This thesis investigates UK-US relations with regard to the South Asian Crisis of 1971. Through a focus on an understudied point of disagreement within the relationship between Prime Minister Edward Heath and President Richard Nixon, the thesis sheds further light on Anglo-American relations in the early 1970s. Through analysis of archival documents on both sides of the Atlantic, this thesis contributes to the growing revisionist literature that has moved away from a focus upon Heath’s pro-Europeanism as the cause of problems in the Anglo-American relationship at the time. Rather, a more nuanced approach that also investigates the impact of the secretive foreign policymaking style of the Nixon White House is taken into account. The thesis reveals the issues in communication and differences of interests that, in December 1971, led the UK and US delegations at the UN Security Council to tacitly advocate for opposite sides of a hot war in South Asia. The thesis assesses the effect that these heated disagreements had upon the Anglo-American relationship going into 1972 and 1973.

This thesis examines war trauma in film; it is a comparative reading that aims to study the relationship between films made after the First World War in the 1920s and films made during and after the Vietnam War. I use thirteen focus film texts, some which explicitly engage with war and some that do not. This thesis will argue that the production of these particular films was inflected by the collective trauma that the wars produced in American society. There was not, for example, an explicit combat film made for seven years after the First World War and thirteen years after the Vietnam War. This gap, I will argue, is symptomatic of the cultural climate that existed after each war, but can also be understood in terms of the need for temporal space in which to assimilate the traumas of these wars. An engagement with recent debates in Trauma Theory will be utilised to explore this production gap between event and film, and to suggest that trauma exists not only within the narratives of these focus films but also within the production process itself. This thesis contributes significantly to recent debates in Trauma Studies. As it presents film history scholarship, First World War and Vietnam veteran experiences and archive newspaper research as compatible disciplines and uses the lens of trauma theory as a methodological thread and tool of analysis.

This study, an action research project to promote the teaching of culturally and ethnically diverse history with history trainee teachers on a secondary postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE) course, encompasses two complete action research cycles. The first of which was during the academic year 2007-2008 and the second in 2008-2009. It draws together research from the fields of diversity education, history education and trainee teacher development. Concerns about the ability of trainee teachers from white, monocultural backgrounds to embrace diversity in their classroom practice, not only within the United Kingdom but internationally, were identified during the reconnaissance stage of the action research cycle. Data collected from eight experienced teachers and a cohort of history trainees in 2006-2007 revealed a range of specific concerns and an action plan was created to infuse the history PGCE course to address these. Thus emphasis was placed on including culturally and ethnically diverse content to help trainee history teachers appreciate the values and purposes of the subject and the appropriateness of content to be taught. There was also an increased focus on subject knowledge development, pedagogy and awareness of the impact of the history curriculum on pupils from diverse backgrounds. Seven trainees agreed to participate and provide data during the course 2007-2008. Questionnaires and ‘scenario’ interviews were used to gather data at the start and end of the course. This enabled the development of a new framework, the ‘confidence continuum’, which revealed that most trainees moved from a position of naïve confidence to greater uncertainty between the start and end of the course. A second action research cycle was therefore carried out with a different cohort in 2008-2009. The intention was to see how far a more explicit focus on diversity could embed this element into the practice of trainee teachers. The data, gathered at three points in the year using questionnaires and interviews from six participating trainees, revealed that a more explicit focus on diversity issues helped more trainees move to a position of greater confidence. Overall, the findings from this study show that it is possible for trainee history teachers from a white monocultural background to embrace diversity in their work, although this varies by individual. This research identifies the concerns that trainee teachers face, but more importantly it offers a new way to conceptualise their levels of confidence, through the ‘confidence continuum’, and in so doing demonstrates the complex interplay between different areas of knowledge and confidence. Further, it provides a theoretical model to explain the tensions which need to be addressed during a PGCE course. Together the continuum and the ‘tensions’ model identify and explain why trainees adopt particular positions. The study suggests further gains could be possible if school history departments and school mentors were supported in developing their practice in relation to culturally and ethnically diverse history.

