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biography The Bookshop Purchase any book reviewed in these pages – or any other, rare or new Orders are fulfilled by our partner bookshop, Heywood Hill. All books come wrapped in their famous brown paper and blue ribbon, and can be delivered as a gift with a handwritten note containing your message Knowledgeable and friendly customer service from a bookshop trusted by readers throughout the Englishspeaking world Worldwide delivery EASY ORDERING: Email: lr@heywoodhill.com In your email please include: • book title in full • author • your name • shipping address Phone: +44 (0) 20 7629 0647 When calling please mention Literary Review Literary Review | april 2017 10 when he was himself elected MP for Colne Valley, which gave him important contacts with old associates of Grayson. He published a biography of Grayson in 1985, of which this is an updated edition, making use of source material that he has discovered, often in obscure places, over the past thirty years. The result is an exceptionally interesting, readable book, which is about a hundred pages longer than the original version. In describing Grayson’s election and parliamentary adventures, Clark spells out the links of the West Riding ILP with the suffragettes and with the Pankhurst family in particular. One Pankhurst Grayson did not impress was the most radical of them all, Sylvia, who disliked his showy lifestyle and his disloyalty towards her hero and lover, Keir Hardie. There is also much new material on Grayson’s later life after his courageous service in France during the First World War with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. This is the product of Clark’s research in Australia and New Zealand, where he once interviewed acquaintances of Grayson, and an examination of Grayson’s correspondence, notably with his sister, Augusta Greenwood. There is much ingenious detective work in probing earlier accounts of Grayson’s later years, though in the end Clark admits that obscurities still endure. The mystery man remains just that. Clark provides an excellent analysis of the famous Colne Valley by-election, in which Grayson was not formally endorsed by the Labour Party (though he received informal encouragement from Hardie, Philip Snowden and other leading figures), and of the political, social and religious background to the contest. Colne Valley was a very isolated constituency, and several villages in it had particular radical or socialist traditions. An important factor was popular religion: Grayson’s revivalist style of oratory (he had trained for the Unitarian ministry) strongly appealed to many citizens. He attracted colourful local ministers, Anglican and nonconformist, such as a giant curate, ‘six-foot a socialist, and five-inches a parson’, to his campaign at a time when Wales was experiencing a wave of revivalist religion. Once in Parliament, however, he went downhill. There were embarrassing parliamentary ‘scenes’ and Grayson, a bisexual, seemingly a victim of mental illness and later epilepsy, managed to antagonise, at the same time, potentially sympathetic politicians such as Hardie and the trade unions (whom he despised). He lost his seat in 1910. In the years leading up to the First World War he worked with ‘nationalist socialists’ such as Robert Blatchford, editor of The Clarion, and Henry Hyndman of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation to form a new left-wing British Socialist Party, but this never made much headway. Until his nervous breakdown in 1912 he remained the prospective Labour candidate for Colne Valley. The war years and their immediate aftermath are an obscure phase of his life. He seemed to be simultaneously working for the government secret service and promoting working-class protest. He had ambiguous links with Churchill, while C F G Masterman used his literary and oratorical skills to produce wartime propaganda on behalf of the Allies. As well as associating with Maundy Gregory’s demimonde, he was also caught up in the shady world of Horatio Bottomley, who eventually went to prison for fraud. Clark does his ingenious best to piece together his actual and possible movements during this time and beyond. However, nothing certain can be said about Grayson’s life after an apparent final sighting of him on ‘an electric canoe’ sailing on the Thames near Hampton Court in September 1920. ‘Labour’s lost leader’ was too rootless and psychologically unstable ever to be the leader of anything. His brief and stormy career gives rise to several questions. How could the respectable, chapel-going cotton and woollen workers of Colne Valley have been swayed by so wayward a crusader? How could a man with a contempt for the unions and remote from the realities of working-class life head the fight against industrial inequality? How could a selfstyled rebel become a bellicose voice for wartime patriotism and the colleague of lowlife crooks such as Gregory and Bottomley? To examine these contradictions is to expose some of the complex strands in early British socialism. Perhaps it also goes some way towards explaining the mystery of Victor Grayson. To order this book from the Literary Review Bookshop, see left.
page 13
