BBC History Magazine 2015-01

THE INSIDE STORY OF WOLF HALL

MAGAZINE

WORLD WAR II

BRITAIN’S BESTSELLING HISTORY MAGAZINE January 2015 • www.historyextra.com

SPECIAL ISSUE

Allies or enemies? Antony Beevor on how Churchill was sidelined in victory in 1945 And… � The highs and lows of the 1945 home front

� Why the Holocaust almost faded from history

PLUS

e l u r o t y d Too ran ex o Charles II’s dangerous s

bsession

JANUARY 2015

ON THE COVER: STALIN: SCRSS–TOPFOTO. CHURCHILL: KEYSTONE FRANCE. ROOSEVELT: STOCK MONTAGE. CHARLES II: BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY. WOLF HALL: BBC. THIS PAGE: JOHN CAREY/PAUL HOPKINS–THE IMAGE WORKS/JENI NOTT

WELCOME Welcome to our first issue of 2015. I hope that you’ve had an enjoyable Christmas and new year. Seventy years ago, the people of Britain entered 1945 confident that that year would finally see the end of the war against Nazi Germany. But despite the successful invasion of France in 1944, a great deal remained to be decided in the battle for Europe – not least whether the armies of the east or west would be the ones to conquer the German capital. Meanwhile, on the domestic front, Britons still had to cope with the privations of rationing and the threat of terrifying new German weapons. The celebrations would have to wait. In this 1945 special issue, historians Antony Beevor (page 22) and Maggie Andrews (page 28) tell the story of those last few months of the war, offering fascinating insights into the struggle for European supremacy and the private battles of the home front. Plus, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, BBC filmmaker Laurence Rees reveals why it took several decades for the Holocaust to be widely studied and memorialised. Head to page 34 to read Laurence’s essay. On the subject of BBC television, this month is due to see the broadcast of the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. I spoke with Hilary and Thomas Cromwell expert Diarmaid MacCulloch a few weeks back to discuss the latest historical fiction phenomenon and the murky Tudor statesman who stands at the heart of it. Turn to page 47 to find out what they had to say. Rob Attar Editor

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CONTACT US Thomas Asbridge William Marshal is rightly lauded as one of history’s greatest knights, but his one-time lord and friend, Henry the Young King, tends to be derided as an idle playboy, or simply forgotten entirely. He must rank as England’s most underestimated monarch.

P Thomas writes about Henry the Young King and William Marshal on page 42

Maggie Andrews There is a familiarity to the Second World War home front but each year was different. In 1945 a war-weary nation inched its way towards victory and building the peace. P Maggie writes about life on the home front in 1945 on page 28

Antony Beevor Featuring the Ardennes Offensive, the vast Soviet winter assault on East Prussia and the Red Army’s charge from the Vistula to the Oder, the last six months of the Second World War have always fascinated me. They also provide the vital elements for understanding the origins of the Cold War.

P Antony writes about the race for Berlin on page 22

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JANUARY 2015

CONTENTS Features

Every month 6 ANNIVERSARIES

11 HISTORY NOW 11 The latest history news 14 Backgrounder: wages 17 Past notes

42 “Marshal bested 500 warriors in these years and accrued a significant fortune”

18 LETTERS 21 MICHAEL WOOD’S VIEW Find out what Britons were eating during wartime, on page 28

60 OUR FIRST WORLD WAR

WORLD WAR TWO SPECIAL 22 The race for Berlin Antony Beevor reveals how Churchill and Britain were increasingly sidelined in the final defeat of Nazi Germany

28 Life in the shadow of victory Maggie Andrews analyses the hopes and fears of ordinary Britons in the months leading up to VE Day

34 Auschwitz remembered Laurence Rees explains why it took half a century for the Holocaust to be properly memorialised

40 Waking up with Plato Greg Jenner examines Roman toilet brushes and Egyptian underpants in his history of our morning routine

42 The forgotten king and his Lancelot Thomas Asbridge describes the remarkable friendship of a medieval monarch and the ‘greatest knight’

47 Wolf Hall: fact and fiction Hilary Mantel discusses her acclaimed novels in the company of Thomas Cromwell expert Diarmaid MacCulloch

54 Charles II: too randy to rule? Don Jordan and Michael Walsh highlight the troubling extent of the merrie monarch’s obsession with sex

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Experts review new releases, plus John Guy discusses his new book on Henry VIII

77 TV & RADIO The pick of this month’s history programmes

80 OUT & ABOUT 80 History explorer: Stephen and Matilda 84 Ten things to do in January 86 My favourite place: Sicily

93 MISCELLANY 93 Q&A and quiz 95 Sam’s recipe corner 96 Prize crossword

98 MY HISTORY HERO Kate Mosse chooses Edith Cavell

DREAMSTIME/TOPFOTO/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/BBC/MIRRORPIX/ALAMY

63 BOOKS

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USPS Identification Statement BBC HISTORY (ISSN 1469-8552) (USPS 024-177) January 2015 is published 13 times a year under license from BBC Worldwide by Immediate Media Company Bristol Ltd, 9th Floor, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN, UK. Distributed in the US by Circulation Specialists, Inc., 2 Corporate Drive, Suite 945, Shelton CT 06484-6238. Periodicals postage paid at Shelton, CT and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to BBC HISTORY, PO Box 37495, Boone, IA 50037-0495.

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40 Discover the bizarre origins of some modern-day breakfast favourites 47 How Thomas Cromwell, Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII have been reshaped by fiction

34 Why Holocaust survivors struggled to be heard

22 “STALIN SAID BERLIN HAD ‘LOST ITS IMPORTANCE’. IT WAS THE GREATEST APRIL FOOL IN HISTORY” BBC History Magazine

54 Meet the women who kept Charles II preoccupied

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Dominic Sandbrook highlights events that took place in January in history

ANNIVERSARIES 5 January 1757

9 January 1806

Louis XV cheats an assassin’s blade

Nelson makes his final journey

Freezing weather saves the French king’s life from an assailant’s knife but it doesn’t cool his thirst for revenge

Thousands of Londoners line the streets to mourn the hero of Trafalgar

n 5 January 1757, Versailles shivered under a thick blanket of snow. At six that evening, Louis XV, the 56-year-old king of France, left his daughter’s apartments to return to his own rooms at the Grand Trianon. As he walked through the marble courtyard towards his carriage, the guards stood motionless, their torches held aloft. And then the assassin made his move, slipping out of the darkness to plunge a short knife into the king’s chest. The cold probably saved Louis’s life, since his clothes were so thick that the knife penetrated less than half an inch into his chest. The writer and historian Voltaire, one of the king’s fiercest critics, later claimed that it had been merely a “pinprick”. Even so, Louis feared the worst: when the queen ran to his side, he made a point of apologising for his countless affairs.

The assassin, meanwhile, made no attempt to resist arrest. A former domestic servant from Arras called Robert-François Damiens, he appears to have been outraged by the rigid policies of the French Catholic church, for which he held Louis personally responsible. Almost certainly he was insane. What followed, however, was simply horrific. On 28 March, Damiens was publicly tortured with pincers and burned with sulphur, hot wax and boiling oil. The executioner then cut off his arms and legs. Finally Damiens’s torso – he was still alive, incidentally – was burned at the stake. Among the crowd was the womanising adventurer Giacomo Casanova. “I was several times obliged to turn away my face and to stop my ears,” Casanova wrote, “as I heard his piercing shrieks.” But his fellow spectators, he noted, watched with hungry glee, their eyes bright with pleasure.

Robert-François Damiens is tortured following his failed attempt to assassinate Louis XV. His punishment involved sulphur, hot wax, boiling oil and dismemberment

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he funeral of Horatio, Lord Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar, was one of the greatest public events London has ever seen. For three days from 5 January, his coffin lay in state in Greenwich’s Painted Hall, while thousands of people paid their respects. On the 8th, a royal barge, draped in black velvet and solemnly escorted by City of London barges, carried it up the Thames to Whitehall. There it was taken to the Admiralty where it rested overnight, guarded by Nelson’s chaplain, Alexander Scott. The funeral procession on 9 January was one of the most colourful in the city’s history. Tens of thousands of Londoners lined the streets; some sat in specially erected stands, while others had bought tickets to obtain the best view. The cortege, made up of the Victory’s crew, Nelson’s fellow officers, Greenwich pensioners and thousands of soldiers, was so long that by the time the column reached St Paul’s, the funeral car was still at Whitehall. By the time the service began, it was already dark. In the gloom of the cathedral, 130 lamps glittered in the dome, from where the staff of St Paul’s had hung two gigantic captured French and Spanish flags. The mood was sombre, and Nelson’s nephew wrote that it was “the most awful sight I ever saw”. At the end of the service, as Nelson’s coffin descended into the crypt, a herald slowly read the great man’s titles, ending with the words: “The hero, who in the moment of victory, fell covered with immortal glory.” At that, Nelson’s officers broke their staves, which were later thrown into his grave. But his sailors did not follow the script. Instead of folding Victory’s flag, they ripped it in two and divided it between them as relics of Britain’s greatest naval hero.

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ALAMY

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ALAMY

Dominic Sandbrook recently presented Tomorrow’s Worlds: The Unearthly History of Science Fiction on BBC Two

A printed linen panel from 1806 depicts the funeral procession of Lord Nelson and scenes from his life. In the top right of the image his funeral cortege can be seen making its way to St Paul’s Cathedral. Thousands packed London’s streets to bid the naval hero farewell

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Anniversaries 2 January 1492 After an eight-month siege, the last Muslim emirate in the Iberian peninsula, Granada, surrenders to Castile and Aragon, marking the end of Islamic rule in what is now Spain.

14 January 1907 In Kingston, Jamaica an earthquake kills almost 1,000 people and leaves some 10,000 more homeless.

29 January 2002 George W Bush pledges to take on states that he says sponsor terrorism, identifying Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’.

25 January 1077

Henry IV bends his knee to the pope at Canossa The Holy Roman Emperor blinks first in a battle of wills between state and church

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he ruined castle of Canossa stands on the summit of a rocky hill in Reggio Emilia, northern Italy. In 1077, it was one of the most impregnable fortresses in the region. It was here that Pope Gregory VII took refuge during his bitter dispute with the Holy Roman Emperor, the German king Henry IV. And it was here that Henry waited on his knees in one of history’s most famous acts of penance. At the root of the Walk to Canossa was

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a long-simmering row about the balance of power between pope and emperor, known as the Investiture Controversy. When relations broke down, Gregory formally excommunicated and deposed the emperor – the ultimate sanction in medieval Christendom. As his support began to erode, Henry felt compelled to take extraordinary measures. After crossing the Alps in the first weeks of 1077, Henry dressed as a penitent, abandoning his shoes and putting on a

monk’s hair shirt. It was in this attire that, on 25 January, he arrived at Canossa. When the pope refused him entry, Henry waited outside, praying on his knees in the snow. At last, on 28 January, the castle gate creaked open. Inside, Henry fell on his knees before the pope and asked for forgiveness, and then they took communion together. Today, ‘going to Canossa’ has become a common expression denoting reluctant penance, especially in Germany. In reality, the effect was limited, as Henry and Gregory soon fell out again. But as a symbol of the conflict between Germany and the papacy, Canossa became enormously important. For many Lutherans, the emperor was the ‘first Protestant’. And when, in the 19th century, Otto von Bismarck launched his drive to curtail the powers of the Catholic church, he made his intentions very clear. “We will not,” he said, “go to Canossa.”

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Pope Gregory VII receives Henry IV at Canossa in this 14th-century illustration. The German king was forced to kneel in the snow for three days before being admitted to the hilltop fortress

20 January 1265

England’s first parliament meets The new assembly presents a potent threat to Henry III

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he first parliament in English history met on 20 January 1265, but it was so different from its modernday equivalent that the two can barely be compared. It was called not by the king – the decent, dithering Henry III – but by the rebellious magnate Simon de Montfort, who had become the standard-bearer for the cause of the barons against the monarchy. After defeating Henry’s forces at Lewes in May 1264, de Montfort decided to call an assembly (‘parlement’) in Westminster Hall to discuss his plans. The king had called such assemblies before; what was unusual about this one, though, was that its members included representatives of the shires and boroughs, not just the clerical and aristocratic elite. As such, it posed a potent challenge to the king’s monopoly of power. It was made up not merely of England’s bishops, abbots, earls and barons,

Simon de Montfort, who called the first parliament in English history, depicted on a stained-glass window in St Andrew’s Church, Oxford

but of two knights from each county and two burgesses from each borough. Of course de Montfort never intended it to be entirely independent; many historians think he packed his parliament with men sympathetic to his interests. But by inviting knights and burgesses – who became known as the ‘Commons’ – de Montfort implicitly recognised the rising power of the English gentry. Little detail about this first parliament

survives, and it seems to have broken up within a month. But it established a vital principle, and when Henry’s son Edward I summoned the ‘Model Parliament’ 30 years later, he too invited knights and burgesses, as well as representatives from each city, all of whom were elected. So perhaps de Montfort’s reputation as the accidental godfather of parliamentary democracy is not entirely false, even if he was far from being a democrat.

COMMENT / Professor Nicholas Vincent

HOWARD STANBURY PHOTOGRAPHY

“Thanks to de Montfort, parliament can celebrate 750 years of debate” The events of January 1265 were momentous in several ways. In the words of the great constitutional historian FW Maitland, they helped transform parliament “from an occasion into an institution”. Exactly 50 years after Magna Carta first demanded that no tax be imposed without consultation, the king’s subjects now met to debate far wider questions of policy. Their potential future division into ‘houses’ of Lords, clergy and ‘commoners’ was clear to see. The ‘commons’, as early as 1265, were elected on a county and borough franchise still operating into the 19th century and beyond.

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Parliament is thus an ancient institution. It is not the most ancient in Europe. Parts of Spain and southern France had representative assemblies long before 1265. Simon de Montfort, a Frenchman and chief orchestrator of the events at Westminster, knew this. He had witnessed the assemblies of France and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Thanks to his actions, the Westminster parliament can now celebrate 750 years of debate. It was elected primarily to represent the people, to advise and, if necessary, alter their governance. It has great powers, but also great responsibilities. Back in de Montfort’s day, as is the

case now, parliament’s authority rested upon popular respect. Should it lose that respect, even today, then it forfeits all authority. Nicholas Vincent’s

latest book is Magna Carta: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012). Follow his week-byweek construction of the events that led to Magna Carta at magnacartaresearch.org

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HISTORY NOW Have a story? Please email Matt Elton at [email protected]

Sculptures and sacrifice: inside multifaith Roman Britain A huge temple complex in Cumbria is offering up new clues about the ways in which religion was practised in the British Isles almost 2,000 years ago. David Keys reports he remains of a massive statue of the Roman god Hercules, a sculpture of the head of a fertility goddess, and relics that point to castration and bloody sacrifice. These are some of the artefacts that have been discovered in one of the largest collections of ancient religious material to have ever been found in the United Kingdom. The wide variety of deities to which the finds are dedicated points to the range of worship that took place even in some relatively minor settlements in Roman Britain. They include gods and goddesses from Roman, Middle Eastern and Celtic mythology, traditions that existed alongside each other in the multicultural society of the time. The discoveries have been made near the former site of a large complex of temples in the remains of a 1,900-yearold settlement next to a Roman fort in Papcastle, Cumbria. They include evidence of at least five temples or shrines, each dedicated to a specific god or goddess. The Roman deity Hercules, regarded as the protector of soldiers in battle and particularly revered in Britain, appears to have been among those worshipped in the settlement. Archaeologists have uncovered

MEGAN STOAKLEY

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Local god This unusual naked figure is among the artefacts unearthed in Cumbria. Experts believe that it may be the personification of the river that runs through the site, linked to the Celtic ‘god of the sacred oak’

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History now / News

Gods and monsters Miniature bronze figures of a stag (left) and a boar found at Papcastle suggest that a temple at the site was dedicated to Silvanus and Cocidius, the Roman and Celtic gods of hunting

“Finding evidence for this range of ancient gods and goddesses in one excavation in Britain is unprecedented” 12

Richard III DNA shows evidence of infidelity Analysis of genetic material taken from remains of Richard III found beneath a Leicester car park in 2012 shows evidence of infidelity in his family tree – although it is not yet known at what point the break in the lineage occurred. The scientists who carried out the research, published in Nature Communications, also say that the tests show that there is a “99.999 per cent probability” that the bones are indeed those of the king.

Experts have concerns about Stonehenge road be the personification of the river that runs through the site, associated with the Celtic ‘god of the sacred oak’, Daronwy. It is from this deity that both the name of the Roman settlement, Derventio, and the waterway’s present-day name, Derwent, derive. Miniature bronze figures of a stag and a boar found at the site – both pictured above – suggest that there was probably a fifth temple dedicated to the Roman god of hunting, Silvanus, and his Celtic equivalent, Cocidius. Excavators for the project, which has been co-ordinated by Cumbrian archaeological consultancy Grampus Heritage and supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, identified two miniature ceramic oil lamps and a miniature bronze axe – symbolising divine light and sacrifice, respectively. They also discovered the ceramic bowls that would have been used to make offerings of food to the deities. All of the artefacts had been found dumped in ditches or reused as building material for a later structure, probably during or after a Christian suppression of paganism that took place in the late fourth century AD. “Finding evidence for this range of ancient gods and goddesses in one excavation in Britain is unprecedented,” Roman sculptural specialist Dr Lindsay Allason-Jones of Newcastle University told BBC History Magazine. “The site demonstrates not only the variety of deities worshipped, but also, interestingly, how they eventually fell from grace, probably in the late Roman period.”

An advisory body on World Heritage Sites has raised concerns about the impact of a proposed new dual carriageway and road tunnel set to run past the site of Stonehenge in Wiltshire. The International Council on Monuments and Sites wrote to the British government about plans to improve the A303 before they were announced in December.

Shakespeare Folio has been found in France A rare Shakespeare First Folio, originally printed in 1623, has been discovered in the library of a small French town after being overlooked for more than 200 years. The book, which may have been misfiled due to it missing its title page, was found as librarians in Saint-Omer near Calais were planning an exhibition exploring the region’s historic links to England. The Folio is important because it collected 36 of Shakespeare’s plays for the first time and only 800 copies were thought to have been produced. Stay up to date with the latest stories at historyextra.com/news

The Shakespeare First Folio was missing several of its pages

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part of the naked torso of a giant statue thought to have been constructed in his honour, with the size of the fragment suggesting that the sculpture was more than 10ft tall. The discovery of a sculpture of the head of the Syrian mother goddess Cybele is also significant, as it marks the first time that such a representation has been found in Britain. It was unearthed along with a sculptural representation of the head of her consort, the Asian fertility god Attis. The followers of Attis and Cybele – in common with those of several other ancient religions – believed that an animal’s life-force was represented by its blood. Historical evidence from elsewhere in the Roman empire suggests that this temple may have contained a special facility for the ritual slaughter of sacred bulls. Leading worshippers would have stood in a subterranean pit below a metal grid on which the bull was sacrificed, so that they could drench themselves in its blood – which was believed to have divine life-giving properties. All of the priests of Cybele had to undergo ritual castration, meaning that the man who carried out the ceremonies in this temple would almost certainly have been a eunuch. Finally, the remains of an effigy of a naked figure (pictured on page 11) is believed to be explicitly linked to the local area. Experts believe that it could

WHAT WE’VE LEARNED THIS MONTH…

Moments in time Events will be held in the coming months to mark (clockwise from top left) the First World War Gallipoli campaign, the 1815 battle of Waterloo, the sealing of Magna Carta in 1215 and the battle of Agincourt in 1415

EVENTS

BRIDGEMAN/MARY EVANS

Europe prepares for a year of anniversaries F rom Magna Carta to the battles of Agincourt and Waterloo, commemorations are set to be held throughout 2015 for a series of key historical events. The 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta on 15 June 1215 will be celebrated with events including the unification of the four surviving original copies of the document at the British Library in London from 2–4 February. The library will also be running the largest exhibition in its history from 13 March to 1 September, exploring the significance of the sealing, and a diverse range of other events will be held around the UK (see magnacarta800th.com for more). “These commemorations are important because Magna Carta has inspired so many people over time, from Thomas Jefferson to Winston Churchill, and influenced drafters of constitutional documents including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Julian Harrison, co-curator of the British Library exhibition, told BBC History Magazine. “Magna Carta established for the first time that everybody was subject to the law. Without it, we might not have some of the freedoms we cherish so much today.” The centenary of the First World War Gallipoli campaign, meanwhile, will feature a UK-led ceremony at the Commonwealth War

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Graves Commission Helles memorial in Turkey on 24 April, and a national service of commemoration at the Cenotaph in London a day later. The Allied naval attack, designed to secure a strategically important peninsula in the Ottoman empire, was repelled after eight months of fighting and significant losses. The National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth will be the venue for an event on 6 August exploring the story of the only surviving Allied ship, HMS M33. Speaking at the launch of the commemorations in November, UK prime minister, David Cameron, said: “When we mark the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign, we will recognise the sacrifice made by so many and reaffirm our gratitude for the contribution of Irish and Commonwealth troops, in particular the role of the Anzac forces whose gallantry did so much to define Australia and New Zealand as strong independent nations.” June will mark the 200th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo, at which Napoleon’s

“Without Magna Carta, we might not have some of the freedoms that we cherish so much today”

French army was defeated by the Seventh Coalition including British forces led by the Duke of Wellington. Bicentenary events include an exhibition of artefacts from the conflict, at Windsor Castle from 31 January; the completion of a project to restore the farmhouse around which the battle was fought; and a memorial service in St Paul’s Cathedral in London on 18 June. Full details are available at waterloo200.org. “Waterloo’s significance has to be judged in the long term,” said historian Andrew Lambert, who will be speaking about the battle at a BBC History Magazine event in Bristol on 22 March (see page 79 for more). “It provided the basis for 40 years of reduced defence expenditure, debt reduction, global economic expansion and domestic progress.” Finally, 25 October marks 600 years since another famous clash – the 1415 battle of Agincourt, in which Henry V won a major victory against French forces in the Hundred Years’ War. Events include an archery contest on 23 and 24 May at villages around the site of the battlefield; a conference, running from 31 July to 3 August and debating key aspects of the conflict; and, on 29 October, a service of commemoration in Westminster Abbey. For full listings, see agincourt600.com. Matt Elton

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History now / Backgrounder

The historians’ view…

Is wage stagnation a modern phenomenon? The size of Britons’ pay packets proved one of the most charged political issues of 2014. But is today’s lacklustre wage growth as exceptional as some commentators would have us believe? Two historians offer their verdicts Interviews by Chris Bowlby, a BBC journalist specialising in history

Wages remained healthy during the Depression, but that was cold comfort for the 15 per cent of the population that was unemployed NICHOLAS CRAFTS

There have undoubtedly been similar episodes of wage stagnation before. As far as we can tell, there was zero real wage growth during the years between about 1835 and 1848 – and that probably went on for a bit longer than the difficulties we’re experiencing now. However, when the economy recovered from this dip, real wages jumped by about 10 per cent in two years – so quite a bit of the bad news was reversed. That pattern of zero real wage growth (taking into account the effects of inflation), followed by a swift recovery, was repeated between 1874 and 1882 and again from 1919–26. Following that latter period, wages bounced back and rose by about 7 or 8 per cent over the next three years. It may surprise people that wages did not stagnate or fall during the Great Depression. What happened in the early 1930s was that real wages remained reasonably healthy for those still in

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employment – that was the key feature. And there was a real fall in the price of imported foods. Obviously that was cold comfort for the 15 per cent of the workforce who were unemployed by 1933. But the problem was high unemployment, rather than falling real wages. That’s in direct contrast to today when we’ve had stagnant real wages for many in employment, but unemployment levels that haven’t exceeded 8 per cent – far below 1930s levels. What’s happening now undoubtedly marks a change from the post Second World War trend, when real wages have grown pretty steadily – somewhere around, on average, 2 per cent a year. What we face today perhaps is a period in which, for the first time in decades, productivity has taken a backward step. In the long run, real wage growth and labour productivity go mostly hand in hand. Also, since the 1980s, the ability of trade unions to mark wages up over market levels in the private sector has pretty much disappeared. After the First World War, the labour force became quite unionised – union membership doubled during the conflict. In response to wartime labour unrest, there was increasing collective bargaining – partly institutionalised by the state – through, for example, wage boards. These changes made for a less flexible labour market, which led to the high levels of unemployment seen later. What’s happened since the 1980s is that – partly with the weakening of union

Public sector staff demand ‘fair pay’, Bristol, 10 July 2014. After decades of growth, wages in the UK are beginning to flatline

power, and partly due to changes made to unemployment benefit rules – we have seen wage behaviour become more flexible. And these days, particularly in the private sector, the economy is much more exposed to international competition than it was in earlier periods. In the past, union leaders took for their workers a portion of the supernormal profits that would have accrued through the market power of firms. Once that market power is eroded by international competition, unions have less to go at, and therefore less to offer their members. So it’s not surprising that union membership has collapsed in the private sector. So overall I’m surprised by the magnitude of current wage stagnation – but not by the general direction of travel. Wages have taken more of the strain, and employment rather less. That’s a difference from what you would have expected either in the 1920s and 30s or in the 1970s and 80s.

Nicholas Crafts is professor of economics and economic history at the University of Warwick

BBC History Magazine

Workers ice biscuits in a Liverpool factory, 1926. Mechanisation could curb household incomes because it put many women out of work, says Jane Humphries

For a large section of the population, the industrial revolution didn’t trigger any increase in the standard of living

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JANE HUMPHRIES

We’ve come to assume that every generation can expect to be better off than its predecessor. This expectation is associated with the industrial revolution. Industrialisation is viewed traditionally as the gateway to modern economic growth, delivering an ever improving standard of living. The British industrial revolution was unique. It was the very first industrial revolution, and so pioneered this transition. But it did not provide a dramatic increase in the standard of living or even, for a significant part of the population, any increase in the standard of living. There is now general agreement that there was no consistent improvement in real wages from the late 18th century until about the 1830s. We only really got consistent rises from that decade onwards, and even then we suffered severe setbacks, such as the ‘Hungry

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Forties’ (1840s), when unemployment was at levels that some historians think rivalled those of the 1930s. Furthermore, the standard of living at this time, as today, was determined by how much money actually reached households, not by the size of men’s pay packets. Some male breadwinners weren’t always as disciplined as we’d like to believe. Wages were ‘topsliced’ – men believed they deserved to spend some of their money in the pub. Even within households, they often enjoyed a disproportionate share of resources. Industrialisation also undermined the ability of other family members to earn and add to household incomes. For many agricultural labourers, family incomes had been shored up by the contribution of wives and daughters, not only through employment in agriculture but also through handicraft activities like spinning. But the emergence of the new factory system eventually wiped out large chunks of the traditional economy. For example, female hand-spinning – women producing yarn for the dramatic increase in textile production – boomed in the middle of the 18th century but was then destroyed in a matter of 30 years by mechanisation. If spinning had been a male occupation there’d be shelves of books about it. But

because it was a woman’s job, it has by and large been relegated to footnotes. Yet hand-spinning provided work for thousands of women, and so a key element of household income disappeared. And that’s partly why the industrial revolution also saw a boom in child labour. We have underestimated the burden of children in poor households (in 1826 almost 40 per cent of the population was under 15), or in the many households where husbands and fathers were absent or, in this still high-mortality society, no longer living. For all these reasons, there was pressure on family living standards, manifesting itself in the supply of child workers. So men’s wage rates are a helpful indicator of wellbeing and family income. But economists and historians have spent far too much time scrutinising them. We also need to know how long people are working, how regularly and what different family members are contributing. We should also scrutinise other sources of income such as welfare, how many children there are, and whether a family has other sources of subsistence – for example, an allotment or income from taking in lodgers. And we should be doing all this for the past, as well as the present.

Jane Humphries is a professor of economic history at the University of Oxford, and author of Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2010)

DISCOVER MORE BOOK E Work and Pay in 20th Century Britain

by Nicholas Crafts, Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell (eds) (Oxford University Press, 2007)

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FILMS OF REMEMBRANCE

THE BATTLES OF CORONEL AND FALKLANDS ISLANDS Newly restored by the BFI National Archive, this stunning 1927 silent film reconstructs two of the key naval battles of World War One. With a new score performed by the Band of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines. AVAILABLE ON DVD AND BLU-RAY OUT 19 JANUARY

NIGHT WILL FALL Using original archive footage and eyewitness testimonies, this acclaimed documentary tells the extraordinary story of the filming of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps by the Allied forces, and how the footage was shelved for 70 years. AVAILABLE ON DVD OUT 2 FEBRUARY

The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands score supported by PRS for Music Foundation.

Enquiries 020 7957 4767 bfi.org.uk

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History now / Past notes PAST NOTES BEARDS

OLD NEWS

A monkey hugs its way back into a sailor’s possession Bury and Norwich Post / 16 September 1818

O

BRIDGEMAN/BENJONESILLUSTRATION.COM

News story sourced from britishnewspaper archive.co.uk and rediscovered by Fern Riddell. Fern regularly appears on Radio 3’s Night Waves.

