The world lost three great Irish musicians in 2023: Shane MacGowan, Sinéad O’Connor and Christy Dignam. While their music reflected their individual struggles and resilience, it also grappled with the evolving essence of Irish identity. Their work stands as a reminder of Ireland’s complex history.
In their absence, a new generation of Irish musicians is carrying forward their legacy, navigating the balance between tradition and innovation. They’re using music not just as entertainment but as a powerful tool for social commentary and cultural evolution. Here are just a few embodying that spirit.
1. The Scratch
Another Round by The Scratch.
The Scratch, a four-piece acoustic ensemble hailing from Dublin, manage to be both trad and metal. In tracks like Another Round, they showcase their remarkable ability to fuse these divergent styles.
The song opens with rich vocal harmonies and rapid-fire lyrics, drawing listeners into a narrative that feels familiar – a snapshot of an evening unfolding at the local.
Then, in a striking moment, the music transitions to crunching electric guitar, delivering a powerful mid-song drop that captures the essence of the night’s escalating intensity.
2. Lankum
Go Dig My Grave by Lankum.
Lankum, an Irish folk ensemble, navigates the realms of traditional music with an exploration of harsher, darker textures. Their approach to traditional material is to emphasise the trauma embedded within the songs themselves.
In their rendition of Go Dig My Grave, Lankum immerse us in a song heavy with dread – a heartbroken young woman kills herself, leaving her father to find her body. Rather than softening the edges, Lankum purposefully stress the song’s horror and despair, employing an oppressive sonic palette that weighs heavily on the listener.
Their treatment of the music becomes an immersive experience, akin to encountering the textured layers of a harsh, emotional landscape – an aural Rothko painting in its intensity.
Unlike the poised and sympathetic renditions by artists like Joan Baez or Sinéad O’Connor, Lankum’s approach rejects restraint. Their unconventional, melodramatic execution demands attention, leaving little room for detached observation.
In doing so, they create a sonic realm that confronts and assails the listener, enveloping them in an unsettling world woven by their music.
3. John Francis Flynn
Mole in the Ground by John Francis Flynn.
John Francis Flynn is another folk artist determined to infuse traditional music with harsher, more potent sounds. His recent album, Look Over the Wall, See the Sky (2023), offers a mesmerising reimagining of the classic Mole in the Ground, originally performed by folklorist Bascom Lamar Lunsford.
Lunsford’s rendition embodies an elusive folk song quality – an interplay between simplicity and profound depth. His performance exudes gladness, wisdom, and magnanimity. It’s a stark contrast to Flynn’s interpretation with its practically subterranean vocals and underground essence.
Flynn’s version, much like the other artists mentioned, emerges from an anti-establishment position. Notably, he emphasises one of the song’s most enduring lines as he concludes: “The railroad man he’ll kill you when he can / And drink up your blood like wine.”
This line, famously referenced by Bob Dylan in Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again (1966), vividly portrays a vampiric image of businessmen, leaving little ambiguity about its politics. In Flynn’s own words: “It’s about taking down the system, so I wanted to make it punchy and aggressive.”
4. The Mary Wallopers
Frost Is All Over by The Mary Wallopers.
Folk punk outfit The Mary Wallopers carved out a devoted following during the isolation of the COVID lockdowns, during which they live-streamed performances from a converted barn in Dundalk.
Among their standout renditions is Frost Is All Over. Their take breathes new life into the song with captivating percussion elements. Beginning with acoustic guitars, banjo and accordion, it initially signals an upbeat revisitation of a standard – so far, so folk.
However, the infusion of bass drum and snare soon escalates the tempo, injecting fresh vigour into the track. There are other novel touches, like the call and response between vocalist Andrew Hendy and the rest of the group.
5. Pauline Scanlon
As I Roved On by Pauline Scanlon featuring Loinnir McAliskey.
Traditional Irish singer Pauline Scanlon’s haunting rendition of As I Roved Out is steeped in plangent, dreamy sounds reminiscent of Daniel Lanois. Her performance, characterised by a steady, deliberate rhythm, unravels the dark story of a young woman’s encounter with an amorous soldier.
The tale is capped off with her mother’s unforgiving response – she beats her daughter for bringing the soldier home with her – and the soldier’s indifference to her imminent death.
The rendition’s eerie beauty lies in the siren-like harmonies and the airy wisps of synthesizer juxtaposed against the underlying theme of callousness. Despite her undeniable victimhood, there’s an aura of equanimity and serenity captured in the young woman’s refrain and the music’s steady, unperturbed pulse.
Contrary to a version like that of the Clancy Brothers, who cast it as a boisterous, roguish song that favours the soldier’s perspective, Scanlon reclaims the song as an anthem of defiance, asserting a young woman’s determination to chart her own path, risk be damned.
For Scanlon, interpreting this song held personal significance. She saw in it echoes of her mother’s perspective, but also those of her mother’s contemporaries. Through her rendition, Scanlon sought to bridge the song’s narrative with modern sensibilities, intertwining personal and collective experiences to offer a resonant portrayal of agency in the face of societal pressures.
