BBC History Magazine 2015-05

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WORLD WAR TWO’S EVERYDAY HEROES M MAGAZINE E

CROMWELL vs CHARLES I

s h t y m t a e r The g of the

r a W l i v i C

SINKING THE LUSITANIA Who was really to blame for the WW1 tragedy at sea?

May 2015 • www.historyextra.com

David Starkey on the origins of Magna Carta How to win a General Election Britain’s unlikely slave owners

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MAY 2015

PORTRAIT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 1649 BY ROBERT WALKER, LEEDS MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES, BRIDGEMAN. KING CHARLES I BY SIR ANTHONY VAN DYCK BURGHLEY HOUSE COLLECTION, BRIDGEMAN. TOP RIGHT: EILEEN YOUNGHUSBAND THIS PAGE: RICHIE HOBSON/JENI NOTTTIM KIRBY

WELCOME This month a National Civil War Centre is opening in Newark, offering visitors an in-depth exploration of the conflict that ripped the British Isles apart in the 17th century. To mark the occasion, we have gathered 10 of the country’s leading Civil War historians to explode some of the myths that surround the clash. Discover what they had to say on page 33 and then find out more about the new centre on page 84. We’re also remembering another war this month, as we come to the 70th anniversary of VE Day. y The BBC is commemorating the event with a range of programmes, including an oral history series, The Greatest Generation, which comprises interviews with some of the most remarkable veterans of the Second World War. Series producer Steve Humphries shares his thoughts on what made this generation so special on page 22. It surely can’t have escaped your attention that May will see a general election here in the UK. As the competing parties seek to find the winning formula, Dominic Sandbrook k looks back at the past 25 elections to find out what has traditionally driven success and failure at the p olls. You can read his piece on page 51. Finally, I’m delighted to announce that our History Weekend will be returning to Malmess bury this year, from 15–18 October. We’re also launch h ing a companion weekend in York that will run from m 25–27 September. Head to page 61 for details off when and where the tickets will go on sale. Rob Attar Editor

THIS ISSUE’S CONTRIBUTORS

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WORLD WAR TWO’ S EVERYDAY HERO ES M MAGA ZINE E

CROMWELL vs CHAR LES I

BBC History Magazine e is now available for the e Kindle, Kindle Fire, The great myths iPad/iPhone, Google of the Civil War Play and Zinio. For SINKING THE LUS ITANIA more details of prices and availability for all of these, please visit our website historyextra.com/digital it l Who was really the WW1 tragedyto blame for at sea?

£4.60 • May 2015

David Starkey on the origins of Magn a Carta How to win a Gene ral Elect ion

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Britain’s unlike ly slave owners

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Collector’s Edition: Medieval life Discover how people lived, thought, prayed, dressed and shopped in the Middle Ages in this fascinating compendium of the best articles from BBC History Magazine. Buy your copy for just £9.99, and subscribers get free UK P+P* Order at buysubscriptions.com/ medieval or call 0844 844 0250**

CONTACT US David Starkey The process of drafting and editing Magna Carta between 1215 and 1225, and the debates about its composition, reminded me so much of the depiction of the 20thcentury civil service in the TV series Yes Minister.

David discusses his new book on Magna Carta on page 63

David Olusoga The new research behind my upcoming BBC Two series shows that slave ownership was widespread and ordinary. Britain’s slave owners lived everywhere from the Orkney Islands to the Isle of Wight, and 40 per cent of them were women.

Vanessa Collingridge Very rarely does a site so well known, both visually and in terms of its story, not only live up to its billing but blow you away. The Great Wall of China certainly did. Vanessa explores the Great Wall of China on page 86

David Olusoga writes about British slave owners on page 56

* Subscribers to BBC History Magazinee receive FREE UK P&P on this collector’s edition. Prices including postage are: £11.49 for all other UK residents, £12.99 for Europe and £13.49 for Rest of World. All orders subject to availability. Please allow up to 28 days for delivery ** Calls to this number from a BT landline will cost no more than 5p per minute. Calls from mobiles and other providers may vary. Lines are open 8am–8pm weekdays and 9am–1pm Saturday.

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MAY 2015

CONTENTS Features

Every month 6 ANNIVERSARIES

11 HISTORY NOW 11 The latest history news 14 Backgrounder: global oil prices 17 Past notes

18 LETTERS

42 How Britain may have been partly to blame when the Lusitania was sunk

21 MICHAEL WOOD’S VIEW 48 OUR FIRST WORLD WAR

63 BOOKS On page 51 we examine elections through the ages. Who did we vote for, and why?

Experts review the latest releases, plus David Starkey discusses his new book on Magna Carta

77 TV & RADIO On the 70th anniversary of VE Day, Steve Humphries reveals what was special about the generation that served in the war

26 Why Churchill’s reputation is still on the line The 50th anniversary of his death is an opportunity to reassess the statesman’s place in history, says David Cannadine

28 The many lives of India Sunil Khilnani talks to Rob Attar about some of India’s historical heavyweights

33 Civil War misconceptions Experts explode 10 myths surrounding the seismic 17th-century conflict

42 Did Britain doom the liner Lusitania in 1915? Should this country share the blame for the torpedoing of the ship by a U-boat 100 years ago, asks Saul David

51 How to win an election Dominic Sandbrook reveals how the last 25 general elections were won and lost

56 A nation of slave owners Many Britons profited from the slave trade and fought against the idea of abolition, reveals David Olusoga

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The pick of this month’s history programmes

80 OUT & ABOUT 80 History explorer: taking a look at medieval universities 84 Ten things to do in May 86 My favourite place: Great Wall of China

26 Churchill and his reputation

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

98 MY HISTORY HERO Alan Titchmarsh chooses Jane Austen

40 SUBSCRIBE

Subscribe now and the first issue is FREE*

WORLD WAR TWO’S

EVERYDAY HEROES

MAGAZIN M NE E

CROMWELL vs CHARLES I

The great myths of the

Civil War

SINKING THE LUSITANIA

Who was really to blame for the WW1 tragedy at sea?

£4.60 • May 2015

• www.historyex tra.com

David Starkey origins of Magna on the Carta How to win a Genera l Electio n Britain’s unlikely slave owners

*All offers, prices and discounts are correct at the time of being published and may be subject to change 40% saving offer available to UK Direct Debit orders only USPS Identiﬁcation Statement BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE (ISSN 1469-8552) (USPS 024-177) May 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 MAGAZINE, PO Box 37495, Boone, IA 50037-0495.

TOPFOTO/BRIDGEMAN/ALAMY/REX/RICHIE HOPSON

22 Unsung war heroes

28 Meet some of India’s Indias most colourful historical characters BBC History Magazine

22 Why the generation that lived through the Second World War was so special

63 David Starkey talks about Magna Carta and what it means today

33 “THE CIVIL WAR WAS BLOODIER THAN THE BELLIGERENTS HAD EXPECTED” BBC History Magazine

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Dominic Sandbrook highlights events that took place in May in history

ANNIVERSARIES 6 May 1527

25 May 1895

The army of the Holy Roman Emperor sacks Rome

Oscar Wilde is convicted

Charles V’s imperial troops mutiny and rampage through the Vatican, looting and killing

The Irish writer’s reputation is left in tatters as he is jailed for gross indecency

least 20,000 imperial soldiers began their assault. Disastrously, the duke, wearing his trademark white cloak, was shot and killed almost immediately – and any semblance of discipline disappeared. What followed was an orgy of plunder and vandalism as the imperial army swept aside the feeble resistance and rampaged through the city. Inside the Vatican, the Swiss Guard made a desperate last stand as Pope Clement VII escaped to the Castel Sant’Angelo. They were slaughtered where they stood, their captain cut down in full view of his watching wife. Meanwhile, imperial troops were ransacking churches, tombs and cemeteries. In all, at least 12,000 people were estimated to have been murdered. “The Germans were bad,” said one churchman. “The Italians were worse; the Spanish were the worst.”