history felipe fernández-armesto Handing over the Keys to Paradise The Moor’s Last Stand: How Seven Centuries of Muslim Rule in Spain Came to an End By Elizabeth Drayson (Profile Books 191pp £17.99) When the kingdom of Granada fell to Ferdinand and Isabella in January 1492, a humanist in their pay hailed ‘the extinction of Spain’s calamities’. The victory, according to a chronicler in the Basque Country, ‘redeemed Spain, indeed all Europe’. The pope agreed, ordering bonfires and bells. The conquest and its aftermath changed the profile of Europe, where, outside the range of Ottoman conquests, no Muslim-ruled state ever re-emerged. Until the creation of an independent Albania in 1928, there was no state with a Muslim majority. It became possible – though the argument is perhaps not convincing – to claim that the culture of Europe, if such a thing exists, is Christian. Until recently, the habit of identifying Europe with Christendom went almost unchallenged. Before Granada’s fall, its leader, Boabdil, as Christians called him, had not behaved with exemplary valour, relying on conspiracy, compromise and a series of tactical alliances to perpetuate an apparent anachronism. Christian conquerors had long ago swept up every other Muslim kingdom in Iberia. Ferdinand and Isabella could have avoided the costs of the war and exacted handsome tribute from Granada instead. But many of the nobles who had fought for them in the civil war that inaugurated the reign remained inadequately rewarded and potentially restive. According to the laws, rulers were not allowed to give away their inherited patrimony but could do what they liked with conquered lands. By the time the conquest of Granada was complete, more than half the surface area of the kingdom had been distributed among nobles. So rather than being a clash of civilisations, a crusade or a jihad, the war resembled a chivalresque encounter between enemies who shared the same secular culture. Throughout the fighting, as always in medieval wars between Spanish kingdoms, there were warriors who crossed the religious divide. Boabdil entered politics in his late teens, as a rebellious prince, the plaything of plotters in the seraglio. Support for him came at first from factions at court but spread with the strain and failures of the war under his father’s rule. A combined palace putsch and popular uprising brought him to power in Boabdil in crown and chains 1482. But he proved inept as a general and fell into Christian hands after a disastrous action at Lucena. He had little bargaining power to negotiate his release. He recovered his personal liberty and obtained Ferdinand’s help in his bid to recover his throne. In return he swore vassalage, which might have been no great calamity, as Granada had always paid tribute to Castile. But Ferdinand’s strategy was to sap the kingdom’s strength and provoke division in Granada. The Granadine royal family adopted a bunker mentality, squabbling over an inheritance no longer worth defending. Needing more help, Boabdil agreed to even harsher terms, promising to cede Granada to Castile and retain only the town of Guadix and its environs as a nominally independent kingdom. It is hard to believe that Boabdil can ever have intended to keep to the agreement, or that Ferdinand can have proposed these terms for any reason other than to prolong Granada’s civil war. The militant mood of Granada’s inhabitants made it impossible for Boabdil to honour his treaty with Ferdinand, even in the last months of 1491, when the besiegers closed around the walls and famine struck within them. Spanish troops entered the citadel by night on the eve of the capitulation in order to avoid ‘much scandal’ – that is, the needless bloodshed a desperate last stand might otherwise have caused. Did Boabdil really say to Ferdinand, as he handed over the keys of the Alhambra on 2 January 1492, ‘God must love you well, for these are the keys to his paradise’? Most of the population were right to mistrust the victors’ bogus guarantees of freedom and tolerance. Many took immediate advantage of a clause in the terms of surrender that guaranteed Boabdil’s subjects right of passage to Africa and transported them for free. Countless left Granada. Boabdil, whose continued presence in Spain the monarchs clearly resented, left with a retinue of 1,130 in October 1493 for obscurity in Morocco. It is hard to imagine a career more self-serving, cowardly and ignominious. Elizabeth Drayson promises to rescue her subject’s reputation and identify ‘implications for the religious and cultural issues of our time’. The latter aim is laudable, but it is represented only by a few lines of pious pleading for ‘a new world of possibility and reconciliation’. The former is impossible without distorting the facts. Drayson is too honourable and conscientious for falsehood. She falls back on four strategies: psychological humbug, blaming Boabdil’s father for his son’s deficiencies; vapid speculations in the absence of evidence (Boabdil ‘may have harboured a hope … to come lead a counter-attack’ from exile); feeble maunderings (‘Perhaps he felt great fear, relief, shame, sadness, or all of these at the same time’); and imaginative reconstructions worthy of teatime charades in a Victorian nursery (‘the moonbeams fall on the figure of a small boy’). The book will do little harm to the ignorant and no good to the wise. To order this book from the Literary Review Bookshop, see page opposite. april 2017 | Literary Review 11