As she explained to Folk Radio: “I am intentionally redirecting these songs away from the traditional narrative, turning them to face the modern era, to reflect a new social outlook, and I am imagining the present as I sing them.”
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We travel to Ghana to meet El Anatsui and see the construction of his monumental installation for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. Made of thousands of metal bottle tops and fragments, Behind the Red Moon builds on Anatsui’s interest in histories of encounter and the migration of goods and people during the transatlantic slave trade. Sourced in Nigeria, the liquor bottle tops used in this commission form part of a present-day industry built on colonial trade routes. See Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon at Tate Modern until 14 April 2024. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
Watch as we challenge young photographer Ejatu Shaw to create professionally shot images inspired by the Tate Modern exhibition ‘A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography’. Will she be able to use her budget of £50 to gather everything from props and camera equipment to models and editing software and deliver this task in under 48 hours? Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
Note: This film includes reference to racism and imagery of racist violence and the Ku Klux Klan. Philip Guston thought hard about the artist's responsibility to bear witness to ‘the brutality of the world‘. Consistently changing and reinventing, he sought to make work that embodies life’s complexities, its beauty, absurdity, humour and suffering. In this short film, curators Michael Wellen and Michael Raymond, conservator Anna Cooper and the artist's daughter, Musa Mayer, recount the story of Guston's life and career, as well as his restless urge to challenge himself creatively. This film was created as part of the Terra Foundation for American Art Series: New Perspectives. It includes extracts from the following documentaries: Philip Guston: A Life Lived, directed by Michael Blackwood (New York: Michael Blackwood Productions, 1981). Conversations with Philip Guston, directed by Michael Blackwood (New York: Michael Blackwood Productions, 2003). https://ift.tt/qgu6tbQ Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
Artist Zohra Opoku trained as a fashion and textiles designer, and her works combine fabric with photography to interrogate identity. In pieces like Queens and Kings (2017), she explores the ways that tradition and globalisation intersect in modern day Ghana. In this short film, Opoku invites us into her studio in Accra, Ghana, to witness her collaborative approach to art-making. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
In this film, Anne Barlow, Director, Tate St Ives, gives us a tour of The Casablanca Art School exhibition and introduces us to some of the school's key artists; Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chabâa and Mohamed Melehi. See The Casablanca Art School exhibition at Tate St Ives 27 May 2023 – 14 January 2024 Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
In this film visual artist Barbara Walker MBE, RA shows us around her studio in Birmingham and talks about the themes present in her practice, including temporality, power and body politics. We also see her creating a free-hand wall drawing in Towner Gallery as part of her series Burden of Proof, whereby she creates large-scale in-situ portraits of individuals affected by the Windrush Scandal Barbara Walker is nominated for the 2023 Turner Prize, hosted by Towner Eastbourne. The winner will be announced on 5 December 2023. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
What keeps us afloat in uncertain times? In this film, artist and composer Rory Pilgrim meets with the eight members of Green Shoes Arts who collaborated on RAFTS, a film and later live performance created over three years during the Covid-19 pandemic. Exploring the process of connection in different ways, from digital to embodied, verbal to musical, Rory's practice is underpinning by a concern as to how we might collectively contribute to social change. Rory Pilgrim is nominated for the 2023 Turner Prize, hosted by Towner Eastbourne. The winner will be announced on 5 December 2023. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
Artist Ghislaine Leung takes a critical look at the ways in which art is produced, presented and circulated. She has developed a process of art-making that is based on ‘scores’. These are text-based instructions or descriptions that are realised by institutions in close conversation with the artist. In this film, narrated by Leung, we follow the installation of her work Violets 2 at Towner Eastbourne, and see how art technicians interpret the work’s score within the unique parameters of the gallery space. Ghislaine Leung is nominated for the 2023 Turner Prize, hosted by Towner Eastbourne. The winner will be announced on 5 December 2023. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
Where are we, Jesse? The answer is not clear. In this video, artist Jesse Darling and a small film crew go on a road trip across the UK. Passing through seaside towns, container ports, service stations, retail parts and an abandoned airport, this is a journey that encounters at every turn the barriers and borders (both physical and invisible) of modern Britain. It’s a journey without a final destination, but one that hints at just how complicated and connected, how wonderful and terrible everything is. Jesse Darling is nominated for the 2023 Turner Prize, hosted by Towner Eastbourne. The winner will be announced on 5 December 2023. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
Security officer and budding artist Marcia Henderson takes us behind the scenes at Tate Britain and shares her artistic talents. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
Our curatorial and conservation teams share the fascinating discovering they made whilst restoring Arthur Devis' painting, Portrait of a Man. What happened next tested their detective skills! If you can help us solve this art world mystery, please email us at: hello@tate.org.uk Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
Artist Sammy Baloji grew up in the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), an area shaped by the exploitation of both human and natural resources, particularly through mining. We visit his studio in Brussels, Belgium, to find out more about how he uses photographic archives to unpick this complex history, and document complex legacies of colonialism. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
Smash Hits, the new Grayson Perry retrospective at Edinburgh’s National Galleries, spans the 40-year career of the recently knighted artist. It’s an exhibition packed with scrutiny of the entanglements of self and society, as Perry casts up snippets of the institutional landscapes that formed him: family, England, the art world.
