Journalism

The book club for men

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 11:47:52 +0000

A group of Guy Walters’ male friends who call themselves the “Dissectors” meet regularly to discuss books and drink beer

It all starts with a tap on the shoulder in the pub. “I was wondering if we could have a word,” says your friend conspiratorially, over the brim of his bitter. As he ushers you into a quiet corner, you worry that perhaps he doesn’t like the way you’ve been talking to his wife, or whether you owe him money.
“Some friends and I have got together . . .” he begins.
Uh-oh, you think. It’s wife-swapping or Freemasons. Perhaps both.
“. . . to form a book club. We thought you might like to join us. Is it your sort of thing?”

It doesn’t take you more than a second to tell him that indeed it is. To hum and haw would be insulting, akin to telling someone you’ll sleep on the offer of MCC fast-track membership. There is no greater privilege, and you accept instantly.
If your book club is like mine — the Dissectors — then you will find yourself embarking on a long and fruitful journey of literary and cultural exploration. You’ll also marvel that your friends do, in fact, have brains, and that some of the learning acquired two decades ago from a booze-addled humanities degree still remains.
During the first few meetings, you may find yourself a little rusty, as you struggle to discern the subtext of J. L. Carr’s deceptively simple A Month in the Country, or whether you even have the energy to finish Balzac’s Cousin
Bette. But it’s important that you try, because Book Club is about self-improvement.
It’s that effort that distinguishes male book clubs from their female equivalents — we men actually read the books. And we discuss them. Granted, the first half of our bi-monthly meetings usually involves us gossiping, but after dinner (cooked dutifully by one of our wives) we sit down to begin what we archly call “dissection”.
In fact, we are so organised that we even have a chairman, who I’ll call Mark. As he happens to be the only one of our group who has a job that involves wearing a suit and tie, it is his role to bring us to order and steer our discussion. In return, we mercilessly take the mickey.
Mark takes the Dissectors so seriously that he has even issued us all with ties monogrammed with our logo — a quill pen with a blade on the end of it — that we all think looks like something a coach driver would wear, but we haven’t had the heart to tell him.
He also drew up a charter, which I think I still have somewhere. In short, the charter states that the host must present the group with a shortlist of three books to be discussed at the next meeting. A vote is then taken, which normally leaves some disappointed, but members are reminded that they can read the losing books in their own time.
But despite the banter and the ceremony, the heart of Book Club (it must always be capitalised in this way) is sound. Over the past five years, we have discussed more than 30 works, by authors such as Zola, Isherwood, Kazantzakis, Szerb, Kerouac and Coren (junior). We often don’t like the books, but that doesn’t matter, and often makes for a better discussion.
So, if you’re ever approached to join such a group, go for it. You have nothing to lose but your ignorance.

What if Hitler had survived? (And how he could have escaped the bunker)

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:59:26 +0000

THERE were few better pilots in the Third Reich than Hanna Reitsch, and none more loyal to its leader, Adolf Hitler.
Her flying skills and fanaticism were fully displayed on the night of April 26, 1945, when Reitsch landed her small Fieseler Storch plane on a makeshift airstrip on the Tiergarten in the centre of war-ravaged Berlin.
Accompanied by General von Greim, the head of the Luftwaffe, Reitsch made her way to Hitler's bunker, where she found a scene of chaos.
Drunken Wehrmacht officers caroused with secretaries, while nearby artillery shells provided a rumbling background soundtrack of impending doom.
According to most accounts, Reitsch's mission was little more than an expression of her complete devotion to her Fuhrer.
The Hitler she found in the dying days of the war was not a well man, his gait shuffling, his face lined, his body coursing with a noxious torrent of prescribed drugs.
She expressed a wish to die alongside her ailing hero in an epic scene of Wagnerian drama.
But Hitler insisted that the fight was not over, and that although his body was weak, his will still radiated the same power as it had back in the 1930s.
Hitler informed the 33-year-old pilot that her next task would be the most important she would ever perform - she was going to help him escape.
The Fuhrer told Reitsch that although the battle for Berlin was surely lost, the battle for the hearts and minds of the German people was still not over, and that Nazism would always survive so long as he was still alive.
Four days later, just after 11pm on April 30, three figures cautiously emerged into the flickering gloom of the Chancellery garden. Two members of the party were female - one was Reitsch, and the other was the newly married Eva Hitler, better known to the world as Eva Braun.
The third figure was wearing the uniform of an army corporal, and his face was divested of its trademark toothbrush moustache.
He carried a Walther PPK 7.65mm pistol, as well as three vials of cyanide - one for each of the group should they be captured by the Russians.
Sidestepping shell holes, burst water mains and corpses, the small party eventually reached Reitsch's small aircraft on the Tiergarten.
Although she had expressed severe misgivings that the aircraft was large enough for three people, Hitler was nevertheless insistent that he take his new wife.

The skull fragment the Russians hold which they claim belongs to Hitler

Reitsch was accustomed to dangerous flights, but this journey was like no other. With its extra passenger, the plane only just managed to clear the wreckage of a shattered Panzer halfway down the Tiergarten, and as soon as they were airborne, it seemed as though every Soviet gun opened up on them.
The explosions tossed the Storch around like a feather, and it required all of Reitsch's skill to keep them in the air. Both the Fuhrer and his bride were sick - yet Frau Hitler was still able to crack a quip that not many brides had honeymoons that had started quite like this.
When the plane reached 20,000ft, it settled into a smoother flight, safe from anti-aircraft shells. Hitler peered down to look at the blazing centre of his once glorious Reich, and vowed that he would rebuild it twice the size.
From that altitude, the Fuhrer would not have been able to see whether his orders were being carried out faithfully by his valet, Heinz Linge, but he was confident that they would be.
Linge was a loyal servant, and when Hitler had asked him to arrange for the execution of a middle-aged man and a younger woman, and then to dress their corpses in the clothes of Hitler and his wife, he knew Linge would oblige.
He also knew that Linge would make sure that the bodies would be cremated beyond recognition with some 200 litres of petrol - a scarce enough commodity even for the occupants of the Fuhrerbunker.
After a two-hour flight, the plane reached its destination - the coastal town of Travemunde, some 160 miles northwest of Berlin. There, moored in the water, was an enormous six-engine BV 222 flying-boat, its fuselage marked with the identifier V7.
With a range of nearly 4,000 miles, the aircraft was the ideal vehicle to spirit Hitler away from the clutches of his enemies.
Captained by Colonel Werner Baumbach and navigated by Captain Ernst Koenig, the plane took off at a little after four o'clock in the morning, and headed towards the North Sea.
Its destination was Greenland, its icy wastes forming the perfect redoubt from which Hitler could plot the resurgence of his vile creed.
Unlike many Nazis, Hitler had no wish to travel to South America, which he knew would be the first place his pursuers would look.
After 13 hours, the mighty BV 222 landed on the near-frozen waters near the village of Ittoqqortoormiit on the eastern coast of Greenland.
The huts of a German weather station on a small island a few miles out to sea constituted, for the time being, the final destination of a man who had unleashed the most destructive conflict in history.

