Peter Forbes

John Betjeman used to wax lyrical about the old North London railway that emanated from Broad Street Station in the City, near Liverpool Street. It was an urban railway that ran across North London, through Islington and Camden to Richmond.

Broad Street station itself was closed in 1986 to make way for the unloved an unlovely Broadgate complex (now facing redevelopment). It was the down at heel, along-the-houses’-backs nature of the railway that appealed to Bejeman and over the years it became even more shabby. The abandoned bits around Shoreditch and Hackney rotted away, unredeveloped, and a skeleton railway, often vandalized just about survived on subsistence level. By the turn of the Millennium it was on its last legs.

The came the new Greater London Authority and its Mayor. One of the sad things about modern Britain has been its can’t do attitude. Fifty years after nationalisation and subsequent privatization, most of Britain’s railways still ran along the old pre-nationalization company lines, The idea of joining them up was anathema. There then came Thameslink, linking North and South London, and the new GLA had the idea of joining up some abandoned tracks to create Overground. By next year this will provide an outer rail ring linking Stratford, Richmond, Clapham, West Croydon and points in between. Overground have also taken over the local line to Watford Junction and the network is a major new resource for the capital. I’ve just travelled from Camden to New Cross Gate for the first time and the new railway is a joy. Like Betjeman I’ve always loved what used to be the North London Line. Researching my last book, I used to take it to get to the National Archives at Kew. It is a genuine urban railway, displaying the individual character of the city’s precincts and also knitting them together.

The engineering and design are very fine. There are many new stations and the architecture is nothing fancy but crisp, clean modern metal and concrete architecture, rather like the Jubilee line but without the extravagance. The service is generally 4 to 6 trains an hour on most routes so it is almost but not quite Tube-like – you certainly only have  to turn up.

One of the joys is the way it is opening up Hackney and the old East End. Some of the East End stations have wonderful murals by Sarah McMenemy, an artist in the line of David Gentleman of Charing Cross Tube Staition fame. Unlike Charing Cross, though, McMenemy's murals are devloped form water colours. (Why hasn't the Underground attempted anyhting like this in its huge station revamp programme - there is no original artwork at all.)

The new Overground is already very popular and it should become even more so when the final link is completed. It is fast, avoiding the crush of Central London, and there is scenery. The trains are much airier too. In case you hadn’t quite got the message, I am totally smitten.  It is a triumph of the practical imagination.

The obituary notices for the test pilot Peter Twiss brought back a lost world of British aviation. Twiss broke the world air speed record when he flew the Fairy Delta 2 at 1132 mph on 10 March 1956. British aviation, like British science and technology generally, had entered the post-WW2 era on a par with the USA in most departments but a series of catastrophic bungles reduced us to the condition we are in today. We no longer have the capacity to make a complete aircraft – we only do bits.

The FD2 saga is perhaps the most appalling. Not only were the Ministry of Defence not impressed by Twist’s feat, they were so incensed by the barrage of damage claims from sonic booms that they banned supersonic test flights. Twiss took the FD2 to the French Dassault airfield. The great plane maker Marcel Dassault was very impressed by the FD2 and the classic Mirage 3 shows clear signs of FD2 influence.

In 1957 the British Defence Minister, Duncan Sandys, cancelled all manned fighter projects other than the English Electric Lightning. Missiles would take over, he said. Only now are drones beginning to usurp manned planes. The last 50 years have been the age of the fighter bomber and few have been as successful as the Mirage 3. The whole story is beautifully told in James Hamilton-Paterson’s Empire of the Clouds.

I’ve just finished Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules…For Now and can confidently suggest that if you only ever read one history book, this is it. Morris tells a new kind of scientific history, beginning with human evolution, the growth of technology, and shows how our civilisation really works. He shifts the perspective to show how parochial some of our concerns are. In short: it’s the big picture he gives us.

The analysis of the past is utterly compelling but it’s his prognosis that is most telling. We are reaching one of the great barriers to development, such as human beings have faced several times before: in the Younger Dryas Cold Spell around 10,800 BCE, the Bronze Dark Age  of 1200 BCE, the Fall of Rome, etc. He says there are two ways it could go and there is unlikely to be a fudged halfway house. In many respects his work ties in with several other recent thinkers. Jared Diamond is his most obvious influence. James Lovelock is in there too and this probably isn’t an influence but there are similarities to David Deutch’s recent The Beginning of Infinity. These are two magnificent books that everyone should read.

