Book Review: Richard Griffiths, What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-45
| Author | Mark Klobas |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929917717442 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsBritain and Ireland |
Book Reviews 657
Governing Hibernia: British Politicians and
Ireland 1800-1921, by K Theodore Hoppen.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 337pp.,
£35.00 (h/b), ISBN 9780198207436
When it was passed in 1801, the Act of Union
represented the most earnest effort yet by the
British political leadership to bring Ireland per-
manently into their fold. The failure of that
effort little more than a century later has gener-
ated a mountain of scholarship seeking to
understand the various factors involved in it.
Not the least of Theodore Hoppen’s achieve-
ments in this book is his identification of one
such factor often overlooked by historians of
the era, which is the evolving mindset of
British politicians towards Ireland and the role
that their attitudes played in the eventual
foundering of Union.
Hoppen sees the perspectives of British
political leaders going through three distinct
stages. The first of these was one in which their
thinking about Ireland was shaped by a persis-
tent view of Ireland’s alienness relative to the
rest of the United Kingdom. Such attitudes
were perhaps understandable given the novelty
of Union and the unfamiliarity of most Britons
with Ireland, but their persistence hindered
efforts to integrate Ireland into the rest of the
kingdom in the way that Scotland had been
during the previous century.
Within a generation, these views were
superseded by a more optimistic belief in the
possibility of assimilation. Yet the assimila-
tionist polices pursued were still predicated on
an assumption of Irish inferiority, which hob-
bled attempts to address Ireland’s distinctive-
ness. The frustration of these efforts led both
the Liberals and the Conservatives to abandon
assimilation by the 1870s in favour of, respec-
tively, the self-help of devolution and eco-
nomic and social policies tailored specifically
to Ireland’s unique needs. Although their goals
were different, both approaches shared the
assumption of Ireland as an entity separate
from the rest of the United Kingdom, one that
paved the way for the granting of independ-
ence in 1921.
Hoppen’s book is a masterful study that
illuminates an underappreciated dimension of
the failure of Britain’s union with Ireland. In it
the author displays both the fruits of a lifetime
of archival labour and a thorough command of
the vast literature on the subject, all of which
he has marshalled to make a major contribution
to the scholarship on his subject. It is a book
that should be read by anyone with an interest
in the topic, as well as those seeking historical
perspectives on the now-relevant issue of the
failure of multinational unions.
Mark Klobas
(Scottsdale Community College, Arizona)
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1478929917716091
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
What Did You Do During the War? The Last
Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-
45 by Richard Griffiths. Abingdon: Routledge,
2016. 380pp., £19.99 (p/b), ISBN 9781138888999
When Richard Griffiths’ book Fellow
Travellers of the Right was first published in
1980, it provided readers with a groundbreak-
ing study of the public support by right-wing
Britons for Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Although Griffiths intended the book as a
stand-alone work, the subsequent discovery of
the membership ledger of the Right Club led
him to write a sequel, Patriotism Perverted
(2011), which scrutinised the activities of the
pro-Nazi far right in the period between
Britain’s entry into the war in September 1939
and May 1940, when the end of the ‘Phoney
War’ led to the detention of many of the Club’s
members. With the current book, Griffiths
completes what is now a trilogy by extending
his examination of the group from the spring of
1940 to the end of the war.
Griffiths divides his study into six parts,
addressing the ‘myths’ of the far right related
to the Phoney War period, the role of the far
right within the early wartime peace move-
ment, the impact of the arrests of members of
the far right under Defence Regulation 18B,
the experience of Britons who became
broadcasters for Germany during the war,
the responses of various members of the far
right to the arrests and subsequent events and
the decline of the movement after the war.
The various threads demonstrate the diverse
range of reactions to the developments of
the war, illustrating how there was no com-
mon response among them; some distanced
To continue reading
Request your trial