The torched city burns as thousands of imperial troops pillage Rome on 6 May 1527, as depicted by a 16th or 17th-century Italian artist

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scar Wilde’s decision to launch a libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry, who had accused him of “posing somdomite [sic]”, was the most unfortunate he ever made. The trial opened on 3 April 1895 and almost immediately it was obvious that Wilde was in deep trouble. When the defence announced that they had found several male prostitutes who would testify that they had had sex with Wilde, the playwright dropped the case – but, even as he left the courtroom, the authorities were drawing up a warrant for his arrest on charges of gross indecency. At Wilde’s ﬁrst trial, which opened on 26 April, the jury was unable to reach a verdict. Three weeks later, a second trial began at the Old Bailey, prosecuted by the Liberal government’s solicitor general, Sir Frank Lockwood. Wilde wrote later that Lockwood had issued an “appalling denunciation – like something out of Tacitus, like a passage in Dante, like one of Savonarola’s indictments of the popes of Rome”. This was an exaggeration: by the standards of the day, Lockwood’s closing statement was remarkably restrained. But it is easy to understand why Wilde was so distraught. On 25 May, the foreman announced the jury’s verdict: guilty. There were cries of “Shame!” from the gallery, and Wilde turned grey with horror. “It is no use for me to address you. People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame, and one cannot hope to produce any effect upon them. It is the worst case I have ever tried,” said Mr Justice Wills, who sentenced Wilde to two years of hard labour. It was, he added, “the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgment it is totally inadequate for a case such as this.”

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BBC History Magazine

AKG-IMAGES

n the early 16th century, Italy was a dangerous place to live. Torn apart by endless wars between the French king, Francis I, and his bitter rival, Charles V, king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, the peninsula had become a byword for massacres, plunder and rapine. But nothing made a greater impression on the European imagination than what happened on 6 May 1527, the day the imperial army hurled itself on Rome. The sack of Rome was never part of Charles V’s plan. His troops had already beaten the French; the problem was that funds had run short – so the imperial army’s commander, the Duke of Bourbon, had effectively lost control over his own men. Only by promising them loot from the capture of Rome did the duke manage to prevent a full-scale mutiny. And so it was that on 6 May, at

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GETTY

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

Oscar Wilde photographed in 1882, 13 years before his conviction for gross indecency. His attempt to sue the Marquess of Queensberry for libel resulted in his own prosecution – which led to imprisonment, self-imposed exile and early death

BBC History Magazine

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Anniversaries 19 May 1536 Charged with adultery, incest and treason, Henry VIII’s second wife, the enigmatic Anne Boleyn, is executed at the Tower of London.

26 May 1805 Napoleon (right) claims the title of king of Italy and is crowned with the medieval Iron Crown of Lombardy in Milan’s magnificent cathedral.

15 May 1982 Attacked by Argentine Skyhawk aircraft off the coast of the Falkland Islands, the British destroyer HMS Coventry is sunk. The attack takes the lives of 20 crew.

14 May 1264

Montfort crushes Henry III’s hapless army at Lewes The king suffers an early setback in the Second Barons’ War n the long list of royal catastrophes, the battle of Lewes holds an especially ignominious place. Like his father, the ill-starred John, Henry III had spent decades feuding with his barons while attempting to raise money. In particular, he found himself pitted against the ruthless Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, who was determined to uphold the principles of Magna Carta and secure

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more power for England’s magnates. Both sides had begun preparing for war in the early 1260s, but it was not until 14 May 1264 that their armies clashed in earnest. Montfort had cornered the royal army in the Sussex town of Lewes. The night before battle was joined, the barons’ leader slept not a wink, preferring instead to give his time “to divine ofﬁces and prayers

and exhorting his men to make sincere confessions”. Montfort need not have worried. When battle commenced the following day, the royal troops’ lack of discipline proved fatal. Though the king’s son, the future Edward I, led a stirring cavalry charge that broke his enemy’s left wing, he was unable to rally his men back to their positions. In the confusion, Montfort’s men crushed the rest of the king’s army. Henry himself – who was almost 50 years old – fought bravely, but to no avail. By evening, he and his son had retreated to Lewes Priory, and the following day they formally surrendered to Simon de Montfort. It was one of the most humiliating moments in Plantagenet history.

BBC History Magazine

BRIDGEMAN/GETTY

Henry III tastes bitter defeat to powerful baron Simon de Montfort at the battle of Lewes, depicted in a 19th-century illustration. Grasping his new power, Montfort called his great parliament the following January

A handful of British defenders rest while mustered at Musson’s Corner during the six-month siege of the dusty town of Mafeking between October 1899 and May 1900

16 May 1900

Mafeking is relieved The South African town’s defenders enjoy victory after 217 days besieged he Boer War began disastrously for Britain. The autumn of 1899 saw one defeat after another, while at Mafeking, on the border between British-held Cape Colony and the Transvaal, some 1,500 British troops were surrounded by a far larger Boer army. On 12 October the telegraph lines were cut; four days later the ﬁrst Boer shells landed in the dusty little town. Yet for more than 200 days, the defenders held out. Inspired by their commander, Colonel Robert BadenPowell, they not only laid fake landmines and mounted daring diversionary attacks, but always made time for Sunday cricket matches. In Britain, the valiant resistance of the Mafeking defenders gripped the public imagination. By May 1900, with a relief column on its way, it seemed that everybody was waiting for news of victory. And, at last, it came. Late on the

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evening of 16 May, the defenders heard ﬁring to the north. At about 7.30pm, seven British cavalrymen rode into the town. As they paused, tired and dusty, a passer-by said casually: “Oh yes, I heard you were knocking about.” The main relief column arrived in Mafeking just before four o’clock next morning. By then, crowds had poured into the streets, ﬁlled with unbridled joy. “One man tried to speak; then he swore; then he buried his face in his arms and

sobbed,” wrote a watching reporter. But that was as nothing compared with the reaction back home: a week’s worth of hysterical rejoicing ensued, complete with street parties and ﬁreworks. The defenders of Mafeking, wrote the author FT Stevens, “carried themselves like Britons of the old breed… and because they played the game and played up well, and played to the end, and by the will of God have won, we honour them and count the country richer this day for them.”

