Conflict of Interest | Series 3

Helen: Hi, I'm Helen Lewis. I'm a journalist and I'm a museum geek.

James: My name's James. I'm the head of public history at Imperial War Museums.

Narrator: Helen Lewis has joined James Bulgin, at Imperial War Museum London, to pose the questions that many of us are too embarrassed to ask... about how recent conflicts have shaped our world. In this series, we're exploring the role of the war artist, filmmaker, and photographer in capturing seismic moments of contemporary history. And in this episode, we are looking at how art, photography, and film have captured different scales of destruction in the Twentieth Century.

Suzanne: I remember a firefighter running up to me and asking me if he could use my phone to call his wife. And he couldn't get through and he couldn't get through. And then he had to go and I remember I had this phone number on my phone and thought... do I call? I don't know if I call her, or do I not?

Narrator: From No Man's Land to mushroom clouds, we'll look at the people that have documented over a hundred years of conflict.

Newsreel: The huts in which they suffered are destroyed by fire. We must cleanse the world of the filth and pestulence of this place...

Narrator: On our way, we'll encounter artistic works that have captured some of the darkest moments in human history. All so that we leave with an understanding of the significance of art in a time of war.

Helen: There's people sitting down amidst dead bodies and people who were obviously in terrible distress and there's one woman crying and being sick - And my immediate thought was, how could you see this and go back home and not have it haunt you for ever?

Narrator: All this in under an hour. I'm James Taylor and this is Conflict of Interest.

Narrator: It is a crisp, autumnal afternoon; and James and Helen are making their way towards Imperial War Museum London.

Helen: I love museums, but I have never been, not that I can remember, to the Imperial War Museum, which is strange 'cause I lived in South London for a long
time. And it's, let's be honest, of all the museums, it's maybe the most impressive looking from the outside. Right?

James: Well we like to think so.

Helen: I'm interested to see a gallery here that is specifically focused on something thematically.

James: Okay.

Helen: I think that's really nice to break out one slice. Rather than trying to either give you the kind of iconic highlight or to give you the kind of waterfront. I think, I guess galleries can be a bit more quirky, can't they? They can be a bit more led by individual taste.

James: Are you surprised that the Imperial War Museum has a substantial art gallery as part of its public offer?

Helen: It's not something I would've thought about, but it makes a lot of sense to me because people have always been fascinated by - even before war photography - war paintings, having official artists. I'm pretty sure the Army had an official artist.

James: Yeah they did, the war artist commission. Yeah. Yeah. They did. We'll see some of that inside. Perhaps it is something which a lot of people don't necessarily know that, the museum has a really substantial and actually, significant collection of art, which, as you say, bears witness to over a century of conflict now.

Narrator: Helen and James will be joined by a third voice: Suzanne Plunkett, Reuters' Chief Photographer for the UK and Ireland... and a photojournalist for almost 30 years.

Suzanne: I spent two long assignments in Kabul, in Afghanistan after the war in 2002, and 2003.

Helen: And we've got some of Suzanne's work in here, right?

James: Which is amazing. And it's such an incredible thing to be able to see this work with the person who created it. .

Paul Nash, The Menin Road, 1919
Narrator: We have arrived at our first object. On certain podcast apps you can glance at your phone as you listen, to see some of the works we're discussing.

Helen: So I'm presuming that this is a first World War painting. We've got a few bits of kind of concrete and pillars and what looks like kind of corrugated iron and then all these tree stumps that have just been, cut off kind of six feet from the ground. It it, is a landscape of total, total destruction. And the color scheme reflects that too, right? That it's very muted tones, but then it has these patches of ochre. It's it's almost like the, human-made bits are kind of leaving the landscape. But am I right?

James: You're not wrong. It's it is a painting called Menin Road by artist called Paul Nash. It's interesting that you see it as a, completely just about a rural landscape because actually what it. relates to, in its historic context, is The Battle of Menin Road. So there was a road, but the road itself has been completely subsumed, which is one of the things that Nash was really kind of interested in portraying. The total level of destruction. All of the, kind of the nature has almost been obliterated and we just see it sort of fragments remaining.

Helen: Suzanne, does this look like any landscape that you've photographed in your career?

Suzanne: It does. I covered the, Indian Ocean tsunami in 2005. And I remember feeling like you can't get a photograph to show the scale. And it was not until we got into a helicopter and could kind of see from above, but even then there was no human element. So it did feel like it just went on and on and on.

James: It's kind of interesting, isn't it? 'Cause we always, perfectly reasonably, summised that we're kind of at the whim of nature because nature has this kind of extraordinary strength and power. But here we see that humanity has almost kind of demonstrated its own capacity to be as destructive as nature. And I suppose that's one of the things which is so significant about 20th century conflict, modern conflict. And this is at the front edge of that. This idea that, battles aren't contained. These wars are so huge and vast. They have the capacity to completely destroy.

Helen: What year would he have painted this?

James: So this was just immediately after the war. So, Nash had served in the war. He'd actually had this sort of strange quirk of fate that he had been serving, as an officer in, 1917 in Ypres. And his unit had happened to have a relatively quiet time whilst they were there. He, one strange moment, stumbled over and broke a rib in the trench so he was taken off the line. And after he'd gone, back to recuperate, his unit was wiped out in an attack or virtually completely wiped out. So he escaped it, in one of those really strange quirks of fate that he just happened to break a rib, which took him away. When he came back to the front, he came back as an official war artist. So he was there to observe. And he painted this afterwards. And it's really interesting because, as this was happening, his own relationship to his kind of beliefs about the conflict were changing quite substantially.

Helen: That story is so interesting to me, 'cause I've just noticed that there is one tree still standing, right? Amid all of the other trees have been wiped out, which is kind of presumably what to some extent he must have felt like he was the - and, lots of men in that war must have felt like I'm the one person I knew who came home.

James: Particularly given the broader context in which this happens in 1917, it's really, difficult to overestimate how significant the battle of the Somme had been the year before. 1916, which had been this huge, loss of life and huge number of casualties in this battle on the first day. And then that sustained itself over the, the weeks and months that followed. So, It's the, it is the sort of story of the First World War really that, it, it was a kind of a, paradigmatic moment. Suddenly mankind demonstrates that it has this propensity almost to create this sort of total destruction. As you say, it meant that, even if there was never quite a lost generation, which is one of the myths that emerged from the war, it was certainly the case that virtually everybody would've known somebody who'd been lost. And it really kind of laid waste to a lot of the big ideas that had underpinned western civilization and certainly British civilization and culture. This idea, this idea is the certainty of the rightness of, everything and, the likes of Freud and, Marx and all these people coming through and challenging these preexisting - Nietzsche's coming. So, so there's a lot happening at the same time. And you do see this, this sense that somehow who we are has changed and our relationships ourselves has fundamentally changed.

Helen: But also that I think you're right, that if you think about modernism being an artistic and a literary movement about the kind of, it was about destruction, right? It was about throwing away formal old rules that maybe this was a time when they felt, hang on a minute, actually things are going to change in social ways, which they did. I wrote about this in my, book. Women moving Into factories and jobs. You come out of this in 1918. Women get the vote. Women get the right to sit as magistrates. They have often, throughout the First World War, been earning their own wages. The kind of, the social disruptions of the twenties are quite hard to understand unless you understand that, you moved a huge population of men to another country and the women kind of were left behind doing different things. And I wrote about them, the women's football teams, during the first World War that happened in the factories, they had ladies football teams. 'cause the FA suspended the men's league. And one of them, Dick, Kerr Ladies, went on a tour exactly of a battlefield like this immediately after the war had ended, they went and played French players who all played in berets, which I find, very charming. But, the descriptions in their diaries of what it was like to just drive through mile after mile of France that was, had been just blitzed, run over, and there was, there were just tiny little pockets of villages, but still littered with barbed wire. . I don't think - it's hard now to appreciate, even when we see images of war on tv, what it's like to just - everywhere as far as the eye can see is, has been destroyed.

James: Yeah. There's that. And Graves has that line in, is the title of his book, Goodbye To All That. And, obviously he's talking about something specific. But I would think it pertains so well to that whole sentiment of saying that's all gone. That our version of the world and the structure, the certainty of the structures of kind of gender norms and class norms.

Helen: And the aristocracy, the great houses suddenly, fall into disrepair. Labour costs are much higher because there's fewer, men of working age. It's what kind of, yeah, it's what ends Edwardian Britain, isn't it? And then the, Britain that emerges from it is very different.

James: Yeah, there's, Freud has this whole kind of man is no longer master in his own home. This idea that even certainty of self can't be relied upon anymore. So the first World War kind of demonstrates this. But what is, in, in retrospect really chilling, is that actually this augered in the age of something much bigger and you're talking about some of the wars since, and things like the tsunami, you suddenly realise that this is not an abearance. This is actually the start of something. This is, the humanity kind of defining new terms under which it will exist.

Helen: James. I'm loving this. This is like the classiest guided tour ever. This is my dream, this is my absolute dream. You get someone to ask them questions personally, and they can't run away!

Narrator: We move on from modernism to something with a touch of surrealism. Again, if you check your phone on certain podcast apps, you can see what Helen sees. 

John Armstrong, Pro Patria, 1938

Helen: instantly when I saw this, I thought it's got The air of a, René Magritte or a Salvador Dali. There's something surrealist about it. You've got bits of broken walls and a bit of a face of a statue. Someone maybe bathing half naked in a, a lake. But there's also a peeled off poster, and then... I'm not quite sure what's happening on the right hand side. It looks like sort of wallpaper has come off a, wall somehow, but there are a lot of slightly confusing elements
it's not giving me a lot of help about what it's about. James, help me!

James: Yeah, no, sure. I can completely understand that. The picture relates, specifically to the Spanish Civil War, and specifically to the bombing of Guernica as part of the Spanish civil War.

Helen: So that's 1930s?

James: 1930s, yeah. .

Helen: And that's Guernica as in, which people will have heard of in the sense the Pablo Picasso giant painting. So this is the same incident? It's the same incident and it's, but it's a really significant incident. The Spanish Civil War is one of those wars, which, has kind of perhaps receded a little in the kind of public popular imagination or the collective memory, but really significant for a number of different reasons. Not least because the bombing of Guernica was this, again, kind of enormous transgression. The first time that there was, was bombing of civilians in an urban target like that. It ushers in a new era. So there's a noticeable difference from, the subjects that Nash was working with, which had to do with sort of spaces of conflict, which is not to say that civilians weren't caught up in the First World War, of course there were, but, moving into this space, suddenly there's this new dimension of human experience whereby bombs can drop from the air. And, we might think about that today as being a given, because that's pretty established. But putting ourselves back in the position of the 1930s when something like that has never happened before, is huge. But it's still pretty terrifying, isn't it? 'Cause now the thing I think that people find hard is the idea of, unmanned, drones essentially, and the idea that someone can be sitting at essentially with a video games controller in the middle of Nevada and they're killing people thousands of miles away.

James: Yeah, exactly. For quite, but very much born out of this sort of initial moment where that, kind of Rubicon is crossed. So, so what we see here is, in contrast to the Nash painting, the fragments, the sort of shards of human spaces in a, way that human spaces are more absent from the Nash painting. it's almost like the focus of conflict is becoming more about the role and the positionality of the civilian in conflict and their sort of fundamental vulnerability under the weight modern war. The artist himself, John Armstrong, wasn't there during the Spanish Civil War, but it had this huge impression on that whole generation. Because of course, the other thing about the Spanish Civil War, which is kind of extraordinarily romantic in its own way, is that all these artists from across the world obviously went over there en masse.

Helen: Yeah, and George Orwell too, right? Turns up and on the front lines, gets shot in the neck and ends up having to be invalided out. But there was a sense that it was. there was a movement behind it, right? That it was, happening in someone else's country, but it was part of a kind of political movement that young avant-garde people would ally themselves to.

James: Exactly. And it really kind of activated and motivated this generation of artists, together. And in fact, Paul Nash established a group called Unit One, which was quite short-lived, but Armstrong was a part of it. So there was a connection between those two artists. And then, Armstrong becomes this person who's one of many people galvanized by the Spanish civil War. But I was thinking this, painting for me, you get this on the floor here, there's this sort of fragment of a, what looks like a, a statue.

Helen: But huge right. That's what threw me back. I dunno. Suzanne, did you also, when you looked at this, think there's a slight surrealism to it? Because the, bit of the statue is just so vast that it, almost, it, it just doesn't feel like it belongs in the same way to the rest of the painting.

Suzanne: Yeah. It looks like the, painting is in layers. Which photojournalist always kind of try to strive to get in layers into their work. But it does look like a Dalí or a De Chirico, but it's got this kind of sinister edge, you just feel like something wrong has happened, even though it's just in the posters that are expressions of the people that -

Helen: Yeah, people screaming in the posters or shouting and then a tree half growing out of what looks like rock.

James: Yeah.

Helen: Have you had a situation somewhere, you've, taken a photo and you've seen something in it that just profoundly feels like it doesn't belong there?

Suzanne: So I haven't been on a front line, but I've photographed the, aftermath and almost daily life after. And you'll see sort of when I was in Afghanistan, I remember being in towns where, people are going about their daily life. And meanwhile, the buildings are falling apart. They're in pieces. There's, and there's still people with, Kalashnikovs walking down the street casually and you're saying, oh, good morning to them and thinking, what's going on?

James: Yeah.

Suzanne: Exactly.

Helen: One of the problems I'm guessing about photographing the aftermath of conflict is we have such a well established idea about the kind of visual clichés of it, that trying to find the freshness in that, that brings, that actually tells a new story and an accurate story, rather than slotting into.

Suzanne: Those clichés, which you don't want to fall into. And trying to find a human story to sort of, you know, pin to the wider theme.

James: But that whole concept of incongruousness as well is really important I think. Clearly that's something which Armstrong had - we could presume - Armstrong had in mind as he's working on this, but, that sort of surrealism we talk about Dalí et cetera. I think it, it does suggest that there is something broader going on to do with representation and almost like the, kind of escalating crisis of representation that the sort of mimetic form of art. Which, the Nash is still in its own way, mimetic, you still recognize it as a landscape, you don't need to be told that. Whereas for this one, we recognize elements and fragments of it, but it's composition is disorientating. It is incongruous. and there is an incongruency about this. And I, always sort of feel like in, in a way this bit of statue suggests like the destruction of the great cultures. Do you know what I mean? It looks like come from.

Helen: It does look like Roman or Greek doesn't it? Doesn't it?

James: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Suzanne: I almost feel like in places I've been, this could exist. You know like at first when I looked at this, I went, it's surreal. It wouldn't ever be when you look at a Dalí, there's melting clocks and it's crazy. But when you look at this, this could exist.

James: The physics almost hold firm, don't they? The physics seem authentic and plausible. Just... it's just their composition.

Helen: Just has a deep sense of wrongness about it, doesn't it, this painting? Which I think is it kind of compelling is it conveys an emotion and a mood as much as any, much as visual information. So was the Spanish Civil War one of the first wars to be exhaustively covered if it was attracting all these artists and writers?

James: Yeah, there's

Suzanne: Wasn't Hemingway in there as well?

Helen: Was Hemingway there well? Okay.

James: Yeah, And what it also did is on a historical level, is kind of introduced the world, and again, Guernica's a part of that - but to the realities of what modern war was likely to be like. So it, sort of, set a precedent, I suppose, when the second World War followed. That's not to suggest there was any kind of direct relationship or causality or anything of that nature, but it meant that the types of weapons that would be used in the second World War were witnessed in the Spanish Civil War. And it, really kind of gave people an enormous cause for concern. Because whilst nobody could have possibly predicted the course of the Second World War, or indeed whether or not it would actually happen at all, nevertheless, it did suggest that if there were to be another World War, it would be of a very, different order.

Helen: I think it's hard for us to remember now, but if you were alive in 1910, you might have been born when the Civil War happened, right? the Civil War in the America in the 1860s, which is still people lining up in, across a field and walking at each other. And your life could have covered that, just incredible industrialisation war. So there would've been people around for whom this was, just completely new and not the way that things had been done.
James: For sure. And, you've gotta remember even things like flight, for the first World War, like the RAF was only formed during the First World War. The idea of airplanes being used in combat was new because airplanes themselves were pretty new.

