Dominion

Bibliographical Note

Dominion involved a greater range of background reading than any previous novel I have written.

On British social and political history from the 1930s to the 1950s, the most useful works were Angus Calder’s The People’s War: Britain 1939–45 (1971), still I think the best social history of wartime Britain. Also very useful were Juliet Gardiner’s The Thirties:An Intimate History (2010), and Wartime Britain 1939–45 (2004), and Richard Overy’s The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (2009).

Peter Hennessy’s Never Again: Britain 1945–51 (1992) and Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (2000) are packed with fascinating information. David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain 1945–51 (2008) and Family Britain 1951–57 (2010) were also very helpful. I think Kynaston’s insight that, culturally, Britain in the decade following the Second World War retreated into a 1930s view on many social issues, is crucial. In the first decade after the war there were highly censorious attitudes to subjects like illegitimacy, homosexuality and divorce, and the belief that women belonged in the home returned after the war. In my alternate universe Britain in 1952 is even more like the 1930s, and without the social reforms and full employment created by the Attlee government of 1945–51.

On particular topics, Juliet Nicolson’s The Great Silence (2009) is a moving and evocative account of Britain coming to terms with the terrible losses of the First World War, which so affected Sarah’s family in my book. Barbara Tate’s West End Girls (2010) is a fascinating and extraordinary memoir of life in a Soho brothel of the period, and Dilys’ establishment in Dominion owes it much. The Channel 4 documentary Killer Fog (1999) tells the extraordinary story of the Great Smog of 1952 evocatively and with compassion for the many who died. Rupert Allason’s The Branch (1983) was a very useful brief introduction to the history of the Special Branch; though I suspect the author would disagree with my portrayal of how the Branch might have developed in an authoritarian Britain, I see it as perfectly probable.

Many novels helped me in reimagining the period, notably those of Patrick Hamilton. (The roadhouse where David and his party stop on the way to Birmingham owes something to the Kings Head in the third volume of his Gorse trilogy (1952–1955).) Norman Collins’ wonderful though sadly forgotten novel London Belongs to Me (1945) brings London uniquely to life during the traumatic years 1938–40. Noblesse Oblige, ed. Nancy Mitford (1956) includes her hilarious essay on snobbery and the use of language in contemporary society.

The story of Britain between the 1930s and 1950s is partly the story of empire in decline. Jan Morris’ Farewell the Trumpets (1976), the final volume of her Pax Britannica Trilogy, was particularly useful and evocative. I read a number of accounts of Civil Service life during the period, of which the most useful was undoubtedly Joe Garner’s The Commonwealth Office, 1925–68 (1968). Andrew Stewart’s Britain and the Dominions in the Second World War (2008) is a useful and informative recent academic study. Peter Hennessy’s Whitehall (1989) was also very helpful.

For Churchill and the crisis of May 1940, Roy Jenkins’ Churchill (2001) is I think the best single-volume biography to date. John Charmley’s Churchill: The End of Glory (1993) is exhaustively well-informed though exhaustingly biased against Churchill. On the other hand, Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War (2010), telling of his extraordinary callousness when it came to the Bengal famine of 1942, was a necessary douche of cold water for one like me who, remembering Churchill’s role in 1940, can perhaps incline to being too reverential.

On the Cabinet discussions over whether to make peace in 1940 I found Andrew Roberts’ Eminent Churchillians (1994) and The Holy Fox: A Life of Lord Halifax (1991) very useful, along with John Lukacs’ Five Days in London: May 1940 (2001) and Ian Kershaw’s Fateful Choices (2007). Richard Overy’s The Battle of Britain was very helpful at the early stages of my research. I had originally considered setting this book in a Britain where the proposed German invasion of Britain in 1940, Operation Sealion, had actually taken place. There has been much debate as to whether it could have succeeded and Overy’s book finally convinced me that it could not.

There was a substantial minority in Britain who in 1939–40, for various reasons, opposed undertaking what would inevitably be total mobilization for a life-or-death struggle against Nazi Germany. Many were pacifists; a few were Scottish Nationalists; the most important were anti-Semites and outright Nazis. Particularly helpful on these various individuals and groups were Thomas Linehan’s British Fascism 1918–39 (2000), and Richard Griffiths’ Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933–39 (1993) together with his Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939–40 (1998). This book tells the story of one of the leading pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic figures, who ended up detained in prison along with Oswald Mosley and who, while there, was much exercised, like the Scottish National Party, by the question of Scottish women being sent to work in England. (Ramsay was a Scottish Conservative MP.) The SNP’s opposition to Scots being conscripted to fight the war against Nazism can be verified in studies, such as Peter Lynch’s The History of the Scottish National Party (Cardiff, 2002).

On the history of British anti-Semitism, I found Anthony Julius’ Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (2010) to be very fair and informative in the sections leading up to 1945, though the post-war sections are, in my view, neither. Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie’s biography Beaverbrook: a Life (1992) convinced me that if there was one outstanding candidate to run a regime such as the one portrayed in this book it was Beaverbrook.

