A Rare Friend

If The Companion to British History' Were the only history book to survive an epochal national catastrophe, things would not be so bad. A future Gibbon seeking to reassemble the pre-apocalyptic British world would find in this gargantuan historical dictionary more than enough to reconstruct a worthy narrative, and subsequent doctoral stu­dents would be able to gather ample specula­tive fodder for many generations of theses. At more than 1,400 pages, 21,000 column inches and 1.4 million words, it may contain more reliable information about British history than any other single volume ever produced. Consequently, it is not hyperbolic to say that looking into the CBH is akin to opening Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia or Isidore of Seville's Etymoligiae; like its epic forebears, Charles Arnold-Baker's book is an awesome storehouse of history.

It is also the product of a particular type of scholar (an amateur) and a particular type of Englishman (a mid-century G erman émigré). Both factors may be causal. Very few academ­ics would be brave enough to stray so very far beyond their immediate expertise. The Companion barely knows boundaries. encompass­ing everything from deep prehistory to the present day - from the laying of Stonehenge's, heel stone in the third millennium BC to, in this third edition, the' Brown government and the Diana inquest of 2008. Between these two extremes it is overwhelmingly comprehensive. Diligence on this scale begins to look obsessive - though in an interview a couple of years ago, Arnold-Baker dismissed the allega­tion, saying with adroit matter-of-factness that all it had been was "a persistent buzzing noise ... brm. brm, brm .... That's the book. It was fun to do".

Such extensive commitment to British history (the first edition took thirty years) could perhaps only come from a natural­ized foreigner. Charles Arnold-Baker was born Wolfgang von Blumenthal in Berlin at the close of Kaiser Wilhelm's reign. but spent his youth at Winchester and Magdalen Col­lege, Oxford. before discarding his name and nationality in the 1930s and becoming a British Officer. A member of Churchill’s bodyguard and a participant in the liberation of Norway he captured the Gestapo archive and used it to arrest, among others, the Deputy Commandant of Auschwitz, Hans Aumeier. before returning to London and a life at the Bar. (His memoirs have been deservedly published as For He is an Englishman, 2007).

As his establishment background might suggest, Arnold-Baker's perspectives in the Companion are often unashamedly (and delightfully) personal. "Political Correct­ness" is thus defined as "the insistence upon something which is not correct except, depend­ing on the point of view. in a political sense", Eurospeak as "suspect linguistic usages in which familiar expressions convey different concepts from those generally understood". and skinheads are noted as having "a loud­mouthed quasi-fascist aura (but without the leadership )".

Not possessing the requisite competence to speak for the veracity of the work as a whole (though taking some succour from the fact that I am not alone in that), I have spent most time with those periods I know best. As is inevitable with undertakings of this size, a few things arc wrong., a few interpretations have been superseded, a few omissions wink (The Battle of Culloden being one). But for each tiny hole which might be picked there are swathes of humblingly precise research that make the Companion a thing of beauty

A large part of its joy lies, of course, in the browsing and in the resultant ability to annoy one's friends with fresh curiosities. For the first time I can claim to have a working know­ledge of the peace congress of Westphalia, of the functions of a pyx, and can discuss with confidence the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi (signed between British forces and forty-six Maori chiefs. ceding sovereignty of New Zealand to the Crown - "it is uncertain how well they understood the document").

Two sadnesses hang over the CBH. Without wishing to cast aspersions on the spriteliness of the author. he is a nonagenarian and one fears that this third edition may be the last to which he is sole contributor. It is. however. to be hoped that his publishers will resist the temptation of posthumous additions and continuations. As with all truly classic work. of reference, the voice should be allowed to remain the author's alone. The fact of this singular voice is the source of further sadness because if the future of reference works lies in collective. online entities, then the Companion is presumably the last great dictionary that will be written alone. It marks the cnd of a tradition arching back to Pliny's Pompeii and beyond. But then, when the apocalypse comes, it is unlikely that web 2.0 and Wikipedia will survive it, though there is a chance that at least one copy of Charles Arnold-baker’s maximum opus might just remain.  Alex Burghart, The Times Literary Supplement, 30th March 2009