Helen: And presumably such a souring of a dream in the sense that you read people writing in the 1890s and 1900s about things like electricity and industrialisation, and that was, it was, this huge, exciting engine of progress. And then you begin to see through the first World War and then the Spanish Civil War, the downside of that, which is you can do everything much more efficiently and at much greater scale, including killing people.

War Pictorial News No. 21

Narrator: We move on this time to one of the darkest moments in human history. Helen and Suzanne witness a newsreel from the end of the Second World War filmmakers educating allied audiences on the Nazi genocide of the Jewish race.

Newsreel: Here in Belsen, just one of their concentration camps, people are still dying at the rate of 40 a day. German soldiers under a British Guard carry the pitiful dead from the huts in which they had been herded. These men died from deliberate starvation and neglect. It was too late to save them. They were too weak to take food or respond to medical care.

James: the Holocaust Memorial Day focuses on the, liberation of Auschwitz. And there are good reasons for that. And Auschwitz has become this kind of real focus of, holocaust, memory. And there are good reasons for that too. Belsen, for Britain, is particularly significant because Belsen was liberated by British forces.

Helen: So where is it, in Poland? In Germany?

James: No, it's Germany. So, but it's an unusual site, actually. Belsen, for the majority of its existence didn't exist as a concentration camp in the way that other sites did. It was a transit camp, and it was a site where so-called privileged Jews were kept, or exchanged Jews, in the hope and anticipation that they could kind of be swapped as part of kind of grotesque deals on the behalf of the Nazis.

Narrator: as the Allied Forces closed in on Germany from both the east and West, the Nazis began a grim evacuation of concentration camps moving prisoners deeper into the Reich. This retreat resulted in the harrowing death marches. Columns of emaciated prisoners forced to travel long distances under brutal conditions. Many succumb to exhaustion, starvation, and violence with around a third dying on the journey. These marches marked a catastrophic final chapter of the Holocaust. By the time the survivors reached Germany, the shrinking territory left fewer sites to hold them amplifying the horror.

James: Belsen became the site to which the majority of people were evacuated just because it was the most sort of, convenient, I suppose, given other things that were going on. So what it meant is that at the point of liberation, in April 1945, there were about 60,000 prisoners in Belsen with virtually no provision for them. That's far, far, far more than any other site of that nature. What had also happened at that stage is that the Nazis, or Germany, had completely lost control of the whole system. I.e. communications networks were breaking down, supply lines were breaking down, et cetera. So they weren't able to do anything to support or sustain that population at all. So when these people arrived, there was absolutely nothing there for them.

Helen: I think one of the most shocking things about the footage is the bit when you go from seeing the prisoners who have obviously in most cases starved to death, to seeing the Camp Commandant who looks sleek and plump and all the women who worked there and, and just the kind of the shocking, difference - visuals bring that home to you in a way that a written description even maybe wouldn't.

James: Yeah, I think one of the things I think about the footage which is so significant and the Belsen footage is, sort of dominates all of this liberation footage, because there's so much of it, because there were so many people there in the AFPU, the Army Film and Photography Unit, was there to capture it. It's really sort of defined the way that we think about these things in a lot of ways. But what I always think is really striking about it's so striking, as you say, and so immediate, that it has sort of, in a way, indulged this myth that the allies knew nothing about these things until they arrived at the gates, which of course they did. They had a really comprehensive knowledge of what was going on throughout. But exactly as you say, there was something about seeing it or being able to visualize it, which was transformative. And so I always think we could talk about versions of knowing. We could know intellectually, but to know, because we see it is transformative.

Helen: The other image that I find just very striking just now is there's people sitting down amidst dead bodies and people who were obviously in terrible distress and there's one woman crying and being sick. And interesting thing is that's not everybody, right? I don't know how you felt when you saw this, Suzanne, but I thought, my immediate thought was, how could you see this and go back home and not have it haunt you for ever?

Suzanne: Do you put your camera down and help, or do you take pictures in hopes that it will bring help in?

James: Right.

Helen: I, yeah, I find that the story of Kevin Carter, who took the very famous photo during famine of the child being stalked by a vulture and then won a Pulitzer for it, but then was then haunted by the question of 'and what happened next?' And he couldn't answer that. To me, that kind of encapsulates the photojournalist's dilema right, which is what are you there to do? Right? Are you there to record it for posterity or do you have to put your humanity aside to some extent to do that? Because you are a kind of emissary of the rest of the world to bring this stuff home.

Suzanne: Right, and it, and he ended up... he did help the child...but I think it it felt like he was bullied by people not understanding and jumping on seeing these photographs thinking you know, that's kind of when the conversation started. for a lot of photographers.

James: There are really difficult, ethical questions which continue to exercise anyone working with this content and this footage about what you should or shouldn't use. I think you're seeing people in such terrible levels of suffering and degradation, and their bodies, particularly people who've haven't obviously had the ability to give their consent to be filmed. Something which we talked to a lot of different people about when we were working on the galleries and consulted a lot about, because on one hand it exists within historical record, so to, to not use it means that you are kind of eliding that part of the, archive. But on the other, you do run the risk of sort of further exploiting people who have already been so egregiously exploited and assaulted in their lives.

Helen: How much of this made it back to Britain? Obviously there was a huge amount of footage collected, but did people, were people able to see it? Were they, not happy to see it, but were they, were they in a place to be able to receive and understand that this stuff had happened?

James: Yeah they were. I think they, it sort of made itself kind of felt and seen in various different forms. It was obviously front page, the newspapers was a big thing, and for example, Josef Kramer, who you were just alluding to just there, he was the Commandant at Belsen, who extraordinarily, and this is a whole other story, chose to stay in post when he knew that the allies were coming because Belson, when it was liberated, was still behind enemy lines. And there was this concern from the Germans - obviously entirely about their self-interest - concern from them that if the allies were to fight through into Belsen and the prisoners were allowed to escape, then , typhus would become rampant because there was so much typhus within the camp. So they brokered this kind of agreement that Belsen would be within the zone of protection, which is how the Allies arrived there. And Kramer was still at his post when they got there. But then in the British press he became known as the Beast of Belsen. And these sort of various titles come out quite often, very gendered and quite misogynist. There's, Irma Grese became The Beastess of Belsen. These, The Bitch of Belsen. So all these various names associated with it. So the pictures were in the papers. The film was seen in newsreels, et cetera, and it did have a really significant impact on the way that people thought about things. And what it also became, and it was a post-rationalisation, but it became something which really rationalised the entire war. There's this whole sense of saying 'and this proves what we were fighting for'.

Helen: That was even, I think in the voiceover, which was, if it hadn't been for the Battle of Britain looking at a pile of bodies, this could have been, this could have been you.

Suzanne: I noticed that. That was very -

James: Yeah. it's quite unapologetic, isn't it.

Helen: Obviously to put a very strong, patriotic kind of spin on it, that you could see that the people not being allowed to just digest these images as they were, they were delivered with a message behind them.

James: Yeah. But the Holocaust has this real problem in the collective memory, in that there's almost sort of two - and a number of scholars have talked about this - two different versions of the Holocaust. There's the version of the Holocaust that actually happened. And there's the version of the Holocaust that's been sort of reconstructed in culture. So, films and.

Helen: There's always a mythology with any event that is that big and happens on such a massive scale.

James: Exactly. But the sort of challenge with the Holocaust is that, that sort of quote unquote myth of the Holocaust and that's how Tim Cole describes it as well, has almost completely displaced the actual historic one. So the details and the references and the understanding that people have gleaned from all of those kind of mythologised versions have really distracted from the reality of what occured. And I think the Belsen footage makes this point actually. One of my big, concerns about some of the cultural recreations of the subjects is that they really tend towards this obsession with the idea of systemisation and bureaucratisation and, that kind of thing. Whereas I think actually the Holocaust was far more messy, iterative, brutal.

Helen: Right, which is what The Zone of Interest tried to capture, right? The idea that it was happening next door to people's gardens. And you had to actively ignore that something weird was happening at the end of your road.

James: Yeah. And of course, people didn't - I think, again, this idea is one of those prevailing myths, and it became obviously a natural defense mechanism afterwards to say, I didn't know about it, I didn't know about it. Even at Nuremberg, senior Nazis were seeking to make that case. It really doesn't bear any close scrutiny. In fact, one of the things we display in the galleries is a letter from a lady called Eleonore Gusenbauer, who lived near Mauthausen concentration camp. And she wrote to the Commandant at Mauthausen during its operation, and she said, it was a letter of complaint to him, she said it was very distressing for her as a, civilian living nearby to have to witness and listen to prisoners dying, these protracted, agonising deaths. And what she said is, she would be much more happy if they could either kill them quickly or do it away from public gaze so that she doesn't have to deal with it.

Mushroom Cloud over Nagasaki, 1945

Narrator: We move again to another scene of destruction

Helen: So, I'm looking at a black and white photo of a mushroom cloud, and I'm presuming this is a test fire? One of the ones in the Pacific, is that what I'm looking at? One of the very first tests?

James: No, this is, the actual one over Nagasaki. This is the real thing, yeah. Nagasaki was obviously the second of the bombs that was, dropped. Part of a series of events that have this massive significance for humanity. We were talking previously about science and the role of science and conflict and technology, and, the atomic science was such a critical part of the scientific movement in the early part of the last century. And at first there were these hopes that it had this propensity, or this potential for humanity to revolutionise everything and to allow us to be our kind of better selves and everything. And of course, what actually happened is the atomic bomb was created. And in extraordinarily quick order. It's really easy to lose sight of this, that this science was moving so fast. So fast. And this group of scientists, which, it's a project which started in this country actually, which, again gets forgotten. Not saying that's something we should be proud of, but it, I think it's important to know-

Helen: It's strange, hell-for-leather, isn't it? I was reading about William Shockley, the physicist, and there was, there was something very strange happened, that basically all of the, the physics community, in the late 1930s and 1940s in America, suddenly they all just vanished to Los Alamos. And then no one heard from them. But there must have been that incredible sense in this, in the community. Oh, something's up.

James: Yeah. And these extraordinarily smart people, as you say, the sort of people who would, in other circumstances have been in laboratories and nobody would've heard of, they'd have just been getting on with their stuff and making these really important discoveries, but suddenly they all convened in this place.

Helen: Suzanne, can I ask you about how you feel about the aesthetic qualities of this image? Because it's obviously, I presume, taken out of a plane, is that right? But it's, but it's quite badly cropped. I don't mean to-
Suzanne: it is...

Helen: ...pernickety.

Suzanne: It's niggling me a bit.

Helen: So you're cutting off a bit of the mushroom cloud and it, it takes a moment. Now we know it's an iconic shape. We sort of know what it is, but it actually doesn't convey a lot of visual information itself. What did it make you think when you first saw it?

Suzanne: Well at first, yeah, I thought the crop was bad, but I thought how did they get that picture? Because if that was the actual one, that's so and how did the person in the plane survive? And it must have just been taken-

James: Really fast. No, there's a lot of risk for them as they were doing these things, because of course, the nature and scale of the blast for these things is massive. So they were various sort of manoeuvres that they had to follow once the device had been dropped and they had these kinda sunglasses and stuff in order to, protect their eyes and stuff. So I suppose in a way, the poorness of the framing evidences the sort of the liveness of the moment because they would've just had to grab the shot and then get out of Get out of there.

Suzanne: That makes sense.

James: Yeah. And not knowing how big it was gonna be. What always strikes me about these things is that they are, if you didn't know what was beneath it, there's almost like this, almost like a sort of an ethereal beauty about it. The shape and the form. It's just that, it's the knowledge that beneath it is such-

Suzanne: And that's this reflection and the- yeah.

Helen: And to be a photographer in that situation, I can't imagine there's anything comparable in your career that you just look at and think, no human in history has ever looked at this before. It doesn't happen that often.

James: Yeah. This was only the third bomb, they did the one, the Trinity test, before they left, and then there's the bomb and Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. So this is the third time this had happened.

Suzanne: My grandfather was in World War II and he was on, in Bimini when they did a test? And it made a huge impact on him. He talked about it endlessly. And with me he wanted me to have this photograph before he died so I could kind of go out and tell the world exactly what happened. He was very shaken by it.

James: I think one of the strange things about it is when within the context of the war, there had been more people killed in bombing raids in conventional bombing raids in Japan than were killed during the atomic bombs. So I sometimes wonder if it's sort of the clarity of the difference it made that emerged slightly later, but it clearly changed everything.

Helen: I presume that in some ways the morality of that was like, we have to end this war before, while we're still ahead.

James: It turned out that the Germans were nowhere near it.

Helen: But that's one of the great ironies, isn't it, of the Holocaust, is the fact that so many brilliant European scientists had all left because they were Jewish. And there's that description of it as being essentially a Hungarian school science fair project, right. The Manhattan Project. But the Nazis fell behind technologically because they had driven out their best scientists through racism. It's an extraordinary historical irony.

James: Yeah. they denied themselves the capacity through their own sort of prejudice and bigotry. Yeah. and thank god they did because it's, obviously the ends never justified the means in that respect, but the, I do shudder to think sometimes what would've happened had Hitler had the bomb at his disposal.

Suzanne Plunkett, People Covered in Dust and Debris New York, 11 September 2001.

Narrator: We have come to our last object: two photographs taken by one of today's guests...

Helen: So, Suzanne, we've finally come to your pictures from your time reporting on 9/11 on the terror attacks that took down the World Trade Center. And the thing that first of all strikes me is it's almost like the bottom one is almost like a kind of a blizzard. Like it's a snowfall, people are covering their mouths, they're running away, but there's just so much dust hanging in the air. And the same is true of the other one, which is of someone being interviewed, but the streets are white. It's, and I have to say, is that one of your abiding memories of that day? I always wonder what did it, smell like? It must have smelled like burning as well, right?

Suzanne: It, it was, yeah. It was a horrible smell. It was, my overriding memories are just of complete confusion, but trying to make sense of it. I came out of this, actually this subway station sort of about a few minutes before the towers came down. And I remember looking up and you could see the towers. I was about two blocks away and you could see them. And at that point the planes had gone in and I was thinking, how are they gonna put out that fire? Like we didn't really, we weren't really thinking what it was. I wasn't thinking terrorism. So I came out of that subway station and was setting my camera settings for the beautiful sunny day and then someone yelled, they're coming down and I was thinking it would fall, a tree in the forest. You don't know which way it's gonna go. And I was not 110 stories away from- so I thought it's gonna come and hit me. I ran and hid under a car and then kind of had that moment of this is not gonna do any- this is not gonna work. And then got out from under the car and you could hear kind of this huge noise. It was really loud and then it was just quiet.

Helen: Was it like metal groaning noise? That's what I feel like I can remember from TV reports at the time. Just this kind of sort of wail of kind of steel coming apart.

Suzanne: Yeah. You can hear- I've found the recording of exactly at that moment where I had photographed some people kind of running away in horror and you can hear just things, breaking and falling and screaming and then it's just absolutely quiet. So in this picture here, the one that looks like a blizzard, it was just absolute silence and no one knew what to do. And I remember thinking, I need to capture the horror of this, and this is a recurring thing and showing the scale and just sort of wandering around lower Manhattan.

Helen: - to me because it's, again, it's one of those things that's hard to put yourself back at the time that it happened, right? Because it became so much a justification for the war in Iraq, and therefore so politicised. But you didn't have any idea about that or any idea about the way that, that your photographs could later be used. What, did you think you needed to get down on film? What was the thing that you thought, this is important, this is what I- what are the things that you were drawn to photographing?

Suzanne: It was everything because it was such a strange scene. It wasn't your every day. It was, you can see people, there was women without shoes, people with shoes in this dust. People weren't crying and screaming and that's what I was looking for. It felt like there was this sort of silence and everyone was probably just as confused as I was. But you're right. It's the detail. So the guy that's being interviewed on TV is still clutching a can of soda. It's just like he's sort of cracked open a Sprite or something.

