A forgotten review in a newspaper of a forgotten book holds a profound and seldom admitted truth about security, writes Mark Rowe.
The Phoney War on the Home Front was not the most promising title of a book, by ES Turner. It told the unbecoming story of the oddly quiet first months of the Second World War, from September 1939 to May 1940. Peter Fleming reviewed it in the Sunday Telegraph, of September 3, 1961 (well timed for the anniversary of the outbreak of WW2).
I can claim some kinship with Peter Fleming as he had just published a book called Invasion 1940, about the German plans and the British preparations for invading this country after the fall of France in June 1940; the subject of a book of mine, Don’t Panic, in 2010. Peter Fleming was brother of the more famous writer Ian, creator of James Bond, whose flat (Ian Fleming’s, that is) you can see commemorated with a blue plaque, not far east of Victoria station, if you have a spare half hour if you ever miss your train.
Fleming described as Turner told it, the Phoney War as a sort of ‘silly season’. If the book had a villain, the reviewer went on, ‘perhaps it is Security, the potent bogey which when invoked by politicians, bureaucrats or servicemen so often masked foolish or arbitrary actions and so seldom resulted in the denial to the enemy of information which had he obtained it would have been of the slightest use to him. The suddenly inflated, virtually all powerful and largely inexperienced bureaucracy which found itself in control of almost every aspect of the nation’s life was bound to make mistakes, but the fallacy that everything connected with the war from the destination of evacuated children [pictured; British wartime leaflets about evacuation] to the profile of a gasworks or the requisitioning of a hotel ought to be kept secret was probably responsible for more muddles than any other single factor.
“Moreover Security by simultaneously inflating the importance of the jack in office and making many of his actions appears in the light of common sense to be ridiculous or unreasonable served to discredit authority at a time when authority needed all the public confidence and cooperation it could get.”
Two things to add. First, that a security or police person does not necessarily like doing foolish things in the name of secrecy or national security; they have minds of their own; they are citizens, parents too.
Second, a point from the memoir A Kind of Survivor, by a veteran of two world wars, the historian of France, Guy Chapman: ‘excellence is not rewarded as naturally as the sun ripens a fig’. In other words, mankind does not operate by the laws of nature, whereby seeds grow; people do not naturally flower; they can be irrational or can find themselves stuck in an irrational situation.
A story about an expo at London Olympia comes to mind. Most recently its organisation has been fine, but years before it went through a phase of having 100-yard, half-hour queues to enter. The worst I remember was a crush at an entrance. It was either my finest or least fine hour as a journalist because I was not going to miss what was starting inside, so I joined a slightly quicker VIP queue that I was not entitled to. That does show how a mishandled situation caused order to further break down as people take the law into their own hands. A man in vain was trying to keep the VIP lane pure – what was he going to do, send me to the back, when we were packed like sardines?!
The crush and long wait to enter was due to the organisers having too few lanes for throughput of visitors of x-ray screening machines, and, or, too few printers to print our tickets; after we presented our ID as proof of identity for permission to get a ticket printed. As that validating of each of us (done perfunctorily because the staff could see what a state the event was in) and the printing took x amount of time to print out one visitor’s ticket, and a screening lane could only process y people per minute, given all those waiting at 9am, it was certain that a crush would ensue for some time. Quite apart from the poor customer service, the hundreds of people on a west London pavement made an ideal target for a nutter suicide bomber – embarrassing for a security gathering.
Angry at it all, I said something of this to a woman next to me, who from her badge appeared to be a visitor and a quite senior security manager. The gist of her reply was that she trusted that the organisers had good reason and knew what they were doing. Yet the evidence of our eyes was that they did not. Security and other people have to be prepared to see things for as they are and raise the alarm, when something is wrong in this country, because otherwise even worse things can and do happen. Hillsboroughs. Grenfell Towers.