On the subject of mental hospitals in the 1950s – that decade must have been one of the worst in which to be mentally ill, with experimental and sometimes dangerous new treatments introduced and before the radical reforms of the 1960s – I found Diana Gittins’ Madness in Its Place: Narratives of Severalls Hospital 1913–97 (1998) especially helpful, along with Dilys Smith’s Park Prewett Hospital: the History 1898–1984 (1986) and Derek McCarthy’s Certified and Detained: A True Account (2009). Interestingly all three books describe an identical regime, though from widely different points of view. Bartley Green asylum is fictitious but, I think, representative.

The Great Smog of December 1952 was caused by unusual weather conditions over southern England, at a period when London was still belching out tons of coal smoke from homes and power stations (the weather that week was unusually cold) as well as, increasingly, traffic fumes. It was the worst smog in the capital’s history. It is now estimated that 12,000 people died, mostly from respiratory diseases. Atmospheric conditions and pollution levels would have been the same in my alternate universe. In the real world, the government covered up the number who died, but the smog was instrumental in bringing about the Clean Air Act a few years later.

In looking at how a British Resistance Movement might have fought a collaborationist regime, the closest (though not exact) parallel has to be the French Resistance. I found John F. Sweets’ Choices in Vichy France (1994) and Matthew Cobb’s The Resistance (2009) especially helpful.

The United States in this novel is neutral and at peace with Japan, as I believe could have happened if Britain had fallen or surrendered in 1940. This would have strengthened the predominantly Republican isolationist movement in America, which in turn could have led to Roosevelt losing the 1940 Presidential election. If, as in this book, a Democrat was at last again elected in 1952, the most likely candidate would have been the man who lost to Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson. Porter McKeever’s biography, Adlai Stevenson (1989), tells the story of one of history’s narrow losers who, in this book, becomes a winner.

Inevitably, Dominion involved much reading about Nazi Germany. I think the best recent study of the regime is Richard Evans’ three-volume history: The Coming of the Third Reich (2003), The Third Reich in Power (2005) and The Third Reich at War (2008). Toby Thacker’s Joseph Goebbels; Life and Death (2010) was very useful on the man who in my book succeeds Hitler, and on the politics of the regime generally. Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe is an excellent study, not least of the various crazy and murderous Nazi plans for the future of Russia. James Taylor and Warren Shaw’s Dictionary of the Third Reich (1987) was indispensable. Warren Shaw’s son, my friend William Shaw, was one of those who read the book in manuscript; Dominion therefore owes something to two generations of the same family.

Russia’s War (1997) by Richard Overy, the range of whose scholarship on the Second World War is matched only by his readability, is I think the best short account of Germany’s militarily unwinnable war against the Soviet Union. Rodric Braithwaite’s Moscow 1941: a City and Its People at War (2006) is an enthralling account of Germany’s first defeat at the Battle of Moscow. In my alternate universe German forces, are able – with Britain gone from the field – to begin their offensive against Russia earlier and with more troops, and take Moscow, but then become, as I think they inevitably would, bogged down in Russia’s vastness. Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (2011) is an enthralling and important account of the role of food supplies in the winning and losing of the Second World War, again not least in Russia.

On the development of nuclear weapons and rocketry, Michael Neufeld’s Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (2007) and James P. Delgado’s Nuclear Dawn: the Atomic Bomb from the Manhattan Project to the Cold War (2009) were very helpful for a non-scientist. C.P. Snow’s The New Men (1954) is a fascinating novel by a wartime Civil Service insider about Britain’s efforts to manufacture a nuclear bomb.

John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope (1999) is the best of all too many accounts of how the Vatican of Pope Pius XII collaborated with the Nazi regime and its puppets and did next to nothing to stop the Holocaust in Catholic countries, despite the efforts of some courageous local Catholics. I found the story of the extent of the Catholic Church hierarchy’s collaborationist attitude to Nazi and Fascist mass murder shocking enough in the context of the Spanish Civil War: in that of the Second World War it seems an almost indelible stain.

Which brings me, finally, to the tragic story of Slovakia and the Holocaust. The events that Natalia relates to David all happened in Slovakia in the real world, as in the alternate one. A collaborationist, nationalist anti-Semitic regime led by a Catholic priest, Father Tiso, and his second in command, the murderous Fascist Vojtech Tuka, used its own party paramilitaries, the Hlinka Guard, to load Slovak Jews onto the trains which were to carry them to the death camps in the first major deportations of the Holocaust, and also sent troops to fight in Russia. Some Slovak Catholics approved the deportations, others protested so vigorously that the deportations were – though too late for most – suspended. There is a good literature on the subject. Karen Henderson’s Slovakia: the Escape from Invisibility (2002) is a useful introduction to the country’s modern history. Mark W. Axworthy’s Axis Slovakia: Hitler’s Slavic Wedge 1938–45 (2002) tells the story of the Tiso regime. Kathryn Winter’s Katarina (1998), Gerta Vrbová’s Trust and Deceit: a Tale of Survival in Slovakia and Hungary 1939–1945 (2006) and her husband Rudolf Vrba’s I Escaped from Auschwitz (2006) tell the story from the point of view of Slovak Jews. Vrba’s story is one of the most extraordinary memoirs of the Second World War. Finally the papers in Racial Violence Past and Present (Slovak National Museum and Museum of Jewish Culture, Bratislava 2003) are a warning from history to Europe today.

Finally, and more happily, I cannot end without mentioning Robert Harris’ Fatherland (1992) – for me the best alternate history novel ever written.