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Book review of 'Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War' by Peter Barham (3412 words) |
 | Barham notes that this discrimination between middle-class officers and lower-class soldiers was mirrored in the representation of officers as suffering anxiety neuroses expressed through garrulousness, while lower-class ranks suffered traumas in which voices were silenced or distorted. |
| At various points in his narrative Barham refers to the 'feminisation' of society almost interchangeably with that of the impact of 'civilianness' on the military, and employs it as a motive force for the voices calling for concessions and justice from the state and the military. |
| Barham may be using this characterisation in what he believes to be a positive sense, but the attribution of 'sensitivity' and 'empathy' to 'the feminine' and 'control' and 'hierarchy' to 'the masculine' is at best a distraction and at worst unwittingly perpetuates unnecessary divisions between people. |
| HMS Barham (1914) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (715 words) |
| HMS Barham was a Queen Elizabeth-class battleship of the Royal Navy named after Admiral Charles Middleton, 1st Baron Barham, built at the John Brown shipyards in Clydebank, Scotland, and launched in 1914. |
| There is an interesting footnote to this story; At a seance in Portsmouth in late November 1941, Helen Duncan, a Spiritualist medium from Edinburgh, Scotland, announced that she had contacted a dead sailor who had told her that his ship, HMS Barham, had recently been sunk. |
| Helen Duncan was not arrested in the aftermath of the Barham incident but later, when superstitious intelligence officers learned of the event, they feared that Duncan might reveal plans for the D-Day landings. |
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