Three Crimean War veterans – two hirsute, one less so. It was during this conflict that the beard became the mark of the hero

As beards are once again a common sight on Britain’s high streets, Julian Humphrys takes a brief look at the history of facial hair and its popularity in the military

ILLUSTRATION BY BEN JONES

n a quiet Wednesday in 1818, the genteel surroundings of the lord mayor’s Mansion House were suddenly rocked by the appearance of a sailor, a showman and a monkey. The sailor had recently visited an exhibition of wild beasts at Saint Bartholomew’s Fair, “a school of vice which has initiated many youth into the habits of villainy”. It was a place the Newgate Calendar would call the “assemblage of idle people… waiting to plunder the honest part of the people”. For the sailor, just such a misfortune had occurred, as the monkey in question was taken from him and placed into the showman’s menagerie, who now claimed ownership over the poor primate. All three parties in question had arrived to settle the dispute. The lord mayor decided that the only way to resolve the case was to let the monkey choose for himself, and, as a curious crowd grew outside, the monkey made it clear he was much more attached to the sailor than the showman, by clinging to his neck with great affection.

Full beards had last been fashionable in Tudor times, so why did they suddenly grow popular again in the 19th century? The army led the way. During the Crimean War shaving was impractical so soldiers began to grow beards. The image of the bearded soldier was then publicised in the photographs of Roger Fenton and later in the epic paintings of Lady Butler. The beard had become the mark of the hero and – in the same way that civilians copied First World War soldiers by replacing pocket watches with wrist watches – men at home grew beards. How long did the fashion last? Until the late 1880s. By then a new generation saw beards as old-fashioned and unhygienic, and men about town were once again shaving, or being shaved, on a daily basis. This process was accelerated at the turn of the century by KC Gillette’s invention of the razor with disposable blades. How did the army react? Slowly. Beards were restricted to active service, then prohibited but the moustache remained the mark of the soldier for some time – and, from 1860 until 1916, British Army dress

BBC History Magazine

regulations prohibited all soldiers from shaving their upper lips. For how long did this ban on shaving last? The ban was finally ended in 1916. The fact that the seals of gas masks would only work on hairless skin may have had a part to play in this but, as many photographs of turn-of-thecentury soldiers show, the regulation was already being ignored. Instead of influencing fashion, the army was now following it. What happened next? For the next 50 years beards were a relative rarity. When they returned in the 1960s they were associated with the counter-culture, not with the military. So is the military’s love affair with beards now well and truly over? They have always survived in the Royal Navy, where it’s a case of a ‘full set’ of moustache and beard or nothing. In the army and RAF, beards are normally only allowed on medical or religious grounds, although in Afghanistan some troops have grown them to gain acceptance with the locals.

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Your views on the magazine and the world of history

LETTERS A view from the other side

I read with great interest the article in your November issue regarding Napoleon (Why Napoleon Merits the Title ‘The Great’). I was brought up in Poland, where even today Napoleon is considered to be a hero equal to Churchill. When I arrived in the UK at the age of 20, I was shocked to discover how much Napoleon is disliked here. Of course I understand that for the British nation, Napoleon was a great threat and a bitter enemy. But it still surprised me that not many British people are aware of his positive side. For the Polish nation, he was a hero who tried to free us from the Russian-PrussianAustrian occupation. In 1807, following his defeat of Prussia, he created the Duchy of Warsaw (a small, semi-independent Polish state). When Napoleon was captured, all

LETTER OF THE MONTH

Napoleon the nasty Andrew Roberts is right that Napoleon was great. Yes, a great evil! He may have made reforms but this was really a way of making himself popular with the masses. Napoleon had his secret police and they were utterly ruthless, making sure he remained dictator. If he had conquered Britain he would have seen us become just a satellite country with no power at all. Thank god for Nelson! Michael Bird, Plymouth

The promise Lincoln wouldn’t break In the article The Vote That Saved America (December) I believe one issue was overlooked. That was that Abraham Lincoln felt a sense of obligation to honour the promise of emancipation to the black soldiers who had enlisted in the Union army. Some of the credit for this lies with Frederick American abolitionist Frederick Douglass lobbied for a black regiment in the Civil War

hopes for a free Poland faded and the country did not return to European maps until the end of the First World War. After the Russian, Prussian and Austrian partition, Napoleon was the only great general standing up to the three empires and for that he is greatly remembered by the Polish. He may not have succeeded, but he tried to liberate Poland and that has never been forgotten. Kataryzna Hollis, Bromley

P We reward the writer of the letter of the month with our ‘History Choice’ book of the month. This issue it is The English and Their History by Robert Tombs. Read the review on page 67

Douglass who had lobbied congress for the formation of a black regiment. Lincoln’s refusal to renege on that promise even when he appeared to be losing the election is testimony to his greatness. It is the 1864 election that should, in my view, have been the subject of Steven Spielberg’s biopic Lincoln. Andrew Hudson, Ulverston

Elizabethan propaganda Anna Whitelock’s interesting rehabilitation of Mary Tudor (Mary: Queen Against the Odds, Christmas) rightly ascribes much of her bad reputation to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, published in 1563. She might have further strengthened her case by pointing to the fact that, five years into her reign, Elizabeth’s government had to resort to such a massive propaganda exercise (ordering that a copy of Foxe should be placed in every parish church). This does much to give the lie to the traditional notion of a nation eagerly embracing Protestantism after the horrors wrought by Bloody Mary. JRG Edwards, Kent

Your timely article on German internment in the UK during the First World War (News, Christmas) shows the importance of looking at things from others’ viewpoints. We should also look into why so many intelligent Germans supported their war effort. For example, the novelist Thomas Mann wrote an original defence of this (Reflections of an Unpolitical Person, 1916), where he contrasted the German approach to life and politics with the French approach, which he saw as too rationalistic. In place of democracy, he said, the Germans had a heartfelt respect for tradition and a relationship of personal loyalty with their leaders. After the war, Mann underwent a virtual conversion to democracy and humanist rationalism. Strangely, some of his arguments anticipated the philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s defence of British conservatism against the spirit of the French Revolution in his 1947 essay Rationalism in Politics. Professor Antony Black, Dundee

Science fiction wars As a science fiction fan for over 50 years I realise that we all have different views as to the seminal works, but I feel that Dominic Sandbrook has omitted some significant influences (The Phantom Menace, December). Isaac Asimov’s robot and artificial intelligence novels, Arthur C Clarke’s predictions of such

Isaac Asimov’s 1950 novel I, Robot is a seminal science fiction work, says reader Colin Bullen

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

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BBC History Magazine

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/BRIDGEMAN

In praise of Poland’s Churchill

SOCIAL MEDIA What you’ve been saying on Twitter and Facebook

@HistoryExtra: “The biggest problem with the Sainsbury’s Christmas advert is that it perpetuates myths about WW1,” says expert Mark Connelly. What do you think?

Debbie Beall Perryman I don’t think Sainsbury’s intended the ad as historical commentary; it’s a reminder to be thankful to those who did their duty in the past, and an encouragement to think of those who are serving now when they are not able to be at home with their families at Christmas. We need to keep those in uniform in our prayers Nicholas John The advert takes one minute episode of positivity from years of almost constant unimaginable horror to give a wholly false account of both the nature of the conflict and the motives of the soldiers, solely as a vessel to aid Sainsbury’s Christmas sales

The burning of W Seaman, T Carman and T Hudson from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which did much to influence subsequent generations’ opinion of Mary I

major developments as man-made satellites and Larry Niven’s prescient warnings of organ banks spring to mind. As far as films are concerned, the excellent Forbidden Planet, based on The Tempest, was a major influence on the best TV and film series ever made – namely Star Trek – which, in my view, is infinitely superior to Star Wars! Colin Bullen, Tonbridge

BRIDGEMAN

The missing millionaires Ian Mortimer’s thought-provoking piece on the progressive changes to our world and the people who inhabit it (Which Century Saw the Most Change?, November) seems to have overlooked one of the most significant social changes of the 19th century. That is the creation of enormously and heretofore unthinkably wealthy individuals during those 100 years. One only has to think of William Armstrong, Alexander Bell, Andrew Carnegie or Alfred Krupp, among many others, who from their inventiveness and enterprise achieved or exceeded the levels of wealth of the landed aristocracy. David A Walker, Buckinghamshire

BBC History Magazine

A question on the quiz I have enjoyed your magazine for some time but one thing puzzles me: why do you print the quiz answers upside down? Who am I cheating by not knowing the answers to the questions and, therefore, needing to look? Or is it a subtle test of your readers’ dexterity? I really do find it incredibly bizarre (and I suppose this reflects on me more than anything, as I expect I am the only one to mention it!). Austin Baird, Cramlington Editor replies: One reason for printing the answers upside down is so that it’s harder to accidentally read them before embarking on the quiz. But we’re always open to changes – what do other readers think?

WRITE TO US We welcome your letters, while reserving the right to edit them. We may publish your letters on our website. Please include a daytime phone number and, if emailing, a postal address (not for publication). Letters should be no longer than 250 words.

Jessica Howard The Christmas truce has always been idealised, and history has always been manipulated to present specific perspectives. I say this is harmless – it’s more about the spirit of Christmas than it is about historical commentary @CHS_History The advert has stimulated interest and encouraged our pupils to discuss the First World War. Surely that’s a positive thing? @HistoryExtra: “It’s a shame that tomb-raiding has gone out of ethical fashion. After Richard III, is it time to dig up other famous skeletons?” asks Dan Jones. What do you think?

Joni Bell I think it would be both interesting and educational. I do feel with the technology we now have it can be done in a manner that still allows dignity for the deceased Matt Szalwinski Human remains found while excavating a parking lot should be analyzed. Those remains placed in tombs, coffins, or urns were done so by their loved ones with the expectation of eternal rest. This ethical expectation should be eternally respected, and these remains should not be disturbed @MsStephania When there is a clear, valid academic reason then yes. But we must not allow this to turn into a free-for-all

email: [email protected] Post:

Letters, BBC History Magazine, Immediate Media Company Bristol Ltd, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN

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Fo t Se rc he mi eC R n lu oy ars b, al in Pi Ai cc r ad ill y

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Approved by the Ministry of Defence in support of the ELC Scheme ELC Provider Number 1460

Directed by Professor Lloyd Clark, one of Britain’s leading authorities in modern warfare, this one-year course, starting in October 2015, examines major themes in modern military history and warfare.

Sir Max Hastings General The Lord Dannatt Professor Sir Hew Strachan General The Lord Richards Lord Ashdown

Based in central London, but designed for those that may live further afield, participants will undertake independent research under expert supervision on a topic of their choice. Assessment is by a dissertation of 20,000 words.

Those who wish to attend the seminars and dinners, but not to undertake a dissertation, may join the course as Associate Students, at a reduced fee.

A central feature of the programme is its celebrated series of evening seminars and post-seminar dinners, at the Royal Air Force Club, Piccadilly, at which participants can engage in general discussion with the speakers. The ten seminars are led by internationally distinguished experts, including:

For further details Google: ‘Buckingham War Studies’ or see the website: www.buckingham.ac.uk/humanities/ma/warstudies Course enquiries: Claire Prendergast [email protected] THE UNIVERSITY OF

BUCKINGHAM

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The University of Buckingham is ranked in the élite top twenty of the 120 British Universities: The Guardian Universities League Table 2012-13

Comment

Michael Wood on… Rethinking the past

“Beware those who write history… as the winners”

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. His most recent TV series was King Alfred and the Anglo-Saxons

grammar school we were taught that traditional English Catholic Christianity was venal, corrupt and irredeemably superstitious, and that the Tudor Reformation was a consensual choice by the English people who wanted to move into the clear light of Protestantism. In other words, a CofE establishment line. It’s easy to forget how slanted that bias was: at the 1953 coronation the archbishop of Canterbury even refused to take communion with other churches! How things have changed in 60 years. The problem, as always in history, went back to the sources, and how they were read. The sources came from the centre, the tight-knit groups who pushed through their religious revolutions: the split with Rome under Henry VIII, the Taliban-like iconoclastic fervour under Edward VI, Mary’s attempt to turn the clock back with more martyrs fires, then Elizabeth’s return to Protestantism. That’s four changes of state religion in a generation! But in the last 30 years, historians have forced us to look again, using a vast range of sources, churchwardens’ books, priests’ surveys, wills and diaries to reveal that traditional religion was by no means decadent and decayed, but a vigorous popular tradition with a deep sense of piety, charity and community. Change, we now see, was not consensual at all, but a violently enforced break with traditional English Christian culture and belief. It took five decades for the establishment to triumph, and another five or more of religious turmoil and civil war before the dust began to settle (if it has yet!). And then of course it was the establishment that wrote the history… as the winners. The revisionist historiography on the Reformation in the last 30 years has produced some really fascinating new insights into our history, and it also has great relevance to Britain and Ireland today. For history – as a curriculum, an academic subject and the carrier of our socially transmitted identities – is not only where we go to understand the past. It’s also about how we see the present, how we see ourselves – and how we act towards our neighbours.

REX FEATURES

We always think of history as something fixed don’t we? A narrative that patient detective work and imagination can bring definitively to the light of day. But history is never fixed. The narrative is always changing as each generation revises the way it looks at the past to help it make sense of its present. That’s not to say, of course, that we change the date of Waterloo or the execution of King Charles I. It’s how and why things happened, and what they mean to us now. So there’s no such thing as a definitive historical narrative. Revising is the name of the game. And that is especially valuable when one interpretation of events has become entrenched by the political and intellectual establishments. I was talking at a sixth form college in Stockport the other day, and one of the audience asked about revisionist historians. He was thinking about Ireland, a topic always alive in the Manchester area with its big Irish connections. The Tudor settlement, the importance of Ireland in the civil wars of the 17th century, the massive assault on Irish culture by the British since the Elizabethan period: all these still are to my mind little acknowledged and poorly understood. In our street we even viewed our Irish neighbours differently. I feel ashamed now how unaware we were of this history as we grew up. Now the revisions are coming thick and fast, and how exciting it is. We saw this, for example, when the extraordinary 1641 Dublin Depositions were put online by Irish president Mary McAleese and Ian Paisley together at Trinity College; or when the Queen on her first visit to Ireland in 2011 made her moving speech about Anglo-Irish history; or when, three years later, in a speech to the House of Commons, Ireland’s president, Michael D Higgins, evoked Irish patriots like Constance Markievicz and Daniel O’Connell, but also hailed the Magna Carta – issued in its Irish version in 1216! Seeing things afresh is the stuff of history as well as of politics. Revision then is at the heart of history. And in English history too. One of the most fascinating modern revisions here is the Reformation. When I was at

ILLUSTRATION BY FEMKE DE JONG

BBC History Magazine

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Cover story

AKG IMAGES

A soldier of the 2nd British Army pictured during the operation to capture Bremen, 26 April 1945. Though the British successfully subdued the city, by now they were playing a bit-part role in the conquest of Germany

COVER STORY

THE RACE FOR BERLIN 22

BBC History Magazine

Soviet tanks cross the river Oder in their advance towards the Soviet capital as part of their offensive on 16 April. Stalin was determined to seize Berlin before the western Allies got there

During the opening months of 1945 the Allies were engaged in a bitter dash to seize German territory. Yet, says Antony Beevor, as US and Soviet forces advanced on the capital, Britain found itself increasingly sidelined BBC History Magazine

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Cover story

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n the afternoon of 11 January 1945, Generaloberst Heinz Guderian received the news he had been dreading. His intelligence chief confirmed that the great Soviet winter offensive was to begin the next morning. Only two days before, Guderian had warned Adolf Hitler: “The eastern front is like a house of cards. If the front is broken through at one point all the rest will collapse.” Guderian, the head of the Oberkommando des Heeres (army high command), was responsible for the eastern front. He had feared from the start that Hitler’s Ardennes Offensive the previous month (a major attack against the western Allies through the Ardennes region of southern Belgium) would leave his forces in the east at the mercy of the Red Army. Josef Stalin did not trust his western Allies, especially that anti-bolshevik Winston Churchill. He had made a habit of rubbing-in the fact that British and American armies had suffered few casualties in the war against their common enemy while the sacrifices of the Red Army had been enormous. He even pretended that he had advanced the date of his winter offensive in order to save the Americans in the Ardennes. This was untrue. The German attack in Belgium had been

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Hitler and his general staff (including Heinz Guderian, right, and Göring, left) plan an air strike in support of the Ardennes Offensive, 1944

halted on 26 December, while Stalin’s real reason for bringing forward the date was due to meteorological forecasts. A thaw was predicted for later in January and the Red Army needed the ground to remain frozen for its tank armies to charge forward to the river Oder. The winter offensive began on 12 January with Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front advancing from the Soviet bridgeheads west of the Vistula towards Upper Silesia. Over the next two days, the 2nd and 3rd Belorussian Fronts assaulted East Prussia, and Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front began its operation towards Berlin from south of Warsaw. Once crossings had been secured over the river Pilica, there was little to stop the 1st and 2nd Guards Tank Armies. Their headlong advance by day and night meant that all orders from the führer’s headquarters were 24 hours out of date by the time they reached German divisions. The front collapsed even more rapidly than Guderian had feared. Some 8 million German civilians were fleeing for their lives. Hitler

made things worse by his meddling, and on 31 January the first Red Army soldiers crossed the frozen Oder to form a bridgehead less than 60 miles from Berlin.

Heroic and doomed Another reason for Stalin’s haste was to secure all Polish territory before the Yalta Conference began on 4 February 1945. He intended to impose on Poland his puppet ‘Lublin government’ and treat the Armia Kraiova, or Home Army, which was loyal to the Polish government-in-exile, as ‘fascists’, despite their heroic and doomed uprising against the Germans in Warsaw the previous year. He greatly exaggerated the incidence of German stay-behind forces in order to justify the oppression of non-communist Poles. Any found with weapons, whether or not they helped the Red Army in its operations, were arrested by NKVD (secret police) rifle regiments. Stalin claimed that he had to secure his rear areas to ensure the resupply of his fighting formations. The Yalta Conference, between the United

“Stalin wanted Berlin, ‘the lair of the fascist beast’, for reasons of prestige and to capture German uranium” BBC History Magazine

BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGES

At Yalta in February 1945, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin discuss Europe’s postwar division as well as their strategy for the invasion of Germany

MAP ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN SANDERS – MAPART.CO.UK

German army groups British general US generals Soviet generals

States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, had been organised in order to discuss Europe’s postwar reorganisation. During the conference, Stalin took every opportunity to divide the British and the Americans. He knew that Churchill wanted to secure freedom for Poland while Franklin D Roosevelt’s priorities were to establish the United Nations and persuade Stalin to attack Japanese forces in Manchuria and northern China. The American president felt that he could win Stalin’s trust and even admitted to the Soviet leader that the western Allies did not agree on the strategy for the invasion of Nazi Germany. Roosevelt suggested that General Dwight Eisenhower should establish direct contact with the Stavka supreme command of the Red Army to discuss plans. Stalin encouraged the idea so that he would know what the Americans were doing, while giving nothing away himself. Stalin made clear his contempt for the rights of smaller nations. In central Europe and the Balkans, Soviet interests were paramount. “The Polish question is a question of life and death for the Soviet state,” he said. “Poland represents the gravest of strategic problems for the Soviet Union. Throughout history, Poland has served as a corridor for enemies coming to attack Russia.” One could well argue that the origins of the Cold War lay in 1941 and the traumatic shock of the German invasion. BBC History Magazine

Stalin was determined to have a security belt of satellite countries to prevent such a thing ever happening again. Using again the argument that Poland was in the rear of his armies attacking Germany, he compared the situation to France, where he was restraining the communists from causing trouble in the rear of the western Allies. Churchill soon realised that he was out on a limb. Roosevelt, suffering from extreme ill-health, showed little interest. To Churchill’s horror, Roosevelt even announced without warning him that American forces would be withdrawn from Europe. The Americans simply wanted to finish the war. They showed little interest in the postwar map of Europe. All Churchill could ask for was free elections in Poland, but Stalin’s insistence on a government “friendly to the Soviet Union”, suggested it would be under Moscow’s control. Ever since the breakout from Normandy led by Patton’s 3rd Army in August 1944, British influence had been fading rapidly. Field Marshal Montgomery’s repeated attempts to be appointed ground forces commander had only made things worse. They had culminated in his boasting that he had saved the situation in the Ardennes. General George C Marshall, the American chief of staff, was furious, and Eisenhower told Churchill that none of his generals were willing to serve under Montgomery again. “His relations with Monty are quite

insoluble,” Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke wrote after a meeting with Eisenhower on 6 March. “He only sees the worst side of Monty.” Montgomery had even been beaten in the race to cross the Rhine by the Americans taking the bridge at Remagen on 7 March and Patton securing a bridgehead south of Mainz. Once 21st Army Group was across the Rhine on 24 March, Montgomery lost the American 9th Army from his command, and the British were sidelined in the north. All his hopes of leading the advance on Berlin from the west were dashed. He was ordered to head for Denmark via Hamburg. Churchill’s desire to reach Berlin and “shake hands with the Russians as far to the east as possible,” was ignored. Eisenhower, who had started to believe in an Alpine Redoubt to which the remaining German forces would withdraw, intended to send the bulk of his forces across central and southern Germany.

US defers to the Soviets Stalin, who had criticised the western Allies for advancing so slowly, reacted very differently to news of the bridge at Remagen. He immediately summoned Marshal Zhukov to Moscow, even though he was conducting the campaign to secure the ‘Baltic balcony’ of Pomerania before attacking Berlin. With American bridgeheads across the Rhine, Stalin now feared they might get to Berlin first. He ordered Zhukov to work 25

Cover story Montgomery, Eisenhower and the latter’s British deputy Tedder. Stalin exploited the tension between the US and British commanders of the Allies

through the night preparing plans for the ‘Berlin Operation’. Zhukov later acknowledged their concern that “the British command was still nursing the dream of capturing Berlin before the Red Army”. Stalin wanted Berlin, “the lair of the fascist beast”, both for reasons of prestige and because he hoped to capture German uranium stocks and the scientists working on an atomic bomb. He knew from his spies on the Manhattan Project that the Americans were close to perfecting their own. What he did not know was that the bulk of the uranium had already been evacuated south to the Black Forest. Eisenhower, on the other hand, considered Berlin was “no longer a particularly important objective”. On 2 March he started to request the opinion of the Soviet Stavka on strategic planning. This exasperated their British counterparts, especially Churchill. Some British officers were appalled by US deference to Stalin’s wishes, bitterly talking of American leaders using a call employed by London prostitutes when soliciting American soldiers: “Have a go, Joe.” To British outrage,

Eisenhower communicated his plans to Stalin even before he told Churchill or his own British deputy, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder. This signal, known as SCAF-252, became a bitter issue between the Allies. British suspicions of Stalin’s intentions grew apace as news arrived of mass arrests in Poland, rounding up all those who did not welcome Soviet rule. Western representatives were meanwhile denied access to Poland, despite the agreement at Yalta. At the same time Stalin’s paranoia increased when he heard of American negotiations with German officers in northern Italy. He became convinced that the Germans would surrender to the British and Americans or let them through while they strengthened their forces facing the Red Army. He even feared a secret deal. After receiving SCAF-252 on the evening of 31 March, Stalin approved Eisenhower’s plan to attack well to the south of Berlin and encouraged his fears of a German last-ditch resistance in the Alps. The next morning, Stalin summoned Marshals Zhukov and Konev. “Well, then,” he said, eyeing the

“Stalin was so determined to have Berlin that almost certainly he would have turned his guns on advancing US forces” 26

two men. “Who is going to take Berlin: are we or are the Allies?” His order was to surround the city first before attacking inwards to prevent any chance of the Americans coming in from the west. The offensive with 2.5 million men was to take place “no later than 16 April”. Later that day, which happened to be 1 April, Stalin sent his reply to Eisenhower. He assured his trusting ally that “Berlin has lost its former strategic importance” and that the Soviet command would send only “second-rate forces against it”. The bulk of the Red Army would join up with Eisenhower’s armies further to the south. They would not start their advance until the second half of May. “However, this plan may undergo certain alterations, depending on circumstances.” It was the greatest April Fool in modern history. During the first week of April, the British 2nd Army reached Celle 25 miles north-east of Hanover, while the US 9th Army, led by General WH Simpson, was beyond Hanover and heading for the river Elbe. The 1st US Army was heading for Leipzig (125 miles south-west of Berlin) and Patton’s 3rd Army was in the Harz mountains on its way to the Czech border. By 12 April, the British were approaching Bremen and the American 9th Army had bridgeheads across the Elbe. Simpson wanted his divisions to head straight for Berlin, but on 15 April Eisenhower stopped him there to avoid casualties. In fact Simpson’s forces would have faced little BBC History Magazine

GETTY IMAGES/ALAMY

Refugees cross the river Elbe on a damaged bridge to escape the chaos behind German lines as Soviet forces advance in early May 1945

Stalin sold the Americans the lie that he wasn’t obsessed with taking Berlin first

resistance since the best German formations faced east awaiting the onslaught from the rivers Oder and Neisse, which began the next day. But Eisenhower had made the right decision for the wrong reasons. Stalin was so determined to have Berlin that almost certainly he would have turned his long-range artillery and attack aircraft on US forces, claiming that the Americans were responsible for the mistake. And Eisenhower was determined to avoid clashes at all costs. Churchill wanted Patton to take Prague to pre-empt a Soviet occupation, but Eisenhower refused on General Marshall’s advice.

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Berlin falls to the Soviets While eight Soviet armies fought their way into Berlin, the British in north-west Germany, far from the centre of events, pushed on to Bremen. They occupied it on 27 April after a five-day battle. Montgomery, to Eisenhower’s frustration, crossed the lower Elbe in his usual methodical way to take Hamburg. But then news arrived that the Red Army was making a dash for Denmark ahead of him. The 11th Armoured Division rushed on to Lübeck on the Baltic coast and British paratroopers seized Wismar just two hours before Marshal Rokossovsky’s forces reached the town. Denmark was saved, but Poland, to Churchill’s bitter regret, was not. Stalin’s intention to impose a Soviet government in Poland had become clear at the end of March when 16 Polish representatives of the government-in-exile in London BBC History Magazine

Soviet tanks roll into Berlin in April 1945, as the Red Army races to beat US forces into the city

“Churchill asked his chiefs of staff to study the possibility of forcing back Soviet t troops to secure ‘a square deal for Poland’” were arrested despite safe-conduct passes. In May Soviet foreign minister Molotov brutally informed Edward Stettinius, the American secretary of state, that they had been charged with the murder of 200 members of the Red Army, a preposterous accusation. Further indications of communist repression in Poland convinced Churchill that something had to be done. Within a week of Germany’s surrender, he summoned his chiefs of staff to ask them to study the possibility of forcing back Soviet troops to secure “a square deal for Poland”. The offensive should take place by 1 July 1945, before Allied troops were demobilised or transferred to the Far East. Although the discussions were conducted in great secrecy, one of the Whitehall moles reporting to Beria, the Soviet police chief, heard of them. He sent details to Moscow of the instruction to Montgomery to gather up captured German arms in case they were needed to re-arm Wehrmacht troops. The Soviets, not surprisingly, felt that their worst suspicions had been confirmed. Operation Unthinkable, as even Churchill called it, was a mad enterprise. British

soldiers, grateful for the Red Army’s sacrifice, would almost certainly have refused to obey orders. And the Americans would surely have rejected the plan. The chiefs of staff all agreed that it was “unthinkable”. “The idea is of course fantastic and the chances of success quite impossible,” wrote Field Marshal Brooke. “There is no doubt that from now onwards Russia is all powerful in Europe.” Churchill, the greatest war leader Britain has ever produced, was forced to face the fact that his impoverished country had lost almost all its power and influence in a dramatically changed world. Britain had helped liberate the western half of Europe at the cost of abandoning the eastern half to a Soviet dictatorship that would last for another 44 years. Antony Beevor is one of the world’s leading historians of the Second World War. His latest book, The Second World War, is now out in paperback (Phoenix, 2014) DISCOVER MORE BOOK E Berlin: The Downfall 1945 by Antony

Beevor (Penguin, 2007)

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The home front in 1945

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LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF VICTORY

Maggie Andrews chronicles the joy and trepidation that filled the hearts of Britons on the home front in the early months of 1945 7

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1945 in pictures 1 Evacuees make their way home, Waterloo station, June 2 With the threat of invasion a thing of the past, men remove barbed wire from Bognor Regis seafront 3 Huts in Lambeth built for bombedout families 4 Housewives examine cuts of fish 5 Allied captives pictured shortly after their PoW camp had been seized by British troops, April 6 A housewife gathers possessions from her wrecked London home following a V2 attack 7 The Japanese surrender delegation aboard USS Missouri, 2 September 8 A mushroom cloud rises above Hiroshima, 6 August 9 A V1 flying bomb over London 10 As rationing bites, women plant potatoes for the next crop, April 11 Winston Churchill on the campaign trail, Towcester, 25 June – shortly before losing the general election

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n January 1945 an advert appeared in a number of newspapers, which read: “Some of the sterner war-time duties are relaxing – Home guard, Fire Guard, Civil Defense. If this leaves you a little spare time, remember the job that’s still as important as ever – growing your own foodstuffs in garden and allotment. It’s a healthy job, and a war winner too!” By the end of 1944, victory over Germany seemed certain. As the threat of invasion evaporated, mines and barbed wire were removed from the beaches and, on the final day of the year, the Home Guard – a nowiconic symbol of British defiance in the face of Nazi aggression – was stood down. But though the Radio Times was moved to announce that “This Christmas after a year of momentous victories we chart The Journey Home,” it was to be more than eight months before the war finally ended. And, far from being swept aloft on a tide of euphoria, the British people peered into the future with as much trepidation as joy. But why? Well, above all, the population was war-weary. Five years of rationing, of making-do and mending, had enveloped the nation in a certain dreary drabness. Severe food shortages, caused by naval blockades, had hardly lightened the mood – and had transformed “As soon as home-grown produce from I opened that was my mouth it something merely desirable to filled up with an absolute necessity. dust and grit Mr Middleton, whose reputation and I started as a radio and TV coughing and gardener had been established before the spat it out” war, urged the nation B Scarlett recalls the to “Dig for dear life” moments after a V2 and to force rhubarb, rocket hit his home, killing his father and plant potatoes and sow peas. His new five siblings book, Dig for Victory, was an all-year guide to domestic food production with adverts for Clay’s Fertilizer, which apparently would ensure: “Vim and Vigour on the Vegetable Front.” Others had to rely upon their ingenuity, resilience and willingness to adapt their tastes. One such recalled: “Meat was rationed, butter was rationed, eggs, milk and so on and we accepted that rationing was just part of the facts of life. We found ways, like using lard and using dripping and that kind of thing to make the butter or the margarine go further…” The tenacity of the civilian population was also severely tested by the unmanned V1 and

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Sitting pretty A sailor gives his girlfriend a better view of London’s VE Day celebrations, 8 May. “I feel happier and more conscious of peace than I ever expected,” said one woman of the news of victory in Europe

V2 rockets, which had begun falling on the south of England in June 1944. Naomi Mitchinson noted in her diary in January 1945 that she was “getting increasingly frightened of going to London, which is silly”. Her morale was not irredeemably dented, however, and she resolved “just because I am frightened I must go”.