COMMENT / Dr Spencer Jones

GETTY

“The courage and dedication of the Mafeking Cadets inspired Baden-Powell” The resistance to the siege at Mafeking provided rare positive news among the defeats of the early months of the Boer War. So when the town was relieved in May 1900, spontaneous ‘Mafeking Night’ celebrations erupted across the country. Crowds ﬂooded London’s West End, singing, dancing and waving ﬂags; similar scenes were repeated in cities across the nation. A new word entered the English language: ‘mafﬁck’, meaning ‘to rejoice in a boisterous fashion’. Robert Baden-Powell returned to Britain as a national hero. He was promoted to inspector general of cavalry,

BBC History Magazine

and introduced reforms that would prove their worth during the First World War. During the siege, Baden-Powell had employed a force of uniformed boys known as the Mafeking Cadets as lookouts and messengers. The courage and dedication of the boys impressed Baden-Powell, inspiring him to found the Boy Scouts in 1908. The opening pages of the organisation’s handbook, Scouting for Boys, paid tribute to these forgotten defenders of Mafeking, noting that they did “right good work”, and holding them as an example for Boy Scouts to follow. Backed by Baden-Powell’s celebrity status, the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides

became hugely popular. Though the siege itself is now largely forgotten, the legacy of Mafeking lives on in the worldwide Scouting Movement.

Dr Spencer Jones is a senior lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton. His latest book, Courage without Glory: The British Army on the Western Front 1915, will be published by Helion & Company in November 2015

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The latest news, plus Backgrounder 14 Past notes 17

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

The shape of things to come A 20th-century reconstruction of an Iron Age settlement at Heathrow in c500–300 BC. New research is suggesting that parts of London wouldn’t have looked so different from this hundreds of years later under Roman occupation

MUSEUM OF LONDON

Why Roman London wasn’t as ‘Roman’ as you might expect Researchers exploring early Londinium have made a surprising discovery: that parts of it would have looked very much like a Celtic village. By David Keys

BBC History Magazine

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ith a grid of streets and blocks of large, impressive buildings, the stereotypical image of a city in the Roman empire continues to leave a strong impression centuries later. However, new research has revealed that, in the ﬁrst years of its existence, London would have been very different: indeed, archaeologists now believe that some parts of the nascent Londinium would have looked more like a Celtic village than a Roman town. According to a 14-year study recently completed by researchers from Museum of

London Archaeology (MOLA), some parts of the early city featured clusters of Celticstyle roundhouses instead of the rectangular structures more traditionally associated with Roman architecture. Experts focused on 13 buildings, most of which would have measured between 5 and 7 metres in diameter, constructed in the 1st century AD on Ludgate Hill in what is now the City of London. It is the largest group of such roundhouses yet found in London. Archaeologists believe that these houses were inhabited by native British craftsmen

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History now / News

MEDICINE

How fear of STIs put the knife into cosmetic surgery

Celtic crafts Blue Celtic-style glass beads taken from the archaeological site in the heart of London. Experts believe that they would have been produced in a workshop in order to cater for the city’s expanding consumer market

involved in making Celtic-style glass beads for the expanding London market – much of which would have comprised local, non-Roman people. The roundhouses were arranged around a more traditionally ‘Roman’ rectangular building that functioned as a workshop. Archaeologists exploring the former site of that structure discovered two glass-melting hearths and a pit ﬁlled with ash, as well as unﬁnished Celtic-style beads and imported broken blue glass used as the raw material from which to make them. Five other roundhouses, dating from between AD 50 and 59, have also been found within a few hundred metres of the cluster. Antony Francis, MOLA project ofﬁcer, told BBC History Magazine: “The study of this roundhouse cluster has changed our view of early Roman London. The presence of native-style and Roman buildings at this stage in the capital’s history represents an important transition from Iron Age ways of living to Roman ones.” Other recently published research by University of Cambridge scholar Dr Lacey Wallace demonstrates clearly for the ﬁrst time that, during the ﬁrst three decades of its existence, London was not

“The study of this roundhouse cluster has changed our view of early Roman London” 12

just one settlement but, effectively, three. The ﬁrst, an administrative and mainly mercantile area, was located on and around high ground on Cornhill, to the north of London Bridge. A more hybrid Roman and native British area developed on and around Ludgate Hill while, on the other side of the Thames, a settlement grew up in the area that is now known as Southwark. In total, the three areas covered some 40 hectares. All three settlements were separated from each other by natural barriers. The Walbrook, a minor tributary of the Thames, kept the Cornhill and Ludgate Hill settlements apart, while the Thames itself kept both of those areas separated from Southwark. Evidence suggests that bridges were built to connect the three. Experts believe that the site that is now London developed into a town in around AD 50 because the Romans chose it as the location to build a bridge across the Thames. For the ﬁrst years of Roman occupation, Colchester, not Londinium, served as the province’s capital, and it was not until Boudica’s revolt in AD 60 and 61 – in which both cities were largely destroyed – that the status was transferred to London. Rapid growth followed, and a major expansion programme between AD 70 and 100 expanded the city from 40 hectares to 130. Yet those original 40 hectares of early Roman London remain elusive. So far, experts have investigated less than 5 per cent due to the fact that the archaeology of many areas was obliterated by the construction of deep basements in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

osmetic surgery may be considered a relatively modern phenomenon, but new research has highlighted its long history – and the reason that it fell out of favour in 17th and 18th-century Europe. A study, published in the journal Social History of Medicine, explores the work of 16th-century Italian surgeon Gasparo Tagliacozzi. His reﬁnements to methods of reconstructive surgery included forming a new nose from skin taken from a patient’s arm (see illustration below). The surgeon would ﬁrst use specially designed instruments to form a ﬂap of skin – known as a ‘pedicle’ – from the arm. This would then be connected to the nose, and the patient would have their arm bandaged in a raised position for up to three weeks until the skin was ﬁrmly attached. After another two weeks the link was severed, and the new skin shaped to resemble a nose. The procedure was complicated, and not without its critics. “Unless there was imminent threat to life, surgeons would not generally have wanted to intervene with painful procedures,” says the author of the study, Dr Emily Cock from the University of Adelaide. “There are also records of experts remarking that care should be taken to minimise scarring, particularly on the face.” However, Cock points to another, more surprising, reason why patients may not have elected to go under the knife: the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Symptoms of syphilis included ‘saddle nose’, which caused the bridge of the nose to cave into the face and the ﬂesh to rot away. The assumption increasingly became, therefore, that a patient seeking an operation on their nose would be doing so to cover the effects of a disease seen as morally and physically corrupt. “As the 17th century went on, the damage wrought by syphilis

BBC History Magazine

MOLA PUBLICATIONS: ROMANO-BRITISH ROUND HOUSES TO MEDIEVAL PARISH

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GETTY/BRIDGEMAN

A contemporary painting showing London’s ‘frost fair’ of 1683/84. A new study suggests that the Thames might not have frozen over as much as is widely thought

did seem to take over and, wherever talk of reconstruction arose, it carried the presumption that the operation would be used on a syphilitic patient,” Cock says. This new research is also important because, despite histories of cosmetic surgery suggesting that Tagliacozzi’s procedures were largely ignored by medical science after his death in 1599, Cock has found evidence that this was not the case. “I have managed to show that knowledge of the technique did continue through the period from 1600 to 1800 – it features in an English translation in a book published in London in 1687 and 1696, for instance,” she says. “This means that, as historians, we’re justiﬁed in looking harder for evidence that surgeons who knew about it – because they owned the relevant books – might have decided to give it a try. And on the ﬂip side, if they didn’t try it, what were the reasons that they didn’t?” Cock takes her argument beyond the 17th century, asserting that social stigma continues to police the practical application of medical science into the 21st century. “Here in Australia, a leading health insurer has recently come under ﬁre for classing follow-up procedures to reconstructive surgeries – including skin grafts for burns patients and nipple tattooing for women who have had breast reconstructions after mastectomies – as cosmetic and therefore not covered by insurance,” she says. “So again, we have perceived social opinion policing what medicine can and cannot do.” Matt Elton

