BBC History Magazine 2012-10

Britain’s bestselling history magazine

Tudors in America England’s first adventures in the New World

Vol 13, no 10 October 2012

HITLER’S DARK

CHARISMA Why did millions of Germans follow the Nazi leader?

Accompanies Laurence Rees’s major new series

5BIG

QUESTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD

HOW BRITAIN GOT THE BOMB

Did the Victorians

live in sin?

DISABILITY THROUGH HISTORY

Welcome

COVER: ADOLF HITLER, CIRCA 1930: UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE–GETTY IMAGES. BACKGROUND: CROWDS SALUTING GERMANS IN AUSTRIA, 1938: HUGO JAEGER–TIMEPIX–TIME LIFE PICTURES–GETTY IMAGES. THIS PAGE: JENI NOTT/AKG IMAGES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/

OCTOBER 2012

One of the most brilliant but unsettling books I have read in the past few years was Their Darkest Hour by Laurence Rees. It was a collection of interviews that Rees, a BBC filmmaker, had undertaken with those who participated in the bleakest moments of the Second World War. He sat down with perpetrators of some of the conflict’s worst crimes and asked them a simple question: why? Laurence is now asking that question again, this time of the German people in the 1930s. Why did they turn to a leader whose hate-filled ideology would lead their country and much of Europe into ruin? Was it Hitler’s world view that appealed, or did he possess such personal magnetism that people were blinded as to his true motives? See page 18 for Laurence’s article and do let us know what you think of his conclusions. Laurence will be joined by Professor Ashley Jackson for a special joint lecture on the charisma of Hitler and Churchill at the British Academy this month. You can find more information on that on page 85. It’s part of a growing programme of BBC History Magazine events that also includes a First World War day on 4 November (see page 17). This month as well we’re launching our Young Historians’ Podcast Competition. If you’re aged 16–18 and would like to be the next Simon Schama or Amanda Vickery then be sure to take part, as you may get the chance to be broadcast to the world on our weekly podcast. Turn to page 44 for more details. We look forward to receiving your entries. Rob Attar

The story of Tudor England and the New World PAGE 50

Explaining the rise of the Nazi party PAGE 18

How attitudes to disability changed through the ages PAGE 76

When Britain went it alone in the nuclear age PAGE 46

Challenging the cohabitation myth PAGE 40

We explore the latest debates in global history PAGE 30

EDITOR

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Contents

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OCTOBER 2012

FEATURES

18 Hitler’s dark charisma Laurence Rees considers the reasons behind the Nazi party’s surge to power in Germany in the 1930s

26 A new church is born Geza Vermes explains how the early Christian movement departed from its origins at a key meeting in AD 325

30 The five big questions in global history Odd Arne Westad considers global history’s big debates, from human migration to the rise of the west

EVERY MONTH 6

Letters

8

The big picture

10

Milestones: It happened in October

News 12

Breaking news

14

News from the journals

Big Days in History by Dominic Sandbrook Changing Times 39 by Chris Bowlby 28

Book reviews 11 new history books reviewed TV&Radio 71 What’s on this month 59

40 Living in sin? Rebecca Probert reveals that, contrary to popular assumptions, poorer Victorians did not cohabit

76

Where history happened: Disability

84

Ten things to do in October

86

Ye olde travel guide: Dublin in 1000 AD

Miscellany 46 How Britain got the bomb

93

Michael S Goodman tells the story of the country’s first nuclear weapons test, which took place 60 years ago

96

50 Tudors in America David Childs discusses why early English forays into the New World lagged far behind other powers

56 The scandal of female miners Denise Bates reveals how images of topless women working in coal mines shocked the nation in the 1840s 4

Q&A: Your historical questions answered Get more from BBC History Magazine

97

Puzzles

98

My history hero by Paddy Ashdown

36

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Subscribe to our iPad edition today and never miss a best-selling issue of BBC History Magazine. Find our latest subscription offers here. BBC History Magazine Events 17 N 85 N

First World War Day 4 November 2012

Lecture at the British Academy 18 Oct 2012 BBC History Magazine

AKG IMAGES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGES

Out&About

Letters OCTOBER 2012

TH N MO

Rockets in the Hebrides

I read with interest and pleasure your item on rocket mail (Q&A, July). The United States Post Office in 1959 was not however first to try this out. In 1934 a German engineer, Gerhard Zucker, attempted to launch mail in his own rocket from the Hebridean island of Scarp to the larger island of Harris. Sadly, due to fuel problems, the rocket exploded and most of the mail was destroyed. In the 1930s, an amateur group in Scotland, the Paisley Rocketeers started by a John D Stewart, launched many rockets, some with mail inside made of lightweight paper. This group had contacts with American experimenter OK Rumbel of Mission, Texas, who in 1936 launched rocket mail across the Rio Grande from the US to Mexico, forming the ‘First International Rocket Mail’. The Scottish group then launched the ‘First Transatlantic Mail’ by firing rockets across the narrow tidal stretch of the sea at Clachan Bridge, near the town of Oban. This, like the spanning of the Rio Grande, was only a distance of a few metres, but it was the symbolism that was important.

Harry Ford, East Sussex

We reward the writer of the letter of the month with our Pick of the Month book. This issue it is The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I by Stephen Alford. Read the review on page 59

Serious about the Olympics Professor Jefferys stated in Going to the Games (August) that the disputes over the boycotts of 1980 and 1984 “also affected Britain’s place in the Olympic Movement for a generation to come”. This is not true. His belief that these disputes harmed the chances of Britain hosting the Olympics for more than 20 years is also the complete opposite to what actually occurred. The vast majority of the members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) lauded the British Olympic Association (BOA) for attending both Games, particularly those in Moscow when it defied the Conservative government. How could they not? The reason Birmingham (in 1986) and Manchester (in 1990 and 1993) then failed to get the Olympics was not because of those earlier disputes. It was because of 6

the widespread attitude articulated by an IOC member to Craig Reedie, the BOA chairman. After the decision in Monte Carlo to award the 2000 Games to Sydney rather than Manchester, he was told: “We will know you are serious when you come back with London.” The BOA later appointed David Luckes to investigate how the capital could host the Olympics. A plan was drawn up. It got the government on board, thanks to the enlightened support of first Tessa Jowell and then Tony Blair. And the BOA’s enterprise was triumphantly rewarded when the IOC members voted for London against a very strong field in Singapore in 2005. John Goodbody Sports news correspondent for The Times, 1986–2007

Keith Jefferys replies: I agree with John about the importance of Jowell and Blair in helping to

Celebrations in 2005 when London was announced as the host city for the 2012 Olympic Games

secure London’s right to host the 2012 Olympics, but I think the reasons for the failure of the Birmingham and Manchester bids were more varied than he suggests. “Come back with London” was a factor (though one wonders why the IOC allowed three British bids to come forward before making this clear), but so too in my view was the feeling that Thatcher’s government was out of step with international sporting opinion and could not be trusted to provide the necessary political and economic backing to stage the Games. This view was reinforced by issues such as Thatcher’s attitude towards sporting links with Apartheiddominated South Africa. There was, in the words of David Pickup, head of the Sports Council at the time, a belief among international administrators that “Britain was more indifferent than most to the fate of South Africa’s blacks”. One need look no further for an explanation of our poor showing in the votes for the 1996 and 2000 Olympics.

Treason for adultery? I was surprised to see the August Q&A repeat the story that “the official reason for Anne Boleyn’s execution was that she had committed adultery which, in a

royal wife, constituted high treason”. In 1536 adultery was classed as an offence against morality and prosecuting it was exclusively a matter for the church courts. The charge against Anne and her alleged ‘lovers’ was that their courtly badinage demonstrated a wish to see Henry VIII dead and so came under the 1352 statute which made it high treason to imagine the king’s death. Adultery by or with a queen only became high treason six years after Anne, by an addition to the 1542 act of attainder condemning Catherine Howard. Professor Eric Ives Warwick

Tracy Borman replies: Professor Ives is right to point out that Anne and her supposed lovers were charged with high treason because they had “compassed and imagined the king’s death”. However, in Anne’s case, her alleged adultery was the most prominent of the charges made against her, and it receives by far the most attention in the voluminous papers that record her arrest, interrogation and trial. The authors make little or no distinction between this and the crime for which she was officially condemned. The lurid details of his wife’s infidelity were enough to convince BBC History Magazine

REX FEATURES

R TEHE T LE F T O

The opinions expressed by our commentators are their own and may not represent the views of BBC History Magazine or the Immediate Media Company

Read our medieval underwear piece online: TAP As an ex-National Serviceman, I look back at the education brought about by visiting various parts of the world I would not normally have expected to enjoy, learning to contribute to the team of mixed class and ability and, not least, to obey orders without question in a threatening situation. I don’t suppose that National Service would work in the current political climate but I am convinced that I and thousands of others benefited in the 1950s. Mike de Winter Surrey

Don’t ignore Africans

Henry VIII that he had been cuckolded, and his rage and humiliation made him determined to wreak the ultimate revenge. The evidence suggests that he sent for the executioner from Calais before Anne’s trial had even begun. It should also be noted that in royal circles adultery was not just an offence against morality. The 1536 Act of Succession made it treason to “espouse, marry or deflower being unmarried” any of the king’s female relations.

BRIDGEMAN/INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK

The value of National Service I refer to the critique on National Service: From Aldershot to Aden published in your August issue (Reviews) and written by Denis Judd. Although I agree with Judd’s comments that the author, Colin Shindler, wastes too much space on unoriginal introductory material, I am of the opinion that both he and Judd have missed the essential advantages of the National Service experience for the majority of the conscripts, namely the building of teamwork and self-discipline. BBC History Magazine

In the July issue of BBC History Magazine, there was an article titled The Missing Tudors: Black People in 16th-century England by Onyeka, which I found quite riveting and I was really excited that the BBC was covering generally sidelined topics. When our presence as Africans in Britain in the 16th century is continually ignored or written out of history by historians, mainstream television programmes and filmmakers, it shows that we as Africans will never be credited for our contribution to society and that we have no place in Britain. It begs the question, will Africans in Britain today be written out of history in the next centuries to come? The necessity now is to ensure that we have these

The 18th-century writer, composer and actor Ignatius Sancho who played an important role in the abolition movement

TO READ NOW

topics widely discussed and brought to our attention, so that our children are taught about history that includes them. We need more historians like Onyeka to bring these discrepancies to light. Yvonne Apire London

Medieval underpants from Lengberg. Could similar items have been worn in Paris at the time?

Evidence for underpants

It was India’s war too

Thank you for the fascinating article about the 15th-century underwear found at Lengberg (Medieval Lingerie, August). I had read about the use of ‘breast bags’ by German women but never hoped to see one, let alone several! On the question of whether medieval women wore underpants, there is one scrap of evidence from the court record of a rape trial in mid-14th-century Paris. Describing the assault, the 12-year-old plaintiff testified that the accused “la jeta à terre et avala ses braies” – threw her to the ground and pulled down her underpants. This seems to have aroused no special comment, so presumably nobody in the court found anything unusual or morally suspect about this young girl wearing them. Evidently in mid-14th-century Paris it was normal for at least some women to wear underpants at least some of the time. This case from the Registre Criminel de Saint-Martin-desChamps is transcribed in Histoire des Justices des Anciennes Églises et Communautés Monastiques de Paris by Louis Tanon, published in Paris, 1883.The fact that this Parisian girl used the word for male underpants, ‘braies’, suggests that they were either identical to the male garments of the time – which were considerably longer and baggier than the skimpy style illustrated in your article – or at least similar enough to be called by the same name.

Women involved in the Second World War also included women of India. They were the WRINS (Women’s Royal Indian Naval Service), and wore special uniform sarees. Sadly the monument of the seven million women you mention (Where History Happened, September) does not include them, and as such is a very serious omission that has a total disregard for their participation in the war. What is never appreciated is the fact that at the time, India’s enemy was Britain, not Germany, and yet incalculable support came from India – men, money and materials. What was worse was that Britain put freedom fighters in India into prisons while benefiting from Indian support for their own fight for freedom. We are not even a footnote to war history.

Victoria Solt Dennis Gillingham

Dr Kusoom Vadgama London

CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS

E A couple of readers pointed out that the plaque in Wimborne Minster, Dorset which we used to illustrate In Search of the Normans (August) shows King Æthelred I, not Æthelred the Unready.

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BBC History Magazine

The big picture

British work camps Student waiters carry pitchers and teapots at a restaurant run by the Ministry of Labour in Acton, January 1934. They were part of a controversial programme of ‘work camps’ for the unemployed during the Great Depression. Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government introduced ‘Instructional Centres’ in 1929 because ministers were concerned that many men who had been unemployed for long periods were no longer fit for work. Those attending the camps stayed away from home for up to 12 weeks; if they refused to go, their dole money was stopped. Hours were long, the work was hard and the men lived in wooden Nissen huts under military-style discipline. When the programme ended in 1939, a total of about 200,000 men had attended the camps, but it is estimated that fewer than 10 per cent were able to find work when they returned home.

BBC History Magazine

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Milestones Julian Humphrys highlights events that took place in October in history Japanese freighter Lisbon Maru was torpedoed off Shanghai by US submarine Grouper. Unknown to the Grouper’s crew, 1,800 British prisoners of war were aboard. More than 800 either drowned or were shot by the Japanese as they attempted to escape the sinking vessel.

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OCT 1452

The future King Richard III of England was born in Fotheringay Castle in Northamptonshire. He was the youngest surviving child of Richard, Duke of York and Cecily Neville.

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British Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson died at Aldworth House, his family home near Haslemere. He is buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Tennyson was Poet Laureate for 42 years

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Spain, Portugal, Poland and most of Italy adopted the new calendar introduced by Pope Gregory XIII. Although other Catholic countries soon followed suit Protestant states were slower to accept the change, with Britain only switching in 1752.

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OCT 1612

Frederick, Elector Palatine arrived in England to marry Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of James VI and I and Anne of Denmark. Despite her mother’s concerns that she was marrying beneath her station, the pair wed at Whitehall in February 1613.

Pietro Torrigiani's gilt bronze effigies of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York

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OCT 1512

King Henry VIII commissioned Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiani to produce a monument to the royal's parents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, in Westminster Abbey. Torrigiani (who famously broke Michelangelo’s nose in a student brawl) had “to make and worke, or doo to be made and wrought, well, surely, clenly, workemanly, curiously and substancyally, for the sum of £1,500 sterling, a tombe or sepulture of whit marbill and of black touchstone wt. ymags, figures, beasts and other things of cuppure gilt”. For more on tombs and memorials see our quiz on page 97

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Britain detonated its first atomic device in a lagoon off Trimouille Island in the uninhabited Monte Bello Islands off the west coast of Australia. Code named 'Hurricane', the bomb was detonated inside the hull of HMS Plym, an anchored frigate which was almost completely vaporised by the explosion. The decision to carry out the test had been made by Clement Attlee’s Labour government, but by the time the device was actually ready for testing Winston Churchill’s Conservative government was in power.

Operation Hurricane saw the first British atom bomb test, off the coast of Australia

For more on how Britain got the bomb see our feature on page 46

OCT 1892

OCT 1582

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OCT 1952

OCT 1492

A month after leaving the Canary Islands on his first voyage, Christopher Columbus ordered his fleet to change course to follow a large flock of birds. Five days later they sighted land in what is now known as the Bahamas.

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OCT 1912

At a public meeting in the Royal Albert Hall, suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst underlined the Women’s Social and Political Union’s opposition to all political parties, and its intention to continue its attacks on public and private property.

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OCT 1422

Following the death of his grandfather, Charles VI, the 10-month-old Henry VI of England became King of France according to the terms of the Treaty of Troyes. He had succeeded to the English throne two months earlier.

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OCT 1942

With Montgomery’s offensive at El Alamein in its fifth day, the Germans and Italians mounted an armoured counter-attack at Kidney Ridge, but were driven back and sustained heavy tank losses.

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OCT 1952

112 people were killed and 340 injured when two express trains collided at Harrow and Wealdstone station and a third train crashed into the wreckage.

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OCT 1922

The British Broadcasting Company was founded by a group of leading wireless manufacturers. It was funded by a 10-shilling licence fee and made its first broadcast in November from the Marconi studio in The Strand, London.

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OCT 1962

President John F Kennedy appeared on American television to inform the world of the presence of Soviet missiles on Cuba and to publicly demand their withdrawal.

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OCT 1562

Forces loyal to Mary, Queen of Scots under the Earl of Moray defeated a rebellion by George Gordon, Fourth Earl of Huntly at the battle of Corrichie, near Aberdeen. Huntly is said to have died of apoplexy after being captured.

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OCT 1192

King Richard I of England left the Holy Land at the end of the Third Crusade. After bad weather drove him ashore near Venice he was seized by Duke Leopold of Austria, before being handed over to German emperor Henry VI, who ransomed the monarch.

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OCT 1762

HMS Britannia was launched at Portsmouth. A 100-gun first-rate ship of the line, she saw service at the battle of Cape St Vincent and also at Trafalgar, where she was the flagship of Nelson’s third-in-command, the Earl of Northesk.

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OCT 1642

In the first major battle of the English Civil War, the armies of King Charles I and the Earl of Essex clashed at Edgehill in Warwickshire. The battle was largely indecisive although the royalists ended the day in control of the road to London.

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OCT 1562

Churchman George Abbot was born in Guildford, Surrey. Abbot was appointed archbishop of Canterbury in 1611. In 1621 his authority was undermined when he accidentally killed a gamekeeper while hunting.

BBC History Magazine

BRIDGEMAN/ITOPFOTO/ALAMY

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OCT 1942

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Soldier and colonial governor Sir Galbraith Lowry Cole died at Highfield House, Hampshire. He was one of Wellington’s most reliable subordinates during the Peninsular War, but missed the Waterloo campaign because he was on his honeymoon.

For more on murderers see our quiz on page 97

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OCT 732

Traditional date of the battle of Tours when the Franks under Charles Martel defeated an army of the Umayyad Caliphate. Along with campaigns in 736 and 739, Martel’s victory stopped the advance of Muslim forces into western Europe.

ALAMY/BBC/GETTY IMAGES

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OCT 1842

OCT 1872

Militant suffragette Emily Davison was born in Blackheath. In June 1913 she was killed after running out in front of the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby.

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OCT 1812

Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero was born in Piedmont. In 1846 he discovered nitroglycerin when he added glycerol to a mixture of nitric and sulphuric acid. Alarmed by the compound’s explosive nature, he warned vigorously against its use.

Dame Sybil Thorndike as Joan of Arc

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OCT 1882

Pembroke College chapel, Cambridge

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OCT 1962

Nelson Mandela was sentenced to five years imprisonment for inciting workers to strike and for leaving South Africa illegally. Two years later he was jailed for life for sabotage.

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Tony Fasson, Colin Grazier and Tommy Brown from HMS Petard retrieved an Enigma coding machine from a sinking U-boat off Port Said. Fasson and Grazier continued searching the submarine but were drowned when it suddenly sank.

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OCT 1812

An outnumbered force of British regulars, Canadian militia and Native Americans under Major-General Isaac Brock defeated a US attempt to invade Upper Canada at the battle of Queenston Heights. Brock was killed in the fighting.

Tea finally came off the ration in 1952

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OCT 1322

The Scots under Robert Bruce routed the English at the battle of Byland in North Yorkshire. Edward II was forced to make a hurried escape, leaving his personal baggage behind.

STORY by James McQueen

Monthly highlights from the archives of the BBC, which has informed, educated and entertained since 1922

British actress Dame Sybil Thorndike was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. She became a friend of George Bernard Shaw, who wrote his play Saint Joan with her specifically in mind.

OCT 1942

Tea rationing ended in Britain. Restrictions had been in force since January 1940 but a buying rush was not anticipated as the ration had already reached the prewar consumption level of three ounces per week.

THE

OCT 1632

Architect, mathematician and astronomer Christopher Wren was born in East Knowle in Wiltshire. Evidence of his prodigious talent can be seen in the fact that before taking a degree at Wadham College, Oxford, he had already designed an air pump, an instrument for writing in the dark, numerous astronomical devices and a beehive. At the age of only 25 he was appointed professor of astronomy at Gresham College, London. Four years later, he became Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford. The first building he designed was a chapel for Pembroke College, Cambridge.

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OCT 1952

OCT 1922

After taking the oath of allegiance to King Victor Emmanuel III in Rome’s Quirinal Palace, Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini took up office as the 27th prime minister of Italy.

The illustrator and writer John Ryan, creator of Captain Pugwash. The sailor made his bow in a cartoon strip in the Eagle comic

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OCT 1957

The first episode of Captain Pugwash aired on this day. The animation was written, illustrated and produced by John Ryan. The bumbling sailor was brought to life by Peter Hawkins, who provided all the voices. Captain Horatio Pugwash was skipper of the Black Pig. His crew were Tom the cabin boy, pirates Barnabas and Willy, and Master Mate. His arch-enemy was Cut-Throat Jake. Pugwash’s greed and cowardice were forever

getting him in trouble, but Tom always rescued him. In 1991 Ryan successfully sued The Guardian and Sunday Correspondent, which had repeated the unfounded myth that the names of the crew contained sexual innuendoes, and that the programme had been taken off the air for that reason. Captain Pugwash ran from 1957 to 1966, and was revived in both 1974 and 1997. Ryan, who also created Mary, Mungo and Midge and Sir Prancelot, died in 2009.

For more great moments, see www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc BBC History Magazine

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OCTOBER

THE BIG STORY

A detail from the Catalan Atlas, created by 14th-century cartographer Abraham Cresques, reflects the importance of the Mali empire. The figure on the right is Musa I, who reigned from c1312–37

Lost African city starts to yield secrets

T

HE LONG-LOST metropolis at the heart of west Africa’s biggest-ever empire has been discovered by a British archaeologist. Investigations 200 miles south of the Sahara have revealed the existence of a vast city, which appears to have had a population

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of approximately 50,000 people and to have covered an area of 90 hectares. Researchers, led by Professor Kevin MacDonald of University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, believe that the archaeological site known as Sorotomo was probably the major

political centre and de facto capital of the Mali empire at some stage in the 13th and 14th centuries – during the height of its power. “The discovery of Sorotomo is significant because it at last reveals, in tangible form, the sheer scale and sophistication of the

medieval empire of Mali,” said Professor MacDonald. “The Mali empire wasn’t just important from an African historical perspective. It was the principal supplier of gold to the Mediterranean/Europe – and thus played a key role in underpinning the medieval BBC History Magazine

BRIDGEMAN

Once, Sorotomo was a vast metropolis, a political centre of the Mali empire. Later, the city was abandoned in the wake of a violent attack. David Keys reports on its rediscovery and new excavations

ONLINE

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SLIDE SHOW

world’s economic system.” It’s estimated that between the 13th and 16th centuries, the empire supplied the Christian and Islamic powers with more than 1,000 tonnes of solid gold. The lost city is being compared to Pompeii in some respects because everything has been preserved exactly as it was in its final hours. A layer of burnt material and scattered human bone has been found – evidence suggesting that it was attacked by the Mali empire’s nemesis, the emerging Songhai empire. The population either fled, was massacred or was enslaved. Much of what people owned was simply abandoned. So far, only a fraction of the city has been excavated, but already the archaeologists have been able to piece together a snapshot of what life there was like. Finds so far include dozens of medieval cooking and storage pots, grinding stones, spindlewhorls for making textiles, jewellery and cowrie shells (used as money in the Mali empire). Plant remains indicate that cotton was widely grown nearby and processed in the city, while animal bones reveal the presence of horses, as well as cattle, sheep and goats. It appears the metropolis consisted of a central core (72 hectares) plus a number of satellite suburbs and other building complexes, which covered a further 18 hectares. The Mali empire was the In the late 19th century, explorer Louis Gustave Binger searched for Mali’s imperial capital

BBC History Magazine

ROMAN BRITAIN

Northern conflict A REMARKABLE complex of Iron Age and Roman remains in south-west Scotland may have been the site of a battle in the second century AD. For the past 33 years – since details of the excavation of the site, Burnswark in Dumfries and Galloway, were published – most academics have thought the two camps there were built by the Roman army as part of a training exercise. But some archaeologists are now questioning whether this is what actually happened, says one of the world’s leading experts on Roman siege warfare, Dr Gwyn Davies of Florida International University. Dr Davies, who was until recently a rare voice casting doubt on the ‘training exercise’ interpretation, told BBC History Magazine that he is increasingly confident that the two Roman camps were probably built as siege works

second and largest of a series of three great medieval empires that rose and fell in the west African grasslands, between the southern fringes of the Sahara and the coastal forests. It was the major political force in west Africa for more than 200 years (1235–1460) and continued in a much reduced state until the early 18th century. At its peak, the empire consisted of 450,000 square miles of territory – almost nine times the size of England – and stretched 1,000 miles from east to west. It was sophisticated yet adaptive and decentralised, usually retaining at least some of the administrative structures of conquered peoples. Some 14 provinces were divided up into scores of counties and hundreds of local districts. The population at this time

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during a littleknown war in northern Britain in the AD 150s. The camps are adjacent to an Iron Age British hillfort. “In my view, the An aerial view showing Roman fact that two military earthworks at Burnswark camps, not one, in Dumfries and Galloway were built; the massive nature of their defences, provided with 150s at a time when Britain three huge catapult platforms; appears to have been plagued the fact that valuable catapult by serious security problems. ordnance, transported there from This is evidenced by a Roman many miles away, was abandoned coin from 155, which shows on site; and the realisation that Britannia weeping. there was conflict in northern Dr Davies believes that Britain in the mid-second an abandoned hillfort at century, all suggest, on balance, Burnswark was being used as that this was a real battle site, not a mustering point for British a training exercise,” said Davies. tribes preparing to attack Archaeological evidence from Hadrian’s Wall, but that Roman the site suggests the siege works forces surrounded them. Two were erected sometime after the camps, the platforms for the original Roman expansion into giant catapults and possibly Scotland under Governor some additional siege works Agricola in the late AD 80s. were built. Hadrian’s Wall was then built According to Dr Davies, in the 120s with the Antonine the evidence suggests the Wall, 70 miles further north, hillfort was then taken being constructed in the 140s. following a heavy barrage from However, this latter wall was the Roman artillery. abandoned in the mid-to-late David Keys

was of many millions. The empire maintained a professional standing army of 100,000 men, including 10,000 cavalrymen. Armed with bows, poisoned javelins and stabbing spears – and swords and lances for the cavalry – the military ensured the

for staples, ‘harmony-inducing’ regulation of relationships between social groups and basic legal rights for slaves. In a sense, the discovery of the lost city is the culmination of a 120-year long quest. That’s because the search for the site of Mali’s early capital began in the 19th century with an expedition led by a French military officer, Captain Louis Binger. Kevin MacDonald’s team is carrying out the research into Sorotomo in conjunction with Seydou Camara of Mali’s Institute of Human Sciences and Daouda Keita of the University of Bamako. The archaeological and historical investigations, including excavations and oral history research, are expected to continue for several years.