Black skies Victory may have been within touching distance but there was no sense of things winding down – as the 150,000 men who entered the armed forces in the first half of 1945 would have attested. Those who lived near aerodromes in the Midlands saw American, Canadian and British bombers continuing their war work. “The sky was still black with planes each night they could fly,” recalled one woman. “They returned about dawn so we knew they were going much further.” On 13 and 14 February, such bombers headed for Dresden, killing more people in that one German town in 24 hours than had died in the whole of the London Blitz. Despite the best efforts of British intelligence to confuse German navigation, London remained a target for the V2 rockets, as the following recollection from B Scarlett, whose father and five siblings were killed on 16 February, makes tragically clear. “At about 11.30pm I heard dad come home and asked mum, who had just gone to bed, if she wanted a cup of tea, as he was going to make one and have a sandwich. He then walked down to the kitchen at the back of the house. “The next thing I knew, I was waking up, trying to turn over, I found I could not move.

I remember thinking “A ‘proper ole I must still be asleep caper’ was and thought if I indeed in shouted I would wake myself up, so I progress, and did. As soon as I opened my mouth it conveniently filled up with dust adjacent and grit and to a pub” I started coughing Joyce Denning and spat it out.” describes the evening On 27 March Ivy that her Devonshire Millichamp of village celebrated Orpington, southGermany’s surrender east London became the last civilian to be killed in a V2 attack – and, by the end of the month, the all-too familiar wail of air-raid sirens would be heard over the capital no more. The devastation that the Luftwaffe had wrought would, however, take a long time to repair. Though an army of 130,000 men had repaired 800,000 London homes by the end of March, many families were still living in temporary and inadequate accommodation or huts. It’s hardly surprising, then, that in an interview with the magazine Picture Post in April, the philosopher Bertrand Russell intoned: “Making good the enormous destruction and deterioration of goods and industrial capital will be a stupendous task.” But what sort of Britain would emerge from the rubble? Postwar planning had been much discussed across a wide range of groups in the country and the armed forces since the publication of the Beveridge Report (1942), which outlined plans for a new national insurance scheme and the foundations of the postwar state. The 1944 Butler Education Act had, meanwhile, guaranteed the introduction of secondary education for all children. As discussions of how to build the people’s peace became more heated, the foundations were laid to shake up the political landscape. All the while, the war in Europe hurtled towards its inevitable conclusion. At the end of April, news arrived that Mussolini had been shot, that the German armies in Italy had surrendered, and then, on the 30th of the month, that Adolf Hitler had committed suicide. With the führer dead, Britons huddled around their radios, wondering when victory would come. Naomi Mitchinson recorded in her diary on 5 May: “Again not V Day, dull and cold.” On the 7th she wrote: “Everyone waiting for the announcement that the war had ended and in the evening the newsreader announced, tomorrow would be VE [Victory in Europe] Day and Churchill would speak at 3pm.” While some towns and villages had carefully laid plans to celebrate the end of BBC History Magazine

THIS PAGE: GETTY / PAGES 28–29: PA/GETTY/REX/TOPFOTO/MIRRORPIX/KIND PERMISSION MRS JEANETTE FLICKMAN,FRANK L’ALONETTE COLLECTION, WEST SUSSEX RECORD OFFICE

The home front in 1945

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Party like it’s 1945 Residents of Northampton celebrate the end of war in Europe with their mayor and mayoress, 8 May 1945. Despite the flags, cheers and bunting, Britons were faced with ever-deepening austerity as peace replaced conflict

hostilities, for others VE day was a more impromptu affair. Joyce Dennys’ diary of her life in a Devonshire village described the events that unfurled as the evening progressed: “In the street where I have spent so many unhappy shopping hours, a ‘Proper ole Caper’ as we say, was indeed in progress, and conveniently adjacent to the pub. Some large-hearted resident had allowed his piano to be dragged out onto the pavement and before I knew where I was I was seated before it playing Annie Lurie on as many notes as it felt like sounding…” Britons celebrated victory just as they had endured war – with their friends and “It was family, but also by riotous… I expressing their drew the line emotions in public places. Frank Mees in at [kissing] Stockton-on-Tees hairy-faced recalled that: “Came sailors and tea time and everything stopped for tea, stuck to even celebrations. Mum had dug out a the girls” large tin of Del Monte Frank Mees of Peaches with a hidden Stockton-on-Tees relives the dance he tin of Carnation Milk attended on VE Day possibly saved from BBC History Magazine

our last box from New Zealand. It was a rare and marvellous treat to us after years of saving food in case… “I went off to a dance and it was riotous – flags draped around the hall and lights full on, every one kissing every one else. I drew the line at hairy faced sailors and stuck to the girls, making sure I went round several times. We sang we danced and we joined hands singing all the Songs we could think of. “Finally tipped out of there we walked home in groups feeling as if a huge cloud had lifted off our shoulders and I must admit I never once thought of the war in the far east still going on as we sang and danced in the streets.”

Bankrupt Britain Two days later Frances Partridge, a pacifist, wrote in her diary: “I feel happier and more conscious of peace than ever I expected. I am very much aware this morning that something has gone – a background to our daily existence.” For all the euphoria, Britain was virtually bankrupt – massively in debt to the United States. It’s one of the great ironies of the home front in 1945 that austerity actually deepened after VE Day, with the government reducing bacon and lard rations three

“I am aware this morning that something has gone – a background to our daily existence”

weeks later, and introducing bread rations in 1946. Events were evolving apace at Westminster too. Churchill, the Conservative leader of the wartime coalition government, dissolved Frances Partridge parliament on confides in her diary 15 June, and then as the reality of peace embarked on a hits home poorly conceived election campaign, characterised by attacks on his former coalition colleagues in the Labour party. For many people, Churchill was too strongly identified with fighting the war while Labour was more widely associated with domestic policies. In cinemas, the cheering that had greeted images of the prime minister on newsreels in wartime was suddenly replaced by booing. The Labour party, meanwhile, was in high spirits at its Blackpool conference in early June. Parliamentary candidate Major Healey’s passionate speech suggested a new mood in the country. “The upper classes,” he 31

The home front in 1945

announced “in every country are selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent.” Polling day was on 5 July but the results had to wait for postal votes from soldiers serving abroad to be counted. After VE Day the process of reuniting families and communities began in earnest. Over 3 million children, some accompanied by their mothers, had been evacuated to places of safety during the war. Once the bombing was over, many gleefully returned home, leaving only 55,000 evacuees to travel under the official systems via coach and train. One recalled: “When the coach arrived to take us to the station and home I did not even wait to say goodbye, but just ran and jumped onto the coach.” Some children chose to remain with their foster parents and were adopted. Others had no choice – the authorities were unable to trace the families of more than 5,000 children. Reginald Walsh remembers being lined up with 26 other evacuees in his school in Staffordshire and the teacher saying: “‘You’re all going back apart from the Walshes’ – that was me and my sister.” His father had jumped ship and the authorities could not find his mother, who had thought he would be better cared for in the countryside, without her.

Crushing victory By 26 July it was clear that the Labour party had won a landslide victory in the general election (it would secure a majority of 146) and that Clement Attlee would be Britain’s next prime minister. But not everyone was jubilant on learning of this political earthquake. “We got a real shock when we heard our Conservative member had been beaten by 12,000 – we simply could not believe it,” said Nella Last of the Women’s Voluntary Service Centre in Barrow-on-Furness. “Someone wondered if we would get the road across Morecambe Bay now, as Labour ‘doesn’t care about spending money or consider whether it is practical’.” Meanwhile, Naomi Mitchinson remarked that she was “afraid this isn’t exactly socialism “The upper in our time”. On 6 August classes in 1945, the debate every country over which party was most fit to lead are selfish, Britain in the depraved, postwar world dissolute and momentarily took a back seat as news decadent” filtered through A parliamentary candidate shoots from that American forces had dropped the hip at the Labour party conference an atomic bomb on 32

Hiroshima. This world-changing event elicited the entire gamut of responses from Britons: some were awed, some frightened; some felt it was Cumbrian villager ‘Old Joe’ reacts to news of the justified, others atomic bomb exploding were appalled. over Hiroshima Nella Last, then on holiday in the Cumbrian village of Spark Bridge, recorded how a neighbour ‘Old Joe’ had brandished the Daily Mail and shouted: ‘“Look at this,’ – and it was the article about the atomic bombs. I’ve rarely seen him so excited – or upset. He said: ‘Read it – why, this will change all t’world. Ee I wish I were 30 years younger and could see it aw.’” Nella’s diary, however, notes that she “felt sick”. How would the Japanese react to the prospect of more of these new and terrifying weapons being dropped over their homeland? The next few days were rife with speculation. Finally, on 14 August, President Harry Truman announced that Tokyo had surrendered and that, for Britons, the long, tortuous journey to victory was finally at an end. The following day, 15 August 1945, will go down in history as VJ (Victory over Japan) Day. Yet in Britain, it marked another august occasion: the state opening of parliament. And so an ancient custom became something of a victory parade, as the king and queen drove down the Mall in an open carriage to the acclaim of the nation. Once again, there were fireworks, singing and dancing. But as an entry in Naomi Mitchinson’s diary reveals, even at the moment of triumph, the celebrations were tinged with anxiety. “I know we are going to have hell trying to work the peace – trying to give people a worthwhile-ness in their peace time lives comparable with the worthwhile-ness of working together during the war.”

“Why, this will change all t’ world. Ee I wish I were 30 years younger and could see it aw”

Maggie Andrews is a professor of cultural history at the University of Worcester. She is a historical consultant for the BBC Radio 4 drama series Home Front DISCOVER MORE BOOK E The Home Front in Britain edited by

Maggie Andrews and Janis Lomas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Cast of the successful comedy It’s That Man Again take to the mic

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STRANGE MEATS AND JITTERBUGS From dancing the night away to turning dried eggs into Yorkshire pudding, how Britons lived their lives in 1945… What we were listening to

A sailor and his girlfriend do the jitterbug in New York

LEFT: British women queue for horsemeat, which was not subject to rationing in 1945

A man reads the Daily Mail, one of Britain’s most popular wartime papers

The radio became a national obsession in wartime. As one woman recalled: “We didn’t do anything else except listen to the wireless and knitting.” After D-Day the audience tuned-in for news of the Allied armies’ progress in Europe. The Forces Service played light music for audiences at home, in the forces and the factories. Popular request programmes linked those on the home front with their loved ones who were away. The most popular comedy programme was ITMA – It’s That Man Again, which starred Tommy Handley and reputedly had an audience of 18 million.

What we were watching The cinema was the mass entertainment of wartime, particularly for women who enjoyed Hollywood escapism. Many British films in 1945 used the war as a backdrop. Great Day paid tribute to Women’s Institutes’ war efforts and followed a village institute preparing for a visit from Mrs Roosevelt, wife of the American president, Franklin. The melodrama Love Story was a romance between a dying concert pianist and an RAF pilot going blind. The Essex Newsman assured its readers: “You will enjoy it, and you will be fascinated by the haunting Cornish rhapsody.”

What we were eating With rationing exerting an ever-tightening grip on the nation’s food supplies, only the most ingenious cooks thrived. In this spirit, newspapers carried advice on how to turn dried eggs imported from America into omelettes, scotch eggs and Yorkshire puddings. And, as one person recalled, such creativity extended to the weekly supply of meat: “My mother used to get funny cuts of meat… we didn’t so much go in for the whale meat, but we did eat some rather strange meat, notably it was rabbit, and you could get that in the butchers without compromising your weekly meat ration.”

What we were dancing to The nearly 2 million American troops stationed in Britain prior to D-Day had popularised energetic and athletic dances such as the jitterbug. Swing bands enabled crowds, whether in the dance halls or work canteens in their lunch hour, to forget their troubles and enjoy themselves. On 16 January 1945 The Gloucestershire Citizen announced “The commencement of the Jitterbug Contest at ‘Dancing at the Baths Tonight’,” and that “Cpt Thomas of the US army will present One Pound to the winning couple in addition to the Prize.”

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What we were reading

Margaret Lockwood and Stewart Granger star in Love Story

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While, in the darkest days of the war, newspapers and magazines had sought to educate the public and bolster morale, by 1945 they were articulating their anxieties about what life would be like once victory was accomplished. The People wondered what would happen when “browned off-warriors – lauded to the skies in war – returned home if jobs and support were not provided”. The News of the World ran regular stories of the violence that would ensue if men discovered that their wives had been unfaithful. The News Chronicle helpfully suggested: “The unfaithful wife of a serviceman is an outlaw… she may be murdered with impunity.”

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Visitors to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin study images of four of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Nazis. Like many Holocaust memorials around the world, this is a recent innovation – opening in 2005

The Nazi death camps witnessed crimes of unprecedented horror so why did it take decades for a Holocaust memorial day to be established? By Laurence Rees

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FORGOTTEN VOICES OF THE HOLOCAUST

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olocaust Memorial Day on 27 January is an occasion for myriad acts of commemoration – most especially this year because January 2015 also marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The BBC, for instance, has planned a whole season of programmes, in which my own

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film – a 90-minute feature-length documentary called Touched by Auschwitz – plays a part. Holocaust Memorial Day is a keystone of the national calendar. And who would argue that it shouldn’t be? What could be more important than to commemorate every year the unique atrocity of the Holocaust? Indeed, my impression is that most people think that Holocaust Memorial Day has been with us since the end of the war. But that’s far from the truth. In fact, the first Holocaust Memorial Day was held in Britain just 14 years ago, in 2001. And it wasn’t until 2004 that the United Nations made a formal statement of commitment to commemorate the atrocity, recognising that the Holocaust “shook the foundations of modern civilisation” and was a crime of “unprecedented character and horror”. Similarly, it wasn’t until relatively recently that largescale Holocaust museums became prevalent. The United States Holocaust Museum opened in Washington to the public in 1993 and Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe opened in 2005. Doesn’t it seem extraordinary that it took so long for these memorials to be created and for the world to come together in agreement to honour the memory of the dead on a Holocaust Memorial Day? Why, in particular, did it take the United Nations nearly 60 years to recognise the “unprecedented character and horror” of the Holocaust and agree to the creation of a special memorial day every year? Our first clue as to the answer lies in the circumstances of the liberation of Auschwitz. This camp, more than any other, is symbolic of the Holocaust. Auschwitz is the site of the largest mass murder in the history of the world. Around 1.1 million people were killed there – 1 million of them Jews. It’s no accident, therefore, that the date chosen for Holocaust Memorial Day in this country is the day that Auschwitz was liberated – 27 January. But when Red Army soldiers of the 1st Ukrainian Front first approached Auschwitz in 1945 they did not appreciate the immense significance of the place. Ivan Martynushkin, a lieutenant in the Red Army, reached Auschwitz/Birkenau just hours after the camp had been secured by his comrades. “We had a feeling that we had done something good,” he says, “a very good deed, that we had somehow fulfilled our duty.” But though he and his comrades had “feelings of compassion” for the Auschwitz survivors they encountered, they did not think that they were witnessing something special: “You have to understand the psychology of people who have been at war… I al-

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ready had more than a year of direct combat experience behind me, and during that time I had seen camps – not like this one, but they were nevertheless smaller prison camps. I had seen towns being destroyed. I had seen the destruction of villages. I had seen the suffering of our own people. I had seen small children maimed. There was not one village which had not experienced this horror, this tragedy, these sufferings.” While the liberation of Auschwitz was not ignored in newspapers at the time, it was given much less prominence than one would expect from the perspective of today. The Pravda correspondent Boris Polevoi wrote an article that was published on 2 February, and the Jewish Chronicle in Britain followed up the story a few days later. However, there wasn’t the sense in the media that something truly astonishing had been uncovered at Auschwitz. That was partly because there had already been extensive coverage of the discovery of Majdanek camp six months before. And since Zyklon B had been used for killing at both Auschwitz and Majdanek, it was possible at first for the general public not to understand the unique significance of Auschwitz within the Nazi state. Even more important for the way understanding of the Holocaust would develop, was the manner in which Polevoi in his Pravda article

Soviet soldiers with freed inmates at Auschwitz in 1945. For many troops, the camp was unexceptional – just one of the countless examples of Nazi brutality

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“According to Marxist beliefs, Auschwitz was the logical conclusion of capitalism – a giant factory where the workers were murdered when they were no longer useful” chose to interpret what had happened at Auschwitz. Following Marxist beliefs, Polevoi saw Auschwitz as the logical conclusion of capitalism – a giant factory where the workers were murdered when they were no longer useful. From this point onwards there would be a fissure between the communist and non-communist worlds over the historical significance of Auschwitz. In particular, the Soviets would seek to reduce the emphasis on Jewish suffering, often referring to the dead only as “victims of fascism”. All of the major Nazi death camps were now in territory controlled by the Red Army, and subsequently in postwar communist Poland. History was written – and often re-written – to put the communists centre stage in the struggle against Nazism. One Polish history of the Warsaw ghetto uprising stated that communist fighters had organised the revolt (when in fact it was orchestrated by the Jewish resis-

tance). All criticism of the Soviet Union was banned and the true history was distorted to grotesque levels. In the west the emphasis was on highlighting iconic events of the conflict like the Battle of Britain and D-Day. The role of the western Allies in acquiescing to Stalin’s rule of eastern Europe was inconvenient for any ‘heroic’ narrative of the war. The fact that the Polish had simply swapped the rule of one dictator, Adolf Hitler, for that of another, Josef Stalin, was especially embarrassing – not least because the catalyst for war, as far as the British and French were concerned, had been the Nazi invasion of Poland. In that context, the fact that around half of the victims of the Holocaust had been Polish, and Poland still remained under repressive rule, was a huge problem for the western Allies in their desire to present the war as a ‘total victory’. As for the survivors of the Holocaust, they moved in their hundreds of thousands away from their prewar homelands, with many settling in Israel and America. Until recently the conventional wisdom had been that large numbers of these survivors chose to keep quiet about their wartime suffering in an attempt to start afresh. But pioneering scholarly work over the last few years has exploded this ‘myth of silence’ by demonstrating that many survivors did talk about their experiences at the hands of the Nazis – though in some cases, while the survivors wanted to talk, their acquaintances and workmates were not that keen on listening. t first glance one might think that the one country where survivors would be encouraged to speak about their suffering would be Israel. But the situation there was complex. While in April 1951 the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) announced the creation of a Holocaust memorial day, there was ambivalence among some Israelis about the behaviour of Holocaust survivors during the war. As Moshe Tavor, a soldier who fought in the Jewish Brigade in the British Army put it: “I’m a different type of person than those Jews who lived in small towns in Poland. As kids we’d pretend we were old Jewish heroes and fight mock wars. I feel very connected to the people who fought here [in Israel] 2,000 years ago, and I was less attached to the Jews who went like sheep to the slaughter – this I couldn’t understand.” The desperately unfair taunt that Holocaust survivors went to their deaths like “sheep to the slaughter” was not uncommon – a number of survivors in Israel have told me personally that they heard such insults on their arrival after the war. The apparent pacifity of many of the survivors was in stark contrast to the heroic image that the new Israeli state wanted to project. This explains why the original declaration in 1951 creating Holocaust Memorial Day – in Hebrew ‘Yom Hashoah U’Mered HaGetaot’ – translates into English as ‘Holocaust and Ghetto revolt remembrance day’. The emphasis from the beginning was on ‘resistance’ as much as suffering. It was the trial and eventual execution of Adolf Eichmann (who helped facilitate the mass deportation of Jews to the death camps) in

Josef Stalin, shown in a 1947 poster hailing him “Leader of the Soviet people!”, presided over a regime that sought to characterise the Auschwitz dead as “victims of fascism”

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Jewish immigrants pictured living on ships in Haifa harbour while waiting for admission to Palestine, 13 August 1946. Some Holocaust survivors living in Israel were subjected to taunts that they went to the death camps “like sheep to the slaughter”

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“There is now general agreement that the word ‘Holocaust’ recognises the extermination of the Jews as a crime of singular horror and importance in the history of the world” a broad acceptance of the word has brought. Notwithstanding the definitional arguments, there is now general agreement that the word ‘Holocaust’ recognises the extermination of the Jews as a crime of singular horror and importance in the history of the world. In short, it’s important to remember that you can’t have a ‘Holocaust’ memorial day or a ‘Holocaust’ museum without the word ‘Holocaust’. This isn’t quite as obvious a statement as it first sounds. Because for 20 years after the war there wasn’t one descriptive word in general circulation for the crime. Labelling is important.

Israel in 1961 that opened many people’s eyes to the true scale and horror of the Holocaust for the first time. In the courtroom survivors took centre stage as never before and – in contrast to the Nuremberg trials immediately after the end of the war – were able, one after another, to confront one of the key perpetrators directly. Most dramatically, Auschwitz survivor Yehiel De-Nur testified in front of Eichmann and then fainted. The Eichmann trial also paved the way during the 1960s for an increased awareness of the word ‘Holocaust’. Though Israel’s declaration of independence had used the term as far back as 1948 to describe the Nazis’ campaign of murder against the Jews, it wasn’t in general use until much later. Dictionaries in the early 1960s still referred to a ‘Holocaust’ in non-specific terms as a ‘complete destruction’ or a ‘burnt sacrifice’. The adoption of the word by the general public to describe the mass murder of the Jews was gradual, but certainly by the time the successful NBC mini-series Holocaust was broadcast on American TV in 1978, the idea that this ‘unique’ crime deserved a ‘unique’ descriptive term had been generally accepted. Of course, there are problems with the word ‘Holocaust’ – most obviously that there isn’t universal agreement about what precisely the word means. Some people use the term to describe only the extermination of the Jews, others to describe any act of genocide – for example the ‘Rwandan Holocaust’. But an even bigger difficulty, in my view, is that a narrow definition of ‘Holocaust’ can result in a misunderstanding of the history. While the extermination of the Jews was a unique crime at the epicentre of the Nazis’ plans to racially reshape Europe, you can’t comprehend Nazi thinking if you omit their potentially exterminatory intention towards other groups. This included the plan to destroy tens of millions of Slavs via the General Plan for the East, the ‘euthanasia’ actions against people with mental or physical disabilities, and the murder of countless Poles and gypsies in camps like Auschwitz. However, none of that is a reason not to appreciate the benefits that

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Adolf Eichmann during his trial in 1961. The sight of Auschwitz survivors directly confronting one of their chief tormenters transformed the Holocaust in the world’s consciousness

ut it took one final historical upheaval to prepare the ground for the explosion of public awareness in the Holocaust. And that was the collapse of communism in eastern Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For the first time, those who had experienced the Second World War and had lived behind the iron curtain could speak openly about the conflict. I remember, for example, meeting a former member of the Nazi killing squads who was living in Lithuania, and filming him for my series Nazis: A Warning from History in the mid-1990s. His testimony was shocking – but instructive – and would have been impossible to obtain if the communists had still been in power. Even though he had already served 20 years in a Gulag for his crimes, he had been forbidden by the communist authorities to talk about the war. And it wasn’t just people who were released from the restrictions of communism, it was places as well. For the first time it was possible to have free access not just to Auschwitz, but also the sites of other death camps, like Sobibor and Treblinka. Significantly, not until well after the fall of communism would the signage at the Auschwitz museum be changed to reflect in a proper manner the suffering of the Jews. We tend to forget how effective repression can be in stifling and distorting historical knowledge. How much, for example, is known in this country about the appalling conflict between China and Japan that raged from 1937–45? Because the Chinese government controls access to the key archives and vital eyewitnesses, it is impossible to make a TV series about this war in the same way I made Nazis: A Warning from History. Not that I didn’t try. I filmed in China for my series Horror in the East 15 years ago, but it was so hard to get eyewitnesses to speak without fear of repercussions that I had to say to my bosses at the BBC that my planned six-part series should be shortened to two. Even when we approached Chinese eyewitnesses privately and offered them anonymity, away from the prying eyes of our government minder, the majority remained too frightened to speak. The Chinese government’s attitude to the filming was governed by their own narrow political interests. They were happy that we interview survivors of the Nanking massacre, but refused to allow eyewitnesses from the murderous Japanese actions in the north of China to talk on camera. One night my government minder got drunk and told me why he thought this was. “The truth is,” he said, “we’re looking for the Japanese to build a big DVD factory around there.”

THE HISTORY ESSAY

“I can’t see how a United Nations consensus around Holocaust Memorial Day would have been possible if the Soviet Union still existed and many of the dead were classed as ‘victims of fascism’”

CORBIS

Images of Jewish victims of the Nazis are displayed at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum. “The history of Holocaust memorial reminds us that it can take years before a consensus is formed about the importance of past events,” says Laurence Rees

I filmed in the former Soviet Union back in the 1980s and experienced exactly the same self-serving attitude by the authorities towards history. And there’s no doubt that after the war this prevented a complete historical analysis of the actions of the Nazis on territory subsequently controlled by the Soviets. However, it is also certainly the case that a movement towards commemorating the Holocaust in a more high-profile way had begun before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In America, though the Holocaust Memorial Museum did not open until 1993, the United States Congress had agreed as far back as 1980 that such a museum should be established. In Britain, the Holocaust Educational Trust, which does such important work, was formed in 1988. But despite all that, I can’t see how a United Nations consensus around Holocaust Memorial Day would have been possible if the Soviet Union still existed, and many of the dead were simply classed as “victims of fascism”. The history of Holocaust memorial is thus an instructive one, re-

minding us that it can take many years before a consensus is formed about the importance of past events. And, if repressive regimes remain in place, sometimes this worldwide consensus can never happen at all. Laurence Rees is a writer and broadcaster who has made numerous series for the BBC including Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ (2005) and Nazis: A Warning from History (1997) DISCOVER MORE TELEVISION E Laurence’s documentary Touched by Auschwitz is

due to air on BBC Two this month, as part of a series of BBC programmes on the Holocaust WEBSITE E For more on Holocaust Memorial Day visit hmd.org.uk

Next month’s essay: Diarmaid MacCulloch discusses Christianity’s relationship with sex

BBC History Magazine

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The morning routine

WAKING UP WITH Sleep like a log on a stone Since time immemorial, the morning routine has begun in bed. Sleep has always been a physiological necessity and the oldest evidence for a bed comes from the Middle Stone Age. Dating to 77,000 years ago, the remains of a handstitched mattress, woven out of leaves and rushes, have been found by archaeologists in South Africa. These cave dwellers presumably rolled out their mat on the floor, but if we jump to Neolithic Orkney (5,000 years ago), the inhabitants of Skara Brae slept on elevated beds carved from stone. At the same time, in ancient Egypt, the nobility preferred beds that sloped downwards, or bowed in the middle. Oddly, while the poor slept on piles of cushions, the wealthy rested their heads on curved pillows carved from wood, ivory or alabaster. This was to protect their elaborate hair styles from morning bedhead.

