Telling Arthur's Story

Lorraine Sitzia
Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers
& University of Sussex, Brighton, England

Introduction

These webpages gives a brief introduction to an oral history project recording the life story of Arthur Thickett, an infantry soldier who served in the Second World War, at partition in India, and in the Korean War, and whose experiences of war led him to become a socialist, a member of the Communist Party, and finally a pacifist. The edited interviews will result in a book to be published in the early part of 2000 by Working Press (a member of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers) .

Arthur at Queenspark book launch Dec. 1996.

For further information of this project, details of the forthcoming book and references for project-related publications contact;

Lorraine Sitzia: sitzia@mistral.co.uk

Richard McKeever: working_press@compuserve.com

wORking Press
47 Melbourne Avenue
London N13 4SY

Why is this work important?

Arthur's story is the life story of a single working-class man, the type of story which is seldom told and never appears in traditional `military' histories. Many of Arthur's experiences are common but many are remarkable. His story shows not only the complexities of an ordinary life but the way in which the choices in that life are so often influenced by events in the public sphere. It gives a clear statement of the damaging effects of war on an ordinary soldier's life, not just during wartime but throughout his lifetime. Most importantly Arthur's story provides an example of the slow redemption brought by the discovery of socialist politics in an individual life.

Arthur's story is told through a combination of oral and written testimony. The oral testimony comes from interviews recorded by me over three years. The written pieces are Arthur's own, written over the last forty years as events happened, and show Arthur's perceptions of the happenings around him and his attempts to understand and make sense of his life. These are placed within the oral testimony to complement and enrich the oral story.

The completed book will begin with an introduction providing background to the project, its development and how we have worked together. Arthur's story arranged into chapters will follow and finally an epilogue written by Arthur. There will also be a time-line at the beginning to show how Arthur's life intersected with major historical events.

Issues raised by this work

This type of work raises several important issues. The following three in particular require attention when undertaking an oral history project:

• Oral history relationships: There is an increasing recognition that an understanding of the oral history relationship is important in any analysis and interpretation of the interview and the stories which are told and not told. In particular the effect of class, age, gender, for example need careful consideration. My friendship with Arthur and our shared interests, family background and class have all contributed to Arthur's openness with me and the way in which Arthur tells his story.
• Shared authority: This project was founded on Michael Frisch's principle of a `shared authority', in which the interviewer and the narrator share the responsibility for and the authorship of the final narrative. As a result Arthur has been involved in all the stages of the project and has been an equal participant in all discussions and decision-making.
• Memory and identity: Arthur's story can be used to explore the way in which people remember and the ways in which they construct their identity through the stories they tell.

ARTHUR'S STORY

A working-class teenager in Hull, England in the middle years of the Second World War, Arthur couldn't wait to sign up `to get at the Germans', but first saw active duty with the British Army in India during the August 1946 riots between Hindus and Muslims. Arthur volunteered for `special duties', to clear mounds of dead, bloated bodies from the streets of Calcutta. After being demobbed in 1948, Arthur was increasingly troubled by memories of India. He began drinking and eventually suffered his first nervous breakdown:

I had rather a nasty experience in India which was connected with a massive riot that went on in Calcutta. It didn't seem to affect me at the time at all - but I wondered in retrospect if it did. I did actually do some special duties and it was one hell of a mess, it was bloody horrible because we had to clear up corpses and they were rotten. It shook me a bit, it did, a lot of it because you'd be walking along and there'd be thousands of people, and a lot of people had just been killed and they were there. People would clear off and then come back and on the other side of the road there were more dead. [...] It shook me a bit because soon after that in India - not straight after, as I said I didn't think it had affected me much - but it was towards the end of my service in India that I really started drinking a bit.

However, Arthur was still desperate to fight for Britain, as had the men in his family before him, and with the advent of the Korean War he again tried to sign up for the British Army. Refused admission because of his breakdown, he saw an advertisement for recruits placed by the Australian Army in the Hull Gazette and decided to apply. After telling a few `white lies' he was pronounced `A1 fully fit' and left England in November 1950 for a six year term of Australian Army service.

Arthur's experiences in Korea, in the front-line trenches and in the surrounding villages and minefields, were predictably brutal:

I remember I was just going to shoot a group of Chinese one night. They were rather close, about a hundred yards off, and - it was before I'd cracked up again - I was perfectly willing to shoot them. It was, it was remote, it was as though they were not people, they were just shadows in the night. It wasn't often you could see them but I could and I was just going to shoot them with a machine-gun, light-machine gun, and they went to ground. And I thought, they're going to come a bit nearer, I won't even wake my mate up because I can take care of this myself, I was that cool. It was strange. And then just at that moment I got a field telephone call, just as they got up, and our officer, a chappie called Minefield Moore - because he often lead us in to minefields, that was true - he said, `Don't open fire yet Yorkie,' he said, `we're going to take 'em prisoner. Keep watching 'em, keep reporting and we'll take them prisoner.' Well, I kept reporting. We sent two patrols out and I watched our patrols get shot to pieces and we took one prisoner who was dead when they got him back. I just sat and watched it, in the trench.

On returning to Australia in the mid-1950s Arthur `became rather wild', drinking heavily with a gang of veterans and getting into fights, and eventually he suffered a series of breakdowns. During these years Arthur also began to question his world view - conservative, patriotic, militarist, imperialist - and increasingly found answers in socialism.

R & R in Japan 1953,
Arthur, third from right

In 1959 Arthur completed his `conversion' and joined the Communist Party of Australia:

Fifty-seven to fifty-eight was an agonising period of conversion. I was searching for explanations, agonising over the war. I was grasping at things through lack of education - how to sort it out, what had we been doing in Korea? I was searching for the truth of the world. This wasn't a nervous attack, that was separate to this agonising in my mind. Hearing Communist Party speakers, the people that I heard were the only ones that seemed to provide the answers.

Arthur at the Sydney Trade Unions May Day Ball, 1960					Arthur second row holding banner - march in Sydney 1960

Arthur returned to England in 1961, became active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the anti-Vietnam movement, and eventually gained a degree as a mature student in the 1970s and became a school teacher. However, memories of war were never far away and he continued to struggle with guilt about his military service. A predominant theme in Arthur's life during these years was the need to find a `just' war and be on the `right' side, a theme influenced by Arthur's romantic view of the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigade. On several occasions, Arthur actively pursued this desire to take arms against imperialism. For example, he travelled to Ireland in the late 1960s to make contact with socialist groups and found himself, by accident, in Belfast during the riots of August 1969:

I crawled into the blazing house, I remember. The smoke was about waist high and I crawled in and I shouted and I heard shouting back. I crawled in a bit further and I could hear people shouting. Then somebody from behind tapped me on the leg, you know, I was laid on the floor. Somebody tapped me and said, "Get out, come out, it's the Paisleyites, they're egging you inside." They were Protestants who had petrol bombed the house, and they were egging us on. They were in the back garden.

Arthur also tried to find ways to get actively involved in the Vietnam War, as seen in this letter to the Secretary of the London Branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain:

I have decided to volunteer my services to help the Vietnamese people liberate their country and live in peace. I have considered this matter very carefully for many months now and make this application to you for assistance in joining the Liberation Army of Vietnam with a serious and considered judgement and reasoning.

However, these intentions were never fulfilled and gradually, over recent years, Arthur has become more able to reconcile the various facets of his life. After some teaching and other jobs Arthur retired and he now lives in Brighton where he is actively involved in QueenSpark Books, a community writing and publishing group. He has also just completed his term as the Chair of the national Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers. He remains a socialist, and became committed to pacifism in 1992.

Arthur, May 1999

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