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Recently, we’ve been remembering the two World Wars: rationing, evacuees, bombs, black-outs…

 I thought I’d jot down a few of the family stories my parents told me about their war-time experiences because they seem, to me, a little different to the image of the war years we are fed by more ‘official’ history.

My grandad, George Price was born in 1900 and so was too young for the First War. At fourteen, he was already the wage-earner of the family. He left school and started work at 12 because his father, a miner, was out of work. He lived with his family in a row of cottages with slate roofs.

Grandad at the brickyard. He's on the right. No idea who the other two are.

At the time there was a tremendous scare about zeppelins, which were expected to float overhead at any moment, dropping explosives or incendaries. My youthful Grandad’s contribution to the war effort was to take the metal dustbin lids and shy them up onto the roofs. They landed on the slates with a terrific echoing clash and then slid and bounced down the slates making a din you can imagine.

My Grandad and his mates drew deep breaths and yelled, “Zeppelins!” The cottage doors were flung open and people came running out, the women with their aprons flung over their heads. (This sounds like a Dickensian joke but I’m assured that — for reasons I find hard to comprehend — many women used to do this when alarmed. I can only imagine that it was something like Zaphod Beeblebrox’s peril-sensitive sunglasses: what you can’t see can’t frighten you.) When the sober elders saw the youths doubled over with laughter, they were not pleased. Grandad and friends waited a few days and then did it again — and again, until the only reaction was, “That bloody Price kid needs a good hiding.”

I’m told that when an elder of ‘the row’ found out that it was George Price who’d invented the prank, he was not surprised. “The brighter they am,” the elder observed, “the more ways they can think of to make trouble.” Grandad was also well-known for disturbing peaceful evenings by knocking on doors and politely asking what the time was. The factory at the end of the row had an enormous clock over its gate.

When I was told this story, I was always given the impression that the neighbours' fear of zeppelins was unfounded: that they were being rather silly and that the dustbin lids rattling down the slates was a great joke on them.

I've since found that this wasn't the case at all. The neighbours had very good reason to fear zeppelins as the nearby towns of Wolverhampton and Walsall, about ten miles away, had very recently been bombed by zeppelins.

It happened on January 31st, 1916 and the zeppelin L21 was heading for Liverpool but became disorientated. The crew were looking for the Manchester ship canal as a landmark and, thinking they were further north than they were, mistook one of the Black Country's many canals for the one they were searching for. The bombing killed 67 people and injured many more.

 This puts another complexion on my 16-year old grandad's little joke. I'm inclined to think he should have had a good hiding -- although as he'd been the family breadwinner for four years, nobody was going to do it.

George Price grew up to marry Elsie Savage. I'm told they first met when his younger sisters invited her round. George (when not shying dustbin lids onto roofs) was a quiet man who liked to eat his meal and read his paper in silence. The girls were talking and laughing and annoying him. He told them to be quiet. Elsie stood up, put her hands on her hips and said something like, "You're not the boss of me, George Price!" He folded his newspaper, got up and threw them all out of the house.

But reader, she married him and it was a long and, as far as I know, happy marriage. They had two children: my father and aunt who were ten and five respectively when the Second World War broke out. Many accounts of the war give the impression that all city and town children of this age were evacuated. Certainly the Black Country, as a centre of industry, was heavily bombed and some neighbours’ children were evacuated. But my Grandad absolutely refused to consider it. He is reported as saying, to neighbours, “You can send your kids away to strangers if you like but mine am staying with me. Whatever’s coming, we’ll all go through it together and I shall know where they am and what’s happening to them.”

The 'formidable' Elsie Price - author's own photo

Since my Grandmother Price was anything but meek — ‘formidable’ is usually the word that people find themselves using to describe her — I can only conclude that she was in complete agreement with this. My aunt suspects, for various reasons, that there was sexual abuse in her mother’s family. There was certainly physical abuse. The refusal to send their children away to live with complete strangers may have been my Grandmother’s idea.