Perry’s artistic journey began with evening classes in pottery. His Kinky Sex plate (1983) shares the chunkiness of his recent ceramic English Wanker (2023). This makes a satisfying contrast with the highly polished style of his vases and the intricacy of his prints and tapestries.
Everything is beautifully made. Perry operates in a realm serviced by elite fabricators, while the exhibition text notes that all his pots are made with the coil method (one of the oldest techniques used to make pots): “Perry has never used a pottery wheel.”
Access to adult education, arts funding and affordable housing – some of the conditions that helped make Perry – have all been eroded. It is hard to imagine the young artist of Sales Pitch (1987) growing up on a council estate and achieving such success now.
Sympathetic heretic
For all his astonishing success, Perry is likeable because he casts a critical eye on himself as much as others. His brand of self-mocking “iconclasm” is on parade in the print Map of Nowhere (2008). This depicts Perry “as a God … A heavenly light shines out of my anus onto a mountaintop shrine”. For a clue on how seriously we should take this divinity, Perry adds: “Doubt [is] the essence of civilisation.”
A mixed-class couple I chatted to in front of one of six engrossing tapestries in the series The Vanity of Small Differences (2012), described Perry as “cutting but kind, judgy but not”. This carefully crafted role embodies Perry’s attention to the complexity and contradictions of being human. These lie at the heart of his work and are named in his discussion of his transformation through therapy.
The couple recognised themselves in the signifiers of class, status and aspiration in which the artist deals: Aga, Le Creuset, Penguin mugs. A jar of jam labelled “Allotment organic homemade local” sums up the way that food, along with clothes, furnishings and behaviour, crystallise class structures.
Across seven galleries that present a chronological medley of his life’s work, Perry is often right on the money with his stock-in-trade deconstructing and remixing of the foibles, hypocrisies and contradictions that lurk within institutions and psyches.
His success is encapsulated in the trajectory from Early English Motorcycle Helmet (1981) – his mash-up of Anglo-Saxon relic and his obsession with motorcycles – and the triumphantly garish Kenilworth AM1 (2015), Perry’s two-wheeled “popemobile” and performance-art prop.
Kitsch, elegance and laughs mix with pathos and irreverence. This emotional palette contrasts with the virtue signalling he calls out in the colour woodcut Selfie with Political Causes (2018) or his comment on “the puritanism of woke culture”. The sight of Perry’s iconic Claire’s Coming out Dress (2000) lit spectrally in an alcove feels earnest and playful. It is moving to read Perry learn that:
Being a transvestite wasn’t about pretending to be a woman. It was about me putting on the clothes that gave me the feelings that I wanted.
Made in Britain
The retrospective focuses on English tropes and travails and the homogenising force of “Britishness”. One exception is Two Old Guys Wearing Check Skirts (2023) a ceramic showing “Alan [Measles] in his Tam O'Shanter cap and kilt and Claire in Balmoral drag”, with Perry noting that, “Scotland suffers from tourist clichés as much if not more so than England”.
Another is the embroidery Britain is Best (2014) which depicts five men crammed on one horse, based on interviews with Unionists in Northern Ireland for his television series Who are You?. “They seem to be holding out for an imagined Golden Age,” Perry muses.
His retrospective comes in a year of strikes that echo the mass uprisings of the 1980s, and it is clear Perry is interested in workers. The large ship sculpture The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman (2011) considers the fact that “a minority of the millions of artefacts in the [British] museum had makers attached to them”. In Death of a Working Hero (2016), Perry reflects on the annual Durham Miners Gala, which celebrates the vibrancy of “community, international solidarity and working-class culture ” today.
In Edinburgh, a city that epitomises privilege and the extremes of uneven wealth, Perry’s show follows the group exhibition Poor Things at the nearby Fruitmarket Gallery. Reflecting practices shaped by diverse working and lower-middle class backgrounds, the artists shared Perry’s view that art can be powerful and funny.
But their show’s insightful closing talk offered a starker exposé of how the brutality of the class system limits opportunities in life, including the arts. Some critiqued art world expectations that working-class art be defined by hardship, which their playful artworks and the humour and excess of Perry’s art defy.
Imagination, depicted as a river in Perry’s wonderful A Map of Days (2013) uproots oppressive states, inner and outer. It is common to us all, but our ability to exercise it is linked to our basic material security and the opportunity to have the time, the freedom and the means to live a full life: key demands of strikers. The absence of these conditions cuts us off from fulfilling our potential; it alienates us.