BUT could such a scenario have happened? Is it possible that Hitler did not commit suicide with his wife in his bunker on April 30 - and that he actually escaped?
After all, in the years after the war, doubts about Hitler's death were frequently expressed.
With a lack of firm proof that the dictator had perished, the Russians initially claimed that Hitler was being sheltered by the Americans and the British.
But it turned out later that many of these early Soviet allegations were part of the deliberate disinformation game which was taking place at the birth of the Cold War - it suited Stalin's propaganda aims to smear the Allies with the idea that they were protecting Hitler.
However, there were many supposed sightings of the Fuhrer, and the Allies were obliged to take them seriously.
Some believed that Hitler had escaped on board U-977, a German submarine laden with valuables that had supposedly escaped to Argentina after the war. Although there was no truth in this 'submarine route' - in fact no ranking Nazis are known to have escaped in such a way - there were plenty of other theories.
In September 1945, both Hitler and his private secretary, Martin Bormann, were reported to have sailed out of Hamburg on a luxury mahogany yacht, and to have hidden in one of the many inlets and islands on the Schleswig-Holstein coast.
Once again, after a thorough investigation by the British, the story was found to be groundless.
Even the most absurd claims were taken seriously. In October 1945, the British Legation in Copenhagen felt obliged to inform the Foreign Office that a Danish woman had reported that a friend of hers had dreamed that Hitler was disguised as a monk in a monastery in Algeciras in Spain.
As the supposedly psychic Dane had also had accurate premonitions about RAF raids during the war, the Legation told the head of the German department that the story 'might conceivably be of interest to you'. It is not known whether any enquiries were made.
In December that year, the U.S. War Department's Counter Espionage department - X-2 - discovered there was a possibility that Hitler had in fact escaped to the Balearic islands.
According to an informant, Hitler had landed by submarine in Majorca, and had holed up at the Hotel Formentor with a group of nuclear scientists. An investigation was launched, and the story was soon found to be yet more nonsense.
But still the rumours persisted, sometimes abetted by those who should have been more wary. In April 1947, an American former intelligence officer, William F. Heimlich, told the Press that he believed Hitler was alive and hiding somewhere in Europe.
Describing himself as the officer in charge of searching for Hitler at the end of the war, Heimlich declared that Hitler and Martin Bormann 'left the air raid bunker together before the date of their purported deaths and certain persons helped them escape from Berlin'.
Like so many other 'experts', Heimlich was unable to furnish evidence to support his story.
Nevertheless, he did feel confident enough to rubbish other accounts that claimed that Hitler was living in the Antarctic, and that Bormann was living in Cairo. But Heimlich's stories were no more truthful than those he so readily dismissed.
As the years wore on, theories about Hitler's fate grew increasingly outlandish.
By the 1970s, some cranks were even speculating that Hitler was in fact living on the Moon, biding his time on a Nazi lunar base built in the 1950s.
But even if one casts such rubbish aside, it is important to remember that it was certainly feasible that Hitler could have escaped from his bunker.
After all, many senior Nazis had done so, and the escape from Berlin by aircraft, as recounted above, is just one way in which the dictator might have fled.

SO IF Hitler had ended up somewhere far-flung such as Greenland, what might he have done? Although Germany was thoroughly controlled by the Allies, there were still plenty of Germans who secretly remained loyal to the Nazi cause.
Broadcasts by Hitler might have helped to foment a resistance movement. However, without access to a regular supply of arms, it is likely that any uprising would have soon been crushed. Four huge Allied armies occupied the country for decades, after all.
The Allies, too, would have done their best to find Hitler, knowing that as long as he remained alive, so would Nazism.
And while many Nazis were not tracked down after the war owing to a lack of resources and political will, every effort would, of course, have been expended to hunt Hitler.
Perhaps this would have forced Hitler to flee reluctantly to South America, where he could at least have been sheltered by the Argentine dictator Juan Peron. However, even there he would have been in danger - the prospect of a large bounty offered by the Allies would surely have loosened the tongue of someone in the Nazi community or the Argentine secret police.
Once Hitler had been found, the Argentine dictator would have come under the most immense international pressure to release his 'guest'. A mixture of diplomatic sanctions and economic bribes would have forced Peron, who had a weak grip on power, to surrender his charge.
At some point in the early 1950s, Hitler would have been brought to face justice at another Nuremberg trial and he would have been hanged after what would have been the trial of the century.
Although such a chain of events was certainly feasible, it is a mistake to confuse a possibility for likelihood. The truth is, the notion of Hitler's escape goes against all the evidence.
The most authoritative investigation of the dictator's death was carried out by the historian and MI6 officer Hugh Trevor-Roper, in which he interviewed many of those who had been present during Hitler's final hours.
Trevor-Roper was able to demonstrate convincingly that Hitler had in fact killed himself, and that his corpse and that of Eva Braun were incinerated.
As well as Trevor-Roper's account, many of those who served in the Fuhrer bunker, such as Hanna Reitsch and Heinz Linge, have also published their memoirs, all of which - with a few minor discrepancies aside - show that Hitler took poison and shot himself with his Walther PPK.
If Hitler had really escaped then all these people would have to be either participants in a massive conspiracy, or wildly mistaken. Both of these alternatives are so unlikely as to be ridiculous.
But what of the fragment of skull? Can we take the Russians' reassurance that it is genuine at face value?
In fact, the fragment has been dismissed as evidence on previous occasions, as the bullet hole is not nearly large enough to be the exit hole of a round fired from a Walther PPK at close range.
And the fire damage is not nearly extensive enough - Hitler's body was almost completely burned, and any piece of skull or bone that survived would have been far more burnt than the Moscow fragment.
In addition, if Hitler did escape, he left the bottom part of his head in Berlin, as charred pieces of his lower and upper jaw were unearthed in the German capital in 1945 and matched to X-rays of Hitler's skull and teeth.
They also matched the details in the testimony left by Hitler's dentist, Hugo Blaschke. However, the jaw fragment has since been hidden away in KGB archives.
But if the skull fragment is not from Hitler, then who did it belong to? One theory is that it came from Eva Braun, but as she did not die from a gunshot wound, the fragment cannot be hers. The truth is, many thousands were killed in Berlin in 1945, and the fragment could have belonged to any one of them.
The most likely explanation is that the fragment of skull belonged to yet another victim of the horror that Hitler had created. The only thing that Hitler escaped from was justice.

• Guy Walters is the author of Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped (Bantam, £18.99)

The Battle of Cressy

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:15:05 +0100

How the quintessential English delicacy watercress is under threat from cheap and tasteless foreign imports