Elsie worked all her life -- in fact, she had quite a career, going from canteen worker to supervisor of School Meals for Oldbury (at a time when that meant cooking real meals in kitchens and coming up with a menu that supplied most of the daily nutritional requirements of a child.) She also became a Cordon Bleu cook and managed the VIP dining room at a company which entertained customers from all over the world.

But during WW2 she managed a canteen at Accles & Pollocks, where they made parts for Spitfires and Hurricanes. "I'd much rather have women work for me," she said. "A woman does what you ask her to do, and when she's finished, looks round, sees what else is to be done and gets on with it. A man does what you tell him to do and when he's finished, he goes outside for a smoke." (I'm saying nothing.)

When the air-raid sirens sounded, Elsie was supposed to go into the works' shelter. Instead she went outside and ran through the streets to home, with shrapnel ricocheting off the walls and pavements as the anti-aircraft guns fired. She wanted to join her children in their own shelter.

After she'd done this a few times, someone she worked with told my Grandad what she was doing and he told her, angrily, that she wasn't ever to do that again. What was her being missing from their shelter a few times compared to her being killed by shrapnel or a bomb and never coming home again? I suppose Elsie saw the point, as she started going into the works' shelter.

I'll end with an alleged joke. This is an heirloom joke, worth one and sixpence, passed down to me through generations.

A VIP, visiting A&P, stopped beside a workman and asked, "How many fighters do you make here in a week, my man?"

"Oh, hundreds," the man said. "Hundreds, easy."

"My word! You make hundreds of Spitfires a week?"

"Spitfires? -- Oh, you said fighters. I thought you said, 'lighters'."

(The men who worked at A&P often used the machinery and materials to make cigarette-lighters  which they traded or sold.)

I usually post for Authors Electric and, a little while ago, my colleague, Griselda Heppel, wrote there about how annoying it is when people make wild unsubstantiated guesses about Shakespeare's life, based on very little evidence.

For instance, he left his wife his 'second best bed,' so, obviously, he didn't think much of her. And she was eight years older than him so, obviously it was an unwanted marriage of convenience. And he went away to be a playwright in London, so quite plainly, he hated the sight of her.

Any of these statements may be true. But it's just as likely that they aren't. They are much made out of very little.

The idea that Bill didn't get on with Anne because he was young and carefree and she was such a grumpy old hag is based solely on a line in Twelfth Night: 'Let still the woman take an elder than herself.' This is seized on as a hot-line to Shakespeare's heart. Aha! This is him regretting his unwise marriage and letting slip what he really thought.

Never mind that Shakespeare was putting words into the mouths of characters and making stuff up, never mind that it's just one among thousands of lines that he wrote. Perhaps he did believe that it was a mistake for a man to marry an older woman. But I have just as much evidence (none), to state that it was an in-joke between Shakespeare, Anne and their crowd. In my small circle of friends - to take a random sample - there are three very happy marriages where the wife is several years older than the husband. They sometimes joke about it - one older wife recently promised her 'boy' some pocket-money from her pension to buy sweeties.

Then there's the 'fact' that Shakespeare ran away to London to escape the crone. What's this based on? Nothing. We have exactly no idea how often Shakespeare went home to the country, or Anne made a trip into town. We have plenty of marriages today where one partner lives away from home for part of the time, perhaps even in a different country and yet some of those marriages survive. Travel was harder in the past, but people still travelled long distances very often - recent archaeology has shown that animals raised in the Orkneys were eaten during feasts at Stonehenge. How did these animals get from the Orkneys to Salisbury Plain? Clue: they didn't go by Ryan Air.

In the past there were also plenty of marriages where one or the other partner was absent for a long time. Ships made long sea-crossings, Vikings viked, fish-wives travelled from town to town, drovers were away for months as they droved cattle to market. It's certainly not out of the question that Shakespeare went home quite often -- and he obviously didn't cut all ties with Stratford, since he returned there and built himself a big house. His wife was one of those ties.

