Invasion Literature (1871 to 1914)

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

Invasion Literature was a popular genre leading up to the Great War, that fed on British fears of invasion from the Continent. There may have been earlier stories about foreign invasion, but it was started off by a 1971 novella called The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer by George Tomkyns Chesney, an actual soldier, a fact that perhaps helped add a sense of realism to the book. The great enemy in many of these was not England's perennial foe France, but Germany, which had risen as the dominant power in Europe after the Franco-Prussian War and German unification.
I thought it would be interesting to list some of these books and their authors here.
Let the invasion begin!

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

 

This is the novella that started it all; first published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1871. An unnamed nation (that speaks German) invades an unprepared Britain. It is the reminisces of a soldier who took part in the key battle of Dorking.




The author George Tomkyns Chesney was a colonel in the Royal Engineers when he wrote it. He later rose to the rank of general. Most of his service was spent in India.

[samdawson]

Jun 26, 2023 10:44:32 GMT 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr said:

 

This is the novella that started it all; first published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1871. An unnamed nation (that speaks German) invades an unprepared Britain. It is the reminisces of a soldier who took part in the key battle of Dorking.




The author George Tomkyns Chesney was a colonel in the Royal Engineers when he wrote it. He later rose to the rank of general. Most of his service was spent in India.

[samdawson]

I had the great pleasure of researching The Battle of Dorking (which is really rather good) when writing the book Dorking: a Town Underground. Chesney's novel was hugely influential in its time and did indeed kickstart the genre of invasion literature singlehanded. 


Here's what I wrote. The context is that the fears stoked by Chesney and others gave rise to a line of 'forts' (in reality small mobilisation centres) sited in weak spots noted by Chesney. If you've ever been to Box Hill you may well have seen the best known of these.


From the time of the Romans one of the obvious routes of an invasion of Britain has been a landing on the South Coast of England, followed by a sweep northwards. Which means passing the funnel of the Dorking Gap, the break in the highly defensible North Downs created by the valley of the River Mole. For centuries the nation used a fleet, fort, field strategy to resist and deter aggression. This relied on the Royal Navy, backed by coastal fortresses, and only lastly on a small army supplemented by a militia. But by the 19th century warfare was changing. Concerns about the expansionist intent of France led in the 1860s to the building of Britain’s equivalent of the Maginot Line, a massive peacetime building programme of expensive and technically advanced fortresses and sea forts that became known (probably unfairly, given their possible deterrent effect) as ‘Palmerston’s follies’.

Then everything changed again. The unexpected and almost unthinkable Prussian defeat in 1870 of continental superpower France, grown fat on a hubristic belief in its own military and intellectual superiority, ushered in a new era of warfare. The threat found its voice in the 1871 novella The Battle of Dorking, by a Royal Engineers Captain, George Tomkyns Chesney. It told the story of an attack by a Germanic power whose army advances on London from the coast. The decision is taken to halt the invaders at the North Downs, ‘the line of the great chalk-range’. The story’s narrator is from the Volunteers, the auxiliary regiments intended to supplement the regular army, which is fatally overstretched defending Britain’s imperial possessions. It is clear where the enemy will try to bypass the natural defences of the Downs, so he is sent to ‘the little town of Dorking, nestling in the trees’. It is there, on Denbies hillside and Box Hill, that the British empire meets its end, as the brave but muddled territorials and the efficient but too few regular army soldiers are outflanked by an army that ensures that its men, unlike the storyteller’s fellows, get the rations, trenchcoats and ammunition they need, when they need them.

The book succeeded brilliantly in persuading the public that imperial Britain might be unready for warfare in the age of the telegraph, troop movement by railway, and advances in artillery. It also singlehandedly invented the genre of invasion literature, giving birth to similarly influential books such as The Riddle of the Sands, When William Came and, arguably, The War of the Worlds.