The lost city is being compared to Pompeii. It’s been preserved as it was in its final hours empire’s expansion and survival. Its economy thrived on exporting three major commodities to the Mediterranean/European world: gold, salt and slaves. The emperors, or mansas, introduced radical economic and social reforms, including price control

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News from the journals

The morning after a bombing raid on Coventry, 1940. The city would become a focus for criticism of postwar planners

Nige Tassell brings you the best stories from academic periodicals POSTWAR

Rebuilding Britain, poorly

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HERE ARE few who would regard the rebuilding of Britain’s shelled towns and cities in the immediate postwar period as the zenith of the nation’s architectural history. Its critics have the architects and planners in their sights, deeming the reconstruction both ugly and ‘un-British’. This criticism resonated for decades. In her 1987 speech to the Conservative party conference, Margaret Thatcher continued to blame the rebuilding programme for many of society’s ills, denouncing planners who’d “cut the heart out of our cities… They simply set the municipal bulldozer to work.” But, as Catherine Flinn reveals in “The City of our Dreams? The Political and Economic Realities of Rebuilding Britain’s Blitzed Cities, 1945–54” (20th Century British History, vol 23, no 2, OUP), to lay the blame exclusively at the door of architects and planners fails to acknowledge the tangled economic and political context in which they operated. They didn’t have carte blanche to ‘re-imagine’ Britain’s urban areas however they

saw fit. Instead, their decisions were subject to the myriad exigencies facing a damaged country close to bankruptcy. German bombers had seriously dented the British economy, destroying 75,000 shops, 25,000 factories and 42,000 other commercial properties, leaving the coffers of local authorities severely weakened. As Flinn rhetorically asks: “How could a city pay to rebuild its infrastructure when it also had significantly less income because

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of the loss of rates from shops, offices, and even homes?” Even if a local authority could bankroll a major building programme, there were issues around materials and labour. With central government needing to raise exports to repair a perilous balance of payments deficit, steel for domestic use was in short supply. As was labour. Unemployment, recorded at nine per cent in 1939, had fallen to two

effectively denying the building industry – in the words of housing minister Aneurin Bevan – “the right to build luxury buildings while people are needing houses”. These controls formed what Flinn describes as “the most sweeping planning legislation in British history”. Also implemented was the Investment Programmes Committee, a cabinet-level group

overseeing investment in buildings and infrastructure. But, as the subsequent release of public documents has shown, regeneration was a low priority for the IPC under the postwar governments of both Labour’s Clement Attlee and Conservative Winston Churchill. At worst, the proportion of the nation’s capital investment directed towards rebuilding blitzed cities was less than 0.1 per cent. The IPC was dismantled in 1953, with building controls relaxed in 1954. This attracted property developers keen to work with local authorities and it was these partnerships that accelerated the previously stalled regeneration – the victim of economic prioritising and political inertia. “Without private developers,” Flinn concludes, “the actual rebuilding of the worst of the wardamaged areas of Britain would have been far, far slower.”

recurrent infections – wasn’t just a concern for the medical profession. This behaviour, as Trevor Burnard and Richard Follett illuminate in “Caribbean Slavery, British AntiSlavery, and the Cultural Politics of Venereal Disease” (The Historical Journal, vol 55, No 2, CUP),

struck deep into the core of the British empire. At this time – and in the following decades of the antislavery movement – advocates of humanitarian reform baulked at the antics of their compatriots in the tropics. These campaigners promoted the virtues and value of settled communities in the empire’s far-flung reaches; slaveholders, with their despotic ways and harems of enslaved black concubines, were pulling in the opposite direction. Indeed, as Burnard and Follett reason, “the fast-living, sallow-faced gluttonous West Indian planter whose major vice was illicit sex with allegedly promiscuous black women was the

obverse of what an ideal Englishman ought to be”. Thus the sexual behaviour of planters became a central plank of the abolitionist argument, mobilising the support of humanitarians and evangelists alike. Venereal complaints – previously seen as mere infections, quickly dealt with by physicians like Thomas Thistlewood’s – now wore the label of ‘disease’, perceived as representing something much graver. Venereal disease, the ‘reward’ of unconfined sexual behaviour, became a symbol of colonial excess, one that needed to be erased for the success of the imperial project.

per cent in 1947. Furthermore, this labour force was only 70 per cent of its prewar level. This situation led to ‘labour rationing’. With nearly half a million domestic dwellings destroyed or made uninhabitable by the Luftwaffe, homes needed to be built. Accordingly, building controls were introduced,

Architects didn’t have carte blanche to ‘re-imagine’ Britain’s urban areas

The sex taint of slave owners AS A SLAVE-HOLDER in 18th-century Jamaica, Thomas Thistlewood led an energetic – but not wholly atypical – sexual life. His diaries confide that, between 1751 and 1764, he had intercourse 1,774 times with 109 black woman and two white women. But there was a downside to this prodigiousness: Thistlewood was a frequent visitor to his doctor for treatment for gonorrhoea and syphilis. But the sexual mores of white British slave-owners – and their 14

African slaves in the 18th century

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The focus of attention Hitler speaks and the people listen at the Brown House, Munich, c1930. “His calculations about… how to best manipulate the emotions of ordinary Germans were extremely sophisticated,” says Laurence Rees

I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the Earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the Earth Leni Riefenstahl, director of the propaganda film Triumph of the Will, describes hearing Hitler speak 18

BBC History Magazine

The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler

Accompanies the BBC Two series

THE DARK

CHARISMA OF ADOLF HITLER Adolf Hitler was far more than the frenzied madman of popular perception, argues Laurence Rees. Here was a charismatic politician, brilliant at articulating the fears and desires of the people

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TOP FOR a moment and imagine Adolf Hitler. Picture him in your mind. Who do you see? I imagine you see a figure not unlike the portrayal of Hitler in the film Downfall. A shouting, aggressive, unhinged character. Bruno Ganz, who played Hitler in Downfall, shook and screamed so much that one key scene from the movie has become an internet phenomenon, with comical subtitles on a host of subjects being set to Ganz’s incredible ranting. But while it’s true that in his last days Hitler was at times scarcely rational, it’s not representative of the whole history. Moreover, the trouble is that this image plays into a deep desire I think most of us secretly possess. We want Hitler to have been a lunatic from start to finish. We want Hitler to be mad because it makes the monstrous crimes he committed – particularly during the Second World War – easy to explain. It’s simple, we can tell ourselves comfortably, Hitler was a madman who somehow hypnotised millions of ordinary Germans to do things against 19

I had never seen the man before, and there I sat, an unknown among unknowns. I saw this man shortly before midnight, after he had spoken for three hours, drenched in perspiration, radiant. My neighbour said he thought he saw a halo around his head, and I experienced something which transcended the commonplace Julius Streicher, publisher of the anti-Semitic magazine Der Stürmer, who heard Hitler speak in the early 1920s. He was executed for war crimes in 1946

their better judgment. Well, he wasn’t a madman, and he hypnotised no one. Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933 by democratic means. A large number of the German elite – sharp, clever people – decided to back him. Why would they support a lunatic? And the way Hitler conducted himself between 1930 and 1933 demonstrated that he was an astute – but wholly unscrupulous – politician. His calculations about where power really lay in Germany and how to best manipulate the emotions of ordinary Germans were extremely sophisticated.

Democratic gains In addition, Hitler generated enormous – and genuine – support. His views very often matched those of huge numbers of the German population. That’s something incomprehensible if we take at face value the portrayal of Hitler as a screaming nightmare. I’ve been making documentary films and writing books about the Nazis and the Second World War for 20 years now and have met hundreds of people who lived through this period – including many who dealt personally with Adolf Hitler. And the picture they paint of the 20

führer is a much more complex and nuanced one than the dribbling lunatic of Downfall. In particular, many talk of the incredible ‘charisma’ that they felt Hitler possessed. Fridolin von Spaun, for example, met Hitler at a dinner for Nazi supporters in the early 1930s. As Spaun saw Hitler staring at him he felt as if Hitler’s eyes looked directly into his innermost thoughts. And when Hitler held on to the back of von Spaun’s chair, Spaun felt “a trembling from his fingers penetrating me. I actually felt it. But not a nervous trembling. Rather I felt: this man, this body, is only the tool for implementing a big, all-powerful will here on Earth. That’s a miracle in my view.” As for Emil Klein, who heard Hitler speak at a beer hall in Munich in the 1920s, he believes that Hitler “gave off such a charisma that people believed whatever he said”. What we learn from eye-witnesses like von Spaun and Klein is that charisma is first and foremost about making a connection between people. No one can be charismatic alone on a desert island. Charisma is formed in a relationship. As Sir Nevile Henderson, British ambassador to Berlin in the 1930s, wrote, Hitler “owed his success in

SCHERL–SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO - BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/ AKG IMAGES

Hitler in 1921. He didn’t hypnotise the German people, says Laurence Rees – millions of them shared his views

BBC History Magazine

Accompanies the BBC Two series

The great orator

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On the day of the Reichstag elections of 1930 Hitler speaks to a Nazi party rally backed by a military band

the struggle for power to the fact that he was the reflection of their [ie his supporters’] subconscious mind, and his ability to express in words what that subconscious mind felt that it wanted.” It’s a view confirmed by Konrad Heiden, who heard Hitler speak many times in the 1920s: “His speeches are daydreams of this mass soul… The speeches begin always with deep pessimism and end in overjoyed redemption, a triumphant happy ending; often they can be refuted by reason, but they follow the far mightier logic of the subconscious, which no refutation can touch… Hitler has given speech to the speechless terror of the modern mass…” People like von Spaun and Emil Klein were predisposed to find Hitler charismatic because they already believed in large amounts of the policies that Hitler advocated. So did Albert Speer, who first attended a Hitler meeting in the early 1930s: “I was carried away on the wave of the enthusiasm which, one could almost feel this physically, bore the speaker along from sentence to sentence… Finally, Hitler no longer seemed to be speaking to convince; rather, he seemed to feel that he was expressing what the BBC History Magazine

audience, by now transformed into a single mass, expected of him.” But if you didn’t believe in the policies Hitler proselytised then he exercised no charismatic power at all. Josef Felder, for instance, was appalled when he listened to Hitler’s outpouring of hatred against the Jews: “When I left that meeting, we would get together and talk in groups. And I said to my friend, ‘After that speech, my impression is, that this man, Hitler will hopefully never come to political power’. We were agreed on that then.” And Herbert Richter, a veteran of the First World War, came across Hitler in a café in Munich and “immediately disliked him” because of his “scratchy voice” and his tendency to “shout” out “really, really simple” political ideas. Richter also thought Hitler’s appearance “rather comical, with his funny little moustache” and that he was “creepy” and “wasn’t quite normal”. However, if Hitler did make a connection with his audience, then he built on that bond in a number of other ways to consolidate this charismatic link. Crucially, Hitler was always certain in his judgements. He never expressed doubt about anything to his audience. He knew the problems Germany faced and he said he knew the solutions. In addition he presented himself as a heroic figure – a simple, brave soldier from the First World War – who wanted his supporters to have ‘faith’ in him. As a result, some Nazi supporters even drew blasphemous comparisons between Hitler and Jesus – both had been 30 when they started ‘preaching’ and both sought the ‘salvation’ of their people.

The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler

Pursuing power ABOVE: Hitler became chancellor under President Paul von Hindenburg (pictured left) in 1933 RIGHT: Franz von Papen, a former chancellor himself, believed that the Nazi leader could be controlled if made chancellor

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Going nowhere But in 1928, nine years after Hitler first became involved with the German Workers’ Party – subsequently the National Socialist German Workers’ party, or Nazis for short – and seven years after he became party leader, it seemed as if the Nazi party was going nowhere in German politics. In the 1928 election the Nazis polled just 2.6 per cent of the vote – so more than 97 per cent of the German electorate rejected any charismatic power Hitler may have possessed. It was clear that unless Hitler could make a connection with the mass of Germans, then he could not succeed. It took the Wall Street Crash and the dire economic crisis of the early 1930s to make millions of Germans

An election poster from 1932 which states: “Women! Millions of men out of work. Millions of children without future. Save the German family – vote for Adolf Hitler!”

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10 November 1933. Political parties had been banned earlier that year and trade unions abolished

responsive to Hitler’s appeal. Suddenly, to people like student Jutta Ruediger, Hitler’s call for a national resurgence made him seem like “the bringer of salvation”. So much so that by 1932 the Nazis were suddenly the biggest political party in Germany. But then Hitler and the Nazis seemed to hit a

Gustav Stresemann, who, when German chancellor, refused to deal with Hitler and the Nazi party

brick wall – in the shape of President Hindenburg. State Secretary Otto Meissner reported that Hindenburg said to Hitler on 13 August 1932: “He [ie Hindenburg] could not justify before God, before his conscience or before the Fatherland, the transfer of the whole authority of government to a

I was often together with Stresemann, the foreign minister at the time. A liberal, a right-wing liberal. I remember very well. It was Whitsun 1929. One evening Stresemann started talking about Hitler and said, ‘He is the most dangerous man in Germany. He possesses a devilish rhetoric. He has an instinct for mass psychology like no one else. When I retire, I will travel through Germany and get rid of this man’. There were also a few men from the foreign office there. We didn’t understand Stresemann. We said, ‘This little party? Let the guy shout.’ Theodor Eschenburg, German writer. Stresemann died in October 1929, just days before the Wall Street Crash

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Mystical messiah But while Hitler’s followers continued to bask in his magnetism, the chancellor of Germany, Franz von Papen, found it hard to see what all the fuss was about. Von Papen recognised in a statement he made in Munich in October 1932 that Hitler was not like a “normal” politician, and the Nazi movement not a “normal” political party. He referred to the Nazi party as “a political religion” whose followers professed a “mystical messiah faith” in Hitler. But while von Papen acknowledged that millions of Germans now recognised Hitler as a “mystical messiah”, he himself was immune to Hitler’s charisma. When he first met Hitler, in the summer of 1932, he found him “curiously unimpressive”. Hitler was not from the “officer” class, and seemed to von Papen to be the “complete petit bourgeois” with his “little moustache and curious hair style”. Equally dismissive was President Hindenburg, who referred to Hitler as a “Bohemian corporal”. Then, in the November 1932 election the Nazis saw their share of the vote drop by 4 per cent to 33 per cent while the Communist party increased its share by two million votes. It looked like support for the Nazis had peaked. BBC History Magazine

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Meeting the workers Hitler does the classic politician’s ‘press the flesh’ in Berlin on

single party, especially to a party that was biased against people who had different views from their own.” In this crucial period between Hindenburg’s rejection of Hitler’s bid for the chancellorship of Germany, and his final appointment as chancellor in January 1933, two different perceptions of Hitler’s charisma came together – and in the process revealed a very different side to Hitler the politician than the slavering incompetent of Downfall. Hitler, during these months, had never been more impressive to devoted followers like Joseph Goebbels. On 13 August 1932, Hitler discussed the consequences of Hindenburg’s rejection with his Nazi colleagues. “Hitler holds his nerve,” recorded Goebbels in his diary. “He stands above the machinations. So I love him.” Hitler exuded confidence that all would come right, saying in December 1932 that he still intended to wait until he was offered the chancellorship. He promised, “that day will come – it is probably nearer than we think”. Success depended on “our unity and on our unshakable faith in victory; it depends on our leadership”.

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Accompanies the BBC Two series

But the German elite were more concerned about the dangers of communism than Nazism. Without the Nazis participating in some way in an authoritarian government that would willingly deal with the dangers of Communism there would be no popular mandate for change. President Hindenburg still found Hitler unimpressive, yet he now began to think of him as a possible chancellor. And the reasons why he started to change his mind were purely pragmatic. The most important was von Papen’s offer to be vice chancellor. He offered to serve as vice chancellor to Hitler’s chancellor in a cabinet in which only a minority of posts were to be given to Nazis. Then there was Hindenburg’s age – he was 85 in December 1932 (and would die 18 months later). “He felt his age,” said Josef Felder, who was elected as a Socialist member of the Reichstag in 1932. “And he realised that he was becoming physically weaker, very much weaker. He could barely carry his marshal’s baton any more.” Hindenburg’s son, Oskar, also supported the idea of Hitler as chancellor and Von Papen as vicechancellor, and he certainly influenced

The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler

He showed a way, the only way left to all ruined peoples in history, that of the grim new beginning from the most profound depths through courage, faith, readiness for action, hard work, and devotion, a great, shining, common goal…. Hans Frank, who heard Hitler speak in 1920 and later became a leading Nazi. He was executed for war crimes in 1946

his father. Then came Hitler’s masterstroke. Almost more than anyone, he understood the importance of timing in all political decisions, and he now ordered the Nazis to commit a vast – seemingly disproportionate – effort in state elections to be held in the tiny district of Lippe-Detmold on 15 January 1933. The tactic worked. When the results were announced, the Nazi vote had increased by around 20 per cent – from 33,000 to 39,000. The Nazis, it appeared, were still capable of increasing their support. On the afternoon of Sunday, 29 January 1933, Hindenburg agreed to appoint Hitler as chancellor, with von

Papen as vice chancellor, and both assumed office the next day. Joseph Felder remembered that “we believed we could still control him [ie Hitler] through parliament – total lunacy”. As for Hitler supporters like Reinhard Spitzy, this moment signalled the end of democracy in Germany. Something that he was pleased to see. “I have never myself been a democrat,” said Spitzy. “I believe a country should be ruled like a big company. That means a certain council of specialists and so on, but I didn’t believe in the role of parliament. When we had such a terrible crisis, like an economic crisis, and hunger and unemployment, and in such a moment, we were longing for

Concentration camps The brutal and repressive nature of Hitler’s policies was clear from the first. These political prisoners were imprisoned in one of Germany’s first concentration camps in 1933. These camps were violent in the extreme and a number of prisoners were murdered – though the mass extermination of the Holocaust was still to come

BBC History Magazine

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The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler

Accompanies the BBC Two series

Man of the people Hitler pictured at his mountain retreat of Obersalzberg in 1935. Such was his popularity that some supporters compared him to Jesus

The commonest little dog I have ever seen Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain describes Hitler in a letter to his sister, 1938

Bruno Ganz’s performance as a ranting, unhinged Hitler in Downfall would eventually create a comedy internet meme

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and they had been wrong. They trusted him now. When he asked them to have faith once again, then they would listen. As for von Papen, he would shortly discover that he had made one of the most spectacular political misjudgments in history. (After being marginalised, he resigned his post and was made ambassador to Austria). We learn a number of important things, I think, from the story of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany in January 1933. We discover that Hitler could be an instinctive and extremely powerful politician – light years away from the broken and crazed man portrayed in Downfall. Above all, we can see the power of the situation to change perception. Hitler was dismissed as a peripheral figure in 1928, yet lauded by millions in 1933. What changed was not Hitler but the situation. Economic catastrophe made huge numbers of Germans seek a charismatic ‘saviour’. As we see economic events unfold in Europe today, it’s scarcely possible to imagine a greater warning from history than that.

Laurence Rees is an acclaimed historian and filmmaker. In 2006 he won the British Book Award for history book of the year for Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’. His television awards include a BAFTA and a Broadcasting Press Guild Award. His latest BBC TV series and book is The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler JOURNEYS

Books

E The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler: Leading Millions into the Abyss by Laurence Rees (Ebury Press, 2012)

Website

E Visit Laurence Rees’s award-winning multimedia website WW2History.com

TV

E The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler by Laurence Rees is due to be shown on BBC Two in the autumn Hitler or Churchill: Who Had More Charisma? Laurence Rees and Ashley Jackson will be discussing this question as part of the BBC History Magazine Lecture series. For more details, turn to page 85

BBC History Magazine TAP HERE FOR HISTORY TV ON DEMAND

SEPP SPIEGL–SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO - BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/KOBAL COLLECTION

a new general director, like what happens in a big company. You find a man, and he has to bring the whole thing in order.” For Hitler’s supporters this was the strongest proof yet of his power as a charismatic leader. When it had looked impossible that he would become chancellor he had asked them to have faith. And now he was chancellor. In the future, when they might doubt him, many would look back to this moment and remember that he had been right

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A new church is born World-renowned biblical historian Geza Vermes’s latest book centres on a pivotal moment in the history of Christianity. He talks to Rob Attar about how the ‘Jesus movement’ grew into a ‘dogmatic’ religion under Roman control

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N THE TOWN of Nicaea, on the shores of what is now lake Iznik in the northwest of Turkey, a council was held in AD 325 that decided the path for Christianity. It was convened by the Roman emperor Constantine to settle a question that was threatening to split the Christian world at the time: what was the relationship of Jesus to God? The row had been brewing for seven years, since a priest in Alexandria named Arius had promoted a doctrine whereby Jesus was stated to be non-eternal and generated by God. This challenged the beliefs of the local bishop, Alexander, who vaguely saw Jesus as being derived from eternity and of a similar nature to God. Two rival theological camps emerged and the dispute seemed intractable. None of this was music to the ears of Constantine, who was sympathetic to Christianity but not yet a member of the faith (he was only baptised on his deathbed). The emperor’s chief wish was for the large number of Christians living within his realm to coexist peacefully and not spend their time squabbling over what he called “small and very insignificant questions”. At the council of some 200 bishops, Alexander’s faction skilfully handled proceedings and emerged victorious over Arius’s supporters. In fact, the final resolution went even further than Alexander had before, declaring Jesus to be consubstantial with the father – equal and equally eternal to God. Desirous to see the matter ended, Constantine used his not insignificant authority to ensure the vast majority of those assembled endorsed the new

creed. For biblical historian Geza Vermes, this was a decisive moment in the development of the faith, a fundamental break with the origins of the Jesus movement.

A prophet or a god? Vermes’s exploration of these events begins three centuries earlier with the flesh-and-blood Jesus. Did such a man really exist? “I would say it is much more likely that he did than he didn’t,” says Vermes. “To believe that he had been imagined or invented is a much harder task than to rely on the available evidence, which is obviously not as clear-cut as one would like, but is sufficiently good to say that somebody by the name of Jesus existed around the time when Pontius Pilate was

governor of Judea in the first century AD.” Through his reading of the gospels, with the added context of contemporary Jewish writings, Vermes paints a picture of Jesus as “a charismatic prophet”, preaching in Galilee about the imminent arrival of ‘the kingdom of God’. At this time

An AD 500 portrayal of Christ from the Commodilla catacombs in Rome

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Early Christianity

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Jesus’s message was transmitted solely to Palestinian Jews, and not yet to the world at large. Jesus was killed before he could introduce his followers to this kingdom of God, but the impact he had made on those around him ensured that his message was kept alive by a small group of supporters. “It was a little Jewish subset,” Vermes explains, “which had the special peculiarity that they believed Jesus of Nazareth was the crucified, risen and glorified messiah whose return would come very soon.” The group continued to act as Jews, evidenced by the fact that they visited the Jewish temple, which only those of the Jewish faith were permitted to enter. Outside the Holy Land, however, non-Jews began to be drawn to the fledgling movement, largely through the efforts of St Paul, who spread the word in places such as Turkey and Asia Minor. In AD 49, at a meeting in Jerusalem, the apostles decreed that non-Jews could join the faith without having to take on all the laws of Moses. This angered traditionalists, but made conversion to the new religion simpler for those in the wider Greco-Roman world. Soon a divide grew between Jewish and non-Jewish members. A major bone of contention was the figure of Jesus.