James: And that guy, he's using his newspaper to try and filter-

Suzanne: Yeah, and there was this cough that you had after, it was sort of the 9/11 cough and everybody had this horrible cough and you knew who was down there and who wasn't. And I remember taking this picture because I wasn't used to- this was before mobile phones, so it was almost like this last generation of photographers who were capturing iconic images. We weren't taking selfies of each other. We weren't photographing ourselves. We weren't- and I remember this is a weird picture but I'm gonna to shoot everything. Right. And thinking, why am I taking a picture of the reporter?

James: And you were shooting on film as well?

Suzanne: No, this was digital.

James: This was digital? Okay.

Suzanne: This was an early digital camera. And that's why they're so small is the file

James: sizes were very small. Ah, Yeah. Interesting.

Helen: When did you send your photos into, was it AP you were working for at the time?

Suzanne: It was, yeah. I probably took pictures for about... 20 minutes? And then thought I have to get these on the wire, I have get these on the wire. And I went into this sort of vitamin/beeper shop New York kinda places and they were letting people in and then they closed the gate and people were almost banging on the gate to get in the shop because, we thought, this is before the second tower had fallen and so we were taking shelter and then, it was crammed. And I was saying, can I use a phone line, can I use a phone line? And I, thought, and can I plug my laptop in thinking, just thinking of the job, thinking, I need to keep my laptop charged today. I don't know what I'm gonna see. And took out my enormous mobile phone, connected it to my laptop, sent three pictures, that was all I could get out. And that was when my office went, she's okay. Oh, thank God. And then, my parents were calling and, they could tell them, she, she's all right. we see pictures. And I did not take as, as many pictures now if I had gone back, now, you shoot 3000 pictures at a football match and I probably took about 500 pictures that day.

Helen: Do you have an emotional response to seeing that?

Suzanne: I do. I feel like I do get a shaky feeling whenever I talk about it I start feeling shaky and, almost cold. I don't know. It's chilling and just going right back there. It was such a vivid memory of the day. Every single thing that went on. I remember a firefighter running up to me and asking me if he could use my phone to call his wife. And he couldn't get through and he couldn't get through. And then he had to go and he dashed towards the, Ground Zero, at that time I didn't- and I remember I had this phone number on my phone and thought, do- and for weeks- What can you tell her? Do I call? I don't know if I call her or do I not? Did he sur-, I don't know who he is-

James: And you still don't know?

Suzanne: I still don't know.

Narrator: Our time at the gallery is almost at an end, but there's just time for a Cup of tea in the cafe and a chance to decompress.

Helen: I think what will stay with me from looking around that gallery is the difficulty of capturing the scale of war and actually that ability to stand back and put it in perspective. That war is simultaneously something that happens to individual people, often changing their lives forever, ending their lives, but also that it, it is something kind of a, mass event. And also that it's something that happens to the people back home and there is always a kind of contest about what images that they're getting beamed back to them, and the difficulty of working in dangerous situations to, to tell the truth. I think it's about the hardest place to kind of claim that images are true. And photojournalism is always a kind of a huge debate about what does truth really mean. Can you ever capture some- the totality of a situation in a single image? And in war that is just so much harder than anywhere else. You are always shooting it from your perspective, which is by definition, a limited perspective. But yeah, one of the things I'm really gonna take away is now I think from people born in Western Europe in the second half of the 20th century have had one of the most conflict-free existences of anybody in human nature. And that's not the default experience of humanity. And that's why, great to come to a museum like this because war is almost not the natural state of humanity, but it is something that has been a constant throughout human history. and we're deluding ourselves if we think it's gone away. Maybe the Ukraine war has changed how people feel about that. But in the same way that 9/11, I think, changed how many Americans felt about violence and destruction, that it was something that, oh, it happens here, it happens in Manhattan. And that's not ever something you've ever experienced before.

James, Suzanne, thank you so much for being my guides to the gallery and to what it's like to be a photojournalist. It was very mind expanding, which is what I always hope for when I come to a museum. And to me, the crazy thing about it is that I just, I've scratched the surface of the Imperial War Museum. We were walking through the galleries on our way there and I kept wanting to go off and go, oh, that's an exploded tank. That looks interesting. So, this was my first visit, but it will not be my last visit to the museum.

James: Good.

Narrator: And that's where we must leave this Conflict of Interest and the Blavatnik Art Film and Photography Gallery. Thanks to our guests, Helen Lewis, Suzanne Plunkett, and James Bul next week on Conflict of Interest

Suzanne: And also there's the loss of life, isn't it? If you're asking people from the colonies to come and fight and then they don't come back.
Absolutely. It's just, you know, what then happens?

Narrator: Actor Susan Wokoma discovers the artist depicting the changing face of the British home front.

My name is James Taylor. The producer was Matt Hill at Rethink Audio with support from Eleanor Head, Daniel BenChorin, and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums.
 

Archive: During the war years, we in this country have seen many new faces. People from all parts of the British Commonwealth and Empire and from the Allied Nations. When they are in the forces, we have learned to spot some of them. But when they are just dressed like anybody else, it is not so easy.

Susan Wokoma: Hi. I'm Susan Wokoma. I'm an actress, writer, director... sort of known for Taskmaster I'd say? Yeah, that's me. Who are you?

Geoff Spender: I am Geoff. I am an assistant curator here at IWM. I have of course seen you in Taskmaster.

Susan Wokoma: Thank you.

Geoff Spender: My partner's a big fan of Chewing Gum.

Susan Wokoma: Hey!

James Taylor: Susan has joined curator, Geoff Spender, at Imperial War Museum London, to pose the questions that many of us are too embarrassed to ask... about how recent conflicts have shaped our world. 
In this series, we are exploring the role of the war artist in capturing seismic moments of contemporary history. And today... it's the turn of the home front.

Susan Wokoma: Cause I think that was something that I just was like, 'why would you do that?' Like look at how Great Britain treated you afterwards. But actually that film, by the end of it, I was like, why wouldn't you want to learn new skills, make new friends , fly a plane?

James Taylor: From documenting the women that entered the workforce during the First World War, to the people that made the journey to Britain to help defeat Nazism. We'll look at the artists and photographers behind those stories.
Diya Gupta: It's one of the biggest losses of allied civilian life in the war... and not one trace of that in, in his photographs, from India. On our way, we'll encounter censored images of wartime Britain and explore iconic items from the museum's collection; so that we all leave with an understanding of the importance of art in a time of war. All this in under an hour. I'm James Taylor and this is Conflict of Interest.

James Taylor: Susan and Geoff meet outside the gift shop and begin their journey to the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Gallery.

Geoff Spender: Are you a avid museum goer?

Susan Wokoma: Do you know? I think I am more a gallery goer...

Geoff Spender: You say you've been to the Imperial War Museum, but not for some time, is that right?

Susan Wokoma: Not for some time. I've definitely come on a school trip, And then had a date here. Which was a bit intense. My, my boyfriend, he was like a history nut, which is so lovely when you are, so passionate, but it obviously isn't necessarily a date idea necessarily. Right. Not for everybody.

James Taylor: There is one more to our panel today: joining Susan and Geoff... is Diya Gupta.

Diya Gupta: I work as lecturer in public history at City University of London. And, I've used the IWM's wonderful visual archives many times in my research.

Geoff Spender: Okay. Shall we head to the first object then?

Susan Wokoma: Yes, please.

Diya Gupta: Let's go for it.

James Taylor: Amidst the sound of other films in the gallery, Susan is presented with a large oil painting. On certain podcast apps, you'll be able to see what Susan sees. Take a look at your screen now.

Anna Airy, A Shell Forge at a National Projectile Factory, Hackney Marshes, London, 1918

Susan Wokoma: Right. What we're looking at is a really large painting, for a kind of workhouse, I think there's some welding going on, and you have loads of workers. it's really stunning.

Geoff Spender: Well, this is one of a series of paintings made during the First World War by an artist called Anna Airy. And it's a painting of ammunitions factory that was in Hackney marshes during the first World War. 
It's a scene where you see men and women both working to, fill these, red hot shell casings. The story I heard is that Anna Airy, the artist, while she was painting this, her shoes caught fire 'cause of-

Susan Wokoma: No!

Geoff Spender: ...the intensity of the heat.

Susan Wokoma: It's like you can feel the heat... but also just knowing that this is Hackley Marshes as well. Sort of... it looks like something that could be in, I don't know... south of America, do you know what I mean? But it's, but it's Hackney.

Geoff Spender: So Anna Airy was commissioned by IWM to paint these pictures. She was quite a well known artist in her day. But she mostly painted domestic scenes and portraits. But she was brought in to a series of these photos basically celebrating the factory work, which was like really crucial part of the war. And lots of people who couldn't actually go and fight because they were too old... or perhaps 'cause they were women, they weren't eligible for military service... they would go and work in these places instead.

Diya Gupta: When you say commissioned, she was, commissioned by the IWM?

Geoff Spender: Yes. Lots of artists and photographers during the war to record things in their own way. They had a brief from the museum, there, certain things you wanted them to look at. The idea was they knew, even as the war was going on, that once it was over they wanted to commemorate it. And that was the origin of IWM, the Imperial War Museum.

Susan Wokoma: Yeah. Yeah. Who are the people that would've been in this factory?

Geoff Spender: The First and Second World War, were what they called total wars, which meant that everyone in society was involved in some way... or touched by the war efforts. Even in the First World War, there were zeppelins dropping bombs.

Susan Wokoma: Yes.

Geoff Spender: ...on London. Obviously people were joining the military. There was very large scale conscription, which was a relatively new thing. And injured soldiers being sent home. The idea that the frontline was this distant thing. It really kind of starts to erode that concept, the First World War. 'cause there was a blurring of the line- It's also saying something, you know, you, you read about First World War poetry and, you know, Owen and Siegfried Sassoon...

Diya Gupta: And then you look at this kind of painting and it feels like it's a different world, with men and women on the same plane doing the same kind of job.

Geoff Spender: And was unusual; 60 years before you had the Crimean War, you had Florence Nightingale and nurses... but apart from that sort of formalised roles for women in the war effort... that hadn't really been done before, but the scale of the First World War made it necessary.

James Taylor: And with five side steps, we move seamlessly to our second object, a group of images. The photos show women office filing, tent-making and sending telegrams. A mixture of French civilians and British women of Queen Mary's Army Auxiliary Corps.

Olive Edis, Women’s Services in France, 1919 photographs

Susan Wokoma: So, as with the factory work in England, there was also a call for women to go over to Europe to work in support roles.

Geoff Spender: Most famously 'be nursing.

Diya Gupta: Yeah.

Geoff Spender: Obviously medical support. But also administrative work, which is what you mostly see here. Filing, paperwork, the logistics of war, which is always hugely complicated, especially war on this scale.

Susan Wokoma: So these pictures are of British women, or largely, or a mix of-

Geoff Spender: I would expect they largely are...

Susan Wokoma: Wow.

Geoff Spender: ...British Women's Services. Yes. The photographer was a woman named Olive Edis, another female practitioner like Anna Airy. Like Anna Airy, she was, in peace time, a professional photographer. She did portraits, things like... she had a portrait studio. She wasn't able to go and photograph soldiers on the front lines. Not because it was unsafe necessarily; in fact, she planned to go in 1918, but then the war did finish. But as you could see in 1919, there was still a lot going on. Yeah. There was still people being repatriated. Soldiers, prisoners of war, the dead.

Susan Wokoma: Yeah.

Geoff Spender: You know: deciding what to do with them, whether they should be returned to their home countries... huge amounts of work that Olive Edis was able to capture.

Diya Gupta: It does feel like this idea of women weren't... didn't have certain rights or couldn't perform.

Susan Wokoma: certain jobs. It felt so pregnant that women were central to the war effort.

Did that stay? You know, women were being enlisted in these roles... did that go away?

Geoff Spender: The reason that women were taking on these roles-

Susan Wokoma: Yeah.

Geoff Spender: -was essentially to take the place so that a man could then go and fight. So when they returned from the war, they wanted their jobs back. So that meant that women were kind of shunted aside... in a lot of cases. I mean, once the genie's outta the bottle, you can't really... completely go back to how it was. And this was the era of women's suffrage. The women's vote came around this time as well. That must have accelerated that process. 
But yes, there was definitely pushback after the war was over. From people who just wanted things to go back to how they'd been before. Because in a way that was what a lot of them were fighting for, was for normalcy. For normality. And that was part of their idea of what that was.

Diya Gupta: Yeah, was that women should be in the domestic spaces and-

Geoff Spender: Exactly.

Diya Gupta: -not performing these public roles.

James Taylor: By coincidence, or very possibly design, the next object is another series of photos. This time taken during the Second World War... but these photos have been partially covered by red pen.

MOI Censored photographs

Geoff Spender: During the second World War, there weren't that many ways to get information about what was going on. You had the radio. And you had newspapers, essentially.

Diya Gupta: Yep.

Geoff Spender: These are press photographs, of which thousands and thousands were produced by newspapers up and down the country. The problem was that we had the Ministry of Information back then. It was controlling what information was going out to the public, and these are all photographs that the censor has taken their red pen to and said the photo's fine, but that bit has to be cut out.

Susan Wokoma: Oh, I see....

James Taylor: And Geoff has a little game to play with these photographs.

Geoff Spender: You see this photo here? A family outside a house? There's clearly been a bombing raid. The family looks cheerful. You know, the children are all out.

Susan Wokoma: Yeah.

Geoff Spender: ...but next door you see that the house has been bombed into rubble. There's nothing left.

Susan Wokoma: Yeah.

Geoff Spender: Why do you think that's been censored?

Susan Wokoma: Well, some of these editorial changes were made to... boost morale? Hiding the devastation right next to this family is to not kind of elicit more fear.

Geoff Spender: Exactly right. Yes. The reality was that if you lived in this country during the war, you would've seen this sort of damage. Buildings destroyed. There was still an idea that, you know, if it's something to be on a matter of record in the newspaper, you present an optimistic face.

Susan Wokoma: Yeah.

Geoff Spender: And also anything like that could be used potentially as propaganda by the other side. You see the damage that we are doing to England. And you are denying the enemy kind of easy access to that sort of material they could use.So what about this one? What do you see in this photograph?

Susan Wokoma: Oh, that's an interesting edit, because beyond the kind of edge of the land, so there's like a sort of landscape in the background there's like red marks with red pen, so obviously whoever's edited this or censored this or- doesn't want us to get the complete location.

Diya Gupta: Yeah.

Susan Wokoma: -of where these people are, but can you see where the woman is? But she's sort of changing her shoes or- that's been edited out. And I can't quite make out why.

Diya Gupta: That just looks like a fence or something. Yeah.

Geoff Spender: Well, first of all, you're exactly right that they wanted to hide the location-

Susan Wokoma: Yeah.

Geoff Spender: ...of this photo. Because up to date photo intelligence on England would be extremely valuable to the enemy. They know exactly what's going on where. What's also censored, to either side of these people are fencing, barbed wire, just as you say. And these are coastal defences.

Diya Gupta: Oh, I see.

Geoff Spender: And the idea was... there was a general ban on revealing what exactly the defences were along Britain's coastlines in case there should be an attempted invasion. So looking at what's left there, someone over in Germany couldn't tell exactly where it was, what the defences were, so it would be no use to them as intelligence.

Susan Wokoma: Right.

Diya Gupta: I see. That makes sense. So, so the bit near the lady, taking her shoe off...

Susan Wokoma: Or someone, yeah...

Diya Gupta: ...is just the type of defense being used.

Geoff Spender: Yes, exactly.

Diya Gupta: That is being censored. Okay. Yes.

Geoff Spender: And you see, she's not scribbled out. She can be in the photo.

Susan Wokoma: Yeah, yeah. So, in terms of kind of what I understand of modern Photoshop or whatever, being able to get the barbed wire that's either side of the woman out, like scribbling that out, would be easy. They had the kind of technology to be able to do that, then?

Geoff Spender: They had airbrushing techniques yes. They could absolutely-

Susan Wokoma: That sounds very green, but I'm genuinely...