Body work A 1597 depiction of surgery to repair the nose using skin from the arm. New research explores the social history of such procedures BB BBC BB BC C Hi H i ssto stto torry y Ma Mag M a azi zzii n ne e

SCIENCE

The new theory that is shutting the ‘Little Ice Age’ out in the cold It’s one of the most evocative images of London’s past: 17th-century shoppers browsing stalls on the frozen Thames. Yet, according to new research, the prominence of such events in the popular imagination may have led to the reality of the so-called European ‘Little Ice Age’ being overstated. First established in the 20th century, the concept of the European Little Ice Age (ELIA) suggests that the continent experienced a period of cooling from the medieval era up until roughly 1850. Evidence for the phenomenon has been sought by examining environmental factors such as variations in tree rings, and the timing of French grape harvests. It’s also been identiﬁed in less immediate sources, including works of art – most famously, Bruegel the Elder’s 1565 painting The Hunters in Snow, which depicts a deeply frozen landscape. However, a study by Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda, from University College Dublin, has called the theory into question. The authors used a range of statistical tests to examine reconstructed data of summer and winter temperatures from the Middle Ages onwards. The analysis led to some surprising results: although there was considerable evidence of a lasting shift in 1900, the only sustained change in mean temperature that the authors found before that date was a brief drop experienced in Switzerland in the 1810s.

Such ﬁndings run counter to the existing consensus on the ELIA, a fact that Kelly and Ó Gráda are aware make their study “provocative stuff”. However, the authors suggest that this divergence is due to the fact that they avoided using the common practice of ‘smoothening’, in which a ﬁlter is applied to the data in a bid to remove statistical ‘noise’ – extreme temperature readings caused by local weather observations. As such, it’s possible that the widely held view on historic climate change is based on a “statistical artefact”: in other words, the removal of certain data – rather than any long-term warming or cooling experienced by Europe’s population. However, the experts are keen to stress that historical climate changes remain important. “We are not claiming that extreme weather events did not matter; they clearly did,” says Ó Gráda. “In north-western Europe severe frosts, and cold and wet summers, led to several famines in the 1700s and 1800s. But random severe winters don’t make a Little Ice Age. Nor does our agnosticism towards the idea entail a denial of important changes in climate or the role that human activity may play. On the contrary, the apparent absence of major variations in European climate from 1200 to 1800 only makes the rise in temperatures in the late 19th and 20th centuries stand out as more of a structural, rather than a cyclical, phenomenon.” ME

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History now / Backgrounder

The historians’ view…

Why do global oil prices remain so stubbornly erratic? Amid talk of a supply glut, the price of oil has tumbled in recent months, with huge economic ramifications not just for Britain’s drivers but governments across the world. Two historians offer their verdicts on the fluctuations Interviews by Chris Bowlby, a BBC journalist specialising in history

In 1860 the price of oil went up to $20 dollars a barrel ($120 in today’s money). A few months later it went down to 20 cents ALEXANDER KEMP The oil industry as we know it got under way with the drilling of the Drake well in Pennsylvania in 1859, and the oil price has shown ﬂuctuations on a major scale for much of the time since then. In 1860 the price went up to $20 dollars a barrel (more than $120 in today’s money). A few months later it went down to 20 cents! That showed the effect of even a modest discovery on the supply and the total market, which was quite small in those days. For a long time afterwards, the main reason for price ﬂuctuations was signiﬁcant discoveries being made, which had an immediate effect on supply potential and therefore price. Examples are the discovery of the enormous Spindletop ﬁeld in Texas in 1901, the opening up of oilﬁelds in what is now Baku in Azerbaijan, and Russian oil coming onto the world market. So the

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supply side shocks have been there for a very long time, while the demand side shocks have been a more recent phenomenon. Improvements in technology for oil extraction have also had a major impact. For many years extraction was all onshore. Offshore was not regarded as very feasible, physically or economically, until more recently. After the Second World War, Gulf of Mexico ﬁelds in more shallow waters were opened up. The technology developed there was adapted for use in the southern North Sea. Deeper waters in the North Sea’s central and northern waters needed signiﬁcant new technologies: these were achieved in the 1970s and in turn have fed into the new technologies for fracking today. What of political involvement? In most countries the sovereign rights to extract oil belong to governments. That’s one reason why the exploitation of oil is always entangled with politics. Governments can always award rights and concessions to oil companies. Political involvement, in general, is inevitable. There have been plenty of international attempts to control oil prices by companies and governments. For example, in the late 1920s on the verge of the Great Depression, the price of oil fell dramatically. The chairmen of Shell, BP and Esso went to shoot grouse in Inverness-shire and to produce what became known as the Achnacarry agreement – an attempt to regulate the crude

Pumping units in action at an oil plant at Uhrice in the Czech Republic, March 2015. “Every time someone says: ‘This is it, we’ve reached peak oil production,’ there’s more,” says Ellen Wald

oil price outside North America (where there was anti-trust legislation) and, of course, outside communist areas. That agreement was on paper for a few years, but didn’t work all that well, as the Great Depression in the 1930s led to a big decrease in demand and the price continued to fall for some time. Opec, the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, was founded in 1960. By 1973 its members had about 53 per cent of world production, but didn’t have enormous market powers until the 1970s. Then, because of the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Egypt/Syria, Arab producers put a boycott on exports – in particular to the US and Netherlands [which had been supplying weapons to Israel] – and that led to the big oil shock of 1973–74, when prices rose more than 400 per cent. Governments for the ﬁrst time unilaterally took control of oil pricing. That encouraged them to try to use their powers for years afterwards.

Professor Alexander Kemp of the University of Aberdeen is ofﬁcial historian of the North Sea oil and gas industry

BBC History Magazine

An American driver runs out of petrol in 1973 during a shortage of oil triggered by the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East

Members of Opec began to assert influence over oil prices in 1974. But they have never had complete control

GETTY

ELLEN WALD I don’t see the recent drop in oil prices as a fundamental shift – a permanent loss of control by oil producers. Members of Opec began to assert inﬂuence over oil prices in 1974, but they’ve never had complete control. What’s happening now is in line with the long-term policies of a key oil producer, Saudi Arabia. The Saudi example shows the complex mix of private and political interests in the oil industry. Aramco, the Saudi oil company, used to be a wholly American-owned entity. Over time, the Saudis began buying shares of the company and in the 1980s they ﬁnally purchased the entire company.