THIS PAGE, LEFT TO RIGHT: The remains of an elevated bed at the Neolithic site of Skara Brae in Orkney; a knocker-upper prepares to wake workers from their slumbers in 1936; latrines in Roman baths at Leptis Magna, Libya; this shower washed well-to-do Georgians in early 19th-century England

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Whistle as you wake We are certainly not the first to be startled from our slumber by a timekeeping gadget. Allegedly, the first alarm clock was invented by Greek philosopher Plato, who lived about 2,400 years ago. We don’t know what this device looked like, but it may have been a water clock that used a draining mechanism to force air through a small gap, thereby producing a whistling sound to rouse Plato’s snoozing students. Mechanical clockwork was miniaturised in the 17th century, thanks to the discovery of the pendulum, allowing Charles II’s subjects to own pocket watches. But it wasn’t until the 20th century that alarm clocks began loitering on bedside tables. Indeed, factory workers in Victorian Britain were awoken by a knocker-upper who tapped on their windows with a long pole.

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Spend a penny 4 Exercise your on a potty right to take a shower Our plastic toilet seat is not too dissimilar to the stone models used by the ancient Egyptians, though the flushing loo didn’t arrive until Queen Elizabeth I’s godson, Sir John Harrington, designed one in the 1590s. Yet he was too busy scribbling scandalous poetry to market his invention. So it wasn’t until the arrival of Josiah George Jennings’s washout toilets, unveiled at the Great Exhibition of 1851, before the middle class could abandon the potty in favour of plumbing. We wouldn’t dream of using the loo today without wiping our bums, and it was no different for our Stone Age ancestors, who probably used moss and leaves on their backsides. Somewhat more unnervingly, Roman public toilets were equipped with a sponge, fixed on the end of a stick, which was used by successive lavatory visitors. The Chinese were wiping with hygienic paper in the ninth century, but the west was a millennium off the pace. It took until 1857 for Joseph Gayetty to mass-produce modern loo roll impregnated with aloe plant extract for hygienic lubrication.

The modern shower was invented by William Feetham in 1767. Curiously, some versions were mounted on wheels, meaning the user had to be careful not to roll away on what was effectively a moistened skateboard. The following century also witnessed the bizarre arrival of the velodouche – a shower that only sprinkled water if you pedalled on an exercise bike. But hygienic washing almost certainly extends back to the Stone Age. And, by the Bronze Age, the people of ancient Pakistan, the Harappans, were perfecting a public sanitation infrastructure that was arguably unrivalled until the 19th century. Though the Romans and Greeks built huge public bathhouses, heated by elaborate hypocaust systems, the Harappans delivered running water to most of their homes 2,500 years before ancient Athens was at its peak.

BBC History Magazine

TOPFOTO/ALAMY/CORBIS/GETTY

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PLATO

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Greg Jenner explores the history of our morning routine, from a Greek philosopher’s alarm clock to bizarre Tudor toothbrushes

Put your pants 6 Dress to on (if you’re impress the wearing any) fashion police When Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, among the glorious golden treasures were also 145 pairs of underpants. The linen loincloth (shenti) was standard underwear of the time, regardless of class or wealth, but its origins seem even older. The mummified corpse of Ötzi the Iceman, who was murdered in the Tyrolean Alps 5,300 years ago, revealed he sported a goatskin loincloth. Most European men and women went pantless until the mid-19th century, with ladies wearing long smocks under their dresses and men merely tucking their long shirts between their legs. However, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was surprisingly found to have been wearing boxer shorts when his preserved corpse was examined by modern conservators.

Body lice thrive in the folds of clothing, and are thought to have branched off from their near relatives, head lice, thousands of years ago – as a result of people adopting fabric clothing. We often depict Stone Age people in animal furs, but they also wove flax on primitive looms and used needle and thread to make clothes fit more snugly. In the Ice Age, well-insulated clothes were key to survival. Today, fashion is more about looking good, but the ‘fashion police’ have been in operation for longer than you might think. In the Middle Ages there were laws proscribing certain colours and designs, and Edward IV demanded that purple, gold and silver fabrics be limited to royalty. You had to be of knightly class to get away with velvet. In 17th-century Japan, a rule preventing merchants from wearing ornate robes led some to have the designs tattooed on their skin. This art of irezumi is still so highly regarded in Japan that people have been paid to bequeath their flayed skin to museums upon their death.

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Spice on your cornflakes? Strangely, our humble bowl of cornflakes first arrived in the 1890s as a treatment for patients with mental illness who masturbated too much. Dr John Harvey Kellogg believed the lack of sugar and spice would reduce a person’s sex drive. It was his brother, Will, who sprinkled the sugar back on top and made a fortune out of the Kellogg’s brand. Of course, every bowl of cereal needs a splash of milk, but this was only possible after the Neolithic farming revolution saw humans domesticate animals. Indeed, the mutated gene that allows most of us to drink cow’s milk without suffering painful flatulence is only 6,000 years old, and the majority of the world’s population don’t have it.

THIS PAGE, LEFT TO RIGHT: By the 20th century, most people were sporting underwear, as this image from the 1920 suggests; a man covered in the traditional Japanese irezumi tattoo in c1880; Dr John Harvey Kellogg chose not to use sugar in his cornflakes recipe in a bid to reduce patients’ sex drive; an 1810 coloured engraving shows men who probably didn’t own a toothbrush

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Ask your slave to brush your teeth People have been treating toothache for millennia, with evidence of dental drilling in Pakistan dating back 9,000 years. But avoiding surgery has always been preferable, so tooth brushing with a frayed twig was part of the morning routine for everyone from the medieval residents of India to the Elizabethans. Roman aristocrats had slaves to brush their teeth for them, applying powdered antler horn to brighten the enamel. Oddly, the best available mouthwash at the time was human urine imported from Portugal. The Chinese invented the modern toothbrush but it never reached Europe, so the reinvention is credited to William Addis who, in 1780, inserted horsehair into a pig bone. But even Addis didn’t recommend brushing twice a day – that advice came from US army hygiene experiments in World War Two. Greg Jenner is a historian who spent many years as the historical consultant to CBBC’s multi-awardwinning Horrible Histories DISCOVER MORE BOOK E A Million Years in a Day: A

Curious History of Everyday Life by Greg Jenner (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, January 2015)

BBC History Magazine

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Medieval England

HENRY THE YOUNG KING

The

forgotten

King & his Lancelot WILLIAM MARSHAL

Thomas Asbridge, author of a new biography of the famed knight William Marshal, explores a remarkable medieval friendship that echoed England’s greatest legend 42

BBC History Magazine

he legends of King Arthur, his leading warrior the mighty Lancelot and the tragic love triangle they formed with Queen Guinevere, retain their allure, though more than eight centuries have passed since they were first popularised. These tales remain touchstones of the Middle Ages, evoking romanticised images of a distant era, replete with knightly daring and courtly gallantry. Yet, for all our fascination with Arthurian myths, one probable inspiration for these stories has been all but forgotten. In the late 12th century – just as medieval Europe was falling under the spell of early Arthurian ‘Romance’ literature – a real king was feted as the ultimate paragon of chivalry. He too was served by a faithful retainer, one renowned as the greatest knight of his generation. And, like Arthur and Lancelot, their story ended in tragedy amid accusations of adultery and betrayal. Though history seldom remembers him now, Henry the Young King seemed assured of a glittering future when he was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey on 14 June 1170. Just 15 years old, Henry was already tall and incredibly handsome – the golden child of his generation. As the eldest surviving son of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, he stood to inherit medieval Europe’s most powerful realm, the Angevin empire, with lands stretching from the borders of Scotland in the north to the foothills of the Pyrenees in the south. But though Young Henry had undergone the sacred and transformative ritual of coronation – becoming a king in name – he was denied real power for the remainder of his career. Crowned during the lifetime of his virile and overbearing father (in the vain hope of securing a peaceful succession), the Young King was expected to wait patiently in the wings, serving as an associate monarch.

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Vexed king As it was, Henry II (or the ‘Old King’, as he came to be known) lived for another 19 years, stubbornly refusing to apportion any region of the Angevin realm to his primary heir and, not surprisingly, Young Henry soon became vexed by this state of affairs. The situation would have unsettled any ruling dynasty, but because Young Henry happened to belong to the most dysfunctional royal family in English history, it proved to be utterly ruinous. Thwarted by an imperious father on the one hand, yet encouraged to assert his rights by a scheming mother on the other, the Young King also had to contest with a viper’s brood of power-hungry siblings, BBC History Magazine

Lancelot fights for Guinevere in a medieval illumination. Was William Marshal also ensnared in a dangerous love triangle?

“Marshal shot to fame in the tournaments, using a combination of martial skill, steely resolve and canny tactics” including Richard the Lionheart and the future King John. In many respects Young Henry’s career proved to be a tragic waste. He led two failed rebellions against his father and ultimately suffered a squalid and agonising death in 1183, having contracted dysentery. Historians have traditionally offered a withering assessment of his career, typically portraying him as a feckless dandy – the young, extravagant playboy who, once denied the chance to rule in his own right, frittered away his time in pursuit of vacuous chivalric glory. Dismissed as “shallow, vain, careless, empty-headed, incompetent, improvident and irresponsible”, the Young King remains a misunderstood and often overlooked figure. A closer and more impartial study of Henry’s life reveals that this view is overly simplistic, at times even misrepresentative, and deeply shaded by hindsight. In fact, the best contemporary evidence indicates that the Young King was an able and politically engaged member of the Angevin dynasty, renowned in his own lifetime as a champion of the warrior class. This status brought Henry real political influence and marked him out as a model for contemporary authors of chivalric literature and Arthurian myth. The course of Young Henry’s career and his connection to the cult of chivalry were heavily influenced by his close association with William Marshal – a man later described by the archbishop of Canterbury as “the greatest knight in all the world”. Born the younger son of a minor Anglo-Norman noble, William

trained as a warrior and rose through the ranks, serving at the right hand of five English monarchs in the course of his long and eventful career. Like Henry, Marshal was said to have been a fine figure of a man, but he was built first and foremost for war. Possessed with extraordinary physical endurance and vitality, and imbued with the raw strength to deliver shattering sword blows that resounded like a blacksmith’s hammer, he also became a peerless horseman, able to manoeuvre his mount with deft agility. These gifts, when married to an insatiable appetite for advancement, fuelled William’s meteoric rise. Later in life he would become Earl of Pembroke and regent of the realm. But in 1170 Marshal was still in his early 20s and a household knight serving in Eleanor of Aquitaine’s retinue. After Henry the Young King’s coronation, Marshal was appointed as the boy’s tutor-inarms – a promotion that was probably engineered by Queen Eleanor so that she could maintain a degree of contact with, and influence over, her eldest son. William soon became Young Henry’s leading retainer and close confidant. The pair developed a warm friendship and together they set out in the 1170s to make their mark on the world. By this time, western Europe was in the grip of a craze for knightly tournaments. These contests were light years away from the mannered jousts of the later Middle Ages, being riotous, chaotic affairs, tantamount to large-scale war games played out by teams of mounted knights across great swathes of territory, often more than 30 miles wide. They were not without their risks. There is no evidence that warriors used blunted weaponry – relying instead upon their armour to protect them from severe injury – and the gravest danger came from being unhorsed and trampled under-hoof in the midst of a heated melee. Henry’s younger brother Geoffrey died from wounds sustained in this manner and one of William Marshal’s sons would suffer a similar fate. But the great value of these events was that they offered noblemen the perfect opportunity to demonstrate their knightly qualities to their peers, enabling them to earn renown within a society obsessed with chivalric culture. Tournaments came to feature heavily in Arthurian Romances, with Lancelot depicted as the leading champion.

Feckless youths? The most persistent accusation levelled by historians against the Young King and his knight William Marshal is that they wastefully immersed themselves in the world of the chivalric tournament. However, while it 43

Medieval England The lives of the “great knight” and England’s heir William Marshal

Henry the Young King

1147 Born as the younger son of a minor Anglo-Norman noble, John Marshal, and grows up in England’s West Country

William Marshal boasted a physique made for war

1155 Born to King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. As eldest surviving son he is heir-apparent to the Angevin empire. His younger brother is Richard the Lionheart

1160 Though barely five, Henry is married to the French king’s two-year-old daughter, Marguerite; both were rumoured to have bawled throughout the ceremony

1170

1170

William is appointed as Henry the Young King’s tutor-in-arms

Crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey during his father’s lifetime, but expected to serve as an associate monarch

Henry the Young King is crowned in 1170

is true that they became leading devotees of the tourney circuit, this was hardly the all-consuming focus of their careers – their participation being chiefly confined to an intense, four-year period, between 1176 and 1180. Nor is it the case that these years were squandered. In fact, the successes they enjoyed on the tournament field transformed the prospects of both men. Serving as the captain of Young Henry’s tournament team, William Marshal shot to fame using a combination of martial skill, steely resolve and canny tactics to score a tide of victories. William was rightly revered for his prowess, but there were also important practical and financial gains to be made. Most tournaments revolved around attempts to capture opposing knights, either by battering them into submission or by seizing control of their horses (one of William’s favourite tricks). Prisoners would then have to pay a ransom and perhaps also forfeit their equipment in return for release. Marshal bested some 500 warriors in these years and thus accrued a significant personal fortune. By 1180 he was in position to support a small retinue of knights of his own and had achieved such celebrity that he was on familiar terms with counts, dukes and kings.

1173 74 Leads first rebellion against Henry II, in alliance with Louis VII of France and Philip of Flanders, but is thwarted by his father A medieval woodcut shows men jousting, a highly perilous pastime at which William Marshal excelled

1176

1179

1179

He is permitted to raise his own banner and attends the great tournament at Lagny-sur-Marne

Attends Philip II of France’s coronation and the grand tournament at Lagny-sur-Marne

Starts to frequent the northern French tournament circuit alongside William Marshal, quickly earning a reputation for lavish largesse

1182 Accused of betraying Henry and bedding his wife, William is forced into exile

1183

1183

Returns to Young Henry’s side shortly before his death. William later sets out for the Holy Land to redeem Henry’s crusading vow

Second rebellion against Henry II’s regime leads to war in Aquitaine. Henry the Young King contracts dysentery and dies in agony at Martel, west central France

1186 Comes back to Europe, enters King Henry II’s household and starts to accrue lands and wealth

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Henry the Young King also stood to gain from his close involvement in the tournament circuit. As the patron of a leading team Henry participated in events but was generally shielded from the worst of the fracas by his retainers. For a man of his exalted social standing, there was less emphasis on individual prowess and more upon the chivalric quality of largesse – and in this regard, Henry was unmatched. At a time when leading nobles were judged on the size and splendour of their retinues, the Young King assembled one of the most impressive military households in all of Europe. As a result, contemporaries compared Henry to Alexander the Great and Arthur, the great heroes of old, and hailed him as a ‘father of chivalry’ – a cult figure, worthy of reverence. Such ostentation came at a crippling cost but this display of status was not simply an exercise in idle frivolity, as most historians have assumed. Tourneys were games of prowess, but they were played by many of the most powerful men in Europe – barons and magnates driven by a deepening fixation with knightly ideals. This lent Young Henry’s renown a potent edge because it inevitably brought with it a measure of influence beyond the confines of the tournament field. As a teenager, Henry had sought power through rebellion. In the late 1170s he made his name and affirmed his BBC History Magazine

BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/ALAMY

Exalted standing

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BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

“Young Henry and William revelled in a glorious festival of pageantry, the air thick with the thunderous din of battle” regal status in a different arena. These achievements could not be ignored by the Old King. Historians have often suggested that Henry II viewed his son’s lavish tournament career as merely wasteful and trivial. But by 1179 his attitude was unquestionably more positive. On 1 November that year, the frail teenager Philip II was crowned and anointed as the next king of France in the royal city of Rheims. All of western Europe’s leading dynasties and noble houses attended this grand ceremony and to top it all a massive tournament was organised to celebrate Philip’s investiture. That autumn the close correlation between practical power and chivalric spectacle was laid bare. With the creation of a new French king, the chess board of politics was about to be reordered and naturally all the key players were angling for influence and advantage. Leading figures such as Philip, Count of Flanders and Duke Hugh of Burgundy – both tournament enthusiasts – were present, eager to establish themselves as the young French monarch’s preferred mentor. Henry II looked to his eldest son to represent the Angevin house, and so Young Henry went to Rheims alongside his illustrious champion, William Marshal. Young Henry duly played a starring role in the coronation, carrying Philip’s crown in affirmation of his close connection to the new French monarch. After a round of feasting, Henry and William moved on to a large area of open terrain east of Paris, at Lagny-surMarne for the greatest tournament of the 12th century. There, as leading knights among some 3,000 participants, Young Henry and William revelled in a glorious festival of pageantry, awash with the colour of hundreds of unfurled banners. That day, according to one chronicler, “the entire field of combat was swarming with [warriors]”, so that “not an inch of ground could be seen”. It was a spectacle the likes of which had “never [been] seen before or since” – and Young Henry and William Marshal were its stars. The contest at Lagny marked the apogee of William Marshal’s tournament career and the Young King’s dedication to the cult of chivalry. Having resuscitated his reputation, BBC History Magazine

Young Henry sought to make a more direct re-entry into the world of power politics by snatching the duchy of Aquitaine from his brother Richard the Lionheart. But then, a shocking rumour reached his ears. One of his warriors was bedding Queen Marguerite, his wife. The man accused of this heinous crime was none other than William Marshal.

Passionate affair It is impossible to know whether there was any substance to this allegation. It appears to have been levelled by a disaffected faction in the Young King’s entourage and possibly prompted by jealously of Marshal’s glittering career. It is perhaps no coincidence that it was precisely in this period that the famed author of Arthurian literature, Chrétien de Troyes, composed his first story about Lancelot and his passionate affair with Queen Guinevere. In all probability Young Henry did not believe William to be guilty or else he would have enacted a more severe punishment than mere exile. As it was, the shame surrounding Marshal was sufficient to require his banishment from court in late 1182. When the Young King began his second rebellion against his father in 1183 he did so without his leading knight and advisor by his side and the subsequent civil war did not go in his favour. Facing the combined might of the Old King and the Lionheart, Young Henry eventually relented and recalled William to his side. Tragically, William Marshal only arrived in time to witness his lord’s descent into ill health, for the Young King contracted dysentery and died in agony at Martel, near Limoges in France, on 11 June 1183. On his deathbed Henry reportedly turned to “his most intimate friend” and bid William to carry his regal cloak to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in payment of his “debts to God”. It was a charge that William duly fulfilled. Young King Henry received scourging press from most late 12th-century chroniclers. For these historians, writing during the reigns of the Old King and his successors, Henry was easy game – a wayward princeling who died young and left no great court historians to sing his praises. In their accounts he became little more than a mutinous traitor who “befouled the whole world with his treasons”. Only a few of Young Henry’s closest contemporaries offered a more immediate impression of his achievements and character. The most heartfelt memorial was offered by the Young King’s own chaplain, who wrote that “it was a blow to all chivalry when he passed away in the very glow of youth” and concluded that “when Henry died heaven was hungry, so all the world went begging”. For more on King Henry II, turn to our feature on page 80

1189 Marriage to the heiress Isabel of Clare (arranged by Richard the Lionheart) brings William the lordship of Striguil (Chepstow). The couple have no less than 10 children

1190 94 Serves as co-justiciar of England during King Richard I’s absence on crusade and period in captivity

1215 William helps to negotiate the terms of Magna Carta and he appears as the first named nobleman in the document

1216 After King John’s death, William supports the child Henry III’s claim to the crown and is appointed as ‘guardian of the realm’, thus becoming regent of England

1217 Despite being 70 years old, William fights in the frontline at the battle of Lincoln and defeats the combined forces of the baronial rebels and the French

The effigy of William Marshal at London’s Temple Church

1219 William resigns as regent, dies in peace shortly thereafter and is buried in London’s Temple Church

Dr Thomas Asbridge is reader in medieval history at Queen Mary, University of London. In 2014, he presented the BBC Two documentary The Greatest Knight: William the Marshal DISCOVER MORE BOOKS E The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable

Life of William Marshal, the Power Behind Five English Thrones by Thomas Asbridge (Simon & Schuster, 2015) E ‘William Marshal, Lancelot and Arthur: Chivalry and Kingship’ by Laura Ashe, Anglo-Norman Studies, vol 30 (2007) E Chivalry by Maurice Keen (Yale University Press, 1984)

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six magazines a year: three of Stand To!, our acclaimed journal; and three of Bulletin, our members’ magazine worldwide, with 50 branches throughout the UK national, regional and local conferences and events battlefield tours monthly eNewsletter social media discussions on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WFA Forum 11 November Cenotaph ceremony

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Mark Rylance stars as Thomas Cromwell in the upcoming BBC dramatisation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies

A 1537 miniature of Thomas Cromwell, which, says, Diarmaid MacCulloch, shows how the Tudor statesman might have looked in “affectionate mode”

The Cromwell enigma As the BBC dramatisation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies is about to air, the novels’ author Hilary Mantel and Thomas Cromwell biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch share their thoughts on the upcoming series and its complex hero INTERVIEW BY ROB ATTAR Accompanies the BBC Two drama series Wolf Hall

BBC History Magazine

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Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel (shown here at BBC History Magazine’s History Weekend) on why the ‘hero’ of her novels still divides opinions almost 500 years after his heyday

What can the TV adaptation add to the story and what might be the biggest challenges of bringing Wolf Hall to the small screen? HM: We have the dream team, I think: director Peter Kosminsky with his acute political sense and visual flair, plus writer Peter Straughan with his ability to cut through the most knotty plot complications and produce something clear, spare, witty. Their sense of the material is exactly my own. The biggest problem (as with the theatre adaptations) is choosing which plot lines to pursue, and how to organise an intricate, self-questioning narrative, which

loops back and retells itself even as it’s being written. Someone counted 159 characters in the books. Each has his or her part in the story. The way through is to remember who is central: Thomas Cromwell. DM: The biggest challenge with TV is always that the pictures are going to take over, and thoughts go out of the window. The problem can be overcome. I look forward to seeing Hilary’s solutions. Which other historical dramas on television have you admired? DM: To be frank, nothing in recent years, but that is probably because I haven’t sought out even the better ones. I go back all the way to Derek Jacobi in I, Claudius and Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth I. Or those most intelligent of spoofs: the four Blackadder series. HM: John Adams, the HBO series about the American Revolution, is the best that I have seen. I liked its plain integrity, its commitment to storytelling. Why does Thomas Cromwell – the central figure in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies – work so well as a hero or anti-hero? HM: You can’t add him up. He’s an enigma. He’s always, for me, a work in progress, and I think he becomes so for the reader and for the viewer. DM: The genius of Hilary’s take on him both in the novels and the recent stage adaptations has been to make him an instinctive observer: hard work for Ben Miles as an actor [Miles played Cromwell in the theatre version], because it means that he’s hardly ever off stage. But Cromwell’s more than an observer for us, because we are observing him too, through Hilary’s device – so much commented on by readers – of referring to Cromwell as ‘he’ throughout the text. And who is the observer then? Us, the reader/audience? Or Cromwell, watching Cromwell as much as everyone else? Would you agree that history has been unkind to Thomas Cromwell, and what do you see as his positive qualities? DM: He’s been a Marmite figure. John Foxe in the Book of Martyrs made him a hero, but High Church Anglicans joined Roman Catholics in hating him, mainly for destroying the monasteries. The famous Holbein portrait now in the Frick Collection hasn’t helped, with its piggy, suspicious eyes. There is a Holbein miniature of him from 1537 [see previous page] which shows how the same face could look in affectionate mode – and we now know, thanks to brilliant detective

BBC History Magazine

STEVE SAYERS

He’ll never be the romantic’s choice. If you’re sentimental about Roman Catholic England you might regard him as a human wrecking ball

Why do you think Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have been so successful – both critically and commercially? Hilary Mantel: They seem to have united two constituencies: people who read the literary novel, and people who like historical fiction as a genre. (I dislike the tag ‘literary novel,’ but no one has come up with a better one.) I think genre authors often condescend to their readers. I wanted to put something rich and complicated into play, and see if I could entice the wary. Some readers retired hurt, but many more have responded to a challenge. And of course people love to read about Henry and his wives; it’s one of those ‘you couldn’t make it up’ stories, deeply embedded in the national narrative, and it works at all levels. The books have gone beyond these islands, though, and into some 35 languages; that argues the presence of archetypal figures and universal themes. Diarmaid MacCulloch: They’re great stories in themselves, and people vaguely remember a bit about them from school history and from our national fascination with the Tudors, which to my surprise (though gratification) never seems to wane. But to these basic assets, Hilary brings the skills of an exceptionally talented novelist, and a detailed knowledge of the period, which astonished me when I first began reading Wolf Hall.

work by an Australian historical enthusiast, Teri Fitzgerald, that that is because the miniature was designed as a pair with a portrait miniature of his much-loved teenage son, Gregory. The boy has the Cromwell face too, but delicate, thoughtful, indeed pretty. It’s a revelation. HM: In popular history and in fiction and drama his reputation has been black. If you start out with the assumption that a man is bad, then every action is interpreted in the light of that assumption. Academic historians, thankfully, are less interested in issuing a moral report card, and yet unexamined prejudices about the man and his work have been casually passed down the generations. And because he was championed by the great Tudor historian GR Elton, later scholars who need to define themselves against Elton’s work have been tempted to diminish Cromwell’s role. So we have to ask, are we talking about Cromwell himself, or the internal politics of the discipline? He’ll never be the romantic’s choice. If you’re sentimental about Roman Catholic England, you may regard him as a human wrecking ball. There’s ingrained misunderstanding about what happened to faith and practice and church institutions in Henry’s reign, and in religious and other matters Cromwell often carries the blame for what he didn’t do. Instead of rushing to judgment, I would like my reader to ask: ‘What would I do, in his place?’

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Is it fair to say that Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have significantly changed public perceptions of Thomas Cromwell? DM: No question! My old doctoral supervisor, GR Elton, who deeply admired Cromwell and detested Thomas More, would have been delighted. HM: They certainly have. When I began, and would tell people my subject, they would say: “Don’t you mean Oliver?” Considering the source material available, how difficult is it to get a sense of the ‘real’ Cromwell? HM: You must accept that your man is a representation, one of a long chain of representations. His actions – though sometimes ambiguous and well disguised – are there to be examined, but his private thoughts are lost to us. The world of motive is murky, and one in which novelists move more easily than historians. He wasn’t self-revealing, like Thomas More. His letters are official letters; but the man shows through the paper. You try to work out what happens when the ink has dried and the man rises from the desk. You get a sense of the impression he made from BBC History Magazine

what others say about him, but you must be aware of who is saying it, and when it is said. DM: There’s a big problem. The archive is vast, but most of his own letters and writings are lost, the records of them probably destroyed by his household when he was arrested, to try and complicate the investigation of him by his enemies. So you stumble through a cacophony of other voices, trying to hear echoes of what he said. What sources would you most like to discover to add to our understanding of Cromwell? DM: I’d like to find the files kept by his great friend Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, which would have included dedicated letter-books for their correspondence, copied by Cranmer’s clerks. We know that they existed from the chance survival of one of Cranmer’s letter-books, which has his correspondence with everyone else, but hardly a peep of the letters to and from Cromwell. They must have been in a separate series of books (that shows how special the relationship was), and they’ve vanished. HM: The single thing I’d like most is another portrait. No disrespect to the masterly Holbein, but another artist, another day… that might be interesting. How closely does the Henry VIII of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies match the historians’ view of him and is he also ripe for a reappraisal? HM: Henry is always being reappraised. I would be suspicious of any consensus about him. I never try consciously to match up my characters with the work of historians. I read everything I can, as near to source as I can, then I try to imagine freshly. With Henry as with Cromwell, I would like to ask my readers, not to concur with my vision, but to think again, question what they think they know, and look at the sources of their information. DM: I don’t believe he is ripe for reappraisal. Hilary’s novels get him right. He was a selfish monster who, like most successful selfish monsters possessed of power, had a dangerous charm, and was no fool. That’s the man you meet in Hilary’s re-creation. The coup against Anne Boleyn is perhaps the most hotly debated incident from the Tudor court in this period. What do you see as the most likely cause of her downfall? HM: I see a multiplicity of causes. That’s how life works. To blame ‘faction’, or find the cause in the court’s sexual politics, to adduce that regime change is steered from abroad, or to ask, ‘Is it Cromwell or is it the king?’: this approach leads us further into a maze of

You stumble through a cacophony of other voices trying to hear echoes of what Thomas Cromwell said Diarmaid MacCulloch on the difficulties of getting to the ‘real’ Cromwell with the limited source material available

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Wolf Hall

Cromwell (Rylance) with Anne Boleyn (played by Claire Foy). He had a key role in her downfall

Jonathan Pryce as Cardinal Wolsey, Cromwell’s predecessor and mentor Damian Lewis as Henry VIII. Hilary Mantel wants people to question their views of the king

Cromwell and Henry in Wolf Hall. Their relationship is central to the drama

everything and won a crown. At a certain point she lost: as Cromwell himself lost, a few years later.