Geoff Spender: They could absolutely doctor these images as they needed to, yes. Try this one. The bottom middle here. What do you see there?

Susan Wokoma: So this looks like a kind of, some sort of transportation carriage. Like lots of it's been blown up. It's been obliterated. So there's like lots of wood all piled up.

Diya Gupta: Yeah, lots of wheels in the air.

Susan Wokoma: Yeah, lots of wheels in the air. But in terms of where the red marker is, it's on the ground, which doesn't look, there's no like no indication of where this is. So the red marker is on the ground. And then there's a little bit in the background, which looks like a location kind of hiding the location a bit. 'Cause that looks like maybe a bridge or some sort of building in the background that they don't want people to know. But the marking on the ground is peculiar 'cause it doesn't look like it reveals anything.

Diya Gupta: It's not distinctive, is it?

Susan Wokoma: Yeah

Geoff Spender: Well, it reveals perhaps more than you think.

Susan Wokoma: Um oh, okay.

Geoff Spender: This is a train derailment-

Susan Wokoma: Right, oh it's a train. Brilliant.

Geoff Spender: The... presumably the, line has been bombed out and the train's come off the tracks and crashed. If you look at the ground, I know it's a black and white photo, but can you see what color the ground is? It's like white? Yeah.Yeah. It's snow on the ground.

Susan Wokoma: Oh, it's snow.

Geoff Spender: And if you were in German intelligence, you could look at that. You could check the weather as it's been in England. Okay Where it snowed. And you can figure out where that train derailment was. So even things like that, the sensors thought of and-

Susan Wokoma: Goodness!

Geoff Spender: Is this art is the question.

Susan Wokoma: Is this art?

Geoff Spender: Is it art by dint of the fact that it's on display in a gallery?

Susan Wokoma: I mean, yeah. I mean, is that the definition of art?

Geoff Spender: Is it as simple as that? I don't know.

MOI Colour Photographs

James Taylor: Move on. Geoff escorts, Susan and Diya through the gallery to the next object.

Geoff Spender: The First World war was in some ways quite liberating for women. As they got them into the workplace, you get opportunities they didn't have before. And that did decline again after the war was over. But then with the second World War, these opportunities began to appear again. It was another total war. It was another all-out conflict in which everyone was needed to contribute. So we're gonna look at a few photographs again that illustrate this.

Susan Wokoma: We've got one here of a woman holding an axe. Then we have this photo, which is of two men, two black gentlemen. They look like they're having some sort of tea. there's some toast, I think. It's making me feel really hungry.

Geoff Spender: The two gentlemen enjoying their sandwiches and their newspaper are in the Colonial Club in London, which was a social club for certainly Caribbean, I think also African men to come and have a break, have a socialise. You can see the barman serving them is white. Which I think would've been an unusual experience for men from the colonies coming to England. They were probably meant to be reproduced in pictorial magazines, which were very popular at the time. Sort of National Geographic.

Diya Gupta: Really the photograph is telling us it wasn't just Britain fighting the war, it was the British Empire. So really what we are considering the home front was a very mixed and cosmopolitan space.

Geoff Spender: And during the Second World War, particularly in 1939, the restrictions on non-white colonial subjects serving in the military that they were relaxed quite a lot because they needed more manpower.

Susan Wokoma: In a way it's like, we discussed earlier in terms of the roles that women had in the war and sort of those opportunities opening and then closing again, it's like the kind of totality of the world wars meant that things had to be relaxed and changed for those periods. Which in a way, kind of, definitely not a utopia, because they're world wars and millions of people dying, but in a way it's just, even these pictures, the fact these are commissioned by the Ministry of Information? It's wanting people to feel involved. And to feel seen and feel like they are contributing regardless of where they're from.

Diya Gupta: It's fascinating you say Geoff, that the Colonial Club picture shows us a white barman serving these two black gentlemen. And that seems very deliberate, I think on the ministry's part to say, you know, if you come to Britain and fight for us, look how the racial dynamic changes. Yeah.

Geoff Spender: And there was pushback against that of course. Yeah. Particularly from colonial governments in Africa, in the Caribbean, other places who did not like these sorts of messages being put put out. Because you felt when these people come back home they'll have these new ideas and that's a problem for us. Yes. So there was a tension there between, because british authorities didn't care as much, they were... get these guys over, we make these promises, 
that's fine. And there was... there was some delicate negotiations. 

John Page, Paul Rotha Productions, West Indies Calling, 1943

James Taylor: We move from photography to film and a piece entitled West Indies Calling. Starring well-known voices from the time preparing for a broadcast on BBC radio. What about these people, for example, who are making their way to broadcasting house in London? Do you know what part of the world they come from? Are they from West Africa or the union? From the Americas or from some outlying island in the Pacific?

Susan Wokoma: That idea of like, they could be like us. That's the thing, the sort of assimilation.

Geoff Spender: Exactly, yeah

Archive: This is Una Marson introducing West Indians in Britain. First of all, here is Learie Constantine, the world famous cricketer. Learie used to be just a summer visitor, but when the war began, he became a welfare officer to the Ministry of Labour.

Geoff Spender: He would've been about 24 I think?

Susan Wokoma: Yeah, look, I was about to say. He looks really young.

Archive: Hardly any of us had experience of flying before the war. The air routes between the islands were mainly run by the Americans. When peace comes, the increase in air transport should mean a new career for many of us who have now learned the job.

Susan Wokoma: So transferable skills. It's not just this, it'll be of use later on. And the idea of, like they've never flown a plane before, and then they just-

Geoff Spender: That was true of a lot of British pilots as well.

Susan Wokoma: Blimey.

James Taylor: As Susan and Diya look on, the West Indies recruits dance together in the BBC's theatre. White women and Black men; Black women and white men.

Susan Wokoma: It's very seductive.

Diya Gupta: It is, isn't it?

Susan Wokoma: Especially if you felt like an outsider and faced discrimination.

Diya Gupta: ...didn't have many job opportunities or training...

Susan Wokoma: because it's all this "beyond the war."

Diya Gupta: Exactly.

Susan Wokoma: "Beyond the war this, that...."

Diya Gupta: Absolutely.

Geoff Spender: So my question to you is... who do you think that film was made for?

Diya Gupta: Now that is a great question.

Susan Wokoma: For people in the colonies coming over? Also to show... because it was so many... although, it seemed very focused on West Indian people coming over to to work, there was that interaction and showcasing of women as well. So it felt like that was it, young people, people with, who are aspirational.

Geoff Spender: Well you are, you're half right.

Susan Wokoma: Half?

Geoff Spender: The film is actually an edited down version of a longer film that was originally made to be shown in the Caribbean. But also in the Soviet Union.

Diya Gupta: Oh...

Susan Wokoma: Oh wow. Oh, nice.

Geoff Spender: So so those are the markets it was produced for: the Caribbean market, fairly obvious as you've talked about, but the Soviets, it's harder to know what they were going for there. They may have been trying to present a very, I dunno if the word is right, but whitewashed image of the British Empire, you know. We are your allies in this war, we believe in some of the same ideas of equality that you do, as evidenced by this film and unlike the other side. Perhaps that's part of it.

Susan Wokoma: That's fascinating.

Geoff Spender: But the film was then, 'cause it was quite successful I think, it was edited down to this shorter version and that was released domestically in the uk.

Susan Wokoma: Right. Okay. It ...right .

Geoff Spender: Uh so the version we watched was cut together for a UK audience. And I think part of it was just to warm people up to the idea of having West Indian people in Britain: "these are great guys, they speak really well.... they're okay for the war effort."

Diya Gupta: Mm-Hmm.

Geoff Spender: You know, they're they're good fun. You don't have to worry about it. And at the end of the war, they're gonna go home and rebuild their countries. You don't have to worry about that either. I think that may be part of the messaging in that, that-

Diya Gupta: It's serving a dual purpose, really. This idea that you're learning all these skills and, you know, knowledge that you can use in this new post-war world. You know, deliberately, as you were saying, Geoff, left vague and undefined. Whatever this new will be. It's both for the elites and an West Indian audience, but also for English people to say, well, they're gonna go home and rebuild. Yeah. Not stay around here.
And Una Marson and people... they were big advocates for...

Susan Wokoma: Yeah. Huge.

Geoff Spender: ...for Black people in Britain and I think that may be partly why they agreed to perform in this film, to take part because, you know, they were advocating for the black people who were coming to serve in Britain and that was something that mattered to them a great deal.

Susan Wokoma: You know, the need to get British people on board. That's quite interesting, I think, especially now looking at conflict where it doesn't seem to matter what people actually want... it just sort of happens! But that need of, like, consensus. But also... not consensus because they need to have people joining the war effort, in terms of numbers.

Geoff Spender: Yeah. I think during the war itself, I think it worked very well. I think people from colonies were made to feel very welcome in Britain for most part. Um, there were tensions with American soldiers. 
Susan Wokoma: Yes.

Geoff Spender: That's another issue.

Diya Gupta: Mm-Hmm. Yeah.

Geoff Spender: In general, they went very well. Things soured slightly when the war ended. They said, well now you can can go back to the Caribbean, with all these skills, and build own factories and your own airplanes.

Susan Wokoma: And you've made all these friends, you can't have them anymore.

Geoff Spender: You have them anymore. Yes. During those kind of crisis years, I think it did bring people together, at least for a while.

Diya Gupta: And I've read people's sort of accounts of being in Britain from the Empire at that time, and they said, you know, compared to the colonies where actually racial hierarchies were very strongly and sharply maintained. When they came to Britain during the war years, they were warmly welcomed. And I think possibly films like this had some sort of role to play in that.

Susan Wokoma: Definitely.

Diya Gupta: In creating a sense of, you know, everybody's participating.

Susan Wokoma: Yeah.

Diya Gupta: It must have been a delicate balance to strike, because on one hand, you know, so I thought it was quite brave that they show Black men dancing with white women, for example. I wonder how that went down with the English audience. I mean, yeah. I can see why it might work with the West Indian audience a bit more, but it, that's...that felt like to me the most-

Susan Wokoma: I thought that was very interesting.

Yeah. I sort of held my breath a bit. I was like, really?

Geoff Spender: I wonder if that was spontaneous or if people were matched together for the scene?

Diya Gupta: Yeah.

Susan Wokoma: Oh, they were casting. As an actor, I'm telling you casting happened. yeah. They went, "you two, you two... bump into each other."

Diya Gupta: No, go for it.

Susan Wokoma: No, go for it in this... tiny space.

Diya Gupta: "And then we gotta a camera in your face..."

Susan Wokoma: "Just... just ignore us!"

Cecil Beaton, Official war photographs of Asia and Africa, 1942–1944

James Taylor: Much like the First World War renowned artists and photographers were recruited to document the Second World War on several fronts, and that included the legendary Cecil Baden, some of whose work during the war we have come to now.

Susan Wokoma: Who's a famous photographer. I sort of know from... more doing fashion and famous people like Marilyn Monroe. So this is really interesting. 

James Taylor: Beaton was sent to Egypt, India, and China explicitly to catalogue the efforts of a united Empire. And in the gallery we are presented with soldiers and civilians in India who have volunteered for the Allied war effort.

Susan Wokoma: Oh my goodness. That's really stunning.... that looks very Beaton-esque. That could be in like Vogue, I think. Really stunning. I'm itching to look at the panel... but I'm not going to, I'm gonna look at you, Geoff, and you're gonna explain these photos, please. Stunning.

Geoff Spender: These are photos, as you say, by Cecil Beaton. The fashion and society photographer. During the war, he wanted to contribute somehow. He was persuaded by his friends that maybe the Army wasn't for him. Okay. So he instead... he offered his services as a photographer. He took his usual approach. I mean, he's clearly got an eye for a good looking subject.

Susan Wokoma: Yeah. They're all very beautiful.

Geoff Spender: And this last one, like you say, it's very Beaton. It's a society photo. I believe she was, the Maharani Gayatri Devi?

Diya Gupta: Oh Yeah.

Geoff Spender: ...of Jaipur?.

Diya Gupta: A very young  Gayatri Devi-

Geoff Spender: Beaton said that she was one of the 10 most beautiful women in the world.

Diya Gupta: Wow.

Susan Wokoma: Wow.

Geoff Spender: I believe this is the palace she lived in.

Susan Wokoma: Oh wow.

Geoff Spender: ...so while he was photographing soldiers and ordinary people, he would take a break to mix with,

Susan Wokoma: Go to the palace!

Geoff Spender: ...the sort of people he would photograph in peace time. Yeah. Yeah, to be honest. It's-

Diya Gupta: To me, it's really fascinating to see this kind of documentation happening because... this also seems to tell us that there was, a huge consensus and agreement in India

Susan Wokoma: Yeah.

Diya Gupta: ...to serve Britain in this war. But actually that wasn't the case. Absolutely. I mean, there were two and a half million men, yeah, from undivided India who served this war for Britain. And Geoff was telling us earlier how the colonies never had con... conscription.

Susan Wokoma: Yeah.

Diya Gupta: So technically these were volunteers. But equally, you know, there were men who needed jobs, there were men who needed to feed their families. They were men like we saw in that, West Indian film who simply wanted to learn new skills and the war was this big kind of launching pad and opportunity to go and train yourself. And do something in the post-war world. Yeah? So there was a whole range of reasons why these men from India were signing up for war.

Susan Wokoma: Sure.

Diya Gupta: But it was a hotly contested space. So you have the big fight for independence. to get the British out of India. That's happening in 1942 with the Quit India movement.

Susan Wokoma: Right.

Diya Gupta: And it's fascinating because I think the photo is taking around 1942.

Geoff Spender: It's '44 I think...

Diya Gupta: Is it '44? So a bit later.

Susan Wokoma: Okay. So that is happening at the time of...

Diya Gupta: That is happening at the time of this. You wouldn't know that to see this.

Susan Wokoma: No. Obviously I know, that there is support behind the war effort, but actually there is great contention.

Diya Gupta: There is great contention.

Susan Wokoma: And that's quite scary thing, for Britain to hear that, you know, the kind of fall of the colonies. you don't wanna hear that. Especially if you are looking down the barrel of the end of the war. You don't to feel like you are losing that strong holder No. cause ' you're fighting for Britain. Yeah.

Diya Gupta: Yeah. the other sort of thing to mention, which always strikes me when I look at his Forties photographs, is... he's in Calcutta here. Between '42 and '44, there's the 1943 Bengal Famine that happens. Calcutta is like the locus of it, where more than 3 million people die... and there is no trace of that in any of his photographs, whatsoever.

Susan Wokoma: Wow.

Diya Gupta: It's one of the biggest losses of Allied civilian life in the war and not one trace of that Yeah, the suppression of histories and photography is fascinating to me.

Susan Wokoma: It goes back to the question of what is art? And what I said about like truth and... what you are depicting. Like, for me, this kind of... leans more, in comparison to those photos that we saw before, this leans more to what I consider art, and yet behind this is... the truth which is not being shown in these pictures. So art kind of feels... in terms of what I've been conditioned to think, what art is something that has been... it's not actually the truth. Sure. It's more about what is beautiful.

Diya Gupta: I mean, I think it's fascinating that his pictures show beauty in the midst of war. I think that's the troubling thing about it as well. I mean, these images are quite attractive ones. But they're also troubling in that they hide so much

James Taylor: Our time at the gallery is almost at an end. As Geoff leads Susan and Diya through the museum to the cafe, they reflect on what they have seen today.

Susan Wokoma: Right, so... as we go for cup of tea, which I definitely need. Love a cuppa. It's really interesting. This notion, which we've touched on before about the changes that the wars encouraged in the UK and then that sort of... I definitely had this looming feeling of, oh, but not all of it stuck!  Like this utopia that was projected and all of it stuck. So what do we, I mean, what do we know? What do we assume is the things that, that, stuck and things that didn't? I mean, definitely I think multiculturalism in, you know... whether it was welcome, was definitely that's... is one of the reasons why I'm here. My parents are from Nigeria and they definitely made the decision to arrive in southeast london because they felt a certain kind of attachment, relationship with the uk? Definitely I feel... doesn't mean that they had the best time on that journey, but that's definitely why they ended up here so directly 
I feel it's had that, impact, but.... what else do we, do we feel post-war?

