Re-remembering the soldier hero: The psychic and social construction of memory in personal narratives of the great war

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 50, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 181-204

  Roper, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33750066212     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/2000.50.181     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. The precise number of casualties that day is unclear. The Regimental history, drawing on the reports of 'living survivors', claims that the number of casualties was around 150, and that the official figures were 'much understated'. However, it misquotes the Battalion diary. The Battalion diary states that thirty men were missing, whilst the Regimental history quotes the diary as having reported about 20 men missing. See H. Stacke, The Worcestershire Regiment in the Great War, Kidderminster, 1928, p. 20; War Diary, Third Battalion Worcesters Regiment, WO95/1415, 20 September 1914, Public Record Office.
2. Lyndall Urwick (hereafter LU) to mother, 25 Sept. 1914. All family correspondence quoted here is in private possession.
3. 'The Knightly Years', undated MS (probably 1970s) in private possession, p. 60.
4. Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living With the Legend, Melbourne, 1994.
5. Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War, Manchester, 1998.
6. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities, Routledge, London, 1994, esp. pp. 22-3.
7. Dawson, Soldier Heroes, p. 25.
8. Thomson does acknowledge the role of psychological processes in shaping memory. Stories, he argues, cannot always contain the conflicts of the past. These may reveal themselves in Freudian parapraxes such as misremembering, slips of the tongue, or jokes (Thomson, Anzac Memories, pp. 9-11).
9. At the same time his interest is primarily in the marginalizing and distorting effects of dominant forms of public memory. Summerfield's analysis neglects not only these psychological processes, but the general relationship of individual experience to public narrative forms. She uses oral testimony to show that personal narratives broadly conform to these public forms. However, this level of analysis does not permit her to explore why some of her interviewees tended to embrace the changes brought by wartime participation, whilst others asserted more traditional codes of femininity. It is not clear from her account why her interviewees were predisposed to one rather than another public narrative. The key question of why one discourse of femininity rather than another was 'taken up and . . . deployed' by her interviewees is left unanswered (Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives, p. 15-16).
10. Donald Spence, 'Passive remembering', in U. Neisser and E. Winograd (eds), Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory, Cambridge, 1988, p. 321.
11. 'Knightly Years', undated, p. 1.
12. Urwick's letters to his father usually concerned the family business, politics, or the nature of army bureaucracy. The vast majority were however addressed to his mother. Whilst he assumed that both parents would read them, these letters adopted a more confessional tone. He used them to 'have his grouse out', complaining about his superior officers, and lamenting the army's slowness in awarding him promotions. Her love for him allowed him to vent feelings which could not easily be admitted to fellow officers: 'I take it you are more or less interested in my thoughts & feelings while I don't suppose anyone here is. It is impossible to [sic] me to bottle it up all the time' (LU to mother 18 April 1915).
13. 'Biographical Note. Lt. Col. L. F. Urwick', April 1955, Henley Management College (henceforward Urwick Papers), D10b. According to Dorothy Rowe, his research assistant, it was 'written for an overseas enquirer'.
14. The project to publish a 'very elegant looking bibliography and life story' was initiated just after the honours list was published in January 1957. The bibliography was published by UOP in 1957 but the life story remained in manuscript form. 'Notes on the Life and Work of Lyndall Urwick', Urwick Orr and Partners, 1959, p. 26, Urwick Papers, D10b; D. Hook to Miss D.M. Adam, 16 Jan. 1957, Urwick Papers, D2b.
15. 'I must confess also that I was mildly influenced by the pleasant prospect of being able to pull a long nose at the management people in this country and at the "establishment", who have left me virtually unemployed as far as public work in this country is concerned for the past ten years', he wrote in 1961. LU to 'Mike', 12 May 1961, Urwick Papers, D20aiii.
16. See Appendix, 'Bibliographical Note', for a list of the memoirs and biographical works.
17. Harry Swainston to LU, 18 March 1942, Urwick Papers, D6b.
18. Carolyn Steedman, 'The Radical Policeman's Tale: working-class men and writing in the nineteenth century', Past Tenses: Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History, London, 1992, p. 152.
