Hard Times

Dr. Peter Liddle, F.R.Hist.S, teacher, lecturer, editor, and author, is also the founding director of two important archives on the world wars of the twentieth century. The Liddle Collection, located in the Brotherton Library, the University of Leeds, is devoted to the collection of personal experiences regarding World War i. The Second World War Experience Centre, established in North Wetherby, outside Leeds—the institution of which Dr. Liddle is life president—documents the lives of more than nine thousand people in that war, a multitude of the Centre’s interviews having been personally collected by Dr. Liddle across a span of years. Captured Memories 1930–1945, which contains forty-seven of the most vivid recollections he has recorded, is a skillfully edited, well-illustrated, and admirable companion volume to Captured Memories 1900–1918, the collection of twenty-nine interviews that he published in 2010. Organized into two major sections, the 1930s and 1939–1945, and five subsections, including The Thirties, At Sea, In the Air, On Land, and On the Home Front, volume ii covers a staggering range of experience with such precision of scintillating detail that the reader’s interest never flags. And, once a reading is complete, the reader wishes only for more.

Liddle opens with an examination of the decade immediately before the war; this section entitled The Thirties, contains eight fascinating interviews. Wilfred Shaw, Annie Millar, and Joseph Reck testify in compelling ways to the grinding poverty endured by many people in Britain during the Great Depression. In contrast the privileged sons Humphrey Prideaux and George Savile describe their attendance at Eton, advanced educational opportunities, and preparation for important careers. While Shaw went without shoes and wore clogs to school, Prideaux, reporting to his Indian regiment as a twenty-one-year-old subaltern, found that he was to be waited on daily by no fewer than seven servants. Baroness Barbara Castle records her lifelong Labor Party activism, while admiral of the fleet Baron Hill-Norton offers the best recollection of years at Dartmouth Naval College and the education of an officer in the Royal Navy that until now no one was ever likely to see in print. The final interview in the section is with Oswald Mosley, the British fascist, and it delivers a surprise: no matter how deeply one disagrees with the man’s political views, one cannot help but be impressed by Mosley’s eloquence and intelligence as he describes the formation of his movement and some of the events that led to his incarceration during the war.

The book’s At Sea selections begin with Commander Loftus Peyton- Jones’s descriptions of his Arctic convoy duty and the Battle of the Barrents Sea before going on to cover his later capture, escape, and evasion in Italy. Frank Arkle follows with a vivid account of close combat in the St. Nazaire raid, and Vernon Upton describes his training for the Merchant Marine and his extended command of two lifeboats in the Atlantic, an exploit for which he was rightly awarded the George Medal for saving more than forty lives after his ship was torpedoed. Henry Leach records the catastrophic experience of being in Singapore on the day when his father, commanding the battleship Prince of Wales, was sunk and killed off the coast by Japanese air attack; and then he tells of his participation in the sinking of the Scharnhorst. Clarence Smith concludes the section by recalling the fury with which he hurled a potato at a passing Japanese pilot even as the West Virginia was sunk out from under him at Pearl Harbor, the pilot passing so close down the side that Smith felt certain that he had struck his target.

Invariably Dr. Liddle begins the individual interviews by asking his characters about their upbringing and education, and invariably the paths that led to later service prove unique. Squadron Leader George (“Ben”) Bennions, a fighter ace who accounted for thirteen victories during the Battle of Britain, actually began his service...