13th January 2009
OC Author Peter Parker talks to pupils
As they prepared for their forthcoming synoptic paper, Sixth Form English pupils joined with Upper Sixth historians to welcome distinguished OC author and journalist Peter Parker to offer a new perspective on ‘the myth of the First World War’.
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| Old Canfordian author and journalist Peter Parker (left) |
In his lecture, based on his acclaimed book The Old Lie, he argued that the view of the First World War as an unmitigated tragedy was a myth based on the views of a small and unrepresentative group of junior officers, known collectively as ‘the War Poets’. The extreme disillusion experienced by these poets was a direct consequence of the high ideals of patriotism, chivalry and sportsmanship instilled into them by public school education, popular boys’ magazines and boys’ clubs.
Although the Allies eventually won the war with some victorious battles, our collective memory remains fixated upon the massacres of the Somme and Passchendaele. This view has been perpetuated in more recent ‘literary’ accounts of the war: Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong, Pat Barker’s Regeneration’ and Joan Littlewood’s 1960s production of Oh! What a Lovely War.
To illustrate the view that today’s school pupils derive their view of the First World War from literature rather than history, Parker referred to a scene from Alan Bennett’s The History Boys in which the boys recite in unison Philip Larkin’s poem MCMXIV: ‘You can’t explain away poetry, Sir … Art wins in the end.’
A lively question and answer session followed with topics ranging from Blackadder Goes Forth to T S Eliot’s The Wasteland, and Peter Parker finally turned the tables by addressing some queries to the pupils about their own experiences of learning about the First World War.
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