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The City of Coventry The City of Coventry A Twentieth Century Icon ADRIAN SMITH Published in 2006 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan a division of St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2006 Adrian Smith The right of Adrian Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 10: 1 84511 034 X ISBN 13: 978 1 84511 034 5 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall From camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction: Surrealism, Sky Blues, and Specials AKA 9 Chapter 2 Cars, cricket, and Alf Smith: The place of works-based 33 sports and social clubs in the life of mid- century Coventry Chapter 3 ‘Temporary Gentleman’ My father and World War II 48 Chapter 4 Sent to Coventry – reassessing Humphrey Jennings’ 60 Heart of Britain (1941) Chapter 5 The Coventry factor: Philip Larkin and John Hewitt 85 Chapter 6 An oval ball and a broken city: Coventry, its people, 106 and its rugby team, part 1 Chapter 7 An oval ball and a broken city: Coventry, its people, 116 and its rugby team, part 2 1995-98 Chapter 8 “Back, Moody, Kronfeld? We don’t need those lads at 131 Treize Tigers”: sport, counterfactual history, and the twin codes Chapter 9 Coda – remembering the Blitz: Coventry and Southampton 142 over sixty years on Notes 163 Index 197 To schoolboy role models: David Duckham for the Corinthian spirit, and Bob Carlton for the Bohemian 1 INTRODUCTION Surrealism, Sky Blues, and Specials AKA W hile the odd excursion takes the story almost to the present day, this is a book about Coventry in the middle decades of the twentieth century, a uniquely positive period marred only by that pivotal moment in the city’s history, the Blitz. The book was prompted by a mix of authorial ego and filial duty. On the one hand I wanted to unite a set of essays written intermittently over two decades but sharing a common theme; and on the other I needed to acknowledge a passing phenomenon: my parents’ generation, now in their seventies and eighties, or even older, share a keen sense of urban identity and a deep-rooted affection for their city. This much- battered bond between the individual and the wider civic community was cast in the Depression and steeled by war. The postwar years encouraged a deeper sense of achievement and respect, albeit tempered by increasing disappointment and ultimate disillusion. That disillusion was – and is - invariably expressed in terms of regret for a long-lost era of social citizenship and communal solidarity. There never was a golden age in Coventry, but elderly people mourn the passing of a (superficially) more homogenous society rooted in the nuclear family and located in a compact, clearly defined urban landscape. In 1936 my mother, displaying remarkable maturity and self-confidence for a sixteen-year old, left the west coast of Ireland to seek work in Coventry. With scarcely a trace of Galway left in her voice, she constitutes a triumph of cultural assimilation. The fierce pride she feels for her adopted city (clearly distinguishable from the