Smash Hits epitomises Perry’s journey from alienation to self-fulfillment. It shares captivating art and hard-won lessons about life. But to understand how the many might join him and thrive, rather than merely survive, we must look beyond the maps that Perry provides.
Experiences of girlhood are shaped by art and visual culture as much as they are shown in them. In this film, Claire Marie Healy explores this relationship, guiding us through the making and meaning of girlhood in Tate's collection of art. She traces the journey of 'the girl' in art, from a silent subject of portraiture, to an expressive creator of self-portraiture. Claire Marie Healy is a writer and editor who explores the experiences of young women in her ongoing multi-media project, Girlhood Studies. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
Want to bring a bit of Barbara Hepworth into your own green space? Jodi Dickinson, Head Gardener at the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden shares his top tips on texture, height, climate and sustainability. Artist Barbara Hepworth moved to Cornwall at the outbreak of war in 1939. She lived and worked in Trewyn studios, now the Hepworth Museum, from 1949 until her death in 1975. 'Finding Trewyn Studio was a sort of magic', wrote Hepworth; 'here was a studio, a yard and garden where I could work in open air and space'. Today, Jodi takes great care to maintain the garden as it was towards the end of Hepworth's life. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
Take a look behind-the-scenes, as Lead Frame Conservator, Batoul Algasra chats to us about looking after the picture frames, what goes into her conservation work and her favourite thing about the role. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
Like many conscientious objectors during the second world war, John Corsellis was acutely aware of the complex and conflicted position he was taking. Years later, he told the Imperial War Museum’s oral history project:
I was always pretty strongly conscious of the illogicality of the pacifist position … I was well aware of the very great and extreme evil of Nazism, and conscious that the pacifist had only a very thin answer indeed as to how Nazism could be opposed in any other way than by force of arms.
Corsellis, the son of a barrister and educated at Westminster School in London, was far from alone in this inner-conflict. According to my research into these conscientious objectors – who remain far less well understood than their first world war counterparts – many were plagued with feelings of doubt, finding it difficult even years later to express their reasoning.
Corsellis was one of some 60,000 British men and 900 women who attested a conscientious objection during the second world war. (Many more women would like to have declared themselves conscientious objectors, but had no official way of doing so.) The 1% of conscripted men was proportionally more than the 16,000 who objected in the two years of conscription during the first world war. Most, but not all, objected on religious grounds and were from middle- or upper-class backgrounds. Most, but not all, were still willing to work in some capacity for Britain’s second world war effort.
This article is part of Conversation Insights
The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.
Indeed, this new breed of “conchie” often displayed a strong desire to relieve the suffering of war – and were willing to risk their lives far from home. Having initially worked with the Quaker-affiliated Friends Ambulance Unit at home, Corsellis was sent to the El-Shatt refugee camp in Egypt and later the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Italy and Austria. There he witnessed the forced repatriation of refugees to eastern European countries including Yugoslavia – where many faced summary execution. (The trauma of these experiences led to Corsellis spending the rest of his life raising awareness of the fates of Yugoslav displaced persons.)
A colleague on these missions, A. Tegla Davies, later described the motivation of second world war objectors in his history of the Friends Ambulance Unit:
When the war came upon them, the state treated them with surprising leniency. Some members of the unit went to prison, but for the majority the battle of the prisons had been won by the steadfastness of their [objector] fathers in the previous war. Now they felt that pacifism, having been recognised by the state, should show in action what it could do to relieve the suffering and agony which years of war were bound to produce.
‘The pacifist is not a freak’
Where first world war objectors can be characterised by their persistent opposition to the state, objectors in the second world war were generally willing to compromise so as to be useful in a non-combatant way. Despite being pacifists, they could be found in every corner of the war – and their experiences were often not so different from their fighting contemporaries. As Davies wrote:
The normal, healthy young pacifist is not a freak. He feels the same passions and emotions as his fellow men. He does not enjoy being classed as odd or different. When war comes he is in a dilemma. If he joins the army, he violates his deepest convictions. If he refuses, he is in danger of cutting himself off from the community. Some are not unduly worried by that segregation. Others are tortured by it.
Feelings of doubt were common among second world war objectors. Faced with a much more tolerant and flexible governmental strategy than the punitive stance of the first world war, ironically this engendered a much less certain course of action in many.
A second world war tribunal for conscientious objectors.Wikimedia Commons
Even before the truth about Nazi atrocities came to light, their war was also a much more obvious battle between good and evil. The author and broadcaster Edward Blishen was working in Barnet as a young journalist when war was declared. Turning 18 in 1940, he was required to register as a conscientious objector just as France fell to the Nazis – a coincidence of events that tortured him, according to his war memoirs:
The shock of knowing that France was finished, and the voice within you saying: ‘You can’t … You can’t not be in it now – not now they’ve done this to France.’
Yet despite this “voice of disloyal temptation”, Blishen registered as an objector, later recalling:
I was sent to the bottom of the buzzing room, alone, away from all the others; and it felt as though I was separating myself from the world.