Every day for the past 119 years, a member of the Hitchings family has risen early, pulled on their wellies and walked out into crystal-clear waters to tend the four acres of watercress beds that lie at the edge of their idyllic Wiltshire village of Broad Chalke.
Last Thursday was a typical day, little different from any of the previous 6,000-odd Thursdays that the family have run the farm.
Just after 8am, 44-year-old Keith Hitchings and his uncle Rob, 64, met at the bunching sheds and, together with 22-year-old Bill Bevis, sploshed out into the middle of the gravel-lined beds (see above).
Armed with carving knives and a contraption that resembled a supermarket conveyor belt perched on top of a lawn mower, the men carefully harvested some 4,000 hand-sown bunches of deep green Nasturtium officinale, or watercress.
In the sharp morning light, their hunched forms cast long shadows over the beds, just as the figure of Keith's great-great-grandfather had done back in 1880.
(Uncle Rob has been doing the job for nearly 50 years and has no intention of giving up just yet).
The scene was timeless, uplifting and like something out of a painting by Turner.
Sadly, and perhaps predictably, it is a scene that may soon be lost for ever, consigned to live on only in the memories of the locals and in the occasional old postcard found in a jumble sale.
For our traditional watercress farmers are being threatened by a foreign invasion.
Growers in warmer climes are keen to cash in on what is now a £60million market for the crop, prompted by a surge of interest in the health-giving properties of the peppery 'superfood'.
However, instead of growing their watercress in gravel beds flowing with mineral-rich spring water, farmers in countries such as Spain commit watercress heresy: they grow the plant in the soil.
Worse still, they even grow cress inside humid polytunnels. To British farmers such as Keith Hitchings, this is cheating.
'We've got no problem with people growing watercress how they want,' he tells me back at the bunching shed, where his cress is packaged to be sold on to wholesalers.
'But if they grow it in soil, then it should be called land-grown cress, not watercress.'
To Keith and the rest of the British watercress industry, land-grown cress represents a significant threat.
As it is cheaper and quicker to produce, it will be tempting for the profit-obsessed supermarkets to buy their watercress from abroad.
If that happens, the traditional cress farm could be a thing of the past.
Which is why Keith and his fellow British farmers are seeking to have their watercress designated with the EU status of Traditional Speciality Guaranteed - a form of protection afforded only to the most distinguished gastronomic traditions.
The most famous examples are classic specialities such as Serrano ham and Mozzarella cheese.
Over the past few years, watercress has gone from being a forgotten delicacy to a fashionable staple of health-conscious consumers.
And for once, the hype is justified. The plant is full of essential vitamins and minerals, containing more vitamin C than an orange, more calcium than milk and more iron than spinach.
A series of studies has also highlighted its cancer-beating potential.
The irony is that such knowledge is nothing new.
The health-giving properties of watercress have been known since ancient times.
Hippocrates, often described as the father of medicine, is said to have chosen the site of his hospital on Kos close to a stream in which he could cultivate watercress, which he believed essential for treating his patients.
In Victorian England, watercress was seen almost as a cure-all and was consumed in hand-held bunches, rather as one might eat an ice-cream cone today.
However, by the Sixties, the closure of many railway lines that helped distribute the crop, and the introduction of rival salad leaves from abroad, saw the consumption of watercress plummet, to the extent that it was seen as little more than a weed.
Only in places such as Broad Chalke - where the wise old inhabitants have long known that their local crop had near-magical properties - did the appetite continue.
Today, with watercress very much back in vogue, producers such as the Hitchings family are prospering again, with UK sales rising by as much as £18 million a year.
Small wonder, then, that foreign agri-giants want a piece of the watercress market.
So should consumers really mind where it comes from?
I put it to Keith that there can't be much difference between foreign 'land-cress' and watercress.
'You're wrong,' he says, draining his tea from a chipped old mug. 'In June, a large consumer test was carried out, and the assessors concluded that landcress did not taste as good as watercress.
'Instead of giving that peppery tang which we all know and love, the land-cress is just bitter.'
To prove his point, he passes me a handful from that morning's crop, still wet from the river bed.
I take a mouthful and there's no doubting it's the real deal: fiery on the tongue, but also deliciously crisp and invigorating.
Like a heart-starting plunge into an icy bath, you can almost feel the good it's doing to the bloodstream.
Keith's worry is that if the public becomes accustomed to land-cress, they'll forget what water-grown cress tastes like.
'That's the worst-case scenario,' he says. 'Few people today know what salmon tastes like - real salmon, not farmed salmon.
'The fish may be the same, but the way they grow is different and that has an enormous impact on flavour.
'If the public loses its taste for proper English watercress, we'll be history.'
The loss of southern England's watercress beds would be more than just sentimental.
Ecologists argue that watercress beds do a vital job in protecting the headwaters of so many of our chalk streams, and a victory for land-cress could mean the loss of such streams and the wildlife they sustain.
The economic impact would also be severe. Keith's business is a profitable one: he sells some 60,000 kg - around 600,000 bunches - of watercress a year and employs up to seven people.
It takes just eight weeks between planting and harvesting, so there's almost always a crop ready to be picked.
Although the loss of seven jobs may seem trivial at a time when the recession has left almost 2.5million people in Britain out of work, it would have a devastating effect on Broad Chalke, with its population of just 652.
The best hope is that watercress farmers will get the recognition and protection they deserve by being awarded the TSG kitemark.
Trouble is, the application process takes about two years.
In the meantime, men like Keith will have little option other than to cut costs as foreign imports flood the market.
So what can be done? More than two millennia ago, the Greek general Xenophon insisted his soldiers ate watercress before going into battle, in the belief that it enabled them to make 'bold decisions'.
As he faces his own salad war, I suggest to Keith he could send each EU bureaucrat a bunch of watercress to help them come to their own 'bold decision'.
He laughs and then looks me in the eye.
'They don't need to make a bold decision,' he says. 'Just the right one.'

We’ve been here before with Stella the high-speed fella

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:11:27 +0100

The victory of Caster Semenya in the women's 800 metres final is not the first time an athlete of questionable gender has struck gold in Berlin's Olympic Stadium.
During the 1936 Olympic Games, all three medal winners in the women's 100 metres looked more butch than their male counterparts.
The winner was American Helen Stephens, whose features were so masculine and voice so deep that one British female athlete openly queried how she was even allowed into the women's section of the Olympic village.
The silver medal was won by Stella Walsh (above left) a Polish sprinter whose true gender was only discovered when he/she was gunned down in the crossfire of a bank robbery in Ohio in 1980.
The autopsy revealed that her nickname of 'Stella the Fella' was well deserved: she was found to have male genitalia.
Meanwhile, there was little doubt that one of the German competitors in the women's high jump had something hidden her shorts.
Dora Ratjen (above middle), whose real name was Hermann, was deliberately entered into the female event by the Nazis to ensure an unfair advantage that would bring glory to the Reich.
The ruse was suspected, even though he is said to have bound his genitals tightly to conceal them.
'I thought something was a bit funny,' recalled one athlete, 'because she had a deep voice and snored in her sleep. What's more, she also had to shave her face.'
Unfortunately for the Nazis, Ratjen came only fourth, and retired from female athletics to pursue the more masculine career of running a pub.
Famously, it was the Eastern Bloc that would take 'gender-bending' into new realms after the war.
Tamara and Irina Press, two sisters in the Soviet team of the 1960s, won five Olympic shot and discus medals between them, and set 26 new world records.
But as soon as the gender test was introduced, they disappeared from international competition.
Likewise, the absurdly masculine appearance of East German female hammer throwers from the 1960s and the 1970s still raises laughs; but those beefy looks hid tragic stories of young women whose bodies were pumped full of anabolic steroids in order to improve athletic performance, and thereby supposedly glorify Communism.
One of the most infamous examples was Heidi Krieger (above right), an East German shot putter who was given so many drugs that she turned into a man, and is now called Andreas.
Usually, young women such as Krieger were told that the pills were nothing more than vitamins.
East German shot putter Birgit Boese recalled how the drugs were given to her from the age of 11.
As a result, she has been left with a disarmingly male appearance - and no end of health problems.
'Once, a doctor told me: "Ms Boese, if you were a car and came in for inspection, I'd write off the car and send it to the junkyard,"' she said.

• GUY WALTERS is the author of Berlin Games: How Hitler Stole The Olympic Dream.