Until 325 there was not one single teacher who dared assert Jesus was equal to the father

The divine Jesus

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For the early Jewish Christians, Jesus was a messenger, but it was God the father who remained the central figure of the faith. However, when Paul proselytised among pagan audiences outside Palestine, he placed a greater emphasis on Jesus himself, until gradually the messenger began to be seen as divine – and Jewish Christians became marginalised. “Church fathers considered the Jewish Christians to be heretics because they did not believe in the divinity of Jesus,” says Vermes. “They continued to exist in little pockets for the following two or three centuries, but gradually petered out, either joining the church or reverting to Judaism. As St Jerome later said, by wanting to be both Jews and Christians, they failed to be either.”

A 15th-century Russian icon shows Emperor Constantine at the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325

While Jewish membership of the Jesus movement declined, the early church moved further away from its origins and a rift developed between the two faiths. Some Christians began to denounce the Jewish religion. One of the most extreme was the writer Barnabas, who declared in the early second century that Jews had never been the chosen people. Instead, he claimed, only Christians were. Now separate from Judaism, the Christians continued to evolve their ideas of Jesus – a process that lasted until the Council of Nicaea. Jesus’s relationship to God the father was, Vermes believes, “the main problem of early Christianity”. The debate was infused with Greek philosophical ideas that led Jesus to be viewed as a kind of divine message. “But,” says Vermes, “up until 325 there was not a single teacher in the church who dared assert that Jesus was equal to the father. He was the inferior god, not quite the same, not quite as powerful, not quite as eternal as God the father.” It required a major dispute and the Council of Nicaea for that leap to be made. The Council of Nicaea consolidated and furthered changes that had taken place within Christianity during its first

300 years. Vermes argues that “a faith based on the preaching and message of a charismatic prophet, became a dogmatic religion of the formalised church, under the supervision and rule of the Roman emperor.” Vermes accepts that many of his views are likely to be controversial, but he hopes that his book will be taken in the spirit that it is written. “I am not one of those who sets out to shock or scandalise,” he says. “I am just trying to get across how I see things and how the evidence is read by me.” Geza Vermes is a Hungarian-born biblical historian whose career has spanned more than 60 years. He is best known for his work on early Christianity, Judaism and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is a professor emeritus of Jewish studies at Oxford University JOURNEYS

Books

E Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea, AD 30–325 by Geza Vermes (Allen Lane, 2012)

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A big day in history by Dominic Sandbrook

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“A cross of light” leads Constantine to victory

struck first, sending in his cavalry, who had the letter X, with a perpendicular line drawn been so effective for him in the past. As through it and turned round thus at the top, Maxentius’s line buckled, Constantine’s being the cipher of CHRIST.” infantry joined the attack, pushing their Eusebius, however, told a different story, adversaries back towards the river. Maxentius which he claimed to have heard from began to pull his men south, presumably to Constantine’s own lips. On the morning of make a stand on the other side. Sagging under the battle, he wrote, the future emperor had their weight, however, the improvised wooden had a vision. Praying for divine aid, bridge began to break up. “The boats with the Constantine looked up, and there he saw AT THE END of October AD 312, the streets of Rome seethed with discontent. men disappeared in the depths,” wrote Eusebius, “a cross of light” blazing in the heavens, and with it the Greek words ‘ “The customary rains and showers of the “and first that most impious one himself ’ winter season ceased to fall in their wonted [Maxentius], then the shield-bearers who were (‘By this sign, conquer’). abundance upon the earth and an with him, sank like lead into the mighty waters, Can this really have happened? We will unexpected famine made its appearance, as the divine oracles and in addition to this a pestilence,” wrote had foretold.” the Christian chronicler Eusebius. “Some Maxentius’s body people, wasted away like ghosts and at the was not found until the very point of death, stumbled and tottered following day, when here and there, and too weak to stand fell his severed head was down in the middle of the streets.” exhibited throughout As was traditional, many people blamed Rome as proof that he the emperor, Maxentius – in this age of was dead. By this time, intense political unrest, merely one of a host Constantine had of competing claimants across the empire. already entered the city In the taverns, men discussed the latest news in triumph. Unusually, from northern Italy, where a former officer’s however, he did not son called Constantine, whose troops had visit the Temple of proclaimed him emperor in the remote city Jupiter to make the of York, was steadily moving south. That traditional sacrifices summer, Milan had welcomed him with – a sign, perhaps, that open arms. Verona, Modena and Ravenna here was a different had followed suit. Now Constantine was kind of emperor. A approaching the Tiber, just a few miles year later, he issued the north of Rome. At first, Maxentius cut the Edict of Milan, which, bridges and stockpiled grain for a siege. But for the first time, made A c1630 engraving shows the death of Emperor Maxentius at the battle of Milvian Bridge at the city’s games on 27 October, public Christianity legal. And dissatisfaction boiled over, the crowds in May 337, just days before his death, never know. Perhaps all that matters, chanting Constantine’s name and mocking Constantine was formally baptised, becoming though, is what the story signified. Maxentius as a coward. The very next the first Christian emperor in history. By the end of Constantine’s reign, morning, Maxentius led his army north. By now, legends were already circulating Christianity was well on the way to about Constantine’s victory at becoming the most popular creed in the the Milvian Bridge, all those Roman world. If that battle on 28 October It seemed obvious that his victory years ago. At the time of the had gone the other way, how different battle, the emperor had not things might have been. had been divinely inspired formally been a Christian, even The clash at the Milvian Bridge on though his mother, Helena, had undoubtedly 28 October has gone down as one of taught him about her faith. For Christian Dominic Sandbrook’s latest history’s decisive battles. If the chroniclers chroniclers, however, it seemed obvious that book is Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979 are to be believed, Maxentius had partly his victory had been divinely inspired. The (Allen Lane). He is a frequent destroyed the bridge in readiness for the historian Lactantius claimed that on the night siege, so his men crossed the Tiber on a before the battle, the emperor had had a dream. guest on Radio 4’s Saturday Review hastily assembled pontoon bridge of It told him “to cause the heavenly sign to be wooden boats. The emperor drew up his delineated on the shields of his soldiers, and so For more on the birth of Christianity, forces, perhaps 75,000 strong, with the river to proceed to battle. He did as he had been turn to page 26 at their backs, but it was Constantine who commanded, and he marked on their shields AKG-IMAGES

October AD 312

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BBC History Magazine

THE FIVE BIG QUESTIONS IN GLOBAL HISTORY As Andrew Marr presents a major new series on the history of the world on BBC One, Professor Odd Arne Westad introduces five major themes in humanity’s wider story that strongly divide academic opinion

What is ‘global history’? WHAT DO WE MEAN when we say ‘global history’ – or indeed ‘world history’, ‘transnational history’ or ‘international history’? These are surprisingly tricky terms to pin down. Here’s what historians do agree upon: we are dealing with issues that are bigger than those contained within one state or one nation. In most cases, we’re also talking about issues that have participants from different societies. To be more specific, global history has come to mean an emphasis on comparative aspects of human activities in

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the broadest sense. World history is often about histories that take a particular view as to what connects humankind over time. Transnational history is about how ideas, money and people travel, and about how communities are constituted outside the frameworks of empire, state or nation. International history centres on relations among communities, peoples and states. These are vague and contested definitions. But it is at least helpful to know a little about where we’re starting from in these debates…

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Why have Homo sapiens proved so overwhelmingly successful?

THE STORY OF humankind is at root the tale of clever apes spreading across the globe. We know that the first humans of our own species, Homo sapiens or anatomically modern humans, walked out of their African homeland around 65,000 years ago. What we know less about is what happened to them during the first few millennia of their odyssey. The speed with which they spread is astonishing. Within less than 20,000 years they had reached Australia, which they began to explore at around the same time as they spread to most of Europe. What accounts for our massive and almost instant success as a species? Our capacity to learn and to adapt is, of course, at the bottom of this. But the size of our brains, historians agree, is not enough in itself to explain what happened. Diet most certainly played a role. The first humans chanced upon the protein-rich foods of the coastal zone, and it’s quite likely that their colonisation of the world was linked to their dietary needs (or preferences). This explains why they followed the coasts everywhere and why it took a long time before they began to penetrate the interiors. Life on the beach certainly pushed humans in the direction of life on the water, not just along its edges. Within a hundred generations or so of them first venturing outside Africa, simple boats had made their appearance, although historians disagree over how far the first humans could travel by water. It is likely that our forebears’ maritime

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History of the World

skills developed incrementally, but that this knowledge spread fast. Our ancestors could communicate through language, and it is quite possible that the idea of a boat may have been familiar to people who had never even seen one. Some historians claim that even in our early history similar tools appear in different population groups, with the knowledge of how to build these tools spread via word of mouth rather than through hard-and-fast experience. But could all humans communicate? We do not know when language differentiation appeared (‘very early’ is most people’s guess), although we know a bit about how languages developed. It’s a subject complicated by the fact that our

Some of the most important disease-fighting genes we now carry evolved outside our own subspecies

of what we broadly call Neanderthal groups interbred – up to four per cent of our own DNA is of Neanderthal origin. But was such intermingling also common with other groups, whose identity we still cannot trace for certain? It will take a bit of time before we can determine where and with what results different groups of humans interbred after our ancestors left Africa. This is one of the most exciting fields of prehistorical research and one that is going to have great consequences for our understanding of humans living today. After the Neanderthal genome was mapped a couple of years ago, it became clear that some of the most important disease-fighting genes humans now carry originated from outside our own sub-species. Some researchers think the very fact that we could interbreed with other human groups contributed massively to the peopling of the Earth, because it provided ‘hybrid vigour’ to help us become ubiquitous on all continents save Antarctica.

immediate ancestors were not the only humans around in the new territories they colonised. In Eurasia, at least one of our genetic cousins was already resident. Recent advances in human DNA research have deeply influenced our view of – and our debates about – early humanity. We know that Homo sapiens and humans This Cro-Magnon skull, which dates from c28,000 years ago, was found in the Dordogne region of France

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THE FIRST HUMANS were all hunters and gatherers. There is no doubt that our steadily increasing abilities to hunt large animals – based on our tool-making and communication skills – contributed significantly to the increase in our intake of nutrients. We therefore became bigger and this also enabled our brains to develop to their full potential. We probably became healthier too, because we had a more regular intake of food. But did the next step in human food production, agriculture, which started about 10,000 years ago, also lead to improvements in human health? Agriculture has been seen by historians in the past as possibly the biggest breakthrough ever for humankind. In terms of civilisation, this is undoubtedly true. In order to sustain agricultural gains, a large number of people had to congregate in villages. They co-operated and innovated. Out of this process arose states and empires. However, historians have recently found that a move to agriculture did not necessarily improve human health. On the contrary, the first villages or towns, like our cities today, were not very healthy places. Hunter-gatherers were, in many areas, likely to have longer and healthier lives than farmers. This raises two big questions. The first is, of course, why on Earth did people embrace agriculture if it didn’t improve their chances of survival? The

Historians have recently found that a move to agriculture did not necessarily improve human health answers here vary. Some historians stress the push factor: lords and nobles forced the farming population together by using authority and force. And life in the wild was, after all, a pretty brutal kind of existence. Another group could easily attack you and take your food stores. Villages offered protection, even if safety often came at the price of subservience. Others stress the pull factors: villages provided the opportunity to acquire goods that a hunting band could not make for themselves. Villages also maximised resources. Grain stores – as the story of Moses tells us – could help large groups of people pull through lean times. But recent research shows that, just as nomads led

healthier lives than settled peoples, for a long time hunters got the better of bartering exchanges with farmers because they got more calories in return for their meat than they provided. So how did settled societies manage to overcome this health deficiency over time? This has a lot to do with our ever-increasing resistance to epidemics. Like those of other animals, the human immune system is adaptive, it ‘learns’ a lot about illnesses that have been around for a while and this increases our chances of survival. Ironically, human cohabitation in large units therefore, over time, strengthens our immune responses. Sustained levels of nutrition, even in hard times, also helps protect against illness. And perhaps most important of all, increasingly these groups of villages did not live in isolation. Instead, they became part of networks that eventually would come to cover much of the Eurasian continent.

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Why did we swap hunter-gathering for farms and villages?

A replica of a Paleolithic cave painting at Lascaux in south-western France. Such paintings appear to celebrate the hunt, central to pre-agricultural life

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A medallion depicting Attila the Hun, leader of an empire that encompassed Hungary, parts of Germany, the Balkans and Ukraine

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What drove the great migrations of the first millennium AD?

WE ALL ‘KNOW’ that the Roman empire collapsed because of ‘barbarian’ invasions. Those with an interest in matters outside Europe also know that the Han empire in China collapsed around the same time for the same reasons. What historians are debating today is what caused these massive migrations, which centre on the years AD 400–800. We also don’t know why theses exoduses lasted so long, or why some groups settled (often in places that seem incongruous based on their origins) and others went on almost to the other end of the Eurasian landmass. What drove people to act as they did? Some historians emphasise fear. Changes in climate or epidemics may have made aggressive neighbours more powerful and forced tribes out of their native lands. When fleeing, these tribes in turn came across others less skilled in war – or maybe simply unaccustomed to the kind of warfare they were facing. These groups could then be robbed and plundered, and in some cases subjugated to form new states. The Huns, who hit Europe and the Middle East in the late third century, were probably driven west. But having previously lost the contest for BBC History Magazine

resources in their native central Asia (somewhere around where the western part of Mongolia is now), they were victims no more. Attila, their chief, became one of the greatest (and most brutal) conquerors the world has seen. Other historians talk about the push of groups coming out of central Eurasia (roughly the area between Mongolia and the Caspian Sea), which forced other nations east, west and south. This may explain the Germanic invasions of western and southern Europe. Forced from their homelands in the east, the Germanic peoples invaded other territory occupied by peoples who seemed weaker – or at least a less fearsome alternative to those pushing from the east. It was as if there was a great central Eurasian conveyor belt of peoples sending different groups off east towards China, west towards the Roman empire and south towards India. These invaders in turn pushed other peoples ahead of them, which

History of the World

then – in some cases – broke into established empires for protection. The Völkerwanderung, as the Germans call it, or the great migration of the peoples, made some groups fetch up in the strangest of places, as modern DNA research reveals. Persian-speaking Alans ended up in what is today north-eastern France and Belgium – their genes are still left in the population, although their language has disappeared. Germanic Vandals went to north Africa, where they constructed an empire; the local Berbers still carry a very high percentage of their genetic composition. For a while migration became the done thing – even peoples who had been settled for a very long time got the taste for it, as opportunities opened up. The ‘conveyor-belt’ idea isn’t universally accepted. Another group of historians argue that the weakness of empires created the migration period, rather than events working the other way around. People began breaking into the rich lands of the east, west and south because they could, because the empires that held these lands had become too weak to defend their territories. In this reading, a combination of climate change, epidemics and shifts in military power caused imperial instability. This decline of empires in turn created unwanted immigration. Power protects. Weakness invites others in. Looking at the great migrations after the Völkerwanderung does pose a few questions about both of these general explanations. What, for example, did non-material factors, such as culture and religion, have to do with what happened? If we look at the creation of the Muslim empires, or – before them – of the Turk expansion of the fifth to the eighth centuries, it seems that material factors may have been less important than a religion that inflamed the minds of men or a culture that seemed trendy and inclusive. Muhammad’s armies swept everything before them not because of their military innovations, but because their commanders knew they were right. And for a brief moment many young people in a vast area – from Manchuria to Anatolia – wanted to be Turks. We don’t know why, but then we don’t know why so many young people across the globe today want to be American gangster rappers either.

Changes in climate or epidemics may have made aggressive neighbours more powerful

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WHY DID CHINA, when it was the most powerful country in the world, not expand? Why did Europeans, in another great migration, populate three continents, while the Chinese mostly declined to travel? One key line of discussion on this question concerns technology in comparative terms, and we will return to this in box 5. However, it’s a discussion that needs to be seen in conjunction with controversy over interpretations of Chinese history – controversy focused on the Song dynasty, when China was at the peak of its power in terms of culture and administration. Later Chinese dynasties were more militarily powerful (the Ming and the Qing) but it was the Song, many historians now claim, that set China on the path to prefer domestic finesse over limitless conquest. In all of China’s long history, there is something special about the Song dynasty, which ruled, in one form or another, from AD 960 to 1279. It came to power after a long series of destructive civil wars. The main aim of its leaders was to postulate and construct a comprehensive set of ideas around which society should evolve. The Song reformers wanted a reinvigorated economy, an integrated government and well-defined laws

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based on obligations and responsibilities. Most importantly, they managed to put many of their ideas into practice. One thing that really stands out when looking at the era is Song technological innovation – gunpowder, movable type and the sternpost can all be traced to the Song period. Uniquely for the premodern world, economic growth in China seems for a long period to have outstripped demographic trends. One change making this possible was certainly the discovery and adoption of a rice variety that permitted two crops a year. But China was also producing nearly as much iron as the whole of Europe six centuries later. Textile production too underwent dramatic development, and it is possible to speak of Song ‘industrialisation’ as a recognisable phenomenon. But Song China did not have a missionary zeal to drive it towards militarisation and world conquest. Its focus was on growth at home and – first and foremost – on developing Confucian ideals as to how society should be organised and on how civilised people should live their lives.

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Song China did not have a missionary zeal to drive it towards militarisation and conquest It preferred peace deals to conquest. Historians still debate how important these ideals were for what Song China actually did. Was the lack of expansion based on a Confucian emphasis on moderation and restraint, and therefore deliberate? Or was it the by-product of a love of luxury and a not insignificant portion of sloth, and therefore (at least in some ways) accidental? Perhaps not surprisingly, the Song empire fell to its more aggressive northern neighbours. In fact, it fell twice, because the northern part was conquered by the Jin in 1127 and the southern rump by the Mongols 150 years later. But the dynasty bequeathed to its successors a Confucian ideology, which would remain largely intact until the collapse of the Qing dynasty in the 20th century. Is it possible that the culture and the ideals the Song created prevented China’s expansion even in those later dynasties when such immoderation would have been militarily plausible?

Part of a Taoist mural from the Song dynasty era. Did the Song emphasis on the domestic sphere lead to China’s failure to expand?

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4

Why did the Chinese stay at home?

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Dark satanic mills were key to European prosperity, but how far do they explain the continent imposing a global order?

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Why did Europe dominate the world from the 18th to 20th centuries?

IN CONTRAST TO China, many European states expanded globally. But why precisely have states of European origin largely dominated the world since (at least) 1700? There are plentiful explanations for this, all of them contested. The historian Niall Ferguson sets out what he calls the west’s six ‘killer apps’: competition, science, property, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. But it is hard to see how these – even in combination – should propel the kind of extraordinary expansion that created the global European empires. One key issue here is religion. Together with Islam, Christianity has a missionary zeal at its core, the kind of zeal that historically has often pushed ideologies of conquest. Gaining territory overseas was not just about material advantage, it was about winning souls for Christ. This provided a justification for expansionist foreign policies and imperial ambitions. Unlike China, European states in the early modern era became skilled at warfare through inter-state competition. But as China shows, a motive was needed that went beyond skills and

weapons. Christianity supplied such a motive in abundance. But even if religion and bellicosity spread trouble-making Europeans around the globe by the 18th century, the era of total European predominance still lay in the future. Here, the view that European science, medicine, consumerism and attitudes to work somehow predestined global dominance does not hold up to scrutiny. The Chinese economy, on its terms, was doing at least as well as the European in the early 18th century. But then something happened. Between 1750 and 1850, parts of Europe went through cataclysmic change, which made states of European origin able to impose the first global order, an order that has lasted up until our own time. Again, what happened? Some historians, such as Kenneth Pomeranz and Bin Wong, have tried a comparative approach between China and Europe, which emphasises the unique advantages the most advanced European states

Gaining territory was not just about material advantage, it was about winning souls for Christ

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History of the World

gained from the middle of the 18th century onwards. One key factor seems to have been cheap energy in the form of coal. Another was access to plentiful resources from the Americas. Both these factors favoured new technologies over old and spurred the expansion of integrated capitalist markets. An age of political ferment and massive inter-state wars may also have led to the main European countries, Britain and France, looking outwards rather than inwards. It was, in other words, not decline and fall elsewhere that made Europe’s global expansion possible. The stress, at least in historians’ debates at the moment, is on parts of Europe being an exception to what had gone before. In this context, Ferguson is right about Europe’s strengths, but these were also available elsewhere, albeit in slightly different forms. By themselves – even in combination with religious zealotry – such strengths cannot explain how the European world system came into being. Something truly exceptional in other fields (such as an energy revolution and access to virgin lands, such as the Americas) had to happen for these advantages to develop as they did. Our debates about the rise of Europe must also be influenced by how relatively brief the European age turned out to be. By the late 19th century, non-European peoples had acquired much of Europe’s military technology and were gradually learning how to use it. By the late 20th century, even the most powerful European offshoot, the USA, was feeling the pressure of an Asian resurgence. If the debate on the causes for the rise of the west teaches us anything, it is that in history even the most exceptional advantage tends to be transient, transformable and transitional. Odd Arne Westad is professor of international history at LSE. He is the author of Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 (Bodley Head, 2012) JOURNEYS

Books

E A New History of the World by Andrew Marr (Macmillan, October 2012)

Lecture

E See Odd Arne Westad discuss Ronald Reagan and the Re-Constitution of American Hegemony on 28 November at the British Academy www.britac.ac.uk

TV

E Andrew Marr’s History of the World will be shown on BBC One from October

An 18th-century painting showing Dominican missionaries baptising a Native American in Mexico

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inspiration to learn new skills…

Changing times by Chris Bowlby There’s more to domestic service than Downton Abbey

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ILLUSTRATION BY FEMKE DE JONG

CERTAIN THINGS, tradition suggests, should not be discussed ‘in front of the servants’. In addition, historian Lucy Delap of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge believes we have never been very open in discussing domestic service itself. We may relish its TV portrayal, but a better historical sense of the good and bad sides of servant life, and its modern survival in new forms, has always been more elusive. The scale of such labour, Dr Delap suggests, is one of the first things to grasp, comprising an “astonishingly high proportion of women’s employment”. In the 1930s servants still numbered around 1.6 million, nearly a quarter of the female workforce, working not only in The writers of the stately homes, but also in suburban semis. Do the high numbers reflect many original Upstairs, forced into service for lack of other Downstairs revealed opportunities? This may often have been case, but Lucy Delap cautions against harsh social divisions the too bleak a view of servants’ lives. For women escaping, say, the drudgery of life in industrial or agricultural areas, domestic service could offer an escape. Given a good employer it could be a “satisfying”, even “glamorous” job. Accommodation was provided and there were opportunities to save – although that was partly due to long hours and limited time for spending. Those less fortunate, however, found themselves “unable to assert their rights at work and resist ill-treatment”. Servants could be dismissed instantly for such offences as “defiance of proper orders”, and struggled to find further work if denied an employer’s reference. Some even suffered physical and sexual assault. The authorities were not unaware of such abuses, suggests Delap. But monitoring and controlling what went on in private homes was difficult. Official enquiries made proposals, but action was “always shelved” because government “never felt it could enforce” protection of Chris Bowlby is a domestic workers. The trade union movement also proved presenter on BBC reluctant or unable to unionise servants. radio, specialising That might have seemed irrelevant amid talk of the new in history “servantless household” after the Second World War. However employment of outsiders – especially women – in JOURNEYS the home has far from declined, even if their roles have been given new names, TV from ‘home help’ and ‘charlady’ to ‘au E The three-part series Servants: The pair’ and ‘nanny’. Such names, says True Story of Life Below Stairs Lucy Delap, tend to “duck the issue begins on BBC Two this month. For more details, turn to page 72 of what such workers really are”. She asserts there has been a “collective Look out for previous Changing refusal to acknowledge the amount of Times columns on our website paid domestic labour that goes on”. And www.historyextra.com/feature work such as cleaning often remains at

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the bottom of pay scales, and outside the formal economy. Recruits were drawn increasingly from abroad, ranging from Jews fleeing Nazi persecution to women from countries as varied as Spain, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. More recently, men and women from Poland and other former communist countries have taken many domestic jobs. They have faced new versions of old pressures – in the past, fear of sudden dismissal, now fear of deportation. Both have led to workers tolerating exploitation. The Overseas Domestic Worker visa, introduced in the 1990s but abolished earlier this year, gave migrant workers a procedure for quitting abusive employers without losing their right to remain. Governments still point to what they say is the difficulty of implementing protection. Meanwhile, popular fascination with the history of domestic service grows. But a more critical view is not what TV audiences seem to want. The writers of the original Upstairs, Downstairs series broadcast in the 1970s saw themselves as revealing harsh social divisions. Many viewers, it appears, approved nostalgically a time when people ‘knew their place’. These days, many people see a revived Upstairs, Downstairs and the wildly successful Downton Abbey as offering an escape from contemporary problems – Downton instead of downturn, as the satirists might say. This series is produced with History & Policy. You can find out more about them and read their papers at www.historyandpolicy.org

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Living in sin? Is the idea that Victorian working-class couples often skipped marriage accurate? Rebecca Probert looks at newly available evidence

A wedding party poses for the camera in the 1890s. Despite mo ralists’ frenzied reports of sex ual licence and immorality, cohabitation was rare

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HERE IS A surprisingly widespread assumption, shared by popular and academic historians alike, that cohabitation (living together in a relationship without being married) was common among the Victorian poor. The journalist Matthew Sweet suggests in Inventing the Victorians that working-class men and women took an “equivocal and pragmatic approach” to marriage, with many choosing to cohabit out of economic convenience.