And that infamous 'second-best bed.' We only know of this bed because, in his will, Bill bequeathed it to Anne. From this, some people have concluded that, since he only considered her deserving of second-best, Bill didn't like Anne very much. Reading of this, my uxorious father commented, "Maybe it was the most comfortable bed." Which is entirely possible. Beds were a bit of a status symbol at the time -- if you were nobody, you slept on a straw-filled mattress on the floor. Or even, in pele towers, in a horizontal slot in the wall - where, I suppose, at least you were out of the draughts. The 'best bed' would have been the most showy and expensive, the one with the most carving and the most embroidered curtains. The one you put guests in. 'Best' doesn't always mean the most comfortable or the favourite.

It never seems to have crossed the minds of historians who take this line that Shakespeare may have discussed his will with his wife and the bed known in the family as 'the second-best bed' was the one she wanted. There is exactly as much evidence to back this view as the one that supposes it was Bill being spiteful.

Then there are all the guesses made about Shakespeare's 'lost years.' He must have spent them as an ostler because his plays reveal knowledge about horses. Some nautical terms are used in The Tempest, so he must have been a sailor. He mentions some weaponry and tactics, so he must have been a soldier.

I think anyone who's written any fiction can see through these arguments. Writers are experts in making much of little, so I doubt Shakespeare was a slouch at it.

I have myself been praised to my face for the knowledge of riding and weaponry revealed in my Sterkarm books and I don't know how I kept my face straight. Riding and weaponry -- two subjects of which I know even less, I would guess, than Shakespeare knew about sailing.

The Sterkarm Handshake

My reiver family, the Sterkarms spend a great deal of their life riding, so I knew I was going to have to mention horses now and again. There's one dodge always available to a fiction writer -- when something is so much a part of a character's life, they take it for granted and don't often gab on about it. As I type these words, I'm not thinking about the pros and cons of Microsoft versus Apple. So if the POV is Per Sterkarm, he's not going to detail every step in saddling and bridling his horse, or grooming it. He just does it, in his sleep if necessary, and goes on his way.

What's needed is not pages of detail but a few little telling points to mention in passing, to slip in between lines of dialogue, that will give many readers the impression that I know all of what I write, while, in fact, knowing almost nothing. Someone mounting, say, and then leaning down from the saddle to tighten the saddle-girth. And a bit of terming, like 'girth' helps as well.

Where do I find these details? Well, some are cribbed from books and, these days, from the internet. But the best little tid-bits always come from talking to people who know far, far more than I do. So, a big thank you from me to Karen Bush and Katherine Roberts of this parish, who are both excellent riders and know all sorts of good stuff. Karen, in particular, did me a big favour in reading A Sterkarm Tryst and correcting everything horse-related as well as giving me a few more details.

A Sterkarm Tryst

Shakespeare didn't have to work as an ostler to gain knowledge about horses. In his time and until quite recently, nearly all land transport involved horses. My grandfather was an ostler, which is how I  learned that odd word. ('Your grandad's first job was as an ostler.' -  'What's an ostler?') Grandad worked with the giant percherons who pulled the carts of a local brewery and I learned a few odd little horsey facts from stories about him. When Shakespeare needed a few similar pointers, I doubt he had to search very hard for an ostler to chat to. It must have been impossible to turn round without bumping into one.

The same goes for his 'knowledge' of ships and their ways. He lived in London. Wharfs and warehouses lined the north bank of the Thames near London Bridge and the Tower. Ships came and went all the time. There would have been sailors of different ranks in his audiences.

And my own vaunted knowledge of weaponry? For a while I was friendly with a couple of fellas who seemed to spend their every spare minute re-enacting. Most of the time they were Roman legionnaires and had impressive suits of Roman armour. But they often helped out another group at by pretending to be Americans in WW2. At the drop of a helmet, they would go and be Vietnam Vets. Now they were very knowledgeable about weapons. So I asked them: If it was necessary to equip mercenaries at short notice and on the cheap, what weapons would be supplied?

