The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation, by Margot Bennett

“Informed public opinion is infectious, even to governments.” (p. 149)

Thursday, 30 July 1964 saw publication of two paperback “Penguin Specials” from Penguin Books both looking at the same subject. At four shillings, Nuclear Disaster by Tom Stonier,

“was based on his 1961 report to the New York Academy of Sciences which dealt with the biological and environmental effects of dropping a 20-megaton bomb on Manhattan”. Geoffrey Goodman, “Obituary — Tom Stonier”, Guardian, 28 June 1999.

Alongside this, at a slightly cheaper three shillings and sixpence, Margot Bennett’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation is, according to the back-cover blurb, a “first reader in the most uncomfortable subject in the world”. 

The title is surely a riff on The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw, first published by Constable & Co in 1928 and republished in 1937 as an inexpensive two-volume paperback — the first Pelican Book — under the revised title The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism. 

Of course, that was timely given the ongoing civil war between Republicans and Fascists in Spain, and the growing power of the Nazis in Germany. I’d be surprised if Margot Bennett wasn’t aware of the book, given that in 1937 she was in Spain. It was the year that Margot Mitchell (sometimes known as Margot Miller) married English journalist Richard Bennett while both were working for the Government — that is, Republican — radio station. Bennett, who also worked as a nurse, had been machine-gunned in the legs the previous year and at the time of her engagement had recently broken her arm when the ambulance she was in crashed under shellfire.

There’s nothing very militant in her book on atomic radiation, written 27 years later. “Politics is not the concern of this book,” she tells us in her introduction (p. 10). The focus is instead on the cause and effects fallout,

“addressed more to women than to men [because] the mother is far more intimately concerned with the health of the family than the father. It is the mother who sees that the children have green vegetables and milk, and who nurses then when they have measles.” (p. 11)

This still holds, she says, even if the mother has a career; a woman with no family, “still has a tenderness to children that is different in quality from the feelings of a man.”

It’s not exactly the most feminist stance but this is a politically active woman writing in the mid-1960s for a small-C conservative readership, the emphasis on presenting just the facts rather than on what we should think. The book concludes on a broad political note:

“Science affects us all; so far, overwhelmingly to our advantage. If there are times when we feel this is not so, as members of a democracy we have some kind of duty to find out what is happening.” (p. 154)

But there’s no sense of a particular party or ideology being favoured. We’re left to make up our own minds.

The domestic perspective — the way radiation affects milk and green vegetables, and our children — might imply this is rather lightweight or condescending to the ordinary housewife. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed one contemporary review thought it was, 

“little more than another text book, and heavy going at that.” (Robin Turner, “Nuclear penguins and others”, Birmingham Post, 8 August 1964, p. 5.)

A more generous review found it,

“Thought provoking … easily read but thorough” (John Berrie, “Woman’s angle”, Nottingham Evening Post and News, 7 August 1964, p. 10.)

It’s certainly thorough, covering the ground in detail in just 154 pages (not including appendices, glossary and index). After the introduction, the first three chapters give us a grounding in the physics involved in atomic radiation — “Inside the Atom”, “Neutrons and Nuclear Energy" and “Fission, Fusion, and Fallout”. We then switch to biology for “The Message in Our Cells”.

Chapter 5, “The Subtle Enemy”, then applies the physics to the biology to explain the damage atomic radiation can do to us and to future generations. The next chapter, “The Influential Friend”, puts a counter case, outlining all the beneficial ways atomic radiation can be applied. “Pollution and Protection” addresses what can be done to mitigate potential fallout. Bennett then provides a conclusion, making the case that even statistically “negligible” numbers of people wounded or killed would still be tragic for those concerned.

A lot of this is very technical. Promotion for the book at the time said that Bennett wrote in “plain English” (for example, “For Your Bookshelf”, Halifax Daily Courier and Guardian, 31 July 1964, p. 4). Even so, I found it quite hard going and made slow progress. 

Two things really bring it alive. First, Bennett peppers her book with vivid real-world examples of the way radiation can affect people’s lives. Hauntingly, she details the stages of radiation sickness suffered by early pioneers, from skin rashes and hair loss through anaemia, sterility and useless, deformed fingers to the fatal cancers (pp. 96-97). Or there’s the awful story of the Radium Girls (pp. 100-101). 

I’d be interested to know more about the Russian scientist who claimed to be able to cure the effects of radiation on DNA via a simple pill (p. 114), or about the Scottish boy discovered playing in a “pile of radioactive dust” and the factory making luminous dials that proved so radioactive that the Radiological Protection Service had the whole site buried (both stories p. 146). Frustratingly, there are no notes or bibliography to guide us to more information.

Secondly, throughout the book Bennett uses relatable, often domestic analogies to explain the complex ideas. She likens electrical charges — the way positive and negative attract one another but two positives or two negatives repel — to attraction between people, where a talker will fall for a listener (p. 17). She describes atoms of different elements as being like different breeds of dog (p. 22). Compounds and molecules are likened to marriages (p. 24).

Sometimes those analogies show how far we have come. On page 83, she refers to the cumulative effect of exposure to radiation over “the long days of our lives — 20,000 days if we live to be about sixty”, which doesn’t seem very long at all. (Bennett lived to 68).

But on the whole the effect is to make a complex, technical subject more tangible. The central, political idea here is the responsibility to be better informed: nuclear weapons are devastatingly powerful, but knowledge is also power — one to hold the arms race at bay.

*

Obligatory Doctor Who bit

Since the book was published at the end of July 1964, Bennett must have delivered the manuscript no later than, I’d guess, the end of May. Given the technical detail, it can’t have been a quick book to write. As well as the time taken to research it, a note just ahead of the introduction tells us that, 

“Everything factual has been checked by scientists whose knowledge is far more than equal to the task” (p. 7).

We’re not told who these scientists were or what the editorial process involved, but writing and editing surely took some months, which means work on the book overlapped with Bennett’s conversation(s) with BBC story editor David Whitaker about potentially writing for Doctor Who. As detailed in my post on Bennett’s novel The Furious Masters, that seems to have happened in late February 1964. She was being considered to write a story comprising four 25-minute episodes as a potential replacement for what became Planet of Giants — but nothing further is known about what her story might have entailed, or whether she even submitted an idea.

I partly read this book in the faint hope of finding some clue as to what she might have discussed with or submitted to Whitaker. The short biography of Bennett on the opening page is suggestive:

“She likes variety in writing and is now doing something in Science Fiction,” (p. 1) 

That “something” may have been The Furious Masters, published four years later. Or Bennett may have completed work on her study of atomic radiation and then turned to Doctor Who, only to discover that she was now too late and Planet of Giants was going ahead after all…

Then there’s one of the allusions she uses. At the end of her introduction, Bennett says that there’s no point wishing that the atom had never been cracked open.

“Man can’t afford to retreat; it is by discovery and invention, from fire and flint axe onwards, that he has survived. The axe is dangerously sharp, and the fire has grown as hot as the sun.” (p. 13)

Unlike most of the analogies she uses, this isn’t contemporary or domestic — it’s making a link between modern technology and the ancient past. 

The first ever Doctor Who story, broadcast 23 November to 14 December 1963, involves a tribe of cave people where authority is dependent on the ability to make fire (I think this owes a debt to The Inheritors by William Golding). “Fire will kill us all in the end,” opines the Old Mother of the tribe.

In the next story, we see something of this prophecy come to pass when the TARDIS materialises in a petrified forest that Barbara initially thinks is the result of a “forest fire”. It turns out that the devastation is the result of a neutron bomb, leaving the ground and atmosphere “polluted with a very high level of fallout”. Beings called Daleks are among the survivors.

I’m not the first to suggest that the Doctor Who production team deliberately juxtaposed the role of fire in the prehistoric tribe and the role of nuclear weapons on this futuristic world as part of a wider ambition to have the time travellers witness key moments of societal change. And it’s exactly the same connection made by Margot Bennett.