Geoff Spender: Well, I think that the experience of being, asked to volunteer to come and serve the war efforts to enter the workplace, to go to another country, meet different kinds of people. I think it just changes the perspective. I mean, once you've had that experience, you're not gonna go back to your old life completely unchanged. And I think people went back into their homes or to their country of origin and thought, you know, well, why can't I still have that? 
And that I think may have been a driving force... another way of life is possible.

Diya Gupta: There's a particular kind of outcome that you get when you've been through something as enormous as a world war, and you've survived, or perhaps you've lost people dear to you in that you might become much more aware of your rights and your opportunities and what, and I guess, you know, what, you think is owed to you.

Susan Wokoma: Well, Susan, we are coming to the end of our time in the galleries today. What will stay with you, what you've taken away from the experience?What we said kind of near the beginning about what Britain was fighting for and then... the war inevitably changes what that is. So then when the wars are over and soldiers who survived come back wanting to keep that status quo, but that's not what they find... I think is really interesting. 'cause then you start thinking, what were you fighting for?

Diya Gupta: Absolutely. I think if the war, both wars were being fought for particular types of freedom, there were a whole range of other freedoms that were achieved at the end of it. Absolutely.

Susan Wokoma: And also understanding. why lots of people came over to britain to fight in the war. 'Cause I think that was something that I just was like, why would you do that? Like, look at how Great Britain treated you afterwards. But actually that film, by the end of it, I was like, why wouldn't you want to learn new skills, make new friends , fly a plane? But definitely my... my parents When they were looking at the world and thinking where they wanted to have their future, they thought of Great Britain be- because of Nigeria's relationship to Great Britain. They knew that there would be other Nigerians there so they wouldn't be alone. Once you start that's what happens is you can't ever sort of go back.

James Taylor: And that's where we must leave this Conflict of Interest and the Blavatnik Art Film and Photography Gallery. 
Thanks again to our guests. Susan  Wokoma.  Diya Gupta and Geoff Spender.

Next week on Conflict of Interest. 
Carl: Everyone has seen the mustard gas. Everyone has seen that kind of flat, no man's land kind of thing. Whereas this one.... and I studied war!
I've never seen an image of a World War I scene with mosquito nets. 
James Taylor: Writer and podcaster, Carl Miller tackles the morality and ethics of portraying our war dead and wounded.

My name is James Taylor. The producer was Matt Hill at Rethink Audio with support from Eleanor Head, Daniel Ben-Chorin, and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums. Thank you for listening and goodbye.
 

Carl: I'm Carl Miller and I'm largely a podcaster and writer nowadays, but I did, I feel a bit like, I'm 10 years old again, 'cause a long time ago I did study war at Kings College London. It's all kinda simmering back up.

Claire: Welcome to the Imperial War Museum, Carl. My name is Claire Brenard. I'm one of the art curators here. I'll be very glad to show you round and talk about what we have here today.

Carl: Please do.

James Taylor: Carl has joined Claire Brenard at Imperial War Museum London to pose the questions that many of us are too embarrassed to ask about how recent conflicts have shaped our world.  And in this episode, we are looking at how art, photography, and film have depicted our war dead and our wounded.

Claire: The months are coming closer as the exhibition's about to open and everyone's like, you can't show it. And instead of taking it off the wall, he puts brown paper all over it and the word censored across.

James Taylor: From the trenches of France to soldiers in Iraq, we'll discuss the artists and photographers who chose what to show us of the horrors of the front line.

Carl: Everyone has seen the mustard gas. Everyone has seen that kind of flat, no man's land kind of thing. Whereas this I've never seen an image of a world war I scene with mosquito nets.

James Taylor: On our way, we'll encounter artistic works that have rarely been seen by the public. Also that we leave with an understanding of the significance of art in a time of war.

Ana: These ladies cut their teeth on the front lines in France working on men. And yes, it was scandalous. And yet the men who went to this hospital actually loved it. 

James Taylor: All this in under an hour. I'm James Taylor, and this is Conflict of Interest.

James Taylor: Carl Miller is the host of one of the biggest podcasts of the last 12 months, the Kill List and Investigation Years in the Making.

Carl: So I'm an associate at the Imperial Museum, that's one of the things that I look at and I study a lot, is basically how information spaces have become theaters of war. And I know that the museum's kind of been having conversations around how they might capture that and exhibit that. So yeah, I came here quite a lot.

Claire: It's a very different area to what we're looking at today, 'cause we are looking at art and conflict,

Carl: No. I've been carefully cultivating my ignorance on this topic for many years. 

James Taylor: Carl and Claire will be joined by another expert, Professor Ana Carden Coyne, who runs the Centre for the Cultural History of War.

Ana: And what we do is we study the impact of war on people and culture. So not so much the battles but really how culture has changed by war and conflict and art plays a massive role in that.

Carl: I genuinely feel like I've won some kind of competition.

Like, I got the, I cut out the coupon and I sent it in and I've won a kind of tour around the gallery with two world experts. This is brilliant.

Claire: Right. We're going into the Blavatnik Art Film and Photography galleries now, and obviously it's so broad what we have in here. So we're going to take a special look at one particular subject. We're looking at representations of the war wounded and the dead. So we're going through now to probably, I think it's fair to say, one of our most famous, if not the most famous work of art in the collection. The Iconic, yes, Gassed by John Singer Sargent.

James Taylor: Gassed by John Singer Sergeant is set against the battlefield landscape of the First World War spanning almost four and a half meters in width. You could see Allied soldiers standing in a line all with bandages across their eyes, but there's more to the image than this first impression. On certain podcast apps, you can glance at your phone as you listen to see some of the works we are discussing.

Carl: There's bodies lying on the ground. I mean, it's the aftermath of a chemical warfare attack, isn't it? Oh my gosh. I've just spotted, that's incredible. They're playing football in the background.

Ana: Oh, yes. That's a lot of discussion about that. That's very iconic too. But yeah, so they're blinded, they're covered in blindfolds this is commemorating the-, probably one of the earliest German attacks of the use of mustard gas in 1917. But also we should say that the British and the Allies also did use chemical warfare of course, as well.

Claire: I mean, this is a very frightening thing. Of course, the first time, really that chemical warfare is used and, you know, it becomes, associated with this conflict, very famously through the work of the war poets like Wilfred Owen. It doesn't matter that actually it wasn't the thing that killed most of these soldiers. What's important to remember is the soldiers in this painting, they would recover from this, most of them. And they're being led as you can see, the tent, ropes, the guy ropes. They're being led into the medical tent and there's the sense of, you know, whatever the terrible thing they've gone through is over and they're being looked after now. And the idea of the football game is afterwards, there's a life for them. You know, it's, this is not the end.

Ana: There were about 6,000 British dead from chemical attacks. And so they counted in the war statistics, and you'll be interested in this in terms of contemporary ideas about who are the casualties? But it's not just the psychological effect and the fear. It's a terror weapon, but it's also the chronic illnesses that people had afterwards. So those people who died many years later from respiratory conditions weren't counted in the statistics.

Carl: So in terms of John Singer Sargent, then, what function might we say this painting is doing? I mean, is this accusatory, is this really going after that kind of, jingoist kind of like Victorian idea of war?

Claire: It's part of a memorial scheme. And a memorial scheme that was started in 1918 while the conflict was still going. It was actually commissioned by the Ministry of Information, and there was this idea that a committee would get together and commission the whole spectrum of British art. Sargent was very well established, he was a society portrait painter. He was painting the great and the good and lots of ladies and beautiful frocks and things like that. That's what he was known for. And he was in his early sixties at this time. And then he gets commissioned to do this painting amongst other artists like him, but other artists also that were very young, part of the avant-garde. So it's this idea, there's a spectrum of British art, but he's the only one that finishes this painting at this scale. There was a sort of vague idea, we'll commission all these artists and maybe we'll have a building. We'll have a building which we'll call the Hall of Memory or the Hall of Remembrance. All these paintings will line that building and the idea behind this was, you know, saying to the people, your effort in this terrible, terrible war has not gone in vain. Your sacrifice is worth it, look what you've done. But the irony, of course, when the war ends, the money's run out. There's no money to spend on building a hall of remembrance. But luckily for the IWM, all these paintings that were completed, not everything got completed just 'cause it got shut down. We were the happy recipient of these incredible paintings, we'll look at a few more as we go along. And when we open in 1920 at the Crystal Palace, this painting takes pride of place and it's pretty much been on display ever since.

Carl: Wow.

Ana: And you can just imagine the impact on the British public at seeing this hugely colorful piece of history, immediate history, when most of the war to them was black and white through photographs, through Pathé film, newsreels, And this was a very visual war. It was like the digital war of its time. There was a very famous Canadian surgeon, Sir William Osler, who went to see the painting when it was on at this exhibition. And he had lost his own son in the war to an abdominal wound. He gave an address to the British Classical Association and he said, I am sorry to have seen Sargent's Gassed. I'm sorry. Because it haunts the mind like a nightmare. So there's the hard bitten surgeon actually being haunted. Extraordinary.

Claire: It was shocking wasn't it? I think the reports of ladies fainting, having seen it and everything, I mean, because you can't get away from it. It's absolutely massive, isn't it? It's an epic, and Sargent wanted to do an epic. He was asked to do an epic, but it was difficult because when he went to the front line, the closer he went to the front line, the fewer men were there. They were all hidden away. So he came back and he came- and this is when he witnessed-

Carl: Oh, so he was there?

Claire: He witnessed the scene. He was there. Okay. Because he was sent to France, yeah. And he witnessed the scene in the medical area that at the dressing station and here's his epic. He's got all the bodies. It relates to those older sort of paintings, when we think about the glorification of more Victorian sort of paintings, the battle paintings, where you would want a lot of bodies to really show this sort of action. So it's got that relation to that, but at the same time, it's very, very new because it's dealing with this horrific new subject of gas.

James Taylor: We move on to a smaller portrait, but one that is by no means pulling its punches. Carl is asked what he can see.

Carl: Alright, well, no respite, so- There is a man right in front of you in this painting with a blood-soaked bandage on his head. He's on a- stretcher, thank you. That was a technical term. His top's been stripped off. He's got blood dripping down. He's quite emaciated. The whole kind of picture, the kind of cue of the painting is kind of white. It's quite stark. He looks thin and unhealthy. He's kind of grimacing and there's a doctor peering under his bandage. In the background there are more wounded people with slings and then bare buttocks. I wanna say that maybe this is earlier than first world war? I don't know. The kind of red, no, is it the same with the kinda magenta?

Claire: Perceptive! It's 1916, whereas that's 1919.

Carl: Oh, nice. Yeah. make sure that gets in.

Ana: Well, Nevinson, was a pacifist and-

Claire: Well, he wasn't exactly 'cause he was a futurist for a bit, wasn't he?

Ana: I suppose so-

Claire: He did ditch the futurism. So maybe we need to explain that.

Carl: Oh, let's dwell on vorticism, because that's a new word to me. So what's Vorticism?

Ana: Well, see all these sort of angles and it was about speed and about the glorification of war, and it was an idea. And then of course a lot of those artists ended up actually being in the first World War, and then they had a sudden realisation that maybe it wasn't all about modern machinery and an exciting future that we're going to have. It was sort of futurism.

Claire: Vorticism is like the English version of Futurism, which is an Italian movement.

Carl: And is that linked to modernism?

Claire: Yes. Yes, they're all modernist movements-

Carl: Fritz Lang, and that sort-

Claire: Sort of like the umbrella term. Yeah. So, Filippo Marinetti, who's this poet and provocateur, he's Italian, devised this idea of futurism. And like you say, weirdly, we think of artists as being pacifists, rather than glorifying war. But Futurism embraces war because they wanted everything modern and new and they embraced their machine age. And the idea was it would sweep away everything old with a war. We'll start again. So Nevinson, being a good Futurist, thinks right, the war's started, I have to sign up.

Ana: But he joins the field ambulance.

Claire: That’s right because he’s not very well.

Ana: This is a regimental aid post. See how it's underground?

Claire: It's actually-

Carl: Oh yes. It's this notorious place called The Shambles. It's just- it's just a wonderful- horrible.

Carl: And there's someone actually dead next to him there isn't there?

Claire: Yes. Likely to be dead. And it's this goods yard outside Dunkirk. We're talking very early in the war, 1914 when he goes off and volunteers. He's a medical orderly, he has to basically pick up the injured and ferry them back to this massive goods yard where they haven't really organized proper medical services yet. They're just dumping these men-

Carl: You can see there's like straw, like scattered on the ground there.

Claire: It's just very, rough, very basic. And these men are just shoved into this place and left to fester for weeks on end without any kind of attention. 
Ana: Which was scandalous at the time.

Claire: It really was. And part of his painting was kind of saying this is the reality of warit all. And this is absolutely shocking. No one's shown this before. He, you know, after a week he said he felt like he'd been born into this nightmare. And then he's, you know, he's seen things that man can hardly conceive of in his own mind. You shouldn't have to think of these grotesque things. And then, I think he manages about two months and he has a breakdown. Like you would, right? And then he comes back to Britain and he starts painting. He eventually has this show in 1916 and this is one of the works. And you can imagine it just causes this sensation and no one's seen this stuff before.

Ana: And a bare buttock. A bare buttock with a very bloody wound. How undignified, you know, the glory of war and this great indignity and the pain, I mean, this man is groaning. So to make something as difficult as men's pain, not men's honour, but men's pain in a painting, and to convey that through this gaping mouth was really something.

Carl: So he exhibits this during the war.

Claire: During the war.

Carl How does the government react to that?

Claire: Well, he's not an official artist at that time. There's not the- there's this kind of growing momentum to call for an official artist scheme because what's coming back off the front are photographs and the Ministry of Information - well, its predecessor - has to sort of clamp down a bit on that because there was just no filter. You know, people started having smaller handheld cameras and they were showing all these things. They had to say no dead bodies. They had to set up this sort of censorship idea so they could have some kind of control. So what was coming out was just small, black and white photographs of a few, you know, muddy fields, I suppose-

Carl: No – basically – any of that.

Claire: yeah, nothing like this

Ana: no, definitely no dead bodies.

Claire: But he was a free artist. He could, what's interesting at this time, we don't really think of this too much, but it was a Liberal government and there's this- and the elite are liberal-minded. They kind of had this idea that, you know, artists should be free to express themselves and this is kind of what we're fighting for as well. So he has this show, and it's not just his show, it's other, you know, people like Paul Nash as well. And people are saying, we need to have something more official. We need to send artists out under the aegis of the government  and to show us what the war is because we're not getting the images otherwise.

James Taylor: And so the official war artist scheme begins and commissioned within it is our next object by the artist Stanley Spencer. Carl attempts to make sense of it.

Carl: Gosh. And now this one I genuinely have never seen before. I mean, I didn't even glance at this one when I was, I mean, I think Gassed was taking up all of my attention a moment ago. It feels like a different style of painting, certainly a different perspective. So we're looking down on the heads of
a series of medical orderlies. There are stretchers, but this time they're attached to horses, donkeys? I wanna say World War I again.

Ana: It is.

Carl: But I'm somewhere that is certainly not the Western Front. Africa?

Claire: No, it's the Macedonian front, north Greek border. To keep out the central powers of Austria, Hungary and Germany.

Ana: -Bulgaria and Turkey from invading Greece. These poor men on these stretchers that would've gone over some fairly rough terrain. Gosh It would've been pretty painful, that journey.

Claire: Yeah. They would've been bumped along.

Ana: if you had a compound fracture, you possibly could have died.

Carl: To summarise, so it looks like we're in basically a long queue for the surgeon's table.

Claire: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So this is a painting by Stanley Spencer and you may notice - a geeky fact, it's a-

Carl: We love geeky facts.