The period of Ottoman rule, pejoratively termed the ‘Turkish yoke’, is often regarded in the Balkans – a region divided by quests for self-definition – as a period of darkness and suffering. Given the paucity of South Slavic historical records, scholars have sought to corroborate evidence of the ‘yoke’ in ‘historical paratexts’, fragmentary records of historical events to be found in the margins of Church Slavonic manuscripts and early printed books. With the Ottoman Empire on the verge of collapse in the first decades of the twentieth century, scholars and folklorists from the several splintered nations that form the Balkans became very interested in archiving and compiling these paratextual materials into published compendia, a trend which continues up to the present day. They believed that conserving these presumed eyewitness testimonials would preserve the core of the nation, an idea that has been transmitted largely unchallenged. These paratexts are seen as ‘writing from below’ which records facts about the suffering brought about by Ottoman rule. Present scholarship in the Balkans has interpreted ‘znatise’ (‘let it be known’), the formulaic expression that announces some of these annotations, as indicative of a self-conscious tendency to create historically truthful records of the South Slavs under Ottoman rule. However, one only needs to sift through these various records to be struck by the repetitions and the limited scope of the patterns that pervade a majority of these inscriptions as opposed to the range of observations that could be expected to result from an autobiographical impulse. This thesis accounts for these patterns and challenges the dominant interpretation of these paratexts by locating them within the larger writing traditions to which they belonged. By interrogating the relationship between paratextual writing and Church Slavonic historiography, this study provides an alternative framework which explains and brings together sources that have otherwise been left disparate and scattered. The formula ‘let it be known’ is to be understood not as testimony but rather as apocalyptic prophecy. The thesis demonstrates that historical paratexts mainly recorded those events -- such as natural disaster, famine, the outbreak of disease and celestial phenomena -- that were understood as portents and figured in apocalyptic literature. In this light, the clergy’s tone towards the military successes and the Ottoman reign is shown to be determined by an apocalyptic understanding of history. We also see how South Slavic attitudes towards the Ottomans were diverse with references to the Sultan ranging from ‘son of perdition’ (Antichrist) to ‘Tsar’ depending on the political relations between a diocese and the Ottoman administration. The thesis also provides new readings of three important paratextual accounts: (i) Monk Isaija’s colophon of 1371 (ii) Deacon Dimitar’s colophon of 1466 and (iii) the self-narratives of Mihail of Kratovo written between 1649 and 1660. The labels of ‘truthfulness’, ‘factuality’, and ‘sincerity’ that have been attributed to these first person accounts are questioned by demonstrating the socially strategic and ambiguous nature of these paratexts.