Did she and David Whitaker discuss it? And who exactly informed whom?

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

LXXI

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all they Tears wash out a Word of it. (p. 92)

Or, to put it another way, you can’t rewrite history — not one line.

In 1859, a reclusive, privately wealthy scholar called Edward Fitzgerald anonymously published 250 copies of a pamphlet containing his translation in English of 75 four-line rhyming poems, a form known as “rubāʿī”, attributed to a Persian poet, Omar Khayyám, in the 11th century. No one paid much attention to this pamphlet until, in 1861, the lawyer and literary scholar Whitley Stokes happened across a stack of copies at a bookstall near Leicester Square, where the original price of five shillings had been reduced to a penny. 

Having bought one, Stokes showed it to his friends, including the poets Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who duly bought their own copies. Swinburne’s account of what then happened (apparently from p. 188, vol 6, of The Swinburne Letters) is quoted in my copy of the Rubáiyát:

“Next day we thought we might get some more for presents among our friends, but the man at the stall asked twopence! Rossetti expostulated with him in terms of such humorously indignant remonstrance as none but he could ever have commanded. We took a few, and left him. In a week or two, if I am not much mistaken, the remaining copies were sold at a guinea.” (p. x)

Word gradually caught on. Fitzgerald produced an expanded, second edition containing 110 of the four-line poems in 1868, and further revised editions, each of 101 of these quatrains, in 1872, 1879 and 1889 — the latter published after Fitzgerald’s death.

By the end of the 19th century, “more than two millions copies have been sold [of the Rubaiyat] in over two hundred editions” (according to a facsimile of the first edition published c. 1900). It became “one of the most admired works of Victorian literature” and “in the first half of the 20th century was arguably the most influential [long poem] in the English language”, according to Melvyn Bragg, introducing a 2014 episode of In Our Time on The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. 

Hector Hugh Munro adopted the pen-name “Saki” after the cup-bearer in the Rubaiyat. Various dining clubs were established in honour of Khayyam: writers JM Barrie, Arthur Conan-Doyle, Thomas Hardy and AE Housman were all members of one. Housman’s friend, the mathematician John Edensor Littlewood bought a slim, pocket-sized volume containing both the first and forth editions as a present for my great aunt on her 11th birthday in 1938, which is the copy I’ve just read.

In 1961, David Whitaker drew from this book when he wrote the BBC children’s serial Garry Halliday and the Secret of Omar Khayyam, broadcast at Saturday teatimes over seven weeks in early 1962. I’ll dig into that more when I write up my notes for the corresponding entry in my Garry Halliday episode guide. But for now, it’s enough to recognise that this little book was still resonant a hundred years after Whitley Stokes first discovered it on that bookstall. 

But why was this slim book of poems such a massive hit in the late 19th and early 20th century? 

It’s effectively a day in the life; the opening rubāʿī describes the start of new day in the early part of the year, the dawn sun touching the Sultan’s Turret in an unnamed Persian town, a cock crowing and — in subsequent quatrains — a group of people waiting eagerly for the tavern to open. The poet wanders this town, enjoying a cup of wine and musing on the nature of existence. 

XLVII

And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,

End in the Nothing all Things end in—Yes—

Then fancy while Thou art, Thou art but what

Thou shalt be—Nothing—Thou shalt not be less.

(First edition, p. 56)

XXIV

Ah, make the most of what ye may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend;

Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!

(Fourth edition, p, 76)

There was, at the time Fitzgerald published his first edition, a long-standing interest in Persian culture and the wider Orient, not least because of British imperial interests across the east and into India. The Persian language was used by the East India Company in provincial governments and courts until the 1830s. Sir William Jones’s various translations and his A grammar of the Persian language (1771) influenced the generations that followed. For example, the Jones translation of the 8th century Mu’allaqat inspired Alfred Tennyson to write his Locksley Hall (1835). Tennyson was, in turn, a friend of Edward Fitzgerald.

That context is useful but doesn’t explain the particular appeal of the Rubaiyat. What made this text stand out?

Note that in the two quatrains quoted above there’s no mention of an afterlife. The In Our Time episode on the Rubaiyat and Sadeq Saba in his 2010 documentary The Genius of Omar Khayyam explore this issue of godlessness. Fitzgerald published his first edition in 1859, the same year that Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, at a time when there was already much interest in “long time” — ancient, geological history stretching back millions and billions of years, far further than accounted for by a literal reading of the Bible. These ideas were controversial. On In Our Time, the suggestion is made that Fitzgerald couldn’t have published a work of his own (supposed) agnostic, perhaps even atheistic, musings without inviting scandal; Khayyam enabled him to do so at a safe remove. Readers could also engage in such ideas without breaking from the Church.

I can see, too, that there’s an appeal in the world conjured here: a rich culture different from that of the late Victorians, and seemingly more free. The In Our Time episode talks about the wider allure of Orientalism to the late Victorians, notably in the sensuous hedonism of the harem. I don’t think there’s much licentiousness in the Rubaiyat, beyond the idea that the poet says to drink and enjoy wine while we can. But there’s an allure in any different, rich culture in which we can escape and be immersed — like the appeal of Middle Earth or sci-fi or Regency novels. Once entranced, there’s always more to steep yourself in: the history and rules, the minutiae, the power politics in wrangling among other true believers. (The same might be true of the football terrace, too.)

There are often good reasons why someone actively seeks such escape. In Our Time cites Fitzgerald’s close friendship with Professor Edward Byles Cowell; the first edition is in part a translation of the Persian quatrains Cowell found while in Calcutta and sent to Fitzgerald, their correspondence apparently suggestive of how keenly the two men felt their separation. We can read something into this, just as readers of the Rubaiyat could read their own hopes and desires into the tantalising world it conjured. It’s a frame in which things are possible that would not be dared outside.

But maybe the appeal isn’t nearly so immersive. This kind of “enjoy life while you can” stuff is not a world away from “live, laugh love”. That such aphorisms here derive from some ancient, eastern scholar confers authenticity and value to what a cynic might otherwise see as greetings-card wisdom. And there’s also something haunting in this voice from what’s now almost a thousand years ago exhorting us to enjoy our existence and to live while we can.

In fact, we’re not sure Omar Khayyam really said the things attributed to him. It’s not just that many of the surviving quatrains in Persian give no indication of author, but Fitzgerald took a very free hand in translating the texts he had to hand, reordering and rewording them, grafting in bits that sound like the Book of Common Prayer (compare the last quatrain I quoted to the famous “dust to dust...”) and Shakespeare. That might not resonate so much with us now as it did with late Victorian readers. Moulded in their own language, no wonder they felt that this text out of the long past spoke to them so directly.

The real Omar Khayyam — full name Ghiyāth al-Dīn Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm Nīsābūrī — is no less fascinating than this mythic version. 

“Better known for his poetry, it often surprises many to learn that Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) was one of the greatest of all medieval mathematicians,” says Jim Al-Khalili in his book Pathfinders — The Golden Age of Arabic Science (2010). He cites Khayyam’s work on cubic equations in Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, including “both algebraic and geometric methods for solving them systematically and elegantly, using the method of conical sections (which involves slicing through a cone at different angles to produce different types of curves such as circles, ellipses, parabolas and hyperbolas)” (p. 122).

I’m familiar with conic sections being used to make sense or orbits, whether those of celestial bodies or the rockets and craft trying to reach them, and wonder how much of Khayyam survives in the mechanics of the space age.

Khayyam was also part of a team that, with cutting-edge technology such as the astrolabe, calculated the length of the year with much greater accuracy than the contemporary Gregorian model; indeed, the Jalali calendar devised by Khayyam and his colleagues was still in use into the 20th century. In addition, Al-Khalili quotes a long passage from one of Khayyam’s other surviving works, more reliably attributed to him than his poetry, extolling the virtues of seeking the truth — and acknowledging that people will mock you for doing so. It’s quoted at length because it expresses a sentiment that Al-Khalili recognises now, the voice of the exasperated scientist ringing down to us through the ages.