You are both currently working on new books on Thomas Cromwell. Have you been able to assist each other on those and what do you think a historian and historical novelist can learn from each other? DM: Yes, I’ve hugely enjoyed our conversations, and exchanging ideas with Hilary, confident that her soaring imagination can reach parts of the past which historians can’t And was this Cromwell’s most or shouldn’t. dishonourable act? HM: I owe everything to the DM: It certainly was. historians who have cut a path HM: In Bring Up the Bodies for me, even if the crooked I’ve gone with a version of path sometimes leads me events which does give him to the wrong destination; a large measure of rage and despair are great responsibility for Anne’s fuel. What I provide isn’t a fall; but when he tells supplement to history, or Eustace Chapuys [the an enrichment or impovHoly Roman Empire’s erishment of it, or a ambassador in England] contrarian’s version. A that she is threatening to take novelist is concerned with the his head off, we believe him. part of human experience a Whichever version of events you historian cannot process: the adopt, Anne was not a victim. A portrait of a young man unconscious motive, the She was a player in a harsh thought to be Thomas Cromwell’s son, Gregory random event. political game. She had staked 50

When I began work on my Cromwell books I knew no Tudor historians. Their welcome has surprised me. Almost everyone has proved open-minded, few have been dismissive, and sometimes I’ve been helped towards startling illuminations. Only this morning, Diarmaid sent me something I thought didn’t exist: a portrait of an ‘unknown young man’ who, as he mentioned, is quite likely to be Cromwell’s son, Gregory. These are the moments you live for: the face forming in the air, the lost thing finding itself. Hilary Mantel is a novelist, best known for her two Cromwell novels, Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, 2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate, 2012), both of which won the Man Booker Prize. Her most recent book is The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (Fourth Estate, 2014) Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch is a historian based at the University of Oxford, specialising in Christianity and the Tudor period. He is also a regular presenter of BBC TV series. He is currently working on a new biography of Thomas Cromwell DISCOVER MORE TELEVISION E Wolf Hall is due to be shown on BBC Two

this month. For more details please check our weekly TV updates on historyextra.com BBC History Magazine

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unknowability. I take it as axiomatic that most of the time, when we look at the past, we know what happened but not why. My job as a novelist is to try to work out how it might have felt to be part of those events. DM: She had been fun as a mistress, but as a wife, she was too clever and spirited. So her enemies could play on Henry’s disillusionment – and Cromwell, who had never been a soulmate of hers despite their shared evangelical religion, joined the pack, for his own reasons.

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The home front in 1945

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1945 in pictures 1 Evacuees make their way home, Waterloo station, June 2 With the threat of invasion a thing of the past, men remove barbed wire from Bognor Regis seafront 3 Huts in Lambeth built for bombedout families 4 Housewives examine cuts of fish 5 Allied captives pictured shortly after their PoW camp had been seized by British troops, April 6 A housewife gathers possessions from her wrecked London home following a V2 attack 7 The Japanese surrender delegation aboard USS Missouri, 2 September 8 A mushroom cloud rises above Hiroshima, 6 August 9 A V1 flying bomb over London 10 As rationing bites, women plant potatoes for the next crop, April 11 Winston Churchill on the campaign trail, Towcester, 25 June – shortly before losing the general election

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LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF VICTORY

Maggie Andrews chronicles the joy and trepidation that filled the hearts of Britons on the home front in the early months of 1945 7

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Charles II’s love life

CHARLES II: TOO RANDY TO RULE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

Don Jordan and Michael Walsh reveal how the merrie monarch’s obsession with sex cost England a fortune and left it vulnerable to attack

ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT: Royal sexual partners, official and unofficial – Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine; Queen Catherine shown with Charles; Louise de Kéroualle

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BBC History Magazine

“During his 25 years on the throne, he spent more time on the pursuit and enjoyment of women than in council meetings”

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

Charles II, shown in around 1665, was a notorious philanderer whose dedicated pursuit of pleasure led the nation into crisis

BBC History Magazine

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Charles II’s love life

n late summer 1662, King Charles II stood on the roof of his banqueting house looking over his sprawling palace below. Beside him stood his famously voluptuous mistress, the raven-haired Barbara Castlemaine. King and concubine watched a dazzling procession arrive at the palace. It carried Charles’s new queen, Catherine of Braganza. She was moving from Hampton Court, where she and the king had recently honeymooned, to take up residence at Whitehall Palace. This scene – the king and his mistress watching the queen arrive, in effect, alone – is the quintessence of Charles II’s hedonistic reign. He was besotted by sensuality. During his 25 years on the throne, he spent more time on the pursuit and enjoyment of women than in council meetings. He flaunted his mistresses in front of the nation and Queen Catherine. His court shared his obsession with sex. Leading lights such as the Duke of Buckingham and Earl of Danby were amoral, carefree and licentious. Venereal disease was so common among them that a specialist ‘pox doctor’ was on call in the court. None among his intimates could have been surprised in 1674 to hear that Charles was infected and that his French mistress of the time, Louise de Kéroualle, had berated him before the French ambassador for laying her low with the infection. Charles has often been cast as a dextrous politician. But interests were neglected and decisions postponed in order to meet the demands of his social life. He once broke off talks on war and peace with a French delegation so as not to keep Barbara waiting for dinner. To reduce the tedium of government business (which he hated) he took to conducting state affairs from Barbara’s apartments in Whitehall

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Charles II shown at a court ball in the 1660s. He and his inner circle at court were obsessed with partying and he flaunted his mistresses in front of his wife, Catherine

Addicted to love Charles brought the addiction home from exile in 1660 after parliament issued the invitation for him to ascend a throne empty since his father’s execution 11 years earlier. In the intervening period Charles had remained in exile, living on the charity of the royal houses of Europe. He filled his days partying, riding, sailing and seducing women. At his Restoration, a large retinue of exiled royalists came home, including Barbara, the daughter of an impoverished peer and wife of the courtier and politician, Roger Palmer. She may well have already become Charles’s lover. Two years later, Charles married Catherine of Braganza, daughter of the king of Portugal. Disastrously, the marriage did not produce a royal heir, while Barbara gave Charles several children. A boy, Charles, was born in Hampton Court in June 1662 while the newly wed king and Catherine were honeymooning there. The affront to the queen was the first of many insults Catherine would endure. At Barbara’s behest, Charles insisted Catherine appoint her as a lady-of-thebedchamber. The queen resisted, supported by the lord chancellor, Clarendon. Usually placid, Charles showed steely determination where sex was involved. He warned Clarendon, “whosoever I find use any endeavour to hinder this resolution of mine… I will be his enemy to the last moment of my life”. Barbara Countess of Castlemaine with her son Charles whom the king acknowledged as his own, by court painter Sir Peter Lely

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“This single scene – the king and his mistress watching the queen arrive alone – is the quintessence of Charles II’s hedonistic reign” Barbara’s new position meant she was ensconced in Whitehall, on tap for the king’s delight. Her huge palace apartments were ostentatious, while her spending almost certainly outstripped that of anyone else in the kingdom. Charles deluged her with gifts and allowed her to siphon off funds that would otherwise have gone to the exchequer. Custom duties brought her £10,000 per annum, beer tax another £10,000, post office revenue £5,000, and so on. One evening she lost £25,000 playing cards. Charles picked up the debt. Barbara wanted Charles to make her position as a courtesan something grander, what the French called a maîtresse-en-titre, or official mistress. To satisfy her hunger for status, Charles piled aristocratic honours upon her, labelling her countess and then duchess. Barbara meddled in politics almost from the outset, gaining her first political scalp in 1662 when she helped arrange the sacking of the venerable secretary of state Sir Edward Nicholas. Later, she played the major part in the downfall of the even more venerable lord chancellor, Clarendon, who had made plain his view of her by refusing to utter her name and BBC History Magazine

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Palace. The courtier John Evelyn commented that Charles would have made a good ruler, “if he had been less addicted to women”.

Charles II’s other women It was hard to refuse such a powerful figure, but one woman famously got away

Nell Gwyn The nation’s sweetheart Although she’s one of the most famous figures in popular British history, parts of Nell Gwyn’s life are clouded in mystery. Dates for her birth range from 1642 to 1651, with 1650 possibly correct. Her birthplace is uncertain. Even her many famous witticisms were usually reported second-hand and many may be apocryphal. What is certain is that she spent some early years in a slum in Covent Garden, by her own admission serving beer to customers in a brothel. Her acting talent was real, making her a huge stage star, while her shining personality brought her to the bed of a king – she bore him two sons during their 16-year love affair – and into the heart of a nation. She died in 1687.

Frances Stuart banning his wife from speaking to her. The queen, with the fortitude of a religious upbringing and the breeding of a royal princess, rarely gave vent to her feelings. As Charles paraded his mistresses, Catherine cried in private. Her agony was increased by the arrival from France of Charles’s illegitimate first-born son, James Scott, upon whom he doted. He made the boy Duke of Monmouth, a title worthy of a legitimate heir, which prompted Catherine to threaten to leave her husband and “never see his face no more”. It was an empty threat; she had nowhere to go. Though Charles had experienced sex when as young as 15, Monmouth’s mother, the Welsh beauty Lucy Walter, was his first meaningful relationship. John Evelyn described her as being “brown, beautiful, bold”. Lucy and Charles became lovers in 1648 when they were both just 18 and living in exile. Lucy was soon pregnant and Charles accepted the child as his. His friends abused Lucy as “a whore” and, under pressure, Charles eventually abandoned her and took away her son to be raised under his mother’s protection. Lucy reportedly died in poverty in Paris in 1658 not yet aged 30, possibly having had to take up prostitution.

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Royal ‘pimpmaster’ Prostitution was not a profession with which Charles had a problem. He dallied with all sorts of women, of all social classes. Many were ‘actresses’ procured by his servant William Chiffinch, known as the king’s ‘pimpmaster’. Some came straight from brothels. When the queen fell gravely ill, probably following a miscarriage, the talk in the court was that if Catherine died, Charles would marry Frances Stuart, a teenage beauty and one of the queen’s ladies-of-the-bedchamber. The queen recovered, only to miscarry at least twice more. Courtiers begged Charles to divorce BBC History Magazine

The greatest beauty It was difficult for young women of the royal court to resist the king’s advances. But in 1663, a 15-year-old not only bowled Charles over, but kept him at bay for years. This was Frances Stuart (1647–1702), described by Samuel Pepys as “the greatest beauty I ever saw, I think, in my life”. Frances arrived at the court as a lady-of-thebedchamber to the queen, and Charles immediately saw her as a flower to be plucked. In 1667, fearing that sooner or later she’d have to succumb to the king, Frances eloped with the Duke of Richmond and Lennox. She was, literally, the one that got away.

Hortense Mancini The wild bisexual The wildest of Charles’s mistresses was Hortense Mancini (1646–99), the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV’s first minister. She was married at the age of 14 to the much older Duke de Meilleraye. The duke was a religious fanatic who believed that the milkmaids on his estate could be turned into sex maniacs by touching cows’ udders. He therefore had the girls’ teeth knocked out to make them unattractive to men. Hortense ran away several times, eventually travelling to London, where she became Charles’s mistress. She was bisexual, and one of her many other lovers was Anne, Countess of Sussex, the daughter of Charles II and Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine.

her and marry Frances but he refused. While these domestic matters transfixed the court, the country suffered humiliation in a naval battle. England was engaged in war with the Dutch, which had begun in the spring of 1665 in a struggle for supremacy of the sea and trade. In early 1667, the British crown ran out of money, and could not afford to refit the fleet and pay ships’ crews. When the crown asked parliament for the necessary £1.5m it replied that first it wanted to know how the £5m it had previously allocated to the exchequer had been spent. No answer was forthcoming. According to Samuel Pepys at the navy board, £2.3m was unaccounted for. It was rumoured that the

king had lavished much of this on his mistresses. With no money forthcoming, Charles made the momentous decision to lay up the bulk of the fleet in the Medway river. When the Dutch discovered this, they decided to finish the war in a decisive knockout blow. In June, the Dutch fleet was spotted massing off the Thames Estuary. Charles didn’t act. Two days later the Dutch sailed into the river Medway and burnt or captured the pride of the British fleet, even towing away the flagship, the Royal Charles. While this was taking place, the king was playing parlour games with Barbara and other favourites. Mobs gathered in London, 57

Charles II’s love life

whole court was invited to a huge celebratory party, at which their first coupling was expected. The celebration lasted two weeks, climaxing in a mock marriage between Charles and Louise. The king allotted her a luxurious suite of chambers in Whitehall, showered jewels on her and allowed her to raid the public purses on an even greater scale than Barbara managed. Where Barbara had employed a fearsome temper to get her way, the softly spoken Louise employed tears, embraces and sympathy. Hers was the winning formula with the increasingly jaded king and in 1676 Barbara quit England for Paris, not returning permanently until 1682.

In thrall to his mistress

denouncing the monarchy, with “the Countess of Castlemaine bewailing, above all others, that she should be the first torn to pieces”. As the Dutch sailed from the Medway into the mouth of the Thames, London panicked. Many people fled, thinking the capital was sure to fall. But the Dutch held off, and the capital was saved. Charles could do nothing but seek peace on the best terms possible.

Out of touch with reality In the aftermath of all this, the king could not, of course, be blamed. The scurrilous and anonymous pamphlets that circulated in London blamed Barbara and even the Earl of Clarendon, who had been against the war from the beginning. A commission was set up to look into the royal finances, but it never sat. The Medway Raid provided a graphic illustration of Charles II becoming detached from the realities of policy while spending too much time on personal gratification. There was a pattern to Charles’s behaviour; he loved to escape into the feminine world of frivolity and lack of responsibility (for in the 17th century, women of high social standing were expected to exemplify the first and could never have the latter). Stories abounded of how he hated serious conversation. He enjoyed being with women, making love to them, socialising with them, being pampered by them. Yet he remained curiously aloof, never falling in love, his interest remaining, as pointed out by the contemporary politician and writer, George Savile, carnal enjoyment. Charles’s emotional need for women’s company never developed into the mature bonds that most men and women enjoy. He wanted pleasure, but he also needed female solace and flattery. 58

Barbara’s demise as effective maîtresse-entitre came in the wake of the 1670 secret treaty of Dover. This promised Charles huge French pay-offs to back Louis XIV’s war of conquest in the Netherlands while he agreed to turn Catholic. While this monumental deal was being concluded in Dover, Charles’s eye lit on a baby-faced lady-in-waiting in the French delegation. Typically, he deliberately prolonged negotiations on this hugely important pact just to see more of her. The young woman was Louise de Kéroualle, the daughter of an impecunious Breton aristocrat. With the Sun King’s connivance, Barbara’s enemies, led by the Earl of Arlington, plotted the replacement of Barbara by the young Breton. Arlington tutored her in the ‘dos and don’ts’ of keeping the king happy. It was impressed upon her that the big don’t was “don’t talk business to His Majesty”. It took a year before Louise was secure enough of his affections to allow him to bed her. A measure of how important the role of maîtresse-en-titre had become was that the

“The bishop of Salisbury, who knew him well, said: ‘The ruin of his reign… was occasioned chiefly by his delivering himself up to a mad range of pleasure’”

Don Jordan and Michael Walsh have written a number of history books together, including The King’s Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History (Little, Brown, 2012) DISCOVER MORE BOOK E The King’s Bed: Sex, Power and the

Court of Charles II by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh (Little, Brown, January 2015) BBC History Magazine

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In 1667, with the English naval fleet laid up in the Medway due to a lack of funds for a refit, the Dutch made a devastating raid (illustrated here), even seizing the flagship Royal Charles

Widely decried as a French spy, Louise certainly appears to have served French interests well. Under her influence, Charles continually resisted popular pressure to contain French expansionism and stood by while France seized more and more of the Netherlands. The most abject moment came when Charles offered not to call parliament again without Louis XIV’s agreement. Louise’s French biographer Henri Forneron wrote of her: “During 15 years she was holding Great Britain in her delicate little hand, and manipulated its king and statesmen as dexterously as she might have done her fan.” It is somehow fitting that in 1685, on the evening before the onset of his short and fatal illness, Charles enjoyed a soirée with three of his mistresses – Louise, Barbara and a more recent addition, Hortense Mancini. His contemporaries were not slow to pass verdict upon him. The bishop of Salisbury, who knew him well, said: “The ruin of his reign… was occasioned chiefly by his delivering himself up to a mad range of pleasure.” Sexual pleasure was indeed the problem. He was introduced to it before his 15th birthday, became addicted to it in exile, using it as a defence against a world in which his father had been executed and he himself robbed of his golden years. When Charles suddenly gained the throne, for which he was unprepared, he continued in the same way, ruling, as the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope put it, “when love was all an easie monarch’s care”. Charles was simply the king who never grew up.

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WWI eyewitness accounts

PART 8

“Our First World War” In part eight of his personal testimony series, Peter Hart takes us to January 1915, when hundreds of thousands of recruits were undergoing basic training. Peter will be tracing the experiences of 20 people who lived through the First World War – via interviews, letters and diary entries – as the conflict’s centenary progresses ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAMES ALBON

George Ashurst

Edmund Williams

George was born in Tontine in 1895, the son of a quarryman. While working as an engine cleaner, he had trained as a special reservist and arrived in France in late 1914.

Edmund was born on 10 January 1894 in Formby, to a fairly well-off family. He went to Merchant Taylors’ School in nearby Crosby, worked as a chemist for Sir Benjamin Johnson’s dyeing and cleaning works, then studied chemistry at technical college.

In January 1915, the bitterly cold weather penetrated deep, making every waking minute an agony. Trenches were often flooded which meant the men were up to their knees in freezing cold water. They soon began to suffer from ‘trench foot’, where their feet took on a spongy texture. Some even got frostbite and Private George Ashurst of the 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers was an early victim.

I got in my hole in the side of the trench – it had been raining. My ground sheet over me and my feet down there. After a while I woke up and thin ice was round both my ankles! I said, “Look here, I’m frozen up!” Just as a joke! I broke the ice and pulled my feet out – they didn’t feel so bad or ’owt. So I carried on. But a couple of days later, when they were out of the line, George realised that all was not well.

Oooh hell! My feet are that big! Both of them. Swollen! I can’t get up – can’t stand on my feet. We cut my shoes off with a knife. A lad had to carry me

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down the street to where we had the sick parade. Ashurst was packed off to hospital for treatment.

They put us in a room with three others with frozen feet. Our feet were uncovered in bed, sticking up at the foot of the bed. The doctor used to come round and just feel at your toes and feet. “How are you this morning?” “Not so bad, Sir!” All the time he had a needle – we didn’t know that for quite a while – and he was shoving it in your toes! You didn’t move – you didn’t feel it! The doctor knew when you jumped your feet were getting right! He knew life was there again. Then: “Oooh!” – terrible, horrible pain, just a touch of anything and you’d scream out. You used to go to the toilet on your hands and knees with your toes cocked up! A fellow would be coming back and when you got together, “Woof! Woof!” A bit of a dogfight – the nurses used to laugh at us! For a few it would be no laughing matter. Serious cases of frostbite or trench foot could lead to amputation.

Back in the UK, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were going through their basic training to get them ready for war. In September 1914, Edmund and his brother had both volunteered to join the 19th King’s Liverpool Regiment at St George’s Hall, Liverpool. The battalion began training, first at Sefton Park and then Knowsley Park Camp in Liverpool.

Our company sergeant major was very good; he was an old soldier – he’d been a tailor. He would ‘needle’ us because this was part of the discipline; you had to get used to standing to attention when you would like to open your mouth! There was nothing harsh about this – this was civilian discipline, not barrack discipline. We were a very mixed lot. Some of them were very rough, good sorts, but they were from the rougher parts of Liverpool. One claimed to be a deserter from the American navy! One evening after coming back drunk he held the hut at bay with a drawn bayonet in his hand having smashed the crockery up. My little brother

was one of two ordered by the sergeant to go and arrest him. They said: “We’ll go if you lead us, sergeant!” Like all new soldiers the brothers had to learn to drill. Endless hours were spent on the drill square, perfecting their moves.

When you recollect that people have to be taught to drill in unison, together at word of command, smartly – the number of hours put in at platoon drill, company drill and even battalion drill! This was hard slogging. The officers had to learn how to command us – some with a rather amusing lack of ‘word of command’. We had a first lieutenant with no ‘word of command’ and he was endeavouring to imitate a guardsman, but he had a squeaky voice! We didn’t know what to do – we were standing to attention, some of us sloped arms and other people didn’t! He couldn’t get a word out that we could understand. The company sergeant major was getting redder and redder in the face!

BBC History Magazine

JANUARY 2015 Thomas Louch

“We all think these new formations with (rather elderly) doubtful commanders… a great mistake”

Thomas was born the son of an archdeacon in Geraldton, Australia in 1894. He worked as a law clerk in Albany, Western Australia until war broke out. As soon as he could he joined the Australian Imperial Force (AIF).

GETTY IMAGES

Corporal Thomas Louch of the 11th (Western Australia) Battalion was engaged in practising ‘fire and movement’ style tactics in the sands of the Egyptian desert. Here the Australian Imperial Force was training ready to be sent to the western front – or so they thought.

We now began field training, based on the supposed lessons of the Boer War. Day after day we made frontal attacks on an imaginary enemy supposed to be occupying some bit of desert. From afar we approached in company column until we got within the supposed range of the enemy guns, when we broke down first into platoons and then into sections. When told that we were within rifle range, we did the old business of advancing in short rushes until about 100 yards from our objective. We then

fixed bayonets and lay down, firing lustily while reinforcements came from behind to thicken the attack. When there were no more reinforcements to come from behind, and the mystic moment arrived, someone carried away by the lust of battle would cry “Charge!” and all would, thereupon, dash forward making offensive noises until the enemy position was overrun. That accomplished we sorted ourselves out again into our proper sections, platoons and companies and then marched home. But before we left the scene of battle, numerous small boys would miraculously appear from nowhere to sell us: “Oranges, big ones, two for a half piastre!” At this stage the Australian troops had never heard of the shores of Gallipoli where they would be first ‘blooded’ in real warfare against the Turks.

Barber time for Australian troops training in Egypt in 1915 and ultimately bound for Gallipoli

Sir Douglas Haig In December 1914, Haig had been promoted to command the 1st Army of the expanding BEF. By January 1915, the BEF (British Expeditionary Force, destined for the western front) was expanding rapidly. The original two corps had swollen to a total of six corps, which were formed into the 1st and 2nd Armies. Yet the vast expansion brought other problems in its train. Who would lead the new armies, corps and divisions? There was a serious lack of officers with sufficient experience to take on high command. Of even more concern was the puzzle as to how the great masses of partially trained recruits could be transformed into warriors capable of facing the most dangerous opponent in the world – the German army. There were already disquieting rumours that the politicians were considering employing troops on ‘Easterner’ campaigns against the Turks. General Sir Douglas Haig had good reason to be concerned.

Lord Kitchener has recently published in the press that six armies will be formed each of about three corps! We all think these new formations with (rather elderly) doubtful commanders and untrained staff a great mistake. It was folly to send out ‘the New Army’ by divisions and armies. Much better to send out battalions, or even brigades, for incorporation in our existing divisions and corps. We all quite concurred, and thought that the new corps and new armies

(which are insufficiently trained) might readily become a danger! [Commander-in-chief of the BEF Sir John] French also read a letter from Kitchener in which the latter hinted that his New Army might be used better elsewhere than on the eastern frontier of France. A suggestion was made of co-operating with Italy and Greece. I said that we ought not to divide our military force, but concentrate on the decisive front which was on this frontier. With more guns and ammunition, and more troops, we are bound to break through. Many of the key themes of the First World War were already being explored. It would be a gargantuan conflict, involving millions of men at the front, and the mobilisation of whole populations behind the wheel of conflict. This would be a long struggle, with constantly evolving defence tactics to thwart every new attacking initiative. Peter Hart is an oral historian at the Imperial War Museum, and the author of several books about the First World War DISCOVER MORE BOOK E Douglas Haig: War Diaries

and Letters 1914–1918, eds Gary Sheffield & John Bourne (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005) WEBSITE E You can read previous

instalments of “Our First World War” at historyextra.com/ ourfirstworldwar TV AND RADIO E The BBC’s First World War

coverage is continuing – please see our TV and radio preview pages for more details

FEBRUARY ISSUE: “I found myself stumbling into shell holes and being lacerated by barbed wire.” BBC History Magazine

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John Guy at Clare College, University of Cambridge. “You couldn’t cross Henry VIII: there was his way, and the wrong way,” he argues. “It’s similar to what people have told me about large private-sector organisations run by tyrannical chief executives”

Photography by Ian Farrell

INTERVIEW / JOHN GUY

IAN FARRELL

“Henry VIII had a mindset that you might associate with Stalin or Mao” John Guy talks to Matt Elton about his new biography of the Tudor king, from the childhood experiences that shaped him to his relationships with Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell BBC History Magazine

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Books / Interview PROFILE JOHN GUY Born in Australia, Guy moved to Britain as a child and went on to study history at Clare College, Cambridge. After holding posts at institutions including the University of Bristol, St Andrews University and UC Berkeley, he returned to Clare College as a teaching fellow. His previous works include Tudor England (Oxford University Press, 1988) and Thomas More (Hodder, 2000).

IN CONTEXT

One of Europe’s most well-known monarchs – famous for his six wives – Henry VIII held the English throne from 1509. His efforts to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn led to the Church of England breaking away from the authority of the pope and the Catholic church in Rome, although debate continues about his motivations. Other key figures include Thomas Wolsey, a cardinal and eventually lord chancellor, and lawyer Thomas Cromwell. Henry lived extravagantly and suffered from increasing obesity and ill health, contributing to his death in 1547. His later reign is often characterised as being egotistical, paranoid and insecure.