At his June 1940 tribunal, Blishen was granted agricultural work. Unlike in the first world war, these tribunals were headed by a civilian judge and included representation from trade unions. Incarceration was rare, with only 3% of men – compared with one-third in the first world war – given a prison sentence (generally 3-6 months) as a result of refusing to engage with the process of the tribunal altogether.
Complete exemption from military service was also rare. Around three-quarters of those applying for CO status were directed to work of “national importance”. This ranged from agricultural work to service in the army – either in the medical services or the specially formed Non-Combatant Corps.
Blishen’s doubts persisted throughout the war. He didn’t enlist, but was painfully honest about the “feeling of shame” that haunted him as the fighting finally came to an end:
I wondered, had I been motivated simply by the dread of being killed or maimed? … Wasn’t it true that through five years of universal agony, I had hidden away in despicable refuge? Had I even been a good pacifist? I had shuffled, hummed and hawed – put off all painful decisions. There it was, nearly over, and I was ashamed of myself.
A Friends Ambulance Unit driver in Wolfsburg, Germany, at the end of the second world war.Vernon39 via Wikimedia Commons
‘We needed each other’
As in the first world war, nearly all who claimed objection at tribunal did so on the grounds of their religion – with many coming from traditionally pacifist churches such as the Quakers.
The Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) in which Corsellis and Davies served was a re-creation of a first world war service that treated both military and civilian casualties. Predominantly funded by the Cadbury family of Quakers famous for its chocolate bars, the unit engendered a sense of solidarity among objectors according to another member, William Brough:
We needed each other. We needed the confirmation of each other. We needed the affirmation of each other.
Within the unit, the legacy of the first world war loomed large. Corsellis, whose father had lost an arm during the infamous Gallipoli campaign, said he grew up strongly conscious of the “great war”, and argued that his entire generation felt the same. Avoiding a repeat of its destruction was, he added, a “major factor” in his pacifism. Fellow FAU member Michael Cadbury (a distant relative of the chocolate-making family) noted that he and his contemporaries were operating “on top of the mountain” that their forefathers “had scaled on our behalf”.
The popularity of great war poets during the objectors’ formative years was another important factor for some, including Blishen:
I looked at things very simply in those days. Pacifism had seemed to be the air we all breathed when we were in the grammar school together … We all read Remarque and Barbusse and Toller, and our views had always appeared so beautifully clear. War was black. Any war was black.
The horrors of the western front trenches are persistent motifs in the writings and interviews of many second world war objectors. For example, Mark Holloway described in a collective memoir how:
All through childhood, real and imaginary pictures of the war flickered semi-consciously in front of me like Very lights. They were supplemented later by visits to Belgium – where my parents proudly showed me Zeebrugge and described its intricate wartime history – and to the battlefields with their actual soundbites, trenches, barbed wire and charred stumps of tree that people still pay to see 10 years after war ended.
‘Ought I to rethink this?’
Conscientious objectors weren’t all united in their reactions to the onset of the second world war. While many were willing to work alongside and even in the military, others took a very different position.
Tony Parker grew up in Manchester, the son of a cotton merchant who also owned a second-hand bookshop. This shop, where Parker had worked while at school, was a gateway to pacifism for him. The prominent anti-war literature he read there, notably the poems of Siegfried Sassoon – author of The Dug-Out and Suicide in The Trenches – made him realise that war was “nonsensical”.
At his initial tribunal in 1941, Parker was granted non-combatant or ambulance service, but he appealed this and was given mining work instead. Unlike the camaraderie engendered by units like the FAU, Parker was not part of any pacifist group and was the only objector sent to his mine, Bradford Colliery in Manchester. Of this time, Parker recalled:
I think you did feel very alone – or at least, I did … All the time one was saying: ‘Am I doing right or am I doing wrong. Ought I to rethink this?’
In the mine, Parker described himself as “like a strange being from another world” due to his markedly middle-class accent and upbringing. But though short-lived, it proved a transformative moment in his life. “I had never thought there was this kind of life that people had,” he recalled, adding that a friendship with another young miner – with whom he swapped poetry and classical records – had “stopped me thinking there was anything special about a middle-class education”.
Parker’s experience in the mine fuelled his socialism and politicised him in a way which would have been unthinkable before the war, as he learned about “working life in terms of not having things”. After suffering a broken arm and ribs while uncoupling two wagons of coal, he returned to work in his father’s bookshop – but the legacy of this time as a miner is clear. Parker spent the rest of his working life as a pioneering oral historian, interviewing people “marginalised” by and living on the outskirts of society – including criminals, lighthouse keepers and single mothers.
‘I had to join the damned’
Upon the outbreak of the second world war, Patrick Kenneth Mayhew joined the Royal Army Medical Corp (RAMC) of the British Army and was deployed for service in France – where he became embroiled in one of the most infamous events of the war.