Without taking a moment to draw breath, they said, "Kalashnikovs." And went on to explain why. And, generally, the pros and cons of kalishnikovs. They did even better -- they borrowed a replica kalishniknov and let me feel how heavy it was, and showed me how to take it apart and slam it back together.

I lost touch with them but remain grateful and hope they are still happily marching behind the eagle all these years later. I went home and wove all they'd told me in and out of dialogue and background in my book. I made much out of little.

The joy of it is, that people who know far more about these subjects than I will ever do, read these little asides and often conclude that I know as much about riding or weapons as they do.

Much out of little. I'd put money on Shakespeare being a master of it. No clues or hints about his life taken from his plays can be trusted. All you can conclude from some mention of horse-doctoring or cannonades or sails being shortened is that Bill had probably been chatting in the pub again.

"You know when you're out at sea and a storm blows up, yeah? Like, whaddaya do?"

Warning: This blog is much longer than usual, but it reviews a fascinating book.


          Why does the human race - supposedly intelligent - keep fighting wars, despite all that can be said against the habit?
          Why do empires, such as the Roman and the British, periodically rise and then fall or fade away?
           Why do leaders such as Alexander, Napoleon and Hitler periodically arise to lead their people into war -- and why do the people willingly, even eagerly, follow them?
          Why has Europe been, for centuries, a 'cockpit of war'? And revolution. 
          Can the EU prevent such 'Wars of Civilisation' in the future?
          Why are so many vicious, murderous political gangs -- I could say 'IRA' or  'Baader Meinhof' or 'Daesh' -- drawn from the nicely brought up and spoken boys and girls of the middle-classes? Who, on the face of it, have comfortable lives and little need to fight for 'freedom.'
          And why, in every part of the world and at all times, have the poor always had many more children than the rich, despite being less able to afford them? Why does contraception and education make little difference to this trend?

          All these many questions, and more, can be answered very simply, according to Paul Colinvaux in his 'The Fates of Nations.' The answer is: Niche-Space and Breeding Strategy.

          Colinvaux was an ecologist, and The Fates of Nations answers all these questions by applying the rules of ecology, not to salmon or brown bears or wildebeeste, but to that other animal, the Naked Ape.

          Colinvaux defines 'niche-space' as 'a specific set of capabilities for extracting resources, for surviving hazards and for competing; coupled with a corresponding set of needs.' It describes not only the amount of physical space an animal requires to live naturally and healthily, but also the animals' requirements in terms of climate, type and amount of food, type and size of home or lair and so on. Each species has evolved to dove-tail into its niche-space. For instance, camels live in places short of water, and have evolved an ability to store water in their bodies and live without access to water for longer than most other species.

         Some niche-spaces are larger than others. An acre of land can support many hundreds of deer, if there is enough water and vegetation. It gives them all they need.
          However, that same lush, well-watered acre would not support a single tiger. As a dedicated carnivore, a tiger needs access to many, many deer to feed itself. Deer run away from tigers and many are too fast to be caught. Also, all deer become skittish when there's a predator about. So a tiger needs to be able to shift ground frequently, to find more unsuspecting prey. Every single tiger needs a large territory, which it will defend from others.
          This is, as Colinvaux put in in the memorable title of another of his books, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare. Long before humans became a plague on the earth, before tigers' habitat was remotely threatened, long before they could be efficiently slaughtered for the supposed medicinal value of their bones, even then, tigers were still rare compared to deer or mice or strawberry plants. They were rare because they had a comparatively wide niche-space. Making a living as a tiger demands a lot of resources in terms of space and prey animals.
          Colinvaux calculates that when humans were living their natural, Ice-Age life, as hunter-gatherers, they were about as common as bears. That is, more common than tigers, because bears and humans are omnivorous and will stoop to eating fruit, vegetables and grubs, but a lot rarer than deer or mice.

