and Richard Griffiths’ Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933– 39 (1993) together with his Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939–40 (1998). This book tells the story of one of the leading pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic figures, who ended up detained in prison along with Oswald Mosley and who, while there, was much exercised, like the Scottish National Party, by the question of Scottish women being sent to work in England. (Ramsay was a Scottish Conservative MP.) The SNP’s opposition to Scots being conscripted to fight the war against Nazism can be verified in studies, such as Peter Lynch’s The History of the Scottish National Party (Cardiff, 2002).
On the history of British anti-Semitism, I found Anthony Julius’ Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (2010) to be very fair and informative in the sections leading up to 1945, though the post-war sections are, in my view, neither. Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie’s biography Beaverbrook: a Life (1992) convinced me that if there was one outstanding candidate to run a regime such as the one portrayed in this book it was Beaverbrook.
On the subject of mental hospitals in the 1950s – that decade must have been one of the worst in which to be mentally ill, with experimental and sometimes dangerous new treatments introduced and before the radical reforms of the 1960s – I found Diana Gittins’ Madness in Its Place: Narratives of Severalls Hospital 1913–97 (1998) especially helpful, along with Dilys Smith’s Park Prewett Hospital: the History 1898–1984 (1986) and Derek McCarthy’s Certified and Detained: A True Account (2009). Interestingly all three books describe an identical regime, though from widely different points of view. Bartley Green asylum is fictitious but, I think, representative.
The Great Smog of December 1952 was caused by unusual weather conditions over southern England, at a period when London was still belching out tons of coal smoke from homes and power stations (the weather that week was unusually cold) as well as, increasingly, traffic fumes. It was the worst smog in the capital’s history. It is now estimated that 12,000 people died, mostly from respiratory diseases. Atmospheric conditions and pollution levels would have been the same in my alternate universe. In the real world, the government covered up the number who died, but the smog was instrumental in bringing about the Clean Air Act a few years later.
In looking at how a British Resistance Movement might have fought a collaborationist regime, the closest (though not exact) parallel has to be the French Resistance. I found John F. Sweets’ Choices in Vichy France (1994) and Matthew Cobb’s The Resistance (2009) especially helpful.
The United States in this novel is neutral and at peace with Japan, as I believe could have happened if Britain had fallen or surrendered in 1940. This would have strengthened the predominantly Republican isolationist movement in America, which in turn could have led to Roosevelt losing the 1940 Presidential election. If, as in this book, a Democrat was at last again elected in 1952, the most likely candidate would have been the man who lost to Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson. Porter McKeever’s biography, Adlai Stevenson (1989), tells the story of one of history’s narrow losers who, in this book, becomes a winner.
Inevitably, Dominion involved much reading about Nazi Germany. I think the best recent study of the regime is Richard Evans’ three-volume history: The Coming of the Third Reich (2003), The Third Reich in Power (2005) and The Third Reich at War (2008). Toby Thacker’s Joseph Goebbels; Life and Death (2010) was very useful on the man who in my book succeeds Hitler, and on the politics of the regime generally. Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe is an excellent study, not least of the various crazy and murderous Nazi plans for the future of Russia. James Taylor and Warren Shaw’s Dictionary of the Third Reich (1987) was indispensable. Warren Shaw’s son, my friend William Shaw, was one of those who read the book in manuscript; Dominion therefore owes something to two generations of the same family.
Russia’s War (1997) by Richard Overy, the range of whose scholarship on the Second World War is matched only by his readability, is I think the best short account of Germany’s militarily unwinnable war against the Soviet Union. Rodric Braithwaite’s Moscow 1941: a City and Its People at War (2006) is an enthralling account of Germany’s first defeat at the Battle of Moscow. In my alternate universe German forces, are able – with Britain gone from the field – to begin their offensive against Russia earlier and with more troops, and take Moscow, but then become, as I think they inevitably would, bogged down in Russia’s vastness. Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (2011) is an enthralling and important account of the role of food supplies in the winning and losing of the Second World War, again not least in Russia.
On the development of nuclear weapons and rocketry, Michael Neufeld’s Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (2007) and James P. Delgado’s Nuclear Dawn: the Atomic Bomb from the Manhattan Project to the Cold War (2009) were very helpful for a non-scientist. C.P. Snow’s The New Men (1954) is a fascinating novel by a wartime Civil Service insider about Britain’s efforts to manufacture a nuclear bomb.
John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope (1999) is the best of all too many accounts of how the Vatican of Pope Pius XII collaborated with the Nazi regime and its puppets and did next to nothing to stop the Holocaust in Catholic countries, despite the efforts of some courageous local Catholics. I found the story of the extent of the Catholic Church hierarchy’s collaborationist attitude to Nazi and Fascist mass murder shocking enough in the context of the Spanish Civil War: in that of the Second World War it seems an almost indelible stain.
Which brings me, finally, to the tragic story of Slovakia and the Holocaust. The events that Natalia relates to David all happened in Slovakia in the real world, as in the alternate one. A collaborationist, nationalist anti-Semitic regime led by a Catholic priest, Father Tiso, and his second in command, the murderous Fascist Vojtech Tuka, used its own party paramilitaries, the Hlinka Guard, to load Slovak Jews onto the trains which were to carry them to the death camps in the first major deportations of the Holocaust, and also sent troops to fight in Russia. Some Slovak Catholics approved the deportations, others protested so vigorously that the deportations were – though too late for most – suspended. There is a good literature on the subject. Karen Henderson’s Slovakia: the Escape from Invisibility (2002) is a useful introduction to the country’s modern history. Mark W. Axworthy’s Axis Slovakia: Hitler’s Slavic Wedge 1938–45 (2002) tells the story of the Tiso regime. Kathryn Winter’s Katarina (1998), Gerta Vrbova’s Trust and Deceit: a Tale of Survival in Slovakia and Hungary 1939–1945 (2006) and her husband Rudolf Vrba’s I Escaped from Auschwitz (2006) tell the story from the point of view of Slovak Jews. Vrba’s story is one of the most extraordinary memoirs of the Second World War. Finally the papers in Racial Violence Past and Present (Slovak National Museum and Museum of Jewish Culture, Bratislava 2003) are a warning from history to Europe today.
Finally, and more happily, I cannot end without mentioning Robert Harris’ Fatherland (1992) – for me the best alternate history novel ever written.
Historical Note
I was born in 1952, the year in which Dominion is set. My parents met through the wartime naval posting of my father, an English Midlander, to Scotland, my mother’s home. So I am, like many British people of my generation, a child of wartime population movements.
Winston Churchill was Prime Minister when I was born, and throughout my childhood he was a revered figure. By the time I came to political awareness at the start of the 1970s, and abandoned, to their amusement and bemusement, my parents’ Conservatism for the left-wing sympathies I have retained ever since, I found a different view of Churchill in the new circles I moved in. He was, many said, a warmonger, a fanatical imperialist who opposed any progress towards Indian independence, a ferocious anti-Socialist, hammer of the workers in the General Strike of 1926 and sender of troops to shoot down miners at Tonypandy in 1910. All of these accusations are true except, oddly, the last, despite its persistence.1
There were, I think, several Churchills – not surprising for a man whose political career spanned sixty-four years and who spent his life promoting highly original ideas, some crazy, some brilliant. First there was the radical Liberal, on the left of his party, of the years before 1914. Then during and after the Great War appeared the second