BBC History Magazine

As the owners are the Saudi royal family, the nation’s rulers, they’re always thinking about what the oil price means for the long-term development of their country. Aramco has $800bn in cash reserves, and the cost of bringing a barrel of oil out of the ground in Saudi Arabia is much less than in the US. They don’t mind if the price of oil is low for a while because they don’t have great need of extra revenue right now. Other countries, such as Brazil and Russia, are suffering much more directly as a result of low prices. Iran and Nigeria also didn’t want cheaper oil. But Saudi Arabia has the largest reserves and so the most clout within Opec. The US has used control over oil production and supply for political ends in the past – for example putting pressure on Britain and France to withdraw troops from Egypt during the 1956 Suez crisis by threatening to withhold oil supplies from US sources when both countries had limited reserves. The US has new oil resources today thanks to fracking, but the amount it is producing is not going to affect the global picture that much. Having more of its own oil will probably not enable the US to disentangle itself from some political commitments even if it is less reliant on other countries’ oil. The energy industry today is entirely globalised.

American companies own assets all over the world and foreign companies own and operate American assets. Might the world become less dependent on oil? One thing we see from history is that every time someone says: “This is it, we’ve reached ‘peak oil’ production,” there’s more – something else is discovered. There’s been much talk of the end of the age of oil, as oil runs out and/or ‘cleaner’ energy sources are preferred. I don’t think we’re ever going to ﬁnd a perfect source of energy. But in the US, energy efﬁciency has reduced the amount of oil consumed, plus new technologies are making the use of oil cleaner. What happens historically is that different kinds of energy use and production co-exist for long periods. The age of coal is not yet over either. Electric cars are an important innovation – people see them as being cleaner – but they do still use power and that power’s generation may be more dirty than pollution caused by the car itself. Historically we have always had a mix of energy sources and that’s going to continue, including oil.

Professor Ellen Wald teaches at Jacksonville University and is a historian of the energy industry DISCOVER MORE BOOK The Squeeze: Oil, Money & Greed

in the 21st Century by Tim Bower (Harper Press, 2010)

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Browned Off and Bloody-Minded

The Liberation of the Camps

The British Soldier Goes to War 1939–1945 Alan Allport

The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath Dan Stone

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Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace, 1814–1852 Rory Muir

The Path to Victory 1769–1814 Rory Muir

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History now / Past notes PAST NOTES RE-ENACTING BATTLES OLD NEWS

Police kept at bay by robbers armed with a good burgundy Dundee Courier/ 30 August 1888 t might have seemed like a good idea to the three young men who broke into a Parisian villa one August evening. The owner was away in the country, allowing them to successfully pillage the entire place from top to bottom. Having collected a huge pile of pilfered goods, common sense would tell you to leave as fast as possible. However, the attractions of the larder and wine cellar proved too much for the young men, who settled in to the abandoned champagne and cognac with increasing delight. Unfortunately, strains of drunken singing were carried on the night air to the villa’s neighbours, who promptly called the police. Twenty men arrived to deal with the burglars, who had by now lit the gas, drunk the wine and become a little maudlin. They shouted and bellowed loudly enough to keep the small army at bay, which refused to enter the villa until the arrival of the police inspector. In the early hours he ﬁnally appeared, and, leading the charge, found the young men insensible on the ground, having kept the police at bay for the entire night with the remaining burgundy, two rusty swords and a ﬂintlock pistol. News story sourced from britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk and rediscovered by Fern Riddell. Fern regularly appears on Radio 3’s Free Thinking.

BBC History Magazine

Back in 1969, members of the Sealed Knot – now the biggest re-enactment society in Europe – act out the Civil War siege of Basing House

As re-enactors across the country get ready for this year’s campaigning season, Julian Humphrys looks at the origins of this martial hobby When were the ﬁrst battle re-enactments? The Romans regularly staged re-enactments of land and even sea battles as part of their public games. Unfortunately for the participants, health and safety did not feature on the list of the organisers’ concerns.

ILLUSTRATION BY BEN JONES

GETTY/BENJONESILLUSTRATION.COM

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Has the British Army staged battle re-enactments? Yes, and earlier than you might think. In 1638 members of London’s Honourable Artillery Company staged a mock battle between Christians and ‘Saracens’ and in 1645 a parliamentarian ofﬁcer in Kent tried to distract the local population from traditional May Day pursuits, which he saw as ‘ungodly’, by putting on a mock battle at Blackheath. Half his men played the parts of disciplined Roundheads, and half played unruly Cavaliers. The Royal Tournament regularly featured re-enactments of military events, while the hugely popular interwar Aldershot military tattoo was famous for its historical displays, which used large numbers of serving soldiers. The 1925 show included not only a re-enactment of Waterloo but also a re-creation of the burning of Moscow, carried out to the strains of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

When did battle re-enactment become a popular pursuit in the UK? Although one-off re-enactments were relatively common in Britain and elsewhere in the 19th century, battle re-enactment as a hobby traces its roots back to the era of peace and love. The year 1968 saw the foundation of two major societies: the Southern Skirmish Association, which recreates the American Civil War, and the Sealed Knot, which re-enacts the British Civil Wars. Why is it called the Sealed Knot? It takes its name from a secret royalist society that operated during the Interregnum. Founded by distinguished soldier and Sandhurst lecturer Brigadier Peter Young, it is Britain’s largest re-enactment society. One of its earliest events was held at Basing House in 1969. At that time it lacked a Roundhead wing and so numbers were made up from a variety of local sources, some of whom received a severe ticking off from Young when they started throwing clods of turf at advancing Cavaliers. The sheer novelty of the event ensured that it received considerable media coverage at the time, notably on Thames TV’s cult children’s show Magpie.

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Your views on the magazine and the world of history

LETTERS

A turn-up for the books

Ron Bateman (The Orwell Society) Swindon

The legacy of Monty’s hubris I have been a student of history, particularly relating to the Second World War, for more than 20 years. After reading Antony Beevor’s article The Race for Berlin (January), I am wondering – as I never did before – whether Field Marshal Montgomery’s behaviour could have changed the response of the Americans towards the Soviets in the outline of postwar Europe. By the time of the Yalta Conference, the negative feelings held by the American generals towards Montgomery – along with the reticence of President Roosevelt, then ill and tired – helped allow Stalin to gain the upper hand in eastern Europe and reach Berlin ﬁrst. I am not suggesting that all of this was Montgomery’s fault, but I wonder why Churchill permitted Montgomery to remain in such a powerful position, knowing that he was alienating the Americans – who were obviously in

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Bradley Langridge, Dagenham

A prisoner’s pain

A trainee tailor in the late 1940s learns to sew turn-ups – a sign of real freedom?