Victorian society

Others refer darkly to ‘unknown’ numbers of people living in ‘irregular unions’ – the implication being that those numbers, though unknown, must nevertheless have been large. Moving from the belief that the poor did not marry to the observation that the working classes made up the largest section of the population, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that marriage was a minority practice in Victorian England. Of course, individual examples of cohabiting couples can be found in all classes of Victorian society. George Eliot is a regularly cited example, and her fellow authors Mary Elizabeth Bradden and Wilkie Collins, along with the political activist Eleanor Marx, often feature alongside her on lists of Victorian cohabitants. And yes, alternatives to marriage were seriously discussed by radical thinkers such as the socialist Robert Owen in the 1830s and the early feminists of the late 19th century. But one should never confuse big names with big numbers. Newly available historical data, using

George Henry Lewes (left) and author Mary Ann Evans (better known as George Eliot) lived together but were never married

recently digitised sources, clearly establishes that all but a tiny fraction of Victorian couples sharing a home had gone through a ceremony of marriage. Earlier generations of researchers who have looked at the extent of cohabitation were hampered by the need to wade through thousands of pages of registers when searching for evidence that a marriage had taken place. Understandably, they often failed

Legal marriage was the general rule even among the “roughest class” to trace weddings that had been held more than a few miles from a couple’s home parish, and from this failure deduced high rates of cohabitation. But as any family historian is well aware, finding a marriage depends on searching in the right place. To take an example of how digitisation has revolutionised this task, marriages could only be traced for some two-thirds of couples listed in the 1851 census for the Northamptonshire village of Kilsby when using the laborious old method of looking through the parish registers of the most likely locations. With the assistance of modern databases, though, the proportion traced rose to 100 per cent. In short, Victorian couples were both more mobile and more likely to marry than previously thought.

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Crime hotspot

family An 1891 painting of a working-class e strik ers’ during the 1889 dock

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And this social conformity was not confined to rural areas: similar results were achieved for Neithrop, a poor suburb of Banbury, studied because it was notorious locally for crime and immorality. Even here, marriages have been traced for 95 per cent of the people who described themselves as married in the 1851 census, and the missing five per cent

can largely be accounted for by recording errors, multiple matches and marriages overseas. Nor was there generally any reason to suspect an illicit cohabiting relationship between men and their ‘housekeepers’, or between female householders and their ‘lodgers’: one couple who looked like possible cohabitants turned out to be a brother and his married sister. Even in this impoverished ward, the picture seems to have been overwhelmingly one of marital conformity. These findings of very low levels of cohabitation are supported by the conclusions of the more measured Victorian commentators (as opposed to the hysterical polemicists who were responsible for a genre of ‘slum’ literature that makes today’s tabloids seem restrained). Charles Booth, who carried out his survey of working-class life in London between 1886 and 1903, noted that legal marriage was the general rule even among the “roughest class”. Tracing a ceremony of marriage, of course, is no guarantee that a couple were legally married: bigamists abounded, and there are plenty of examples of a man entering into a prohibited marriage with his deceased wife’s sister. But the relatively high incidence of bigamy only serves to underline the significance Victorians attached to marriage. If cohabitation had been acceptable, there would have been no need to risk criminal penalties to secure respectability. So did couples live together before they married, as is the norm today? Some historians have noted Booth’s comment on the frequency with which bridal couples gave the same address, and the marriage registers support his observation. But when addresses in the marriage register are checked against census returns, it turns out that the great majority who claimed to be living together were actually residing at different addresses. Here, the census is likely to be the more reliable. There was, after all, no advantage to be gained from concealing a cohabiting relationship from census-takers. And there was a 41

Cohabitation and the myth of the ‘commonlaw marriage’

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Victim of slander: a costermonger sells herring in a London street market in 1877

very practical reason why couples might wish to appear to be living at the same address even if they were not: vicars – and even civil registrars – faced with a couple apparently living together unwed, would often waive the marriage fee. Even though Victorians married late – when compared to the mid-20th century – it was still rare for couples to set up home in advance of the wedding. Indeed, unmarried Victorians had little scope to establish a household of

Francis Kilvert wrote of one couple being evicted simply because they were unmarried their own. The Hertfordshire town of Berkhamsted had a particularly high level of unmarried adults in 1851, with 45 per cent of women aged between 25 and 34 still single and most of these living at home. A further third were working as servants. Only around five per cent headed their own household, and only one woman (out of over 100) appears to have been cohabiting with a man, whom she later married. Very occasionally, a sexual relationship between a woman and a

man sharing an address can be inferred from the presence of a child and a subsequent marriage. But this was rare, and childbearing outside marriage was not generally the result of a cohabiting relationship. While some areas of Victorian England had high levels of extramarital births – over 30 per cent in the then Lancashire parish of Culcheth, for example – it is clear that most of the mothers of illegitimate babies were not living with the father. Linking digitised baptism and census records from a range of parishes confirms that such women were more likely to be living in the workhouse, or with family, than with any man who might be the father. For the Victorians, relationships outside marriage tended to be surreptitious rather than openly acknowledged. The poor, dependent upon landlords, employers, and occasionally charity, needed to maintain a good reputation just as much as the wealthy, if not more so. The diarist and clergyman Francis Kilvert wrote of one couple being evicted from their home simply because they were unmarried, and the receipt of social BBC History Magazine

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Today, 2.8 million British couples live together outside marriage, almost 90 per cent of marrying couples have cohabited beforehand, and 47 per cent of children are born outside marriage, the majority to cohabiting couples. All this, however, is historically unprecedented. Given the rudimentary nature and general unpopularity of birth control until recent decades, most stable sexual relationships would in time produce children. As a result, the illegitimacy ratio gives us a good idea of the maximum possible frequency of cohabiting relationships in the population. But in earlier centuries births outside marriage were relatively rare, and cohabitation proportionally even rarer. Fluctuations in the illegitimacy ratio occurred within a small scale: rising from less than two per cent in 1700 to five per cent by 1800, a little under seven per cent by 1850, then falling again to four per cent by 1900. A close examination of baptism registers suggests that throughout this period cohabiting couples accounted for only a tiny proportion of illegitimate births, and thus a vanishingly small proportion of births overall. So, what changed? The causes are complex, but one factor – the emergence of the myth that cohabitants had a ‘common-law marriage’ – stands out. Contrary to popular belief, English law has never recognised cohabiting couples as having a ‘common-law marriage’. It was not until the 1960s that the term even crept into popular usage, and it was not until the late 1970s that the myth emerged that cohabiting couples enjoyed the same rights as married couples, a misunderstanding generated by misleading media reporting of the limited legal reforms of the period. After the myth took hold, there was a sharp rise in births outside marriage, from 16 to 30 per cent over the course of the 1980s, with cohabiting couples accounting for the bulk of the increase.

Victorian society

Married couple Harry and Mabel Hill with their six children, in Parkstone, Dorset, 1888

support could depend on showing one’s ‘marriage lines’. This was a society that drew a sharp distinction between the married and the unmarried. One writer noted that there was a public interest in knowing who was and was not married, since others’ behaviour toward them had to be regulated accordingly. For most, marriage was not a ‘choice’, any more than putting on clothes before one left the house was a ‘choice’. It was simply what one did so as not to cause trouble for oneself or offence for others.

DREAMSTIME/ALAMY/TOPFOTO

Fear of the slums So why has such a different perception of the Victorian poor proved so popular? Middle-class Victorian moralists were willing to believe the worst of the denizens of outcast London. Fear and suspicion of the poor, who were effectively seen as a race apart, meant that any claims about immorality and sexual licence met with a receptive audience. The journalist Henry Mayhew was pandering to this taste when he claimed in London Labour and the London Poor that, at most, only one in 10 of London’s BBC History Magazine

A London slum, c1890. Middle-class moralists were fearful and suspicious of the poor

costermongers (who sold food from a street barrow or stall) were married. So incensed were the costermongers at this slander that they held a public meeting to condemn Mayhew’s methods. They drew attention to the fact that Mayhew was writing “to suit the tastes and views of the upper and middle classes”, and that he had paid disreputable informants for inaccurate information. But they were only too well aware that it was Mayhew’s account that would eventually survive, given his public platform, and so it has proved. Today, Mayhew’s costermongers tend to be celebrated rather than condemned for their supposed rejection of marriage. Social commentators’ desire to find precedents for modern trends has led to the unfounded fears of Victorian moralists about the numbers ‘living in sin’ being transformed into evidence of cohabitation. Claims of high rates of cohabitation outside marriage in past centuries seem to be a comforting – but quite incorrect – riposte to modern worries about the collapse of family life. But rather than

acclaiming the costermongers as the pioneers of alternative family forms, we should do them the justice of remembering them as they wanted to be remembered – as they pleaded in the name of their “poor but honest wives”. Rebecca Probert is a professor at the University of Warwick Law School. She has written widely on the history of marriage and cohabitation and appeared on programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? JOURNEYS

Books

E The Legal Regulation of Cohabitation, 1600-2010: From Fornicators to Family by Rebecca Probert (Cambridge, 2012) E Marriage Law For Genealogists: The Definitive Guide by Rebecca Probert (Takeaway, 2012)

On the podcast Rebecca Probert will discuss Victorian marriage in our weekly podcast www.historyextra.com/ podcast-page

43

HOW BRITAIN GOT THE BOMB

I

T TOOK TWO SHIPS almost a year to travel halfway across the world. They had left Britain to sail to the Montebello islands, an archipelago 80 miles off the north-western coast of Australia. The ships carried a naval crew and royal engineers, who had a specific task: to prepare the site for the testing of Britain’s first atomic bomb. On 3 October 1952 at 9.24am local time, just after midnight in London, Britain entered the nuclear age. The test was of a plutonium bomb with a yield of approximately 25 kilotons. The detonation was awe-inspiring. William Penney, the scientific director and a noted mathematical physicist, described the moment he witnessed the explosion: “The sight before our eyes was terrifying – a great greyish cloud being hurled thousands of feet into the

William Penney (far left) at Los Alamos, c1943–45. He was to become the head scientist in the project to build Britain’s first nuclear bomb

46

air and increasing in size with temperature comparable to that in the astonishing rapidity.” The cloud itself interior of the sun. The blast from such was a strange Z-shape, very different to an explosion would destroy life in a the customary mushroom clouds wide area. The size of this area is associated with nuclear weapons difficult to estimate, but it tests. The reason was simple: will probably cover the the device had been placed centre of a big city.” three metres below the The only defence waterline and so the against an atom mixture of water and bomb, they mud changed the argued, was the cloud’s shape. threat from a The rationale similar bomb. for this was also The Frisch/ straightforward. Peierls The experiment was memorandum hit designed not only to a nerve: Britain was confirm that the science at war and in February had been mastered, but also to 1940, when it was written, test the effects of a detonation in was standing alone against shallow water. This was exactly the sort Germany. To investigate its potential, a of result that might be produced if the committee was created. It reported in Soviet Union smuggled one of its 1941 that a bomb was not only feasible, atomic bombs into a harbour in the but that it was imperative that Britain United Kingdom: what might be the develop one and that co-operation with opening salvo of a third world war. the United States was crucial. From The original idea that the splitting of 1941 onwards, under the code name heavy elements could be harnessed as a ‘Tube Alloys’, Britain began to research weapon was proposed by two émigré how to build a nuclear weapon. With scientists in 1940. Otto Frisch and American collaboration assured in Rudolf Peierls, both from the 1943, Britain decided to Otto R Frisch, one of University of Birmingham, relocate its scientists to help the scientists who argued that ‘the showed that the ‘super-bomb’, resolve the scientific issues bomb’ could be built as they termed it, could be hindering US progress. constructed. The two The Manhattan Project physicists were clear (to build the first atomic about what they were bomb) had its heart at proposing: “The Los Alamos in the New energy liberated in Mexico desert. British the explosion of such a scientists and super-bomb… will, for technicians worked at a an instant, produce a number of sites spread

“We’ve got to have this thing… we’ve got to have a bloody Union Jack flying on top of it”

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Michael S Goodman tells the story of how, 60 years ago this month, a war-ravaged nation detonated the most destructive weapon known to man

Nuclear weapons

across the breadth of the US, but most were based at Los Alamos, which included a significant number of European émigrés in its top positions, people who had escaped Nazism. The British mission arrived in December 1943 and by the following year comprised just 19 people: a tiny fraction of the estimated 3,500 total population of Los Alamos. The numbers concealed the value and importance of the British contingent. British scientists were at the heart of some of the most important scientific work. Hans Bethe, who was head of the Theoretical Division, later stated that “the collaboration of the British mission was absolutely essential… without the members of the British mission, it is not unlikely that our final weapon would have been considerably less efficient in this case”. On 16 July 1945 in the Alamogordo desert, the first ever atomic device – Trinity – was exploded. Within a few weeks two different types of bomb – one plutonium implosion; the other uranium gun-method – were dropped on Japan. With the subsequent end of the war, the wives of the British mission prepared a formal party to celebrate, complete with a “feast” of soup, steak and kidney pie and trifle.

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A farsighted move Despite the end of the war, work continued at Los Alamos. The majority of the British mission had left, although some notable figures – including Klaus Fuchs, who would later be revealed as a Soviet spy – remained until 1946. The head of the British mission, Sir James Chadwick (who had won a Nobel prize for discovering the neutron) ordered all departing members to take note of their and other people’s research before leaving the US. The result was an encyclopaedia of the work done during the war. This proved to be a prescient move – in 1946 the US Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act (known as the McMahon Act) which forbade the passing of technical information to any third party, including the UK. War had devastated Britain and it emerged from the six-year conflict economically ruined. The new prime minister, Clement Attlee, was quick to grasp the potential for nuclear weapons. In late August 1945 he wrote that “a decision on major policy with regard to the atomic BBC History Magazine

A cloud rises over the Montebello islands, off the coast of Western Australia, following the explosion of Britain’s first atomic bomb, 3 October 1952

bomb is imperative”, and British mission to Los that until it was taken, Alamos, was chosen to be all postwar planning in charge of the scientific would be “worthless”. aspects. The design for That decision was the bomb was to formally taken in replicate the device January 1947 in a dropped on Nagasaki, specially restricted and Penney is said to cabinet committee yet, in have compared scientific practice, the wheels had been advances with what was set in motion long before this. “Prescient” British known from Chadwick’s physicist Sir James Why did Britain need an encyclopaedia of the Chadwick atomic capability? Several wartime efforts. factors were important: the British Work continued in great secrecy assumed that the Soviet Union would throughout the late 1940s and early acquire them; the best means of defence 1950s. Progress was slow, and there against nuclear weapons was to have were a number of problems along the nuclear weapons; there was no way. Even with a good grasp of the international agreement on their use; science involved, the technical advances and it allowed Britain to remain at the necessary were immense, ranging from high table of international politics, the construction of incredibly particularly vis-à-vis the Americans. precise machine tooling to the The foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, fabrication of fissionable is famously said to have commented at plutonium. a cabinet meeting that “we’ve got to Furthermore, the have this. I don’t mind for myself, but I British design was don’t want any other foreign secretary not an exact of this country to be talked at, or to, by duplication, and the secretary of state of the United novel approaches States as I just have had… we’ve got to had to be made to have this thing over here, whatever it certain aspects. costs… we’ve got to have a bloody As the design Union Jack flying on top of it.” of the bomb William Penney, who continued, had been part of the discussion raged

The world’s first atomic bomb explodes near Alamogordo, New Mexico on 16 July 1945. British scientists played a key role in the weapon’s development

“We’ve got to have this,” said foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, pictured c1943

47

Nuclear weapons

NUCLEAR BRITAIN What happened after 1952?

William Penney pictured in October 1952, the month that Britain became the third member of the nuclear club

about where to test the device and in what way it should be detonated. An answer to the second question arrived in July 1950: an intelligence assessment concluded that Britain’s great vulnerability lay in its ports. For this reason the British authorities decided to replicate a nuclear explosion in a harbour by detonating the bomb in the hull of a ship. The answer to the first question – where? – was resolved soon after, when Attlee wrote to Robert Menzies, his Australian counterpart, requesting permission for the bomb to be tested on Australian soil. (The British chose Australia for a number of reasons – including the fact that the government could pay Australia in pounds sterling, not US dollars). Without discussing it with his cabinet colleagues, Menzies – who declared himself “British to the bootstraps” – agreed. Operation Hurricane was a success. The device worked as hoped and Britain entered the nuclear club as its third member (after the USA and Soviet Union). Scientifically, it was a great achievement, particularly for a country that had been so ravaged by war. However, the radioactive fallout from the test turned out to be greater than predicted and was subsequently detected – at very low doses – at locations thousands of miles away. Part of the explanation for this was what had prompted the test: detonation of a bomb onboard a ship in a harbour setting. Despite this, a 1985 official 48

Australian inquiry concluded that operational policies had been followed and that there had been no exposure above prescribed radiation limits. Within a month the British test was eclipsed by an American one. On 1 November on an atoll in the Pacific, the Americans exploded a device that employed thermonuclear reactions. This ‘hydrogen bomb’ produced a yield over 400 times greater than the British test. The arms race had truly begun. Dr Michael S Goodman is a senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is the author of four previous articles for BBC History Magazine JOURNEYS

Books

E Operation Hurricane: A Personal Account of the British Nuclear Test at Monte Bello, 1952 by PB Bird (Square One Publications, 1989) E Test of Greatness: Britain’s Struggle for the Atom Bomb by B Cathcart (John Murray, 1994) E Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–52 by M Gowing (Palgrave, 1974)

On the podcast Michael S Goodman discusses the project to build Britain’s first nuclear bomb on our weekly podcast www.historyextra.com/ podcast-page

The New York paper the Daily News reports on events in the Montebello islands

BBC History Magazine

TOPFOTO/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

The fallout was detected – at very low doses – at locations thousands of miles away

THE TEST of an atomic bomb in 1952 was the beginning, not the end, of Britain’s involvement in nuclear weapons. Even while scientists had been working on the atomic bomb, advanced atomic designs were being discussed, as were ideas for a hydrogen bomb. The technical leap from atomic to hydrogen weapons was as great as the jump to the first bomb. The increase in potency was significant: scientifically there is no upper limit to the destructive yield of a hydrogen bomb. Britain entered the hydrogen club in May 1957. Shortly afterwards the US passed new legislation which made Britain and America partners, an agreement that is still in force today. Edward Teller, the ‘father’ of the US hydrogen bomb, remarked at the time that: “We found that although they [the British] had devoted a fraction of time and money to their programme as compared with the US programme, their developments substantially parallel our own.” From the 1950s onwards Britain continued to develop new, more sophisticated and more easily transportable nuclear weapons. As the scientific designs advanced so, too, did their means of delivery: from aeroplane to ground-launched ballistic missile to submarine-launched missile. The current British nuclear deterrent is based on the Trident D5 missile, carried under the oceans by a number of Vanguard-class submarines. Both systems are set to be replaced when they expire, by which time the British nuclear deterrent will be nearing its centenary.

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y b a c i r e Am Acci dent

THE QUEST FOR GOLD An engraving from the 1590 History of America by Flemish print-maker Theodore de Bry shows English ships arriving in Virginia. Early visitors were seeking gold or a short cut to Cathay, rather than a new life for themselves on these wild shores

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BBC History Magazine

The New World

While the Spanish were obsessed by central and southern America, England’s Tudor monarchs paid little attention to the New World. As David Childs reveals, it was by pure chance that England’s American colonies came into being

I

N SEPTEMBER 1498 Christopher Columbus, a Genoese in the service of Spain, became the first European to step on to the mainland of South America: 15 months earlier John Cabot, a Venetian in the service of King Henry VII of England, had become the first European since the Vikings to make a similar landing in North America. Yet, despite the proximity of the dates, what happened afterwards diverged widely. Within 50 years the Spaniards had conquered three empires and were shipping previously unimaginable riches back to Iberia. Some 130 years later the English, facing no such opposition, had lost thousands of men while trying to hold on to a beachhead that comprised the lower banks of one river, the James, a small hill at Plymouth, Massachusetts and a few outstations in Newfoundland. Why the discrepancy? The fortunes of England and Spain may have diverged, but the anticipated source of that fortune did not. Both nations shared one major obsession: gold. Whereas the Spaniards, discovering it in abundance, shipped it home in the holds of the annual treasure fleet, the English exported from Baffin Island and Virginia hundreds of tonnes of worthless aggregate that they convinced themselves was gold bearing. Once the lacklustre truth was out, there seemed little reason to invest in a land that was barren of such bounty.

Yet all was not lost, for the English soon discovered that a far easier way to fossick (search) for gold was to seize it from the conveniently slow-moving Spanish container ships. England was a pariah nation whose corsairs, unlike those operating today from harbours in Somalia, had the full backing of the government, which relied on its share of the pirated wealth to balance the books. Such easy pickings deflected ambitious entrepreneurs from risking their investment and the lives of others in far less certain returns from the American coastline. What’s more, for those who fancied establishing a plantation, land was available much nearer home through the confiscation and redistribution of Irish estates. The proponents of American settlement therefore had rival, seemingly less risky, attractions with which to contend. There was, however, one initiative in which the English were prepared to take risks and that was in searching for a north-west passage to wealthy Cathay (China), thus avoiding the seas claimed by the Iberian nations. As mariner after mariner came to grief, trying to squeeze through cracks in the ever-constricting and thickening pavement of ice, their sponsors continued to see America as an obstructive bulwark to be bypassed rather than a promised land. And, anyway, the land was promised. In 1496 Henry VII granted to Cabot and his heirs a licence, “to conquer, occupy, possess whatsoever towns, castles, cities and islands by them thus discovered... acquiring for us the

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England was a pariah nation whose corsairs had the full backing of the government

BBC History Magazine

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Timeline: English in North America 1497 John Cabot (in the service of English king Henry VII) lands in Newfoundland

1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert claims Newfoundland for the crown

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The explorer Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who led a fleet to Newfoundland in 1583

1584 Walter Ralegh funds reconnaissance voyage to America

1585 Ralph Lane establishes military A detail of a base with 107 men c1590 map shows on Roanoke Island, English settlers inside Carolina arriving at Outer Banks Roanoke Island

1586 New land named Virginia in honour of Queen Elizabeth Francis Drake destroys Spanish settlement at San Augustine, Florida and then evacuates Lane’s group

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dominion, title and jurisdiction of the same...” In other words, to invade. This largesse in the granting of land that belonged to others was a feature of all subsequent royal charters. Thus, in 1584, Walter Ralegh was given overlordship of an area extending to 600 miles either side of his first settlement, which he sycophantically and sensibly named Virginia in honour of the holy state of Elizabeth his queen. Her successor, James I, in the first Virginia Company Charter of 1606, licensed the colonisation of a tract of land from 34° north to 45° north, a distance of 660 miles, while the later Virginia Charters extended the land grant from sea to shining sea, that is from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. The letters patent of the Newfoundland Company awarded them the whole of that island for their venture. Moreover, the grantees could sublet – and they did, awarding estates the size of English counties to those willing to invest. But the English crown was not itself prepared to invest either men, material or money in such overseas enterprises. Henry VIII’s ambitions began and ended in France; the youthful Edward reigned for too short a time; Mary could not act so as to upset her Spanish husband; Elizabeth disguised parsimony as prudence; while James I signed a peace treaty with the nation’s colonial rival. Given such state disinterest, America remained

peripheral to English policy while paramount for the Spanish purse. Given a free hand, neither did English adventurers ever match the horizon-stretching deeds awarded to them on paper. Cabot, granted a continent, ventured inland “the shooting distance of a crossbow” before retreating to his ship. So, 150 years later, no Englishman had settled beyond the reach of the tide and all looked to the waterways for their succour: none had broken out from their beachhead to make the land their own.

SPANISH SETTLEMENT The Spanish arrived in numbers and built stone strongholds and churches in South America, as illustrated by the Coacoatzintla Hanging of 1555 from Jalapa, Mexico

Idle rogues Not that it was so considered by those who underwrote most of the voyages. For the most part, settlers were seen as employees, sent forth to risk life and limb for the reward of their masters safe at home. What those investors wanted was swift and rich returns. This dichotomy had obvious results. The planters themselves were seldom England’s finest, often comprising idle rogues, criminals and even idler gentlemen, none of whom saw much benefit in over-exertion. Secondly, given that English trade was in the hand of monopolists, most of the entrepreneurs wished to import items in which they dealt. Thus uneconomic glass and iron works and a silk farm were established on the James river and it was not until America started exporting its own products, chiefly tobacco and fur, that

A Spanish soldier clashes with an Aztec in this detail from a c1550 lithograph

The New World

THE ART ARCHIVE/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/TOPFOTO/AKG-IMAGES/ALAMY/MARY EVANS

1587 the economic viability of the settlements was established, aided by the introduction of freeholding land rights. Moreover, despite much propaganda, not until 1630 were sufficient settlers shipped over to America to guarantee a plantation’s survival, given the high death rate. Just one contrast with Spanish practice is enough to illustrate this. In 1493 Columbus founded the city of La Isabella at a poorly chosen site on the northern coast of Hispaniola. Five years later the disillusioned survivors moved over to the southern shore and founded a new and lasting capital, Santo Domingo. But, by then, 1,500 settlers had disembarked at the proposed site of La Isabella and had built a structure in stone, their numbers and their ramparts able to withstand any attack launched against them. By contrast, in 1587 the grandiloquently and egotistically named corporate body, the Governor and Assistants of the City of Ralegh, appointed John White, an incomparable artist and an incompetent leader, to bring 110 people to the New World. Here he endeavoured to establish a new city at Roanoke (in present-day North Carolina) when he had originally wished to land at a more promising site inside Chesapeake Bay. Five years later, probably far less, it was no more.

