were Stirling Castle, which had endured eight sieges over the years, and the battlefield of Bannockburn, where a Scottish army defeated the English in the fourteenth century. Bridge of Allan was also close to the imaginary line that divided the Lowlands from the Highlands, as shown on the map (fig. 56). It wasn’t an actual physical boundary, or an administrative one either, but reflected an awareness that the cultures on either side were profoundly different from each other. In Kidnapped a character mentions “the Highland line.”

Louis was there at least ten times between the ages of three and twenty-five, and eagerly devoured tales of the romantic past. At Davos he planned to write a formal history of the Highlands, and although that never happened, the reading he did for it was still fresh in his mind when he began Kidnapped.

As their name implies, the Highlands of Scotland are very different, geographically and geologically, from the fertile Lowlands. They are dominated by mountain ranges, and Ben Nevis, at 4,400 feet, is the highest mountain in the British Isles. Population was sparse, supported mainly by cattle raising and subsistence farming. In a book about “Britishness” Linda Colley says that Lowland Scots “traditionally regarded their Highland countrymen as members of a different and inferior race, violent, treacherous, poverty-stricken and backward.” Conversely, Highlanders regarded the urban and commercial Lowlanders as a threat to their way of life.

As everyday garments men in the Highlands wore kilts, which were originally full-length cloaks but in the eighteenth century had been modified to knee-length skirts (women wore dresses, not kilts). The common language of the Highlands was Gaelic, completely different from the Lallans (“Lowland”) Scots that Louis enjoyed using; he never learned Gaelic. In the Lowlands most of the landlords, merchants, lawyers, clergy, and professors had welcomed the 1707 union of Scotland with England. They spoke English, and many of them pursued careers in London. That was the class to which both sides of Louis’s family belonged. He never felt that he belonged, however, and he identified in imagination with the culture of the Highlands, which appealed to him as romantic, passionate, and risk-taking—everything Edinburgh was not. “In spite of the difference of blood and language,” he once wrote, “the Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the Highlander.”

Clann is the Gaelic word for “family,” and clan membership was fundamental to Highland life. “The Highlands were tribal,” the historian T. C. Smout says, “in the exact sense that nineteenth-century Africa was tribal.” A clan might coincide geographically with a particular region, but some chieftains had no land at all; the basis of allegiance was blood relationship. Clan members owed military service to their chief if summoned, a feudal obligation that had not existed in England since the Middle Ages. The obligation of service operated in both directions. Smout explains, “Since all the clansmen from the chief downwards were blood relations of each other, it followed that the chiefs were expected to feel fatherly obligations even towards the poorest and weakest, and all the clansmen were expected to give unstinted help to each other in time of crisis.”

…

There were at least 120 clans in Scotland (including some in the Lowlands), depending how they’re counted—possibly more than 200. Among the most famous Highland clans were the Campbells and Stewarts in the south, the Mackenzies and Macdonalds further north, and in the western Hebrides the Macleans and Macleods. The map indicates the principal locations of a number of clans.

As Fernand Braudel showed in his classic study of the Mediterranean, mountain people everywhere have resisted control from outside, fragmenting into tribes or clans and engaging in endless feuds. Clan solidarity was intense in the Highlands; a character in Kidnapped comments that “they all hing together like bats in a steeple.”

Louis empathized with their defense of a traditional culture. Walter Scott’s novels celebrated the heroic past—that was why Louis’s father loved them—but he acknowledged the historical fatality of its passing, and understood that the defeat of the clans made the development of modern Scotland possible. Louis felt deeply disaffected from modern Scotland, and lost causes always fired his imagination.

Kidnapped is set in 1751, at a time in history that may need some context today. After King James of Scotland succeeded Queen Elizabeth in 1603 as James I, his line—the Stuarts—had occupied the British throne, ruling over England and Wales as well as Scotland. In 1714, however, the next Stuart in the succession was a Catholic. He would have become King James III, but Parliament had declared Catholicism to be disqualifying, and a Protestant imported from Germany was crowned instead as George I. From then on, many Scots claimed allegiance to the displaced Stuart heir, who was known as the Pretender. His supporters were called Jacobites, from Jacobus, the Latin form of James.