We reward the writer of the letter of the month with our ‘History Choice’ book of the month. This issue it is Ministers at War by Jonathan Schneer. Read the review on page 67

a much stronger position. Churchill needed the Americans to fortify his vision of a Soviet-free Poland, which could have drastically altered the postwar European map. I enjoyed Beevor’s article, which helped me to see the outcome of the Yalta Conference from a different point of view. Philinda Bell, New York

Re-evaluating Rudyard I found that Professor Michael Wood’s article on Rudyard Kipling rang very true (Michael Wood’s View, March). Kipling’s work has long been shunned or seen as irrelevant when nothing could be further from the truth. As a 21st-century nation, we have a tendency to look at the controversial writers of a different era as relics. Despite all of his controversial views, when we rack up a

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

I read your account of some of the ofﬁcers who were held as prisoners of the Germans during the First World War (How I Fell Captive to the Germans, February). My father – like me, named Harry Johnson – was born in 1895, and served as a private in the army in that war. He spoke very little about his experiences as a soldier but did tell me that he was wounded by a bullet in his knee, then was taken prisoner by the Germans. He recounted that, after his capture, the bullet was removed from his knee using a pair of rusty scissors. After recovering from the wound, he was put to work on a farm in Germany and continued to work there until the war ended and he was repatriated back to England. Harry Johnson, Coventry

Misplaced honour for Richard It is sad that the aeons of history too easily wash away savagery. All of the pious talk of Richard III being buried with dignity and honour belies his actual deeds. He was, like all kings of that period, a nasty dictator. Torture and hanging were routine. A peasant had no choice but to put down his plough and ﬁght for the king whenever it was demanded. The Richard III sycophancy split hairs about whether he should be buried in Westminster Abbey, Leicester Cathedral or St George’s Chapel in Windsor. Rather, we should ask this: where you would you rebury Saddam Hussein in 500 years’ time? This excessive glamorisation is not good for history. This is not to say that his bones should not be studied – but give honour where honour is due, not simply for the wearing of a crown. Derek Smith, London

Rudyard Kipling, pictured in 1928. Despite his fame as a writer, some of his views remain controversial

BBC History Magazine

TOPFOTO/GETTY

I did enjoy the article Dressed for Warr (March). Reading about the ban on turn-ups on trousers, I was reminded of an article written by George Orwell in his wartime ‘As ‘ I Please’ column in the Tribune. He was writing in reaction to an announcement by the Board of Trade lifting the ban on turned-up trouser-ends – hailed by one tailor’s advertisement as “a ﬁrst instalment of the freedom for which we are ﬁghting”. Orwell commented: “If we were really ﬁghting for turned-up trouser-ends, I should be inclined to be pro-Axis. Turn-ups have no function except to collect dust, and no virtue except that when you clean them out you occasionally ﬁnd a sixpence there.” However, he went on to argue in the article that clothes rationing had been a great “levelling process” and said he would “not mind seeing the whole nation in dyed battledress for ﬁve years if by that means one of the main breeding points of snobbery and envy could be eliminated”.

LETTER OF THE MONTH

list of our nation’s great writers, Kipling will always be a source of pride and a role model for young writers almost 80 years after his death.

SOCIAL MEDIA What you’ve been saying on Twitter and Facebook The Society of Antiquaries’ arched-frame portrait of Richard III was probably painted 30 years after his death

@HistoryExtra: After the success of the #RichardIII excavation, is it time to dig up other famous skeletons? Should we excavate the likes of Elizabeth I and the princes in the Tower? @Raugravine Leave acknowledged tombs and grave sites alone. Do not disrespect the dead Victoria Worsley I don’t see why people think it is unacceptable to ‘disturb’ our royals but don’t say a word about the Egyptians, whose remains are on display in museums for people to gawk over. Why do some get to be reburied with dignity, while others are deemed to be objects of display?

BRIDGEMAN

@MartinWalker666 Same ethics as animal bones/dinosaur bones – what’s dead is dead. Burial grounds have never been sacred

The true colours of Richard III

A Muslim perspective on Paris

Thank you for such a lovely collection of material in the Richard III collector’s edition. As a historian and art historian, though, I must take issue with Michael Hicks’ claim that “we know what Richard III looked like from the numerous portraits – black hair and brown eyes”. The main types – the Society of Antiquaries arched-frame portrait and the Windsor portrait (of which there are more numerous copies) – are very closely related. In composition, one is essentially a lateral inversion of the other, the chief differences being in the colour and pattern of the costume. Both show him with grey-blue eyes and (depending on the state of cleaning and condition of varnish) light to mid-brown wavy hair. The modern reconstructed bust based on the skull also has grey-blue eyes; its hair should be lighter and more curly, the colour seemingly taken from a photograph of one of the portraits before cleaning. The only images I can think of that show Richard with black hair and brown eyes are those of Sir Laurence Olivier in costume from his stage and screen appearances in the role.

I read with great interest both historians’ points of view on the Paris killings (Backgrounder, March) and fully agree with the two historians. I am Muslim, and lived in France for 20 years, then in London for 24 years. I am now living back in France, and I have to say that it is like a different planet to me. As much as I admire the citizens of France for rallying against terrorism and demonstrating that the French revolutionary spirit is far from dead, they have not addressed a number of issues concerning north African immigrants. I am afraid that, when discussing a lot of these thorny issues, it is all black and white here – and if you don’t ﬁt in the box, God help you! (But not in France).

Dr Marianne M Gilchrist, FSA Scot University of Glasgow

BBC History Magazine

R Thorn, Pays de Gex, France

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. email: [email protected] Post:

Alannah Travers The prospect of finding out so much about such intriguing historical figures (primarily the princes in the Tower) is ridiculously exciting. In my opinion, we should begin tomorrow! So long as the bones are treated with respect and reburied, I don’t see the problem Laura Goodlass My morals scream no, let them RIP, but the historian in me NEEDS to know if the boys buried in Westminster really are the princes in the Tower. However, if it turned out one or both were not what then do you do? The ethical debate would be bigger than that of where to reinter Richard! @HistoryExtra: What did you think of the reinterment of #RichardIII? Richard Foinette The service was excellent. However, some of the inane or incorrect comments detracted from the programme Donna Guevremont I thought it was a very dignified service and was so moving to watch. I loved the poem and the service @JamesAitcheson It was great to see medieval history make headline news, but the whole event became a little too theatrical for my taste. Lesley Sage It was dignified and special, but it was spoiled by some of the guests

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

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Comment

Michael Wood on… the cradle of civilisation

“Mesopotamia’s influence on the western world was profound”

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

program) that Uruk had the world’s earliest private treaty stock market: ‘the First Wall Street’. Writing, written law, contract law and international treaties are all found for the ﬁrst time in Mesopotamia. Not only does history begin at Sumer, in the south of the region, but so do law and economics. Until the rediscovery of ancient Iraq in the late 19th century, it was believed that the cultural progenitors of western civilisation were the classical world of Greece and Rome, and Judaeo-Christian religion. It was never suspected that the much older civilisations of the near east and Iraq had had a profound inﬂuence on the civilisations of the Mediterranean. It was not understood that in the invention of writing and literature, in mathematics, science, astronomy and geometry, in the invention of the wheel, the earliest law codes, Mesopotamia led the way. Even today when we count time and space in degrees and units of 60, we are following them. Mesopotamia’s inﬂuence on the thought of the western world was profound. The rediscovery of its ancient literature and poetry in the 19th century focused ﬁrst on its links with the Bible. The Flood, the Tower of Babel and Garden of Eden, it turned out, were all tales that predated the Old Testament. But scholars have been slower to see that ancient Greek literature too is full of Mesopotamian ideas – especially from story cycles about the legendary king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, which are among the most inﬂuential in human culture. Mesopotamian tales and motifs permeate Homer, Hesiod, the Arabian Nights, even down to Dante and medieval Shia mystical tales. Amazingly these tales still survived in oral traditions right down to living memory in south Iraq. In short, Mesopotamian civilisation, so rich in its visions and artistry and speculative thought, and in its sheer humanity, is still alive in all of us in the western and west Asian worlds – in the ways that we think, count time, and measure the world, and also in the stories that we love most: all born in what Fernand Braudel called this land of “singular destiny”. This is the legacy that the fanatics wish to erase.