19. A 'Personal Note on Lt. Col. Lyndall Fownes Urwick' - undated, but probably written during the 1950s or early 1960s - was similarly organized by job title, but took a much more anecdotal form, with the war once again taking up around half the account (Urwick Papers, D10b).
20. 'Apprenticeship to Management. An autobiography of Lt. Col. L. F. Urwick', 1970. In private possession.
21. 'Autobiography. Lt Col L. F. Urwick', 1972. In private possession.
22. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford, 1975, p. 92.
23. As Anthony Wohl has argued in his study of European political imagery, social theory, and imaginative writing, consciousness of generation was 'one of the most prominent characteristics of the age'. The Generation of 1914, Cambridge, Mass., 1979, p. 2.
24. LU to father, 21 April 1915.
25. LU to mother, 27 May 1915.
26. 'Biographical Note', 1955, p. 26.
27. 'Notes on the Life and Work', 1959, p. 33.
28. 'Biographical note', 1955, p. 26. The divergent punctuation is Urwick's.
29. 'Biographical note', 1955, p. 25.
30. The notion of the good administrator as a combination of the practical man and expert was also important to Urwick's self-presentation. As Rowe remarked in her account of 1959, 'Urwick still startles the business leaders he talks to by drawing his examples of leadership, morale, organisation and training, not from industry but from his own military experiences in the first world war' ('Notes on the life and work', 1959, p. 25).
31. 'Biographical note', 1955, pp. 27-8.
32. As Fussell puts it, 'The Great War staff and "home front" merge to assume the shape of the common enemy, persisting as club-man, don, divine, editor, industrialist, and politician. Staff-wallahs all, and hence the enemy', The Great War and Modern Memory, p. 112.
33. Urwick used the title of Lieutenant Colonel in all his memoirs. Over time the image of the army man turned expert on management become part of the social memory of Urwick. Thus in Writers on Organizations, D. S. Pugh, D. J. Hickson and C R. Hinings opened their profile of Urwick with the comment that he 'has experience of both industry and the army' (Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 105).
34. 'Biographical Note', 1955, pp. 28-30.
35. 'Apprenticeship to Management', 1970, p. 71.
36. 'Apprenticeship to Management', 1970, p. 72.
37. Harry Swainston to LU and attached memorandum, 22 Jan. 1954, Urwick Papers, D1b.
38. 'Apprenticeship to management', 1970, p. 72.
39. 'Knightly Years', undated, p. 2.
40. 'Apprenticeship to Management', 1970, p. 35.
41. 'Apprenticeship to Management', 1970. Moral dilemmas figure strongly in the account: whether a retreat when no order has come through is technically cowardice; whether to shoot a fatally injured man in order to end his agony (see p. 80, p. 109).
42. 'Biographical note', 1955, p. 26.
43. 'Apprenticeship to Management', 1970, pp. 52-3.
44. War Diary, 15-20 Sept. 1914.
45. 'Knightly Years', undated, p. 60.
46. LU to mother, 11 October 1914. On 5 October 1914 he had written that 'I particularly detest my Co. commander'.
47. Here is the event as reported in the 'Personal Note on Lt. Col. Lyndall Fownes Urwick' (see n. 18): I reported to my Company Commander that I was going out to inspect a 'listening post' at the end of a ride leading forward from our company's line. He took one look at me, asked if I could walk and, disregarding my protests that I could 'carry on', ordered up a stretcher bearer. 'Help this officer down to the regimental aid post: he's a sick man'. That saved my life. [p. 6]
48. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, London, 1991, p. 84.
49. Sigmund Freud, 'Memorandum on the Electrical Treatment of War Neurotics', Standard Edition vol. 17, London, pp. 212-3.
50. As Elaine Showalter has also shown, war placed Edwardian middle-class codes of manliness under extreme pressure. Shell-shock, she argues, was the 'masculine voice of complaint', as officers trained to suppress their fear began to exhibit symptoms previously associated with the 'feminine malady' of hysteria. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980, London, 1987, pp. 167-94.
51. The silences and gaps in the letters are highlighted by the memoirs, which confess that the rain and poor diet made this 'a miserable time': 'Apprenticeship to Management', 1970, p. 48.