I can see why this little book of poetry, written by an influential mathematician, would have appealed to JE Littlewood, and why he chose it as a gift for an 11 year-old. It bears a simple, four-word inscription, “Ann, from Uncle John”, and the date. But what he was giving her was a guide to life, and a frame in which unconventional ideas and conversations are possible. And that was important because, as the inscription shows, he’d not yet admitted what was known within the family: that Ann was his daughter.

But perhaps I’m just the latest in a long line to read into this little book what I want to see. 

The Secret Life of Fungi, by Aliya Whiteley

This handsome little hardback is an arresting read. The strange, tactile quality of Aliya Whiteley's fiction has long entranced me (see posts on Skyward Inn and The Loosening Skin) and this non-fiction collection is just as oddly, unsettlingly captivating. It's like venturing into the woods with her, to catch a glimpse of something ancient, earthy and alive. An MR James story but real.

"Collection" may not be the right word for what this is; it's a series of often short chapters exploring different aspects of the physicality and science of fungi, and the ways this is woven into culture and literature as well as the life of the author. There's stuff on what it's like to encounter different fungi in the wild, in the UK and abroad. We cover disease, whether St Anthony's Fire or the fungal infections most likely to affect someone with HIV; we cover cures such as penicillin and LSD-related therapies. There's time for monstrous fungus in fantasy and sci-fi (such as Whiteley's own works, Tade Thompson's Rosewater, John Wyndham's Trouble with Lichen and many others). There's stuff on mushrooms as food and as poison.

These tangible, evocative threads are connected, making up a mycelial network of their own. At one point, Whiteley explains that the mycelial networks of fungi might be best thought of as single bodies, vast and intricate, living half-submerged in the soil. It's this kind of thing that makes the book such fertile ground,  all so rich and potent that I kept thinking "This would make the start of a good story..."

One chapter explores fungi as "Saviours" for our real-world problems. Penicillium notatum is the best-known example, discovered in 1928 to kill the bacteria in a series of Petri dishes while Alexander Fleming wasn't looking; over many subsequent years (Whiteley is good at underlining the effort involved), it was then developed into the first antibiotic. A related fungus, Penicillium citrinum, has an effect on cholesterol and led Akira Endo to develop statins, now one of the most commonly taken drugs in the world.

I was particularly taken by examples that may change and shape our future. In 2017, Aspergillus tubingensis was found to be "feeding on polyurethane on a rubbish site at Isamabad" (p. 36). Pestalotiopsis microspora has been identified in the Amazon rainforest doing something similar and may be able to do so without air.

"It could survive deep in the darkness of landfill and steadily work its way through many kinds of plastic, if initial hypotheses turn out to be accurate." (p. 37)

A later chapter, "Stowaways of the Space Age", explores the bacteria and fungal growths identified on spacecraft, the risks they pose to systems and ways they may be affected by exposure to space and radiation. And then there's this, which I dreamt about last night:

"NASA has been investigating the possibility of using mycelia to create living shelters on Mars using melanin-rich fungi to absorb radiation and protect the human inhabitants within. ... They could be constructed, effectively grown, on location, making them easier to transport. They also offer the proposal of easy, organic disposal after use, putting little strain on the alien environment." (p. 121)

It's literally describing alien life and yet that quality of strangeness is something we'd take with us from here. It's all around us, if we'll only look and see.

Spook Street, by Mick Herron

I've been listening to this, the fourth of Mick Herron's Slow Horses books, a little behind the run of the TV version and it's been fascinating to see the differences.

The attention of the security service is taken up with a terrorist bombing in a London shopping centre. River Cartwright, the nominal lead of these adventures, is worried about his elderly grandfather, a retired former spook and legend in the service who is suffering from the early signs of dementia. The "Old Bastard", as he is affectionately known, thinks someone is out to get him and is determined to strike first - which is bad news when River goes to visit...

It's difficult to say more without getting into spoilers. But what I can talk about here is what the TV version changes. A sequence in the book in which a character ends up in the Thames is completely excised - I am assume for being impractical. In the book, someone gets off a train to find the authorities waiting to arrest them; on TV there follows an elaborate chase.

Generally, the changes on TV are to give characters more agency: in the book, one character thinks about doing something with a gun and is then taken by surprise; on TV, they do the thing thought about and then take action in response to the surprise something. Another character doesn't simply retire but finds out how they've been wronged and puts it right. River, meanwhile, puzzles out what's going on rather than being presented with the answer.

I'm not sure the TV version makes such a point of the relationship between River and the character Bertrand, which in the book has a huge impact. But on the whole, I can see how the changes make the TV version more action-packed and visual, people doing things to drive the plot(s) forward.

There are some pretty major revelations here for at least one of the principal characters. Effectively, for the first time in this series, we end on a cliffhanger. It will be interesting to see where things go next, and how much these revelations skew what follows...

See also my posts on the previous books in the series: Slow Horses, Dead Lions and Real Tigers.

Exit Through the Fireplace, by Kate Dunn

First published in 1998, this is an oral history of repertory theatre - which is where the same group of actors star in play after play, usually on stage with one while rehearsing the next. The book is based on interviews with more than 200 actors, directors and stage managers, the youngest of them a 27 year-old David Tennant, here in the company of such luminaries as Lionel Jeffries and Phyllida Law, Harriet Walter and Derek Jacobi.

Names big and small share first-hand experience and also tales they were handed down. At times, this can get a bit repetitive — we get multiple stories about problems with on-set doors and actors having to make entrances or pass props through the fireplace. Quite often, the author summarises what a person is going to say before quoting them saying it. And I suspect that some of these stories have been embellished in the telling, either by the people quoted here or by whoever told them.

It’s not always clear when these stories took place, and I can’t believe that rep was the same in the 1930s and ‘50s and ‘80s. I found myself looking up the birthdates of the people spoken to so that I could put their accounts in chronological context (and work out which were contemporaries of David Whitaker, about whom more in mo…)

There’s also a surprising moment in the plate section, where one photograph from a production of Charley’s Aunt in Buxton in 1952 includes “Prudence Williams (the author’s mother), Gwynn Whitby (the author’s grandmother)” and “Nigel Arkwright (the author’s uncle)” — as well as a very young Nigel Hawthorne. I’d have liked more on this personal connection, the legacy of rep. The photo is followed by two more from productions of Charley’s Aunt, in Ipswich in 1984 and in Bexhill in 1960. Again, I’d have liked more on the choice of plays in rep, making sense of why some production played for just one week in one location and others ran and ran. 

Even so, this is a treasure trove full of insight and detail. Bits of it are extraordinary. Derek Jacobi recounts having smallpox while in Birmingham (p. 190), considered serious enough that he didn’t have to go on stage, while others with gastric flu soldiered on (buckets kept handily just off-stage). Or there’s the reference to Anthony Oakley, who accidentally killed the actor he was duelling with in a production of Macbeth (p. 187). 

Then there’s the sense of tradition, reaching back in time.

“Elizabeth Counsell … worked in a company with an elderly actor, who told her that as a boy he had been in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream playing one of the Mechanicals. During rehearsals an elderly actor in that company had given him the business associated with his character, which had been handed down over hundreds of years from Will Kempe, the actor who played the comic roles in Shakespeare’s own company.” (p. 70) 

Nicely, this is then followed by Alan Ayckbourn being sceptical about this kind of claim — whether its really credible that such knowledge is passed down intact, and whether its useful anyway. That means we get Counsell’s awe-striking anecdote and also probe at it a bit, too.

A lot of it is very funny, such as the amazing image conjured by Brian Cox’s story about the day of his wedding to Caroline Burt in 1968. He was at Birmingham Rep at the time, appearing as Iago in Othello, alongside a blacked-up Michael Gambon in the title role. The reception was held in the morning and then the groom and other cast members were expected back on stage for their afternoon performance.

