Historical readings from today… and the death penalty

Today I started my preliminary reading for my Master’s dissertation, my chosen topic; to what extent did the Second World War help develop a notion of Britishness (throw into that the question of race during early 1940’s Britain). So the first book I pick up to read is: Forgotten Voices, stories of the Blitz and Battle of Britain. The Forgotten Voice’s series is a fantastic couple of books that take oral testimonies of those who fought or lived in the war and put’s them into chronological order without historical analysis (well, this point can be debated as only extracts of oral testimonies are selected and it could be argued that the author only selected those testimonies that can be moulded around his own view point).

The point of my reading (not just out of interest) was to try to piece together some ideas of what British people during the war thought of their country and some common characteristics of national culture during the war. I have already done some reading into this- Paul Ward and Britishness since 1860 where he claims many West Indians who fought in the British army called their post-war children Winston out of patriotic support. Also Tom Harrisson’s Mass Observation archive has bought up such classics as ‘I don’t consider myself British, [I consider the Scots and Welsh as a different race] but I would die to defend Britain [and my Scottish, Welsh neighbours]‘.

From my brief reading I have discovered that the whole British identity could be summarised by two things: tea (that old Chinese import) and common decency. One story talks about how during the blitz a father lost his child through decapitation, he held his child’s body stroking it and saying ‘So this is how you went, Jimmy’, he then got up and thanked a stranger on the street for handing him a mug of tea. More obscure forms of common decency came during the vacation of Dunkirk. One example is that many French and British soldiers were shot by their own side, without hesitation, because they tried to barge into the queues for the boats (that’s right, during the evacuation of Dunkirk when the German’s were bombarding the troops you were expected to form an orderly queue while waiting to get onto a boat and in some cases wear full clean uniform and have a shave).

Digressing from my reading, some thoughts on the death penalty came into my mind today. I would like to point out first that I do lose a lot of respect for people when they make the uneducated statement that we should bring back the death penalty, even if it were for only the most serious of crimes. These thoughts centred around the obvious- if the death penalty were a deterrent then why are crimes still committed in places that still have the death penalty. Then onto the notion that if the death penalty were the most righteous form of justice, then why do some killers kill themselves before they are caught? As a matter of fact- why did Hitler kill himself before he was caught, even though the Allies would had killed him in the end anyway? Are the majority of these people acting through the will of remorse, regret and justice? I think not.