Abstract
This final chapter focuses on the World War II experience, considering representations of civilians who are threatened with the death penalty by Emergency legislation passed during the war. Because the political death penalty reached the mid-century without effective cultural examination, reference to past precedent was an important way that debates about the World War II death penalty were short-circuited during the war. The chapter thus intersects with previous chapters in this section in reflecting on questions of sacrifice, fidelity and betrayal in representing how the individual’s relationship with their nation and its sovereignty might be thrown into relief by the death penalty. Roger Casement’s legacy is shown to inform texts about the psychology of World War II spies by Rebecca West, Greene, Bowen and Christie. These texts share anxieties around whether the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for ‘the enemy within’, whether they are a disloyal British citizen or foreign patriot.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty: Volume I, trans. by Peggy Kamuf, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, 10.
- 2.
Kristine A. Miller, British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War, Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 24.
- 3.
Because the S-Plan is beyond the scope of my chapter, for more information see, for example, Mo Moulton, Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 306–329.
- 4.
Again, see Moulton, Ireland and the Irish, 306–329.
- 5.
David Doyle, ‘Republicans, Martyrology, and the Death Penalty in Britain and Ireland, 1939–1990’, Journal of British Studies, 54 (2015): 703–722 (704).
- 6.
Moulton, Ireland and the Irish, 2.
- 7.
Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002, 57.
- 8.
Derrida, The Death Penalty: Volume II ed. by Geoffrey Bennington and Marc Crépon/trans. by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017, 188.
- 9.
On late modernism’s politics of violence, see Allan Hepburn, Intrigue: Espionage and Culture, Yale: Yale University Press, 2005; Lisa Fluet, ‘Hit-Man Modernism’, Bad Modernisms ed. by Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006: 269–297; Matthew Levay, ‘Cases of Identity: Late Modernism and the Art of Crime’, Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019: 169–214.
- 10.
The only exception to this rule I can think of is Greene’s Anna Hilfe.
- 11.
A. W. Brian Simpson, ‘The Invention of Trials in Camera in Security Cases’, The Trial in History Volume II: Domestic and international trials, 1700–2000, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003: 76–106 (95).
- 12.
Hansard, ‘Treason Bill’, House of Commons Debate, 11th June 1945 Vol. 411 cc1393-8.
- 13.
Simpson, ‘The Invention of Trials’, 96.
- 14.
Mr. A Pierrepoint, ‘MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: TWENTY-EIGHTH DAY AND TWENTY-NINTH DAY’, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1951, 8404–8410. The inquest records show no trace of the traumatic execution that Pierrepoint recalled in his official evidence, suggesting deliberate suppression (The National Archives, PCOM 9/909).
- 15.
As we saw in Chap. 3, Pierrepoint would also feel a sense of anxiety and constraint in describing his work because women had been appointed to the Gowers Commission.
- 16.
‘TREACHERY BILL’, Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 22nd May 1940 Vol. 361 cc185-95
- 17.
See, for example, ‘TREASON BILL’, Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 30th May 1945, Vol. 136, 272–273 and ‘TREASON BILL’ Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 11th June 1945 Vol. 411, 1395–1396.
- 18.
Anon. ‘German Spy Shot: Meteorologist with Radio Set’, The Manchester Guardian, August 16th 1941, 8.
- 19.
Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason, London: The Reprint Society, 1952, 6.
- 20.
Eva Horn, The Secret War: Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction, trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013, 75.
- 21.
For a full picture of what participation in a guerrilla policing campaign might have meant for William Joyce, see D. M. Leeson’s The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence, 1920–1921, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
- 22.
West, The Meaning of Treason, 59.
- 23.
West, The Meaning of Treason, 146–147.
- 24.
West, The Meaning of Treason, 59.
- 25.
Both Lucy McDiarmid (The Irish Art of Controversy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005, 249) and Alison Garden (The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899–2016, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020, 129–130) have briefly addressed this allusion to Casement in Christie, but it has not previously been closely analysed.
- 26.
Anon. ‘New Mystery Stories’, New York Times, 22nd June 1941, 17.
- 27.
M. Willson Disher, ‘Master Spies’, The Times Literary Supplement, 29th November 1941, 589.
- 28.
Disher, ‘Master Spies’, 589.
- 29.
Miller, British Literature of the Blitz, 118.
- 30.
Agatha Christie, N or M?, London: Harper Collins, 2015, 59.
- 31.
Agatha Christie N or M?, 60–62.
- 32.
Agatha Christie N or M?, 97–98.
- 33.
Christie, N or M?, 147.
- 34.
Christie, N or M?, 148.
- 35.
Christie, N or M?, 148–149.
- 36.
Christie, N or M?, 240–241.
- 37.
Christie, N or M?, 217.
- 38.
Christie, N or M?, 210–221.
- 39.
Christie, N or M?, 134–135.
- 40.
Christie, N or M?, 221–223.
- 41.
Michael G. Brennan, Graham Greene: Fictions, Faith and Authorship, London: Continuum, 2010, xii and 75. Brennan argues that the treacherous Dr Forester in The Ministry of Fear is partially based on Kenneth Richmond.
- 42.
Graham Greene, Why Do I Write: An Exchange of Views Between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V. S. Pritchett, London: Percival Marshall, 1948, 47.
- 43.
Greene, Why Do I Write, 47–48.
- 44.
Brennan, Graham Greene, 74–81, 75.
- 45.
William Du Bois, ‘Graham Greene’s Dark Magic: The Ministry of Fear’, The New York Times, 23rd May 1942, 3.
- 46.
R. D. Charques, ‘Film in the Cake’, The Times Literary Supplement, 29th May 1943, 257.
- 47.
Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear, London: Vintage, 2001, 120.
- 48.
Greene, Ministry of Fear, 120
- 49.
Newspaper reports of war-time executions frequently note a fear of ‘bogus refugees’ who were really spies (See, for example, the Waldberg/Lassudry file, The National Archives, PCOM 9/891).
- 50.
Greene, Ministry of Fear, 132.
- 51.
Greene, Ministry of Fear, 203
- 52.
Charques, ‘Film in the Cake’, 257.
- 53.
Miller, British Literature of the Blitz, 120–121.
- 54.
Brian Diemert, Graham Greene’s Thrillers and the 1930s, Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996, 172.
- 55.
Greene, Ministry of Fear, 176
- 56.
Greene, Ministry of Fear, 215.
- 57.
For a rigorous investigation of the British torture of PoWs during World War II, see Helen Fry, The London Cage: The Secret History of Britain’s World War II Interrogation Centre, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017.
- 58.
Greene, The Ministry of Fear, 213
- 59.
West, The Meaning of Treason, 158–159 and 164–165.
- 60.
Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Notes on Eire’: espionage reports to Winston Churchill, 1940–1942, ed. by Jack Lane and Brendan, Clifford Aubane: Aubane Historical Society, 2009.
- 61.
My reading of The Heat of the Day dovetails substantially, though our companion texts and overall framework are different, with Alison Garden’s reading of the novel in her Casement book, which appeared after the manuscript of this book was finalised (The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 146–154).
- 62.
Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Conversation on Traitors’, Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. by Allan Hepburn, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010: 304–322 (304).
- 63.
Bowen, ‘Conversation on Traitors’, 304–305.
- 64.
Bowen, ‘Conversation on Traitors’, 311.
- 65.
Bowen, ‘Conversation on Traitors’, 308.
- 66.
Bowen, ‘Conversation on Traitors’, 314.
- 67.
A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet A Portrait of the Man and his Work, III The Tragic Years 1939–1972, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 187–188.
- 68.
Bowen, ‘Frankly Speaking’, Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabed Bowen, ed. by Allan Hepburn, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010: 323–343 (336).
- 69.
Bowen, ‘Frankly Speaking’, 337–338.
- 70.
Alice S. Morris, ‘Miss Bowen Illumines The Landscape of War’, New York Times, 20th February 1949, 1.
- 71.
Francis Wyndham, ‘The Climate of Treason’, Times Literary Supplement, 5th March 1949, 152.
- 72.
Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 34.
- 73.
Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 39.
- 74.
Megan Faragher ‘The form of modernist propaganda in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day’, Textual Practice, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2013): 49–68 (56).
- 75.
Bowen, ‘Frankly Speaking’, 327.
- 76.
Thomas S. Davis, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’s war gothic’, Textual Practice, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2013): 29–47.
- 77.
Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 195.
- 78.
Adam Piette, Imagination at war: British fiction and poetry, 1939–1945, London: Papermac, 1995, 172.
- 79.
Hepburn, Intrigue: Espionage and Culture, Yale: Yale University Press, 2005, 159.
- 80.
Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 260 and 266.
- 81.
Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 264.
- 82.
Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 262.
- 83.
Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 264.
- 84.
Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 265.
- 85.
Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 262.
- 86.
For a full account of the role of psychiatric medicine during WWII, especially psychiatrists’ involvement in ‘battle schools’, see Joanna Bourke, ‘Psychiatry, Hate Training, and the Second World War’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 52, No. 1 (2018): 101–120.
- 87.
Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 33.
- 88.
Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 264.
- 89.
Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 281.
- 90.
Faragher, ‘The form of modernist propaganda in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day’, 57.
- 91.
Bowen, ‘Conversation on Traitors’, 314.
- 92.
Hepburn, Intrigue: Espionage and Culture, 141–142.
- 93.
Garden, The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 148.
- 94.
See The National Archives, ‘O’Grady, Dorothy Pamela’ PCOM 9/1497 and PCOM 9/1497/1 ‘Psychological report dated 16/6/1944’.
- 95.
In 1927, the Labour party had issued a petition which called capital punishment ‘a relic of barbarism’, the majority of the Labour leadership was supportive of abolition in the 1928 debate and at the 1934 party conference resolution was passed to abolish the death penalty.
- 96.
Victor Bailey, ‘The Shadow of the Gallows: The Death Penalty and the British Labour Government, 1945–1951’, Law and History Review, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2000): 305–349 (309).
- 97.
Seal, ‘Perceptions of safety, fear and social change in the public’s pro-death penalty discourse in mid twentieth-century Britain’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2017) n.pag. paragraphs 1–40.
- 98.
Bailey, ‘The Shadow of the Gallows’, Note 45, 323.
- 99.
Amnesty International Global Report: Death Sentences and Executions 2019, ‘Annex II: Abolitionist and Retentionist Countries as of 31 December 2019’: https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Amnesty-Death-Sentences-and-Executions-2019.pdf [Accessed 27th July 2020]. The report also lists separately those countries which allow the death penalty only under military law or in exceptional circumstances (Brazil, Burkina Faso, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Israel, Kazakhstan, Peru) and countries which retain the death penalty but have not executed anyone for 10 years (Algeria, Brunei Darussalam, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Eritrea, Eswatini (former Swaziland), Ghana, Grenada, Kenya, Laos, Liberia, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco/Western Sahara, Myanmar, Niger, Papua New Guinea, Russian Federation, Sierra Leone, South Korea (Republic of Korea), Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Tonga, Tunisia and Zambia).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ebury, K. (2021). The Political Death Penalty in World War II Writing. In: Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890-1950. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52750-1_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52750-1_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-52749-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-52750-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)