The Year of the Beaver (1985) - A Review

by Lily Kitchen

“Labour isn’t working” read the Conservative Party slogan for the 1979 general election in which they were ultimately and predictably victorious. This sentiment also underpins The Year of the Beaver, though examined from a very different political perspective. The film documents the 2-year-long Grunwick Strike (neutered by the press as ‘The Grunwick Affair’) from the point of view of those directly involved, and from those supporting the strikers. Its scope is broad, narrating the failures of the Labour Party, the opportunism of the Thatcherites, and the complicity of trade unionists with the government and industry itself.

The documentary is an effective and well-researched oral history of the events, using contemporary news footage, interviews, and articles. As well as being an engaging piece of filmmaking, it fundamentally exists to make sense of the Thatcher era, which it was made in the midst of, but in hindsight helps us to understand the further 7 years of Tory rule after Thatcher’s resignation. This Conservative era reflected 18 years of emerging hyper-capitalism, of factory managers in cahoots with the subservient unions quelling strikes before they got too ‘disruptive’, and of “worker against worker, areas of the country pitted against each other”. Sound familiar?

The Grunwick strikers were seen by many (persuaded by The Sun, The Times, and the TV news) as people who sought “to undermine the British industrial character” at a time of high unemployment and a spiral in the home market. This myth, still touted by the Conservative party and right-wing pundits today, is dispelled elegantly by the filmmakers through their inclusion of the words of many strikers. The majority of them were women from ethnic minorities making less than the national average, processing film at the Grunwick plant. An achingly portentous interview with a miner striking in solidarity states simply “it’s much more effective, stopping the coal.”

The strikers simply sought support and recognition from the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff. The strikers were all struck off from the employ of Grunwick’s while the workers who remained at the plant were given a 15% pay rise if they didn’t attempt to join the union. They experienced police violence and unlawful arrests and ultimately were abandoned by the union, the TUC and by the Labour government.

The Year of the Beaver, though intended to be a polemic on hyper-capitalism, anti-unionism, and the emergence of neo-liberalism in the mid-80s, also acts as a stunning insight into the contemporary Tory party. They too believe that Labour and socialism as a whole cannot and will not work. And like in 1979, far too many are willing to take them at their word.

Image of Man - A Review

by Theo Abbott

In reading George Mosse’s historical tracing of manliness, one gets the impression of an author who appears omniscient of masculinity’s insidiousness and is also personally encumbered by the subject matter at hand. Oppressed both by totalitarianism and, as a gay man, it is no wonder that he has a keen eye for the inner workings of stifling social structures, having been trapped within their labyrinthine chambers for large swathes of his life.

Much like Mosse’s itinerant existence, emigrating from Nazi Germany to Britain and then to the US, The Image of Man charts diverse historical territories, giving an expansive account of modern masculinity’s evolution from the French Revolution onwards. Nevertheless, Mosse intrepidly reverses his first-hand experience of fleeing fascism in this book by guiding us towards the climactic status of modern manliness; a mobilising force in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

Before the climax, Mosse seamlessly escorts us through the annals of modern masculinity in all its disparate manifestations. The evolution begins at the transition from aristocratic to bourgeois society; dissecting the duel and its subsequent abolishment to show how literal mediaeval honour codes were both diluted and zealously reappropriated by the modern zeitgeist. Thanks to the fine balance between facts and theory, there’s nothing particularly taxing about The Image of Man. Nevertheless, Mosse rewards committed readers with little historical gems. Such as Karl Marx’s instigation of a student duel, an indispensable piece of information for seminars and house parties alike.

Mosse explores how the false equivalence between a masculine beauty ideal and moral righteousness came to be. This is followed by a fascinating exposition of the ‘countertype’ to this ideal, which emboldened the oppression of minorities that strayed from the hegemonic standard of being a white male. Burgeoning fin-de-siècle opinions precipitated huge societal shifts in this domain of ideas which Mosse juggles with poise in his succeeding chapter on decadence, masterfully conveying how sexual deviance and nascent scientific discoveries interacted with masculinity. Mosse then takes a detour into the socialist applications of manliness before boomeranging back to fascism, which is most striking in its co-opting of classical imagery in service of hate.

What is most commendable about this history is its steadfast alignment with its stated aim. Mosse prefaces the book with the claim that it is purely ‘concerned with the evolution of a stereotype’ and this principle is stuck to assiduously. Mosse resists narrativization to the point of explicitly noting that the history of this idea lacks ‘dramatic tension’. The Image of Man illuminates a thread of masculinity through modern history so vividly that one can chart when it is frayed and challenged by other social forces, when it is pulled taut and rope-like for the erection of fascist states, and when it is tortuous and tangled, asphyxiating a range of victims with its stifling demands.