John White’s 110 settlers disembark at Roanoke. White returns to seek support

1590 White returns to Roanoke but finds the settlers gone

1602–05 English explore coast of New England

1607–08

Short-lived English settlement at Fort St George, New England First 105 settlers arrive in Chesapeake and establish fort at Jamestown on James river

1609 Henry Hudson explores Hudson river

COLUMBUS LANDS

The unexpected killer

This 1886 etching, after a Theodor de Bry painting from the 16th century, shows Columbus becoming the first European to land in South America in 1498

The large number of Spanish emigrants is an indicator of state support, as is the composition of the groups that sailed. Those from Spain included a solid number of soldiers. Both Cortes, the conqueror of the Aztecs, and Pizarro, who defeated the Incas, led professional foot soldiers, gunners and cavalry inland with them. By contrast, faced with a determined enemy, the ex-mercenaries, John Smith in Virginia and Myles Standish in Plymouth, had to form their civilian companions into a militia just to defend the walls of their settlements. To a large extent this disadvantageous position was of their making. The main problem that the English failed to appreciate was that they were invading the territory of another people. The enemy that the English feared was Spain, which had shown its resentment of foreign interlopers by massacring the inhabitants of a French settlement in Florida in 1565. Yet, for

the English, the Spanish barked, but never bit. Their true foes were to be the Indians, famine and disease – which together disposed of more of the invaders, as a percentage, than were lost by either the Merchant Navy or Bomber Command during the Second World War. Of these it was disease that was the major killer, but the enemy without, through siege and denial of sustenance, as well as assault, also made a major contribution to the devastation that the English settlers endured. However, such losses, especially in the north, paled against the destruction of entire native communities unable to resist foreign diseases such as smallpox and measles. The English had dismissed the native

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John Guy sails with 39 colonists for Cuper’s Cove, Newfoundland

threat as inconsequential, and yet, one tree trunk’s width from the shoreline, they could be ambushed with impunity. This meant that they could only move securely by water, which allowed them both to foray and forage, but not to force a frontier through the forest. Until they could clear the woods, they could not create a colony. Tobacco was the crop that led to the clearances and, in 1622, Indians along the James, resentful at the expanding land grab, rose up in a surprise co-ordinated attack and massacred the English along the length of the river. Inexplicably, they did not follow up their initiative by laying siege to Jamestown. Had they done so, their victory would have been complete. As it was, they withdrew and allowed reinforcements to arrive. Those reinforcements illustrate another fact that favoured the English: they could outbreed the opposition.

The English feared Spain but their true foes were the Indians, famine and disease

A medal showing Henry Hudson exploring the river that would bear his name

1610–14 First Powhatan War in Virginia

1613 John Rolfe ships good-quality tobacco from Virginia to England

1614 John Smith explores Norumbega and proposes to name area New England

The New World

Sir George Calvert sends settlers out to Ferryland, Newfoundland

1620 Mayflower disembarks 102 ‘pilgrims’ at Plymouth, Cape Cod

1622 Massacre of English on James river

English colonist: Henry Cary, 1st Viscount Falkland

1623 Viscount Falkland establishes a colony in Newfoundland

1629 Sir William Alexander establishes Fort Charles settlement at Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia Kirke brothers capture Quebec John Mason establishes New Hampshire

1630 Winthrop fleet arrives in Massachusetts Bay. Thousands more flee here to escape from Archbishop Laud’s persecutions

c1631 Nova Scotia and Quebec returned to the French

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The Indian tribes could not readily replace warriors missionaries sailed to North America. Indeed, the New World was seen as a place to despatch those, either Catholic or dissenting who, irritatingly, held to a doctrine deemed false. The export of such nonconformists began with the voyage of Mayflower in 1620 and reached a climax during the reign of Charles I, when thousands crossed the Atlantic to Massachusetts to escape from the persecution being instigated by Archbishop Laud. A similar exodus was to take Catholics to Maryland and Quakers to Pennsylvania. These people could not consider themselves to be sojourners; they had no future other than in the New World. However difficult life became, they had to make it work to survive because there was no going back. Their loyalties were to their community and they made their own laws to ensure that they could live and survive together. From rules, such as the Mayflower Compact, democracy in America was born. Thus, ironically, the future of the English New World was assured by those who arrived carrying the curse rather than the blessing of the court. Although the phrase ‘British empire’, coined in 1577 by John Dee, gives the impression that Britannia wished to set her bounds ever wider for the glory of crown, country and the Protestant creed, the actuality is very different. The early argument for overseas settlement was, in truth, based around finding a passage to Cathay; discomforting Spain; settling indigent

The Spanish in North America FOR A WHILE Spain was interested in the potential offered by North America, and a number of major explorations plunged deep into the interior to search for mythical mines and cities. In 1513 Juan Ponce de León discovered and sailed around the Florida peninsular. His voyages ended when he was mortally wounded by Indians in Tampa Bay in 1521. In 1526 600 settlers failed to establish themselves in South Carolina, being driven away by death, desertion and revolt. Two years later Pánfilo de Narváez marched 300 men along the north coast of the Gulf of Mexico; only a few of them returned home. Unperturbed, in 1539, Hernando de Soto lost hundreds of his men and his own life in fruitless wanderings far inland. After further expeditions, which discovered both the Grand Canyon and California, lost more men and found no wealth, Spain abandoned North America as not worthy of its attentions.

Yet, the Spanish were determined no other nation should establish itself on the continent. In 1564 the French built a small settlement, Fort Caroline, near modern Jacksonville, Florida. The following year the Spanish governor of Florida, Pedro Menéndez, attacked the French and slaughtered all those he rounded up. The English might have expected similar treatment, especially after 1586 when Francis Drake razed the Spanish settlement of San Augustine, which had been built near the site of Fort Caroline. Yet, despite exhortations to act with ferocity, the Spanish response to the Jamestown settlement was somewhat muted. They made protestations at the English court and despatched just two small investigatory voyages into the Chesapeake. One was driven away, while the leader of the other was captured. Thus did Spain, with all its military advantages, allow the nascent English colony to survive.

Theodor de Bry’s illustration shows a French settlement in Florida in the c16th century

or criminal elements; monopolising the distant fishing grounds; searching for precious metals and resettling loyal but non-Anglican groups. While all of these aims could claim to be in the national interest, the crown, apart from granting charters, remained aloof, while the overweening desire of those masterminding the venture was self-aggrandisement. Success was never certain and came about not through a deliberate far-sighted policy, but through a series of inter-locking accidents from which the English emerged as the survivors.

David Childs worked as the development director of the Mary Rose Trust. His latest book, Invading America: The English Assault on the New World 1497–1630, was published by Seaforth in June JOURNEYS

Books

E Invading America: The English Assault on the New World 1497–1630 by David Childs (Seaforth, June 2012) E Mayflower: A Voyage to War by Nathaniel Philbrick (HarperPress, 2006) E England and the Discovery of America by David Quinn (Random House, 1974) BBC History Magazine

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c1619

The Indian tribes could not readily replace those warriors they lost in warfare. The great English tribe could just export another shipload to make up their number – so it was in bed rather than on the battlefield that the English defeated their enemy. Given a religious homogeneity at home, Spain also exported Jesuits to proclaim and convert natives, often brutally, to the one true faith. By contrast, although every English Royal Charter included a paragraph on the need to spread the gospel, few English

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CHINA TREASURES OF

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Saturday 30th June 2012

until 6th January 2013 Journey through over 4500 years of Chinese history! Explore the rise of Imperial China from the Stone Age to the time of the last Emperor, as well as Chinese crafts and the enduring appeal of animals in Chinese culture. Showcasing seventy treasures from Nanjing Museum, experience this unique window into Chinese culture and take part in the cultural festival celebrating London 2012.

Go to www.cimuseums.org.uk /treasuresofchina or scan this with your smartphone Make a weekend of it www.visitcolchester.com This unique project has been made possible because of the support of Essex County Council and Jiangsu Provincial Government in China who have had a strong affiliation for 24 years which has brought many benefits to both regions.

The scandal of

female miners Images of topless women and girls working down mines caused a furore when they appeared in the British press 170 years ago. However, as Denise Bates explains, accusations of immorality did not reflect the true situation

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Two pit girls from Wigan in the 19th century. Female mining became a cause célèbre

labour led to higher wages. Some even refused to work alongside women. The mine owners also reaped greater profits with a male workforce because teenage boys were generally stronger than women and could move more coal. There was a moral dimension too. Respectable miners and owners felt that hauling coal was not an acceptable job for a woman, as some men did work naked. Men often refused to allow their womenfolk underground and some owners stopped girls working as soon as they reached adolescence. All the same,

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ESPECTABLE READERS evidence gathered by the of the Morning Chronicle Employment Commission was and The Times awoke one never adequately reported and morning in May 1842 to rapidly faded from view. disturbing reports of The scandal of female miners trousered women and girls working surfaced, almost by accident, thanks to underground in mines. Harnessed like social reformer Lord Ashley’s stubborn animals, they dragged heavy carts of determination to expose the abuse of coal. In the coming days increasingly child workers in factories. In 1840, scandalous details from the newly Ashley (the future Earl of Shaftesbury) published Report of the Children’s prevailed upon Queen Victoria to Employment Commission appeared in appoint a commission to investigate newspapers and periodicals across the practices in a number of industries. country. The greatest scandal was not Its officials were instructed to report the brutal work, which damaged on the situation of workers aged women’s health, but revelations that they under 18. However, when worked topless alongside naked men. investigating coalmines in east Newspaper coverage of the story Scotland, west Lancashire and west Yorkshire some officials were horrified sensationalist. The unambiguous to see women’s welfare compromised sensuality of pictures commissioned by work that seemed to be by some periodicals fuelled a Lord Ashley, whose beyond their strength. Four rapidly growing feeling that concern for children mining girls were corrupted by led to the scandal of the investigators then overstepped their instructions their surroundings, became and recommended that immoral in conduct and “such a pernicious system” made bad wives and was changed. mothers. A great fury By the 1840s female ignited the country in mining was already on Britain in the summer the wane for a number of 1842, triggering a of reasons. Where press campaign to union activity was prevent females taking hold, miners from working in reckoned that underground caverns. restricting the supply of However, the actual

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Coal mining

some 6,000 women and girls were still working underground in small pits, often helping their husbands, fathers or brothers. This was a legacy of a much older system of mining when whole families had worked together. Despite the press furore about topless female miners, the investigators found just one pit where females worked with bare tops, the Hopwood pit at Barnsley. Only six females worked at Hopwood. One was a child who opened the underground doors for coal trucks to pass through. The other five were young teenagers who pushed the trucks. All went to Sunday school or chapel. Pushing trucks loaded with coal was hot, sweaty work and at Hopwood some tunnels ran uphill, making the task even more onerous. Girls and boys removed their tops for the practical reason that it helped them to keep cool, but investigator Jelinger Symons was still appalled. He labelled Hopwood pit as “a nursery for juvenile vice”. Convinced that he had unearthed serious moral failing at Hopwood, Symons began to ask people he was interviewing about the dress and conduct of female workers. He also recruited another investigator, Samuel Scriven, to the venture. Scriven reported seeing 10-year-old Susan Pitchforth without a top when she left work. She was, however, the only half-dressed female that he witnessed.

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Topless working Several male witnesses assured Symons and Scriven that topless working and immorality among mining women were widespread. Yet it may well be that these men were morally opposed to female mining and hoped their evidence might hasten a change in the law. Moreover, their words were contradicted by the evidence of their female counterparts. For while male witnesses stressed that underground work robbed women of decency of feeling and the skills to run a home, the harrowing testimonies of female miners contradicted the picture of immoral, ungodly women who lacked the ability or motivation to be good wives and mothers. They spoke instead BBC History Magazine

A modified version of the illustration of Ann Ambler and Will Dyson that appeared in the Westminster Review

of the practical difficulties a female miner faced when she returned home exhausted by her work and hurting from chafed skin, cuts that became infected, and crushed fingers or feet. Some were almost too tired to wash when they got home but forced themselves to do so for the sake of cleanliness. Others spent Sunday desperately trying to catch up with housework rather than going to church. Teenage girls, without domestic chores to attend to, reported sleeping for much of Sunday or walking outside in the fresh air after spending six days confined underground. Fifty-year-old Margaret Baxter explained how she went to the pit at four in the morning and returned home at noon to nurse her sick husband and teach her daughters to sew. Ann Fern and Bessy Bailey said that they were kept away from church on Sundays so that they could learn to cook, sew and knit. In spite of such statements, the commission’s report left a bad impression of mining women. This was partly due to the controversial images that were used to accompany it. For example, when illustrating a safety point, Samuel Scriven included a sketch of two topless teenagers, Ann Ambler and Will Dyson, sitting crotch to crotch as they were hauled out of the mine in a dangerous manner. Two other sketches also appeared to show topless

females. These illustrations, Illustrations from the 1842 which were not an accurate report show young females reflection of the mining struggling to carry coal women, had a major impact. Together with the witness statements, they had, with the assistance of the press, sparked a public outcry that left politicians almost powerless to resist. Within three months parliament had banned females from underground work to protect their health and morals, and to enable them to look after their families properly. For some women mining had been the only employment option and they went on to suffer years of hardship because there were no other jobs. A few defied the law for a while and continued to work underground. By the end of the 1840s they had generally found a new role, moving coal at the pit head. The taint of immorality produced by the report would hang over these women for years to come. In fact, it was

They spoke of the practical difficulties a female miner faced when she returned home not until 1911 that those campaigning to have women excluded from any work at the pit head acknowledged that the moral standards of mining women were as high as those who worked in other occupations. Denise Bates is a historian specialising in the 19th century, and is descended from a female miner on the 1841 census JOURNEYS

Books

E Pit Lasses: Women and Girls in Coalmining c.1800–1914 by Denise Bates (Wharncliffe Books, 2012)

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Books

Reader book club Would you like to join the BBC History Magazine reader book club? Visit our website to find out more www.historyextra.com/reader

Eleven new history books to look out for, reviewed by experts in the field

The queen of paranoia Tracy Borman is impressed by an account of plots and plotters in Elizabethan England The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I by Stephen Alford Allen Lane, 416 pages, £20

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HE AUTHOR here explains that “in this book you will find a world shaded in tones of grey rather than drawn in white and black”. This assertion by Stephen Alford is both confident and, accidentally or not, reminds the reader of a certain other book that’s currently taking the publishing world by storm. But The Watchers has nothing in common with the work of EL James. Rather, it provides a genuine – and compelling – reappraisal of one of the most studied periods in English history: the reign of Elizabeth I. In exploring the world (or underworld) of Elizabethan espionage, Alford takes us on a darker, more disturbing and arguably more fascinating journey through the Elizabethan era than any other historian of the period. He covers territory that’s at once both familiar, yet terrifyingly alien. Without doubt, the book’s most impressive achievement is to explode the myth of political stability and self-confidence that the Virgin Queen and her council were so keen to project. Although historians have long proved that her regime was built upon the sand of illegitimacy and religious division, somehow this instability has become a truism, and most accounts of her reign are written with the knowledge that Elizabeth would become the longestBBC History Magazine

reigning and most successful skewed brilliance and of the Tudor monarchs. cunning”, ranging from the Stephen Alford changes well-known (Lord Burghley, Pick of the Sir Francis Walsingham, and all of that. He begins by month taking the reader through a of course Elizabeth herself) to terrifyingly dramatic account those who have remained of an assassination attempt in largely hidden from the historical 1586, which leaves Queen Elizabeth spotlight: Robert Beale, a zealous mortally wounded by a volley of fire Protestant and experienced while travelling in the royal coach. interrogator; Thomas Phelippes, At its heart lies a Catholic conspiracy Walsingham’s right-hand man involving possibly Spain and France, and master cryptographer; and and certainly Mary, Queen of Scots – Charles Paget, Lord Burghley’s Elizabeth’s most deadly enemy. As the gamekeeper-turned-poacher queen’s life hangs in the balance, her spy who ended up conspiring council desperately makes plans for the to assassinate the queen. government of the realm if the worst The book traces the evolution of should happen – which, in this case, it secret communication during the does. It is an imaginary, but startlingly 16th century, from its comparatively real scenario, and one that haunted rudimentary beginnings to the Elizabeth’s advisers throughout her sophisticated operation it 45-year reign. By telling it here, Alford became during sets the scene perfectly for the rest of the Elizabeth’s reign. narrative, putting the reader in the This reached a mindset of the Virgin Queen’s zenith during paranoid ministers, who became the 1580s so obsessed with espionage that – the most they jumped at their own shadows. plot-ridden Alford also introduces us to the decade of the myriad enemies of the Elizabethan reign – when state: kings, queens, politicians, popes the queen’s and spies drawn from across Europe, spymasters and all united by the common aim of finally destroying England’s monarch. It is a claimed their fascinating cast of characters “of a

Elizabeth I projected a strong image, yet she ruled over a dangerously volatile country

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Books OCTOBER 2012

Evolution of a poet Hallie Rubenhold has reservations about a study of Erasmus Darwin Erasmus Darwin: Sex, Science and Serendipity by Patricia Fara Oxford University Press, 336 pages, £20

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RASMUS DARWIN’S greatest misfortune was to be overshadowed by his more famous grandson, Charles. As a result, few people are familiar with his life, and fewer still are familiar with his literary work. Even more are surprised to learn that Erasmus Darwin was calling into question our notions of religion, science and evolution as early as the late 18th century. Like his contemporary and rival, Dr Johnson, Darwin lived in Lichfield, but rather than moving to London he chose to remain in the industrialising Midlands, then known as a centre for Enlightenment thought. As a member of the Lunar Society, an abolitionist, a physician and a natural philosopher, his interests ranged widely from botany to improving women’s education. He invented a letter-writing machine, a steering mechanism for his carriage and designed an early rocket engine. However, as Patricia Fara explains, Darwin is often remembered for his

The watchers who kept Elizabeth I on the throne ultimately betrayed her to make the apparently invincible Elizabethan regime seem dangerously fragile; the dividing line between loyalty and treachery virtually invisible. Tales of codes, ciphers, forgeries and false names make this seem more of a spy thriller than a factual account. But it is not just about the glamour of espionage: the narrative also reveals the “weaknesses and compromises; the unremarkable and ordinary” of those who made their living from this dark and dangerous underworld. Alford weaves together the bewilderingly complex threads of plots and counterplots so skilfully that as a reader you are never left floundering – and even if you were, then a useful cast of characters and chronology is provided for reference. There are also extensive notes and an impressive bibliography for those who want to delve deeper into the subject. They may have kept Elizabeth on her throne, but the watchers ultimately betrayed her. In what seems an unforgivably disloyal final twist to the tale, during the years leading up to the great queen’s death, her own spies are seen focusing less on keeping her alive than on working to smooth the path for her successor, James VI of Scotland. Tracy Borman is the author of Elizabeth’s Women: The Hidden Story of the Virgin Queen (Jonathan Cape, 2009)

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The polymath and poet Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather

interest in sex, both personally, and professionally. Twice a husband, and 12 times a father, Darwin was not shy about his sexual relations, and even openly acknowledged his two illegitimate daughters. His second wife, Elizabeth Pole, was married when he met her but Darwin nevertheless persisted in wooing her with his erotic poetry. His technique worked and when Pole found herself a widow, Darwin, now nearly 50 years old, married her. It was this relationship, Fara concludes, that was responsible for launching Darwin into the next phase of his career as a poet.

Darwin is often remembered for his interest in sex As Fara explains in the introduction here, she has not set out to write a biography of Darwin, but rather to focus on his poetry and the context in which it was composed. However, her route through the subject matter is circuitous and at times confusing. In the space of two pages, her discussion of The Loves of the Plants leaps from Captain Cook to the growth of the British empire and then to the reign of terror, before finally alighting on the subject of racism. It’s only when Fara eventually addresses Darwin’s poetry directly that the reader is offered something original and fascinating. Fara’s second stated objective is to document the process of researching an historical subject, and to take the reader through the twists and turns that lead to discovery. In order to achieve this, she has chosen to write the book in first person. The idea is a noble one. However the author adds a disclaimer in the introduction stating she has fictionalised her own activities “and in some places exaggerated my ignorance, naivety and incompetence”. Darwin’s story is interesting enough not to require embellishment. Hallie Rubenhold is the author of The Covent Garden Ladies (Transworld e-book, 2012) BBC History Magazine

CORBIS

most sought-after victim, Mary Stuart. Her execution in 1587 gave another great Catholic conspirator, Philip II, the excuse he needed to launch his Armada against England (“probably the worst-kept secret in 16th-century Europe”). Philip’s move encapsulated everything that Elizabeth’s ministers had most feared during the previous 30 years, but it would become the queen’s finest hour. The telling of the Armada story is the only weak point in an otherwise engaging and perfectly pitched narrative. It is in uncovering the plots and counter-plots that never came to light where Alford excels. The result is

More reviews You can read expert reviews of hundreds of recent history books on our online archive www.historyextra.com/books

neighbours off the land, on the one hand a pillar of the local community and on the other a man who bent the rules in the interests of personal profit. Yet Christopher Dyer prefers to use his story as a peg on which to hang a picture of a changing society. The question of whether or not Heritage should be described as a capitalist is perhaps a bit forced (Dyer’s view is that he should), but the portrait presented here, of a society in which lordly authority had declined, labour was scarce due to the ongoing effects of plague and depopulation, and enterprising peasants and yeomen were continually pushing at the margins of their ‘station’, is a convincing one. This is familiar territory for Dyer, who has devoted a lifetime to the study of the economy and society of late

This account is both fascinating and valuable

A shepherd depicted in a woodcut from the 1497 botanical work Hortus Sanitatis

A good yarn Chris Given-Wilson welcomes a meticulously researched account of a 16th-century wool-broker, or ‘brogger’, John Heritage A Country Merchant, 1495-1520: Trading and Farming at the End of the Middle Ages by Christopher Dyer Oxford University Press, 272 pages, £65

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HE COUNTRY merchant of this absorbing book was John Heritage, wool-broker (‘brogger’) and grazier of Moreton-inMarsh in Gloucestershire, one of those late medieval English yeomen who formed the link between local peasant producers and the great London merchants who shipped wool on to Flanders to be woven into some of the finest cloth that Europe produced. A competitive business, woolbrogging involved constant travel. This was partly local, within a radius of eight miles of Moreton. It was here that Heritage would meet growers, inspect BBC History Magazine

flocks, and secure fleeces on the futures market by advancing sums on trust, then paying in stages (though not always promptly) once the sheep had been sheared and the wool gathered. Heritage also journeyed between Gloucestershire and London. In the capital he collected tar, fish and even gunpowder to sell back home. His account book, 96 folios long and “grossly, obscurely and lewdly kept”, reveals his book-keeping methods as rather outdated and his memory fallible. Perhaps this is why his business was more profitable during the 1500–09 period than in the latter years of the story from 1510–20. After 1520, when Heritage was about 50, his book abruptly ends and he disappears from the records. The known facts of Heritage’s life are interesting in themselves – a restless and acquisitive young man, an encloser prepared to push less fortunate

medieval England, especially the west Midlands. One of the many virtues of this book, apart from the clear and straightforward writing, is that he demonstrates in detail the steps by which a period of equilibrium of the years around 1500 was attained. Another is the solidity of his research: not just into the record sources (he says that Heritage’s account book took him eight years to transcribe, “slowly”, although the adverb seems redundant), but also into the physical shape of the late medieval townscape and landscape. This encompasses the houses and barns, streets and markets, heaths and pastures, fences, woods and villages (many deserted by now) with evocative names such as Compton Scorpion, Norton Sub Edge and Hanging Aston. More than most historians, Dyer is able to conjure up a sense of what it must have felt like to be alive in the times about which he writes. His account of John Heritage and his world is both fascinating and valuable. Chris Given-Wilson is professor of medieval history, University of St Andrews

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Books OCTOBER 2012

Edward VII had to wait until he was 59 years old to ascend to the throne

Playboy prince Kate Williams enjoys a long-awaited biography of Edward VII Bertie: A Life of Edward VII by Jane Ridley Chatto & Windus, 624 pages, £30

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N HIS English Constitution, journalist Walter Bagehot wrote that “whatever is most attractive, whatever is most seductive, has always been offered to the Prince of Wales of the day. Temptation is applied in its most trying form at the frailest time of human life.” Of all the Princes of Wales in history, one of the most eager to be lured was the young man who became Edward VII. Prince of Wales for 59 years, Prince Albert Edward gathered a fast set of

glamorous mistresses and hunting men, spent wildly and ignored his mother’s complaints about the “luxury and idleness of the aristocracy”. And yet, as Jane Ridley’s fascinating and scholarly book shows, Edward was an engaged king when he ascended to the throne

in 1901, and his attempt to create peace with France in 1903 was a significant intervention in foreign policy. Ridley has long been at work on researching the king and she has been toiling hard in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, finding marvellous letters that illustrate her judicious examination of Bertie’s life. Beautifully written with an enjoyable dry wit, objective and superbly researched, this is an indispensable investigation into a complex man.