That's Niche-Space. Then there's Breeding Strategy.
          Every species that has ever lived has always had the same breeding strategy: to have as many off-spring as it's possible to raise to adulthood.
          For most animals, this is more or less fixed, so much so that naturalists can write of the 'typical' litter or clutch size for a particular species. This is because an animal's niche-space is usually fixed. As Colinvaux puts it, a squirrel, or any other kind of animal, is 'highly tuned to a very specialized profession.' A squirrel cannot decide that, hey, it would rather be a tiger -- any more than a tiger can decide that it would like to try out life as a dolphin.
          Evolution has therefore roughly fixed the optimum number of off-spring an animal can have. A very good year may result in birds producing a second clutch of eggs or other animals having a second litter, but that's an exception. In a bad year, when the land can't support the numbers, the animals starve and the population falls. The population of predators is linked to that of their prey. A good year for mice and deer means a good year for wolves and foxes -- and vice versa.

Evolution has also fixed the approach most species take to child-rearing: low-investment or high-investment. Low investment species, such as salmon, spawn and fertilise hundreds of eggs at a time. Almost all of them will be eaten, either as eggs or fry. One or two might survive and that's all that matters. The salmon might have made an almighty effort to reach its spawning place but once the eggs are laid, it troubles itself no further about its off-spring.
          High-investment species, such as bears, cats and naked apes have one or two off-spring at a time, and they invest a lot of time and effort in feeding and training them. It's a high-risk strategy because, in a bad year, the off-spring might die or be killed to ensure the survival of older off-spring or the parents. Some animals are known to kill and eat their young if faced with a threat to their own survival. Colinvaux argues that early humans almost certainly regulated their population not only by leaving granny on the ice-flow, but by leaving junior with her. Historically, we know that people frequently abandoned children they did not think they could afford to raise.

Changing Niche Space

Animals can't change their niche-space - not by themselves, anyway. Some have become domesticated, some have learned to live alongside humans, but that came about as a result of human actions
          The Naked Ape, however, learned to change its niche-space, and has done so repeatedly.

The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris

          First, they were nomadic hunter-gatherers, as common as bears. But they learned to hunt and gather in almost every part of the world -- in the Europe of the Ice Ages, in the rain forest and deserts of Australia, in Africa, on Siberian tundra, in the far North of Alaska. In doing so, they increased the niche-space of their species. Probably no other species occupies as many different habitats as humans do.
          But this population was still limited by the resources available to hunter-gatherers. They followed the high-investment breeding strategy of having one or two children at a time, and spending much time rearing them. As with all other animal species, their population increased during good times, when more children were born and survived but crashed during bad times when fewer mothers were in condition to give birth and more children died. So the population remained relatively stable.

But then, astonishingly, these animals learned to stop hunting and to herd the animals they needed, whether reindeer, or goats or cattle. They maintained the population of their prey-animals by protecting them from other predators and helping them to find food. This meant that the naked apes themselves could confidently expect to raise more children to adulthood because there was a more certain food supply. Their population increased -- and increased, because it was much less effected by bad years.
          Moving from hunter-gatherers to herders meant an increase in niche-space: more resources were available. But, as ever, the increase in resources was soon absorbed by the increased population.

Not to worry, though, because herding led on to settled farming, another huge increase in niche-space. Now, not only were the prey animals kept in one place, protected and provided with food, but the neccessary plant foods were too. Food could be produced more efficiently, and also stored more efficiently when it didn't have to be carried with a nomadic group, or hidden in caches.
          These were huge changes in life-style for the naked ape but the breeding strategy remained the same. A great many more naked apes were created to take advantage of the increased niche-space, but not to worry. The creation of settled communities and city-states also created lots of little nooks and crannies in the niche-space.
          Greater food security meant more time to develop new technologies -- the smelting of metals, stone-masonry, ship-building. Mastery of these technologies meant status and a livelihood. They created a new 'niche-space' which absorbed many among the growing population who had not inherited land from which to produce food.
          New governing classes, priest and warrior castes were more niche-spaces, all provided livings.