Once the German army invaded France on May 10 1940, Mayhew found himself part of the British army’s immediate retreat. His unit set up a field hospital in a hotel in the town of De Panne, on the Belgian-French border about ten miles from Dunkirk. They worked tirelessly on the many wounded until, in Mayhew’s words: “We were becoming the front instead of the back.”
It was decided that an aid party comprising just one officer and four lower-ranked men would stay to help those who could not be evacuated. Despite not feeling “brave or proud”, Mayhew volunteered and spent 24 hours alternating between medical work and collecting identification disks from the dead outside.
Eventually, his aid party was instructed to evacuate. They made their way to the beach at De Panne, boarded a boat, and rowed for nine hours until they reached the shores of Margate. For his service, Mayhew was awarded the Military Medal for “bravery on land” – despite his strictly non-combatant status.
Memorial commemorating the evacuation of British and Allied Forces from De Panne, May 1940.Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
The awarding of war medals to conscientious objectors was a rarity. Other recipients include members of the FAU’s Hadfield Spears ambulance unit, who received France’s Croix de Guerre, and Desmond Doss, an American pacifist medic who became the first objector to receive the Medal of Honor (the US Armed Forces’ highest military decoration) for going “above and beyond the call of duty” during the Battle of Okinawa, Japan, in 1945. Doss, who refused to carry a weapon of any kind, was the subject of the 2016 Hollywood biopic Hacksaw Ridge.
In Mayhew’s case, the award caused quite a stir. His brother Paul thought it hilarious that a pacifist should win a medal for military bravery and the British press agreed, with several newspapers running articles on Mayhew. But these articles also delighted in the fact that he changed his mind – in the summer of 1940, Mayhew joined the combatant services of the army.
While it was tempting to see a straight line between his harrowing experiences in Dunkirk and this change of heart, Mayhew vehemently rejected this, recalling years later:
It wasn’t anything of the sort. I saw nothing which made me change my mind in that way. Nor – and this is where it becomes so inconsistent – did I feel that I’d been wrong in my Christian belief that war is not acceptable.
Instead, Mayhew blamed the intensity of the war in the summer of 1940, when invasion of Britain by the Nazis looked certain:
You weren’t taking time to think and read books and make up your mind, and talk to this person and that person, and let the thrill of Dunkirk die off … These were immediate, imperative decisions. I found so much in this country that I wanted to do or that I believed in … And I hated the idea of that going down the drain.
Mayhew added that it would have been very easy for him to stay in the RAMC – and that no one would have questioned his pacifism. In his own fascinating description, he was “the right sort of pacifist”: because he was willing to risk his life and help the war effort, his stance was acceptable to the wider public.
But Mayhew’s family was another key driver in his change of heart. The son of Lord Basil Mayhew, his elder siblings were scattered across the world doing “war work”, and he decided he didn’t want to “save his own soul” while his family committed “mortal sins”. Instead, “I had to join the damned.”
Mayhew was far from the only objector to renounce their status and join the military during the second world war. Another was the poet Timothy Corsellis – John’s younger brother – a pacifist who joined the RAF but refused to serve with Bomber Command as he did not want to participate in the indiscriminate bombing of civilians. In 1941, during his service with the Fleet Air Arm, his plane stalled during a training flight and he crashed and died near Annan in south-west Scotland.
‘A turmoil of doubts’
Summing up the second generation of world war objectors is a difficult task. Where their first world war counterparts have become simplified in popular representations, with their valiant opposition to a war that is almost universally condemned, the COs that followed two decades later appear as more nuanced, conflicted human beings.
They doubted their stances. They worried about their families. They felt torn between their duties to society and their duties to themselves and their beliefs. They keenly knew the horrors of the first world war, but they also felt the threat against their country and the emerging horrors of Nazism. Theirs was a complicated position.
The English poet and folk musician Sydney Carter was born in London to a military father. Although from a working-class background, he received a bursary to Christ’s Hospital private school before going to Oxford to read history at Balliol College. While his pacifism was ostensibly based on his religious beliefs, his decision to object was driven as much by heartbreak as anti-war sentiment. He recalled later in an interview for the Imperial War Museum archive that:
Pacifism seemed to offer something like a religion I could live by. It exposed inside, like a light: and suddenly, I felt quite free … It was as inexplicable as my religious experience had been at Christ’s Hospital; I clung to it through the dark years of the war, as [close] to a divine command that I ever had.
At his tribunal, Carter was granted service with the FAU, although he doubted “right up to the last moment and after it”. He admitted to having “a lot of non-pacifist things inside me”, and said he had joined the ambulance unit because it promised to be “arduous and dangerous”.
He was right. After doing perilous shelter work in Britain at the height of the Blitz, he was later posted to Egypt and Palestine. While serving at Nuseirat, a camp for Greek refugees, he took the decision “to cast myself into the melting pot, join the Army, [then] see what shape I came out – if I ever did”.