“I was the only one who was sober… I was sharing a dressing room with Mike. … He finally got all his clothes on [for the performance] and we were ready and ‘Beginners’ was called, then I looked at Mike and I realised he didn’t have any make-up on. And he was playing Othello! I said, ‘Mike, you haven’t got any make-up on,’ and he looked at his sticks of make-up and said, ‘That’s all right,’ and he gathered up the make-up and held the sticks under the lightbulb until they went soft and then rubbed them all over his face.” (p. 69)

Barbara Leslie married Shaun Sutton in 1948 while they were both in the cast of Jane Eyre — “I was playing Adele, aged eight, and Shaun was playing eighty” (p. 69) — and they held a party after the show, which then went on all night. Two weeks later, says Leslie, another colleague in the same company, Joan Sanderson, married Gregory Moseley and they held a party in the middle of the day, before taking to the stage for a performance of You Can’t Take It With You in which “half the cast were drunk”. One older actress was so incapable that a 17 year-old assistant stage manager (ASM) had to be quickly aged up by dousing her in talcum powder so she could take over.

Philip Voss recalls that “there was a lot of drinking in those days”, and in a production of Death of a Salesman at Colchester, a drunk ASM played the wrong sound effect cue at the dramatic climax — instead of a car crash, the audience heard wedding bells (p. 26).

Even without wedding-related shenanigans, there’s a constant feeling of chaos: missed lines, missed entrances and corpsing on stage, on top of all the privations. It’s sometimes difficult to keep track of the paltry rates of pay because the stories are grouped together by theme rather than chronologically, meaning that two actors citing their appallingly low salaries give wildly different figures. 

But we get a vivid sense of the poverty from descriptions of changing rooms (sometimes just one room for all the actors, a curtain to divide the women from the men), accommodation and toilets. Friendly landladies would come into an actors’ room in the morning while they were still in bed to light the coal fire. Dirk Bogarde, we’re told, started his career as a “pot boy” at the Q Theatre in Hammersmith, sweeping the stage, washing up tea cups and cleaning toilets (p. 8).

In piecing together these stories, we get an evocative history of rep, full of textures and feeling. I was surprised to learn that rep isn’t some ancient tradition going back centuries but a particularly 20th century phenomenon. Dunn explains that the term “repertory theatre” was coined during the 1904-07 season at the Royal Court Theatre in London, where John Vedrenne and Hartley Granville-Barker “emphasised the importance of the play, rather than individual actors” (p. 2). The first repertory company was begun by Annie Horniman in 1908, at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester. This book, published in 1998, sees rep as now passing from history — or perhaps even already gone.

There are lots of tidbits, too, on the mechanics of rep. It explains, for example, the role of rep in getting past the Catch-22 situation facing new actors: you could only get a professional job if you had an Equity card, but could only get an Equity card if you had a professional job.

“Every repertory company was allowed to give out two cards a year and the competition for them was understandably fierce.” (p. 7)

I knew that actors in rep had to provide their own costumes and make-up but didn’t realise there were set terms. Dunn quotes from the Standard Esher Contract:

“All character and special costumes and wigs shall be provided by the Manager. No Artist shall be required to provide any costume that could not ordinarily be used by him in his private capacity. A male Artist receiving a weekly salary of £8 or less shall not be required to provide more than two ordinary walking suits and one evening suit.” (p. 130)

A dress call held after morning rehearsal on Friday allowed everyone to see what each other was wearing for the new play opening on Monday, with adjustments then made if actors clashed with one another or the set (p. 131). Most actresses took sewing machines with them (p. 132). But a wide range of skills were expected.

The entry-level job was as assistant stage manager, or acting/ASM, where novice actors got small roles on stage but also did anything else needing doing. The idea was that they’d get a broad education on the workings of theatre — the lights in the “flies”, the logistics of building and dressing a set, and all the unexpected, weird stuff. Liza Goddard learned to reupholster sofas and chairs — “I can still do that” (p. 29). ASMs had to find furniture, decor and ornamentation for the sets, often by going begging round the local shops and houses (p. 28); they also had to provide (and cook) any food eaten on stage (p. 29). 

Then there were the sound effects to be played in live. Alec McCowen recalls traditional means, such as peas on a drum to convey rain, and electrical sticks for lightning (p. 26). Phyllida Law was put in charge of a panotrope gramophone and accompanying 78 rpm records.

“I marked these records, would you believe it, with tailor’s chalk, so I knew where to put the needle on to start the supposedly atmospheric music.” (p. 25)

(Not mentioned, but something I’ve been looking at in my wider research, is the records especially pressed for stage productions, with whatever sound effects an individual play required. The Bishop Sound Company, later Bishop Sound & Electrical Company, in London was a pioneer of this — and the British Library holds a collection of Bishop Sound recordings. The same kind of technology was employed on old television, such as in the early years years of Doctor Who, with “grams” played in live to the studio.)

For one production in Oldham, ASM Bernard Cribbins had to source a goat to appear on stage, which he’d bring in each day on the bus.

“The driver used to make me go upstairs [with it]. I’d ask for one and a goat to Rose Bank, which was near the theatre.” (p. 31)

Cribbins also says that he didn’t get days off, as he was required to help on Sundays with striking the set of one production and putting up the next one (p. 32). He doesn’t have quite the nostalgic wistfulness of his contemporaries: “they weren’t good old days when you think about it, it was bloody hard work.” (pp. 33-34) 

For all the hard graft, the toil and sweat, there’s a vivid sense here of the formality of this bygone age: Jennie Goossens says leading men in a company were always addressed by their surname (p. 57). There’s the respectability, too. At Colchester, according to Philip Voss, producer “Bob Digby insisted that we behave well. We weren’t allowed to hold hands in the street” (p. 57).

I’d already read something of the sort in a biography of Yootha Joyce:

“Whatever their background, Harry Hanson was known to pressure his actors to always appear glamorous, on and off stage. This filtered through to the other associated Harry Hanson companies.” (Paul Curran, Dear Yootha... (2014), p. 28)

That was reflected in the kind of material Hanson’s companies staged. Margery Mason, who worked with Hanson for 10 years, recalled his,

“fondness for ‘Anyone for tennis?’ type plays” (Margery Mason, Peaks and Troughs (2005), p. 32)

These memories were of interest to me as I traced David Whitaker’s life and career, because Whitaker made his professional debut as an actor/ASM with Harry Hanson’s Court Players at the Prince’s Theatre in Bradford in 1951, and over the next three years had stints with Hanson’s companies at the Hippodrome in Keighley, the Theatre Royal in Leeds, the Hippodrome in Stockton-on-Tees and the Lyceum in Sheffield. (For more details of his time in Bradford and Leeds, see the free postscript to my biography of David Whitaker; for more on his stage work more generally, see David’s Whitaker’s listing on Theatricalia.)

Harry Hanson (1895-1972) founded his first Court Players repertory company in Hastings in 1932, and soon had companies all over the UK, from Sheffield to Penge. In Exit Through the Fireplace, Peggy Mount — who was 13 years older than Whitaker — says she also started out as an ASM in “Leeds, which was Harry Hanson’s top company” (p. 189), suggesting that when Whitaker moved from ASM at Bradford to juvenile lead at Leeds, it was a significant step up.

[Above: "A definite step up the ladder" — profile of David Whitaker from an unknown newspaper with no date, though his last known performance at Bradford was on 8 March 1952 and he was at Leeds by 21 April; he turned 24 on 18 April that year.]

 

Mount says that Harry Hanson, “was a little, short, fat man and he had three wigs”, and actors learned to be on their guard if it was the blond one, as it meant Hanson was in a bad mood (p. 55). Others testify to Hanson’s temper; Paul Daneman calls him “a bit of an ogre and he had a stranglehold on rep” while Beryl Cooke says he’d sack actors who weren’t “DLP” or dead letter perfect (p. 54).