The truth about Pius and the Nazi ‘ratlines’

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:00:17 +0100

Whenever I tell someone that I have written a book about how the Nazi war criminals escaped, I am usually met with one of two reactions. The first is an enquiry as to whether I have found any Nazis hiding in the jungles of South America. (For the record - I haven't.) The second is more common and is accompanied with a conspiratorial lean forward, a tap against the nose and the supposed revelation that it was "Pius XII, you know". My normal reaction is to smile politely and to tell my informant that he really needs to buy my book, where all will be revealed.  What I don't tell the nose-tapper is that they will find Hunting Evil a great disappointment, as there is simply no evidence against Pius XII. Nevertheless, the charge is so pervasive that it is almost impossible to convince people that the 260th Pope wasn't running a personal ratline through the catacombs of Rome, and cracking open the Chianti with his good chum Adolf Eichmann.  If I do try to mount a defence, I am met with a condescending look, and treated as if I am naïve - or a Catholic. (As it happens, I am neither.) "Of course there's no evidence," they say, as if an absence of such material in some way proves their case.  Nevertheless, their theories are not entirely unreasonable. As with so much about Pius XII, it was his seemingly ambiguous attitude towards fascism that did so much to foster the suspicion that he must have helped its exponents. After all, this was a man who had granted an audience in May 1941 to Ante Pavelic, the bloodthirsty Croatian dictator. When, in October 1942, the British learned that Pius was to see Pavelic again, the British envoy to the Vatican suggested "that I should have thought the line would be drawn at a man whose hands were dripping with the blood of thousands of innocent victims". The Pope relented, but such actions would mean that he would forever be tainted by those with whom he desired to associate.  However, meeting men like Pavelic should not be considered evidence of papal complicity in running escape routes, and the good news for Catholics is that Pius XII must be treated as innocent. Sometimes my interlocutor is big enough to admit that maybe it wasn't Pius himself, but it was certainly "the Vatican" that helped Nazis on their way to Buenos Aires and Damascus. Once again, I have to disappoint, because there is no evidence of an institutional conspiracy to help the likes of Josef Mengele.   The bad news is that the Catholic priests who did help the Nazis, did so in a big way. They turned more than a blind eye to the criminal pasts of those they helped, and it is fair to say that without the assistance of such priests, the Nazis could never have fled Europe in such vast numbers.  The two most vital priestly cogs in the system of machinery that enabled the Nazis to escape through Austria and Italy were the Croatian Mgr Krunoslav Draganovic and the Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal. A keen supporter of Pavelic and his barbaric Ustashi, Draganovic served as a chaplain at Jasenovac concentration camps, where thousands were slaughtered in the most bestial fashion. Draganovic also played a key role in the "Bureau of Colonisation" which forced Serbs to convert to Catholicism, as well as stealing their property and giving it to Croatians. In the words of one US intelligence officer, Draganovic thought that "the ideas espoused by this arch-nationalist organisation - half-logical, half-lunatic - are basically sound concepts".  After the war, Draganovic travelled around internment camps in northern Italy and Austria checking on the fate of the Ustashi members who had been captured. However, Draganovic's "relief work" also involved sheltering his comrades at San Girolamo, the Croatian monastery in Rome, There, on the mezzanine floor, Draganovic founded the Committee of Croatian Refugees in Rome, which was nothing less than a front for his people-smuggling activity.  The Americans and the British managed to infiltrate a spy into the monastery, who discovered that the Ustashi were being ferried around in cars bearing Vatican diplomatic plates. This led the Allies to assume that Draganovic had the backing "at the highest level" of the Holy See, an allegation that was reiterated by a British intelligence officer some years later, who maintained that it would have been impossible for Draganovic to have operated without the consent of Pius XII.  Unfortunately for Pius-bashers, such suspicions hardly constitute proof that the pope was complicit. Besides, the ultimate protectors of Pavelic were not members of the Vatican, but the Allies themselves. In mid-July 1947, an operation mooted by the Americans and the British to arrest Pavelic was suddenly cancelled with the simple order "Hands off", for reasons that are still opaque. It is fashionable to suggest that an arrest would reveal the complicity of the Vatican in assisting Pavelic, but it is just as likely that the Allies did not wish for the former dictator to be arrested because to have done so would have alienated a vast number of Croatians who were being used as informers in the nascent Cold War against the Soviet Union.  Whether Pavelic ended up being of any use to the Allies is doubtful, but we do know that Draganovc was more than helpful. It was Draganovic who ran the "ratline" down which the Gestapo officer-turned-American agent Klaus Barbie and his family would scuttle in March 1951. Draganovic would spend many years in and out of contact with the CIA, and he was eventually dropped on the grounds of his utter untrustworthiness.  No less a controversial character is that of Alois Hudal, who was the rector of the Austro-German church and seminary, the Santa Maria dell'Anima on the Via della Pace. It is this Austrian bishop who, more than any other figure, did so much to give the Catholic Church its reputation as a Nazi conduit. Although not an out-and-out Nazi, Hudal was broadly sympathetic to much of the fascist creed, but he disliked the idea that a man - in the form of Hitler - could replace God. Nevertheless, his hatred for Communism and his intense nationalism made him sympathetic to many fleeing Nazis, and under the auspices of his Assistenza Austriaca, Hudal enabled hundreds of criminals to flee to Argentina and the Middle East.  Perhaps the most murderous was Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, who is estimated to have overseen the slaughter of some 780,000 Jews. When Stangl arrived in Rome in August 1948, his first port of call was Hudal, and today the archives of the seminary still contain the handwritten CV that Stangl presented to the bishop upon his arrival. Although the document omits Stangl's service at Treblinka, it does reveal that he had been an SS captain. Had Hudal wanted to find out more, he could have done so, but Hudal was not the type of man who would have asked such questions. Instead, he secured Stangl a passage to Syria and a job at a textile mill.  Although it is impossible to ascertain precisely the extent and size of Hudal's network, there can be no doubt that he worked in cahoots with all sorts of nefarious figures, from Argentinian secret agents to people-smugglers motivated by cash. Hudal's motivation might have had its roots in charity and converting more souls to Catholicism, but in doing so, he helped some of the worst murderers of the 20th century to escape.  Once again, the question of Vatican complicity arises, but there is no proof to support it. Although it is possible that Hudal's archives may have been filleted - the presence of Stangl’s CV would suggest not - they bear no evidence of Vatican or papal knowledge. In fact, Pius was no great fan of Hudal, and had even removed his patronage of the Anima in 1939. The Pope's Christmas greetings to Hudal that year were even addressed to the "Aryan College", and Hudal found that he was unable to bring German and Austrian pilgrims into parts of the Vatican that would normally be open to a priest of his seniority. Until his death in 1963, Hudal would remain openly proud of the help he had given the Nazis. His attitude alienated many of his colleagues, some of who openly referred to the Anima as the "Nazi seminary".  Such a label, although somewhat extreme, captures the essence of the whole issue. Helping Nazis escape was not a Catholic activity, but it was certainly a pursuit carried out by Catholics. There is a difference, and those who attack the Church would do well to remember it.   Hunting Evil by Guy Walters is published by Bantam at £18.99

