Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
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Kitty Hauser
Granta 2008
OGS Crawford was a man obsessed with the landscape. As an aerial reconnaissance officer in the First World War he photographed the battlefields of Belgium and of France from above; later, while working for the Ordnance Survey, he did the same to the British countryside. From the skies he could see the patterns of old settlements, long disused roads and buildings demolished many centuries before, in the same way, he explained, that a human gets the clear impression of the overall design of a carpet which a cat at ground level will never have. However, his obsession did not stop there: like many in the twenties and thirties he believed that history itself had a clear pattern, and that it was moving inexorably towards the creation of utopia: a socialist world government. Before they were swept away he wanted to photograph the evils of the present day: advertising billboards, churches, chapels. He visited Russia and was more than willing to be hoodwinked into thinking that the promised land was well on its way to being created there; he contrasted its apparent anti-materialism and the efficiency of Nazi Germany with his own country’s many failings in a splendidly bilious book of grumpy-old-manship called Bloody Old Britain, unsurprisingly never published. Now he is chiefly remembered, if at all, for his archaeological work:the maps he produced, and his founding of the journal Antiquity, which did so much to popularise and professionalise the discipline. Most interesting to me, however, were his photos of Southampton after the blitz, showing ruined buildings and, amongst the ruins, remnants of much earlier constructions: gravestones, cellars, and walls.
Hauser’s biography is a full account of Crawford’s work. We learn little about his private life – perhaps because there isn’t much to learn – but the picture she creates of a society with ideals are so distant from our own is a fascinating one. From it I think I learnt, at last, what made my eccentric primary school teacher tick, and understood better his bitter disillusionment with politicians, his apocalyptic world view, his emphasis on the supremacy of science, and his fierce ambitions for his pupils, as a product of a pre-war youth guided by HG Wells, Orwell, and possibly Crawford himself. Hauser has the knack of making the ostensibly obscure interesting and. if you have any interest in recent British social or political history but none in map-making, this biography is still well worth a look.
9th February 2009
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._G._S._Crawford
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