What was Henry VIII’s childhood like? The big influences were clearly his mother and father. After the death of Henry VIII’s brother Arthur, Henry VII very much took the young prince under his wing and effectively made him his apprentice. By the time he was 15 he was pretty much shadowing his father in everything he did. Philip the Handsome, archduke of the Netherlands, was also very important. He visited Henry VII’s court in 1506, and he and the young prince hit it off on a personal basis. He was a fine sportsman, good with the girls – everything a prince should be. When I was writing this book I stumbled upon a reference from 20 years later in which Henry is still talking about Philip. This idea of the charismatic, athletic, gambling prince, who liked art and music, clearly made a mark. There are specific incidents that had an impact, too. The later years of Henry VII’s reign were really quite dark, with a lot of uncertainty and worries about security, and clearly this fed into Henry’s later character. There was much talk about the succession and lots of bargaining, but Henry was the one person who wasn’t mentioned. So he was alerted to dynastic conspiracy in a big way. That’s the great mystery of Henry: why did a ruler who was actually so secure so often feel psychologically insecure? The answer, I think, goes back to this period. What lessons did Henry learn from his father, either directly or indirectly? Firstly, that dynastic security meant having a male heir. Henry had barely become king

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when he married Catherine of Aragon. He was driven by this need for progeny and security. And, secondly, to be suspicious: I think the suspicions Henry had about people in court, that particularly manifest themselves later in his reign, were always there. On the subject of his wives, which had the biggest impact on Henry? It was undoubtedly Anne Boleyn. She was the love of his life, and he would have done anything for her in the early years of their relationship. And she, of course, played her cards very well too. A question that’s always asked is whether there would have been a break with Rome without Anne. I would always have said no, because Henry’s doctrine was very conservatively Catholic at that point. But there are moments that suggest otherwise. In 1511, when Pope Julius II wanted Henry to join the Holy League, he offered him the title of Most Christian King – then held by the king of France. Henry thought this was wonderful, and this is evidence of his lust for fame appearing as early as 1511. I think that this quest for fame underpins the whole of Henry’s approach in dealing with Rome, and has been completely overlooked. By 1525, there was no doubt that Henry was not the pope’s loyal son: he was making his own decisions without reference to Rome. But even before then, while Henry may have postured that he was the pope’s good son, there’s also evidence of him saying he could get the pope to do anything he wanted. So even before Anne Boleyn, he’d decided that he was going to go his own way, and he already had delusions of grandeur. When Wolsey couldn’t get Henry the divorce from Catherine of Aragon, he had to go. Henry looked for new advisers and these essentially came from the Boleyn stable. Two

“Henry VIII punished crimes of the mind. He wanted to look inside your head: he didn’t just want outward conformity”

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of these advisers came up with a dossier to show Henry, which essentially said that he should restore the proper regality of the kings of England from the bogus claims of popes, to run both church and state. But the dossier also included an extra element: that Henry could define the doctrine and beliefs of his church of England. Henry swallowed all of this hook, line and sinker. The advisers produced documentation – presented in a very slanted way – that there was a historical precedent for all of this, for the position of vicarius dei, or God’s vicar on earth. So Henry came to believe that he had to recover the regality that was his due, and restore things to how they ‘ought’ to be. It fitted perfectly with his psychology because it reignited his quest for fame. Henry really thought that he was Christ’s deputy on earth, and that was the danger: you’re looking at the mindset that you might associate with Stalin or Mao, and the imagemaking and propaganda that goes with that. Having gone to all the trouble to marry Anne, what were the factors behind his sudden change of heart? Well, first of all, Anne had not delivered the son that she had actually promised to be able to produce. Henry believed in providence, that God spoke through events, and the fact that she’d had a daughter followed by a couple of miscarriages was not a good sign. Anne was also a modern woman: she really didn’t belong in the 16th century. She had a tongue and she used it, and could be pretty abrasive. There’s no doubt, either, that there was a lot of flirting on her side of the household and that some of it got a bit out of hand. The Chinese whispers at the court of Henry VIII were absolutely extraordinary. So there was a moment when the cards were stacking up against Anne, and then she’s overheard shooting her mouth off to Henry Norris, a courtier. Word of some of the other things that she’d said around court hadn’t gone down too well with Thomas Cromwell, and this seems to be a moment that he could get rid of her. I don’t agree that Anne had to go simply because Cromwell wanted rid of her. It didn’t work like that: Henry had to decide. Suzannah Lipscomb rightly says that one of Henry’s difficulties was that the flirting and gossip was getting so out of hand that it looked as if he couldn’t keep order in his own household. He had to

BBC History Magazine

“Thomas Cromwell was not the progressive figure of reform of the novels of Hilary Mantel” John Guy discusses Henry VIII and the key figures involved in the king’s “quest for fame” with our books editor, Matt Elton

IAN FARRELL

act to show who was boss, and once Cromwell got his chance he produced this ‘evidence’ that Anne had slept with her brother. Clearly, she hadn’t. Anne knew exactly who she was and how to stay there. Yes, she shot her mouth off too often, but you did not commit adultery at the court of Henry VIII without everyone knowing about it. I think it must have been Cromwell who decided to not only go for an accusation of adultery but also of incest, because Henry was known to find that particularly repugnant. What did you make of Cromwell? Cromwell was there to do his job, but he was also driven by religion: a man with a mission. He was not, in my view, the secular-minded, progressive figure of reform and renewal that we see in the writing of my old teacher GR Elton or the novels of Hilary Mantel. Cromwell, along with Wolsey, was the most capable person that Henry had, although he didn’t realise it until after his death. Their relationships were different, though: Wolsey could just walk in to see Henry, but Cromwell had to essentially make appointments. Cromwell was basically just a useful man of business who helped to steer bills through parliament and did paperwork. He was more than a bookkeeper, but the ideas came from Edward Foxe and Thomas Cranmer.

BBC History Magazine

Cromwell was not second minister in full until after the fall of Anne Boleyn; in many ways, she held that role. But once she was dead, Henry gave Cromwell much more power and he could really start to do things. He met opposition, but look at what he achieved: putting the Bible in the hands of the people, and major steps in defining the doctrine of a more reformed English church. What were Henry’s strengths? He was a big man in every sense: he bestrode the realm like a colossus. He was charismatic, and a great orator. He promoted men of low birth, such as Cromwell and Wolsey. He could be loving to wives and children, but they had to obey him. He was a patron of the arts, but used art as a political weapon rather than being a genuine connoisseur. He also had terrible weaknesses. He had a ferocious desire for revenge, and vindictively pursued people whom he decided had betrayed him – most notably loyal servants and relatives. He was utterly egocentric, and eventually verged on megalomania. He really did believe that he was a ruler with the status of an Old Testament patriarch. Importantly, Henry also punished crimes of the mind. He wanted to look inside your head. he didn’t just want outward conformity, certainly from key people. That’s the big

difference between him and Elizabeth I: she didn’t want to know what people were thinking; she thought it was dangerous and caused too much trouble. Henry did believe that he was a man of conscience, but this ‘conscience’ of his was infinitely elastic and self-serving. Whatever was expedient, he automatically considered to be just. Is it fair to say that Henry was a man of pragmatism rather than strong belief? He did have quite deeply held beliefs, and a genuine desire to change Christendom for the better. But you couldn’t cross him. For Henry, there was his way, and the wrong way. It’s similar to what people have told me about large private-sector organisations run by tyrannical chief executives: he didn’t have to tell you what you should be doing, you knew – or at least thought you knew – what he wanted, and did it before he even asked. That encapsulates the claustrophobia of Henry’s court. He could be a nasty piece of work. Henry VIII: The Quest for Fame by John Guy (Penguin, 160 pages, £10.99) For more on Hilary Mantel’s thoughts on Thomas Cromwell, see our feature starting on page 47

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New history titles, reviewed by experts in their field

REVIEWS more detail, as with the Falklands War, he tends towards the ‘one fact a sentence, every sentence a fact’ school of writing. There are plenty of colourful vignettes to enliven the picture: Oliver Cromwell harangues the Burford mutineers accompanied by a reprieved ringleader “howling and weeping like a crocodile”; a Kentish chapel under Mary I proved difficult to return to Catholicism because it has been used for storing pigs’ skins and “no man could abide in the Chappell for stinck thereof”. Nor does Tombs hold back from his own occasional declaration of partiality. Noting the celebrated wit of prime ministers Disraeli and Churchill, he wonders why it should be that “the only memorable, let along amusing, remarks made by prime ministers are all from Tories”; Lloyd George and Tony Blair might both feel legitimately aggrieved. The publishers claim this as the first full-length, single-volume history of England for decades (although Simon Jenkins came out with one four years ago). The title of the book is, perhaps, misleading: this is a history of England with occasional brief stops for reflection, rather than the in-depth considChurchill meets a British soldier during the Second World War. Tombs “is good at putting eration of the English as a people and England’s troubles into the context of much worse situations elsewhere,” says Seán Lang their relationship with their history that I assumed it would be. These reflective sections, including a wellwritten survey of the Whig school of history, are probably the book’s most satisfying. It’s a shame that MAGAZINE SEÁN LANG on a lengthy history of England that bristles with CHOICE they could not be longer. great stories – and raises questions about modern identities Tombs compares England to an old house: added to and knocked points out that Britain is unique in the around over the years, but still standing The English and Their History world in allowing the government of and still eminently habitable. In effect, by Robert Tombs the day to alter the constitution at its he has written a sort of builder’s survey, Allen Lane, 1,012 pages, £35 convenience – an in-depth consideroutlining how it came to be in its presCheer up, White ation of the English and their history is ent shape and pointing out which walls Van Man. St George’s certainly timely. Tombs, a specialist in are crumbling and which are sound. cross may be out of the history of France, has certainly been His conclusion is that the cowboys were favour with tweeting reading up on his English history: he not the previous builders but the previIslington MPs but covers England’s story from Neolithic Robert Tombs, times to the Scottish referendum and is professor at St John’s up to speed on topics well outside his “Tombs’s style is that College, Cambridge, specialism, although the level of detail, of a chronicler, with rather likes England perhaps inevitably, increases in the later and has written a hefty tome to prove it. chapters. His style is more that of a plenty of vignettes to In these days of referenda and chronicler than of a narrative historian: enliven the picture” constitutional rethinking – Tombs except for moments when he goes into

REX

National epic

BBC History Magazine

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Books / Reviews COMING SOON… “Next issue, our experts will be reviewing new books on topics such as the last days of the Second World War and the life of Lawrence of Arabia. Plus, I’ll be heading to Hampton Court to talk to Anita Anand about Sophia, her look at an influential but little-known suffragette.” Matt Elton, books editor

“Tombs compares England to an old house: added to and knocked around, but still standing” Englishness in the 18th century, it never really comes up with a satisfying definition of Englishness, perhaps because it tells its tale largely divorced from the rest of England’s British context. The Scottish, Welsh and Irish characters we encounter are the familiar ones – James VI and I, Owain Glyndwr, and so on – yet is it possible to define Englishness without seeing how it developed alongside and in response to Welshness, Irishness and Scottishness? Tombs points out how the atrocity tales reaching England and Scotland during the Irish rebellion in 1641 “permanently inflamed an existing stereotype of Irish savagery”, but how did that in turn affect the English view of themselves? Maybe, in this age of devolved parliaments and mixed populations, we can no longer separate the histories of our different kingdoms as we used to. Seán Lang is senior lecturer in history at Anglia Ruskin University. Listen to his special BBC History Magazine podcast charting the complete history of Britain at historyextra.com/britainpodcast

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historyextra.com /podcasts

A history of hysteria DAVID ANDRESS has mixed feelings about a study of responses

to the threat of mass rebellion following the French Revolution Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty, 1789 1848 by Adam Zamoyski William Collins, 592 pages, £30

This substantial work offers a fast-paced, engaging history of the frequently ludicrous lengths to which the fear of revolution carried the political elite of Europe in the 60 years after 1789. One of the author’s concerns is to emphasise how much this fear was irrational, stoked by conspiracy theories about anti-religious plots and secret societies that gained currency long before the Bastille was stormed. Zamoyski’s account sometimes hovers between voicing the fears of its key subjects – he often describes popular uprisings as a ‘mob’ – and criticising in turn the exaggerations of their responses. This is a valid point, but in making it repeatedly, Zamoyski also downplays the reality of what they had to fear. To describe the events of 14 July 1789 as “an alarming outbreak of rioting, mutiny and mob rule” that only gained significance in imaginative retellings is slightly odd. Without the insurrection that culminated on that day, the nascent French National Assembly would almost certainly have been choked out of existence within days by the arch-conservative ministry whose appointment, and its

A contemporary depiction of the 1848 Vienna uprisings. Zamoyski explores how “the fear of revolution” spread

implications, triggered the uprising. In his eagerness to depict the hysterical nature of reactionary thinking, Zamoyski neglects to point out that the French Revolution had, within a year, stripped the aristocracy of its panoply of social and political privileges; set off down the road to abolishing a main source of their income in ‘feudal’ rights; and decreed that nobility no longer existed as a legal category, prohibiting the use of titles and outer signs of noble distinction. All this while erecting a constitution – albeit short-lived – on a franchise of millions of tax-payers and tens of thousands of new, elected public officials. The crowned heads of Europe and the nobilities that made up their elites had many very good reasons to quail in fear at the spectre of revolution. After Napoleon had, in the name of that revolution, shredded the map of Europe for more than a decade, the violently pre-emptive response of the Great Powers to further threats appeared from their perspective entirely justified, even if still sustained in propaganda by legends of the Illuminati, the freemasons, and of course the Jews. In his preface, Zamoyski invites us to contemplate the role of government in manipulating fear of outsiders down to the present day, and implicitly to read this earlier era as a reflection of the falsity of such fears. Yet of course, not only did this period open with real, staggeringly significant, revolution, but it closed with the Europe-wide uprisings of 1848 which, had they succeeded, would have toppled crowned heads in the name of nationalism, democratic republicanism, and even socialism. Readers may therefore ask whether the real lesson is not that of distrusting hysterical propaganda, but the observation that, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. David Andress is professor of modern history at the University of Portsmouth

BBC History Magazine

AKG

ous surveyors, who have consistently overstated the country’s postwar decline and viewed its history through relentlessly gloomy spectacles. Tombs is particularly good at putting England’s troubles into the context of much worse situations elsewhere: the civil wars, though traumatic, were as nothing compared with the Thirty Years’ War; First World War Tommies remained a lot more optimistic of victory than the Germans and French; and if Britain could not have won the Second World War without its allies, its allies were just as dependent for victory on Britain. This inevitable conflation of ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ highlights the book’s biggest shortcoming: despite a chapter on

LISTEN TO ADAM ZAMOYSKI

Provisional Government troops in Dublin experience recoil from an artillery gun fired by other government forces as they fight opponents of the Anglo-Irish treaty during the Irish Civil War, June 1922. RF Foster’s account of the period is “enlivened by sparkling prose”

A generation of radicals DIARMAID FERRITER enjoys a gripping analysis of the “students, actors, writers

and civil servants” who powered the Irish revolution Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890 1923 by RF Foster Allen Lane, 496 pages, £20

This is a powerful, absorbing account of the backgrounds and cultural and political evolutions of the Irish revolutionary generation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a generation of people who propelled the Irish war of independence against British rule from 1916 to 1921, before turning on each other in the civil war of 1922–23. The book draws on decades of engagement with cultural history to bring an original, lively and learned analysis to a fascinating generation through the dissection of their private and public meanderings. Judicious and empathetic, with no attempt to hide his admiration for their idealism, RF Foster does not fall into the trap of assessing them acerbically through the lens of the present but allows their words to breathe. His analysis, enlivened by sparkling prose, focuses on loving, writing, fighting and remembering. This is not a military or political history of the Irish revolution, and is better for it.

BBC History Magazine

What concerns Foster are the mindsets and backgrounds of that generation and “the preceding sea change in Irish opinion” before the 1916 Easter Rising, after which so much was transformed. Foster characterises the worlds of students, actors, writers and civil servants, “often from comfortable backgrounds and often spending part of their lives working in Britain”, including those who rejected not just an Anglicised identity, but “the values and attitudes of their parents”. He locates their zealousness in its broader European context; part of that “generation of 1914” who were almost messianic in their rejection of the established order. As Piaras Béaslaí, stalwart of the Gaelic League (established to promote the Irish language in 1893) and the IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood, the small organisation that orchestrated the 1916 rising), recorded in his diary, aged 23: “I will assert myself! I will make my presence felt... I shall wake up the Gael”. Tracing the evolution of such sentiment in the like-minded leads Foster to elaborate on those largely middle-

“Foster does not attempt to hide his admiration for the idealism of his subjects”

class, educated Irish radicals and their preoccupations (much of which would be forgotten after the revolution) with secularism, socialism, suffragism, vegetarianism, feminism, journalism and, revealingly, sex – about which they were not as puritanical as is often presumed. Some, during the war of independence, found roles as active combatants that they had been craving since youth. But splits over the AngloIrish Treaty compromise with Britain in December 1921 and the civil war that followed brought to an end most of the revolutionary dreams. The difficult aftermath was underlined by IRA veteran Ernie O’Malley: “How does one reconstruct a spiritual state of mind?” Freedom had different meanings, but one of Foster’s findings is that many enjoyed a form of it in their separate spheres of influence despite the absence of social revolution. Crucially, this is not a book built on reductive hindsight; instead it gives us a deep and textured awareness of that “enclosed, self-referencing, hectic world” inhabited by Irish revolutionary thinkers. Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin and author of Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s (Profile Books, 2012)

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Books / Reviews The battle of Crécy in the Hundred Years’ War. The event has a lot in common with conflicts today, in that “we still inhabit a world in which the poor bear both the economic and physical costs of war”

Class war? NICK VINCENT enjoys a detailed account of a medieval conflict

that has surprisingly strong parallels with modern warfare

Yale University Press, 360 pages, £25

Those who inhabit the toxic shadow of modern warfare might spare a thought for the men and women of the 14th and 15th centuries, raised amid the Hundred Years’ War. Many of the effects of that struggle will be all too familiar: deliberate destruction of civilian property, depopulation, refugee crisis, pestilence, the economics of panic, and the crippling of bodies and minds. Other effects, although more subtle, were no less pernicious. Forced to take sides, for England or France, popes and clergy compromised their moral and intellectual integrity. In the process, trust in the intelligentsia plummeted. All sense of ‘progress’ evaporated. Victories supposedly conferred by God were won

by such ungodly means that even the existence of the almighty was called into question. From the childlike Henry VI, via the paranoid Richard II, to the undoubtedly mad French king Charles VI (whose insanity first declared itself on a hot day in 1392 when, starved of sleep, he murdered a page-boy and three other servants), the record of royal leadership was atrocious on both sides. Hardly surprising, then, that this was an age of peasant rebellions and the killing of kings. Meanwhile, so frequent were breaches of trust and truce that peace-making and diplomacy were themselves perverted into instruments of war. From this sprang an undying rivalry between England and France that determined the geopolitics of the next four centuries. As the author reminds us, as late as 1962 the French leader de Gaulle could proclaim that England, not Germany, was the hereditary enemy of France. Green writes with sensitivity, intelligence and a fine eye for detail. He passes rapidly over the events of the war

The modern age KEITH LOWE on an ambitious book that argues that the birth

of today’s world can be traced back to a single year: 1946 1946: The Making of the Modern World by Victor Sebestyen Macmillan, 464 pages, £25

The Second World War looms so large in 20th-century history, and our shelves are so laden with books about that time, that the period of history that came next sometimes struggles to get a look-in. Recently,

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however, things have begun to change, and veteran newspaper reporter Victor Sebestyen is the latest to join this trend. His excellent book focuses on 1946, which he argues was the year in which our modern world was formed. It was when decolonisation kicked in; India’s racial tensions sparked chaos; American influence in the Middle East began to eclipse British influence; and the vastly destructive civil wars in Greece and China reached turning points. Sebestyen describes all of these subjects and more, across 16 different countries.

(elsewhere often recounted as a history of boys with medieval toys), before settling upon a series of themes: the worlds of thought and action; peasants; women and prisoners; and national stereotypes. As for the details, not everybody suffered equally, nor paid an equal price. Amid the cruel ironies of a war from whose tax liabilities the rich were largely immune, we read of the innkeeper who claimed nobility on the basis – determined by a jury of two clerks, eleven noblemen and eight commoners – that to be noble was “to live from one’s revenues without doing manual labour such as

It is a hugely ambitious book, and Sebestyen must be commended for the way in which he synthesises vast amounts of material into a highly readable package. Most of the important stories of the era are included, and his research has turned up anecdotes and quotes that I have not seen elsewhere. He is perhaps at his best when dissecting the personalities of world statesmen, whose hypocrisy, aggression, pragmatism and sometimes superb vision helped shape the time. As is inevitable with a project of such ambition, however, there is a price to be paid for concision and clarity. This is a book about world events, and yet large areas of the world are barely mentioned. Predictably, Africa, Australasia and South America don’t figure much – but neither do Indonesia or Korea. The author admits

BBC History Magazine

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The Hundred Years War: A People’s History by David Green

WANT MORE ? For reviews of hundreds of recent history books, go to our online archive historyextra.com/books

The unrepentant Nazi ROGER MOORHOUSE rates a look at what Adolf Eichmann’s

decade-long exile in Argentina tells us about his character Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer by Bettina Stangneth Bodley Head, 608 pages, £25.00

ploughing, reaping, digging or other peasant work”. On such a basis, there are very few in Europe today who could fail to consider themselves noble. How sad, then, that we still inhabit a world in which the poor bear both the economic and physical costs of war. The superpowers of the 14th and 15th centuries shaped up against one another using the tax revenues and sweated labour of those who, in wartime, endured the bulk of suffering. Plus ça change!

GETTY/SUPERSTOCK

Nick Vincent is professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia

that the main focus is Europe, but there is no real mention of Italy or Austria. A tendency to flit between countries also gives the book an episodic feel. This is a book worth sticking with, however, because an over-arching theme begins to emerge – just as it did in 1946. As the year went on, it became clear that few of the countries described could escape living in the shadow of either the US or the USSR. The book’s main thrust therefore describes the gradual, painful establishment of the Cold War. This, Sebestyen shows us, was the big story of 1946, and one that would dominate world politics for the rest of the 20th century. Keith Lowe is the author of Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (Viking, 2012)

BBC History Magazine

Klement but hardly hid away. Instead, he enjoyed talking about ‘the old days’ within a network of German émigrés, even signing photos of himself “SS-Obersturmbannführer (retired)”. Eichmann in Argentina is revealed as a passionate, convinced and unrepentant Nazi, proud of the deportation actions that he had masterminded, shipping ever more Jews to the waiting deaths camps. He had no regrets. As he boasted to his circle of sympathisers: “I baulk inwardly at saying that we did anything wrong.” Stangneth’s rigorous, thoughtfully presented work perhaps closes the book on Eichmann. There are caveats: it is rather overlong and not always an easy read, betraying not only its author’s Teutonic thoroughness but also her background in philosophy. Indeed, it occasionally seems as if the book has attempted to inoculate itself against the prospect of actually being read. Nonetheless, those who persevere will be rewarded with fresh insight into the least understood chapter in the life of one of the 20th century’s most notorious men. Stangneth shows, once and for all, that Eichmann was many things – a killer, a braggart, a virulent Nazi – but he can never again be described as ‘banal’.

Adolf Eichmann has provoked controversy since he stood in the dock in 1961: not just for his role in the Nazi Holocaust, but also for the explanations that commentators have given for his actions. Most famously, the political theorist Hannah Arendt used the phrase “banality of evil” to describe Eichmann at his trial, suggesting a bloodless, amoral, deskbound killer who consigned millions to their deaths with a stroke of his pen. It was an image that Eichmann also sought to propagate, describing himself with masterly self-exculpation as “a small cog in Hitler’s extermination machine”. This view – of a mere bureaucrat – is one that has been progressively dented and revised since Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, but Bettina Stangneth’s work is perhaps the final nail in its coffin. Stangneth focuses on the decade of Eichmann’s self-imposed exile in Roger Moorhouse is the author Argentina until his capture by Mossad of The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s agents in 1960. Using Eichmann’s own Pact with Stalin, 1939–1941 notes from that period, she shows her (Bodley Head, 2014) subject to be a very different creature to the cowed, petty bureaucrat presented by Arendt. Her Eichmann is a show-off, a careerist – a man who seemed to have Eichmann photographed in Argentina, c1955. revelled in his own notoriety as one of Despite taking the name Nazi Germany’s senior functionaries. Ricardo Klement, says Roger Moorhouse, he Arriving in Argentina after five years “hardly hid away” living under aliases in postwar Germany, Eichmann took the name of Ricardo

“This book offers fresh insight into the life of one of the 20th century’s most notorious men” 71

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Books / Paperbacks

PAPERBACKS Merchant Adventurers: The Voyage of Discovery that Transformed Tudor England by James Evans Phoenix, 352 pages, £9.99

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In this sprightly book, James Evans describes a 16th-century voyage in which three vessels seeking a northwesterly route to the Far East and its riches ended up stranded north of Russia – only one of them returning safely to London. It may seem an eccentric place to discern the roots of the British empire and, more grandly still, the origins of modern attitudes to the world, yet that is precisely what the author does. Evans attends to a relatively neglected Tudor voyage commanded by Sir Hugh

BBC History Magazine

Willoughby, masterminded by Sebastian Cabot and steered by Richard Chancellor in 1553, placing it in the longer history of English exploration as a major turning point. The author has a tendency to over-elaborate on descriptive details whose historical truth cannot be known, but his argument is at least partially convincing. The weakness is the claim that, by blending mathematical precision, a rigorously factual approach to the world and a strong grasp of practical knowledge, Chancellor was the pioneer of ‘modern’ ways of understanding the world. Although he is indeed shown to hold such views, he was by no means alone. Furthermore, Evans underplays the extent to which Chancellor’s medieval forebears could exhibit the same attitudes towards the world. The book’s strength is in showing the extent to which the institutional structure of the

A 14th-century depiction of Dominican friar Albertus Magnus. Miri Rubin’s book explores “everyday life, religion and politics” in the medieval world

joint stock company that emerged from the ill-fated voyage as the Muscovy Company was a model that was replicated to form successful ventures in British trade and imperial outreach for the next two centuries. Even if his claims are somewhat overstated, Evans makes a powerful case for the voyage’s historical importance in a highly readable narrative. Robert J Mayhew is professor of historical geography at the University of Bristol

A Short History of the First World War by Gary Sheffield Oneworld, 256 pages, £8.99

Amid the battalions of recent books on the First World War, this gem should not be overlooked. Military historian Gary Sheffield ranges far beyond his field to bring us everything that we ought to know about the cataclysmic conflict but may have been afraid to ask. From the causes of the war – Sheffield rightly rejects current revisionist ‘we were all guilty’ arguments and pins the main blame squarely on Germany and Austria – to the technical innovations and lasting social changes wrought by the war, this book has it all. Sheffield carefully shows why the war took on the monstrous shape that it did, with a lengthy stalemate along the western front’s wire walls, and patiently explains why plans to stop the slaughter came to nothing until the Central Powers were defeated on the battlefield. Although Sheffield has strong and sometimes controversial

opinions – he is perhaps more indulgent towards the British commander Field Marshal Haig than his much maligned hero actually deserves – they are soundly based on evidence. I can think of no better book to place in the hands of students setting out to study the war. Nigel Jones is the author of Peace and War: Britain in 1914 (Head of Zeus, 2014)

The Middle Ages: A Very Short Introduction by Miri Rubin OUP, 160 pages, £7.99

How to cover 1,000 years in just 160 pages? Rubin breaks it into chapters on everyday life, religion, politics and economy. Her survey of an expanding, integrated and sophisticated Europe dominated by the church is therefore largely a cultural, social and intellectual one. Thus we have four pages on marriage but only four lines on warfare (medieval society was nothing if not organised for war) with chivalry seen primarily as a cultural phenomenon, while kingship is viewed only through its sacred prism. But a brief introduction entails ruthless culling. It is remarkable that Rubin can condense her wide erudition into a text that encompasses everything from the fall of the Roman empire to the social hierarchy of beer-drinking and the introduction of grain-drying techniques to the Hebrides. A marvel of concision and a welcome addition to a terrific series. Sean McGlynn is the author of By Sword and Fire (Orion, 2008)

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Books / Fiction THREE MORE TALES OF VICTORIAN SCANDAL Arthur and George Julian Barnes (2005)

FICTION Political bodies NICK RENNISON praises a novel featuring a pair of Victorian

cross-dressers – and the scandal that their actions provoked The Petticoat Men by Barbara Ewing Head of Zeus, 400 pages, £18.99

In 1870, the case of two young men named Boulton and Park was the talk of London. They were arrested in the Strand Theatre while dressed as women and calling themselves Stella and Fanny. When they were brought to trial, an entire subculture of gay cross-dressers was revealed to the prurient gaze of the Victorian public. Although Boulton and Park were eventually cleared of committing any offence, their lives were ruined. Barbara Ewing’s enormously readable novel reconstructs this 19th-century cause célèbre in vivid detail. It is seen largely through the eyes of Mattie, a young woman whose mother runs the lodging house in which the ‘petticoat men’ rent a room. Mattie has a soft spot for Freddie Park, who was kind to her during a crisis, and is horrified by his treatment at the hands of the law. Attempts to lend him and his friend moral support end in trouble. Malicious

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graffiti-writers daub crude slogans on the walls of the lodging-house. Regular guests find other, less publicised places to stay. The family faces financial disaster. Meanwhile Mattie’s clever brother Billy, a clerk in parliament, has become aware of the wider ramifications of the affair. One of the men implicated is Lord Arthur Clinton, former MP and godson to the prime minister, William Gladstone. Others in high positions fear that they will be dragged into the public eye. The establishment of the day closes ranks and Boulton and Park become pawns in a much larger game. As Mattie and Billy discover when they visit him in his West Country exile, even Lord Arthur will, if necessary, be sacrificed to protect the great and not-so good. This is a rich, warm-hearted novel which, like Mattie and her family, champions ordinary human decency against the prejudice and corruption of the powerful. Ewing has taken the real events that made Boulton and Park briefly notorious in Victorian England and fashioned from them a moving and compelling narrative. Nick Rennison is the author of Carver’s Quest (Corvus, 2013)

The Sealed Letter Emma Donoghue (2008) In 1860s London, women’s rights campaigner Emily Faithfull becomes reluctantly involved in the affairs and messy divorce of one-time friend Helen Codrington. When Helen’s husband takes his erring wife to the courts, Emily is obliged to testify and secrets begin to emerge. Based on a real-life case of a well-known English admiral and his wife, this is a neatly plotted tale of duplicity and hypocrisy in the upper echelons of Victorian society.

McNaughten Siân Busby (2009) Daniel McNaughten caused a sensation in 1843 when he assassinated Downing Street private secretary Edward Drummond, possibly mistaking him for PM Robert Peel. His name lives on in the so-called McNaughten Rules, the legal test for criminal insanity. Siân Busby deftly mixes social history with elements of a thriller in her story of a man whose madness mirrored the doubts and instabilities of early Victorian Britain.

BBC History Magazine

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Ernest Boulton (left) and Frederick Park – also known as Stella and Fanny – c1870. Barbara Ewing’s novel “reconstructs their cause célèbre in vivid detail”

Set in the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras, this is a clever and sophisticated fictional study of two very different men. George Edalji was an Anglo-Indian solicitor from the Midlands who became the victim of a notorious miscarriage of justice when he was sentenced to imprisonment for maiming animals and writing poisonpen letters; Arthur Conan Doyle, famous worldwide as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, campaigned tirelessly for a pardon for Edalji.

