Starter for 12: Beginning at the Beginning.

Crowds cheer and wave outside Buckingham Palace on the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

If you’re starting at Southfields Community College as a Year 12 Student on Tuesday, congratulations: you’ve read your Starter Pack! Welcome to our AS literature course. You’ve been directed here because this is the blog that we use to help prepare you for your exam at the end of the year. We’re excited to have you on board.

Before you move on to the task set for you here, why not roam around the website. Start with our Welcome page at the bottom of the ‘Recent Posts’ column you’ll find on the right– it briefly explains the subject of the course and the purpose of this blog. Check out some of the articles on Move Him Into the Sun relating to the First World War, and note how last year’s students used them to engage in discussion (‘Poppy Wars’ gives you a flavour of the kind of interesting things we find ourselves debating). Click on words and phrases in the ‘Category Cloud’ and ‘Themes, Issues and Events’ boxes to introduce yourself to some of the recurrent themes in our study of First World War literature. If you’d like, you can even ask me a question by clicking on the ‘Ask Mr. Griffiths’ tab at the top of the blog. I can’t promise you a satisfactory answer, but I’ll do my best to help you! Take a look around– see what interests you.

We’ll be using this blog throughout the year to widen our reading and search for meaning in the poetry and prose that we read, its unifying subject: the First World War.

Now, I don’t know how much you know about the First World War. I don’t know anything about the First World War! you may be thinking. I’ve made a terrible mistake! might follow on from this. Goodbye, cruel world! would almost certainly be an excessive reaction, and if you’re thinking this, I’d call a doctor. But don’t panic. I find that most people who begin the course know little about the conflict: one year a student asked me if Henry VIII was king when the war started. She ended the year with a ‘B’ and went on to write one of the best A2 essays I’ve ever read. Ignorance is no crime: and why are you doing an A-level, if not to learn?

By the end of the year you’ll know the history of the war, through the study of the many brilliant poems, books, memoirs and plays written by those effected by it. The only crime is to be incurious– or to dismiss the subject before you start. I’m not interested in the First World War! you may object. Here I quote Yoda from Star Wars: “You will be. You will be”. Why? Because there is no aspect of your life, or that of countless millions of others, that has not been affected by this conflict. You just don’t know why yet.

Off you go. Take a look around.

Back again? Excellent.

In ‘Starter for 12’  I’m going to post some links to some websites that will help you get to grips with how the First World War started. We’ll begin at the beginning, with the origins of the First World War.

The origins of the First World War are, to someone new to the subject, very difficult to grasp. The war began almost a hundred years ago, in a world very different from our own. Nations handled their foreign policies in a way that seems, well, foreign to us. People felt patriotic in a way we find hard to understand. Many welcomed the outbreak of war: they were excited by it. These things can seem very strange at a distance. Yet, as difficult as it can be, I’d like you to try and acquaint yourself with some of the explanations for how the war began. It’s going to be tough, but… let’s try and be smarter than Baldrick!

"There must've been a moment when not being a war on went away, right, and being a war on came along."

Over at FirstWorldWar.com you’ll find a good summary of the events that led up to the outbreak of World War One. Read ‘How It Began’, ‘The Causes of World War One’, ‘Archduke Ferdinand’s Assassination’ and ‘The July Crisis’. Don’t worry if it’s all too much too take in at once; but make notes to help you understand the European Alliance system that so disastrously led to war. You’ll also find two articles on the BBC website that help explain the origins of the war: the first, by Dr Gary Sheffield, argues that war with an aggressive and autocratic Germany was inevitable: a little controversial, but well argued. The second, by Dan Cruikshank, conveys the fear of German militarism that existed in Britain before the war.

I’ll ask to see the notes you’ve made from these websites in the lesson we have on Wednesday.

If you have access to Youtube, you’ll find some interesting documentaries that can give you a broad idea of what life in Britain was like before the war. The best one for our purposes is Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain: The Road to War. Watch this to understand the social tensions in Britain from 1906 to 1914: and, if you’ve got time, you might even go on to watch its follow-up, ‘The Great War’. Again, as a matter of good practice, you should make notes to help you contextualise the poetry, books and plays that you are going to read.