The completion of History as Theatrical Metaphor, now submitted for consideration for the award of the degree of Doctor of Letters, represents an integration and culmination of a number of related strands arising from both my practice as a playwright over the last five decades and my relevant academic research. Susanne Kries has summarised a key approach underlying my writing of history plays as ‘deconstructing the ideological intent behind the very endeavour of writing history and of revealing the ways by which mythologies are formed’. Much of my related academic research shares this interest. A recurring theme of both playwriting and scholarly writing, central to the work submitted, is the significance of the interaction of drama, language – especially Scots and English – and history. The initial phase in exploring such themes was in my developing professional playwriting practice. In 1967, I wrote the first draft of Mary, eventually produced by the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company in 1977. In this first version I sought to address the theme of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, but in a revisionary way. The play’s first acts, before Mary arrives on stage, involved an unlikely affair between Mary of Guise, Queen Regent in Mary’s absence in France, and her Secretary of State, Maitland of Lethington, conceived as a cross between a Chief Minister and a Mafia consigliere, a relationship in which Mary of Guise achieved some form of Lawrentian ‘authentic’ sexual release and self-fulfilment through her relationship with a powerful Scots leader. This motif was developed when Mary arrived and proceeded to fall under the magnetic spell of the even more Lawrentian Bothwell, a transformation of her sexuality and identity marked by the fact that about half way through her scenes she stopped speaking in French-inflected English and started to speak in Scots. The play’s tendentiousness was further marked by its being written in Scots-language free verse. The decision to write in Scots was consciously, if superficially, ideological. It sought to reflect the vibrant language amongst which I grew up on a council scheme, although in my home the dominant language was Standard Scottish English. I also sought to take a revisionary view of Scottish history, seeking to avoid what I saw as the sentimentalisation of that history in plays by an older generation like that of Robert McLellan. What I was concerned to do was later outlined explicitly by Tom McGrath in a 1984 interview, talking of his own practice: I suppose at that time we were coming up with a different ideology. We were coming up with a different approach after all that work, work that had been done [by writers like MacDiarmid and McLellan] in Scots language. We were coming up with this street level sound of existentialist man in the street, "black man in the ghetto" type of writing. It just upset the applecart. (Later I would develop a contextual interpretation of the shift McGrath refers to, and which I sought to be part of, in arguing that the use of Scots on stage was key to supporting and enhancing the cultural prestige of Scots in the 2011 chapter, ‘Drama as a Means for Uphaudin Leid Communities’. This – in a continuing conscious intention to assert the potential and status of Scots – while academic in content, was written entirely in Scots.) In short, from the beginning of my professional playwriting, a key strand was experiment in and exploration of the relationship of drama, Scots language, community identity and history, particularly the interrogation of accepted versions of ‘history’. The first draft of Mary came by the early 1970s to seem to me to be unsatisfactory in its exploration of the interaction of drama, language and history. By then, it appeared in its sensationalist version of Scottish history to have fallen into a parallel trap to the earlier one of a sentimental and romanticised view of that history. It certainly had moved away from conventional treatments of Scotland’s past, but was rather tending to a simplistic dramatic interpretation pour épater les bourgeois. Indeed, its attempts at sexual directness made it unacceptable at that time, 1968-69, to the management of the Royal Lyceum. While its Literary Manager Alan Brown spoke positively of the play, he still felt the company could not present it. Within very few years my own view came to be that, while it might substitute a certain late-adolescent Scots-language raunchiness for earlier playwrights’ Scots-language sentimentalities, it was itself somewhat naïve and sentimental. Further, the use of Scots in a free verse form, rather than adding anything to the dramatic potential of Scots language, seemed to remove it from the everyday discourse which inspired me to use it in the first place. This change of critical perspective and creative intention arose from two related developments in my dramaturgy. One was the impact of a variety of late 1960s theatrical experiments which impressed me in dealing with historical and political material in a post-Shavian and post-Brechtian way. These included the 1964 film version of Peter Brook's production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, which I saw in 1968, John Spurling's MacRune's Guevara (1969) and Peter Nichols's The National Health (1969) in the programme of the National Theatre in London, New York’s Negro Ensemble Company's version of Peter Weiss's The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, which is concerned with Portuguese colonial exploitation, presented in the 1969 London World Theatre Season, and John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy's version of Horatio Nelson’s life and reputation, The Hero Rises Up, presented by Nottingham Playhouse at the 1969 Edinburgh Festival. I was further impressed by the theatrical techniques of the New York-based LaMama troupe, by its version of Paul Foster's Tom Paine (1967) and the popularised and commercialised exploitation of those techniques in Hair (1967). I had also read Foster's Heimskringla! Or The Stoned Angels (1970), written for LaMama and derived from Norse sagas. All employed varying metatheatrical techniques to deconstruct received versions of history and politics which extended my own understanding of what was creatively possible. The second development was that, as those plays affected my understanding of theatrical possibilities in exploring historically based themes, I was researching and beginning to draft my next play on a historical theme. This explored the life, business ethics and politics of Andrew Carnegie. On top of all of this, at this time, having showed Max Stafford-Clark, Artistic Director of the Traverse Theatre, a first draft of Carnegie, begun during the autumn of 1969, I was invited by him to work, in my first professional theatre role, as a writing assistant on the first Traverse Workshop Theatre Company production, Mother Earth (1970), directed by Stafford-Clark when he ceased to be director of the Traverse itself. With his new company, he was developing the deconstructionist and improvisational rehearsal techniques that would later be more widely thought of as the creative method of his Joint Stock Theatre Company, into which the Traverse Workshop Company morphed in 1974. The dramaturgical lessons learned from the examples cited above and by working with such a creative and methodologically innovative director as Stafford-Clark were allied to my own quizzical view of Carnegie’s reputation. This was partly derived from the fact that my great-grandfather was a first cousin of Carnegie’s. There were family stories which, if they did not fully undermine his philanthropic reputation, suggested there were other sides to his career.