City State - wiki

Niche Space Runs Out

But eventually, as the population grows, there comes pressure on resources. So long as there's enough space in the world to enable more land to be cleared or mined, this isn't a problem -- but if there's another city-state over there -- and another one over there -- then the solution is more difficult.
          One way of avoiding the problem of shrinking niche-space is to impose a very strict caste or class system. Most societies of Naked Ape have tried this, in some form, at many different times over the centuries. For instance, only males are allowed to do certain jobs, usually high-status jobs, while females have to find a male to support them.
          Or restrictions may be applied to certain ethnic or religious groups, or simply to 'a lower class' who are deemed 'serfs.' This tactic buys time, for a while, but the breeding strategy ensures that the population continues to grow -- and, ironically, it's usually among the higher classes where the squeeze of narrowing niche-space is felt first and most painfully, by those children born to affluence who suddenly realise that, for instance, the city already has far more priests and acolytes than it needs and is unwilling to find places for more -- or that the army is over-staffed with officers. The affluent youngsters are shocked to find there is no space left for them in the wider, freer niche-space their parents enjoyed and they will have to do plebeian work.

Another way out of the problem is to trade. You go to those states who are crowding your own, and you offer to exchange surplus goods with them. You can even build ships and cross the seas to trade with foreigners. This, for a while, solves the problem, creating livelihoods in the merchant class and in ship-building.
     But every increase in niche-space means an increase in population -- because the breeding strategy rolls on unaltered. Every single person in these growing cities produces as many off-spring as they think they can raise. Up and up goes the population, particuarly among the poorest.

Why do the poor have more children, even where their more prosperous countrymen crush them into a smaller and smaller niche-space?

'Slum Tourism' - wikipedia

       Because if you live, say, on a sheet of cloth spread on a pavement, and your biggest aspiration for your children is that they eat once a day, then children are cheap. They won't cost you much -- indeed, it will possibly cost you more to prevent their birth. They'll also start earning for you while still in infancy, so where is the incentive to limit their number?
       If, however, you are rather better off -- if your plans for your children include a nursery, a crib, a nanny, a bed, rooms of their own in a comfortable house, good clothes and shoes, three or more meals a day, a good education, toys, books, music-lessons, dance-classes, training in a trade, a car (or horse) on their 18th, a good marriage (with a dowry or big wedding) a house of their own, prosperity and children of their own -- well, then each child is going to cost you thousands. One way or another, you make sure you have fewer. It's the well-off who sit down with pencil and paper (or Excel) and work out if they can afford a child. The poor, in this as in almost every other life-situation, just get on with it.
     It's, again, about niche-space. The niche inhabited by the poor is narrow. They have few choices and, as a result, few aspirations. But this narrow niche is cheap. It requires few resources. The people crammed into it are satisfied with little. My aunt, who grew up in a slum during the 1930s, has often told me that, until she won a scholarship to grammar-school, where she met girls whose families, astonishingly, owned cars, fridges and telephones, she'd had no idea her family were poor. She'd had nothing to compare their way of life with.
      The niche-space occupied by the better-off is wider (that is, it holds far more opportunities and possibilities), and increases with wealth. Indeed, Colinvaux remarks that the richer a naked ape is, the more their life includes aspects of the ancient hunter-gatherer life: -- acres of beautiful countryside as their 'territory', hunting as a pastime, closeness to dogs and horses. But although this niche is broad, offering many choices and freedoms, it is very expensive in terms of resources. It can, therefore, be occupied by far fewer than the narrow niches of the poor. The poor are like deer -- hundreds to the acre. The rich become rarer and more tigerish as they grow richer.

Herein also lies the answer to the question: Why are revolutions always led, not by the oppressed, but by the middle-classes? and Why are so many vicious, murderous political gangs drawn from the nicely brought up and spoken boys and girls of the middle-classes?