But Vilma Hollingberry says Hanson was “a marvellous man”, with a “waspish sense of humour and he cared tremendously about the standard of work” (p. 54). She reports, too, that her time with a Hanson company involved two performances a night of the same play, but the afternoon one would be shorter, with cuts made to allow the actors to take a longer tea break between shows. In the second performance, all the cut bits would be reinserted (p. 191). Given the punishing schedule and pressures of weekly rep anyway, this seems something like magic, or something bound to fail. It wouldn’t have helped dispel the air of chaos backstage.

Carmen Silvera also speaks of Hanson’s eye for detail:

“One was that flowers on stage must be right for the season in which the play was set and that every night they must be wrapped up in tissue paper and put in their boxes. All the lampshades that were used on set had to be covered in tissue paper every night, so that when we rehearsed on stage in the morning no dust would get on them and they would not be dirtied. Everything was protected so that his sets always looked good.” (p. 129)

One last intriguing thing. There’s a story from one “MC Hart” (p. 12), who we’re told “started his career with Butlin’s rep and went on to become a television director; among his credits are Waugh on Crime” (p. 260). But the latter seems to refer to a six-episode run of episodes of Thirty-Minute Theatre from 1970-71, half of them directed by Tristan de Vere Cole and the other half by Philip Dudley. Could this be Michael Hart, the director of 1969 Doctor Who story The Space Pirates and of episodes of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, and brother of Tony?

Doctor Who Magazine #609

The latest issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out now, and very excitingly comes with an exclusive Target novelisation of the 1967 story The Evil of the Daleks, written by Frazer Hine with Mike Tucker and Steve Cole as his companions. In fact, it's a novelisation of the 1968 repeat of that story. Another quite good book about The Evil of the Daleks is also available. 

My contribution this issue is the latest Script to Screen feature, this time focused on the Villengard ambulance seen in Boom. I spoke to production designer Phil Sims, art director Rhys Ifan, prop maker Stuart Heath from BGI Supplies and the ambulance herself, actress Susan Twist.

The new issue also includes Richard Unwin's review of my book, Doctor Who - The Time-Travelling Almanac, which he calls, 

"a perfect gift for curious minds, young and old alike."

So he can live - for now. 

Real Tigers, by Mick Herron

This is the third of the, to date, eight Slough House novels (following Slow Horses and Dead Lions). Again, the TV version - which I saw first - is a pretty close adaptation, though as always the things that are different are intriguing.

The failed, disgraced agents exiled to Slough House plod on with their lives. But when Catherine Standish is kidnapped, River Cartwright is instructed to steal the vetting file on the Prime Minister from MI5 headquarter, the Park. Yet this mission is not all it seems. Leading figures in the service and government and making plays for power...

It's a fast-moving, twisty adventure full of memorable characters and nice subversions of what we expect - indeed, at one point River and fellow agent Louisa Guy note that their battle with villains right by a working railway line should have ended with someone being squished by a train, as it's the kind of thing that happens in fiction.

But then there's the way the book uses the fact that it's fiction. In the second book, a non-existent cat prowls the floors of Slough House, providing a perspective on each room and its occupants. Here, the observer passing unseen through the same building is a ghost - but we learn this person is a ghost now but they were alive when they journey up the stair. It's a thrilling moment as we realise what's going on, followed by a typical bit of dark humour from slovenly Jackson Lamb. I can see why this isn't in the TV version; it specifically works in prose, with a third person omniscient narrator able to see beyond the grave.

The other big difference is that the TV version includes a pretty big role for James "Spider" Webb from the previous two adventures, whereas in the book we hear about but don't see him. And the TV version includes stuff that is setting up the next story - the TV version of which concludes this week. I'd love to know more about the mechanics of adapting these books, the choices made to suit the strengths of TV, the things done for more prosaic, practical reasons.

We can also see Mick Herron revising his creation as he goes. I said that first novel makes little effort to obscure the real-life character on which MP Peter Judd is based. Here, alongside Judd's continuing ambitions for power, we get fleeting references to "Boris", so the two men coexist. We didn't know when we were well off.

Oh, and Seán Barrett is a great choice of reader for the audio versions of the novels. I knew him from Father Ted and from voicing Captain Orion in Star Fleet and Tik-Tok in Return to Oz. But he's had the most amazing career, such as playing Timothy opposite Patrick Troughton's St Paul in the BBC's Paul of Tarsus (1960). A picture of him taken during production of Dunkirk (1958) was used on the cover of the Smiths' single, Who Soon is Now?

The Furious Masters, by Margot Bennett

This is a review of a comic science-fiction novel from 1968, sort of John Wyndham done as sitcom. Yet in poking fun at the mores and anxieties of its time, there are things here worth a content warning for sexual violence. 

Characters - male and female - repeatedly joke about rape and when one woman is stripped naked and murdered, it's played for comic effect. I'm not sure how much that's the author satirising misogyny of the period or being steeped in it herself and, given the overall light comic tone, I'm not sure how much that's on purpose. There's a lot going on under the surface.

At 3 am on 16 May, a sonic boom is heard across Yorkshire, trembling windows in Huddersfield and so terrifying the animals at a farm in Highfield-on-Moor that egg production drops by 40%. Two days later, farmer John Holman writes an angry letter to a government department to complain, believing the boom to have been caused by the RAF running exercises. The ministry denies any such exercise has taken place. 

Meanwhile, four precocious students from Oxford - Cressida, Robbie, Sue and David - go hiking across the moor and discover a strange object:

"The main body was a big, squat, metal cuboid, four feet high and over five across. On each side there were three-inch square slots, which on examination appeared to be filled with thick glass. The body was covered by a low pyramid, from which two long cup-ended tentacles projected at different angles. They looked very like aerials. A thick rod rose several feet above the pyramid to support two flat rectangular sheets of metal; one almost parallel to the ground, the other about ten degrees off the perpendicular." (p. 14)

They're soon joined by photographer Henry Brown, who takes atmospheric snaps of Cressida in front of this "spacecraft" and then hurries down to London to sell them to the papers. Soon people are queuing up to see the "Martian" lander, Holman fencing off his land and charging entry. News reporters come by helicopter, the police turn out in force, the local vicar has a moral perspective on all these proceedings, and even the Prime Minister is making pronouncements on TV about what he thinks is going on, based more on what he'd like to think than the evidence on the ground.

In all this frenzy, it takes a while for the students - and the reader - to spot the effects that this lander seems to have on those who get close it. They become more frenzied, angry, violent... The title of the novel refers to the "furious masters of lust and violence" that govern our behaviour.

We get our first clue to what's going on just after Henry photograph Cressida, thrilled by the possibility that these pictures will make him famous. They're also both hot from the walk and the sunny day, and the heat given off by the "spaceship". Henry suddenly changes tack:

"'I wa thinking to hell with fame and what's the hurry [to get to London] and I should pull you down and...' He put his arms around her and rubbed his face against hers. 'And make love to you on this fine bouncy grass.'" (p. 19)

Cressida initially seems keen but then a sheep bleats nearby and ruins the moment. Cressida admits that she likes Henry but thinks they should call the police to inform them about the lander. Henry persists: 

"I should have raped you [but] I'm over-civilised" (p. 20). 

Cressida laughs this off, but it's the first of many casual references to sexual violence. Later, this is linked to sexual liberation - or the lack of it:

"Cressida and Sue ran across the grass to the helicopter.

'Would you have minded being raped?' Sue asked in her shrill, clear voice, as they climbed on board.

'Yes.'

'With your inhibitions, naturally. I would have liked to be raped. It makes a nice change.'