Scandalous behaviour? Joanna Bourke looks back at how previous generations treated single mothers Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in 20th-Century England by Pat Thane and Tanya Evans Oxford University Press, 240 pages, £60

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N TERMS of wit, few anthropologists can beat Geoffrey Gorer. In his classic text, Exploring English Character (1955), he drily observed that: “Most people’s views

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on sexual morality are more rigid than their personal practice.” Pat Thane and Tanya Evans’ new book on unmarried mothers in 20th-century England is an astute historical reflection on Gorer’s comment. It is also a myth-buster. The authors dismiss the view that unmarried mothers prior to the 1960s were ruthlessly banished from respectable society. At the very least, there were simply too many of them. During the First World War, around nine per cent of births were illegitimate

“Our poor strange boy,” said Queen Victoria of her son. The heir to the throne was not a favourite. Poor Bertie was constantly falling short of his elder sister, Vicky, who spoke French by three and was learning Latin at four. As he declared: “Vicky will be mama’s successor... Victoria the second.” It was something of a surprise to learn that matters would proceed differently. The prince, as Ridley shows, was good-hearted and meant well, but a lack of understanding from his father in

and even official statistics show that by the late 1930s nearly a third of ‘legitimate’ births had been conceived before marriage. Of course, poverty and a hostile familial or community response to unmarried pregnancy sometimes resulted in the woman being institutionalised in a workhouse or hospital for the mentally ill. Her child might be packed off to foster care – a precarious fate even after fostering was officially regulated under the 1936 Public Health Act. But other unmarried mothers were able carefully to manage their lives in ways that brought some security and happiness. Thane and Evans also make interesting observations about the role BBC History Magazine

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Bertie was good-hearted and meant well, but was pushed towards rebellion

particular pushed him towards rebellion. Two years after the death of Albert, in 1861, Bertie obeyed his mother’s desire and married Alexandra of Denmark. Attractive and gentle but often ill after a series of pregnancies, she was no competition for the society women of the day. Some women gained from an association with Bertie. Others did not, such as Harriet, Lady Mordaunt, abandoned by her husband and stowed in an asylum to save her family’s reputation. Victoria’s worries about the debauched aristocracy had political import. For the queen, such behaviour recalled “the time before the French revolution”. But when he did ascend, the wheezing, exhausted king was popular. He moved back to Buckingham Palace and travelled widely – becoming the first reigning monarch to visit Russia. He did, however, fail to make particular rapprochement with his nephew, Vicky’s son, Wilhelm II. Four years after Edward’s death, the Great War broke out and the Europe governed by his relations was gone. “I would have liked it 20 years ago,” Edward sniffed, when he came to the throne. We have been waiting for some time for a full biography of Edward VII. Ridley’s erudite and enthralling work is a major contribution to our understanding of the Edwardians and the man who was their king.

A life of derring-do Sam Willis is enthralled by a biography of Edward Pellew, a naval officer who provided the template for a fictional hero Commander: The Life and Exploits of Britain’s Greatest Frigate Captain by Stephen Taylor Faber and Faber, 368 pages, £20

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DMIRAL SIR Edward Pellew (1757–1833) lived in an extraordinary era, when the Atlantic world was repeatedly torn asunder, and when the tentacles of European sea power began to reach further than ever before. His career spanned not one but two of history’s most significant revolutions: the American revolution (1774–83) and the French revolution (1789–99). He then fought the ongoing struggle against the bulging military strength of Napoleon’s empire, and he faced the many diplomatic and military

Taylor paints a picture of a man bursting with energy who was in his element on, or in, the sea

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Kate Williams is the author of Young Elizabeth: The Making of Our Queen (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012)

of voluntary organisations. They have made extensive use of the archives of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (now known as Gingerbread), which was established immediately after the First World War. In the words of its founder, Lettice Fisher, it was “a product of the energy released by the losses, agonies, and strain of the Great War”. This scholarly book will fascinate readers curious both about the lives of unmarried mothers and their children, and about family life and community networks more generally. Joanna Bourke is the author of What It Means to Be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present (Virago, 2011) BBC History Magazine

In 1816, Admiral Sir Edward Pellew led a squadron of ships that bombarded Algiers

problems that arose in the wasteland of Bonaparte’s defeat in 1815. Pellew witnessed British naval success as well as British naval failure on a massive scale. His early career saw an ill-prepared navy struggle in a war in which Britain was roundly defeated. Indeed, the young Pellew was one of a tiny detachment of British sailors who fought, and were captured, at the battle of Saratoga (1777), the first major

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turning point of the American war. In the years that followed, however, Pellew fought in a Royal Navy that utterly dominated wars at sea with its skill and professionalism. To view this period through his eyes is worthwhile simply for what he witnessed, but it is made even more rewarding because of the type of man that Pellew was and because of the shape of his career. The last major biography of Pellew was written in 1934, nearly a century after the previous attempt, a product of its age and the very definition of hagiography. Thanks to Stephen Taylor’s first foray into the challenging field of naval biography, we finally have a more rounded picture that showcases Pellew both as sailor and man. Taylor has scoured the archives for untouched material, even discovering chests full of notes, stacked in a Devon barn. Pellew has been immortalised in fiction in CS Forester’s Hornblower, as Hornblower’s captain when he is on HMS Indefatigable, and it is widely believed that Patrick O’Brien used him as a template for his hero, Jack Aubrey. Unsurprisingly, therefore, this biography is full of adventure and chivalry. Pellew does head stands on the topsail yard, he swims to the rescue of drowning sailors, he chases and defeats the French. Blockades, mutiny, treasure ships, privateers, pirates and slaves all feature. But there is also love and loss, anger and partisanship, nepotism and incompetence. There is even, and rather surprisingly, farming. The picture Taylor paints is one of a man bursting with energy who was utterly in his element either on, or in, the sea. Many officers, including Nelson, spent much of their time afloat feeling seasick or moaning about the rigours of life at sea. But Pellew was different. His contemporaries knew him to be special: “A favourite of the God of the Sea.” This brilliant biography describes a unique man in greater detail than ever before. Dr Sam Willis is the author of the bestselling Hearts of Oak trilogy. His website is www.sam-willis.com

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Imperial visions Frank Trentmann finds much to admire in a nuanced exploration of the years when Britain dominated the globe Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin Allen Lane, 496 pages, £25

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Empire is shown as a jigsaw of dreams and anxieties, conquests and rebellions, conversions and loss of faith Why did it lack the systemic nature of other empires? Darwin mainly points to the lust for profit and trade that drove expansion from Ralegh to Rhodes. In contrast to agrarian empires, Britain’s hinged on commerce. It began as “a private-enterprise empire” that adapted to opportunities, collaborators and resistance as it found them. Variety, however, does not mean that Britons walked into colonies 64

The Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882 led to Britain occupying the country

unprepared in a “fit of absence of mind”. One of the many things to admire about this book is its emphasis on the bureaucratic quality of imperial rule, shown in late Victorian warfare. First against the Ashanti in the 1870s and then in Cairo in the 1880s, General Wolseley perfected a military campaign based on meticulous planning, speed and a well-organised supply base. Generations of students will appreciate the book’s intellectual debt to Robinson and Gallagher’s seminal article ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, written in 1953. Britain, they argued, chose trade with informal control “if possible” but switched to rule “when necessary”. What Darwin adds to this insight is a rare, wonderful capacity for comparison. Empire here is a jigsaw of dreams and anxieties, conquests and rebellions, conversions and loss of faith. Putting several rebellions alongside each other enables Darwin to reflect on the kinds of imperial force employed in different parts of the empire against local tribes and indigenous peoples. White settler militias in South Africa were the most vicious, and Britons as bad as Boers. Collective punishment was in proportion to white fear and how thin their control was. Where colonisers were more secure, repression was less brutal. Such comparative forays may fail a simple ‘empire-good-or-bad?’ test. Yet seeing the imperial experience in the round like this does give us a clearer, more subtle appreciation of the

range of power and violence at play. It raises the historical writing on empire to another level. The downside of filling the jigsaw with one thematic piece after another is that it sacrifices a single overarching chronology. We thus follow visions of empire from the Tudors to JR Seeley’s 1883 Expansion of England, which made the popular case for the white settler colonies as Greater Britain’s historic destiny, long before we are taken through the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and later conquests that first established Britain’s global hegemony. In our post-colonial times there is a temptation to see all history as driven by empire. While fully appreciating the force of Britain’s empire and the suffering it caused, this book is at the same time a reminder of its contradictions and limits, with thought-provoking suggestions for liberals and progressives alike. More often than not, commerce was driving imperialism rather than the other way around. Nor did Britain evolve as a by-product of empire. Britain, Darwin emphasises, was unified long before she started expanding beyond Europe. Imperial culture never defined Britain’s DNA. Once decolonisation took its course, “Domestic imperialism died with a whimper”. Frank Trentmann is professor of history at Birkbeck, London, and a fellow at SCI, Manchester BBC History Magazine

THE ART ARCHIVE

O OTHER subject in British history excites as much passion today as the British empire. On television and in seminar rooms, historians keep turning to it for moral lessons. Did colonisation and slavery leave a dark stain on British society that calls for repentance, even reparation? Or should we instead turn to the British empire as an exemplar for how to rule the world today? Empire may be the text for our times, but, as John Darwin shows in this engrossing book, such moral concerns do little to explain how Britain grew into the world’s superpower and why its empire took the shape it did. To try to identify a single essence is doomed to failure. The empire was a hotchpotch of different societies, political systems and types of rule. Empire meant one thing in the white-settler self-governing Dominions, quite another in India and in the crown colonies. It was this messiness, Darwin argues, that made it so uniquely flexible and powerful.

Books OCTOBER 2012

Chocks away! Philip Sabin likes the anecdotes but laments the lack of depth in a history of Britain’s magnificent men and their flying machines

Repelling the Luftwaffe: RAF pilots discuss what it takes to shoot down German planes

Wings: One Hundred Years of British Aerial Warfare by Patrick Bishop Atlantic, 416 pages, £25

The author makes little attempt to focus on neglected aspects of history rather than the mainstream story with an air gunner at a dance in the sergeant’s mess, only to have him disappear on his very next mission. Bishop skilfully weaves these individual stories into an overall narrative that concisely but effectively gives readers a sense of the overall story of British air power. Inevitably, given the breadth of the topic, many aspects are skated over or omitted entirely. Nearly 90 per cent of 66

the book is focused on the first third of a century to 1945, with the remaining period (apart from the Falklands) getting short shrift. Bishop remains far more interested in fighters and bombers than in the whole supporting structure of maintenance, logistics, intelligence, reconnaissance, air transport and the like, although at least he gives naval air power its due (unlike in some works dealing with the RAF alone). He makes little attempt to focus on neglected aspects of history rather than the mainstream story. He does dismiss the famous 1943 dambusters raid as “a spectacular side show”, but elsewhere familiar names such as Ball, Mannock, Smuts, Trenchard, Dowding and Harris dominate the stage. The book does not delve into controversy. Debates about such issues as whether the Battle of Britain was really such a close-run thing are acknowledged only by brief qualifying statements, and the vexed issue of the

morality of Britain’s bomber offensive receives similarly cursory attention. An enduring thread is how confused, perilous and accident-prone air warfare has been until recently, and I especially enjoyed the story of Fleet Air Arm bombers mistaking HMS Sheffield for the Bismarck but being saved from their own mistake when their torpedoes turned out to be duds! The book is really an extended tribute to the heroism and pluck of British aircrew, as the last few pages clearly attest. Overall, fans of Bishop’s previous works will find much of the same, but on a far wider canvas. There is little here which is new, and pedants will delight in spotting the slips that flow from his broader ambition. The book is a lively, anecdotal overview for the general reader, but offers little beyond this. Professor Philip Sabin is the author of Simulating War: Studying Conflict Through Simulation Games (Continuum, 2012) BBC History Magazine

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FIRST NOTICED Patrick Bishop’s histories of air warfare when a colleague insisted on lending me Bishop’s 2003 book Fighter Boys – and later was equally insistent that I return it! Since then, Bishop has written several other works, including his 2007 volume Bomber Boys and his 2009 account of the Battle of Britain. Now, to mark the centenary of British air power, Bishop has produced a much more wide-ranging volume that aims to cover events across this whole century of aerial fighting. Bishop adopts the common technique in popular histories of focusing on anecdotal details and individual personalities to enliven and illuminate the broad sweep of events. He starts by catapulting the reader straight into the cockpit of a dogfighting Sea Harrier over the Falklands in 1982. The book contains a succession of such episodes, including the poignant memories of an 18-yearold radio telephonist who fell in love

Paperbacks How Food Made History by BW Higman

BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

Wiley-Blackwell, 280 pages, £19.99

PROFESSOR HIGMAN has written extensively on the social and economic history of the Caribbean but this present work covers a much broader canvas. He sets himself the task of reconciling what he has identified as two strands of food history. The first is the history of food as a source of pleasure, the imaginative use of ingredients, regional cuisines and so on. The second, more often associated with economic historians, is the history of food procurement, and anxieties about supply and famines. The book is an excellent survey of the development of humanity’s relationship with food – from the age of hunter-gatherers, where getting adequate food supplies was a key preoccupation, to the time since the Second World War when, in affluent western societies, the proportion of income spent on food struggles to reach 10 per cent. Despite this, we could be said to be both over-fed and undernourished since fat and sugary foods have left an increasing proportion of the population unhealthily overweight yet lacking in essential vitamins. Given the title of the book, this reviewer was surprised to see so little space devoted to the impact of the demand for food on great historic events. The African slave trade, for example, owed its hideous development to the growing demand for Caribbean sugar, but although there are many references to slavery none makes this point. That said, this is an excellent short introduction for the general reader. Stephen Halliday is the author of Our Troubles with Food: Fears, Fads and Fallacies (The History Press, 2009) BBC History Magazine

An early 19th-century print shows juice being squeezed from sugar cane in Antigua

The Reformation Experience: Life in the Turbulent 16th Century by Eric Ives

Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War, 1950 by Andrew Salmon

Lion Hudson, 320 pages, £9.99

Aurum Press, 416 pages. £12.99

IN THIS measured work, Eric Ives, emeritus professor of English history at the University of Birmingham, seeks to put religion back in the Reformation. Concentrating largely on England, he suggests that the Reformation’s driving force on both Catholic and Protestant sides was towards a closer relationship with Christ. He rightly stresses the fluidity of positions before Luther’s decisive break with Rome, ably demonstrating that nothing was a foregone conclusion here, despite common assumptions. Nevertheless, Ives takes a fairly traditional view of proceedings: for example, there is a chapter on the Protestant ‘martyrs’ under Mary I. However, Catholic ones under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I are skipped over, the clerical victims “understandably and justifiably” viewed as traitors. Although there are points with which several modern scholars would certainly quibble, The Reformation Experience is a solid effort at an overview of a complex and controversial period.

THE CONFLICT in Korea is, with good reason, known as the ‘forgotten war’. It receives remarkably little attention given its significance for the countries involved and its impact on the international system. Andrew Salmon is one of the historians attempting to ensure the war and those who fought in it have their proper place in history. While there is a place for broad, formal military history, this book dives deep into the personal experiences of the British and Australian soldiers and Royal Marines, men who saw action in some of the toughest fighting in which their countries have been involved since the Second World War. The book covers two units, 27 Commonwealth Brigade (one battalion each from the Middlesex Regiment, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and the Royal Australian Regiment) and 41 Commando Royal Marines (specially put together to act as an amphibious raiding force). The period it covers is relatively narrow, from the commitment of British ground forces in August 1950 until the end of the year. Yet it still encompasses a wide range of battlefield experience, from the

James Kelly is a fellow at the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University

United Nations command’s initial desperate defence against North Korean attack, through the amphibious landing at Inchon, the breakout and pell-mell advance to the north, to the shock Chinese intervention just as winter set in. The account is based on interviews with survivors as well as written sources. What results is a compelling tale that explains the camaraderie of small units in war, but doesn’t shy away from the visceral if sometimes exhilarating experience of high-intensity conflict, the brutalising effect on those waging it and the consequences for the Korean population. This admirable book does justice to its subjects, who deserve to be better remembered. Tim Benbow is the editor of British Naval Aviation: The First 100 Years (Ashgate, 2011)

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Books OCTOBER 2012 HISTORICAL FICTION

Seeking escape Nick Rennison is enthralled by a tale of an independent Victorian woman unjustly and cruelly confined to an asylum The Painted Bridge by Wendy Wallace Simon & Schuster, 400 pages, £14.99

IN AN ACT of impulsive philanthropy, Anna Palmer, a clergyman’s wife in mid-Victorian England, has left home and visited a coastal town where the survivors of a terrible shipwreck have come ashore. Her cold, conventional husband is appalled by what he considers wilful eccentricity and, on her return, he tricks Anna into accompanying him to Lake House. A large residence on the outskirts of London, this is an asylum for women suffering mental disorders and, before she knows what is happening, Anna has been incarcerated there. Committed to the charge of its owner, Querios Abse, she is labelled ‘mad’ and subjected to a demeaning regimen of institutional life. As Wendy Wallace’s absorbing novel unfolds, Anna struggles to assert her sanity in circumstances where all

Novelist Wallace creates rounded and believable characters

The forbidding environs of a Victorian asylum in Ilkley, Yorkshire

control over her life seems suddenly to be in the hands of others. Lucas St Clair, a doctor who visits the asylum to take pictures of its inmates, is drawn to her and finds his theory about the diagnostic power of photography shaken by their encounters. Anna befriends Abse’s teenage daughter, Catherine, a poetry-loving romantic who feels herself as trapped as her father’s charges. Together, they escape briefly to London. On their enforced return to the asylum, Abse imposes cruel new treatment on Anna. But all is not well at Lake House and her continuing presence there becomes the catalyst for much-needed change. Much of the power of Wallace’s novel lies in her skill at creating

rounded and believable characters. Abse is no monster but a troubled man, aware of the world changing around him in ways he cannot understand, who genuinely believes that he is helping his patients. Even Anna’s dreadful husband is not a moustache-twirling villain from a melodrama but merely a weak, selfish stuffed shirt who cannot bear what he sees as the embarrassment of a wife with a mind and life of her own. However, it is Anna, finding courage and a deep sense of self in her terrible predicament, who remains at the heart of The Painted Bridge and makes it such a moving novel. Nick Rennison is author of 100 Must-Read Historical Novels (A&C Black, 2009)

Three more novels on Victorian women

DORA DAMAGE, resourceful heroine of the late Belinda Starling’s only novel, is forced to take over her husband’s bookbinding business when he falls ill, and is drawn reluctantly into a shadowy world of pornography and corruption. As her difficulties mount, she struggles to assert her independence and to remain true to a new love found in unlikely circumstances.

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Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002) OPENING IN A Southwark thieves’ den in 1862, Fingersmith tells the story of Sue Trinder – employed by a conman in an elaborate scheme to despatch a wealthy heiress to an asylum – who falls in love with her intended victim. As first Sue and then the heiress provide their versions of events, Sarah Waters’s narrative twists and turns in wholly unexpected directions.

The Whores’ Asylum by Katy Darby (2012) IN THIS compelling tale of death and obsessive love, set largely in Oxford in the 1880s, the author has great fun recreating all the conventions of the sensational fiction of the era. Diana Pelham, the woman with a shady past who runs the asylum of the title, becomes the focus for an inventive story filled with the macabre and the melodramatic.

BBC History Magazine

WELLCOME IMAGES

The Journal of Dora Damage by Belinda Starling (2007)

ith w iew w ev No D r DV

Jonathan Wright previews what’s coming up on your TVs and radios Pick o f monththe

Despite Ian Hislop’s severe expressions, Britons haven’t always excelled at suppressing their emotions

Sterner stuff Ian Hislop tells us about his new series on a nation’s antipathy to public displays of emotion Ian Hislop’s Stiff Upper Lip: An Emotional History of Britain TV BBC Two

BRENDAN EASTON–EMILY BANTING– WINGSPAN PRODUCTIONS–BBC

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O BE BRITISH, many assume, is often to be descended from generations of repressed people. Not true, suggests Ian Hislop in his new series on the stiff upper lip. Go back beyond the Victorians and the British were widely thought of as too emotional, too exuberant. “[British men once used to] go around weeping and the sign of refinement is that you’re constantly telling everyone about your emotions,” he tells BBC History Magazine. So what changed? How did the British go from adhering to the idea of sensibility in the 18th

BBC History Magazine

century, when it was considered a virtue to weep as a way of showing finer feelings, to a 19th-century era when a policeman who cried in court was pilloried as PC Emotional? The French revolution, suggests Hislop, was a key turning point. “We forget what a huge impact it made,” he says. “This sort of emotionalism, essentially what we would now think of as foreign letting-it-all-hang-out, was [seen as] jolly dangerous, and if people weren’t in control of themselves they weren’t in control of anything. There was a real fear of mob emotion, which drove a cult of, ‘Well we’re not going to be like that, British people will behave with restraint and decorum and order.’” A measure of how things changed lies in the characters of two of Britain’s greatest military heroes. While Nelson’s last words

included the nakedly emotional sentence, “Kiss me Hardy,” Wellington was made of altogether sterner stuff. Nelson was essentially an 18th-century figure; Wellington belonged in the 19th century. It’s also no coincidence that Wellington’s austere public image was such a contrast to the British view of Napoleon as “this man who goes around with a tent full of books and smothers himself in perfume, with women on hand all the time”. And yet iron self-control comes at a cost. Wellington was a decent violin player, but destroyed his fiddle lest music distracted him from soldiering. Moreover, Wellington’s lack of emotional intelligence helps explain his lack of success as prime minister.