Carter informed his camp commander and set off for Cairo to enlist. Before he reached the Egyptian capital, however, he changed his mind again, and decided to “stick with the people I know”. This turmoil of doubts persisted throughout the war and after. In his 1965 memoir The Objectors, he wrote:
Once, I was a conchie. Why? For over 20 years I have been trying to find out. I could name some noble reasons but, even at the time, I am sure that there were tares among the wheat. Had I gone into the Army, no one would have questioned whether my motives were sincere or not. But being a conchie, I had to justify them – not only to the Tribunal, but to myself. I managed to convince the Tribunal. I’m not sure I ever managed to convince myself.
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Curator Carol Jacobi introduces the Rossetti family and their revolutionary approach to art, love and lifestyles in the largest exhibition of Rossetti artwork in two decades. The exhibition is on at Tate Britain 6 April – 24 September 2023 Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
In this film, Frances Morris (Director Emerita, Tate Modern) discusses the visionary work of Swedish painter, Hilma af Klint. Explore Klint's interest in scientific discovery, spirituality and philosophy, as well as her otherworldly paintings, which she believed were commissioned by higher powers. The Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life exhibition is on at Tate Modern 20 April – 3 September 2023 Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
Film and television actors in the US came out on strike on July 14, causing Hollywood productions to shut down. The action has also had an impact on US films shooting in the UK: director Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice 2 has “paused” and the production of Deadpool 3, filming at Pinewood Studios with stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, has been stood down.
The dispute is about remuneration for actors, very few of whom enjoy the high income of Hollywood stars. But an additional argument between the union, SAG-AFTRA, and film producers is about the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Actors are fearful of the impact of AI on their careers.
When they perform on film sets, their image and voice are digitally recorded at extremely high resolution, providing producers with huge amounts of data. Actors are concerned the data can be reused with AI. New processes such as machine learning – AI systems that improve with time – could turn an actor’s performance in one movie into a new character for another production, or for a video game.
Actors feel an urgent need to control how AI manipulates their image. The union president, Fran Drescher, says: “We are all in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.” But how realistic are these fears?
‘Synthetic media’
When we talk about the use of AI in film and television, there are multiple techniques under development. We categorise these as “synthetic media”. This covers processes such as deepfakes, voice cloning, visual effects (VFX) created using AI, and completely synthetic image and video generation.
I have written before about deepfakes for The Conversation, pointing out the benefits as well as dangers. For screen actors, deepfakes are one of the most vivid threats.
This is because, since machine learning took off, Hollywood stars including Scarlett Johansson and Gal Gadot have found their faces deepfaked into porn movies. This is a major gender-based issue: it’s almost always female actors whose images are manipulated and used in this way.
We tend to think of artifical intelligence as omnipotent. But my research has found that integrating deepfakes into the language of cinema and TV drama is difficult. Certain shot types are easy, such as front-on long shots, but asking the AI to produce a profile shot tests the algorithm to its limit.
Industry research and development (R&D) programmes such as Disney Research have invested a huge amount of effort into perfecting deepfake techniques. But no one has yet produced an easy way to swap an actor’s face into any shot size or angle that the director chooses, with convincing, high-definition results.
A YouTube video uses deepfake technology to insert Malayalam actors into The Godfather.
Background actors
The actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, is particularly concerned about background actors – or “extras” – being exploited by producers using AI manipulation. In the union’s special agreement for background actors, which lists the additional payments that they should receive, there is currently nothing stated about the AI use of recorded footage – the arrival of new technology necessitates a negotiated deal with the producers.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) claims to have made a “groundbreaking AI proposal which protects performers’ digital likenesses, including a requirement for (a) performer’s consent for the creation and use of digital replicas or for digital alterations of a performance”.
However, the actors’ union boss Duncan Crabtree-Ireland retorted: “They proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan – their image, their likeness – and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want, with no consent and no compensation.”
Ethical dimension
This month, I convened a meeting at the University of Reading, in which academics, stakeholders and creative producers came together to discuss the issues of AI in screen production. We have formed the Synthetic Media Research Network, a group that wants to see strong ethics built into the exciting new opportunities that AI brings to the screen industries.
Philosophers, lawyers, ethicists and trade unionists joined the discussion, because establishing a values-based system for how AI can change performers’ images and identities is a fundamental issue for the film and TV industries.
When I talked to Liam Budd, national officer for the UK actors union, Equity, he said: “If you’re going to exploit our members’ work using AI tech, you have to get consent from them and many members won’t want to.” Currently, there is no nationally agreed system regulating how performers give consent for the use of AI on their image.
Actors will want to be persuaded that the extra pay they receive makes it worthwhile – or they want the right to opt out on a job-by-job basis. The current situation is that actors feel obliged to sign away their rights “in all media” and “in perpetuity”.
Dr Mathilde Pavis, an expert on AI rights and intellectual property, says: “You can’t ask all of this from people without either remuneration or something in return, and at the moment that’s being added on to their contracts without more given in return.” The lack of agreed terms has led to Equity launching a campaign called Stop AI Stealing the Show.