'Being raped by one man is all very well. But I had two after me. And Sabine women aren't in this year.'" (p. 83)

The casual tone of all this is shocking, but surely a conscious choice by the author. In part, it's satirising sexual liberation. It's also not so different with the comments by members of the public from the time responding to the sexual assault depicted in The Forsyte Saga, which are included as extras on the DVD of that serial. But one big element of the novel is competing ideas about the cause of the increasing violence: whether it's something being done to us by the "spaceship" or something inside us all anyway that's been given an excuse to let rip. As Cressida and Sue have this conversation, is it a new or prevailing attitude?

As I said, much of the violence here is played for comic effect. When Cressida rebuffs Henry's advances, he resorts to attacking his own blown-up photographs of her. Another character makes a clumsy attempt to break into the bathroom when she's in there. In both cases, the threat is undercut by the inadequacies of these men. Later, as things get every more frenzied, another woman is stripped naked and murdered in a church as part of a kind of ritual sacrifice, but the vicar and congregation don sunglasses so as not to see anything rude.

A lot of these incidents feel like comic sketches. The novel is often funny and well observed, its targets including the press, police, church and civil service bureaucracy. There are some great one-liners:

"I must say Mars couldn't have chosen a more awkward time for the Minister." (p. 36)

But many of the gags are specifically visual in nature. Margot Bennett has a knack for conjuring vivid, strange images - such as this glimpse of the fauna of another world:

"Could the population of Mars, formerly supposed to consist of small snails, have devised a machine capable of driving human beings mad?" (p. 139)

Often, we "see" the comic events taking place, such as squabbles over who is in charge of a helicopter, or the top secret files raining down from an open window on to people rioting in the street. With its lively characters and set pieces, I could easily see this being dramatised - and perhaps Bennett, a prolific writer for TV, did so too. In fact, one reason I was so keen to read this novel is that it had been suggested to me that it originated in an idea Bennett may have offered Doctor Who. 

Her name is listed in two internal BBC documents, one from 28 February 1964 and one undated but probably from 2 March, with the idea to commission a four-part story from her to cover the potential loss of what ultimately became Planet of Giants. Nothing else is known about what Bennett's story might have involved.

If it was the seed of what became The Furious Masters, I can see why it didn't go any further as a Doctor Who adventure. On 20 February, story editor David Whitaker declined a story by another would-be writer, David Fisher, on the basis that it was set in the 20th century; the production team wanted Doctor Who to visit other times and places. We don't know much about Fisher's The Face of the Fire, other than it involved the effects of a machine discovered under the Wessex Downs. If this didn't meet with approval, the same was surely true of an idea from Bennett about the effects of a machine found on the moors in Yorkshire.

I'm continuing to look into this, and have in sight Bennett's other science fiction novel, The Long Way Back (1955) and her non-fiction The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Atomic Radiation (1964). Note that the latter is from around the time she was mooted for Doctor Who, so perhaps that will provide further clues.

See also:

• Me on The Man Who Didn't Fly, a detective novel by Margot Bennett
• Me on The Victorian Chaise-Longue, a science-fiction novella by Marghanita Laski, another author considered for the first year of Doctor Who
• Buy my biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television
• Memoirs of the Spacewomen, a 2015 radio documentary about the work of Margot Bennett, Naomi Mitchison and Rose Macaulay, presented by Matthew Sweet and produced by Allegra McIlroy

Doctor Who and the Time-Travelling Almanac, by me

It seems like only a week since my last book was out. But today sees publication of Doctor Who - The Time-Travelling Almanac, billed as the official guide to the Doctor's year. It is written by me and illustrated by brilliant Emma Price.

What is an almanac anyway? Why do we have August? How do the histories of the Beatles and the Doctor overlap?

Where exactly did the Doctor mean to take Romana instead of that beach at the start of The Leisure Hive? What are the tides on Kastarion 3 like?

All this and Dalek horoscopes, banana penguins, the best time of day for Sea Devils to invade and much more... 

HARDBACK

ISBN: 9781785949173

Length: 256 pages

Dimensions: 224mm x 23mm x 143mm

Weight: 355g

Price: £16.99

PAPERBACK

ISBN: 9781473533943

Length: 256 pages

Price: £8.99

The Story of the Solar System, by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock

Out today, The Story of the Solar System - A Visual Journey, is a sumptuous big book of space infographics written by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock off of The Sky at Night with some help by me and design/illustration by Emma Price. Exactly what you and everyone you know wants for Christmas, if you even dare wait that long.

(Emma and I have another book out next week, too...)

In case of interest, Solar System is the latest of the infographics books I've worked on, following Whographica (2016) written with Steve O'Brien and illustrated by Ben Morris, and Slayer Stats (2018) also written with Steve O'Brien and illustrated by Ilaria Vescovo. I also wrote the regular "Sufficient Data" infographics for Doctor Who Magazine, illustrated by Ben Morris and Roger Langridge.

I've written before about some of what' involved in producing an infographic. They are fiddly. And, if you're writing about space stuff, no sooner have you finished a complicated graphic showing all the moons of Saturns than those bothersome space scientists go and discover a whole load more.

Garry Halliday and the Flying Foxes, by Justin Blake

This is the last of the five Garry Halliday novelisations, published in 1965. That was three years after the last new episode of the TV series Garry Halliday was broadcast and two years after the last repeat. 

The odd thing is that it marks a new beginning, the first adventure not to feature the villainous Voice and the first to feature potential new love interest Vicky Fox. It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger about Garry and Vicky's relationship... 

Whatever the authors might have had in mind, it would have been very different on TV. Here, Vicky is left mourning her brother Nigel who, in giving his life, makes amends for some bad choices. On TV, Nigel survived and was part of the Garry Halliday series for all subsequent adventures.

I was particularly interested to read this novelisation because the TV version is credited to writer David Whitaker - about whom there is quite a good book. There’s no mention of David in the novelisation. He's not there in the indicia, where it is (c) 1965 Justin Blake - the pseudonym of John Bowen and Jeremy Bullmore, creators of Garry Halliday. I’ll dig into why not when I write up the production notes for the episode guide entry on this adventure.

After the events of the previous adventure and the death of the Voice, Garry and his co-pilot Bill Dodds return from Tripoli to their office/home on an airfield in Kent. There they discover that, in their absence, a rival charter airline has taken most of their business, undercutting their prices by 25%. Garry doesn’t exactly run his airline to get rich so the Flying Foxes company must be running at a loss to put him out of business. That means they’ve got money behind them. When Garry looks into it, and watches a flight coming into land (as seen on the cover of the book), he spots something suspicious. Soon, the trail leads him to Rome where a drug developed to prolong life has the opposite effect…

As before, it's a lively, fast-moving, twisty plot involving adventures overseas and some fun, funny set pieces. Sadly, new villain da Rica - aka "the spider" - isn't a patch on the Voice. He's an American hoodlum who takes copious amounts of the BDM drug that he's also involved in smuggling, but there's little sense of a personality. The Voice was so distinctive, he was a selling point for the series; da Rica is a bit generic.

It's odd, too, that the elements set in Rome come so late rather than being part of the sell of the new story from the start. Instead, the opening instalments are set in Kent, around the airfield where Garry Halliday is based and in a nearby lake. It's not especially exciting. When a villain then breaks into Garry's office/home, I was reminded of a similar sequence in the second story - the series repeating itself.

Even so, there's plenty of fun stuff here. One chapter opens by telling us that Bill Dodds "shows enormous intelligence and perspicuity" (p. 25) in what is to follow, underlining his active role in proceedings, and not merely as comic foil. When the plot involves convincing the public that Garry has been killed, Bill gamely heads up to BBC TV Centre and then takes part in a live interview for Tonight in the studios at Lime Grove, with a cameo by real-life presenter Cliff Michelmore. That's not mentioned in the scant surviving paperwork relating to the series - I wonder if it happened on screen?

The supposed death of Garry Halliday causes some problems for the plot. The "death" is contrived to fool da Rica, who duly reads obituaries in the press. But the plot also involves da Rica and his henchperson Luigi not knowing what Garry looks like and so mistaking him for someone else. Presumably at least one obituary ran a photograph.