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Light Upon the Waters

WINNER OF The Mountbatten Maritime Media Award for best literary contribution - 2014

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To order your copy of Light Upon the Waters, the definitive history of Trinity House, please telephone 020 7481 6924 or visit:

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TRINITY HOUSE is the UK’s largest fully endowed maritime charity. It provides major grants to maritime organisations engaged in welfare provision, education and training, and the promotion of safety at sea, and spends over £4 million each year on its charitable objects.

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HIS MAGNIFICENT AND WORTHY BOOK has been published to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the granting of a charter by Henry VIII to the Corporation of Trinity House in 1514. This handsome volume delivers a fine illustrated history of Trinity House and calls upon the strengths of two experts in their respective fields whose writings are supported by a meticulously researched selection of over 350 illustrations, many not seen before – laid out over 320 pages.

Jonathan Wright previews the pick of upcoming programmes

TV&RADIO

Melvyn Bragg considers the Magna Carta’s global impact, on Radio 4

Law of the lands Magna Carta RADIO Radio 4, scheduled for Monday 5 January

Kicking off a Taking Liberties season to mark the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, Melvyn Bragg investigates the history of our most famous legal document – agreed between King John and his barons in a field at Runnymede – which set out limits to the power of the monarchy. The first of four weekday programmes considers the background to events in 1215. Subsequent shows tackle the charter’s negotiation, its influence on British institutions and its huge resonance beyond these shores.

A re-enactor prepares to go into battle in the British countryside

Dressed to kill…

Salute to a warrior Filmmaker John Hayes Fisher tells us about the day Winston Churchill was laid to rest Churchill: A Nation’s Farewell TV BBC One, scheduled for late January

I

n the early hours of 24 January 1965, at the age of 90 and nine days after suffering a severe stroke, Winston Churchill died at his London home. It was the cue for Operation Hope Not to swing into action. The man who became prime minister during the darkest days of the Second World War was to be granted a full state funeral just six days later, on Saturday 30 January. “[It] shows just how far preparations had gone,” says John Hayes Fisher, director and producer of a documentary about the day. “The only thing that would have stopped it was dense fog.” A million mourners turned out on the streets of the capital to witness the event, and a further 350 million around the world watched it on TV. As the coffin passed along the Thames, dockers lowered their crane jibs in salute. The funeral service itself, which unusually was attended by the Queen (monarchs traditionally don’t frequent the funerals of ‘commoners’), was held at St Paul’s. “The reason they chose St Paul’s was because that’s where the Duke

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CHOICE

of Wellington and Admiral Nelson, who were seen as Britain’s great heroes, had their state funerals,” says Fisher. “Churchill was the only commoner in the whole of the 20th century to be granted a state funeral.” In itself, the extraordinary theatre of the day would be enough to justify this documentary. However, the programme, presented by Jeremy Paxman, addresses deeper questions too. These derive in part from the idea of the funeral being “on the hinge point of a new era” as the Britain into which Churchill was born began in earnest to pass into memory. “One of the things that Jeremy asks is whether Churchill’s Britain is a kind of hindrance to us today,” says Fisher. “Should we always be at the top table?” But whatever your take on these questions, Churchill’s status as a great war leader is as far beyond debate as any historical question gets. “Of course he had his faults, but he was the war leader who was there in that vital period of May 1940 and took the country through the Second World War to victory,” says Fisher. “In the simplest form, that’s what he will be remembered for in the years and the centuries to come.”

Weekend Warriors TV Yesterday,

UKTV/BBC/PA IMAGES

scheduled for Wednesday 7 January

Every weekend around Britain enthusiasts dress up as Roman legionaries, cavaliers, roundheads, Vikings and Second World War soldiers. It’s all in aid of re-enacting some of history’s most famous battles, encounters recreated on fields and village greens around the country. Hosted by Johnny Vaughan and with each episode focusing on a different era, here’s a series that celebrates re-enactors’ efforts. Along the way, Vaughan explores how re-enactors go to huge lengths to ensure authenticity, conducting research with the aid of books, letters and the reminiscences of veterans.

BBC History Magazine

Extraordinary theatre: Winston Churchill’s funeral cortège wends its way along the streets of London

“A million mourners turned out on the streets of the capital to witness the event”

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TV & Radio

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BBC Four travels into the mountains of central Asia on the trail of the Appaloosa

True Appaloosa TV BBC Four, scheduled for January

I

n 2009, Conor Woodman fronted a series called Around the World in 80 Trades. It was a travelogue in which he funded a global journey by buying and selling “camels, coffee and surfboards, and at one point horses in Kyrgyzstan”. One of those who watched the show was Scott Engstrom in New Zealand. When she saw one of the horses Woodman sold, Engstrom was immediately excited because she thought it was an Appaloosa, known for its distinctive spotted coat pattern. The breed was long thought to have been distinctively North American, and – like all horses –

A dark tale Mein Kampf: Publish or Burn? RADIO Radio 4, scheduled for January

At the end of 2015, the copyright on Mein Kampf expires. This was Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, a text Hitler first began writing when imprisoned for his part in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923. But if the story of the book’s genesis is broadly familiar to many, what’s far less well known is the part it played in Hitler’s own personal story. By the time he became chancellor, Mein Kampf had sold in excess of 200,000 copies, making its author a millionaire, a fortune crucial in his rise to power. Even after his death, Mein Kampf has continued to sell steadily. As Chris Bowlby discovers in a documentary devoted to this notorious text’s

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introduced to the USA by European settlers. But Appaloosa breeder Engstrom suspected the breed originated in Asia. If she’s right, we may have to rethink notions about migration patterns to the New World, to consider the possibility that, centuries ago, people might have crossed into the north-west of the continent from Asia atop Appaloosas. One piece of evidence for this idea lies in explorers Lewis and Clark’s epic journey across the Rockies in the early 19th century. The large numbers of spotted horses that accompanied them in their journey is inconsistent with all those animals hailing from Europe. Could Engstrom’s ideas be correct? True Appaloosa charts Woodman and Engstrom’s journey to Kyrgyzstan in search of Asian Appaloosas.

post-Nazi-era afterlife, the authorities have collected the royalties and tried to distribute them to charities. Their right to do this has been challenged by members of Hitler’s extended family, who have tried to claim a share of the cash. The show – produced by John Murphy, whose grandfather first translated the text into English back in the 1930s – also considers the history of Mein Kampf in Britain. Several signed copies, it turns out, sit on bookshelves around the country. Chris Bowlby will be discussing Mein Kampf on our podcast: historyextra.com/podcasts

Mein Kampf made Adolf Hitler a millionaire

Children freed from Auschwitz by Soviet troops in 1945

Tying in with Holocaust Memorial Day on Tuesday 27 January, the BBC will mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of AuschwitzBirkenau with several new programmes. The Eichmann Show (BBC Two), starring Martin Freeman and Anthony LaPaglia, is a featurelength drama about the televising of the Holocaust co-architect’s trial in 1961. In Touched by Auschwitz (BBC Two), filmmaker Laurence Rees explores the legacy of the death camp by following the lives of six survivors. (You can read Laurence’s feature on the Holocaust on page 34.) January will also bring BBC Two’s much-anticipated Wolf Hall, an adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novel and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. A starry cast includes Damian Lewis (Henry VIII), Claire Foy (Anne Boleyn) and, at the centre of the story as Thomas Cromwell, Mark Rylance. (Hilary and Diarmaid MacCulloch discuss Thomas Cromwell on page 47.) Time Scanners (Channel 5, January) sees Dallas Campbell looking on as experts create 3D digital models of such locations as the Roman Colosseum, Machu Picchu and Petra. On satellite, highlights include Freedom Summer (PBS America, Monday 19 January), which looks back at events in the summer of 1964, when student volunteers joined local activists trying to ensure AfricanAmericans were enrolled to vote in Mississippi, the most segregated state in the USA.

BBC History Magazine

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Jenny Uglow

Dan Jones

EVENTS BBC History Magazine’s

BBC History Magazine’s

Magna Carta Day

Waterloo Day

Saturday 21 March 2015, 10am–5.30pm

Sunday 22 March 2015, 10am–5.30pm

Venue: M Shed, Princes Wharf, Bristol BS1 4RN

Venue: M Shed, Princes Wharf, Bristol BS1 4RN

With David Carpenter, Dan Jones, Nicholas Vincent and Louise Wilkinson

With Gordon Corrigan, Alan Forrest, Andrew Lambert, Gary Sheffield and Jenny Uglow

Listen to lectures from four eminent speakers, join in an afternoon debate where the historians will take questions from the floor, and enjoy a buffet lunch at the venue, plus morning and afternoon teas and coffees “England in the Age of Magna Carta” Dan Jones is a journalist

“Magna Carta: The Document” David Carpenter

and a bestselling historian. He is the author of several books about medieval England, including The Plantagenets and The Hollow Crown. His latest book, Magna Carta: The Making and Legacy of The Great Charter, was published in December.

is a professor emeritus of medieval history at King’s College London and an honorary professor at University College London.

“Women in the Age of Magna Carta” Louise Wilkinson is professor of medieval history at Canterbury Christ Church University and a co-director of the Magna Carta Project. Her books include a recent biography of King John’s youngest daughter, Eleanor de Montfort.

“The Legacy of Magna Carta” Nicholas Vincent is professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia and leads the Arts and Humanities Research Council team that is investigating the context and meaning of Magna Carta. > Visit historyextra. com/events for full details

STEVE SAYERS

Book tickets online at historyextra.com/ events or call 0871 620 4021*

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please quote the code SUBSMSHED and have your subscriber number to hand when booking (you can find this on the address label of your magazine). If you have a digital subscription, please forward your subscription order confirmation to digitalsubs@ historyextra.com and our digital marketing team will supply you with a code for reduced rate tickets.

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Listen to lectures from five eminent speakers and enjoy a buffet lunch at the venue, plus morning and afternoon teas and coffees “Inscrutable Providence: The Home Front at the End of the Wars” Jenny Uglow has written widely about 18th and 19th-century art, science and society. Her most recent book is In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815.

“Why Was the Battle Fought at Waterloo? British Grand Strategy between 1793 and 1815” Andrew Lambert is Laughton professor of naval history at King’s College London. His latest book is The Challenge: Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812.

“Napoleon and His Place in History” Alan Forrest is emeritus professor of modern history at the University of York. He has

published widely on modern French history, including, most recently, a biography of Napoleon in 2011.

“Wellington from India to Waterloo: The Making of a Military Commander” Gary Sheffield is professor of war studies at the University of Wolverhampton. His biography Wellington is being published in the Pocket Giants series by the History Press in 2015.

“Waterloo: The Battle for Europe” Gordon Corrigan was a regular officer of the Royal Gurkha Rifles before becoming a full-time military historian. His latest book is Waterloo: A New History of the Battle and its Armies. > Visit historyextra.com/ events for full details

Tickets (per day): £65 Subscribers to BBC History Magazine £70 non-subscribers TERMS AND CONDITIONS We reserve the right to replace the speakers with alternatives of equal stature in the unlikely event that any of them are unable to attend. Please let us know when booking of any special access requirements.

*calls cost 10p per minute plus network extras

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OUT&ABOUT HISTORY EXPLORER

Stephen and Matilda’s fight for the throne Professor David Crouch and Charlotte Hodgman visit Wallingford Castle in Oxfordshire, which played a key role in a vicious civil war in the 12th century

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opportunities available to them.” Henry made every effort to ensure a straightforward succession, nominating his only surviving legitimate child, Matilda, as his heir before his death. The great barons and nobles of England had sworn to support Matilda’s claim to the throne and she had been married to one of the most powerful men in France: Geoffrey, Count of Anjou. Henry, it seemed, had set his daughter up to move smoothly into the role of England’s first reigning queen. “Henry’s death couldn’t have come at a worse time,” says Crouch. “He died in the middle of a ferocious row with his son-inlaw – a dispute that saw Matilda side with her husband against her father – and it is even said that Henry had released his magnates from their oath of support for Matilda’s succession. Whether this was the case or not, when Henry died after more than 35 years on the throne, the scene was set for a desperate scramble for power.”

Power struggles Henry, like his father William the Conqueror before him, had ruled both Normandy and England, and after his death the Norman barons decided to ignore Matilda’s claim in favour of Henry’s nephew Theobald, Count of Blois, whom they felt would benefit their interests the most, as well as bring the principalities of Normandy and Blois into alignment. But as Theobald arrived triumphantly in Rouen, confident of his support, he must surely have

Matilda, shown here in a 14th-century illustration, was within two days of becoming England’s first ruling queen

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ith its impressive central mound and tower, high protective walls and deep defensive ditches, Wallingford Castle must have posed a formidable sight to besieging forces in the medieval period, among them those of King Stephen, who sought to take the fortification from his would-be usurper, Empress Matilda, on a number of occasions between 1139 and 1153. Today little remains of the mighty fortress that overlooked a key crossing point of the river Thames. Small, scattered sections of the castle’s stone walls can be found at various points in the 41-acre site now known as Wallingford Castle Meadows. The most complete section, however, is the ruins of St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church, a building that stood within the castle walls and can now be accessed via a relatively steep set of steps. Standing in the shadow of the huge motte – accessible via a wooden suspension bridge – the limestone ruins remind us of the castle’s long history and its strategic importance in the fight for the English crown following the death of Henry I in 1135. “Succession was a flashpoint in any medieval nation’s history,” says Professor David Crouch, professor of medieval history at the University of Hull, “but England was notorious for having no succession customs. The person who took the throne was generally he – or she – who made the most of the

BBC History Magazine

“When Henry I died, the scene was set for a desperate scramble for power” PROFESSOR DAVID CROUCH

The limestone ruins of St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church, which once formed part of Wallingford Castle. This now tranquil site was the epicentre of a 20-year conflict over who should rule England

BBC History Magazine

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Out & about / History Explorer

VISIT

Wallingford Castle Meadows

been shocked to discover that his younger brother, Stephen, had dashed ahead to London where he had already been crowned. “London was a huge city in medieval terms, and the opinions of its people carried great weight,” says Crouch. “Stephen’s appeal to Londoners lay partly in his personality – he was by all accounts a very affable man – but also with the fact that his wife was Countess of Boulogne, a town that was a point of access for trade on the continent. Stephen’s coronation, therefore, was seen to be in London’s best interests.” But what of Matilda, Henry’s nominated heir? Without the support of the Norman barons, Matilda could do little to stake her claim to the throne. Her uncle, David, king of Scotland, had invaded England on her behalf after Henry’s death, but had been unsuccessful and in 1136 he made a peace settlement with Stephen at Durham. All Matilda could do was wait for an opportunity to present itself. The first years of Stephen’s reign went well, but in 1137 tensions surfaced among certain factions at court as the king began to neglect those key men who had served at the core of Henry’s government, and favour his friends, notably the charismatic Waleran de Beaumont. The king’s failure to put down a rebellion against English occupiers in Wales was the last straw, and in 1138 growing

Becoming queen Stephen most probably regretted his decision to allow Matilda to return to her faction when, in February 1141, he was captured by the combined forces of Robert of Gloucester and the Earl of Chester after being defeated in battle outside Lincoln’s city walls. At the mercy of his captors, the king was taken to Bristol Castle where he was held, in chains, for some 10 months on Matilda’s orders. “Stephen’s treatment in Bristol reveals much about Matilda’s character,” says Crouch. “He was placed in leg irons, despite being an anointed king; this seemingly vindictive act shocked his

Castle Lane, Wallingford, Oxfordshire P southoxon.gov.uk

subjects and did little to increase the empress’s popularity. “Matilda’s lack of discretion and sensitivity in the way she treated her magnates at court is well documented by medieval chroniclers. After Stephen’s capture, her route to the throne looked clearer than it had ever been, yet she is described in contemporary sources as alienating members of her court with her uncontrollable and spiteful behaviour.” With Stephen imprisoned and unable to marshal his support, Matilda seized the initiative and made it as far as Westminster in her bid for the crown. There, she was accepted by the population of London – as Stephen had been some six years earlier – and preparations began to take place for her coronation. “By 1141, victory looked to be well within Matilda’s reach,” says Crouch. “Her rival to the throne was in prison and the inhabitants of the most important city in England had accepted her as their reigning queen. But the tables turned dramatically when, just two

“MATILDA SHRIEKED AT HER PETITIONERS AND BANISHED THEM. IN ONE FELL SWOOP SHE HAD LOST THE CITY AND ITS SUPPORT” 82

BBC History Magazine

ALAMY

A 1253 depiction of King Stephen, whose charisma won over the people of London

dissatisfaction became open revolt. “England can be seen to have staggered into rebellion in 1138,” says Crouch, “and when civil war did finally break out, it was very territorial. Generally speaking, Matilda’s support could be found in the south-west of England, where Matilda’s half-brother and chief supporter, Robert, Earl of Gloucester, had land. Yorkshire, East Anglia and London were for the king, while the Cotswold area in between became something of a war zone.” One baron who eventually switched his allegiance from Stephen to Matilda was Brian fitz Count, Lord of Wallingford and Abergavenny. Like many other barons, fitz Count had initially accepted Stephen’s rule, but defended his later defection by citing the oath he had taken under Henry I to support his daughter’s claim. Soon after, Stephen attacked fitz Count’s castle in Wallingford, which had become an important stronghold for Matilda’s faction (Stephen made further attempts to take the castle in 1145/6 and again in 1152, but failed in his endeavours). Matilda herself arrived in England in 1139, landing in Arundel and staying under the protection of Henry I’s widowed second wife, Adeliza of Louvain, at the town’s castle. Unwilling to risk offending Adeliza by attacking the castle, Stephen instead decided to broker a deal with the empress, and she was granted safe passage to Bristol, where she was reunited with Robert of Gloucester.

STEPHEN & MATILDA: FIVE MORE PLACES TO EXPLORE

ALAMY

Henry II granted Wallingford a royal charter in 1155 to recognise its loyalty to his mother. It allowed the town to host the markets still held today

days before her coronation, she alienated both new and old sources of support. “As tradition dictated, Matilda was petitioned by Londoners for tax concessions and other favours in the run-up to her coronation. But, instead of wooing her new subjects with generosity and magnanimity, Matilda, as was her way, granted no favours, shrieked at her petitioners and banished them from her presence. In one fell swoop she had lost the city and its support.” Realising they would gain nothing from Matilda’s reign, the rejected Londoners returned to the city where they proceeded to ring the bells. Men of London’s militia The medieval road bridge across the Thames connects Wallingford and Crowmarsh Gifford. The original bridge played a key role in Stephen’s sieges of the town

poured into the streets and an angry mob advanced on Westminster, forcing Matilda to flee to Oxford for her own safety. Matilda’s bad luck continued when, in September 1141, Robert of Gloucester was captured at Winchester by Stephen’s queen – also Matilda – who had led an army of Flemish mercenaries and loyal barons there to fight Stephen’s cause. A prisoner exchange took place soon after, and Stephen was free to resume his place on the throne and pursue his would-be usurper to Oxford, where Matilda had based her campaign. As Stephen attacked the city, laying siege to Oxford Castle where the empress was residing, Matilda managed to escape. She fled first to the abbey at Abingdon before moving on to Wallingford Castle. The war dragged on with neither side able to deliver the crucial final blow, but, with Robert of Gloucester’s death in 1147, the military heart went out of Matilda’s campaign and she finally left England for Normandy, resigning her rights to the English throne to her son, Henry (later Henry II), who made several expeditions to England to try where his mother had failed. “The final showdown took place in 1153, at Wallingford,” says Crouch, “but it was far from the decisive battle Stephen had waited for. The two armies set up camp either side of the Thames, near Wallingford Castle, but in a dramatic twist, barons in both armies – many of whom had already made private peace treaties among themselves – refused to fight, forcing Henry and Stephen to iron out a peace settlement.” The agreement – which became known widely as the Treaty of Wallingford – was sealed in Westminster in December 1153, and saw Stephen formally acknowledge Henry as his adopted son and successor. “The treaty was a remarkable event in British history,” concludes Crouch, “and laid the groundwork for Magna Carta in 1215. Ultimately, the war was ended, not by the anointed king, but by a group of barons who decided to stand up to their king in order to ensure the peace of the realm.” Words: Charlotte Hodgman. Historical advisor: David Crouch, professor of medieval history at the University of Hull

BBC History Magazine

1 Oxford Castle Where Matilda made a daring escape Matilda based herself at Oxford Castle in 1141 but quickly found herself under siege from Stephen’s forces. Surrounded, the empress was forced to escape under the cover of darkness, allegedly lowered down the walls and dressed in white as camouflage against the snow. You can visit the castle’s medieval motte, crypt and tower. oxfordcastleunlocked.co.uk

2 Wareham Castle Where allegiances changed constantly Built in the 12th century, Wareham Castle was often employed as a transit point for armies just arrived in England from western Normandy. The castle was seized on a number of occasions, allegedly changing hands five times between Stephen and Matilda. Today, only the motte and ditches of the castle remain. visit-dorset.com

3 Leicester Castle Where an earl promoted peace The conflict was effectively ended by barons who made private peace treaties with each other to limit the effects of war. One of these was Robert de Beaumont, twin brother of royal favourite Waleran, who held Leicester Castle. A supporter of the king, Robert was one of those who led the movement for peace among England’s greater earls. The great hall is among the medieval remains that are accessible. visitleicester.co.uk

4 Winchester Cathedral Where a peace treaty was announced Stephen’s brother, Henry de Blois, bishop of Winchester, was one of the most powerful men in England, but transferred his support to Matilda after Stephen’s capture in 1141. He later rejoined his brother, defending the city from Matilda. The treaty that ended the war was announced in the city’s cathedral in November 1153. winchester-cathedral.org.uk

5 Northallerton, Yorkshire Where Matilda’s claim was defended In 1138, David I of Scotland invaded England for a second time to defend his niece’s claim to the throne. At the ensuing battle just outside Northallerton, David was defeated and forced to return north. battlefieldstrust.com

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Out & about

TEN THINGS TO DO IN JANUARY Facing the consequences EXHIBITION / FREE ENTRY

Faces of Conflict Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter 17 January–5 April S 01392 265858 P rammuseum.org.uk

he First World War saw unprecedented numbers of soldiers suffer permanent facial disfigurement as a result of injuries sustained through fighting. This month, RAMM, in collaboration with the University of Exeter, is launching an exhibition that examines how such injuries led to innovations in surgery, as well as how perceptions of the face in art changed. Thomas Cadbury, one of the exhibition’s curators, says: “The nature of trench warfare meant that the head was often exposed to enemy fire and hundreds of thousands of men sustained life-changing head injuries. “From the Crimean War there had been some attempts at basic plastic surgery, but this mainly involved stretching existing skin over wounds, often leaving patients unable to make facial expressions. It was the work of Dr

T

“Early plastic surgery often left patients unable to make facial expressions”

Harold Gillies [who pioneered new surgical techniques at the Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup] that recognised the importance of aesthetics when attempting to restore facial features.” Surgeons of the day worked with artists and this is reflected in many of the pieces on show, including drawings that were used to document a patient’s progress. Visitors can also see surgical instruments and plaster casts of some of the faces that underwent medical treatment. The exhibition considers artistic reactions to facial injury and how radically new forms of surgery developed at this time changed the context in which artists represented the face. Works on show include those by contemporary artists such as Paddy Hartley, Eleanor Crook and René Apallec (see image right), who have been inspired by archival research into the topic. “Many of these injured soldiers found it incredibly hard to reintegrate themselves back into society”, says Cadbury, “and many were ostracised by family and friends. The exhibition looks at the extraordinary stories of some of these men to see how they were affected by their injuries. “But the exhibition also looks at facial disfigurement beyond the First World War, charting the treatment of these injuries right up to the recent war in Afghanistan.”

EXHIBITION / FREE ENTRY

EXHIBITION / FREE ENTRY

EVENT / FREE ENTRY

TALK / FREE ENTRY

Turner in January 2015

The Illustrated Aviary

First World War Researchathon

Cartooning the First World War

Portsmouth City Museum 24 January S 023 9283 4779 P portsmouthcitymuseums.co.uk

National Waterfront Museum, Swansea 17 January S 029 2057 3600 P museumwales.ac.uk/Swansea

Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh 1 31 January S 0131 624 6200 P nationalgalleries.org

Feast your eyes on the gallery’s annual display of watercolours by JMW Turner. Works include those inspired by the artist’s time in Scotland and Switzerland.

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MAGAZINE

CHOICE

Millennium Gallery, Sheffield 31 January–14 June S 0114 278 2600 P museums-sheffield.org.uk

Works drawn from a Victorian collection of bird illustrations reveal the creatures’ beauty and vulnerability. Included are images of some species that are now extinct.

Help to piece together the stories of Portsmouth people during the First World War as well as develop skills that could help with your own family history research.

An 18th-century illustration of a jacamar from South America

Professor Chris Williams of Cardiff University explores the wartime cartoons of Joseph Morewood Staniforth (JMS), published in the News of the World and the Western Mail.

BBC History Magazine

Charlotte Hodgman previews some of the latest events and exhibitions EXHIBITION

Calm During the Storm: Wartime and Embroidery

René Apallec’s paper collage from 2013, Gueule Cassée No 138 (meaning ‘broken faces’), is among the artworks on display at the Faces of Conflict exhibition

EXHIBITION

TALK / FREE ENTRY

Rubens and His Legacy: Van Dyck to Cézanne

Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge 1944 45

Royal Academy of Arts, London 24 January–10 April S 020 7300 8000 P royalacademy.org.uk

Army & Navy Club, London 8 January S 020 7730 0717 (booking line) P nam.ac.uk

Masterpieces by Peter Paul Rubens will be displayed with major works by later artists who were influenced by the baroque painter.

BBC History Magazine

Dr Peter Caddick-Adams reassesses Hitler’s last major offensive campaign of the Second World War, between 16 December 1944 and 25 January 1945.

RENÉ APALLEC/EMBROIDERERS GUILD/ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST © HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II 2014/THE GUILD OF ST GEORGE, MUSEUMS SHEFFIELD

Abbots Hall, Museum of East Anglian Life, Stowmarket 17 January–28 June S 01449 612229 P eastanglianlife.org.uk

Tea cosies, handkerchiefs and sweetheart pincushions are just some of the items on show in this exhibition that examines the role of needlework as a calming influence during times of war. Focusing primarily on the two world wars, the exhibition also examines pieces made by disabled soldiers as part of their occupational therapy and recovery.

A cushion cover displaying flags, made during the First World War

EXHIBITION / FREE ENTRY

Churchill’s Scientists Science Museum, London From 23 January S 020 7942 4000 P sciencemuseum.org.uk

ONLINE SLIDESHOW historyextra.com /WWIIscience

The Science Museum will be marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill with an exhibition that examines his fascination with science, and the scientific achievements that aided Britain during the Second World War – from penicillin and antibiotics, to the secret research behind the first atomic bomb. Among items on show will be a green velvet ‘siren suit’ – an all-in-one air raid outfit, devised and worn by Churchill himself. EXHIBITION

Waterloo at Windsor: 1815 2015 Windsor Castle 31 January–13 January 2016 S 020 7766 7304 P royalcollection.org.uk/windsorcastle

ONLINE SLIDESHOW historyextra.com /waterloo200

In this, the 200th anniversary year of the battle of Waterloo and defeat of Napoleon, Windsor Castle will display a range of prints, drawings and archival material to explore the battle and its aftermath. As well as a themed trail through the state apartments, visitors will also be able to walk into, and around, the huge Waterloo Chamber. Napoleon’s Sèvres table, given to George IV by a grateful Louis XVIII after the defeat of Napoleon

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Out & about

MY FAVOURITE PLACE

Sicily by Miles Russell

S

icily is distinct in so many ways from mainland Italy, of which it is an autonomous region. Washed by the waters of the Mediterranean, Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas, this strategically placed ‘three-cornered isle’ has been a battleground for Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans and other great powers of the ancient, medieval and early modern world. Today, Sicily is perhaps most famous for food, wine, townlife, beaches and, unfortunately, its association with organised crime. For me, however, it is the diverse, unspoiled and monumentally impressive nature of its rural heritage that is its greatest attraction, although food and wine are a close second and third. Mount Etna, Europe’s largest active volcano, grumbles petulantly at the eastern margins of Sicily, forever threatening to smother the towns, villages and farms that thrive upon its fertile soils. It was the combination of this good farmland and the strategic location that first drew ancient Greek and Phoenician colonists. To this day there is a Greek feel to the eastern half while the west sits upon more solid north African foundations.