Last week, the union also held rallies in Manchester and London in support of their striking counterparts in the US. When they began a similar scale of dispute in 1980, actors stopped work for three months. Brian Cox, star of Succession, thinks that the strike may last until the end of the year.
Actors are angry that their system of payment has not caught up with the streaming era, with Netflix, Amazon and Disney repeat screening their work while paying little in the way of royalties.
But fear is the stronger emotion here: AI is a new technology that sparks deep and legitimate fears for screen actors. Will they be “replaced by machines” as the union president has said? Unless they can be reassured about their future, American actors will not be returning to the studios soon.
One of just two copies of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), annotated with her handwriting and preparations to revise it for a US edition, was recently rediscovered in the Fisher Library Rare Books Collection at the University of Sydney.
Purchased in the late 1970s, it had been misfiled with the science books in the Rare Books collection. Simon Cooper, a metadata services officer, found it in 2021 and immediately understood the value of his discovery.
The Sydney copy, which is the only one available for the public to view, has now been digitised. It’s available online – allowing scholars and readers to study and consider Woolf’s editorial interventions.
Virginia Woolf’s annotated copy of The Voyage Out is one of two in the world, and the only one publicly available.The University of Sydney/Stefanie Zingsheim, Author provided
The Voyage Out follows Rachel Vinrace and a mismatched collection of characters embarking on her father’s ship to South America. Woolf’s story grapples with self-discovery and satirises Edwardian life.
It almost finished her writing career. She struggled through years of drafts, eventually abandoning the first version in 1912: it was titled Melymbrosia, named after the food of the Greek gods. Woolf’s ideas on colonialism, women’s suffrage and gender relations were considered too dangerous for a first-time novelist.
Over the next three years, she composed the (retitled) novel we have today, published by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth in London in 1915. At this pivotal moment, she began her diary and suffered a significant mental breakdown, losing the rest of the year to illness.
In preparation for the novel’s first US edition, published by George H. Doran in New York in 1920, Woolf carried out a series of revisions to her text. Two copies of the first UK edition of the novel contain the evidence of this process, with Woolf’s handwritten annotations and typed page fragments pasted into each book.
Why revise?
What motivated Woolf to revise her text? She made revisions in the aftermath of her breakdown, and after her literary career was revived with her second novel, Night and Day, published in 1919.
Virginia Woolf(Picture: George Charles Beresford)/Wikimedia Commons
Scholars have suggested she wished to place some distance between her own psychological stresses and the anguish of her primary character, Rachel Vinrace. Both Woolf and her chief protagonist had domineering father figures, had lost their mothers at a relatively young age, and were denied a formal education – instead being schooled at home. Laying out her character’s mental life so starkly caused Woolf some discomfort. A new edition may have provided an opportunity to reconsider.
This is a plausible theory. But does the evidence in Woolf’s corrections bear it out? There are two main places in the text where the majority of changes are indicated: both are pivotal moments in the narrative.
The first set of changes occurs in Chapter XVI, where the conversation between Vinrace and Terence Hewet – the pair occupying the romantic plotline of the novel – is altered to reduce access to Rachel’s inner thoughts. Entire paragraphs are replaced by typed text pasted directly onto the page, where the narrator studies Rachel without the guarantee of understanding her.
This has the effect of diluting some uncomfortable autobiographical elements in the text, but also marks a significant shift in the way narration accesses the minds of characters.
The narrator is bounded by the limits of character itself: the depths of Rachel’s subjectivity are unknown even to her. This bears the mark of modern psychology and Freud’s theory of the unconscious, in the years before and during the composition of the novel.
A modernist revolution
This innovation signals a profound shift in modernist fiction, which began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is characterised by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing.
The unknowability of Woolf’s characters begins with the dark regions of the mind. No longer in the realm of realism, where thoughts and actions are knowable (and often transmitted by an omniscient narrator), instead the narrator provides a portrait of the complex modern person, who responds to the world in ways not fully accountable by reason.
The other significant set of revisions in the Sydney text arise in Chapter XXV, in which Rachel and Terence attempt to navigate the future of their nascent relationship – which also marks Rachel’s descent into fever and her decline, ending in death.
Long passages are marked for deletion (although none were actually deleted in the first US edition). They are largely concerned with Rachel’s fevered consciousness and Terence’s attitudes towards romantic love and its effects on an artistic life.
Woolf again may have wished to put distance between the narrator and the intimate thoughts of her characters, invoking instead a space of ambiguity, where words and gestures are to be interpreted by readers rather than analysed in full light by a knowing narrative consciousness.
Woolf’s first novel straddles the conventions of realism inherited from the 19th century and the new, experimental fiction of the 20th. The Sydney text tells an important part of this story.
It shines a light on Woolf’s developing technique and its evolution into the free indirect style for which she became famous in later novels such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves.
Woolf was at the centre of the revolution in the novel form during the time of modernism. The evidence is there in her annotated copy of The Voyage Out.
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