52. LU to mother, 18 Sept. 1914.
53. On his arrival in France, Urwick had written to his mother that 'In the words of the old nursery game we are getting warmer' (LU to mother, 7 Sept. 1914). His phrase perhaps also reflects the contemporary perception of war in terms of the cult of games.
54. War diary, 19 Sept. 1914.
55. LU to mother, 25 Sept. 1914.
56. He later uses the term 'little Mary' to describe his recovering stomach (LU to mother, 5 Oct. 1914). This may well have been the colloquialism which his parents had used when describing these childhood ailments, and supports the notion that the problem had re-emerged.
57. Anthony Babbington, Shell-shock: A History of the Changing Attitudes to War Neurosis, London, 1997, p. 144;
58. Samuel Stouffer, The American Soldier: Combat and its Aftermath, vol. 2, New York, 1965, pp. 415-6.
59. 'Autobiography', 1972, p. 60.
60. LU to mother, 26 Sept. 1914.
61. LU to mother, 26 Sept. 1914.
62. LU to mother, 5 Oct. 1914.
63. Quotations above are from LU to mother, 5 Oct. 1914.
64. 'Knightly Years', undated, p. 58.
65. War diary, 19 Sept. 1914.
66. Malcolm Smith argues that by the time of the Second World War, 'the concept of cowardice had been softened by an understanding of shell-shock, based on the experience and research of the Western Front. Not quite so much was to be expected of masculinity as a whole in a future national crisis': 'The War and British Culture', in S. Constantine, M. Kirby and M. Rose (eds), The first World War in British History, London, 1995, p. 177.
67. The letters after Urwick's return to the front-line in mid-1915 show that he was sympathetic to men suffering from shell-shock, but do not suggest that he had close knowledge of research in this area. Significantly, the memoirs draw on a military and non-psychological understanding of war neurosis. Urwick cited Churchill's personal adviser Lord Moran, who believed that 'every man has a certain stock of courage', but that 'When it is used up there is nothing he can do about it' apart from rest ('Apprenticeship to Management', 1970, p. 38).
68. Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 190.
69. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (1929), London, 1957, pp. 182-4.
70. The War Office telegram indicated that he had been 'slightly wounded and is progressing favourably' (postmark 28 Sept. 1914).
71. Anthony Eden, Another World 1897-1917, London, 1976.
72. The tendency for traumatic memories to return in later life is apparently not uncommon amongst ex-servicemen. Nigel Hunt and Ian Robbins argue that this may partly be because retirement gives more time to reflect on earlier experiences, and because of the intensified need in old age to draw out meaning from those experiences. 'Telling Stories of the War: ageing veterans coping with their memories through narrative', Oral History 26: 2, autumn 1998, p. 63.
73. Jay Winter, 'Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War' in Jay Winter and E. Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, 1998, p. 47.
74. Winter, 'Forms of Kinship', p. 47.
75. For a fuller discussion of this, see Timothy Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, 'The Politics of War Memory: contexts, structures and dynamics', in Ashplant, Dawson and Roper (eds), The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, Routledge, forthcoming.
76. Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 216.
77. Alessandro Portelli, 'Uchronic Dreams. Working-Class Memory and Possible Worlds', in The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories, Albany, 1991, pp. 99-117.
78. Points at which the narrator has no awareness of the difference between memory and real events, substituting one for the other, furnish us with clues as to how the 'moment of now' enters the testimony. As Donald Spence concludes, 'certain kinds of errors, such as the transformation of memory into experience, are not entirely false, because they represent a truth about the narrator at another time and place' (Spence, 'Passive Remembering', p. 315).
79. He and his wife had celebrated June's sixth birthday in 1932 by 'great play on the see-saw: the effect on Daddy's digestion at that particular hour was a more open question'. That had been followed by games in the newly-cut hay, in which 'Daddy was buried and then jumped on several times - more trouble for the digestion' (LU to mother 12 June 1932; also 1 April 1931). Most intriguing was 'the elephant game' where Urwick, on all fours with arm outstretched to form a trunk, was presented with a handkerchief in the form of a bun by his children: 'I have to eat with loud sounds of satisfaction. I am then told that it is i. A nice bun in which case it reappears quietly in due course or ii. That it is a nasty bun. In this case the elephant has spasms, sighs of violent indigestion, & is finally sick' (LU to mother 2 Feb. 1934).