Delacroix - wikipedia

      The aspiring and prosperous -- from the middle to the upper classes -- have always had fewer children than the poor and higher aspirations for the few they have. So when the pressure on resources mounts -- when there aren't enough houses or enough food or enough 'good' jobs to earn enough money to buy, say, a house -- who feels the pinch first and the most keenly? Answer: the better-off 'middle-classes.'
      The very wealthy, the oligarchs or aristocracy are insulated by their extreme wealth. The poor are used to hardship and never expected much anyway. They're grateful to 'have a roof over their head and a loaf on the table.'
      But those caught in the middle, those who grew up expecting that their life would include a comfortable house with a big garden, an interesting, rewarding job, the wherewithal to travel and follow interests, whether it be rock-climbing or pottery -- what happens when they find that they are going to have to settle for much less than their parents had? That they can't find a job, can't afford a house, or a car or a holiday -- or a child?
       It understandably comes as a humiliating, painful shock. And why shouldn't it? After all, nothing about the situation is their fault. They didn't choose the time they were born in, or the way they were raised. They'd never even heard of niche-space and breeding strategy and, even if they had, couldn't do anything about it.

When Trade Is Not Enough

 Colinvaux argues that niche-space can be created or increased by trade and technological advance -- because a new technology, whether it's ship-building, smelting metal, or programming computers, creates jobs.
          But, in some periods there comes a point when no new technology is coming to the rescue and trade is no longer supplying enough resources or enough profit to support the growing population. What then?
          Then it inevitably occurs to the naked ape that if, instead of trading with a particular country, if they just took over the country instead, that would be more profitable.
          At any given time, there are always several ambitious Apes seeking power. If one of these ambitious Apes happens to coincide with a squeeze on niche-space -- well, then you have an Alexander, an Augustus, a Clive of India, a Napolean, a Hitler, all of them whole-heartedly supported by their tightly-squeezed countrymen, longing for more niche-space -- which answers all those questions about war. Hitler even spoke about 'living-room.'
          These 'wars of civilisation,' Colinvaux points out, are always a stronger, more technologically advanced state grabbing a weaker (if not geographically smaller), less advanced, less organised country. Whatever high-flown reason is given, whatever excuse is put forward, it is always a straight-forward bullying snatch of land and resources by the stronger state. There has never been an example of, say, a small tribe of acquisitive Bushmen attacking France or Britain. Barbarians took down Rome, yes -- but they were, in fact, highly organised and well-equipped barbarians, quite wealthy in their own opinion -- just as Genghis Khan's 'barbarians' were at a later period. In each case the 'barbarians' faced large states exhausted by their efforts to find new niche-space for their cramped and fractious people; states that had run out of options.

War and colonisation creates niche-space not only by gaining access to resources such as food and materials at less cost -- it also creates interesting and generally well-rewarded jobs for the young of the better-off. They become viceroys and governors of the colonies, merchant-traders, spice-growers, tea-planters. The armies needed to enforce colonisation also provide niche-space for 'the sweepings of the gutter.'
          But breeding strategy continues to do its stuff and the new niche-space gained at the cost of war is filled up by the increasing population.
         Sometimes, it takes a while. The colonisation of Australia and the Americas (and the destruction of the native civilisation,) siphoned off surplus population and relieved pressure for several centuries. 'Go West, young man.' There will never, Colinvaux remarks, be access to such a pressure-release valve again.

Why was Europe the 'cockpit of war?' Colinvaux argues that there were too many nations crammed into one land mass, their populations increasing and aspiring. Every time the pressure of falling resources was felt, another revolution or war was triggered as the prosperous classes felt the pinch and grew angry.

          To win big, final victories and establish an Empire to last for hundreds of years, as the Romans did, you have to go against less well-armed and organised opponents with a tactic they cannot withstand. Alexander won his victories with the phalanx. The Romans had the legion and the tortoise.

Wikipedia: printing press

          But in Europe was developed a piece of technology than not only created a lot of niche-space, it meant that no war-like state was going to be able to win crushing, final victories ever again:-- the printing-press. Once the printing-press was invented, any new tactic you invented was, within a few years, available to everyone else. Hence the endless round of revolutions and wars in Europe, which had no direction, not north, west, south or east, to send its restless and disappointed young and no way of winning new niche-space by winning a lasting victory over another European state.
         This is still true and will probably ensure that Europe will be riven with war again.