REX FEATURES

An Iraqi friend just sent me pictures of the destruction of the monastery of Mar Behnam by the so-called Islamic State – spurts of ﬁre as a church founded in the fourth century was reduced to rubble. I remember a picnic there 25 years ago with the local Christian community: ﬂatbread, white cheese, olives and sweet black tea in the sunny foothills of Kurdistan. After the bulldozing of Nineveh, Nimrud and Hatra, it is another blow to the legacy of Iraq already so damaged by the 2003 war and its aftermath. It set me thinking about the history of Iraq, the birthplace of the ﬁrst civilisation. Like all great civilisations, Iraq had several ﬂowerings: Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Greek and Arab. It had many religious communities: Jewish, Christian, Manichaean, Sunni and Shia Muslim, Mandaean, Yazidi. Always a mixed pluralist society, it never had just one ethnicity. The roots of this melting pot lay far back in the history of the near east. Settled human societies began from about 10,000 BC in an arc through Syria, Palestine and Anatolia. But it was only when large scale irrigation technology was developed that the plain of southern Iraq was opened up to sustain a huge concentration of people and resources. In the fourth millennium came the ﬁrst large cities; a new form of society in the world. In the peak period of the third millennium BC there were around 40 in the Babylonian plain. Mainly independent city states, they were densely settled. Lagash had 36,000 male adults in the third millennium BC, perhaps 100,000 people altogether. Uruk, with its six-mile circuit, bigger than Rome at its height, maybe had more. Each controlled an extensive territory: at Nippur, 200 dependent villages clustered along dozens of canals. Such was the scale of the world’s ﬁrst urban revolution. It was enriched by a trade network which in the case of Uruk stretched to Anatolia, Syria and the Zagros. The world’s ﬁrst trading culture, it has also been argued (on the basis of 100,000 trade and market receipts from the third millennium analysed on a business computer

ILLUSTRATION BY FEMKE DE JONG

BBC History Magazine

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Britain’s greatest generation

On the eve of the 70th anniversary of VE Day, a new TV series focuses on the lives of those who served in the Second World War. Executive producer Steve Humphries reveals why this generation was so special Accompanies the BBC Two series Britain’s Greatest Generation

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here is no doubt that the generation that lived and fought in – and survived – the Second World War has a claim to being one of the greatest generations in British history. These survivors are now in their 90s or beyond; they are our parents, our grandparents, our greatgrandparents. And what they went through at comparatively young ages is difﬁcult to appreciate more than 70 years on. Not only did millions of Britons suffer through the Depression years but, when war came, they fought from the very beginning right through to the end in the cause of freedom and democracy. They saw their homes and families come under direct and sustained attack from German bombers. Then, after their hardwon victory, they endured 10 years of postwar rationing and austerity. This alone makes a convincing case for giving our greatest generation the honour they 22

deserve while the last surviving veterans of the Second World War are still with us. With most now in their ﬁnal years, this is the time to capture their untold stories and celebrate their achievements, not just during the most devastating war of the 20th century, but across the following decades and into grand old age. This is what we set out to do with a major BBC Two oral history series and an accompanying book, Britain’s Greatest Generation. The series begins by exploring distant childhood memories to discover what made them the uniquely resilient men and women they became. The impact of the 1914–18 war, with its tragic legacy of bereavement and disability, was their ﬁrst formative inﬂuence, but victory over Germany also meant that patriotism and pride in Britain and her empire was seeded early, reinforced by school, church and youth organisations. Popular literature played its part too: 94-year-old Freddie Hunn, a veteran of Dunkirk and north Africa, BBC History Magazine

“The interviews reveal many remarkable, untold stories of courage, camaraderie and humanity at every stage of the war”

remembered: “I could recite Kipling’s If word for word and I would gallop around imagining I was in the Charge of the Light Brigade.” Growing up in the inter-war years, many faced poverty and hardship. It was here that personal values were instilled by parents, and lifelong attitudes were forged by experience. Courage, initiative, honesty and fairness were highly valued; initiative and independence were developing too: “At the age of 15, I had the conﬁdence to cycle from London to Dorset and back again,” says Bob Frost, now 92. These personal qualities would stand them in good stead when war came. This generation would be among the ﬁrst in the front line.

Against all odds

REX

Jubilation knows no bounds on the streets of London on VE Day, 8 May 1945. Despite the delight, tough times were ahead for the British population, with austerity measures remaining in place throughout the next decade BBC History Magazine

The interviews reveal many remarkable, untold stories of courage and camaraderie at every stage: from the Battle of Britain to the Blitz, from Dunkirk to D-Day, on the front line and the home front, on the world’s oceans and in the air – and in far-ﬂung PoW camps. They are often stories of survival against all odds, like that of 92-year-old merchant seaman Austin Byrne. After his ship was torpedoed, he was adrift in a lifeboat in the Arctic Sea for four days with only hope to sustain him. “I started praying as I started bailing. I could get a bucket out to a Hail Mary and four out to Our Father.” There are as many affecting stories from women, whether making do on the home front, ﬁring heavy ack-ack guns, or operating code-cracking machinery at Bletchley Park. D-Day nurse Betty Evans, 93, speaks for many of them: “We didn’t have time to be frightened. There was a job to be done.” Though the war was the most memorable and most testing period of their lives, their work wasn’t ﬁnished. After victory came the job of rebuilding a more equal world around the new National Health Service and the welfare state. They then had to weather the storms of ﬁve decades of social change 23

Britain’s greatest generation

Case studies: Lives less ordinary

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The veteran runner

The shark attack survivor

The rocket woman

Jim Purcell – aka Jarra Jim

Sid Graham

Eileen Younghusband

‘Owld Jarra Jim’ is a legend in South Tyneside. Every year, the Second World War veteran puts on his running shoes to compete in the Great North Run. “I’m not as fast as I used to be,” he says, “and sometimes my shadow overtakes me. But I feel A1.” The 93-year-old’s story is emblematic of the extraordinary spirit of so many young working-class men who served in the war. Growing up in Jarrow during the 1930s, where 70 per cent of men were out of work, Jim had no shoes and had to run barefoot to school every day. In 1938, he volunteered to serve in the Royal Engineers and was part of the British Expeditionary Force miraculously rescued from Dunkirk. “I was petriﬁed on the beaches. I was saying little prayers to try to get my courage back.” He was later captured in Africa and became a prisoner of war. He was used as forced labour in the coal mines of Czechoslovakia, but secretly committed acts of sabotage to slow down production. After the war, he met and married local girl Betty, the love of his life with whom he had ﬁve children. Jim was heartbroken when Betty died in 1982 following heart surgery and took up running to overcome his grief. He has now competed in 28 Great North Runs. “Every time I run, I have Betty’s wedding ring around my neck.” This great-grandfather has since raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for charity and was thrilled to be chosen to carry the Olympic torch through his home town in 2012.

