Introduction to our February talk, by our speaker, Barnaby Phillips

I'm a broadcaster and writer. I was born in the UK, raised in Kenya and Switzerland, and studied History at Oxford, with a Masters in African Politics and Geography from London.

I worked for the BBC from 1991-2006. During this time I was a producer at the BBC World Service, and freelance reporter ('stringer') in Mozambique (1993-4) and Angola (1997). Later I became a BBC Correspondent in Nigeria (1998-2001) and Southern Africa (2001-2006). During this time I travelled and reported from countries across Africa. I speak fluent French and Portuguese.

In 2006 I joined the new Al Jazeera English television station, where I'm now a Senior Correspondent. I was based in Athens from 2006-2011, and have been living back in London for the last four years.  With Al Jazeera I've reported from across the world; including Japan, India, Burma, Africa, the Middle East and the United States, although the main focus of my work has been in Europe, recently concentrating on the migration and Eurozone crises. 

My talk

My talk will be will be about a forgotten aspect of the Second World War; how Britain took 100,000 African soldiers to the jungles of Burma to fight against the Japanese. These were the so-called ‘Burma Boys’.  In particular, I will tell the story of Isaac Fadoyebo, who signed up as a 16 year old in rural Nigeria in 1942. He was shipped to India the following year. In March 1944, in Burma, Isaac was horribly injured in a jungle ambush deep behind Japanese lines. His British officers were killed and so were many African colleagues. Too sick to even crawl, Isaac was saved by a family of courageous Burmese rice farmers who hid and fed him for 9 months, before his eventual rescue by the British. Isaac returned to Nigeria in 1945, where he lived a life of respectable obscurity. Many decades later, in his final years, Isaac became my friend in Lagos;  at his urging I went to Burma, carrying a letter of thanks and photographs for the family who'd saved him and of whom he'd been thinking these past seven decades.

Through Isaac’s tale, I will look at the bigger picture. Were these African soldiers volunteers, or were they forced to fight for King and Empire? How were they treated by the British, and how did they fare afterwards? What impact did their experiences have on them and on Independence Struggles after the War? I hope to make your audience think about the Second World War in new and less Eurocentric ways; from the perspective of a Nigerian youth or a Burmese rice farmer it was more a struggle of dying Empires than a heroic stand against fascism.

My book 'Another Man's War: The Story of A Burma Boy in Britain's Forgotten African Army' tells this story. 

Some useful links

For those who are interested in background reading, here are some reviews/articles about the book.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/09/another-mans-war-by-barnaby-phillips-review/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11093145/Another-Mans-War-by-Barnaby-Phillips-review-profoundly-moving.html

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/16/from-nigeria-to-burma-jungle-courage-and-compassion-in-war-with-japan-vj-day

'Another Man's War' was published in late 2014, and was chosen by NPR in the US as 'One of The Best Books of 2014' and by the Daily Telegraph in the UK as 'One of the Best History Books of 2014' . It's now out in paperback and on kindle- Amazon link with reader's reviews is here

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Another-Mans-War-Britains-Forgotten/dp/1780745222/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405695837&sr=1-2&keywords=another+man%27s+war

And for those with a bit more time on their hands- I made an award winning documentary about Isaac Fadoyebo and the Burma Boys in 2011 for Al Jazeera English (a couple of years before I wrote the book).  It's free online, 45 minutes long, and all are welcome to watch 

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeracorrespondent/2011/08/2011828135228487172.html

A couple of other links if people are keen- 

my own website is 

http://barnabyphillips.com/

and if you want to hear an interview with me by Justin Webb on the BBC R4 Today Programme on this story it's here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-29106435

Book and film review, by Hugh Arbuthnott

Sunset Song

By Lewis Grassic Gibbon

“Lewis Grassic Gibbon was born James Leslie Mitchell at the dawn of the twentieth century in 1901 in Aberdeenshire. Spending most of his childhood in Arbuthnott, a farming community in the Mearns, his family and community's tie to the land was to create a love-hate relationship between this area and the writer which lasted until his early death in 1935.”

This passage is taken from the beginning of a BBC article from a series on its website about Scottish writing. It is a good article about the author and in particular about his trilogy A Scots Quair (quair means book) of which Sunset Song is the first volume and thought generally to be the best of the three. It is certainly the most read and was voted Best Scottish Book of All Time at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2006. The other two books are called Cloud Howe and Grey Granite. I should explain here that, in the quote above, the BBC refers  to Aberdeenshire  but in 1901 the area was in Kincardineshire, also known as The Mearns (see the entry for Kincardineshire in Wikipedia).