The story was an international success, and led to increasing calls in the 1880s and 90s for the construction of a line of fortresses to protect London. These grew in the face of a resurgent France, whose Minister of Marine, Admiral Aube, promised that ‘the day is coming when Britain’s shores will be assaulted and her ports burnt by the fleet of a victorious enemy’. In Dorking Lord Ashcombe paid £1,500 to build a Volunteer Drill Hall in West Street. In London the decision was taken to equip the North Downs with a number of blockhouses that would hold ammunition, tools and barbed wire ready for use to build a 72 mile long line of entrenchments. Their placing was like a checklist from Chesney’s story, including Box Hill, Denbies, Reigate and Guildford. These were not the huge fortresses of the Palmerston era, but much more modest tokens of a new and vastly cheaper approach. A mix of very undersized forts and mobilisation centres. Historian Victor Smith concisely summed them up as combining ‘limited permanent construction with contingency planning for a shielding arc of fieldworks to create a vast entrenched camp’.

The mobilisation centres have long been mislabelled as forts. They weren’t. They were depots whose surface rooms could assume the role of a strongpoint. Their role was to hold ammunition, shovels, picks and wheelbarrows. Despite their ramparts and firing steps the function of redoubt was a secondary one. The real defence was to be done from positions dug between and in front of them. Rather quaintly, each unmanned centre was guarded only by a caretaker, who had a cottage alongside the tool store. These are all long since sold off. Box Hill’s became the Fort Tearoom, and, for several years, a Wimpy bar.

Despite this and their complete lack of armament, at very little financial cost the defences wove a spell of supposed readiness and fighting fitness. Rarely has deterrent propaganda come so cheaply. Gibson Thompson was typical of public opinion when in his 1902 book Picturesque Surrey he erroneously stated that Dorking was made famous by Chesney’s story, ‘but that was in 1871, before Box Hill was crowned by a fort armed with heavy guns’.

The mobilisation centres were mini-warehouses rather than artilleried fighting positions – their surface buildings provided a lightly protected fall back position to be defended only by rifle fire

Sister centres to Box Hill’s were built at Betchworth and Denbies (demolished in the 1970s and a bungalow built on top), where in World War Two the Home Guard training school was relocated from London’s Osterley Park. This was in part to neutralise the political plans of its influential Marxist co-founder, the Spanish Civil War veteran, serial philanderer and born publicist Tom Wintringham. A highly effective public champion of the Home Guard, his aim was to forge it into a people’s guerilla army. Relocated to Dorking he began teaching anti-tank warfare, unaware that he was as guilty as the generals he accused of fighting the last war – in his case the Spanish conflict. His suggested tactics (stop an armoured column by placing soup plates on the road to simulate mines, then remove the tank’s tracks by jamming in a crowbar or wooden batten) might have been suitable in extremis for confronting the tiny two man, Italian tankettes or lightweight Panzer Is he had seen in Spain; they would have been suicidal against a German invasion force.

The Home Guard school was a major national undertaking, run by Major Hugh Pollock, husband of Enid Blyton, which brought together a singular but effective mix of Regular Army soldiers, Spanish Civil War combatants, artists and intellectuals. Another influential instructor was local resident and journalist John Langdon-Davies, conscientious objector turned author of The Home Guard Fieldcraft Manual. Langdon-Davies co-founded the charity that is now Plan International, in response to a plea from a Spanish Republican father that read: ‘This is José. I am his father. When Santander falls I will be shot. Please, whoever finds my son take care of him for me.’

 

[jamesdoig]

Jun 28, 2023 17:24:28 GMT samdawson said:

Jun 26, 2023 10:44:32 GMT 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr said:

This is the novella that started it all; first published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1871.

This was a hugely popular genre in Australia at around the same time - typically invaders from Asia.

[ripper]

William Le Queux was quite prominent in invasion literature prior to World War I. He wrote The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) and The Invasion of 1910 (1906). A number of his collected works are available on Kindle.