Claire: -a similar frame to the Sargent. It was part, again, of the proposed Hall of Remembrance scheme. And Spencer also, like Nevinson, volunteered. He volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps, and at first he was serving in a hospital in Bristol, in the west country. But he, decided, no, he wanted to see action, and he was sent out to the Macedonian front and he was really struck by the scene. This is actually painted from memory, he did sketch when he was out there, but he was really frustrated that he lost his sketchbook. But he admits that it's not exactly truthful. He was struck by finding something that was peaceful within the chaos of war. So these poor men have come from whatever they come from, chaotic, unpredictable, dangerous. And although yes, we have said about them being dragged unceremoniously, clanging along on these poles to this place, to this, converted church, it's an operating theatre, as you say. But they're being looked after and they will be all right. And I think he wanted to find some kind of positive message within all of this. I mean, obviously he knew he was being commissioned, but this is his own vision. I mean, these artists were commissioned to be themselves, you know? The reason he was engaged because he, again, a young artist like Nevinson, they both went to the Slade School of Art before the war.

Ana: What's this man doing here? He's putting his hand- is he checking to see if that patient is breathing? He's putting his hand- because people did die on the way. Lots of them did.

Carl: I dunno if he was just comforting him. 'cause like, it, what is slightly striking actually, both in that painting and this, is there's, care happening, but there's not a lot in terms of human comfort. You know, it's quite, mechanical, isn't it? That they're being saved, but they're not, there's, not a lot of human touch, for instance.

Claire: Well, Spencer described it as a never ending stream. These men coming off the battlefield. . But I'm, but what always strikes me, it's the angles, again, they're being brought up to this place. It's like a portal in the, at the top, which is, it's the bright lights of the operating theatre. So this sense of hope-

Ana: There's a bit of a religious feeling about it, I think because, what do you think about this aerial view that he's taken? This is so unusual. It's not, we're not at eye level. We're looking down on them and there's something a bit, I mean, do we take a God-like view when we look down

Carl: at them?

Are we a departed spirit? Kind of floating

above the place of our departure?

Ana: And he was quite spiritual, wasn't he? Actually, he did, he was interested in resurrection ideas?

Claire: Yeah, he talked about the crucifixion. He's talked about how early painters painted the crucifixion, a scene of horror, but made it beautiful and hopeful at the same time. And this is what he was trying to do. And for him, he found the spiritual, found the religious in everyday homely activities.

Carl: The pillows. I mean, it's almost like halos around-

Claire: Yeah. Right, yeah. Is that,

Carl: what do you think is happening there? Why? Why is like-

Claire: Oh, those are the mosquito nets aren't they. Oh, are they

Carl: mosquito nets?

Ana: The Mesopotamian campaign was a big scandal because of medical evacuation, and there was a parliamentary investigation, full committee, with a hundred witnesses and 60 meetings, and, all based on the fact that, you know, people had, there were inadequate medical supplies and all the medical evacuation issues. And the Surgeon-Generals, several of them were, censured in parliament for that. So it was considered a bit of a coverup at the time. So it was a big scandal.

Carl: it's interesting how actually each, then, of these paintings is linked to scandal and almost like they're the exposés of the time. You know, they were kind of, so this was, this came out afterwards, but each one is trying to bring the realities of, also like the failure of their own governments to care for their troops, like to, a watching British public. Tell me a bit about the Mesopotamian camp, 'cause that is genuinely not remembered in the same way that the Western Front is, is it? So was it a particularly bloody part of the war?

Ana: It has been forgotten I suppose because, well, as was sort of Gallipoli, unless you're Australian, because I suppose the focus was always on the Western Front. And think politically it was closer to Britain. There was always that big focus on the Western Front as being sort of the one singular experience. And so that is in a sense why art and the commissioning of artists is so important because this provides us with a cultural memory that we wouldn't otherwise have had.

Carl: You just don't imagine a world War I with mosquito nets. And it's great two are next to each other. Yeah. You know, you've got Gassed, which is haunting and striking because it is in many ways so iconic. Like those images, everyone has seen. Everyone has seen the mustard gas. Everyone has seen that kind of flat, no man's land kind of thing. Whereas this one, I've never seen a, you know. And I studied war a while ago, you know, and like I've never, I've never seen an image of a world war I scene with mosquito nets and the kind of Sahara sun blockers on the back of their caps. Yeah. 

James Taylor: It is time to move on, and for the first time in this series, we are going beyond what the public are allowed to see.

Claire: Right, so now we're going to leave the Blavatnik Gallery because we want to go into the art store to see a painting that Ana has suggested we look at. I won't say anything more about this painting now, but our colleagues, Leila and Emily  are here to show us the way and, let's go.

Carl: Would it be accurate to call the art store heavily guarded?

Claire: Well, look at these heavies...

James Taylor: They are led through corridors, out of sight of visitors to a network of rolling metal racking. Each holding artworks. Finally, Carl, Claire and Anna reach their chosen work of art. It is called an operation at the military Hospital, Endell Street by the artist Francis Dodd.

Ana: So, first impressions?

Carl: So, first impressions. Well, it's a portrait of female surgeons. For the first time we have medical professionals outnumbering the injured.

Ana: Good point.

Carl: Which is great.

Claire: Great point.

Carl: So women all kind clad in white. There's a bit of blood splattered around and then a man being operated on, it looks like his stomach or his chest or something like that. And so my first question is an obvious one, so - and forgive my ignorance - there were women surgeons in the First World War?

Claire: Yeah. I mean, these, women were pioneering doctors because, and, actually they're all suffragettes. Is that right? Or were they suffragists? So

Ana: So your two main ones are Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson. And they were both leading members of the, WSPU, the Women's Social and Political Union, the main suffragist union at the time they were really hardcore.

Carl: So, these aren't generic female surgeons. These are celebrity-

Ana: Depends what you mean by generic, because there weren't many, they weren't really allowed to do this sort of thing. Louisa, she did, she'd done some time. She'd actually been in jail. Hard labourel. She's a convict, a posh convict, I should say. 'cause she's also the daughter of, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who's one of the first British doctors to train and be qualified. And Flora was a doctor as well. So she was also an activist, Flora Murray, she spoke out against the forced feeding of suffragists in jail. So, and they were really wanting to set up a hospital, but the British said, no way. We don't have women doing that. And so they went to France and said, okay, we'll just take our skills and go to France then. And as you do.

Carl: Outside of any kind of permission from the

Ana: or didn't really need to, from the government

Carl: So they just took off to France to set up their own hospital?

Ana: With the Red Cross in France and in Paris and in Wimereux. And they were so successful that the British had a change of heart.

Carl: Wow.

Ana: So they came back under the auspices of Sir Alfred Keogh, who was the Director General of Army Medical Services. And they set up this hospital in an old workhouse, I think it was in Endell Street, in Covent Garden.

Claire: I know a bit about the painting, how it came to be. IWM was founded in 1917 and the way it went about collecting, on various themes. So Army, Navy, Air Force, Munitions, but crucially, the women's work committee was set up by a Lady Priscilla Norman, who also was a suffragist, and she was really really keen to show what women were doing in the war. , But this comes about in 1920. They were still doing their work then. And they contacted Francis Dodd, who was a well-respected portrait painter. In fact, and draughtsman, amazing draughtsman. So he'd drawn a huge number of portraits of these military, senior military figures, generals and commanders and things like that earlier on in the war. and so he's the man to do this sort of work. And they said, well, you know, this hospital, Endell Street by then had been closed down, oh you can still visit the operating theater. Everything's been dismantled, but the women will come back and they'll pose for you. And they made it happen, which I think is really fascinating. They thought, okay, it doesn't matter. This is all over, this is so important. We want to commemorate this and we're gonna make it happen.

Ana: What do you think of the patient being a man surrounded by all of these women?

Carl: Well, rather…  right? Was that seen as scandalous?

Ana: Well, women were not allowed, before the first World War, to work on men's bodies. They worked on children and they worked on other women. So, these ladies cut their teeth, so to speak, on the front lines in France working on men. And yes, it was scandalous. And yet the men who went to this hospital actually loved it. They felt the women's care. It was both highly professionalised but also really caring and nurturing. So men actually preferred.

Claire: And do you know what happened to these women afterwards? 'cause obviously this hospital was shut down, but they must have continued elsewhere.

Ana: So do you know what it, this is such an important point about why this art is so important and why the women wanted it was because out of the 37 doctors and surgeons that worked at Endell Street, none of them were able to go into civilian surgery afterwards. It was like thanks, your role was for the duration, off you go back to the-

Claire: Yeah. war was an extraordinary circumstance.

Ana: Also, these women weren't allowed to have any rank. So it was, they really wanted to be called Major or Colonel or what have you, but they couldn't. And so they struggled and that's the story, I guess, of women in medicine. It's been a big struggle. So this painting is really saying, let's talk about that missing history.

Carl: Ana, do we start a movement to get this onto the wall of the gallery?

Ana: Yes, let's do it.

Carl: Will they let us include that in the podcast?

Claire: These, gallery walls are not static, things can be rotated and I think it's important that things are changed round to show, you know, the breadth of our collection.

Ana: And inspire the next generation of female surgeons.

James Taylor: So far in this tour, we have looked at the various ways in which the wounded have been depicted. Often prompting a reaction from the public, but Claire now turns our attention to an even more taboo subject, how artists depict the war dead.

Claire: So we're looking at this painting here, and this one here.

Carl: Okay, wow.

Claire: And they're both from the First World War. I'll give you that.

Carl: If each painting could become more horrifying, I think somehow that's being achieved. On the left we have two corpses surrounded by barbed wire face down, sinking into the mud. And on the right there is, it looks like a kind of skeletal, kind of corpse, like a corpse that's been there for a time. And then another, and then one of them, the skeletal corpse is kind of facing right at you as the viewer. And both of them have been killed, in a trench. This would've been very, very hard surely for anyone who had either gone through the war or had family through the water to see.

Claire: On this side,

Carl: It's Mr Nevinson again.

Claire: It is Nevinson again.

Ana: How different is this to The Doctor?

Carl: Completely different style.

Ana: Yeah. He's gone realistic on us.

Carl:He's gone realistic.

Claire: Yeah.  I mean, this is Nevinson having gone back as an official war artist. In fact, when he- he'd had enough of the war, but of course, crucially conscription comes along in 1917 and he doesn't want to be sent out to fight. And when he hears about this official war artist scheme that's just started, he says yeah, okay, I will go, you know, I wanna get in on this. And I wanna go back as an artist, which is a bit safer. So he does, he goes back in 1917. Obviously he was already questioning the whole futurist ideas that we talked about, but he'd completely ditched them by then. He just thought it wasn't right to use those methods to show what he's been seeing. And he kind of developed this rather crude realism.

Carl: So he thought that, he thought the- so what was it? It was called Vectorism?

Claire: Vorticism.

Carl: So he thought that Vorticism, even stylistically, was immoral to use, to portray war?

Claire: I mean maybe immoral is a bit strong, but-

Carl: Inappropriate.

Claire: Yeah, it does seem in- yeah, yeah.

Ana: Because he'd seen it for himself. And so all the mythologies about what modern war would be like. Turned out to be actually horrendous and horrific.

Carl:  And so he's dropping even the style and he's like, the only way this should be shown is what it actually looked like on the Front.

Ana: And maybe the secret is in the title.

Carl: Paths of Glory.

Claire: Yeah.

Carl: This is the most inglorious-

Ana: It's inglorious. You've got the barbed wire, you've got two British soldiers faced down in the dirt.

Claire: So he comes back, so you can imagine he's a commissioned artist, officially commissioned by the British government, a part of the British government. He comes back with this.

Carl: This is an odd thing for the British government to want to be- again, from, I suppose they-

Ana: Weren't happy, shall we put it mildly.

Claire: Yes, so I mean, he had, so again, he has this exhibition, everyone's very excited. This famous artist, he had warned some of his friends that he'd changed his style, but I don't think the authorities were that excited that he had. There's other works that were also scandalous. So he did this group of soldiers painting, and it was criticised for looking, you know, the uncouth- these soldiers were not, they're not the sort of heroic looking soldiers that the authorities would've liked to have seen. So he puts this exhibition up and it's well known that images of dead bodies of British servicemen cannot be shown. The sensor will not pass-

Carl: That's is a hard and fast rule?

Ana: Whether it's painting or photography or newsreel. You definitely cannot show-

Carl: And he must have known that.

Claire: He knew.

Ana: Or any dead body for that matter at that point, you really, it wasn't just British, they didn't really like any real deaths being shown.

Claire: But I always think that he would've- what, would he have been like in this age? Because he did what he called a publicity stunt. I think he would've been excellent on social media.

Ana: So do I.

Claire: His father was a journalist, he came from that sort of background. And he was like, I'm gonna hang this work, whatever happens, and the months are coming closer as the exhibition's about to open and everyone's like, you can't show it. And instead of taking it off the wall, this is what you do, when something's censored, you just don't show, it doesn't be seen. He puts brown paper all over it and the word censored across.

Carl: That's a very 21st century-

Ana: They actually objected to that word, didn't they? They didn't like him writing the word censored on it.

Carl: They tried to censor him using the word censor.

Ana: Exactly.

Claire: And there was a photograph of him in front of it. I mean, it's, yeah, it really worked because of course his exhibition was this sensation.

Ana: And yet The William Orpen painting was allowed to be shown. And why do you think that was?

Carl: I think it's probably 'cause they're Germans.

Claire: Yes, And it does say that in the title. So-

Carl: Oh, it does.

Claire: If we let you get a bit closer, we can-

Carl: I was  trying to peer at the helmet. I, always, the helmet's my only clue. I get, I suppose and maybe the color of the uniform, but- alright, so this is a victory then for the Allied powers.

Claire: Yeah. I mean it's interesting what happens with Orpen, so he's another official war artist and he spends longer than anyone out there. I mean he's like Sargent, he's a society portrait painter, and he is very, very successful. He's probably the best known artist of the day.

Carl: Gosh. Can you imagine the change in context? All of these- used to painting royals in their palaces or aristocrats-

Claire: Aristocrats. Absolutely. And he, you know, had he, you know, the life of riley, he was a celeb actually.

Ana: Mm-hmm.

Claire: But he thought, oh, I'm missing out on something. I need to be out there, because creatively he probably at a bit of a dead end. He was just doing the same thing again and again. So he pulls some strings 'cause he knows a lot of people and he manages to get this commission to be a war artist. And at first he's painting generals and portraits. You know, quite traditional portraits. But eventually he gets to do more and more. And at this point in 1917, he's just wandering-

Ana: He's out there for what, two years or something?

Claire: He's out there for years. And he's, wandering the battlefields, which is where the Somme was fought. But they'd moved on, the Germans had retreated. And it was just, this is the empty battle field- well, not empty, but, deserted battlefield, by himself with his easel. And I think he, you know, he drives himself a little bit mad in this situation by himself. And he talks about this moment where he sits down on a tree stump and suddenly he's on the back of his head. And he's fallen over and his easel's up-turned and there's a skull gone through his easel. Who knows what-

Carl: Sorry, what? A skull?

Claire: A skull. A human skull. Because he's going around and there's just skulls and there's like shallow graves and-

Ana: People who didn't get buried in time or- Bodies everywhere. Bodies were used to shore up the trenches, in fact, you know?

Claire: Yeah. I mean-

Ana: So, and you can see this trench, I mean it's been there for a while. These bodies haven't been collected by the German side. They haven't been buried. 
No. There's just not the time to do it. They just left. They had to abandon retreat, and it's this- and also what's distinctive about his work of this period is the sun. And everything's baked white. This mud,

Carl: I was gonna ask if it was snow. But it's not. it's-

Ana: Chalky. Well, suppose, when you bombed a lot of areas, the white chalk came up. And he did a whole series of other paintings, which are absolutely gorgeous, actually they're weirdly stunning, of these white, lunar-looking landscapes that are white and chalky. But look at, I think this person's been dead for a while. They're looking very green and the, again, this gaping open mouth, they look like they died in pain.

Carl: Those sightless eyes and that grimace might be one of the most horrifying, kind of microcosmic things we've seen in any of these paintings. And there's absolutely nothing glorious or honorable or, or victorious about this, is it? That is just simply a kind of picture of human suffering.

Carl: Did Orpen and Nevinson like know each other? This kind of like group of official artists, do they form a kind of community of sorts?