This thesis examines the Chiefs of Staff Committee’s (COS) decision-making and policy-making influence on Britain during the September 1939 to May 1940 period of the Second World War, commonly known as the Phoney War. To date, the actions of the COS during the Phoney War have come under little scrutiny. Historians have included only passing reference to the committee’s actions during the Winter War and the Norway Campaign, and have argued that its conduct was mired in error and misjudgement. As a consequence there is both confusion and debate over the COS’s contribution to Britain’s conduct in the Phoney War. This thesis contains the first systematic analysis of the influence of the COS on Britain’s course during the Phoney War and it advances the argument that the inadequacies of the committee had a major impact on the planning and conduct of the Phoney War. This study places the COS in the context of Britain’s wider decision-making and policy-making machinery during the Phoney War, where it was answerable to the War Cabinet and responsible for Britain’s defence. It argues that the COS was inadequate as a committee and that it failed to recognise its own limitations and to acknowledge the wisdom of its advisers. While on some occasions the COS provided good advice to the War Cabinet, it failed to press its opinions with sufficient force, particularly when the War Cabinet overlooked its recommendations. Individually, the Chiefs were dominated by both Churchill and Ironside, a factor which consistently undermined the COS’s effectiveness in policy-making and decision-making; Chiefs of Staff Newall and Pound were too easily influenced by Ironside and were insufficiently forceful in exerting their positions. This thesis also proposes that Britain’s organisation for the higher management of the war was weak and that this hindered the effectiveness of the COS; the committee structure during the period September 1939 to May 1940 was overly bureaucratic and this occupied too much of the COS’s time. It concludes that the COS demonstrated inadequacies as a decision-making and policy-making committee, however, while found to be wanting, there were mitigating factors which impinged upon its ability to perform. This thesis’s examination of the COS provides a better understanding of a little documented committee, which, although often overlooked, had a profound influence on Britain’s course during the Phoney War. Through archival research of the COS and War Cabinet papers this study will appraise the COS’s contribution to the unfolding of events between September 1939 and May 1940.

This thesis examines the experiences and political subjectivity of women who engaged in workplace protest in Britain between 1968 and 1985. The study covers a period that has been identified with the ‘zenith’ of trade-union militancy in British labour history. The women’s liberation movement also emerged in this period, which produced a shift in public debates about gender roles and relations in the home and the workplace. Women’s trade union membership increased dramatically and trade unions increasingly committed themselves to supporting ‘women’s issues’. Industrial disputes involving working-class women have frequently been cited as evidence of women’s growing participation in the labour movement. However, the voices and experiences of female workers who engaged in workplace protest remain largely unexplored. This thesis addresses this space through an original analysis of the 1968 sewing-machinists’ strike at Ford, Dagenham; the 1976 equal pay strike at Trico, Brentford; the 1972 Sexton shoe factory occupation in Fakenham, Norfolk; the 1981 Lee Jeans factory occupation in Greenock, Inverclyde and the 1984-1985 sewing-machinists’ strike at Ford Dagenham. Drawing upon a combination of oral history and written sources, this study contributes a fresh understanding of the relationship between feminism, workplace activism and trade unionism during the years 1968-1985. In every dispute considered in this thesis, women’s behaviour was perceived by observers as novel, ‘historic’ or extraordinary. But the women did not think of themselves as extraordinary, and rather understood their behaviour as a legitimate and justified response to their everyday experiences of gender and class antagonism. The industrial disputes analysed in this thesis show that women’s workplace militancy was not simply a direct response to women’s heightened presence in trade unions. The women involved in these disputes were more likely to understand their experiences of workplace activism as an expression of the economic, social and subjective value of their work. Whilst they did not adopt a feminist identity or associate their action with the WLM, they spoke about themselves and their motivations in a manner that emphasised feminist values of equality, autonomy and self-worth.