Deadly Jewish revenge: the real Basterds who killed Nazis

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 07:43:51 +0100

Deadly Jewish revenge: the real Basterds who killed Nazis
At the end of October 1943, when the second world war was at its height, the American, British and Soviet foreign ministers signed the Moscow declaration which promised to pursue Nazi criminals to “the uttermost ends of the earth” and bring them to justice.
Scandalously, in the chaotic aftermath of victory in 1945, the promise was not fulfilled. In particular, the British Army’s war crimes investigation teams were hopelessly small and overworked, consisting of just a few men with almost no resources.
“Generally speaking, the whole thing was on a shoestring and all too often one felt: why on earth are we doing this? It was all too little, too late,” former Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Neilson, who was appointed to run the teams, told me recently.
There were British soldiers, however, who were not constrained by lack of political will. They wreaked vengeance unofficially. Many came from the ranks of the 5,000-strong Jewish Brigade, part of the British Army.
After fighting in Italy in the closing stages of the war, the “brigaders” were stationed after victory in Tarvisio, near the border with Austria. While some of them guarded the frontier, others hunted for hidden Nazis and killed them.
Their exploits were a real-life precursor to the new Quentin Tarantino film, Inglourious Basterds, starring Brad Pitt, in which a fictional team of Jewish-American killers goes on a rampage in wartime France.
Morris Harris, a former signaller, told me two years ago: “There was a high spirit to find Germans and kill them.” He thought their officers turned a blind eye.
“Some of those seeking vengeance had families who had died in the camps,” Gideon Fiegel, a former private, recalled. “We were a pretty hardened lot. We might have taken the view that some of the victims had what was coming to them and we were most probably not all that sympathetic.” He claimed the killings were carried out “very efficiently”.
Cyril Pundick, who was a 26-year-old dispatch rider with the brigade, went out in the mountains around Tarvisio with two other brigaders who had lost their families in the camps. He remembered when I spoke to him in Manchester 62 years later: “I used to go with a fellow called Bobby Ackerfield. He was a boxer. The other chap was called Hans Wald. However, we didn’t go looking for them because we knew where they were. This Bobby Ackerfield found out from the women where they were. I didn’t know his technique, but he was amazingly good-looking and he spoke pretty good Italian.”
When they found a German they hauled him out of his house and interrogated him for little more than 15 minutes. “Ackerfield knew right away whether they were a Nazi or not,” said Pundick. While the interrogations took place, he stood outside the house ensuring their victims’ Italian girlfriends did not interfere. If the German had been a member of the regular army he was spared, but if he had served in the SS he would be shot.
It is impossible to estimate accurately how many suspected Nazis were killed by such actions. Pundick said he went on four or five such “outings” in the few months he was stationed around Tarvisio. As they were certainly not nightly affairs and were conducted by only a minority of the brigade, the number killed cannot total more than 500.
The recollections of the British veterans are backed up by other sources. In the 1960s Michael Bar-Zohar, an Israeli journalist and historian, came across other avengers and wrote about them.
A member of one of the teams told him they had used a covered lorry on their nocturnal hunts. Its floor was covered with mattresses to muffle the sound of what happened to their victims, who thought they were simply being taken for questioning.
“To get in at the back,” he said, “you had to put a foot on the bumper, part the tarpaulin and thrust your head in first. The moment the German’s head appeared inside, one of us seized him by the throat and jerked him forward, falling back on the mattress as he did so.”
This would cause the victim to perform an involuntary somersault, still being grasped around the neck, which would usually break. If it did not, then the man would be strangled.
This technique was once used while the victim’s wife stood right next to the truck. “If he had been able to utter a word or a cry, his wife would have started to scream and that might have had serious consequences for us.” The woman watched the truck drive away, unaware that her husband was dead by the time the driver had let in the clutch.
One Jewish group from Lublin in Poland, which called itself Nakam, the Hebrew for vengeance, tried to kill all 36,000 former members of the Gestapo and SS at a US internment camp at Nuremberg-Langwasser in southern Germany.
At the beginning of 1946, members of Nakam installed themselves in civilian jobs in the camp and decided to poison the internees’ bread. Three of them hid inside the bakery at night and started to coat the loaves with arsenic. They were interrupted by night watchmen after poisoning some 2,000.
More than 2,000 prisoners fell sick, but none died — perhaps because nearly 2oz of pure arsenic is required to kill the average man, and the amount coating the crust of each slice of bread would have been considerably less than that.
Tuviah Friedman, who became a prominent Nazi hunter after the war, was a survivor of the ghetto in Radom in Poland. When Soviet troops liberated the area, he joined a militia tasked with hunting down Germans, Poles and Ukrainians who had committed war crimes.
“With burning enthusiasm I embarked on this last chore,” he later wrote. Most of his family had been murdered in Treblinka concentration camp and he was not shy of using physical coercion to get to the truth.
One middle-aged German, who swore he had been a schoolmaster but had been a brutal concentration camp guard, felt Friedman’s wrath.
“His answers incensed me and I struck him severely until I drew blood,” Friedman confessed in 1961. Despite being warned to curb his temper, he was unable to control himself. “I became more brutal in my dealings with the German prisoners,” he admitted, but he felt the beatings produced results quickly.
Friedman helped to establish a Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Vienna, which tracked down hundreds of Nazis, but he was clearly frustrated by due process and slow justice.
He came up with a radical and violent solution. “We thought that if one of the dozens of camps in which top Nazis were being held turned out to be in Austria,” he recalled, “we would gather together a very special group of volunteers and blow up the camp.”
Friedman’s plan to commit mass murder never came to fruition, not because of any moral qualms but rather because there was a risk to the allied soldiers and civilian volunteers in the camp, as well as the possibility that the negotiations for the establishment of a Jewish state would be affected.
© Guy Walters 2009 Extracted from Hunting Evil by Guy Walters, to be published by Transworld on July 30 at £18.99.

How quickly a day at the seaside can turn to disaster as father drowns and son survives...just

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:54:01 +0100

They were like any other holidaymakers, enjoying a moment of fun in the surf at one of Britain's most popular summer beach resorts.
At about 7pm on Sunday, Nigel Hayes, a 51-year-old man from Essex, and his 14-year-old son went 'body-surfing' at Fistral Beach, in Cornwall, using short polystyrene boards to ride the waves to shore.
We do not yet know how quickly they got into difficulties. But we do know that at some point that evening, the pair were swept out to sea by the vicious currents that swirl around the North Cornwall coast.
With the lifeguards off duty, the pair frantically struggled to get back to the shore, but the currents were too strong.
Tragically, Mr Hayes drowned, while his son - who has not been named by police - is recovering from hypothermia. My heart goes out to the whole family for their loss.
More than most, I know how suddenly an innocent moment of fun in the surf can turn to disaster. For when I read of tragedies such as theirs, my blood runs cold with the memories of how I nearly met the same horrific fate.
As millions of us head off on holidays around Britain's glorious coastline, none of us is immune from the power of the sea, no matter how many precautions we take, or how strong we are at swimming.
Furthermore, at a time when we all bridle at those who over-zealously try to protect our health and safety, it is salutary to think that some guidelines are not simply nannying interference but essential tips for avoiding tragedy.
My brush with death - and it was nothing less than that - took place on Widemouth Bay, 40 miles up the coast from Newquay. It was early spring of 2000, and my girlfriend Annabel and I had been dating for around five months.
One weekend we drove down from London for a weekend at a holiday home my parents owned in Cornwall. What Annabel hadn't counted on was my determination to go boogie-boarding, whatever the weather. 'You're mad,' she told me. 'The sea will be freezing.'
But within an hour, we were standing on the beach, surveying the waves. I was not the most experienced of surfers. But I had boogie-boarded enough to be competent in the waves. I had also swam at Widemouth Bay many times - and was aware of its currents.