Similarly, the plot involves smuggled quantities of the age-defying drug, BDM. Before scientific analysis identifies what this is, Garry tries some of it to test that it's not cocaine or heroin - which I don't think is best practice for airline pilots. Other characters also try the drugs. They continue to do so even after it becomes apparent that one batch of the drug is in fact deadly.

The novelisation is surely based on the original storyline and scripts that Bowen and Bullmore delivered before they were reworked by in-house writer David Whitaker, in liaison with uncredited script editor Richard Wade and producer Richard West. It's difficult to know how different the TV version was - though, as I'll detail when I get to the production notes on the episode guide - Bowen and Bullmore clearly felt it departed a great deal from what they'd intended.

But one practical change is evident. In the novelisation, drugs are tested on 20 batches of rabbits, labelled A to J. The chapter "The Secret of Batch J" reveals that one of these batches is deadly. On TV, the same instalment was "The Secret of Batch 3", suggesting a reduced scale, perhaps no more than three hutches, manageable on set.

I wonder, too, how much a moment in which Sonya Delamere - Bill Dodd's fiancee, a returning character who has so little to do in this serial - watches the new girl reflected feelings of the cast.

"The little pang of jealousy Sonya felt was because Vicky was going off to do the kind of thing she used to do herself. But Sonya knew well enough why Vicky had to do it, and being a sensible girl, she stifled her pang, and kept it to herself." (p. 76)

It's an engaging, exciting story but what tantalises me most is how accurate a record it is of the TV version and of what the cast and crew may have felt.

ETA: There's now a full entry on the TV version of this story at the Garry Halliday episode guide.

The Masquerades of Spring, by Ben Aaronovitch

This is great fun - a Rivers of London novella set in New York in the Jazz Age, narrated by the woosterish Augustus Berrycloth-Young. Gussie has fled London and the stern wizards of the Folly because he's been using magic for daft pranks. Then Thomas Nightingale turns up on his doorstep, seeking help to track down a magic saxophone...

It's a fast-moving, quick-witted caper, full of pithy one-liners but grounded in the real history of the jazz and drag scene, prohibition, racism and homophobia. That makes it sort of Dashiell Hammett as written by PG Wodehouse, with some magic mixed in - and not nearly as easy to pull off as Ben makes it look. 

Of course, he has form here. That use of a specific time and place to add some heft to the adventure is the same trick as in Ben's Remembrance of the Daleks (which I adore). Just as that story hinted at hitherto unknown secrets in the Doctor's past, this novella provides some tantalising clues about the early life of Thomas Nightingale.

There's another link to Ben's TV Doctor Who in that Peter Walmsly is, here on p. 29, a reverend who led prayers at Casterbrook school of wizardry, decades before his stint as an archaeologist for the Carbury Trust.

I found it compelling and read it in a day. It closes with the prospect of many more such adventures for some of the principal figures here. Yes, please.

Rivers of London novels I've also blogged about:

• Lies Sleeping
• False Value
• Amongst Our Weapons

Rivers of London novellas:

• What Abigail Did That Summer
• The October Man

Doctor Who and the Left-Handed Hummingbird, by Kate Orman

Someone is meddling with time. That means that when an Aztec warrior ventures into a long abandoned Exxilon spaceship, he isn't instantly killed by the radiation bleeding from its systems. Instead, Huitzilin - his name meaning "southern warrior" and also "left-handed hummingbird" - becomes something like a god. Some 500 years later, the Doctor and his friends arrive in Mexico City in 1994 to find they're late for an adventure and must head back to multiple points in time to catch up...

I've not read The Left-Handed Hummingbird since it was first published in November 1993 - the official publication date was December, but there's a moment in this that I suddenly, madly remembered first reading the night before my driving test so it must have been out the month before. Yet this odd, extraordinary book scored its way into my brain. Reading it again after more than 30 years, it was immediately, vividly familiar, like catching up with an old friend.

Two things surprised me. First, for what I remember as Kate Orman's radical debut, the plot is quite straightforward, even slight. The Doctor and his pals Ace and Bernice are on the trail of "the Blue", ie Huitzilin, which has the power to take people over and make them violent. That includes the Doctor and his friends - all providing Huitzilin with fuel so that he can become corporeal once more. But the more the Doctor is taken over, the more he can see what Huitzilin thinks and feels. And the more Huitzilin becomes corporeal, the more he can be tackled head on...

What makes this so different is the way that it's told, beginning in 1994 - the future, when the book was published - and then dancing back to multiple points in time to piece together the story. Telling a story out of order was a big innovation, perhaps oddly for a long-running series about gadding back and forth in time. And then the novel makes us realise that the pieces don't quite fit because time is in flux and changing. I'm conscious now, as I wasn't at the time, how big an influence this was on my debut novel.

The way it's told includes things we'd never do today. The violence is horrific and vivid, rather than PG or 12A. The Doctor takes magic mushrooms and LSD to communicate with his enemy. One of his companions is a gun-totting solder who kills people with little qualm and reneges on her agreement with the Doctor not to use violence; the other companion kills a man by bashing him with a cooking implement. This book is all set on Earth and yet reading it is a journey to another world.

Secondly, the book is chock-full of references to other Doctor Who, on TV and in print. That's not a criticism - these were books squarely aimed at fans, and I ate up this continuity with greed at the time but was grateful to the entry on this novel in the Cloister Library when trying to remember other books I've not read in more than 30 years. For the most part, you don't need to be able to place these references to enjoy or be caught up in the story. But then there are the exceptions. 

I think the assumed/required knowledge of the reader is 1964 story The Aztecs, which was  readily available to fans at the time of publication having been released on BBC Video on 2 November 1992, and 1974 story Death to the Daleks, released on video July 1987. These  TV stories also inspired two of the best novelisations, too. This kind of thing occupies my head a lot in what I write day to day - how much we can assume fixed points of Doctor Who, the nodes by which we all navigate, as opposed to the obscure stuff that is manna for the dork hardcore (my people). See, for example, what I said about authority as it relates to The Unfolding Text.

But also, amazingly, there are several references to other Doctor Who stories here that the Cloister Library doesn't cover. Perhaps fittingly for a story that plays with chronology and the unfixedness of time, there are the references in this novel to multiple Doctor Who stories from after it was published. When the Doctor is gravely wounded, his friends are asked why they don't rush him to hospital.

"'Because he's from outer crukking space,' spat Bernice. 'A crukking twentieth-century hospital would probably do a crukking brilliant job of killing him.'" (p. 177)

Which, of course, is exactly what happens to kill off this incarnation of the Doctor in the TV movie Doctor Who (1996). Later in the novel, Ace pulls out her gun only to find that the Doctor has swapped it for a potato, years ahead of him pulling the same trick (with a banana) on Captain Jack in The Doctor Dances (2005). Then the TARDIS lands on Abbey Road (p. 201), as it does in The Devil's Chord (2024).

A few other small things occur. Bernice Summerfield, a 26th-century archaeologist of the 20th century, doesn't know what pizza is (p. 71) or how to open tins (p. 73), and doesn't have much to do. When she reveals, at the end, that she doesn't get to do much archaeology while travelling in time and is thinking of leaving the TARDIS, I could well understand why. I doubt I was conscious of all this when I first read the novel; now I'm all too aware of the note from my editors to ensure the regular characters are always well served.

Something very of its time is the frequency with which the author refers to the Doctor as "the Time Lord". Yes, she also refers to Bernice as "the archaeologist" (p. 238) and Cristian as "the Mexican" (p. 259), but there are far more second mentions of the Doctor as Time Lord, which I don't think a Doctor Who novelist would do now. If nothing else, this incarnation of the Doctor, in the crumpled linen suit of the novels, is one of the least assuming Doctors visually, a man we'd fail to notice in a crowd who is yet a near god-like alien in our midst. Referring to him, a lot, as "the Time Lord" is a convention, a fashion, of the time when this novel was written but I think it'a also the wrong cue for what we "see" - as if this unassuming fellow were wearing a big robe and collar.

