A LESSON IN SECRETS ~ MAISIE DOBBS #8 ~ Jacqueline Winspear

A LESSON IN SECRETS finds Maisie Dobb’s career as PI taking an exciting new turn when she is recruited by the British Secret Service to pose as a Philosophy Professor at Cambridge University. Her remit is to discover if there is anything going on that is “not in the interests of His Majesty’s Government.”

And so author Jacqueline Winspear invents the fictional St. Francis college, named after St. Francis of Assisi and dedicated to peace. Maisie Dobbs arrives in the Autumn of 1932 to carry out her duties, and rather to her surprise finds that she is a popular teacher, who enjoys spending time with her students. The founder of the college – Greville Liddicote – is regarded as a hero in Pacifist circles for writing a children’s book during the Great War that questions the whole idea of fighting. Needless to say, the publication of this book caused ructions, and lead to at least one mutiny.

While the above-mentioned is completely fictional – there is no St Francis College at Cambridge University, and a children’s book did not cause a mutiny – nevetheless it does capture the Zeitgeist of the time.  As war progressed and as losses mounted higher and higher with the British army experiencing nearly 60,000 casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916), it is scarcely surprising that the men were increasingly reluctant to fight. I have been to the Somme myself and understand that British and French generals were ordering their men up out of the trenches and into a hail of gunfire from the German army which had captured all of the high ground. Ordering young men to an almost certain death seems entriely crazy. And yet, that was what the First World War was like. No wonder that so many people – including war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfried Owen – were so furious.

And so it is true, that by 1917, the French generals were finding it increasingly impossible to get their troops to fight as mutinies within the French Army were legion. Somehow the powers-that-be managed to conceal this fact from the British Army, which was not that far away, and was more biddable. 

It is also true that there were many conscientious objectors during the First World War, including philosopher Bertrand Russell. True also that these people were treated with the greatest disdain as the majority saw their refusal to fight as the disgraceful behavior of cowards. (At least 250 British soldiers were shot for desertion.) Of course some of these people were suffering from what was then termed “Shell Shock” or “Neurasthenia.” Today we call the condition PTSD.

But what really shocked me was the notion that so many young people in Britain in 1932 were already admirers of Hitler. Young people formed organizations dedicated to his ideaology. Young people defended his views in debates. What is so shocking that all of this took place before Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933.

And what did the parents and grandparents of these young people think? Unfortunately, too many of them told themselves the Nazis posed no threat, because they didn’t do anything violent. And wasn’t it just a passing fad anyway? The real danger, the powers-that-be told anyone who would listen, was the Red Menace.  

And so, Britain drifted into the disaster of World War II.

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