Claire: Well, Nevinson doesn't really form a community of anyone. He just-

Ana: He's an individualist. As a lot of artists are.

Claire: He just annoys people. But I think, and Orpen spends a lot of time in France, as I said, that strange thing that happened to him has this deep impression when he falls over and he doesn't know why, and he ends up hitting the bottle and he actually becomes really good friends with a lot of the military. He's good friends with Earl Haig of all people. And he gives all his work he does as a war artist, to the Nation. And we interpret that as to the Imperial War Museum. So we have a lot of his work.

Carl: The great interpretation.

Claire: Yeah. Yeah. Is, yeah.

Carl: This must have felt like the whole of civilised society, the fabric of kind of human civilization in general was being ripped apart. This would've been absolutely terrifying to contemplate the scale of all of this.

Claire: Can you imagine just coming down, setting up an easel in this trench?

Carl: Yeah. I know, and I'm gonna spend, God knows how, even how long this takes to paint, but you've gotta contemplate that face.

Ana: And also that, you know, most people, their only access to what was going on in any frontline was through black and white images that were highly censored, very sanitised, and told a really glorious story of, you know, efficient medical system or what have you. And these artists really showed absolute opposite of what war propaganda had shown them.

Carl: The green of rotting flesh. Yeah.

Ana: The green, yeah, the colour. This is the- this is a war in colour that you would see. 

James Taylor: We have reached our final object, and as first impressions go, Carl is not sure what to make of it or even what it is. 
Carl: This?

Claire: Yeah.

Carl: The box?

Claire: Yeah.

Carl: My gosh.

Claire: You can touch it.

Carl: You can touch it? Oh my God. Thank God. Oh, wow. So it's a box of, wooden slides. It's quite long, isn't it? It's, and they're stamps. I should have said, I mean, they're stamps of people that have been killed, aren't they?

Claire: That's right. Yes. They are. Absolutely right.

Carl: And these would all be, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Claire: This is Iraq actually.

Ana: Yeah, just Iraq. 2003 to 2008.

Carl: That's extremely haunting, isn't it?

Ana: Very moving.

Carl: Gosh.

Claire: So the artist is Steve McQueen, who's much more well known as a filmmaker. I mean, he's an artist and he's a filmmaker. He was actually commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to make a work about Iraq. And it was really difficult. He was sent out to Basra, he did go with the British Army. But it was in late 2003, after so-called mission accomplished, But it was a very unstable situation in Iraq and, you know, lots of different militant groups. The Army was saying, we can't really let him even leave the base.

Carl: It was all the counter-insurgency, it was the insurgency was flaring, wasn't it.

Claire: Exactly. But he got to know the young soldiers and he was really moved by their commitment to the cause. And then he was hoping to go out again and then lots of delays and never happened. As time wore on, he just came up with this idea as a way of commemorating all those who died, whether they were killed in action or whether they even killed themselves, which was the, I mean, there's quite a lot of controversial things about this commission about this artwork. The MOD weren't happy to release the details of the soldiers' families to the artist. They felt that was something they couldn't do. We had to obviously work with the MOD and

Carl: And the identities of the casualties.

Claire: Yeah.

Carl: So they could-

Ana: The ministry of defense would've being very sensitive to just releasing information like that. But also, I guess there's a political cost of doing that as well. It's, again, back to the question of the explicit sensor and the implicit sensor. It is also incredibly fraught and delicate. I mean, think about whose lives we can commemorate and whose lives we can't and in what public format that can be done.

Carl: And so, but he does manage?

Claire: So what he does is he's got a team of researchers and they do their own research to find all the soldiers' families who're really supportive of the project. And so yeah, as you say, they supply the images. But he wanted them to be postage stamps, as you can see-

Ana: To be released.

Claire: To be released.

Ana: Through the Royal mail.

Claire: Through the Royal Mail. So we approached the Royal Mail, and the Royal Mail were really worried about this as well. And they thought if the MOD weren't on board they couldn't be on board. And so they are sort of, I don't know what you call them, facsimile stamps. They're not official stamps. You couldn't, you know, put them on a letter, they wouldn't work. And in the end he thought, right, I'll make this artwork to house them. The whole equality of this box holding them. I mean, it's obviously got this, it's an old school museum-style sort of cabinet, but also it's reminiscent of a catafalque, which is, you know, something that holds a coffin. It all plays into this. And, it's a memorial piece, you know, and a bit like Gassed, ever since it's been made, we've pretty much had it on display, the whole time for people to browse.

Ana: But I think there's something deeper here, which is about perhaps something as profound as death in war serving your country. To put it on a stamp, and he's still campaigning to get the Royal Mail to agree to it, is to turn it into something very every day and banal. And so everybody who's posted a letter through the weeks and years of the war would actually be reminded of the cost of it.

Carl: I mean, the photographs they use, whether these are kind of- they mainly look like the official military photographs, don't they, they hit very hard, don't they?

Ana: They hit very hard.

Carl: In a way, which is really different to the paintings, 'cause there you have injured men largely in paint. But these are all men in the prime of their life largely. I mean, they look healthy, happy. You know, they're all fighting-age men and the fact that they are all real people, were real people who are now dead, kind of really does hit hard the way that they look.

Ana: And some of them in civilian clothing, maybe it's a photograph from a wedding. I mean, these are really personal, personal photographs for families.

Claire: I mean, it's the only work that is personal, isn't it?

James Taylor: We have reached the end of today's tour of the Blavatnik Art, Film, and Photography Galleries. But there's just time to pop down to the cafe and decompress.

Carl: I mean, I have to confess, you know, I mean, I love the Imperial War Museum, I come here often, but I probably have been sucked into looking at the weapons as a kind of schoolboy and being like, just loving the whole, those those, are enormous.

Ana: The hardware appeals.

Carl: Yeah. Those are enormous cannons. Oh my God, look, that's a tank over there, that's a spitfire. And there's always gonna, I mean, there's always gonna be that, I think. But I'm far more upset today. I think that's a good thing.

Ana: Yeah, 'cause is at the other end of the cannon.

Carl: Yes, exactly. The other end of the cannon. With the skeletal, green, ghostly. I can't unsee that one actually, that is the other end of the cannon as well. And I think that's basically what the art we were looking at today really was about, wasn't it?

Claire: Yeah. Well thank you. Such a joy to go around with both of you, and you to just talk about the things that you are world experts in is, this is amazing. And I think, yeah, I mean if we can rename the gallery The Other End Of The Cannon,

Carl: You know, that would be, great.

James Taylor: And that's where we must end this conflict of interest. Thanks again to our guests, Carl Miller, Claire Brenard, and Professor Ana Carden-Coyne.

Next week on Conflict of Interest.

Rachel: I've often talked in recent times about how easily people put dead children on the news and on social media now. And I didn't know that it wasn't a modern- I didn't know they used that It's really horrific.

James Taylor: Rachel Parris picks up the propaganda thread and explores its relationship to protest art. My name is James Taylor. The producer was Matt Hill at Rethink Audio with support from Eleanor Head, Daniel BenChorin, and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums. Thank you for listening and goodbye. 

Lupino Lane: Well, ladies and gentlemen, we've all been playing a tribute to a showman we all love. Now I'm going to be different. I'm going to show you a showman that we all hate. And it's gonna be in the form of a ballet. A Panzer ballet, and is entitled the Retreat from Moscow.

Rachel: Hello my name's Rachel Parris. You might know me from The Mash Report or Austentatious or, , I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue on Radio Four. And I'm here today at the Imperial War Museum.

James Taylor: Rachel has joined Curator Sarah Holdaway at Imperial War Museum London to pose the questions that many of us are too embarrassed to ask, about how recent conflicts have shaped our world. In this series, we are exploring the role of the war artist in capturing seismic moments of contemporary history, and today we look at the techniques behind propaganda and protest art.

C/O: What on earth do you think you were doing?

Civilian (G H Mulcaster): I thought I was doing a victory roll.

C/O: Good lad! The more you and your friends put your hands in your pockets, the sooner we'll all be doing the victory roll. You bet.

James Taylor: From shock tactics to satire, through the Spanish Civil War to the invasion of Iraq, we'll look at the artists, filmmakers and photographers that have pulled on the public's emotional heartstrings.

Mark: If I was an Australian, if I was an Australian, I'd be quite cross in terms of that's how you try to mobilise, you know, my resistance to the Hun.

James Taylor: On our way, we'll encounter artistic works that challenge our guests' own practice. All so that we leave with an understanding of the significance of art in a time of war.

Rachel: Oh my God. Is that a dead body? And it says, underneath Madrid, it says If you tolerate this your children will be next.

James Taylor: All this in under an hour. I'm James Taylor, and this is Conflict of Interest. Our curator for today's tour is Sarah Holdaway, art curator at Imperial War Museums, who has designed this unique experience for comedian Rachel Parris, around various pieces of propaganda and protest art in the gallery.

Sarah: Rachel, tell me about the last time that you visited a gallery.

Rachel: A gallery, probably not that long ago. Because I tour a lot with comedy around the country, I end up having half days free in random cities, and I quite often might go to a museum or a gallery. I think the last one I went to was in, Dundee in Scotland actually. Just a really small local museum, but it had a gallery as well. I'm really interested in history. And not as interested in art.

James Taylor: In the entranceway to the gallery, Rachel is presented with a third member of the party. Mark Sealy is the Director of Autograph and Professor of Photography Rights and Representation at University of the Arts London.

Mark: My kind of raison d'etre is to think about what's the work that images do in culture? And I'm also very interested in how they change in time and how we see things or how we imagine we see things back then. And then with the knowledge that we have now, how we might reflect on the things that might have been seen as quite normal at the time. And then think about just because you might be a bit knowledgeable about the impact of them, what kind of things are almost replicating the things that we might have imagined that have changed.

Rachel: Yeah,

Mark: Sorry, it's...

Rachel: I followed you. Yeah. Yeah!  When I think of propaganda, around conflict, the one image that everyone I'm sure says is This Country Needs You. Which was so iconic from seeing that in the history books so often. And I think because it's been so much in the news at the moment, I think of the antisemitic propaganda that was used in Germany, in the Second World War. Those are the two things that spring to mind immediately.

Sarah: What do you think when someone says protest art? What springs to mind?

Rachel: Oh God. Graffiti? Some street art is protest art.

Sarah: Well I think we're gonna go and have a look at some images and see if we can work out the difference.

James Taylor: We have arrived at our first set of images all created during, or immediately after, the First World War. On certain podcast apps you can glance at your phone as you listen, to see some of the works we're discussing.

Sarah: So we're here in the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries and this room in particular is called Power of The Image. And as you walk in, you are faced with this wall of posters and I thought we could start here, and with this one just at the top here. Do you want to describe to me what you're looking at?

Rachel: Sure. It's really monstrous. The words say Destroy This Mad Brute: Enlist. So it's encouraging people to join the Army. But the image underneath those words is, an ape with a bloodied bat and bloodied arms carrying a topless woman in a sort of shroud.
And the ape has got a little moustache, FYI, and is wearing a military hat.

Sarah: It's a US Army poster. What do you think the message is behind this? Obviously to enlist, but how are they trying to get people to enlist?

Rachel: They're trying to suggest that the enemy is gonna pillage and rape your innocent women and steal them away. Which I find fascinating to have portrayed that with a woman, with her boobs out. In all of this, I feel like the image is titillating deliberately.

Mark: There are some key things in there, aren't there? There's the, culture baton been kind used as a-

Rachel: Oh yeah.

Mark: -as a bludgeon in terms of there. I think that's a really important part of that. The other thing I think is that there's a, for me, looking at this from the work that I do, there's a kind of racialised element within that as well.

Rachel: Oh yeah.

Mark: It's almost as if the 'Destroy This Mad Brute' is because the history of the representation of the gorilla and its racist implications to the past representations of the African subject. And I think that idea that, you know, the most vulnerable thing as a man is to protect women-

Rachel: yes.

Mark: -from this foreign dark gorilla-like invader. So it plays to a very, I think because this is an American poster, it plays to, plays to lots of sensitivities.

Sarah: I also think the interesting thing about this poster is that it looks filmic to me.

James Taylor: Whilst posters recruiting British soldiers tended to be informative and full of text, those in the US and elsewhere were emotionally charged and persuasive. In some respects, this was due simply to the fact that Britain had conscription. Yet by 1917 when this poster was created, the US had that too. Just to the left of this image in the same display, Sarah draws Rachel's attention to a new poster.

Rachel: There's a little thing in the corner that says Win The War League. I serve. With a little fleur-de-lis type thing. There's a big spooky face wearing I think a German military helmet, who's appearing in a big puff of smoke from the ruins of a burning building. And then there's a sort of Little Lord Fauntleroy pampered little boy character who's running away from the buildings and from
the enemy. And the words say, Don't Falter. Go and Meet the Hun Menace. And the little boy is standing on, Australia? is it Australia?

Sarah: Yeah.

Rachel: I guess you don't want to be that little boy.

Mark: If I was an Australian, if I was an Australian, I'd be quite cross in terms of that's how you try to mobilise my, you know, my resistance to the Hun. So there's that part of it. I'm wondering whether it sees itself as a young nation that needs to grow up and it needs to stand on its own. That's interesting. And it's still in that kind of Commonwealth space, i.e. Europe is standing up to this-

Rachel: Yeah.

Mark: -to this beast, this menace, this Hun. Why don't we grow up and take off our children's clothes and go and face the enemy too.

Rachel: So that youth figure could be representing-

Mark: -standing up as a nation and showing standing on Australian soil.

Rachel: The youngness of the nation. Yeah.

Mark: Maybe thinking, maybe it's like that, as I read that.

Rachel: I came across a video that was, I would say, it reminded me of this, but it was a TikTok video of a very attractive, possibly AI blonde, beautiful girl talking about how weak the new generations are and how boys don't know how to be men anymore and they haven't fought in a war. And how the young are pampered and we need to learn to be strong again. And all of this, it was really, strange. And the fact that it was presented by this beautiful young woman, telling men to be strong, it was so weird. It caused a family argument. And it just reminded me of like, so that same message is still going on, like wielding, using femininity and womanhood to try and wield that as a, like you should be strong and only saying that men should be strong, boys should be strong, not that girls should be. And these, I look at these now and I'm like, it hasn't changed that much. Like, the way they've used, like the vulnerability of women. The sexuality of women.

Sarah: And the idea that the nations who this is calling to are vulnerable. They're young or female, or you know, being destroyed by someone else.

James Taylor: We move on away from the propaganda of the 1920s and into the 1930s where new threats require new shock tactics. And a content warning: this section discusses powerful imagery that some may find upsetting. You can check the show notes for this episode to see if this may apply to you.

Rachel: Oh my God. Is that a dead body? Jesus Christ. it says Madrid. And it says, underneath Madrid, it says the "military", in inverted commas, practice of the rebels. If you tolerate this your children will be next. And the image it's talking about is the image of a dead child with a number on it, with military planes in the background. And it's really awful and harrowing and triggering, which is obviously the point. And I find that interesting because I've often talked in recent times about how easily people put dead children on the news and on social media now, you see images all over begging for help, for donations. They use the image of dead or dying or injured children. And I've often talked about like how that's a modern phenomenon.
And I didn't know that it wasn't a modern- I didn't know they used that.

Sarah: What conflict do you think we are looking at through this poster, and who do you think the target audience is for this one?

Rachel: Well, it's in English. I don't know enough about Spanish military history. It's the Spanish Civil War but we were involved?

Sarah: It is a poster from the Spanish Civil War and as you pointed out it's in English. So the posters were produced in English and in French. And it's interesting to note that both of those countries took an approach of not getting involved. It's really targeting that to draw at the heartstrings and ask, begging for support.

James Taylor: The Spanish Civil War saw the right wing nationalists, led by General Franco, receiving munitions, personnel and air support from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The left wing Republicans received support from the Soviet Union and Mexico. But France, the United Kingdom and the United States were among a number of countries that did not take part. This powerful poster was, in effect, part of a battle for hearts and minds in the western world.