In 1715 James led an armed rebellion to recover the throne, but was defeated in battle in the north of England and spent the rest of his days in France. There was a second rebellion in 1745, led by his son Charles Edward Stuart—“Bonnie Prince Charlie”—and it too was put down. Many Scots continued privately to toast the Pretender as “the king over the water,” but England cracked down, constructing forts throughout Scotland to maintain control. English soldiers—the notorious redcoats—patrolled everywhere, and in effect the Highlands became occupied territory.

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by Joel | 26 November 2025 · 1:25 am

Treasure Island is Born at Braemar

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 357-358:

To amuse themselves during the endless rain, Louis and Lloyd drew a map of an imaginary island and made up stories about it. As Louis remembered, “It was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance Treasure Island.” The tale may have been predestined, but its title wasn’t. Originally he called his story The Sea Cook after Long John Silver, the former pirate who joins the treasure-seeking voyage disguised as a cook. The Sea Cook is almost as unpromising a title as Trimalchio at West Egg, which Fitzgerald originally wanted for his masterpiece The Great Gatsby. It was a publisher who told Louis that Treasure Island would be more effective.

Louis added that the story “seemed to me as original as sin.” There were plenty of melodramatic sea stories in existence, as well as histories of eighteenth-century piracy that he had devoured, but those are forgotten today while Treasure Island is a world classic, translated into scores of languages and reissued in countless editions. It was especially gratifying that the project brought out the adventure-loving romantic in Thomas Stevenson.

I had counted on one boy, I found I had two in my audience. My father caught fire at once with all the romance and childishness of his original nature. His own stories, that every night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealt perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, and commercial travelers before the era of steam. He never finished one of these romances; the lucky man did not require to! But in Treasure Island he recognised something kindred to his own imagination; it was his kind of picturesque; and he not only heard with delight the daily chapter, but set himself actively to collaborate.

Treasure Island is constructed with consummate art, but the best art conceals art. The story is told by Jim Hawkins, recalling his boyhood in a seaside inn kept by his parents in the west of England.

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Filed under Britain, family, literature

by Joel | 21 November 2025 · 10:41 pm

RLS in the “Long Depression”

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 276-277:

This was the time of a “Long Depression” that lasted for six years throughout Europe and the United States. Britain was hardest hit of all. Louis was now confronted with a reality he had been insulated from, and as Furnas says, “There rubbed against him the direct knowledge that to be penniless was more miserable than picturesque; that economic disaster was cruel to individuals as well as abstractly depressing to masses; that alcoholism was incapacitating, not jolly.”

In many ways The Amateur Emigrant anticipates Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London half a century later.

Those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better days. . . . Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar doors broken and removed for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me, or represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.

In a real sense Louis was escaping from defeats of his own. “We were a company of the rejected. The drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land were now fleeing pitifully to another, and though one or two might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of England.” Of Scotland too, of course. “Skilled mechanics, engineers, millwrights, and carpenters were fleeing as from the native country of starvation.” What skills was he himself bringing?

Yet a surprising optimism prevailed. “It must not be supposed that these people exhibited depression. The scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety. Some were heard to sing, and all began to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready laughter.” Louis always enjoyed children, and noted with amusement that they were attracted to each other “like dogs” and went around “all in a band, as thick as thieves at a fair,” while the adults were still “ceremoniously maneuvering on the outskirts of acquaintance.”

As the title of The Amateur Emigrant suggests, he belonged among these people only in a sense. It would be some years before he could support himself by writing, but his parents might resume their subsidies before then, as indeed did happen. His fellow travelers were not just emigrants but immigrants, whereas (despite what the passenger list said) he had no intention of making a home in America. In much the same way, by the time Orwell published his book he had ended his experiment of being down and out. Still, the voyage was a turning point. “Travel is of two kinds, and this voyage of mine across the ocean combined both. ‘Out of my country and myself I go,’ sings the old poet: and I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude and longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates, and consideration.”