Oh, but the European Common Market was created, in part, to prevent war in Europe ever happening again. But all over Europe are nations seething with people whose niche-space has just crashed in on them, thanks to machinations of the wealthy in the bankers' niche. These people, many of whom qualified as lecturers, lawyers or doctors are crushed into a place where they don't want to be. If Colinvaux is right, revolution and war will follow.

          In the last year, the IRA have started attacks again (albeit fitfully.) Daesh commit atrocities. Journalists confess themselves puzzled that the boys and girls who run away to join Daesh are not only 'middle-class' but often appear to know little about Islam. Nor, often, it seems, do the people who recruit them.
          Colinvaux argues that this is because it's not, at bottom, about religion or politics. It never was. It is, and always was, about niche-space. And breeding strategy.

          Left-wingers in the UK at the moment are puzzled and despairing at the political swing to the right -- by the fact that the 'Nasty Party' keeps being re-elected, despite their proving, again and again, just how nasty they are. Good-hearted people are dismayed by the increasing xenophobia, the increasing tendency to stigmatise, punish and isolate the poor. They are distressed by the push to turn schools into academies which can refuse admission to pupils who, to be blunt, they consider not good enough and by the push to privatise the NHS, which would take us back to my great-grandparents' age, when one of their children died because sending for a doctor would have cost twelve and a half pence, which they didn't have.
          If Colinvaux is right, this isn't puzzling at all. The shift to the right, the hardening of class-barriers, is shrinking niche-space in action. As niche-space shrinks people move to protect the space they have. They harden their attitude, become more callous, more prejudiced and xenophobic, less open to argument or new ideas. This is shown in the way they vote. Wealthier people, of course, have more ability to protect their niche-space: and they do so, aggressively. And as the niche-space of others contracts, that of the very wealthy becomes ever wider and more comfortable since the cost of labour falls, making them more profit.
          Our present Tories are eager to rid themselves of 'red tape' which protects workers' rights and the environment. They want back those good old Victorian Values so beloved of the Tories -- when servants were plentiful and cheap, the lower-classes knew their place and weren't there workhouses?


Humans, in common with all other life on earth, have never changed their breeding strategy. They have as many children as they think they can raise to adulthood within the niche-space they occupy at the time. It's natural, it's Nature -- and with all other species, it works pretty well.

But human beings, uniquely, learned to expand their niche-space beyond all other species. We long ago left behind the basics of food, water and a lair. Now we not only live in every region except the poles but we include a home of our own, fashionable clothing and electronic gadgets among our needs -- if not as necessities, then as aspirations.

We now not only have as many children as we think we can afford in our niche-space, massively increasing demand on resources year on year on year -- but we are now occupied in trying to escape death for longer and longer, in trying to ensure that infertile couples can have children too, and in preserving the lives of those who would have naturally died young. It is ruinous to our societies and the planet.

I first read Colinvaux's 'Fate of Nations' over 20 years ago. It lit up my head then, and it does now.
The book is fascinating. Not cheerful -- in fact, rather depressing -- but clarifying. Clarity often is depressing.

'Fate of Nations' is particuarly uncheering for a left-winger like me; but it's hard to deny the truth behind it. The theory doesn't aim to justify war, cruelty, infanticide and so forth. It isn't trying to make people who have children or want to live longer feel guilty -- after all, these perfectly natural desires are so much a part of us, how could we avoid them?

The book simply makes clear the pattern that underlies it all.

In short, a great book if you want to think. But not if you want to sleep easy.

And I'd be interested to know what other History Girls think of the theory. Do you find it convincing, over-ambitious, old hat -- or 'other'?

This is a post from one of our Reserve History Girls and we are very grateful to Susan Price for it. Janie Hampton will be back next month.