By the late-nineteenth-century, cricket had a well-established national narrative. Namely; that the game‘s broadly pre-industrial, rural, and egalitarian culture had been replaced by the 'gentlemanly‘ ethos of amateurism; a culture which encouraged cricket for its own sake and specific norms of 'moral‘ behaviour exemplified by idioms‘ such as 'it‘s not cricket‘. A century later, much of this narrative not only remained intact, it survived unchallenged. However, a regionally specific sub-narrative had emerged in relation to cricket outside of 'first-class‘ Test and County cricket. Cricket in the North was 'Working class‘, 'professional‘, 'commercialised‘, and played within highly 'competitive‘ leagues, while cricket in the South was 'middle-class‘, 'amateur‘, 'non-commercial‘, and played in non-competitive 'friendly‘ fixtures. Whereas cricket in the North has attracted a good deal of academic attention, there remains a paucity of contextualised academic research of cricket in the South. Due to assumed social and cultural similarities, the so-called 'friendly‘ cricket of the South remains subsumed within the national narrative. Whereas we now know a good deal about who played cricket, and why, in the North, we know little, if anything, of those who played cricket, why they did so, and under what circumstances, in the South. This thesis, which focuses on the County of Surrey, thus examines the social and cultural development of 'club‘ cricket in the South for the first time. In order to test the historical assumption that cricket in the South replicated the gentlemanly amateurism inherent to the game‘s national culture and historical discourse, this thesis shall not only examine the origins of these important cultural 'identities‘, but who was playing cricket, and under what social, environmental, economic, and cultural circumstances, in Surrey between 1870 and 1970. In basic terms, it will demonstrate that much of the historiography proves misleading, especially regarding the universality of non-competitive cricket. Moreover, this thesis will also establish that the introduction, implementation, and spread of non-competitive cricket was a class-specific and discriminatory ideology, which had close associations with the middle-classes‘ increasing insecurity and their migration to Surrey. The ideological basis upon which non-competitive cricket was based, was to have fundamentally negative repercussions relating to the game‘s cultural meaning and popularity, and the 're-introduction‘ of competitive league cricket to the South in 1968 may well have saved the sport from a slow and agonising extinction.

The question of ‘the Pictish language’ has been discussed for over four hundred years, and for well over two centuries it has been the subject of ceaseless and often heated debate. The main disagreement focusing on its linguistic categorisation – whether it was Celtic, Germanic (using modern terminology) or whether it belonged to some more exotic language group such as Basque. If it was Celtic then was it Brittonic or Goidelic? The answer to such questions was of some importance in ascertaining to whom the Scottish past belonged. Was it to immigrant Irish, conquering Germanic peoples or native Britons? The twentieth century saw the normalising of the view that it was closely related to Brittonic with some erudite scholars maintaining that another, non-Celtic language, was also spoken in Pictland. The debate subsequently shifted to focusing on just how close was the relationship between Pictish and Neo-Brittonic. Was Pictish simply a northerly dialect variant of the latter or was it indeed a more distinct and perhaps conservative form, evolving independently in an area outwith Roman power and linguistic influence? Recently, as the field of Pictish studies was subjected to both linguistic and historical scrutiny, discussions have become significantly more sophisticated, but the core question remains, as to whether Pictish distinctiveness merits the label ‘dialect’ or ‘language’, as the Venerable Bede himself stated. This thesis will investigate this core issue by providing an overview of previous thinking and scrutinising the evidence for early divergence. It is intended as groundwork for much needed further studies into this field.

This thesis examines the relationship between the private naval armaments industry, businessmen and the British Government’s supply planning framework between 1918 and 1941. More specifically, it reassesses the concept of the Military-Industrial Complex by examining the impact of disarmament upon private industry, the role of leading industrialists within supply and procurement policy, and the successes and failings of the Government’s supply organisation. This work blends together political, naval and business history in new ways, and, by situating the business activities of industrialists alongside their work as government advisors, it sheds new light on the operation of the British state. This thesis argues that there was a small coterie of influential businessmen, led by Lord Weir, who, in a time of great need for Britain, first gained access to secret information on industrial mobilisation as advisers to the Supply Board and Principal Supply Officers Committee (PSOC), and later were able to directly influence policy. This made Lord Weir and Sir James Lithgow among the most influential industrial figures in Britain. This was a relationship which cut both ways: Weir and others provided the state with honest, thoughtful advice and policies, but, as ‘insiders’ utilised their access to information to build a business empire at a fraction of the normal costs. Outsiders, by way of contrast, lacked influence and were forced together into a defensive ‘ring’ – or cartel – and effectively fixed prices for British warships in the lean 1920s. However, by the 1930s, the cartel grew into one of the most sophisticated profiteering groups of its day, before being shut down by the Admiralty in 1941. More generally, this work argues that the Japanese invasion of Manchuria was a turning point for supply organisation, and that between 1931 and 1935, the PSOC and its component bodies were governed by necessity. Powerful constraints on finance and political manoeuvre explain the nature of industrial involvement. Thus, it is argued that the PSOC did a broadly effective job at organising industry with the tools it was given, and the failings were down to the top levels of policymaking – the Cabinet – not acting upon advice to ease procurement bottlenecks early enough, to the extent that British warship construction was more expensive and slower than it could have been. In sum, this group of industrialists, the Admiralty and a few key figures in the PSOC such as Sir Harold Brown, effectively saved MacDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain’s National Government from itself.