Sarah: What's interesting with this piece is it's photographs. So we are moving away from the illustrative element of the First World War posters and moving into photo montage on this one. And by putting the words in English, it's telling and warning of the fact that fascism could become a wider- it's not gonna be isolated to one area. And that with this kind of aerial bombardment is what we're gonna see in future conflicts.

Mark: There was quite a lot of left wing activists from the UK that went to fight for the, so-called Rebels as such. So it was a- I think it was trying to recruit two things. Those that were part of the kind of socialist movement to fight against fascism as a kind of international brigade, and also to provoke the sovereign powers to get involved. So it's got this weird kind of duality across it. I think it's more of a complex one 'cause it's like the military practice of the rebels. It could be read on first instance that the rebels are the ones doing the military work, which is the formation of the planes. So it's a bit ambiguous for me, this one. But it's quite clear that once you know that there's an involvement of both Germany and Italy in supporting Franco's Spain, then you know that it's in- the people are being bombed from outside forces and that the rebels are victims to this moment, and it is the youth and the children that are paying the heaviest price 'cause it is, it does seem to be recognised as an unfair, unjust involvement from external forces. This is the time as well Guernica has been made, and Picasso's making these great- it's a traumatic time where I think probably one of the most iconic pieces of artwork gets made as a protest, you could argue, which is Picasso's Guernica out of that place. So that bombing has a- this moment has a huge resonance in the kind of prelude to World War II and the things- and it's very, it's actually quite accurate. It's really quite, it's really quite something. No, but it is interesting that degree of photorealism now becomes part of the package and that montage becomes, that use of photography. And it's interesting 'cause there's always this idea about truth in images, whereas for me photography's always had this manipulative quality within it. And you can begin to cut and paste the montage and collage work into that propagandist or protest like moment. So it's a powerful piece, this one. Images like this really become quite sophisticated because they're a journey to a new form of communicating, once you begin to start cutting and pasting things together. They're not made by you know, the hand of the artist. They're made by, you know, mechanical reproduction begins to come into play, mass circulation, probably more posters of this than the ones that were, that were rolled off. So they begin to play with like, is this real? Is this not? Is photography doing this? What am I looking through? And they have that realist quality rather than this made-up quality, which make them much more emotive. And it was interesting 'cause you said it's triggering. It's triggering in a way because it brings you closer to the reality of the violence.

Rachel: But it's both because it is real and the photography means it does feel like more truthful and also it is artistic. The way that obviously the placing it with the formation of the planes and the clouds, they've kind of made it a bit ambiguous about what is the child's hair and shadow looks almost like darker clouds, part of the cloudy landscape. So it is a work of art, as well, which feels really gross, somehow, like to make a work of art out of that.

Mark: Do you know what I really like about this piece? Just as we think about it, it's doing several things. You-  the point of view is really interesting. It's not that direct. You're looking down at the child who's died, who's passed away. They're also, they're numbered as well, so they're on the way to some form of, indexicality of their death. But you're looking down at the same time you're looking up. So you're looking down and you're looking up and you're looking- so that kind of, that's what I meant by like this surrealist vision. You are looking both ways at the same time, and very real. So it's a way of looking down at death, but looking at this threat from above. Which you could argue, we begin to understand how dangerous this aerial world becomes in this moment, that bombing becomes a really heavy strategic part of changing conflict. All of a sudden it's not on the ground, it's not in the trenches. The threat is coming from above.

James Taylor: We continue our tour of the gallery descending upon another piece of photo montage from some 40 years after the Spanish Civil War. And it includes one of the most iconic images of the Cold War.

Rachel: Without prior knowledge, if you like, of what it is we can see a big mushroom cloud which has been very artistically and cleverly set against an image of a skull, human skull where the eye holes fall sort of in the gap of the mushroom of the cloud. And there's a symbol on it, which I think is the CND symbol. So I know that's the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima. I assume and it says, Stop Nuclear Suicide. Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and their address.

Sarah: The artist, FHK Henrion, was a German artist. He came to England during the Second World War and he was actually interned at a camp on the Isle of Man I think. He produced Second World War posters for the Ministry of Information, around lots of different subjects, health and safety, awareness of sexual diseases. After the war set up his own design studio and as an artist pioneered corporate branding, I think. So when you think of that, and the campaign for nuclear disarmament as a brand, as an organisation-

Mark: It's interesting. The key thing for me is Stop Nuclear Suicide. That's an interesting term because it's almost as if somehow you're gonna kill yourself. So the enemy isn't actually that clearly identified if we talk about Stop Nuclear Suicide. And then it's the campaign for nuclear disarmament, well, we're going to- you're killing yourself by investing in this kind of future of nuclear weapons. So it's funny, I'm reading this more of a kind of internal conversation about how you address the nation, how you address your fellow citizens.

Rachel: So by saying suicide, would they be trying to imply, if we are involved in nuclear war-

Mark: Absolutely.

Rachel: -that's gonna bring it on ourselves.

Mark: If we embrace that past, which is the nuclear past, something's gone off and that's its impact. Then if we embrace that, then we are committing suicide. So it's the ultimate weapon in war at the time of its making and still probably is, and then, but it also becomes the ultimate weapon of self-destruction.

Rachel: Here's what's interesting, is that poster of the dead child and this poster then, are both using you will hurt yourselves eventually to persuade people, rather than-

Mark: Your future is death.

Rachel: -you'll hurt other people. Look at this poor person's dead child. Look at this poor child who's dead. It's, yeah, but what, when your child is dead, that's when it'll matter. And they're saying no matter that all of these thousands of people have died horribly, but it might happen - in saying suicide, I feel like it's not enough to say don't bomb thousands of millions, they're saying it only matters because it might happen to us.

Mark: I think that's absolutely right. I think that's the key message there. And I think that's the, you know, the campaign for nuclear disarmament is, you know, it's a global - we all lose. There's no winners in that, there's no winners in that conflict. It's complete annihilation of everybody and everything in that sense.

Sarah: Thinking about a wider conversation around propaganda and protest, where do you think this sits?

Rachel: Interesting. Yeah, because I feel like CND were against government arming themselves. So this was from the people, if you like, wasn't it, crying out to the government, stop doing this. So this was more protest art than propaganda.

James Taylor: We move again. This time back to the Second World War. But this film seems years ahead of its era. It features a popular song of the time, set against thousands of goosestepping Nazis.

Rachel: Well, I've never seen anything like it from that era. It reminds me of TikToks and Instagram reels so much. And not even that has been happening for the last 10 years, but what has been specifically this era of what a lot of people are doing, chopping up editing, like movement and dance to a song of their choice. But it's about the retreat from Moscow.

Sarah: So that film is edited to the Lambeth Walk-

Rachel: Which is a banger.

Sarah: Of course. The person who introduced it actually appeared in the play of the subsequent film that made that song famous again. The Nazis were very theatrical and liked to put on almost, like these, they were performances. There were parades and rallies that were meant to boost morale and show this kind of sense of belonging and how powerful it is in power in numbers. And you see that with the marching. It was captured by a filmmaker called Leni Riefenstahl. Hitler actually saw one of her films. She was a filmmaker and an actress, and he saw one of her films, liked the film and invited her to film some of the rallies and the parades. So this was actually some of her footage from probably the most famous film that she did from 1934 called The Triumph of the Will. It was like a big budget movie. It had, you know, tracking, there was lots of people sort of from the Nazi party supporting her, huge numbers. They did sort of high up shots, they were filming from planes, it was this big production. And the British have got hold of this and turned it into this mockery of performance really, isn't it? It's this performance and they've mocked it. That feels very British as well. To go, like, to take something that's very grandiose and formal and big and to go, that's silly. We'll make it really silly and small, and reverse it actually. It appeared on a newsreel. Without saying that it was by the Ministry of Information. So it appeared as part of a news. So how do you think that would've been received?

Rachel: Well, it would've gone out in British news?

Sarah: Yeah.

Rachel: Oh, that's really funny. So it would've just really taken people by surprise.

Mark: Essentially the underlying raison d'être for this is to own the narrative. If Nazi Germany's rallies and the theater and bringing people to a sense of heightened excitement through that rally of wanting to be associated with this space, and then to turn that into a pantomime, literally, and a form of mockery and to be laughed at. Then that offers a degree of security to the audience because, you know, Britain is under threat at this time. So this all mighty goosestepping in formation, flag-waving, führer-bearing rhetoric gets turned into a comic pantomime, then I think people like think, okay, then it's not as scary as it looks.

Rachel: Yeah, if we can still have a bit of a laugh-

Mark: ...we can still have a bit of a laugh. We can still actually defeat it and it's not as serious as we imagine.

Rachel: 'cause all the other, the posters we've looked at so far, it feels like the purpose of them as propaganda is to persuade people to act, whether it's to enlist or to try and get a government to join people in a war. Whereas with that, it feels like it's there, like you say, to reassure and to encourage people to sort of hold tight, keep going, don't give up kind of thing 'cause some good stuff is happening and we can still have a laugh.

Mark: Also that all of it well, I think what's interesting in terms of this film and the parade, Nuremberg Rally, wherever it was, it just also shows that it is also just theatre. So this is all just one big performance and we can easily manipulate it, change it, and challenge it and give you a totally different message. So it's meaning might be scary if you look at it in the raw, but at the same time it's all edited. What it does do is it just shows that you can control the narrative. And that this is how we're gonna control this narrative for you. This narrative in its original state is being controlled and made for you, so that you feel scared and intimidated by this rise of power. But here's what you can also do, which is just disseminate it, recut it, repaste it. And this is, it's actually, I think, really smart for its time. 'cause it's actually showing you what you can do with the medium.

Rachel: Yeah. Which I didn't know they knew.

Mark: Oh yeah, they, yeah. I think they're super smart in that context, yeah.

James Taylor: We move to our final object. One that has been seen millions of times on the internet.

Rachel: Yes, I have seen it before. It's an image of Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister, taking a selfie, or it looks like he's taking a selfie in front of a massive cloud of an explosion in what has been reduced to rubble. His grin, it's worth saying, he's grinning, looking smart in a blue shirt in front of this big black cloud.

Sarah: It was made, I think originally it was made in 2005.

Rachel: That's interesting because, yeah, I remember, I'd just started university and there were protests against the war down the street. I, at that time, was pretty clueless about everything and didn't really have many political opinions, I don't think I was for the war, I didn't really understand what was going on, but I was interested. That was probably the start of me getting interested in politics. But I remember the antiwar feeling. But it's interesting to me that it was created like a couple of years after that.

Sarah: But thinking about this as a photo montage again, so two clearly different images, different vibes, yeah. So the Tony Blair taking a selfie while smiling, it was taken, I think on his campaign, where he took a selfie in front of some young Sea Cadets. And then the artists saw this and put the two images together from that.

Rachel: Two things spring to mind. One is that it was an era when taking selfies was at its height, at its beginning, and also was, I would say, less so these days, it was a real kind of culture war thing of like the taking of the selfie was an act of narcissism. But also that Tony Blair, this image will have helped to create, I think, the caricature that satirists look back on of Tony Blair which is this grinning, this monstrously grinning, caricature and the like, Spitting Image and Dead Ringers and a lot of satire depicts him with this manic grin on his face. And it's interesting 'cause this image will have been part of the folklore around that creation of that image.

Sarah: So the artist, it's listed as Kennardphillipps, and it's a collaboration between Peter Kennard and Cat Phillips. And they started working together around 2002. I think what's really interesting about the way they collaborate, they see it as a conversation between two artists talking about how their work would have very different outcomes if it was just singular artists working on this, and it's very much about collaboration.
I don't really associate it with a damning scenario of the individual. I think it asks you to think the potentiality of the self and how corrupting that power offers, you become absorbed in the self, in the moment of the politics, and you think that you are doing that and you become the story rather than the circumstances that bring around that conflict or those tragedies or those events. And I think Peter's very good at that. I think these are the keys, this is what power does. It becomes all about the self. But you, in making that selfie, you are seeing Tony's caricature, we're seeing Blair's caricature and the consequences of losing the capacity to think about the social and political responsibility that power has. So for me, it's more an image about how power corrupts-

Rachel: -than it is about Tony Blair.

Mark: Than it is about Tony Blair.

Rachel: That's really interesting.

Mark: And the caricature of Tony Blair becomes a metaphor for Western democracy and hypocrisy, because we imagine that we're in democracies, but when democracy goes wrong, or its alliances fail us, then we may as well end up in a kind of fascistic type place. And I think that's the fault line in the Bush/Blair administrative space. They become as demonic as the thing that they're trying to, in theory, liberate us from.

James Taylor: Rachel, Sarah and Mark make their way through the school groups towards the IWM cafe. As they walk, they begin to question the role and impact of satire and ridicule in conflict.

Mark: Personally, I just think that there's a kind of dangerous equation. It is a fine line. I've questioned it constantly in the last few years. As I say, I only really started doing satire because of a show called The Mash Report, and I didn't do that much of it before then. Really honing down on like party politics, Westminster politics, and satirising key figures, human beings. I feel like we know that we mustn't dehumanise groups of people, vulnerable people, we know not to punch down, we know to punch up. The question I've found myself asking over the years in all of the writing and presenting of that is, is it still okay to dehumanise people if you're punching up? If I'm dehumanising the Prime Minister, people who have power and who are making policies that affect the entire world, I'm ridiculing them. And that still feels icky. But it feels okay because they're doing things that are so powerful and they have such a high status, but it is still the act of demonising them. I think that the thing is whether we, in that, where do we leave the audience?

Rachel: Yeah.

Mark: Do we leave the, I think- So the question for me would be, yes, you can criticise, you know, let's just say power. You can call power to account. And I think that's an essential job. But the question is how you do it and where you leave those that are gonna be reading the work.

Rachel: Yeah. It's hard. I find myself with faultlines I found myself making these arbitrary lines about what I would and wouldn't mock, so I wouldn't mock their clothes or their personal appearance or their family life. But that was decided on a day-by-day, joke-by-joke basis, and you wouldn't always fall onto the side of right. There were some things that I look back on and I'm like, I don't love, I don't love that. But it was a form of propaganda, certainly. I don't know what satirists do, if there's protest comedy?

Mark: we've all got an agenda somehow, whether conscious or un unconscious. And yeah, rear view mirror, you think, oh my God, I wished I never supported that, or I missed that thing. But that's the learning part, isn't it? I'm always just more, I'm just mindful of, see institutions like the Imperial War Museum or Autograph, I'm just mindful of the role we have when people have been through it, is it just celebrating what's there or what's the critical path that we want people to actually take away. So what's the change maker that you are actually putting in play? And I think we can lose sight of that very easily because it becomes about infotaining and not changing.

Rachel: Yeah, that's interesting. As a comedian, I get criticised because they're like, just be entertaining. Don't try to persuade. That's not comedy; comedy is just entertainment. And it's like... but if you're talking about politics, you can't, you literally cannot do political comedy without taking side. It's It's about change, it's about persuading people. Thank you so much, Sarah and Mark, for coming round the museum with me and helping me make sense of some of the weird and monstrous things that we saw today. There's loads that I'm taking away from it. Some of which is that techniques of persuasion, I suppose, haven't changed that much from like a hundred years ago to today. The visuals look different, but demonising groups of people using race and gender and outdated stereotypes is still used to persuade people to do things and to control people. And also that humour can be useful to change people's minds as well. The Nazis doing the Lambeth Walk is what he is gonna stay with me for a really long time.

James Taylor: And that's where we must leave this Conflict of Interest and the Blavatnik Gallery of Art, Film and Photography. Thanks again to our guests, 
Rachel Parris. Professor Mark Sealy, and Sarah Holdaway. Next week on Conflict of Interest.

Geoff: I love it now. I know that sounds like the kind of thing that you just say for a thing like this, but I guess you gotta stop and think about it. And now I... I see where he's coming from.

James Taylor: Comedian Jeff Norcott discovers the way artists, filmmakers, and photographers capture the huge technological advances in 20th century warfare. My name is James Taylor. The producer was Matt Hill at Rethink Audio with support from Eleanor Head, Daniel BenChorin, and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums. Thank you for listening, and goodbye.