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Literary Review | april 2017 10

when he was himself elected MP for Colne Valley, which gave him important contacts with old associates of Grayson. He published a biography of Grayson in 1985, of which this is an updated edition, making use of source material that he has discovered, often in obscure places, over the past thirty years. The result is an exceptionally interesting, readable book, which is about a hundred pages longer than the original version. In describing Grayson’s election and parliamentary adventures, Clark spells out the links of the West Riding ILP with the suffragettes and with the Pankhurst family in particular. One Pankhurst Grayson did not impress was the most radical of them all, Sylvia, who disliked his showy lifestyle and his disloyalty towards her hero and lover, Keir Hardie. There is also much new material on Grayson’s later life after his courageous service in France during the First World War with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. This is the product of Clark’s research in Australia and New Zealand, where he once interviewed acquaintances of Grayson, and an examination of Grayson’s correspondence, notably with his sister, Augusta Greenwood. There is much ingenious detective work in probing earlier accounts of Grayson’s later years, though in the end Clark admits that obscurities still endure. The mystery man remains just that.

Clark provides an excellent analysis of the famous Colne Valley by-election, in which Grayson was not formally endorsed by the Labour Party (though he received informal encouragement from Hardie, Philip Snowden and other leading figures), and of the political, social and religious background to the contest. Colne Valley was a very isolated constituency, and several villages in it had particular radical or socialist traditions. An important factor was popular religion: Grayson’s revivalist style of oratory (he had trained for the Unitarian ministry) strongly appealed to many citizens. He attracted colourful local ministers, Anglican and nonconformist, such as a giant curate, ‘six-foot a socialist, and five-inches a parson’, to his campaign at a time when Wales was experiencing a wave of revivalist religion. Once in Parliament, however, he went downhill. There were embarrassing parliamentary ‘scenes’ and Grayson, a bisexual, seemingly a victim of mental illness and later epilepsy, managed to antagonise, at the same time, potentially sympathetic politicians such as Hardie and the trade unions (whom he despised). He lost his seat in 1910. In the years leading up to the First World War he worked with ‘nationalist socialists’ such as Robert Blatchford, editor of The Clarion, and Henry Hyndman of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation to form a new left-wing British Socialist Party, but this never made much headway. Until his nervous breakdown in 1912 he remained the prospective Labour candidate for Colne Valley.

The war years and their immediate aftermath are an obscure phase of his life. He seemed to be simultaneously working for the government secret service and promoting working-class protest. He had ambiguous links with Churchill, while C F G Masterman used his literary and oratorical skills to produce wartime propaganda on behalf of the Allies. As well as associating with Maundy Gregory’s demimonde, he was also caught up in the shady world of Horatio Bottomley, who eventually went to prison for fraud. Clark does his ingenious best to piece together his actual and possible movements during this time and beyond. However, nothing certain can be said about Grayson’s life after an apparent final sighting of him on ‘an electric canoe’ sailing on the Thames near Hampton Court in September 1920.

‘Labour’s lost leader’ was too rootless and psychologically unstable ever to be the leader of anything. His brief and stormy career gives rise to several questions. How could the respectable, chapel-going cotton and woollen workers of Colne Valley have been swayed by so wayward a crusader? How could a man with a contempt for the unions and remote from the realities of working-class life head the fight against industrial inequality? How could a selfstyled rebel become a bellicose voice for wartime patriotism and the colleague of lowlife crooks such as Gregory and Bottomley? To examine these contradictions is to expose some of the complex strands in early British socialism. Perhaps it also goes some way towards explaining the mystery of Victor Grayson. To order this book from the Literary Review Bookshop, see left.

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