Fireside Chat with Phil Craig
Author of “1945: The Reckoning”
Monday 11th May at 18.30 | The Drawing Room and Zoom | £15.00 per person*
*Includes one glass Prosecco
*£10.00 for those joining via Zoom
When we contemplate the uncertainties of the world today, easily forgotten is the historical perspective of other times, such as 1945.
In “1945: The Reckoning: War, Empire and the Struggle for a New World”, Phil Craig considers the landscape back then. When this award-winning television executive, who has worked on the likes of Panorama as well as PBS in America and ABC in Australia, suggests the fate of the world was decided, along with British, Dutch and French empires.
For this Fireside Chat in May, join this former Royal Air Force cadet who, after studying history at Cambridge, worked in television across the world, including overseeing a national commemoration of Anzac Day in 2015, the centenary year. In the Drawing Room, the author will share what was behind him tackling the geopolitical upheaval of 1945, with reverberations of enormous reach and scale, which he maintains were key in defining the world today.
After this, reserve a seat at the Coffee Room table for further discussion over supper with Phil which could both broaden out the evening or dig even deeper into the end of World War 2.
By joining an evening considering “1945”:The Reckoning”, prepare to visit India, where Craig focuses on a generation committed to independence which had to decide whether to support ‘the Raj’ or fight alongside the Japanese. Meanwhile in Borneo, a little-known Australian special forces campaign, secretly controlled from London, went horribly wrong. At the same time, the author maintains that in Indochina and the East Indies, British Generals freed and armed Japanese prisoners of war and used them in savage campaigns that aimed to put colonial rulers back into their palaces.
An evening for some uncomfortable truths featuring potentially as well as a humane and balanced exploration of what victory in the Second World War truly meant.