The story of Sunset Song is of a girl called Chris Guthrie who was born and brought up on the fictional farming estate of Kinraddie, which presumably is loosely based on the Arbuthnott estate and Arbuthnott village where Mitchell first went to school. Life is hard for the tenant farmers and Chris grows up in a community whose farms are frequently hit by disasters, natural or man-made. Her father is a hard man, a patriarch who orders his family about and beats his son for disobeying him while reducing his wife to a “breeding sow” who commits suicide by poisoning herself and her most recent twin babies when she finds she is pregnant again.

When her father dies, Chris marries a local boy, Ewan Taverner, has a baby and faming life continues until the outbreak of war in 1914 when Ewan joins the army. Before going to France, he returns from his training camp, drunk, belligerent and demanding.  Chris is appalled and turns her back on him when he departs at the end of his leave. The next news she has of him is that he has been killed in France but it turns out that he has been shot for desertion – seeking to escape back to the Mearns and the smells of the countryside he knew so well – and perhaps to Chris also. 

The book is written in a version of the Kincardineshire dialect, with some of the spelling changed to make it easier to understand by any English-speaker. The prose is breathless and poetic. The most important message in the book is that everything changes except the land and the seasons. The film, directed by Terence Davies, has tried to capture all these qualities, although he hasn’t tried to force all the actors to stick closely to the dialect.  There are some superb shots of the countryside but it isn’t clear whether it is indeed Kincardineshire or New Zealand where some of the filming took place. This allowed the director to film the farming folk tripping far too often through ripe, waving corn (about which no farmer would have been at all happy) although it was winter in Britain when filming was under way. Parts were also filmed  in Luxembourg, perhaps because some of the financing, which Davies found it difficult to get together, came from the Luxembourg Film Fund. The film lasts for two and a quarter hours which is too long; the director often indulged himself in long, lingering shots of fields, forests and views of interiors. He has here indeed been faithful to the book but somehow the written descriptions are more readable than the film’s meanderings are watchable. Where he was less true to the book, I felt, was in a sequence showing Ewan’s last hours before he is taken out and shot, an episode which is given far more prominence than in the book; perhaps Davies wanted to show how horrific he found the shooting of deserters in WWI, while the author’s treatment of the episode implies that Ewan should have expected nothing else.

The acting was good. Agyness Deyn, a former model who is a relative newcomer to films, played Chris Guthrie and very well. Peter Mullan is her father and although some of the reviews I have read say he plays a stereotype of other recent roles he has had, we hadn’t seen him before and thought he got it right.

Vanessa and I were glad to have seen the film. Of course, this was partly for personal reasons but also because it is a book which I have long admired. If you are ever up in that part of the world, it is worth visiting the Lewis Grassic Gibbon Centre in Arbuthnott village to learn more about the author and the locality. The village is just south of Stonehaven, between Aberdeen and Montrose.

Hugh Arbuthnott

3 Jan 2016

Gratitude by Oliver Sachs 45pp, £9.99 (£4.72 Kindle) Book review by Lawrence Youlten

Oliver Sachs died a few months ago, and this short book comprises four short essays on the themes of mortality and how to assess the contribution of one’s life to the world one is shortly to leave. I have long been a fan of Sachs’s books. He was born in 1933, so is one of my generation, and though we never met, we lived in the same area of North London in our formative years. He was a practising physician in New York until shortly before his death.  He is a wonderfully clear and entertaining writer. Probably his best-known books are “The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat” and “Awakenings”. The latter was made into an award-winning feature film starring Robin Williams and Robert de Niro. Both deal with his work as a neurologist, both as a clinician and a researcher. He has also written an entertaining memoir of his childhood as part of an observant Orthodox Jewish family, “Uncle Tungsten”, and recently a more comprehensive autobiography, “On the Move”.

“Gratitude” is a short book that can easily be read at one sitting, and, as I have already discovered, repays rereading. Of particular interest was his account of how an atheist who has turned his back on his strict religious upbringing makes sense of the world and his place in it. He deals with the sensitive subject of how he broke the news that he was gay to his parents. His mother’s reaction to this seems extraordinary from the perspective of time, but would, I think, have been quite usual in the 1950s. If you have ever wondered how you would cope with the fact of imminent death, you should find a lot of interest and reassurance in “Gratitude”