View of Fistral beach in Newquay, Cornwall

I am also a cautious person, and have always kept to my depth in the sea. I reasoned that so long as my feet could touch the bottom, I could never get into trouble. That was to prove a very false security.
As Annabel and I strode out into the water, I could see she looked uneasy. 'Don't worry,' I reassured her. 'It'll be fine.'
And for the next 20 minutes, it was indeed fine. In fact, it was superb, and both of us were shooting down the waves on our boards.
A few minutes later, the surf had gone calm, so we paused for a rest and lay on our boards, idly paddling. We chatted away, easily at first. And then we started to realise something terribly wrong was happening. We were being sucked out to sea.
Within seconds, I could feel that sickly sense of panic building as we were sucked farther and farther out to sea. I looked over at Annabel, trying to hide my mounting sense of alarm - and could see she was doing the same. But the sea seemed so calm. Surely we could make it back to shore easily?
So we began to paddle - and we paddled hard. But no matter how strongly we swam, we made no progress at all. The current was simply too strong.
At several points - and this still makes me shiver - my feet could touch the ground and I could almost walk, but the power of the current kept throwing me several yards back and out of my depth again. Out to sea. And then what?
Annabel was making similarly poor progress and we looked at each other with the realisation that we were facing an emergency.
I had never shouted 'Help!' in earnest before - but when you shout it for real, you shout it louder than you ever thought possible.
As we screamed, our eyes scoured the beach, and to our relief, we could see a dog-walker.
We waved and shouted, but although he must have been only 40 yards away, he kept walking.
'Why can't he hear us?' I kept thinking, refusing to acknowledge in my desperation that the roar of the surf must have drowned out our voices. Literally. It was at this point I made what could have been a fatal mistake. Hampered by the width of my board, I decided that I would have a better chance of getting ashore if I abandoned it.
In retrospect, I know I was a fool, but I really thought I could make better headway without it.
It was a spectacularly bad move, because at this point the waves welled up again, with astonishing force. To make matters worse, I had lost Annabel, and I was alone with the most enormous sense of terror.
Waves kept swamping me, and I was forced to duck down and hold my breath as they passed. I began to feel increasingly weak and exhausted, still struggling to get ashore, but with less and less ability.
At one point, I clearly remember thinking: 'So this is how I am going to die. At a mere 28, drowned just a few feet out to sea, and with not much to show for my life.'
As well as battling the waves, I was fighting a battle not to give in to this mixture of panic, self-pity and - far worse - the fear at what had befallen Annabel.
How stupid and reckless I had been to get her into this situation. If anything this mental struggle was tougher than the physical challenge.
And then, just as I was about to give up, I glimpsed the most wonderful sight through a break in the surf. Annabel had somehow managed to reach the shore. A strong wave had deposited her and her board on to the sand, and I could see her struggling to her feet.
Limply, she ran up to the man with the dog and pointed frantically out towards me.
Then, in a moment of insane bravery and devotion, she ran back into the surf, this time clutching an emergency red 'torpedo' float that had been mounted on a post at the top of the beach for just such a lifesaving situation.
I remember feeling unbearably grateful, yet at the same time a ridiculous sense of injured male pride that I was having to be rescued by my girlfriend. This is not how it happens in the movies. Surely I should be the hero of the hour, not the bedraggled victim?
Somehow, she managed to swim out to me, and together we struggled back in, eventually reaching the beach where we lay on the sand, gasping for breath. I think we cried a little then - we certainly did when we got home.
First, though, came the help of some nearby builders who proffered that Great British emergency reviver - cups of sweet tea. Then the sound of thudding filled the air. We stepped out to see a yellow Sea King Coastguard helicopter circling the beach, and we waved up at it, our thumbs up, indicating to the small white face at the open hatch that all was well.
We later learned that the man walking his dog on the beach had rushed to a phone and summoned the emergency services.
And so our own little drama was over. For us, there had been a miraculous happy ending.
But even now, I shudder to think how close we came to losing our lives. In my arrogance, I had always thought that only an idiot could get into such a predicament - until that idiot was me.
It won't surprise you to learn that shortly afterwards I asked Annabel to marry me and we were married a few months later.
And it should also come as no shock that despite living in a landlocked county, we donate on a monthly basis to the RNLI.
Today, I will go surfing only on beaches with a lifeguard on duty and plenty of other swimmers nearby.
In my folly, I thought I could beat the sea, but on that day, the sea nearly beat me. Whichever part of the coast you head to this summer, let mine be a cautionary tale.

Former Nazi guard John Demjanjuk is a frail 89-year-old, but can we really let a man who took part in 29,000 murders cheat justice?

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:54:28 +0100

JUST AFTER lunchtime on Tuesday, five U.S. immigration officials arrived at the suburban home of a frail 89-year-old man ten miles south of Cleveland, Ohio.

Their task was to deport John Demjanjuk to Munich, where he was due to be tried for crimes he had committed more than 60 years ago in German occupied Poland.

The officials carried the man down some steps in a wheelchair and transferred him into the back of a white van. A Gulfstream jet was waiting at a nearby airport to fly him to Europe.

The 89-year-old was carried out of his home in his wheelchair earlier this week as authorities moved to deport him.

As the officials made their way to the airport, the man's son drove for four hours to Cincinnati, where he told an appeals court that his father was suffering from kidney disease and blood disorders, was too ill to travel and that the deportation amounted to torture.

Sensationally, the court found in his favour, and the man was returned home, where he will await yet another round in what has been an extraordinary 32-year legal battle to retain his freedom.

Demjanjuk has become the personification of the struggle between those who say war criminals must face justice, regardless of the passage of time, and those who believe there's no point in prosecuting ailing 89-year-olds for offences committed more than half a century ago.

I have spent three years researching the stories of the Nazi war criminals who escaped justice at the end of the war - even tracking one down to her home in Vienna - and there can be no doubt that Demjanjuk is one of the worst.

He proves exactly why these people should be hunted down and brought to justice.

It's difficult today for us even to comprehend the enormity of the crimes people like him committed. Demjanjuk faces trial on no fewer than 29,000 charges of being an accessory to murder of Jews.

When you understand his involvement in the death camps, the question is not why should he be prosecuted, but why should he be free?

Demjanjuk would have the world believe that he is no more than a retired diesel engine mechanic, who has lived peacefully in the U.S. since his arrival in 1952. With his white hair and spectacles, he does, indeed, look like a kindly grandfather.

However, his real nature is mired in the utmost brutality, for Demjanjuk was one of the most savage guards employed by the Germans in their extermination camps. Born Ivan Demjanjuk in the Ukraine on April 3, 1920, he was conscripted into the Soviet Army shortly after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

In May 1942, he was captured by the Germans in the Crimea and, according to one of his accounts, spent the next two years in a series of PoW camps.

War crimes: John Demjanjuk's Nazi ID, which he insisted was a forgery during his trial in Israel

In the middle of 1944, he claims to have fought in Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian units against the Soviet advance, until he and his comrades surrendered to the Allies.

The truth, though, is quite different. Around July 1942, Demjanjuk decided he didn't want to sit out the war as a prisoner of the Germans. Instead, he enrolled at Trawniki camp in Poland, where the SS trained guards for Treblinka and Sobibor death camps.

After six months, Demjanjuk was posted to Majdanek concentration camp, where 79,000 people were to die. Though it is not clear precisely what duties Demjanjuk performed at the camp, he was clearly considered able enough to be transferred to the Sobibor extermination camp on March 26, 1943.