“The French revolution created a real fear of mob emotion” “His basic problem was he was a soldier, and military values don’t necessarily lead to consensus,”

Hislop says. “He did actually say at one point, didn’t he, in a cabinet meeting, ‘I’ve given my orders and no one’s obeying them.’” Despite this, Hislop, who jokes that he is, after all, a product of the English public schools system and descended from Scottish Presbyterians, clearly still finds much to admire in the idea of dogged Victorian explorers, administrators and adventures. “There is a sense in which I know they’re bonkers, but I do find them rather admirable,” he says. The “grand show” of empire, he adds, ultimately rested in part on an ability to appear “stern and capable” – “and an extraordinarily successful show it was”. The imperial world view, of course, was to be blown apart by the First World War, and the era of the stiff upper lip was on the wane. Yet who’s to say when we might need doughty, stubborn qualities again? In the 1920s, people wanted jazz and frivolity. Then came the Second World War. Suddenly, the stiff upper lip, now dubbed the Blitz spirit, was out of necessity back in fashion. E Scheduled for early October

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TV&Radio

Abiding institution

Equine problems afflicted a British diplomat in 1993

Director Steve Humphries discusses a new social history of marriage in Britain

TV BBC Four

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NTIL CHANGES to Britain’s divorce laws in the 1960s, marriage for most couples really was for life. Received wisdom suggests this led to many people becoming trapped in unhappy relationships. Steve Humphries, producer/director of a series that traces the history of marriage over the past century, isn’t so sure this tells the whole story. “There was a kind of pride in staying together, there was a friendship you see in these relationships,” he says. “They weren’t always characterised by strife and conflict. Obviously, there is conflict in all long-term relationships to some degree, but I think what we’ve tried to bring out is that quite a few of these marriages worked in their different ways.” Humphries bases his comments on interviews conducted for the first episode of the series, which covers the 1920s to the 1950s, years that encompass hard economic times and the Second World War. In the wake of 1945, he points out, there was a huge upsurge in the popularity of marriage. “After the separation and tragedy of war, the Depression years, the simple pleasures became so much

sweeter for couples,” he says. “That comes over so strongly in the testimony, the wonder of married life at that time, not being part of a nation at war, being able to focus on your home and your children.” This sense of contentment didn’t last, as the second show in the series explores. In the 1960s and 1970s, marriage, like many traditional institutions, came under attack. However, some of those who led the attacks later amended their views, including Rosie Boycott, co-founder of the feminist magazine Spare Rib, one of the contributors to the programme. “[She’s] happily married now and came to see the virtues of an institution she’d completely reviled in her younger days,” says Humphries. Big weddings became fashionable again in the wake of Charles and Diana’s nuptials in 1981. In addition, he says, many now want to revert to the “old ideal of marriage for life” because they saw “the pain that marital breakdown can bring” in their own childhoods. All three shows make extensive use of first-hand testimony, with contributors including centurion peace campaigner Hetty Bower and memoirist Diana Athill. Then there’s former merchant seaman John Salinas, who risked his life to retrieve a picture of his wife-to-be from his locker after a U-boat torpedoed his ship. Humphries: “He couldn’t bear to lose that photograph and he’s still got it.” E Scheduled for Tuesday 18 September

“After the tragedy of war, simple pleasures seemed sweeter”

A wedding in 1986. The modern era has seen fluctuations in the popularity of marriage

See our feature on Victorian attitudes to cohabiting on page 40

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The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase Radio Radio 4

HARRIED DIPLOMATS serving in far-flung locations sometimes have strange stories to relate. As a new series hosted by Matthew Parris explores, the wittiest of such reports often get passed to ministers and royals to read, a potential career fillip. In 1993, Turkmenistan’s president gifted John Major a racehorse. As dispatches revealed, the horse made an epic journey across the former USSR and had to be rescued from railway bureaucrats. It was a tale that also involved an attack by bandits, a carriageload of melons and commendable ingenuity on the part of a young diplomat. E Scheduled for Monday 24 September

What the butler saw Servants: The True Story of Life Below Stairs TV BBC Two

GO BACK 100 years and 1.5 million British people worked as servants. What were their lives like? It’s a question tackled by social historian Dr Pamela Cox in a series that seeks to uncover the reality of servants’ experiences from the Victorian era through to the end of the Second World War. This involves tackling some contentious questions. Why did an ideal of service rooted in a hierarchical society where emotions had to be suppressed endure for so long? Why did this world pass away? And do the experiences of our forebears in service reveal difficult truths about our comparatively recent history? E Scheduled for September

Social historian Dr Pamela Cox looks at the lives of those in service

BBC History Magazine

©BRENDANEASTON/BETTY/TESTIMONY FILMS/ALAMY

Love and Marriage: A Twentieth Century Romance

Curious dispatches

ALSO LOOK OUT FOR… The battle of Hamburger Hill in May 1969 cost the lives of 72 American troops

DVD REVIEW

Forgotten stories Vietnam: Lost Films History/Go Entertain, £19.99 (DVD) and £24.99 (Blu-Ray)

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ORE THAN 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War and yet, perhaps in part because it was a conflict so widely reviled at home, many surviving veterans have rarely talked about their experiences. Vietnam: Lost Films aims to give voice to those who served. Drawing on first-hand testimony – the tag line for the show for its TV broadcast was, “It’s not the war we know, it’s the war they fought” – and, featuring frontline footage taken by soldiers,

Reassembling the past The Stasi Jigsaw Puzzle Radio Radio 4

ALAMY/CORBIS

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N LATE 1989, as East Germany collapsed, an order came down to destroy records kept by the state’s secret service, its dreaded Stasi. There was so much paperwork that shredders couldn’t cope. When citizens stormed the Stasi’s buildings, in part to recover hitherto secret files, 16,000 sacks filled with torn-up bits of paper came to light. Over the last 15 years, a group near Nuremberg has been painstakingly reassembling these pieces, a task that it was estimated might take 400 years. However, help is at hand. Recently, the authorities have been BBC History Magazine

the series tells the story of the conflict from the build-up of troops in 1964–65 through to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Contributors include Arthur Wiknik, who was just 18 years old when his draft notice arrived in April 1968. A little more than 12 months later, he saw action at the infamous battle of Hamburger Hill, a frontal assault against a location of little strategic value. Later, Wiknik wrote a memoir, Nam Sense, as a way to come to terms with what happened. Not all of those interviewed fought on the front line. Anne Purcell was a military wife whose husband went missing in action, while Joe Galloway reported on the war on and off for a decade. Despite the American focus to what was, after all, a war fought in Asia, this is a moving reminder of the price of conflict. putting Dr Bertram Nickolay’s E-puzzler prototype computer through its paces. This first logs the characteristics of the fragments and then uses an algorithm to determine which pieces fit together. It’s claimed the computer could complete the task of reassembling the documents in just a few years. Will it work? BBC History Magazine columnist Chris Bowlby returns to Berlin, a city where he spent time as a student in the Cold War era, to learn more. As well as hearing why the work to piece together the documents remains important more than two decades after the wall came down, Bowlby also listens to disturbing snippets of the Stasi’s audio archive and meets those who suffered at the hands of the secret police. E Scheduled for Friday 14 September New computer technology could make the work of reassembling ripped-up Stasi files far easier

Heavily trailed, the blockbuster period drama Downton Abbey (ITV1, September) is back, with Shirley MacLaine joining the cast. My Family (CBeebies, September) is a history-cum-genealogy series aimed at pre-schoolers. Each episode features a child learning about the life of someone close to them, so Olympic athlete Mary Peters tells her godchildren about winning gold. The continuing Past Lives (BBC Radio Scotland, September) includes the curious story of the ‘Miracle Stone of the Spey’. Also broadcasting north of the border but available on iPlayer, Grand Tours of Scotland (BBC Two Scotland, September) finds Paul Murton exploring the country to find out how it’s changed since the first tourists visited. True Tales of the Crypt (Radio 4, Thursday 20 September) tells the story of the – ominous drum roll – curse of the mummy. Secrets of the Manor House (Yesterday, Friday 21 Mary Peters, September) who won explores life in gold at Britain’s stately the 1972 homes. On Olympics satellite, look out for The Jewish

Americans (PBS America, Wednesday 19 September), which chronicles Jewish life in the USA. WWII

Secret Army (Military History, Tuesday 11 September) charts resistance against the Nazis.

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TV&Radio

Autumn history highlights on the BBC Martin Davidson, the BBC’s commissioning editor for history, reveals what we can expect to see on TV in the months ahead

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BC HISTORY this autumn promises scale, but also, I hope, insight. On BBC One comes one of the most ambitious projects we have ever attempted, the eight-part

Andrew Marr’s History of the World. Covering 20,000 years, and

touching all corners of the globe, it explores the role played in the human story by food, religion, war, empire, knowledge, plunder,

without whom neither Nazism nor the Holocaust would have happened. Over the course of three programmes, Rees anatomises the tools of power that set Hitler apart even from other demagogues, which went far beyond the black arts of mass persuasion. How did this unprepossessing nobody persuade millions of Germans to offer him their unyielding faith?

German prisoners of the Afrika Korps stop next to a sign showing the way to the scene of Montgomery’s greatest triumph

What motivated Churchill’s obsession with southern Europe and what impact did this have on the Second World War?

The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler,

a multi-part exploration of the man 74

Andrew Marr asks if human beings can learn to manage their own natures

(See Laurence Rees’s feature about Hitler on page 18.) This November will see the anniversary of El Alamein and the crucial (and to some, the controversial) north African campaign, and two films exploring its context and its prosecution. On BBC Four, Professor David Reynolds, in his latest essay on the strategic watersheds of the war, tackles the Soft Underbelly that took Churchill from north Africa, through Italy into southern Europe. What motivated his obsession with this theatre, and what impact did that obsession have on the course of the war? And then, on BBC Two in Churchill’s Desert War: The Road to El Alamein, Jonathan

Dimbleby will look at the entire north African campaign in forensic detail, in a film that

embraces both the geopolitics behind it, and the actual fighting – and in-fighting – on the ground. The film will argue that, although it was motivated by a view of the empire not shared outside Britain, this was the campaign that was pivotal to the Allies’ ability (by no means certain in 1941) to counter and then crush the Axis. By contrast, a three-parter on BBC Two, Servants, will take us into a very, very different world – that of those working below stairs. Presented by Dr Pamela Cox, herself the grand-daughter of a servant, these films not only provide a powerful counter-image of life in service from the one presented in popular dramas, it brings to bear powerful – and moving – testimony from many servants themselves. And to round things off there’s a three-parter from Neil Oliver, also on BBC Two, who sets out to discover the real story behind another often travestied group – the Vikings. Exploring archaeological remains,

Laurence Rees explores why so many Germans were in thrall to Hitler

mythology and the Vikings’ extraordinarily wide-ranging trade networks, he offers what I hope people will find to be a compelling picture of these fearsome seafarers.

TV and radio highlights Keep up to date with all the latest history programmes on TV and radio by signing up now for our weekly newsletter. We’ll send you news of the best history shows direct to your inbox every Friday. www.historyextra.com/ newsletter

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power and ideology. Fleshed out with spectacular CGI and dramatic reconstruction, this series is, however, based on a central, guiding question: for 20 millennia humankind has proved how clever, how ingenious, how resourceful we are at recasting the physical world. But, asks Marr, when it comes to managing our own natures, have we fared as well? We may be clever apes, but are we wise? (See page 30 for our feature on five big questions in global history.) On BBC Two, from BAFTA-winning history producer Laurence Rees, comes what’s in many ways the culmination to a career grand oeuvre. It began in 1995 with The Nazis: A Warning from History, and continued in 2005 with Auschwitz. Now comes

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inspiration for your home…

Out&About Where history happened A HISTORY OF DISABILITY

A history of disability Charlotte Hodgman speaks to Simon Jarrett, contributor to an English Heritage project on the subject, about eight places related to society’s changing attitudes towards disability

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ROM THE SMALL centres of religious care founded in the medieval period to the growth of asylums in the 19th century, the way that society has treated its disabled communities has changed greatly since the Middle Ages. However, the subject has seldom received the scrutiny it deserves. “With this in mind,” says disability historian Simon Jarrett, “English Heritage has tracked the influence of disabled communities on the historic built environment – from the medieval period to the late 20th century – finding out how people with disabilities were seen, and how they saw themselves.” Disability in the medieval period was viewed in two distinct, and rather contradictory, ways. On the one hand a mental or physical impairment could be viewed as a punishment from God; on the other, those disabilities were sometimes seen to actually bring sufferers closer to God. “To be charitable to those with a disability in the medieval period was thought to speed a

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person’s journey into heaven after death,” says Jarrett. “It was not uncommon to find particularly pious people washing or kissing the feet of lepers, or endowing leper hospitals. Henry II himself visited a leper hospital in Canterbury to atone for his sins following the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170. “People with learning disabilities were usually cared for within their families and communities, and almshouses could sometimes be accessed for those without such help. And, as ‘deserving poor’, many physically disabled people were granted begging licences to enable them to earn money.” But where the medieval period is notable for the religious orders that provided care for disabled people, the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII saw many physically and mentally impaired people lose their sole means of survival. “The Tudor period heralded a move towards a more secular type of support for disabled people,” says Jarrett, “and some of the religious hospitals that had been closed during

the Reformation were re-founded by boards of governors, with charitable contributions.” Those with a disability were not always confined to a life of poverty or secular care, though, and some were welcomed into elite circles. Research by historian Suzannah Lipscomb has even revealed that ‘fools’ employed to amuse the Tudor court may have in fact had learning disabilities. “There were deemed to be two types of ‘fool’ during the Tudor period,” says Jarrett, “‘natural fools’ (referring to those with a learning disability), and ‘artificial fools’ (those who acted the part). Will Somer, Henry VIII’s ‘fool’, had his own apartments at court and was finely dressed, yet was deemed unable to look after himself and had a paid carer. This, Lipscomb believes, indicates that he may have been what was then known as a ‘natural fool’.” Warfare has always promoted advances in the care of wounded or disabled people and the aftermath of the Elizabethan wars of the late 16th century saw the development of pensions and other types of practical, non-religious BBC History Magazine

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MAIN PICTURE: Hampton Court Palace was home to the ‘fool’ Will Somer (shown right), who may have had a learning disability

support for returning soldiers. The move from a religious to a secular view of disability continued through the 17th and 18th centuries, as large military hospitals such as the Chelsea Hospital for disabled and infirm soldiers and Greenwich Hospital for disabled and infirm sailors became more commonplace. The treatment of mentally ill people also went through substantial changes during this period, as private ‘madhouses’ grew up around Britain, where wealthy patients could stay until they ‘recovered their reason’. The 18th century also saw the introduction of the first deaf and blind schools, and the beginnings of what we now know as British Sign Language. The first school for the blind was opened in Liverpool by Edward Rushton, himself blind through disease, in 1791, and attempted to equip those with visual impairments with skills to enable them to support themselves. Things changed again in the 19th century – the heyday of the asylum system, when people turned to institutional solutions to mental and BBC History Magazine

physical disabilities rather than the community and familial care of the past. “The Victorian idea that those with a mental illness were somehow dangerous meant that many were confined to lunatic asylums,” says Jarrett. Subsumed into lunacy legislation were those with lifelong learning disabilities who failed to respond to treatment. Many remained in asylums indefinitely. The treatment of disabilities improved rapidly in the 20th century, especially in the wake of the two world wars. Two million servicemen returned from the First World War disabled and unable to resume their former lives. Rehabilitation – as well as medicine – would prove key to their treatment. The Second World War saw huge leaps in surgery, as well as prosthetics and plastic surgery. It also precipitated the development of a disabled rights movement, which saw blind ex-servicemen protesting about pensions and levels of support in the early 1950s. “The English Heritage project aims to dispel some of the myths surrounding disability

history,” says Jarrett, “but also highlights how attitudes have changed since the medieval period. Disability history is often dominated by the asylum period of the 1840s–1980s, but the story is so much bigger than that.” Words: Charlotte Hodgman. Historical advisor: Simon Jarrett, web writer for the English Heritage ‘Disability in Time and Place’ project E Turn the page to discover eight places associated with changing attitudes to disability JOURNEYS

Website

E Disability in Time and Place will be available on the English Heritage website in December 2012 www.english-heritage.org.uk

On the podcast Simon Jarrett will be discussing disability through history on our weekly podcast www.historyextra.com/podcast-page

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Out&About Where history happened A HISTORY OF DISABILITY

1 St Mary Magdalen Chapel, Ripon NORTH YORKSHIRE

Where outcast lepers could seek food and shelter

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LEPROSY, A DISEASE that can inflict severe deformity on sufferers, has been much feared throughout history. Although often believed to be a divine punishment from God, the obvious suffering accompanying the condition (now known as Hansen’s Disease) led some to believe lepers were in fact closer to God than most and should be cared for as such. Medieval religious

1

institutions ran leper hospitals that cared for sufferers in both the spiritual and physical sense. They provided a good diet and clean environment, as well as a chapel for patients. ‘Tame lepers’, as those residing in leper hospitals were known, were sometimes admitted as brethren or as sisters. Unusually, both the leper hospital and chapel at Ripon were open to ‘wild lepers’– as the afflicted living outside of such

institutions were known – and those born in the Ripon area were provided with a daily food ration and clean clothes. Founded in the 12th century, the hospital chapel of St Mary Magdalen is all that remains of the leper hospital, and is open to visitors. E www.ripon-leper-chapel.org. uk

St Mary Magdalen chapel was part of the former leper hospital that cared for sufferers of the debilitating disease

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4 2 63 7

1 St Mary Magdalen Chapel, Ripon, North Yorkshire 2 Imperial War Museum, London 3 Hampton Court Palace, East Molesey, Surrey 4 Chiswick House and Gardens, Chiswick, London 5 The Pembrokeshire Record Office, The Castle, Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire 6 Langdon Down Centre, Teddington, Middlesex 7 St Saviour’s Church, Acton, London 8 Westfield War Memorial Village, Westfield, Lancaster

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2 Imperial War Museum LONDON Where Britain’s first mental illness institution opened its doors to the criminally insane BETHLEM ROYAL HOSPITAL (often known as Bedlam) is one of the world’s oldest hospitals for the treatment of mental illness. It was founded in 1247 as the priory of St Mary of Bethlehem, the site now covered by Liverpool Street station. During the medieval period, the hospital was home to just 20 people, and while the violent and dangerous were restrained with manacles and chains, this was thought to assist the return of sanity. Following the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century, Bethlem was (along with four other ‘royal’ hospitals) handed over to the corporation of the City of London, which raised funds to run it.

Increased numbers and crumbling structures saw a new baroque building open at Moorfields in 1676, and in 1815 the hospital moved to St George’s Fields, Southwark, part of which still survives as the Imperial War Museum. This latter building had a special wing for criminal lunatics, which saw, for the first time, specialist provision for mentally ill people who had committed crimes. Bethlem Royal Hospital has now moved to Bromley, south London, where it continues to provide services to mentally ill people. S 020 7416 5320 E www.iwm.org.uk

BBC History Magazine

‘Jane the Fool’ (far left) and Will Somer (far right) were highly valued members of Henry VIII’s court

3 Hampton Court Palace, East Molesey SURREY Where Tudor ‘fools’ enjoyed royal favour PAID TO AMUSE their royal employers, ‘fools’ were highly valued members of court. They were appreciated for their lack of guile, for their reputation for speaking the truth in a world of flattery and deceit, and also because they were seen as being close to God. A c1545 painting at Hampton Court Palace, which supposedly depicts Henry VIII’s ideal family, illustrates the privileged and important roles held by fools at court. In it, Henry is depicted with his three children, Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, and his late wife Jane Seymour. But what is unusual about the painting is that it features two of the court’s fools: Will Somer and, it is believed, ‘Jane the Fool’, fool to Mary.

Henry’s attachment to Somer is well recorded. Bald-headed ‘Jane the Fool’, who had her head shaved up to twice a month, was also a popular addition to court, enjoying many privileges. None of Henry VIII’s palaces were more important to him than Hampton Court. In the space of 10 years he spent more than £62,000 rebuilding and extending the palace – approximately £18m today. Visitors to Hampton Court can enjoy a host of activities and learn more about the building’s history and famous inhabitants. S 0844 482 7777 E www.hrp.org.uk/HamptonCourtPalace

ALAMY/BRIDGEMAN

The buildings of the Imperial War Museum housed patients of the Bethlem Royal Hospital

4 Chiswick House and Gardens, Chiswick LONDON Where genteel pursuits were thought to restore sanity PRIVATE LUNATIC ASYLUMS, or ‘madhouses’, had become popular by the 18th century as places in which gentlemen and women could ‘recover their reason’. Run by ‘mad doctors’, who didn’t require medical qualifications, these large country houses provided environments where patients could A former private ‘madhouse’, undertake genteel Chiswick House cared for games and therapeutic wealthy, mentally ill patients pursuits, such as horticulture, until they were well enough to leave. The patients were not kept at such institutions against their will, and were encouraged to walk and enjoy their beautiful surroundings. “By the 18th century, madness was beginning to be seen as the loss of reason,” says Simon Jarrett, “and it was believed that placing patients in quiet, rural locations would restore their reason. However, this was really only an option for those who could afford it; treatment of ‘pauper lunatics’ could be much worse.” Chiswick House was run as a private ‘madhouse’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before Middlesex County Council acquired it in 1929. Today, it is known as one of the finest examples of neo-Palladian design in England and for its magnificent landscape gardens. S 020 8995 0508 E www.chgt.org.uk

BBC History Magazine

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➣

Out&About Where history happened A HISTORY OF DISABILITY

5 The Pembrokeshire Record Office, The Castle, Haverfordwest PEMBROKESHIRE

Where patients were fastened to their chairs and denied comfort THE MID-19TH century saw a move to try and assess and control the types of treatment being carried out at private ‘madhouses’ and lunatic asylums. Restraints were a feature of many asylums, and a lunacy commission was formed to inspect institutions. The Haverfordwest Town Gaol was appropriated for the reception of the insane in 1822 and subsequently declared a county asylum. By 1844 the asylum housed 17 patients but inspectors found it to be totally unsuitable for their accommodation and treatment. Following a visit to the asylum in 1842, commissioners reported that “the asylum was deficient in every comfort, and in almost every convenience: the rooms being small and ill-ventilated”. They expressed shock that “the dress of the patients was dirty, ragged, and insufficient,” and that “the refractory patients were confined in strong chairs, their arms being also fastened to the chair”. The former prison buildings, in the castle grounds, are home to the Pembrokeshire Record Office, but the office is soon moving to new premises. Visitors can still visit the remains of Haverfordwest Castle, and the neighbouring museum contains a number of artefacts, including a cell door and leg irons. E www.pembrokeshire.gov.uk

Where the needs of a deaf congregation were embraced

A view of the remains of Haverfordwest Castle

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BRITISH SIGN LANGUAGE as we know it has its roots in ‘the combined system’ developed by Scottish teacher Thomas Braidwood in the mid-18th century, but non-signers often viewed it with suspicion as they couldn’t understand what was being said. St Saviour’s Church in Acton is a wonderful early example of disability adaptation and was the first church in Britain to be built for the deaf community. The church opened in 1875 in Oxford Street (now home to Selfridges) and featured two pulpits: one for the chaplain and one for the

interpreter. Tiered seating and bright lighting meant that deaf members of the congregation could understand what was being said – a unique innovation at the time. The church moved to its current site in Acton in 1922 to a building designed by Sir Edward Maufe: the foundation stone was laid by the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, in 1925. Visitors can attend services at the church or visit on request. E www.londondeafchurch.wordpress.com

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ALAMY/DOWN’S SYNDROME ASSOCIATION-LANGDON DOWN

7 St Saviour’s Church, Acton LONDON

6 Langdon Down Centre, Teddington MIDDLESEX Where a pioneering doctor opened a specialist hospital JOHN LANGDON Haydon Down, a doctor from Cornwall, is best known for his description of a genetic disorder now known as Down’s Syndrome. It was Down himself who coined the expression ‘mongoloid’ to describe the condition based on his belief that the facial features of people with Down’s Syndrome were similar to those of people from Mongolia. The discovery that Down’s Syndrome was the result of a chromosomal abnormality wasn’t made until 1959. Appointed medical superintendent of the Royal Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Surrey, home to people with lifelong learning disabilities, Down pioneered specialist

MARY EVANS/KING’S OWN ROYAL REGIMENT MUSEUM, LANCASTER/PAUL JOACHIM LRPS

MAIN IMAGE: John Langdon Down’s beautiful Victorian theatre LEFT: A portrait of Langdon Down

treatment that advocated education and activity rather than restraints and punishment. In 1868, John and his wife, Mary, purchased the White House (which still remains on the hospital grounds today) to set up a private hospital establishment known as the Normansfield Hospital. Down’s goal was to run the hospital as a family home and place of learning for residents. With this in mind, from 1877–79 he built a beautiful theatre where patients could perform shows and hold dances, both of which he deemed to be conducive to good health. The Langdon Down Centre is the theatre wing of the old Normansfield Hospital and houses the Normansfield Theatre, which is preserved as a rare example of a private Victorian playhouse and contains original painted scenery. The centre is open to the public twice a week. S 0208 614 5100 E www. langdondownmuseum.org.uk

8 Westfield War Memorial Village, Westfield LANCASTER Where disabled servicemen could set up home

The unveiling of the war memorial at Westfield War Memorial Village, 1926

THE END OF THE First World War saw thousands of disabled servicemen returning to Britain, requiring specialist help and equipment. In a national outpouring of gratitude to those who had sacrificed their health and bodies for the country, appeals were launched to build houses for these returning veterans. Westfield War Memorial Village is one of many specialist communities built for such a purpose and was opened in November 1924 by Field Marshal Haig. The memorial at the centre of the village depicts a soldier giving his wounded comrade a drink, and is dedicated to all ranks of the King’s Own Royal Regiment, the Lancaster Artillery Battery and all other Lancastrians who had served during the war. E www.kingsownmuseum.plus.com/ gallerywestfield.htm

ABOVE: St Saviour’s Church at its current site in Acton RIGHT: A girl demonstrates the art of communicating with deaf people in 1801, against a background of a sign language alphabet

BBC History Magazine

More from the series Read more from our Where History Happened series – including the Titanic and Roman www.historyextra.com/feature Britain

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Out&About Ten things to do Charlotte Hodgman previews some of the latest events and exhibitions

The Lost Prince:

e Pick of th month

The colourful life of Henry Stuart National Portrait Gallery, London 18 October–13 January 2013 S 020 7306 0055 E www.npg.org.uk TODAY, FEW people have heard of Henry Stuart – eldest son of King James VI and I, older brother to the future Charles I. But back in 1612 things were very different. In fact when, in November of that year, Henry’s life was ended by typhoid fever (he was just 18), the entire nation was plunged into grief. At Henry’s lavish funeral procession, 2,000 official mourners were joined by thousands lining the streets “whose streaming eyes made knowen howe much inwardly their harts did bleed”. Now, to mark the 400th anniversary of Henry’s death, the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is staging the first-ever exhibition to explore his brief but colourful life. The Lost Prince will showcase more than 80 exhibits, including paintings, miniatures and manuscripts, from a who’s who of great 16th and 17th-century artists, among them Peter Paul Rubens, Hans Holbein and Nicholas Hilliard. “Henry was fascinated by the arts,” says Catharine MacLeod, curator of 17th-century portraits at the NPG. “He was the first member of the royal family actively to collect European Renaissance paintings, he was a great patron of garden designs and court masques and his collections ranged from sculptures to antiquities. So, this exhibition not

only gives us an opportunity to tell his story, but also to showcase Jacobean culture in all its glory.” One of Catharine MacLeod’s favourite exhibits shows Henry mounted on a grey horse accompanied by Father Time. “The painting is allegorical,” she says. “It’s declaring that Henry’s time is coming, and that certainly reflects

He was the focus of great hope in terms of what he might achieve as the king of England

EVENT

TALK

Great Empress, Great Art

Constructing the Third Crusade

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh 6 October S 0300 123 6789 E www.nms.ac.uk Simon Dixon, professor of Russian history at University College, London, gives an in-depth exploration of Catherine the Great.