I will, of course, give you further information and extracts that will help explain how ‘the War to end all Wars’ began. This ‘Starter for 12’ task, however, is a crucial opportunity for you to inform yourself on how it all began– and impress us with your enthusiasm and ability to take on this, your English Literature AS level.

We begin, as we must, with history. Yet within the week we’ll be reading together some of the marvellous poetry that the terrible and momentous First World War has given us.

So here’s to you, Tony Robinson… ‘The Somme’s Secret Weapon’ (and Private Baldrick)

"I've got a cunning plan."

What a life it must be for Tony Robinson.

He’s been on British TV fronting ‘Time Team’ — a well-regarded archaeology program– for 17 years now. He’s been politically active his whole life, and involved in countless campaigning movements: indeed, for four years, 2000-04, he was elected to the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee. He’s been vice-chair of the actor’s union, Equity. Everything points to him having lived a full and varied life.

Yet, and I guarantee you this, if you were to bump into him in the street, all you could think of saying to him, after a well placed nudge in the ribs, is this: “I’ve got a cunning plan”.

Yes, he may have last played Baldrick in a ‘Blackadder’ series in 1989, but it is– and perhaps always will be– as the unfortunate servant to Rowan Atkinson’s hereditary snake that the British nation will remember him. You last saw him (I hope, because the one-offs were dreadful) as Captain Blackadder’s unfortunate batman, Private Baldrick, in one of the finest series of Blackadder, ‘Blackadder Goes Forth’. As a student of the Great War in literature and drama you will have seen this already, of course. Blackadder was, after all, the best UK comedy series of the past 25 years (no arguing at the back). If you haven’t seen it, you can learn how not to make a coffee in the trenches with Baldrick’s help, here.

Hmm. Too much talk of Baldrick. I was, rather, going to draw your attention to Tony Robinson’s longest-running role: as the presenter of ‘Time Team’. This week, ‘Time Team’ presented a special on ‘The Somme’s Secret Weapon’, a program that you can find over at Four On Demand.

The show usually follows a simple formula: Tony Robinson takes a team of archaeologists to a site which is suspected of hiding archaeological riches. ‘The Somme’s Secret Weapon’ does the same, taking us to a battlefield site in France near Mametz Wood where, on the 1st of July 1916, a terrible new weapon was used by the British as part of that most famous of ‘big pushes’, the battle of the Somme. The team goes in search of the remains of an experimental weapon called the Livens Flame Projector, a monstrous flame thrower used to empty the German trenches before the attack by British troops. I won’t spoil the show for you, but suffice to say: if you are not normally interested in archaeology, Robinson and his team do very well to bring this project– and the frontline trenches– alive for you.

One of the ways that they do this is through experimental archaeology. I only know the term from Ms. Thornton, the very intelligent woman with whom I teach English A-level at Southfields. Ms. Thornton, as well as being a brilliant English teacher, is an archaeology student at Birkbeck College, London (incidentally, Isaac Rosenberg’s university too). Experimental archaeology involves recreating the tools and tool-making processes used in the past, and she has done this as part of her archaeological work– smelting metal and making bronze arrow heads with little more than ore, baked mud, clay and dung. This to me sounds rather groovy, like MacGyver in the bronze age. Robinson’s team attempt something similar but larger, with the help of the Royal Engineers, 2,700 litres of Kerosene and diesel, bespoke pipeline and hoses– and two oxy-acetylene blow-torches. Don’t expect the kind of feel-good schmaltz that you normally get at the end of these ‘mission’ documentaries– what the Time Team recreate is something amazing, yet ultimately quite sickening.

This Time Team special certainly makes the First World War come alive– and in the most disturbing way. Here’s to you, Tony Robinson.

 

[Edited July 2011: Tony Robinson featured this week on Desert Island Discs, talking about his life and work. To learn a little bit more about the man who did more than just play Baldrick, have a listen to the show here.]