Sobibor was one of the first camps at which the Nazis used gas to kill their victims.

There, Demjanjuk and his fellow guards unloaded Jews from cattle trucks and beat them into chambers, which were pumped full of carbon monoxide from tank engines.

One of Demjanjuk's other roles was to guard the Jewish forced labourers who disposed of the corpses and their possessions. Before the camp was closed in October 1943, 250,000 were killed.

That same month, Demjanjuk was transferred to Flossenburg concentration camp in Bavaria, where he guarded prisoners who were building bunkers.

Unfortunately for Demjanjuk, it was at Flossenburg where he was given a tattoo of his blood type under his left arm, for ever marking him as a member of the SS. He was at Flossenburg until at least December 1944, after which his movements are not clear.

Like other war criminals, Demjanjuk was able to hide among the millions of refugees marooned by six years of war. In October 1950, he sought to be officially declared a 'Displaced Person', enabling him to gain entry to the U.S.

On his application form, he said he had worked on a farm in Sobibor from 1936 to 1943, after which he had worked in Danzig, and then as a railway worker in Munich from May 1944 until the end of the war.

Demjanjuk's application was successful, and in 1951 he obtained a visa to enter the U.S., which he did with his wife and daughter in February 1952. For the next 25 years, he lived peacefully, settling first in Indiana and then Ohio, where he worked for Ford.

However, in 1977, that peace was shattered when the Justice Department sought to revoke the U.S. citizenship he had gained in 1958.

During investigations into another camp guard, Demjanjuk had been identified by Holocaust survivors as a guard at Treblinka known as 'Ivan the Terrible'.

As the identifications were not considered sufficient evidence to denaturalise Demjanjuk, more proof was sought.

The task of finding this evidence fell to the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), formed in 1979 and the world's most effective Nazi-hunting unit. The OSI worked with the Soviets and, in January 1980, they provided the breakthrough: they had found Demjanjuk's SS identity card, issued at Trawniki.

As well as carrying a photograph that matched that of Demjanjuk's 1951 visa application, the document also revealed the same date and place of birth as that on the visa. In addition, both Demjanjuks had a father called Nikolai and had scars on their backs.

It was conclusive proof that Demjanjuk had been a camp guard, and the head of the OSI, Allan A. Ryan Jr, declared: 'You son of a bitch - we've got you!'

In 1981, Demjanjuk's citizenship was revoked, and he was eventually extradited to stand trial in Israel in February 1986. During the trial, the most crucial piece of evidence was the identity card, which Demjanjuk insisted was a forgery - but was found to be authentic.

There was also a scar that Demjanjuk bore under his left arm, which he was forced to admit was the SS tattoo that he'd had removed after the war. In April 1988, the court found him guilty and sentenced him to death.

But after five more years of legal wrangling, the sentence was overturned. Testimony heard during the trial had identified Demjanjuk as 'Ivan the Terrible', the brutal Treblinka guard. However, documentary evidence showed he'd worked at Trawniki and Sobibor.

An appeal court acquitted him, though with a heavy heart since there was no doubt that even if Demjanjuk had not served at Treblinka, he had undoubtedly been at the other two camps.

In September 1993, Demjanjuk returned to Ohio. For 16 years, U.S. officials and Demjanjuk's lawyers played an exhausting game of legal cat and mouse.

Finally, last month, the Germans charged him with 29,000 counts of accessory to murder and sought to have him extradited. With an appeals board ruling on Good Friday that he could be deported, the way was clear for a new trial.

Then came the last-minute stay of deportation this week. Again, Demjanjuk had cheated justice.

There are some who contend that trying people of Demjanjuk's age is monstrous in itself - the former Tory MP Tony Marlow once described Demjanjuk's trial in Israel as a 'show trial' - but it is surely absurd that age should be a barrier from being held to account.

We have seen trials of old men before - the cases of Erich Priebke and Klaus Barbie being two of the most remarkable - and each time, there have been calls for such 'senior citizens' to be left alone.

Some argue that the evidence is too old to be convincing, but thanks to the Nazis' love of paperwork, there is plenty of evidence to convict such men successfully.

Another argument is that 'such things should be left in the past', an attitude I frequently encountered in Austria when I attempted to interview Erna Wallisch, a former female concentration camp guard who had served at Majdanek and Ravensbruck.

Wallisch, who lived so openly in Vienna that she was in the phone book, had never been brought to account for her crimes, something that I thought was a disgrace.

I was delighted that my visit caused a flurry of interest, and that the Poles even started to make moves to have her extradited. However, just a few months later, Wallisch died peacefully in hospital. She had escaped justice.

It is because of men like Demjanjuk - men who volunteered to be murderers - that a genocide such as the Holocaust took place. It is better for the world to show those tempted to mimic Demjanjuk that justice will catch up with them, regardless of time or ill health.

It is morally wrong that a man who helped to murder thousands should be allowed to live in peace.

‘It’s MR Walters to you’ – why has everyone become so oh-so familiar?