And then there's the other strong visual elicited by this reread: of me, aged 17, utterly absorbed by this book, this series, this gang of authors I so much wanted to be part of. There's a bit towards the end of the novel where the Doctor handles a powerful book that glows with light. It's been fun to return to this book that shone so brightly in my formative years and has stayed with me so long after. Thank you, Kate.

See also:

• My own, awful first idea for a Doctor Who novel which I submitted in 1994
• Me on the 1992 Doctor Who novel Nightshade by Mark Gatiss

The Voice of the Dolphins, by Leo Szilard

Prompted by Richard Flanagan's Question 7, I sought out this "science-fiction" anthology by the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard (1898-1964). He's an extraordinary figure, the man who conceived and patented the idea of the nuclear chain reaction, inspired by The World Set Free by HG Wells (in which Wells coined the term "atomic bomb"). In 2015, I made a documentary about this, HG and the H-Bomb, where we spoke to Liza Jardine about her memories of "Leo", a good friend of her father's. But I didn't know that Szilard himself wrote sci-fi.

It's a short, quirky collection, comprising the following:

pp. 7-12 "Nightmare for Future Reference" (1938) by American poet Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943), from the Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Benét

• Some time in the future, the unknown narrator addresses an 18 year-old who was one of the last to be born before, during the Third World War, the birth rate collapsed. 

pp. 13-68 "The Voice of the Dolphins" (1960)

• Written sometime after 1998 (p. 35), an account of the years 1960-85 and the way intelligent dolphins helped end the nuclear stalemate (for more on which, see below).

pp. 69-79 "My Trial as a War Criminal" (1947), reprinted from The University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 17, no. 1, Autumn 1949.

• During the Third World War, a virus kills American children and the country surrenders to Russia, whereupon Szilard, Henry L Stimson, President Truman and James F Byrnes are put on trial for their roles in the Manhattan Project.

pp. 81-94 "The Mark Gable Foundation" (1948)

• In 1960, the narrator is put in suspended animation and woken in 2050, where no one has teeth and women choose to impregnate themselves with the seed of a small number of celebrities. The narrator is now such a celebrity.

pp. 95-100 "Calling All Stars" (1949)

• A radio message from the planet Cybernetica warns of odd readings detected in the atmosphere of the planet Earth, from which the cybernetic people deduce biological inhabitants, evolution and nuclear war - and warn others to be wary.

pp. 101-107 "Report of 'Grand Central Terminal'" (1948), reprinted from The University of Chicago Magazine, June 1952.

• A report by aliens on their exploration of the extinct planet Earth, and their deductions about the life forms that once lived here based on aspects of Grand Central Station, such as the coin-operated toilets.

pp. 108-111 "Kathy and the Bear" (no date)

• The author relates two meals with four year-old Kathy and her mother at a hotel, and the child's conversations with a bear skin hanging there.

pp. 112-126 "The Mined Cities" (no date), reprinted from Bulletin of the American Scientists, December 1961 - vol. XVII, No. 10.

• A conversation between "A" and "B" in 1980, looking back on a convoluted system to avoid nuclear annihilation by having Americans mine a Russia city and be ready to blow it up (and themselves), and vice versa.

The title story seems to have been prompted by real-life John C Lilly claiming, in the year the story was written, that "dolphins might have a language of their own" (p. 15). We learn from Szilard that one of the few recommendations of the President's Science Advisory Committee to bear fruit is "a major joint Russian-American research project having no relevance to the national defense, or to any politically controversial issues" (p. 14). Instead, the Biological Research Institute in Vienna, established in 1963, focused on dolphin intelligence.

The institute quickly established that dolphins are highly intelligent. We learn, from a book published in 1998, that,

"the dolphins, who grasped mathematics, chemistry, physics and biology with ease, found it difficult to comprehend America's social and political system" (p. 35)

With the dolphins' help, the Vienna Institute develops a cheap food that has the side-effect of lowering birth rates and so solves the problem of over-population. From the licence paid on this best-selling food stuff, the institute has the financial backing to reshape the world. We follow the various, complex schemes and politics. Then, with the nuclear threat averted, questions are raised as to whether the dolphins really were intelligent - implying that the American and Russian scientists between them have duped and saved us all.

Within this fun wheeze, Szilard tells a sprawling future history, predicting the revolution in Iran if not the exact date, and poking fun at various subjects, often with the eye of an outsider. With its new-earned wealth,

"The first major investment made by the Vienna Institute was the purchase of television stations in a number of cities all over the world. Thereafter, the television programs of these stations carried no advertising. Since they no longer had to aim their programs at the largest possible audience, there was no longer any need for them to cater to the taste of morons." (p. 18)

I wonder if he had advert-free BBC Television in mind as the saviour of humanity. There are jibes on the way the two-party system in America favours minority rule since a few per cent of voters with some strongly held view on a particular issue can determine which of two candidates wins (p. 33). On the same page, he cites "Szilard's diary, recently published by Simon and Schuster" - that is, some 40 years after this was written - to show he was right all along about allowing China to join the United Nations.

There's something similar when an extended footnote details the way in which an article by Szilard in the February 1960 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was initially misunderstood.

"After his death, Szilard appears to have received some recognition, however, from his Russian colleagues, who names a small crater after him - on the back side of the moon." (p. 28)

Even the way he refers to the far side is a joke. In fact, there is a Szilard crater, named in 1970 and on the near side of the moon.

The playful and mischievous tone continues through much of what follows. In "My Trial as a War Criminal", the Russians develop a virus that predominately kills children. This was never to be used, and only kept in case of emergency. A later, more advanced virus was intended for use in war.

"It would not affect children at all and would kill predominately men between twenty and forty. Owing to the premature outbreak of the war, however, the Russian government found itself forced to use the stocks which it had on hand." (pp. 69-70)

This is grim humour from a man so closely associated with the development of nuclear weapons he then failed to contain, and well understood the bureaucracy involved in unleashing weapons of mass destruction. There's a similar caustic wit as he considers the option of a new life in Russia, having already lived in Hungary, Germany, England and the US. 

"When you are above fifty you are no longer as quick at learning languages. How many years would it take me to get a sufficient command of Russian to be able to turn a phrase and to be slightly malicious without being outright offensive?" (p. 71)

The twist at the end of the tale is that Szilard and his fellows escape the inevitable guilty verdict when the Russians fall victim to their own virus. That's a consistent idea in this book. These weapons are not something we use on other people; whoever unleashes them, we all lose.

The last story, set in 1980, was first published in The Bulletin of the American Scientists in 1961, and includes "B" asking "A" who first thought up the convoluted idea of "mined cities".

"B: Szilard had proposed it in an article published in The Bulletin of the American Scientists in 1961, but the idea may not have been original with him. His proposal was presented in the form of fiction and it was not taken seriously." (p. 120)

The argument then follows, and repeats almost word for word, some of what was covered in "The Voice of the Dolphins" - which Szilard then acknowledges, but says is a complete coincidence.

"A: I read The Voice of the Dolphins when I was ill in the hospital; I remember that it contained many rather crazy prediction, but what they were, I do not recall." (p. 126) 

It's a daft book full of complicated, intricate ways to prevent nuclear annihilation - none of them madder than the real predicament facing the world. I've read and heard a lot about Szilard and his rather odd perspective and humour - he was, says Richard Flanagan, one of the Hungarian scientists known as "the Martians" because they were so odd.

The blurb for this book refers to his "wry sense of humour and a heartfelt fear for the future of mankind". More than anything, there's a playfulness here, following any daft idea to its logical end. But what did Einstein, or President Truman, make of this strange fellow and his extended flights of fancy. I suspect he was exhausting.