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how a lot of people saw him. He was charismatic, brave, athletic, moral – and he was ardently Protestant. As such, he was the focus of great hope in terms of what he might achieve as the king of England.” As it turned out, there was to be no King Henry IX. Instead, Charles would succeed James to the throne. “Charles hero-worshipped Henry,” says Catharine MacLeod, “and this is reflected in a poignant story of him bringing a small sculpture of a bronze horse to his older brother on his deathbed. A bronze horse is one of the highlights of our exhibition ONLINE E – and we think this may well be the SLID SHOW very same sculpture.”

FREE ENTRY

National Waterfront Museum, Swansea 20 October S 029 2057 3600 E www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/swansea Peter Edbury, professor of medieval history at Cardiff University, examines the Third Crusade.

TAP TO VIEW

EXHIBITION

FREE ENTRY

Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton: A Diamond Jubilee Celebration Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne 20 October–2 December S 0191 232 7734 E www.twmuseums.org.uk Portraits depicting Queen Elizabeth II as princess, monarch and mother.

LECTURE

FREE ENTRY

The Motherland Calls Imperial War Museum London 6 October 2012 S 020 7416 5320 E www.iwm.org.uk Stephen Bourne gives a talk about his new book The Motherland Calls, which pays tribute to the black servicemen and women who volunteered to support Britain during the Second World War.

BBC History Magazine

Prince Henry When an Infant, unknown artist, 1596. James VI and I’s eldest son was to grow into a hugely charismatic young man

A dissected skull is just one of the gruesome finds on show

EXHIBITION

Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men Museum of London, London 19 October–14 April 2013 S 020 7001 9844 E www.museumoflondon.org.uk The 2006 excavation of a burial ground at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel uncovered amazing results, and now you can see just what was revealed in these 262 burials. This major new exhibition shows animal and human remains, exquisite anatomical models and drawings and original artefacts that open up the world of dissection, autopsy and amputation, plus the grisly trade in dead bodies.

TAP TO VIEW

ONLIN

SLIDE E SHOW

EVENT

Autumn Air Show Imperial War Museum Duxford, Cambridge 14 October S 01223 835 000 E www.iwm.org.uk The Imperial War Museum’s annual Autumn Air Show rounds out the UK’s air show season in style, with an array of classic and cutting-edge favourites flying for the crowds. Currently confirmed are the B-17 Flying Fortress Sally B, a Goodyear Corsair, a Catalina flying boat and a P51 Mustang, with many more due to be added to the line-up. EXHIBITION

PRIVATE COLLECTION/MUSEUM OF LONDON ARCHAEOLOGY/ CY TWOMBLY/ TATE, 2011

Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings

RE-ENACTMENT

1066 Battle of Hastings Battle Abbey, East Sussex 13–14 October S 01424 775705 E www.english-heritage.org.uk More than 1,000 soldiers clash in the annual re-enactment of the battle of Hastings, on the site where it took place. The abbey ruins are said to stand on the spot where Harold died.

BBC History Magazine

Tate Liverpool Until 28 October S 0151 702 7400 E www.tate.org.uk Bringing together the works of JMW Turner, Claude Monet and Cy Twombly, this ambitious exhibition explores the work of the three well-known artists, seeking the similarities in their styles, subjects and motivations during the last 20 to 30 years of their lives. The exhibition features famous works such as Monet’s Water Lilies, Turner’s Romantic landscapes and Twombly’s Blooming: A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things.

LECTURE

Hitler and Churchill: Who Had More Charisma? British Academy, London 18 October E www.historyextra.com/lectures Broadcaster Laurence Rees, and Ashley Jackson, professor of Imperial and Military History at King’s College London, consider the charisma of the wartime leaders as part of the BBC History Magazine lecture series.

LEFT TO RIGHT: Turner’s The Exile and the Rock Limpet, Monet’s Poplars on the River Epte, and Twombly’s Autumn, will be on display at Tate Liverpool

Out and about To find out what else is going on in your area in October, take a look at our www.historyextra.com/oct2012 online listings webpage at ONLIN

SLIDE E SHOW

Look out for online slideshows of museum exhibitions and more at www.historyextra.com/feature/galleries

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Out&About Ye olde travel guide HISTORICAL HOLIDAYS: GUIDEBOOKS FROM THE PAST

DUBLIN AD 1000 Clare Downham offers a traveller’s guide to Ireland’s emerging capital – a thriving, rain-sodden hub for traders across the Viking world ILLUSTRATION BY JONTY CLARK

WHEN TO GO Temperatures are mild all year in Ireland, although the rain can seem incessant at times. Go in summer, when the days are longest. WHAT TO TAKE WITH YOU It is not called Dubhlinn (‘Black Pool’) for nothing – the streets and laneways are wet and muddy. Sensible leather footwear is essential. Don’t look like a tourist: dress in Viking style in wool and linen, and top off your new look with a warm cloak. COSTS AND MONEY Don’t leave home without silver – Dublin is a thriving port and prices are high. A new currency has recently been struck in the name of Sitric Silkenbeard, king of Dublin. However AngloSaxon coins are accepted at all

a r e v o l e r r a u q a o t Get in you d n a r u o n o h f o t poin the n o f l e s r u o y d n fi may sword g in ik V a f o d n e p shar 86

retail outlets. Silver can also be exchanged as bullion – but bring your own set of weights and scales to ensure fair dealing. Dublin is a hub for traders across the Viking world, so set aside funds for shopping, and a separate allowance for emergencies (you never know when you may need a mercenary – there are plenty for hire). SIGHTS AND ACTIVITIES If you can get in, the royal court is a great place to visit. Sitric’s court is famous across Ireland for the many coloured clothes worn by the wealthy, and the Viking bling. Both the men and women love jewellery. The locals also take great pride in personal grooming. They wear their hair long and beautifully combed. The king himself is renowned for his silky beard. The feasts are lavish and there are entertainers and poets from across Ireland and Scandinavia. If you are lucky, you may hear a braigetóir or ‘professional farter’. Gossip is another major pastime and the more salacious the better. Sitric’s glamorous mother, Gormflaith, is a legend when

it comes to scandal. The assembly site or ‘thing’ is something to behold, especially if a legal case is in session, or an army is being raised. Otherwise taverns (for drinking and board games), craft shops and markets offer plenty of distraction.

to Brian but rumours of rebellion are rife. The townsfolk also loathe Maelseachlainn, king of Meath, because of a heavy tax he levied 11 years ago. If you hear of an Irish army approaching, a quick exit by sea is recommended.

DANGERS AND ANNOYANCES Dublin can be whiffy and cesspits lie close to the houses (take care if you are roaming about after dark). Rotting vegetation carpets the floors of many wattle-built houses providing perfect homes for all types of unpleasant pest. Fleas and bed bugs are a constant annoyance. These inconveniences pale in comparison to potential dangers. Dublin has a reputation for being rough. Get into a quarrel over a minor point of honour, and you may find yourself at the sharp end of a Viking sword. Also avoid discussing politics – people are passionate about their loyalties. Last year, when King Brian Bóru of Munster came to town, parts of it were burned. King Sitric has recently subordinated himself

SLEEPING AND ACCOMMODATION If you want some nightlife, head to the High Street or Merchant’s Quarter. Don’t expect a room or even a bed to yourself. Houses are usually open-plan, and everyone will be snuggled up on the side benches close to the fire. For a quieter evening, head towards one of the less congested parts of town, like the recently developed west end. EATING AND DRINKING Drinking is taken seriously in both Irish and Scandinavian culture, and there’s a great excuse to indulge: it’s safer to drink ale, mead, wine or beer, than spring water. Food is huge and hearty – beef, pork and fish are available in quantity, often smoked or salted. Stews are a staple dish. For something a bit different, try the sweet and

BBC History Magazine

Dublin today

ALAMY/ILLUSTRATED MAP: WWW.JONTYCLARK.CO.UK

Croke Park, probably the loudest noise in Dublin

sour sauce made from honey and sloe berries. SHOPPING From slaves to silks and spices, you can buy goods from across the Viking world. Hiberno-Scandinavian jewellery is the height of fashion. The latest trend is the ‘kite’ brooch, currently

BBC History Magazine

available from all good metalworkers. GETTING AROUND The town’s lanes and paths are well organised but it’s easy to get muddled as most of the houses look the same. The long-ship is the classiest way to travel long distance. For those on a smaller budget,

space on merchant vessels, fishing boats and ferries is negotiable. Beware of unscrupulous hauliers who may try to capture you and sell you as a slave. Clare Downham is the author of Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland: The Dynasty of Ívarr to AD 1014 (Dunedin Academic Press, 2008)

If Sitric Silkenbeard dropped into the 2012 capital of Ireland he’d find little to remind him of wattle huts and cesspits. Dublin is every inch the modern European capital, complete with rejuvenated waterfront, finely preserved stock of historic buildings and lively shopping and drinking areas. Ireland is a major tourist destination these days, and the capital welcomes a diverse bunch, from city-breakers to dewy-eyed members of the Irish diaspora using Dublin as a launchpad for genealogical wanderings elsewhere in the country. While the occasional closed shop betrays Ireland’s economic malaise, the sense of energy that defined the country during the Celtic Tiger years is still apparent, if slightly tempered by traditional Irish cynicism. Still, this is a city where locals love to have a good time, and the pubs of Temple Bar provide a reliable haunt for tourists looking to emulate them. There is still one place where Dubliners bellow like Vikings: Croke Park, the home of both the Gaelic Athletic Association and Dublin’s football and hurling teams. If you have the chance to join fans of the Dubs on the giant terrace known as Hill 16 for a big match, you’ll feel a step closer to rowdier days gone by.

If you like this…

Galway is smaller, wetter and less heralded than Dublin, but it’s the perfect gateway to the west of Ireland. Or chase the Celtic influence over the Atlantic to Boston. Tom Hall, editor, lonelyplanet.com. You can read more of Tom’s articles at the website

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Miscellany Q&A TAP HERE TO SUBMIT A QUESTION ILLUSTRATION BY GLEN MCBETH

QUICK QUERY

Q. Who was

Boston Corbett?

ALAMY

A. John Wilkes Booth was

the man who shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC. The man who shot Booth was called Boston Corbett. Following the assassination of the president in April 1865, Booth escaped, but was eventually tracked down to a Virginia farm by a troop of soldiers. Orders had been given to take him alive but Corbett, one of the troopers, put a bullet in his neck. Corbett was a very strange man indeed. Some years earlier he had castrated himself in order to avoid the temptations of prostitutes. In later life, he became a recluse, and is thought to have died in a massive forest fire in 1894. Nick Rennison

Q. I have read that Roman slaves sometimes bought their own freedom. Was it usual for them to own money and property in their own right and could their masters confiscate it at will? O Adamberry, Gibraltar

A.

Lincoln’s avenger, Corbett, had castrated himself in order to avoid the temptations of prostitutes

Yes, it was common for Roman slaves to ‘earn’ a little money. This was often in the form of tips but, as Gaius, a Roman jurist, wrote in the second century AD, “whatever property is acquired by a slave is acquired by his master” – whether the slave kept his or her ‘earnings’ seems to have been at the master’s discretion. If slaves saved that money they could use it to buy their freedom for a sum agreed by their master.

The Romans had an official system for freeing slaves that was unique in the ancient world. Called ‘manumission’, from manumissio, (‘release from the hand’ of power), it came in several forms: the most formal involved a magistrate, and gave the freed slave not only his freedom, but also the right to trade and make his own living, as well as to make and to benefit from a will.

Read our feature on the end of Roman Britain online: TAP

Lifelong obedience and services (obsequium et operae) towards the former owner were part of the deal, and a freedman (libertus) remained part of the familia, the ex-owner’s extended household. Less formal forms of manumissio even meant that when the freed slave died, everything he had reverted to his former owner. Gillian Hovell, author of Roman Britain (Crimson Publishing, 2012)

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Miscellany Q&A

The first person to make a hot-air balloon flight in Britain was the editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. James Tytler was a debt-ridden writer in 18th-century Edinburgh whose most successful job was producing a second edition of what was to become the best known of all encyclopedias. Tytler was also a pioneering ballooning enthusiast. In 1784, he completed a half-mile journey in a balloon he had built himself. Briefly, he was the toast of the Scottish capital, but unfortunately his later flights were not so successful and he was soon forgotten. Accused of writing a seditious pamphlet in 1792, he left for America where he became a journalist in Salem, Massachusetts. He died in 1804 after falling into a pond while drunk. Nick Rennison

QUICK QUERY

Q. Where was Pepys Island?

A. In late 1683, the British

privateer Ambrose Cowley was sailing the South Atlantic when he came across a hitherto unknown island, which he wrote in his log book was “a good place for fresh water and tinder”. He named the place Pepys Island in honour of Samuel Pepys, then well known as the secretary to the Admiralty, now more famous as a diarist. For the next century dozens of explorers, including Captain Cook, tried unsuccessfully to find Pepys Island. It was finally decided that Cowley had made a huge navigational error and had unknowingly described one of the Falkland Islands, although as late as 1839, one Spanish naval authority was still stoutly maintaining that Pepys Island must exist. Nick Rennison

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Q. When Harold

and his men left Stamford Bridge to confront the Normans, why didn’t they go by sea?

David Golby, by email

A. Transporting troops by sea

was always an option in 11thcentury England – the Old English words for ‘army’ and ‘fleet’ are virtually interchangeable. During the summer of 1066 Harold had stationed great numbers of men and ships along England’s south coast in anticipation of a Norman invasion, but in early September he had been forced to disband them when their supplies ran out. According to one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the troops returned home and the king and the fleet returned to London. It was only at that point that Harold learned of the Norwegian army’s

landing in Yorkshire, and moved northwards to confront it. At least some of his troops appear to have travelled by ship, to judge from the Chronicle’s use of the phrase lið fylcade (shipborne). But the question assumes that

Q. What are the origins of the Royal Engineers? TD Cowburn, West Sussex

Members of the Royal Engineers take part in bridge-building practice in preparation for the 1920 Royal Tournament

Harold remained at Stamford Bridge after his victory and kept his army intact. It seems more likely that, having defeated his enemies, he would have dismissed his troops, and whatever ships he had with him, just as he had done

A.

The Royal Engineers can claim descent from the military engineers brought to England by William the Conqueror, in

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The battle of Stamford Bridge, as depicted in a 13th-century manuscript

at the start of the month. The Normans did not land at Pevensey, 240 miles away, until three or four days later, and the unexpected news would have taken at least two or three more days to reach Harold in Yorkshire.

The unfortunate English king once again found himself in the position of having to put an army together on the hoof.

particular Bishop Gundulf, who built Rochester Castle. However, the origins of the modern corps lie in the Board of Ordnance, established in 1414 to supply arms and munitions to the English army and navy. In 1717 the board established a Corps of Engineers, consisting entirely of commissioned officers, to oversee construction work to be carried out by civilian labourers. Later in the 18th century, as the British worked to fortify Gibraltar, the officers got fed up with these freelancers, who they felt were flighty and undisciplined. They wanted mechanics they could really depend on. Lieutenant-Colonel William Green, chief engineer at the fortress, proposed the formation of a company of military artificers. Royal consent for this was granted on 6 March 1772, and the Soldier-Artificer Company was

duly established. Then, in the 1780s, with Britain under threat from Spain, the Duke of Richmond, Master-General of the Board, asked Prime Minister William Pitt for a corps of engineers based on the model used at Gibraltar to improve England’s dockyards and fortifications. The PM was supportive and despite opposition in the Commons, the king’s authority “for establishing a corps of royal military artificers” was conveyed on 10 October 1787. Initially consisting of six companies of 100 men, the corps of the Royal Engineers (now known as sappers) was born. It has since lived up to its motto ‘Ubique’ (‘Everywhere’) by providing military engineering and technical support in every major battle the British army has fought.

Marc Morris, historian, author and broadcaster

WHILE ACADEMICS differ on whether Halloween originated as a Christian festival celebrating the eve of All Saints’ Day, the Gaelic harvest festival of Samhain or perhaps even a dimly remembered Roman celebration, the term Halloween, deriving from All Hallows’ Even, doesn’t make its first appearance in the written record until 1556. Nor was there a lot of trick-or-treating in those days, although there were some tasty treats thanks to the practice of ‘souling’ whereby the poor went from door to door on the evening before All Souls’ Day (not Halloween itself), offering prayers for the dead in return for food. This often came in the form of ‘soul cakes’ with each cake representing a soul freed from purgatory. As you might expect, the Protestants didn’t take too kindly to all this, not least because it suggested humans could alter the fate of souls by eating cake – which, to be fair, is a rather unusual idea. From the 17th century, they were more keen for the English at least to move the focus of their celebrations to Guy Fawkes Night. Not so in Scotland or Ireland, however, where the church had to take a more pragmatic approach to

adapting the ancient festival of Samhain to its own use. All of which brings us to the USA. Oddly, before the early 19th century there’s no evidence anyone in the US thought of Halloween as a holiday at all, but with mass Irish and Scottish immigration in the 19th century, that started to change. These immigrants brought with them some of the old ways, including the carving of jack-o-lanterns – which took on new proportions when the humble Scottish turnip could be replaced with the magnificent American pumpkin. Take one of these on a traditional ‘guising’, where children in costume went from door to door seeking treats as they had done when they went ‘a-souling’ in previous centuries, and you have the origins of ‘trick-or-treat’. But if you mutter darkly under your breath about ‘American traditions’ when the doorbell rings repeatedly on Halloween, I should point out that the term and the practice were first recorded in Canada. Justin Pollard‘s latest book is Boffinology: The Real Stories Behind Our Greatest Scientific Discoveries (John Murray, 2010). He is a question writer for the panel show QI on BBC One

Ingredients from different traditions created the recipe for modern Halloween

Dan Cossins, freelance writer

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Miscellany Puzzles HIDDEN HISTORICALS

Greek genius

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Which famous character from history does this pictogram represent? Answer at foot of the page 9 l

Who am I?

Quiz Tombs, memorials and monuments Henry VIII spent a dazzling sum on a monument to his parents (see p10). Can you answer these teasers?

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1 ‘Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspecte.’ What do these words mean, where would you find them and to whom do they refer? 2 Alongside which of his wives l

was Henry VIII buried?

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3 What is Prince Albert holding on London’s Albert Memorial?

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4 “Well might the dead who struggled in the slime/Rise up and deride this sepulchre of crime.” Who wrote these words, and about what? 5 What does it not say on Jane l

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As a child I loved American football and fried squirrel. As a young man, I served my country with pride. I brought black music to white children, and TV cameras showed me strictly above the waist. Who am I? Answer at foot of the page CROSSWORD COMPETITION TERMS & CONDITIONS M The crossword competition is open to all residents of the UK (inc. Channel Islands), aged 18 or over, except Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited employees or contractors, and anyone connected with the competition or their direct family members. By entering participants agree to be bound by these terms and conditions and that their name and county may be released if they win. Only one entry permitted per person. M The closing date and time is as shown on page 96. Entries received after that will not be considered. Entries cannot be returned. Entrants must supply full name, address and daytime phone number. Immediate Media Company (publishers of BBC History Magazine) will only ever use personal details for the purposes of administering this competition, and will not publish them or provide them to anyone without permission. Read more about the Immediate Privacy Policy at www.immediatemedia.co.uk/privacy-policy/

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M The winning entrants will be the first correct entries drawn at random after the closing time. The prize and number of winners will be as shown on the Crossword page. There is no cash alternative and the prize will not be transferable. Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited’s decision is final and no correspondence relating to the competition will be entered into. The winners will be notified within 20 days of the close of the competition by post. The name and county of residence of the winners will be published in the magazine within two months of the closing date. If the winner is unable to be contacted within one month of the closing date, Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited reserves the right to offer the prize to a runner up. M Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited reserves the right to amend these terms and conditions or to cancel, alter or amend the promotion at any stage, if deemed necessary in its opinion, or if circumstances arise outside of its control. The promotion is subject to the laws of England.

Austen’s tomb in Winchester Cathedral?

Garibaldi made a contribution towards its construction. What is it? 8 “Blessed be the man l

that spares these stones/And curst be he that moves my bones” On whose tomb would you find these words?

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9 What is famously buried in this Cambridge College chapel? (above)

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10 What is this and what was removed from it in 1830? (right)

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6 What slightly surprising biblical inscription can be found on the monument to Suffragette martyr Emily Davison in the churchyard of St Mary’s Morpeth?

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7 Its foundation stone was laid in 1861 on the anniversary of Bannockburn and Guiseppe

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Compiled by Julian Humphrys Answers at foot of page

QUIZ ANSWERS: 1. ‘Reader, if you would see his monument, look around you’ in St Paul’s Cathedral about its designer, Sir Christopher Wren 2. Jane Seymour 3. A catalogue of the Great Exhibition 4. Siegfried Sassoon, about Blomfield’s Menin Gate memorial to the missing at Ypres 5. That she was a writer. 6. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” 7. The National Wallace Monument at Stirling, Scotland 8. William Shakespeare’s in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon 9. Oliver Cromwell’s head. (In his old college, Sidney Sussex) 10. The Monument to the Great Fire of London. An inscription claiming that the fire was caused by Catholics Hidden historical: Archimedes Who am I? Elvis Presley

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My history hero ‘Blondie’ Hasler (1914–87) Chosen by Paddy Ashdown, Liberal politician and diplomat

When did you first hear about Blondie Hasler? The question should really be, when did I first meet Blondie Hasler? I bumped into him on a train, shortly after completing my Special Boat Service (SBS) training in the early sixties. I was slumped in my seat trying to fight sleep when a distinguished-looking gentleman with a blonde moustache sat opposite me suddenly asked me if I was in the SBS. That was, of course, information that I couldn’t divulge! A friend later told me that this man was Blondie Hasler. I was stunned. After all, Hasler had long been my hero, and has remained so ever since.

What was Hasler’s finest hour? It was undoubtedly heading the Cockleshell heroes’ raid

on Bordeaux. He and nine other men paddled 70 miles through an area swarming with enemy troops to plant mines on German ships. Six men were caught and shot, two died of hypothermia – and the raid only caused limited damage to the ships in the harbour. However, it’s still been described as the outstanding commando raid of the conflict. Why? It put a huge dent in German morale, and it provided a significant stimulus to the French resistance. What the raid also did was provide a template for future SBS operations – this was the first time that British special forces had been used for strategic purposes (attacking Germany’s blockade runners was undoubtedly a key strategic aim). Most people in the SBS regard this as the founding event in their service.

What kind of person was Hasler? What he wasn’t was a boy’s own, muscle-bound, gung ho military obsessive. In fact, he abhorred violence. That’s why the special forces appealed to him, for they rely more on guile than overwhelming force. In some ways, Hasler was quite a vulnerable character. He was always worrying whether his courage would fail him and he would never ask his men to do something he hadn’t done himself.

What made Hasler a hero? His ability to take ordinary men – one was a milkman from the Wirral, another a coal merchant from Glasgow – and give them the skills and the confidence to do extraordinary things. He was a leader who could bring out the best in his men.

Can you see any parallels between his life and your own? I was a Royal Marine for 11 years, but I’ve done lots of other things outside of the military, and so did Hasler. He produced a play, wrote poetry and

Blondie Hasler pictured in 1966. It was “his ability to take ordinary men and give them the skills and confidence to do extraordinary things” that made him a hero, says Paddy Ashdown (below)

was an accomplished sailor and draughtsman – he even invented the first practical self-steering gear for yachts. So we both pursued plenty of interests outside the Marines. Having said that, he was an incomparably better man than me.

Is there anything you don’t particularly admire about Hasler? He wasn’t a very jolly, sociable person. He had few close friends – and, unless you were very close to him, you never got to know the real Blondie Hasler. He also kept quite a distance from his men. I get the impression that he wasn’t loved as much as he was respected.

If you could meet Hasler (again), what would you ask him? I’d like to ask him, what was it like to spend an entire day in a field with no cover, 150 yards from a German gun position. It’s pouring with rain, there’s only two of you left and you can’t move for hours for fear of being shot. How did that feel? Paddy Ashdown was talking to Spencer Mizen Paddy Ashdown served for the Royal Marines and the Special Boat Service before being elected MP for Yeovil in 1983. He was leader of the Liberal Democrats from 1988 until 1999. His new book on the Cockleshell heroes, A Brilliant Little Operation, has just been published by Aurum Press. He presented a Timewatch documentary on the Cockleshell heroes in 2011 on BBC Two

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ERBERT GEORGE ‘Blondie’ Hasler is most famous for leading the ‘Cockleshell heroes’ in Operation Frankton, a daring commando raid on the French port of Bordeaux in December 1942. Ten Royal Marines undertook the treacherous task of canoeing up the Gironde estuary and planting limpet mines on German ships in the port. Of the ten men, only two made it back to Britain alive – escaping over the Pyrenees to neutral Spain – one of them Blondie Hasler.