Thu, 2 Apr 2009 16:10:29 +0100

From builders to nurses, everyone today insists on using oh-so-familiar first names. One man has had enough of it...
Two days ago, somebody called me something I hadn't been called in ages: 'Mr Walters.' I was nonplussed. Who was this 'Mr Walters'? He sounded like some old man, or a slightly sinister Welsh villain.
It took me a few seconds to realise that the person in question was none other than me, and that the person addressing me as such was simply displaying old-fashioned politeness.
In return, I called him by his surname, and the conversation between 'Mr Wilson' and 'Mr Walters' continued on a formal and efficient basis - he respecting my role, and I respecting his. The dialogue was efficient, professional and impersonal, which was ideal for the matter in question.
Afterwards, I reflected how much I liked being called by my surname. Had Mr Wilson and I opted for the vogueish use of first names - or worse still, 'mate' - I wonder whether we would have afforded each other the same degree of respect and, indeed, whether the conversation would have gone so smoothly.
The use of surnames is today all too rare. In a time when we are all supposed to be chummy and open, calling each other by our last names is seen as anachronistic and even downright hostile. Recently, a friend of mine attended a 'speeding awareness course' after admitting breaking the speed limit in his car.
At the beginning of the course, the members of the group had to introduce themselves. Out came the predictable 'Hi, I'm Dave', 'Just Ian'll do', 'Call me John, mate'...
My friend was having none of this, and instead introduced himself as 'Mr Carter'. The room went silent, and the course leader accused my friend of having 'an attitude problem'. My friend politely explained that he saw no reason for being referred to by his first name as none of those present were his friends.
I wish I had his bravery. When we employed a builder, I was determined to refer to him as 'Mr Jones'. In this way, I cunningly thought, some sort of master/servant relationship would be established, and that 'Mr Jones' would be more likely to do my bidding.
My resolve crumbled on the first day. 'All right, Adam, mate?' I said, as if I were his oldest friend. He then informed me that he liked two sugars in his coffee. So much for the master/servant relationship.
I kicked myself for being so craven and matey, but in the end he did as I wanted, despite us being on Christian-name terms. However, my formal old-fashioned side hankered for the days when we would have used our surnames.
Surnames create a sense of detachment and distance. Just as it is important to separate business from pleasure, the use of a surname helps to define relationships based on professionalism and not friendship.
If one adopts the trappings of friendship with those with whom one does business, then the feeling of sourness when, say, a deal falls through, is magnified.
It is as absurd to refer to a local planning officer by his first name, as it would be to call your best friend by his or her surname. What particularly rankles is when politicians refer to each other as 'Tony' and 'Jacqui', as if these people were friends we had allowed into our homes.
As I wouldn't even allow them into my second home (if I had one), I find the use of first names impertinently familiar. No doubt, as the G20 drags on, we shall hear heads of state referring to each other as 'Gordon' and 'Barack', which will make me feel positively queasy.
The habit has become widespread. Elderly patients in hospital wards are addressed by their first names by nurses young enough to be their grandchildren, and the police love calling people by their first names, just to make us all feel even more like errant children.
So why do we persist in dropping surnames? I know of nobody who enjoys being called by their first name by a telesales functionary, and yet salesmen continue to get away with calling us 'Gavin' or 'Stacey' to 'break down barriers'.
When I worked for an insurance company briefly in my late teens, only one of the hundreds of people I cold-called bristled at my use of their first name.
I suspect the reason why the surname has been abandoned is because today too many of us mistake detachment for deference.
If I asked my gardener, Russell Emm, to call me 'Mr Walters', he would think I was being snooty and all but asking him to doff his cap whenever I addressed him. And if I called him 'Mr Emm', then that sense would be reinforced.
Although his reaction would be forgivable, I wish it were not so. A few decades ago, we would have called each other 'Mr Walters' and 'Mr Emm' because of deference. He would have been deferential to me as someone who was giving him work, but, crucially, I in turn would have also been showing my respect for someone who was working hard at my behest.
That sense of respect was always a two-way street, and the best sorts of squires and grandees well knew it, as indeed does any competent officer in the armed forces.
Using our surnames would have been a useful way of indicating that mutual respect, but that option is no longer open to us in a formalised way and it is hard to know how it can be shown without the use of surnames.
Russell tells me that the few of his clients who ask him to call them by their surnames are in the main of a much older, and perhaps gentler, generation.
Russell also informs me that when he was young, he was allowed to call members of the older generation only by their surnames when he was in paid employment. Until then, if he dared use their Christian names, he would be put in his place.
This was the case when I was growing up in the Seventies, although by then, most friends' mothers would baulk at being called 'Mrs So-and-So', although I cannot recall referring to a friend's father by his first name. Any Dad who said 'call me John' would have have been thought as trying too hard to be matey.
Even now, I find it difficult to call people in their 60s and older by their first names. This is especially true when I am interviewing war veterans, who I strongly admire, and am keen to show that I am as every bit as respectful and appreciative as any from my generation should be. It's just impossible to address a survivor of D-Day as 'Derek'.
Today, those who insist on being called by their surnames are accused of being pompous. There can be no doubt that this can sometimes be true, as such pomposity is a crutch for the talentless and the hollow. It seems a shame that the pompous have the monopoly on the use of surnames, and it should be reclaimed by the rest of us.
By doing so, it would be easier to know where we stood. From now on, if I call someone by their surname, I am not being grand or condescending, I am simply telling them that I respect them, but I am not their friend, and that I expect our dealings to be conducted impersonally. Is there anything wrong with that?
Perhaps it is too late and the battle is lost. Still, I'm going to give it a go. Mr Emm had better like it.

Beta Male: Why I’m neither country boy nor city slicker

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 11:26:54 +0000

Normally, articles that start with “When we moved to the country…” make me want to disembowel the writer, so today I’m going to have to commit seppuku. When we moved to the country – checks for absence of sharp Japanese knives – five years ago, we didn’t give it much thought. We both work from home, could only afford a small place in some tedious suburb, had recently reproduced, so we concluded, let’s get the hell out. This was back in the days when my wife thought everything I said was a good idea, an attitude she has since somewhat modified.
However, I’m not going to bore you with her problems, small as they are. She, like many women approaching the foothills of un certain âge, thinks that Wiltshire lacks all the normal things that women like her need in life – shoes, and countless friends with whom she can talk about shoes. Me, I have three or four pairs of shoes, and one day, I shall doubtless buy another pair. As to friends, well, I have about the same number as I do shoes, which is more than enough for any man.
Instead, I’m going to bore you with my problem, which is this: I am stuck in a limbo between town and country. No, not topographically – I don’t live in Virginia Water, thank you very much – but in terms of outlook. I am neither a Viyella shirt-wearing, pheasant-blasting, trout-tickling country boy, but then nor am I Giles Coren. I love the countryside, feel more at home here than I would in Earlsfield, and frankly, it is a lot easier to put down roots in the Chalke Valley than it is on Garratt Lane.
Manifestations of my limbo are many. Take, for example, clothing. Once a month, around a dozen of us getting-on fortysomething men meet at the excellent [name of pub redacted for fear of townie invasion] in [likewise], where we drink bitter, eat steak and talk nonsense. Clearly, to dress up for such an occasion would be absurd, but the other night I decided to wear a leather jacket. Not one of those tragic faux-biker jackets, but a nice, slightly beaten-up blazer-cut thing which my wife bought in Gap. Oh dear. Cue Bateman cartoon moment in which Walters walks into the Redacted Arms to questions such as, “How come you’re wearing that?” and, my favourite, “You look as though you’re in the Gestapo.” I realised then that I had transgressed, and I was a single Boho in a sea of Boden. It was as if I had turned up to a London nightclub wearing a Barbour.
It’s not just in the clothing department where I feel different. I can’t stand dogs, to be honest, and when I’m going for a walk, people look at me strangely because I don’t have some slobbering turd-muncher running along beside me. Neither am I a great field sports man, but that’s because I’m a bad sportsman full stop, and I certainly don’t regard them as “blood sports”. I’m probably more tolerant than most countryfolk in matters of race, sexuality and any sort of diversity, frankly, which resulted in the completely brazen inquiry as to when we’d move back to the capital with our “London ways”. I was more confused than angry. What “London ways”?
I try to go to London once a fortnight, but sadly I feel as much a boondocker there as I feel an urbanite here. After 14 years of living in the capital, I had worked out how to work it, but in just six years, that’s all gone. I stagger around wide-eyed at the sheer volume and intensity of humanity, and I find that I genuinely suffer from sensory overload. When I’m walking in some part of London I know well, I actually peer through the windscreens of passing cars to see if I know the driver. I’m also now enough of a hick to stare a little too long at the vast number of fantastically beautiful women going about their business. In the country, such women are only to be seen on the television (and in our house, obviously).
I’ve also found that I’m just crap at dealing with restaurant staff, and all I can do is reflect on my glory days when I had mastered the requisite air of polite brusqueness. There are other small things as well. I wear a seatbelt in the back of cabs. I look for my Travelcard right in front of the ticket barriers. I permanently think I’m going to be mugged. I have no idea how to get a drink after 11pm. And so on.
I don’t know what the solution is. I suppose I could hang out with the Country Dads, who come up to London two to three nights a week. You can often find them in the less fashionable restaurants in an odd-numbered SW. They stick together for mutual support, and create a little moleskin island of ruraldom that is insulated against the “ghastliness” of the city. But I don’t want to hang out with them, because I want to be cool when I’m in London. Well, I try.
One semi-serious idea is to spend the week in the country and the weekends in London. I’d get the best of both worlds then, but the finances won’t run to a weekend pad off High Street Ken. Perhaps suburbia is the way forward. Those people in Virginia Water know a thing or two.
Robert Crampton is away