There seem to be two wars in Libya: the one you know about and another one between the USA and NATO. When the US handed over control to NATO and withdrew most of its active forces, Senator John McCain pointed out that NATO did not have the right hardware for the operation. They lacked ground attack planes such as the A10 tankbuster and the Hercules gunship.

Now, several months later, NATO is indeed struggling for lack of the right equipment. Robert Gates, in Brussels the retiring US Secretary of State for Defense was publicly derisive of NATO. He said that NATO was only delivering 150 sorties a day instead of the 300 planned for. The British forces have expressed their frustration with the Americans for withdrawing the A10 tankbusters.

So what is going on? The USA seems to be trying to make a point. By withdrawing and then publicly criticising the European efforts they seem to trying to press home an old political point: that Europe should shoulder more of the burden in Nato. But it seems a particularly distasteful way to do it: whilst the war is being prolonged and people are dying.

But Europe doesn’t come out of it much better. Why is their equipment so inadequate? It has been obvious for at least 20 years (since Gulf War I) that this kind of operation was the most likely combat European forces would see in future. But there is a severe lack of ground-attack capability. The Eurofighter Typhoon has had to be clumsily converted to a ground-attack role. All of the planes involved are firing expensive missiles such as the Paveway to destroy individual tanks, a ridiculously expensive overkill. As for the Navy’s Tomahawks cruise missiles at £½ million a wasted shot….So expensive is it that the operation cannot continue for much longer, according to the British forces (stat: the UK has the 4th largest defence budget in the world). When complete air superiority is obtained, cruder and less expensive anti-armour weapons can be used (if you’ve got any). The whole affair is an embarrassment to us and a tragedy for the Libyans.

A piece in Ian Jack’s The Country Formerly known as Great Britain (p.143) reminds me that Field Marshal Wavell (1883-1950), published a popular anthology of poetry in 1944 called Other Men’s Flowers. This had a certain novelty value and the book’s continuing sales success (still in print today) may owe something to the surprise factor. The contents are the predictable canon of safe, mostly pre-1900 poetry – the kind that a stiff-upper-lip English military man might like.

Wavell is generally regarded as bit of a flop: an old-fashioned soldier. He was not a charismatic war leader and was replaced by Montgomery before the crucial battle of El Alamein. Wavell might have been an awkward stick and his taste in poetry uninspiring but he had one flash of pure genius: on 23 April 1941, he had scribbled a note, a facsimile of which is preserved in the War Office files:

Is it a wild idea that a tank could be camouflaged to look like a lorry from air by light canvas screens over top?  It would be useful; during approach march etc

Please have it considered.

This was more than considered it was implemented as the Sunshield and hundreds of them were used in elaborate decoys before the great battle of El Alamein. Sunshields were erected and at night tanks moved into position under them. Where the tanks had been, they were replaced by dummies. Churchill didn’t have much time for Wavell: meeting him was like “being in the presence of the chairman of a gold club”. But when the battle was won, Churchill paid tribute to “a marvelous system of camouflage”: “The 10th Corps, which he [the enemy] had seen from the air exercising fifty miles in the rear, moved silently away in the night, but leaving an exact simulacrum of its tanks where it had been, and proceeded to its points of attack.”

The story of Wavell and the Sunshields and other war ruses is told in Dazzled and Deceived.

Christopher Lloyd is a historian for the big picture, believing that history should now include our relationship with the natural and material worlds. Now, he's followed his large illustrated books What on Earth Happened? and What on Earth Evolved? with a Wallbook that opens out to tell the human story from the Big Bang to now. Cunningly arranged, with more information than you'd think possible in such a span, it's a great way of taking your bearings on how we got to this point. The text on the reverse of the chart also does a brilliant job of topic selection. It is particularly good on the emergence of our culture, picking up techniques along the way, especially domesticating crops and animals. The What on Earth? Wallbook is currently available at £15 from the What on Earth? website or call 01443 828811.