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I first visited in the late 1980s, having just graduated from university with no clear idea of what to do with my life. Within minutes of landing on the sun-scorched tarmac of Palermo airport, I was engulfed by the colours, sounds and organised chaos that typifies modern Sicily. I loved it. With its mix of Italian and African food, earthy red wine and well-preserved Greek, Roman and medieval architecture, the island is the ideal holiday location. Within the hectic, car-filled streets of Palermo, Norman, Arabic and baroque buildings jostle for attention amid modern steel and glass. Notable treasures can be appreciated by the dedicated history tourist, including the 12th-century red-domed oriental roof of San Giovanni degli Eremiti, the fashionable square of Quattro Canti and the catacombs of the Convento dei Cappuccini (where

‘Bikini-wearing’ athletes are among the mosaics at Villa Romana del Casale

mummified corpses of the city’s former elite are stacked in rows). Away from the disfiguring and apparently uncontrolled property developments that blight suburban Palermo, sun-parched, rugged hills rise dramatically. Ancient cities hug the coastline while medieval stone villages, complete with villas, mansions and renaissance churches, cling precariously to the mountains. The diverse colonisers of ancient Sicily all left their cultural footprint upon the land. In Syracuse, I like to explore the atmospheric Greek theatre before wandering down to the shore where, between 215 BC and 213 BC, the townspeople resisted the might of republican Rome. The defence was aided by war machines invented by its famous inhabitant, philosopher Archimedes. His house, let alone his bath, has yet to be discovered archaeologically, but it is easy to imagine him running naked through the streets shouting ‘eureka’ to startled fellow citizens. Elsewhere, in the Valley of the Temples at Agrigento, a Greek colony once described as “the fairest city inhabited by mortals”, an energetic walk takes visitors past a dizzying array of classical temples. The imposing ruins of Selinunte – where column bases and decorated stonework lie in heaps

ALAMY, ROBERT HARDING

Continuing our historical holidays series, Miles recommends a ‘three-cornered isle’ teeming with Greek, Roman and Norman cultural treasures

BBC History Magazine

The Juno temple is just one of the spectacular Greek ruins at the Valley of Temples in Agrigento

ADVICE FOR TRAVELLERS BEST TIME TO GO like the discarded building blocks of a children’s toy – sit in majestic grandeur overlooking the sea. Elsewhere the stonepaved streets and small open squares of Erice are beguiling, whilst at Cefalù the 12th-century religious splendour of the Norman cathedral and its golden wall mosaics is simply breath-taking. My favourite place in Sicily, however, is Villa Romana del Casale, close to Piazza Armerina, a third-to fourthcentury powerhouse with the finest mosaics to survive from the Roman world. Tourists flock to see mosaics depicting ‘bikini-wearing’ athletes. However it is the hunting mosaic, in which tigers, rhinos, boar and the fictional griffin are being pursued, that is the most spectacular. Other floors depict chariot racing, then the premier sport in Rome, and scenes from Greek mythology including the labours of Hercules, and Odysseus with the Cyclops Polyphemus (shown confusingly with three eyes). We know nothing about the original villa owners, although many have speculated that they had imperial associations. Standing before these masterpieces, it is all too easy to believe you are an emperor yourself. Dr Miles Russell is senior lecturer in archaeology at Bournemouth University.

Spring is the best time to appreciate Sicily, although be careful to avoid Easter, unless you like big crowds and closed shops.

GETTING THERE Sicily is served by three main airports: Palermo, Catania and Trapani. British Airways flies direct to Catania from London Heathrow or London Gatwick.

WHAT TO PACK A sun hat and a laid back attitude to road traffic.

WHAT TO BRING BACK Photographs, memories and olive oil – lots and lots of olive oil.

READERS’ VIEWS Villa Romana del Casale for some of the most stunning mosaics you’ll see - late Roman, very intricate & very beautiful @ShirleyWootten Loved it! Taormina beautiful, esp. Greek theatre. Local driver took us to Etna - wow! Montalbano or Godfather tours too @lesleysworld Selinunte Greek Temples, Modica and Ragusa for Baroque, Siracusa amphitheatres, Ortigia Duomo. All the food and wine @LifeafterSicily

Read more about Miles’s experiences in Sicily at historyextra.com/sicily

At the Greek colony once described as ‘the fairest city inhabited by mortals’, an energetic walk takes visitors past a dizzying array of classical temples

Next month: Sean McGlynn visits Languedoc in France

Been there… Have you been to Sicily? Do you have a top tip for readers? Contact us via Twitter or Facebook twitter.com/historyextra facebook.com/ historyextra

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Advertisement feature 1. THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF ST PETER

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Exeter’s Cathedral is one of the oldest and most beautiful in England. At the heart of the city there has been a Christian presence for nearly 1000 years. The imposing towers date from the early 12th century and are the iconic feature of this ancient building, with the longest stretch of unbroken Gothic vaulting in the world, stunning stained glass and an intricately carved image screen on the West Front.

Peterborough Cathedral is one of the finest Norman cathedrals in England. There has been a place of Christian worship on this site since the 7th century and the current building is 900 years old in 2018. Katharine of Aragon and Mary Queen of Scots were buried here. Don’t miss the Katharine of Aragon Festival, 30 January – 1 February 2015. Details, including hotel deals, are on our website.

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Cathedrals to visit in 2015 Now is a great time to visit Britain’s historical cathedrals. Here is a selection for you to enjoy 1

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11. CHESTER CATHEDRAL Chester Cathedral is full of stories. Founded by St Anselm in 1092 as a Benedictine monastery, it became a Cathedral after the dissolution. Trace the daily lives of the medieval monks; writing in the cloisters, meetings in the chapter house, mealtimes in the refectory, worshipping at the shrine and daily services in the elaborate 14th-century Quire stalls. 01244 500958 www.chestercathedral.com

10. LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL The only medieval three-spired Cathedral in the UK, is the burial place of the great Anglo-Saxon missionary, St Chad. The Cathedral is home to treasures including the Lichfield Angel, St Chad Gospels and Staffordshire Hoard artefacts. Services run daily, information on tours and special events on the website. 01543 306100 [email protected] www.lichfield-cathedral.org

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ST DAVIDS CATHEDRAL St Davids, Pembrokeshire

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CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF ST BARNABAS Nottingham, Nottinghamshire

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THE COPTIC ORTHODOX CATHEDRAL Stevenage, Hertfordshire

TRURO CATHEDRAL Truro, Cornwall

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LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL Lichfield, Staffordshire

CHESTER CATHEDRAL Chester, Cheshire

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9. TRURO CATHEDRAL Stunning Gothic Revival Cathedral in the heart of Cornwall’s only city. Three soaring spires and beautiful stained glass. Unique ‘church within a church’. Cornish Saints found in windows, wood and stone. Free family friendly trails and craft Activities. Fantastic shop. Restaurant serves delicious Cornish cream teas and meals. Free guided tours Easter to Oct. Free Friday 1.10pm lunchtime organ recitals Mar to Oct. Free Entry.

01872 276782 www.trurocathedral.org.uk

Advertisement feature 3. COVENTRY CATHEDRAL

4. ST DAVIDS CATHEDRAL

Designed by Sir Basil Spence and voted the nation’s favourite 20th-century building, Coventry Cathedral is now a fascinating and moving mix of the old and new. An icon of hope, the cathedral is recognised internationally as a World Centre for Peace and Reconciliation and a ‘Casket of Jewels’ of 1950’s and 1960’s architecture.

Come and visit this stunning cathedral and the newly restored Shrine of St David. Open: Monday to Saturday 8.30am – 5.00pm & Sunday 1.00pm – 5.00pm •Daily services •Bookshop •Concerts •Guided tours •Refectory & Cloister Gallery •Porth y Twr Exhibition •Treasury •Disabled Access

024 7652 1210 www.coventrycathedral.org.uk

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5. DURHAM CATHEDRAL Celebrate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta by visiting Durham Cathedral, one of Britain’s best-loved buildings. This magnificent Romanesque Cathedral holds three copies of Magna Carta, one of which will be displayed at Durham University’s Palace Green Library on the Durham UNESCO World Heritage Site in summer 2015. 0191 3864266 www.durhamcathedral.co.uk

5

6. CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF ST BARNABAS 11 6 10 3

2 8

4 12 This map is for illustrative purposes only and is not intended to represent definitive scale and detail.

7

1 9

This Pugin Cathedral was built in 1844. It is cruciform with a large retro choir, Blessed Sacrament chapel and three projecting chapels. With the Blessed Sacrament Chapel still as Pugin designed. The Cathedral is open every day and you’re more than welcome to pay a visit, to see that there is more to Nottingham than Robin Hood. 0115 953 9839 www.stbarnabascathedral.org.uk

8. THE COPTIC ORTHODOX CATHEDRAL

7. ARUNDEL CATHEDRAL

Here’s a delightful meeting point between ancient and contemporary Coptic culture set in a British context. Bearing the name of the patron saint of England, the United Kingdom’s newest Cathedral also remains true to ancient Egyptian roots in its architecture. The high vaults and domes are harmoniously complemented by a neo-traditional modern style.

Founded by Henry 15th Duke of Norfolk in 1873, the Cathedral of Our Lady and St Philip Howard, Arundel was built in stunning Medieval French gothic architecture. The seat of the Bishop of Arundel & Brighton since 1965, the Cathedral is renowned for its impressive annual carpet of flowers celebrated this year on 3rd/4th June.

[email protected] www.CopticCentre.com

01903 882297 www.arundelcathedral.org

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Q&A

Q Who was Renate Müller? A A star of German cinema in the 1930s, Renate Müller is remembered as much for the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death as for her films. Blonde and beautiful, she embodied the Nazi ideal of Aryan womanhood and came under increasing pressure to appear in propaganda films and to desert her Jewish lover. She was unwilling to do either. In October 1937, aged 31, she died after supposedly falling from the third-floor window of a Berlin hospital (although even this basic fact is disputed) and was buried in a private ceremony that her fans were prevented from attending. Probably she committed suicide, but some people have argued that she was murdered by the Gestapo because she was planning, like Marlene Dietrich before her, to leave Germany for Hollywood. Nick Rennison

MUSEUM OF LONDON

Q Who or what was King Bomba? A Emidio Recchioni was an anarchist in late 19th-century Italy who was imprisoned several times before fleeing to London in 1898. He eventually set up a delicatessen in Old Compton Street, Soho. He called his shop ‘King Bomba’ in an ironic reference to a nickname given to the despised Ferdinand II who ruled Naples and Sicily from 1830 to 1859. In the 1920s and 1930s, King Bomba became a meeting place for those opposed to Mussolini’s government and its owner was accused of complicity in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate the Fascist leader. The Italian authorities requested extradition but Recchioni had become a naturalised British citizen and the request was turned down. He died in 1934 but the delicatessen continued until 1971. Nick Rennison Customers at King Bomba, the ironically named Italian deli

BBC History Magazine

ILLUSTRATION BY GLEN MCBETH

Q Watching the football World Cup, I noticed that every country has a national anthem. When did this start, and for what reason? CV Shaw, by email

Almost all countries have an official national anthem, while some also have a ‘royal anthem’ in praise of the monarch. Anthems have several uses: they can be played at sporting or ceremonial occasions, and some are played at the start and/or end of the day’s TV or radio broadcasting. There are several claimants for being the oldest. The Japanese Kimigayo uses words from a 10th-century poem, though the music was composed in the 19th century – the original version by John Fenton, an Irishman. The Dutch anthem, Wilhelmus, was composed in the 1560s or 1570s, while Spaniards reckon their Marcha Real is the first national anthem as it was officially decreed that it should be played on solemn occasions in 1770. Most other older countries had patriotic hymns or marches, one or two of which would be used on formal occasions by the 19th century.

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Britain’s God Save the King/Queen became popular in the mid-18th century, though the tune is older. It was being referred to as ‘the national anthem’ by the early 19th century. The music has also been used in other countries; the crowd at the 2003 European Championship qualifier between England and Liechtenstein were bemused to find both countries’ anthems had the same tune. By the 20th century, every country felt it needed an anthem, partly to engender patriotism, and partly due to the number of international events at which ceremonial music was needed. The playing of the winning anthem at Olympic events, for example, dates back to 1924. Former colonies achieving independence would use their own songs or, more often, commission new ones. Eugene Byrne is an author and freelance journalist

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Miscellany Princess Elizabeth – was she in fact a boy in a frock after 1542?

QUIZ BY JULIAN HUMPHRYS The theme of this month’s quiz is crime and notorious criminals throughout history ONLINE QUIZ EVERY FRIDAY

1. Who were Dismas and Gestas? 2. Who stole the relics of St Foy from the monastery of Agen in AD 866?

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3. Who was Eustace the Monk? 4. Gilles de Rais was hanged in 1440 for multiple kidnapping and murder. Which famous figure had been his former companion in arms? 5. Who did Gavin Dunbar, the archbishop of Glasgow, subject to a 1,500 word curse in 1525? 6. What did Robert Perrot stuff down his breeches on 9 May 1671? 7. Which infamous 18th-century underworld boss’s skeleton is believed to be displayed at London’s Royal College of Surgeons? 8. Which popular 18th-century thief and jailbreaker was hanged before a cheering crowd at Tyburn in 1724? 9. Why was the first verse of Psalm 51 known as the neck verse? 10. Why would a medieval criminal be pleased to see this? 10

Q Was the Bisley Boy myth a contemporary tale or is it more of a modern-day invention? Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory, but the legend of the Bisley Boy has to be one of the most outlandish. In 1542, so the story goes, the future Elizabeth I (then aged nine) was sent to Over Court House in the picturesque Cotswold village of Bisley, Gloucestershire, in order to escape the plague in London. While there, the princess fell gravely ill with a fever and died. Knowing that King Henry VIII was on his way to visit his daughter, her panic-stricken governess searched the village in vain for a girl who resembled Elizabeth enough to fool the king. The only child of the right age and colouring was a boy, so in desperation she dressed him in the princess’s clothes and the deception was complete.

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QUIZ ANSWERS 1. According to the apocryphal gospel of St Nicodemus they were the two thieves crucified alongside Christ. 2. A monk planted there by the Abbey of Conques who wanted the relics. 3. A French pirate beheaded after being captured at the naval battle of Sandwich in 1217. 4. Joan of Arc. 5. The Reivers of the Anglo-Scottish borders. 6. The orb of the crown jewels. Perrot was one of Thomas Blood’s accomplices in the bid to steal them. 7. That of Jonathan Wild. 8. Jack Sheppard. 9. Because by reading (or pretending to read) the first lines, a criminal could claim benefit of clergy, be tried in a clerical court where penalties were more moderate and avoid a death sentence. 10. Because by rapping the door with the original the criminal could claim sanctuary in Durham Cathedral (this is a replica – the original is now kept inside).

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This unlikely theory was first spouted by Thomas Keble, the then vicar of Bisley, who recorded that during renovations at Over Court, he had found an old stone coffin with the skeleton of a girl of about nine, dressed in Tudor clothing. It became part of local folklore, but gained more widespread renown in 1910 when written up by Bram Stoker, creator of Dracula, in his book Famous Imposters. Conspiracy theorists seized upon it as an explanation for why Elizabeth – the famous ‘Virgin Queen’ – refused to marry and have children. Tracy Borman is a historian and author. Her latest book is Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014)

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Karl Goddard, via Facebook

IF YOUR QUESTION IS PRINTED, WE’LL SEND YOU A RECENTLY PUBLISHED HISTORY BOOK

Q When and what was the children’s crusade? Henry Hinder, by email

Following the less-thanstellar results of the late 12th and early 13th-century Third and Fourth Crusades, enthusiasm for crusading, coupled with doubts about the noble military, began to affect the poorer classes. In 1212, a popular crusading movement gained strength primarily along the border lands between France and the Holy Roman Empire. Thousands of pueri, a Latin word that has been translated as ‘children’, joined Nicholas, also a puer, on a mission to rescue the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. They were poor and illprepared for the endeavours of European travel. Several seem to have died of hunger, thirst and exposure, but most – contemporary estimates are 7,000 – marched through

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the Alps into northern Italy, arriving in Genoa in August. There, however, the crusade began to fall apart. One group went from Genoa to Marseilles, another to Rome and another to Brindisi, where the wise bishop forbade them from attempting further to reach the Holy Land. Some of the crusaders seem to have secured boats for the Mediterranean crossing and, the sources claim, were captured by Muslim pirates and sold into slavery. But the fate of most, even Nicholas, is unknown, although one source suggests that he would later, in 1217, fight in the Fifth Crusade. Kelly DeVries is professor of history at Loyola University Maryland

None of the ill-fated 1212 crusaders, depicted in an 1877 image, reached the Holy Land

GOT A QUESTION? Write to BBC History Magazine, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN, email: [email protected] or submit via our website: historyextra.com

SAM’S RECIPE CORNER Every issue, picture editor Sam Nott brings you a recipe from the past. This month it’s a healthy snack thought to have been enjoyed in Egypt around 3,500 years ago

Tiger nut balls If you, like me, have a sweet tooth but are trying to be more healthy in the new year then try tiger nut balls. I found lots of references to this being one of the first Egyptian recipes that we know of, found written on an ancient ostraca (inscribed broken pottery) dating back to 1600 BC. Although I haven’t found a definitive source for this (or why tiger nut balls don’t contain tiger nuts!) they sounded too delicious to pass over. As your average ancient Egyptian seems to have had a very sweet tooth and often added dates and honey to desserts, I like to think that this is a sweet that would have been made thousands of years ago. This recipe is very straightforward, requires no cooking and is a lot fun to make (ideal for younger members of the household who might want to help).

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INGREDIENTS • 200g fresh dates (I used dried, which worked really well) • 1 tsp cold water • 10–15 walnut halves • tsp of cinnamon • small jar of runny honey • 75g ground almonds

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METHOD Chop the dates finely (use seedless, or make sure to remove the stones first) and put them into a bowl. Add the water and stir. Then mix in the chopped walnuts and the cinnamon. Shape the mixture into small balls with your hands. Dip the balls in honey (I warmed it first so the honey coating wouldn’t be quite so thick) then roll the balls in the ground almonds. Chill them in the fridge for half an hour before serving.

BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE TEAM VERDICT “Like historic energy balls.” “I think Tiger nut balls roar with flavour.” “They’re as indulgent as a chocolate truffle!” Difficulty: 1/10 Time: 45 mins Recipe courtesy of http://cookit.e2bn.org/ historycookbook/889-tigernut-sweets.html

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Miscellany

PRIZE CROSSWORD

Mary who nursed in the Crimea? (see 26 across)

You may photocopy this crossword

Across

Down 1 eg ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918–19, killing many millions across the world (8) 2 The ninth-century king of Israel whose marriage to Jezebel revived an alliance with Phoenicia (4) 3 Relating to the royal house that started with Henry II of England (7) 4 As Æthelred II was called with reference to the ‘bad counsel’ that he received (7)

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Book worth

£9.99 for 10 winners

The First World War A Z From Artillery to Zeppelins, from Churchill to Versailles, this is a pocket-sized but extensive guide to key personalities, battles and tactics of the First World War. Written by staff of the Imperial War Museum, it also covers some more unusual and quirky facts, including slang, songs and superstitions. Published by the Imperial War Museum, £9.99

5/27 Series of UK legislations, effectively beginning in 1833, regulating the conditions of child and female industrial employees (7,4) 6 An image of Christ, etc, many examples of which were destroyed, as ‘idolatrous’, in the eighth/ninthcentury Byzantine world (4) 7 See 17 across. 9 Anglo-Saxon earl of Northumbria, brother of Harold Godwinson to whom he became a bitter rival (6) 14 A victory for the Scots led by James Douglas over an army raised by the archbishop of York at this battle of 1319 (5) 16 The US Civil War commander who later became president (5) 19 William, the 14th-century poet said to be the author of Piers Plowman, a great work of English literature (8) 20 Pablo, Colombian drugs lord and, briefly, politician, killed by police in 1993 (7) 21 British soldier, leader of the 3rd Army after featuring prominently in the second battle of Ypres (7) 22 The Roman Fosse Way once ran across England from Lincoln to this city (6) 23 The German socialist philosopher who worked closely with Karl Marx (6)

24 Russian city port, __-on-Don, twice occupied by German forces in the Second World War (6) 27 See 5 down 29 The Roman middle of a month (often associated with date of Julius Caesar’s assassination) (4) Compiled by Eddie James

HOW TO ENTER Open to residents of the UK, (inc. Channel Islands). Post entries to BBC History Magazine, January 2015 Crossword, PO Box 501, Leicester LE94 0AA or email them to [email protected] by 5pm on 28 January 2015. Entrants must supply name, address and phone number. The winners will be the first correct entries drawn at random after the closing time. Winners’ names will appear in the March 2015 issue. By entering, participants agree to be bound by the terms and conditions shown in full in the box below. Immediate Media Company Limited, publishers of BBC History Magazine, would love to keep you informed by post or telephone of special offers and promotions from the Immediate Media Company Group. Please write ‘Do Not Contact Magazines’ or ‘Do Not Contact IMC’ if you prefer not to receive such information by post, email or phone. Write ‘No Email BBCW’ if you do not wish to receive similar offers via email from BBC Worldwide. Please write your email address and mobile phone number on your entry so that BBC History Magazine can keep you informed of newsletters, special offers and promotions via email or free text messages. You may unsubscribe from receiving these messages at any time. For more about the BBC Privacy Policy see the box below.

SOLUTION TO OUR DECEMBER CROSSWORD Across: 1 Fascism 5 Liszt 9 Kublai Khan 12/10 Domesday Book 13 Coup 15/31 Sun Yat-sen 17 Neil 19 Uruk 21 Sir 23 Nero 25 Triassic 27 Slaver 29 Amis 30 Great Stink 32 Barrosa. Down: 2 Asuncion 3 Caleb 4 Shiites 5 Link-man 6/11 Sebastian Cabot 7 Trojan 8 Chad 14 Parnassus 16 NHS 18 Ardennes 20 Kosygin 22 Rosetta 24 Crimea 26 Cree 28 Astor. FOUR WINNERS OF HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 1,000 OBJECTS G Dockerty, Cheshire; I Collins, Cumbria; E Turner, London; T Hull, London CROSSWORD COMPETITION TERMS & CONDITIONS P 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. P The closing date and time is as shown under How to Enter, above. 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 immediatemedia.co.uk/privacy-policy/ P 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 by post within 20 days of the close of the competition. 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. P 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.

MARY EVANS

8 Pharaoh, husband of Nefertiti, who introduced a form of monotheism to Egypt in the 14th century BC (9) 10 English town renowned for the racecourse established by Queen Anne (5) 11 Diamond-mining company that was founded in 1888 by Cecil Rhodes (2,5) 12 The Triple –– of Britain, France and Russia was a basis for the Allied Powers in the First World War(7) 13 As many cats in ancient Egypt were, after death (9) 15 Petition of __ (1628) set out restrictions on the English king’s powers to levy taxes, to declare martial law etc (5) 17/7 down The conspiracy to assassinate the British cabinet was hatched here in London in 1820 (4,6) 18 Parliamentary house that first met in 1919, following Sinn Fein’s boycott of Westminster (4) 24 Characters of ancient Germanic alphabet; Maeshowe, Orkney, has many examples (5) 25 Massachusetts location of the opening shots of the American War of Independence (9) 26 Jamaican nurse, Mary, the ‘forgotten Nightingale’ of the Crimean War (7) 28 Introduced in the UK in 1961, it was intended only for married women (3,4) 30 Port and naval base (until its harbour silted up) of ancient Rome (5) 31 Carl, one of the two investigative journalists mainly involved in exposing the Watergate scandal (9)

CROSSWORD PRIZE

NEXT MONTH MAGAZINE EDITORIAL Editor Rob Attar [email protected] Features editor Charlotte Hodgman [email protected]

Section editor Matt Elton [email protected] Production editor Spencer Mizen Picture editor Samantha Nott [email protected] Art editor Susanne Frank Deputy art editors Sarah Lambert and Rachel Dickens Website editor Emma McFarnon [email protected]

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Vol 16 No 1 – January 2015 BBC History Magazine is published by Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited under licence from BBC Worldwide who help fund new BBC programmes. BBC History Magazine was established to publish authoritative history, written by leading experts, in an accessible and attractive format. We seek to maintain the high journalistic standards traditionally associated with the BBC. ADVERTISING & MARKETING Advertisement manager Lucy Moakes 0117 314 7426 [email protected] Deputy advertisement manager Sam Jones 0117 314 8847 [email protected] Junior brand sales executive Jon Maney 0117 314 8754 [email protected] Classified sales executive Hannah Brown 0117 314 7412 [email protected] Group direct marketing manager Laurence Robertson 00353 5787 57444 Subscriptions director Jacky Perales-Morris Marketing executive Gemma Burns US representative Kate Buckley [email protected] PRESS AND PUBLIC RELATIONS Press officer Carolyn Wray 0117 314 8812 [email protected] SYNDICATION Head of licensing & syndication Tom Hudson Magazine syndication executive Simon Goodman International Partners’ Manager Anna Brown PRODUCTION Production director Sarah Powell Production co-ordinator Emily Mounter Ad co-ordinator Jade O’Halloran IMMEDIATE MEDIA COMPANY Publisher David Musgrove Publishing director Andy Healy Managing director Andy Marshall CEO Tom Bureau Deputy chairman Peter Phippen Chairman Stephen Alexander BBC WORLDWIDE Director of publishing Nicholas Brett Head of publishing Chris Kerwin Publishing co-ordinator Eva Abramik [email protected] www.bbcworldwide.com/uk--anz/ ukpublishing.aspx Jan–June 2014

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MAGNA CARTA David Carpenter shows how the charter offers a window into medieval England, while Nicholas Vincent explores its legacy

Vietnam tightrope Sylvia Ellis on how Harold Wilson tried to balance competing interests during the Vietnam War

Sex and the church Diarmaid MacCulloch charts Christianity’s changing attitudes towards sexual relations

Victorian crime Clive Bloom highlights some of the scandalous cases that shocked 19th-century society

April 2012 – March 2013

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My history hero “Cavell was incredibly brave, and didn’t hesitate from taking the course of action she did, even though she knew it was likely to end in her death”

Novelist Kate Mosse chooses

Edith Cavell 1865 1915 Edith Cavell pictured with her dogs. “She never wavered,” says Kate Mosse of the iconic nurse. “About 200 men owed their lives to her”

dith Cavell was a British nurse who was shot by a German firing squad in the First World War for helping Allied soldiers to escape occupied Belgium. A vicar’s daughter, she trained as a nurse and in 1907 became matron of a nursing school in Brussels. Following the outbreak of war in 1914, she began sheltering and helping British and French troops to escape to the neutral Netherlands. But after being betrayed by a collaborator, she was tried and executed by the German authorities. Cavell became an iconic figure in death, and her execution was exploited by the Allies for propaganda purposes. Numerous memorials were later erected in her honour.

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When did you first hear about Edith Cavell?

The day I went to the Chichester Festival Theatre in the 1980s and saw Joan Plowright starring in a play about Edith’s life. The line I always remember from it was: “It’s Cavell to rhyme with travel”! Most people pronounce it Cav-ell. I was intrigued by the fact that someone could be such a heroine in their day, or at least in the years immediately following their death – witness the statue opposite the National Portrait Gallery in London – but over the years somehow rather disappear from public consciousness.

women at the time, had limited opportunities – but she followed her dreams of going into nursing, even though she didn’t fulfil her ambition of becoming a nurse until she was 30. I suspect that she would have had mixed feelings about, in effect, becoming a secular saint following her death. She would possibly have regarded this as inappropriate – because the two things that were always most important to her were nursing and her faith. What was her finest hour?

It has to be the way she began running escape networks to get British and French soldiers over the border, at one time hiding more than 80 men in her hospital. She gave them money, and even made them fake ID cards using her own Kodak camera – before being arrested, put in solitary confinement and sentenced to death. Yet she never wavered. About 200 men owed her their lives. Is there anything you don’t particularly admire about her?

Not really. I imagine she was unyielding in her work and would have demanded the same high standards of everyone around her as she demanded of herself, which might have been exacting for some people. But I admire pretty much everything about her, right down to the way she trusted in her faith to the very end.

What kind of person was she?

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She was clearly an incredibly strong and principled person which stemmed from her powerful Anglican beliefs, and her sense of what was right and what was wrong, and how you should behave. While she was undoubtedly a patriot, it was that moral certainty that drew her towards helping people in defiance of the German authorities, rather than any particular ideological beliefs.

Can you see any parallels between her life and your own?

What made her a hero?

If you could meet Cavell, what would you ask her?

The fact that she knew what was right, and she did it – and put other people first. She was incredibly brave, but was also a normal person, as it were, and didn’t hesitate from taking the course of action she did, even though she knew it was likely to end in her death. Above all else though, it’s her courage that shines through. The other thing I admire about her is that she made the most of her life chances. She was raised in a vicarage and, like most

I’d ask her if there was anything she would have done differently – and if as the rifles were being cocked before being fired, how she looked back on her life, and what she regarded as her finest hour. Kate Mosse was talking to York Membery Kate Mosse is a novelist, best known for her 2005 book, Labyrinth. Her latest novel is The Taxidermist’s Daughter (Orion, 2014)

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Reading about her life has undoubtedly inspired me as a writer. I’ve always written about courageous women who stand against the expectations of their time, and while unfortunately I can see no real parallels between the two of us as people, I can see plenty between Edith and my fictional characters.

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life & death in the roman empire

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