Sid is an extraordinary survivor. Born in London’s East End in 1920, the son of a seaman from Barbados, he has just celebrated his 95th birthday. Aged 15, he ran away to sea and later became a stoker on the Atlantic and Arctic convoys during the war. In early 1942, he was crossing the Atlantic in supply ship the Scottish Star when it was hit and sunk by a German torpedo. “We were in the lifeboat for 10 days and we were surrounded by sharks. We banged the oars on the side of the boat – bang, bang, bang – and they ﬂoated away!” Sid eventually made it back home six months later, but found his pay had been stopped from the day his ship went down, a common practice at the time. It’s something that still angers him, not least because the merchant seamen were doing some of the most dangerous wartime work of all – 30,000 died as a result of enemy action. Nevertheless, Sid continued to serve and was involved in the D-Day landings. He married Esther with whom he had 13 children and he now presides over an extended family of 118. Despite having suffered a major stroke, he battles on regardless and is adored by his large family who still see him as their ‘captain’. Very little attention has been given to the black, Asian and ethnic minority men like Sid who did such thankless but vitally important jobs in the war. Indeed, Sid has still yet to receive any medal or ofﬁcial recognition for his war service.

Eileen, now 93, was just 18 when she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) at the beginning of the war. After signing up, she quickly demonstrated her keen intellect and mathematical skills, playing a crucial role in Fighter Command’s underground Filter Room. Doing gruelling shifts and under enormous pressure, she worked around the clock, tracking the enemy aircraft attacking Britain. Using information supplied by Britain’s pioneering radar network, she and her fellow ‘ﬁlterers’ were making life-or-death decisions. Eileen was also involved in detecting and helping to destroy Hitler’s devastating V2 rockets targeted on London. After the war – and happily married – she continued to live life to the full as a pig breeder, hotelier and scrap-metal merchant. After losing her beloved husband and son, she embarked on a new adventure to help give her renewed purpose – studying for an Open University arts degree which she achieved with special honours in her 87th year.

“Using information supplied by Britain’s pioneering radar network, Eileen was making life-ordeath decisions” BBC History Magazine

TESTIMONY FILMS/JIM PURCELL, TESTIMONY FILMS/EILEEN YOUNGHUSBAND, TESTIMONY FILMS/ DOROTHY HUGHES, TESTIMONY FILMS/SID GRAHAM, TESTIMONY FILMS/GEORGE JOHNSON

The astonishing, emotional stories of some of the Britain’s Greatest Generation interviewees

The Dambuster

The Chelsea Pensioner

George ‘Johnny’ Johnson

Dorothy Hughes

‘Johnny’, now 93, is the last survivor of the Dambuster Raids, one of the most ingenious and daring operations of the war. How he ever got to play such an important role in such an iconic raid is remarkable and testament to his extraordinary tenacity. Born in Lincolnshire in 1921, the son of a farm foreman, he endured a loveless, impoverished childhood where as a young boy he was effectively treated as a slave. His plight – and his talents – were discovered by his village schoolteacher who helped him get a place at Lord Wandsworth College. This was the making of him. When war broke out, he volunteered for the RAF, serving as a gunner and bomb aimer in Bomber Command’s sorties over Germany in the early years of the war. But his most dangerous mission came in 1943 after he joined the elite 617 Squadron when it was tasked with the seemingly impossible mission of destroying three dams deep within Germany’s Ruhr Valley. On 16 May 1943, Johnny set off alongside 132 specially selected comrades and scored a direct hit with his bomb. Sadly, 53 of his colleagues never came back. Understandably, Johnny still becomes emotional when he recalls the raid and the high price paid by his colleagues. He also movingly recalls how Barnes Wallis, the technical wizard who invented the ‘bouncing bomb’, never got over the heavy death toll on the Dambuster raid that he helped mastermind.

In 2009, Dorothy became one of the ﬁrst two women to enter the ranks of the world-famous Chelsea Pensioners, joining more than 300 male pensioners at London’s Royal Hospital. It was a ﬁtting tribute to a Welsh girl from a humble rural background who joined the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) aged just 16 and worked alongside the rescue services during the Swansea Blitz of 1941, helping the homeless and the injured. Determined to do more, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service and served with a heavy anti-aircraft battery in London, then on the Kent-Sussex coast, fending off V1 ﬂying bombs and dangerous ‘scalded cat’ raids (quickﬁre attacks by fast-ﬂying enemy aircraft). On the way, Dorothy had to overcome much class, sexist and anti-Welsh prejudice from those who thought she wasn’t up to the job. “It was a constant battle,” she says, “and not just against the Germans.” Dorothy was expecting yet more prejudice when she prepared to break the mould at the Chelsea Hospital. Her husband had died 18 years before and she applied for a place, looking to make new friends and a new life. However, she was pleasantly surprised at the warm reception she received. “I felt very humble. I never expected to be accepted. But it’s been wonderful. I feel like Cinderella at the ball.”

BBC History Magazine

when many of the values and attitudes they’d cherished were rejected by their own children in the heady days of sixties permissiveness. But this generation proved adaptable: many welcomed the changes that brought the end of prewar inequality and prejudice based on class, colour or gender. And at last those, like George Montague, 91, could leave the pretence of his marriage and live his life openly as a gay man. “It was like going to heaven,” he says now. “I could be who I really am.” Although quietly proud of what they had done in the war, only a few of the many hundreds we spoke to in making this series wanted to tell their stories on camera. They felt they hadn’t done anything special at all and so needed a lot of persuading. Often they said they couldn’t remember much – it was all such a long time ago. But, as I questioned them, they were amazed at the memories that came ﬂooding back, together with emotions of love, guilt, pain, fear and anger that had long been buried. Secrets were revealed and tears were shed. Often the men were more tearful than the women. Now, very late in life, they were at last able to express feelings of sadness and loss that had been kept under control for a lifetime. It is a mark of the character of the wartime generation that very few of their stories reﬂected on their own bravery or importance. These were always played down; they were just doing what anyone else would have done. In meeting these men and women, I have been deeply moved. The experience reminded me of the debt we owe them. So, is this really Britain’s greatest generation? The last survivors are far too modest to make such a claim for themselves. Of course they had their faults as well as their virtues, but I believe this generation made unique personal sacriﬁces in the name of freedom and helped build the modern world, with all its beneﬁts, that we enjoy today. That’s what makes them not only distinctive, but great. From my point of view, as a child of Britain’s greatest generation, it has been a special privilege to tell their story. Steve Humphries is an award-winning ﬁlm-maker specialising in social history documentaries. He is co-author, with Sue Elliot, of Britain’s Greatest Generation, which was published by Random House in April DISCOVER MORE TELEVISION The ﬁrst episode of the four-part series

Britain’s Greatest Generation will be broadcast on BBC Two in May and available at bbc.co.uk/iplayer ON THE PODCAST

You can hear the recollections of George ‘Johnny’ Johnson on our podcast historyextra.com/podcast/britainslast-dambuster

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Opinion

Why Churchill’s reputation is still on the line Contrasting biographies of the iconic leader show how perceptions of historical figures change with the passing of time, says David Cannadine

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BBC History Magazine

TOPFOTO: THE IMAGE SHOWS CAPTAIN CUTHBERT ORDE’S PORTRAIT OF CHURCHILL IN 1940

R

eputations rise and fall over the course of time – even those of national icons. The 50th anniversary of the death of Sir Winston Churchill provides another opportunity to assess – or to re-assess – his place in history. For much of his life, he was a deeply controversial ﬁgure. As he himself well knew, though, changed perspectives on such people invariably bring changed interpretations. This is what he wrote of his father, Lord Randolph, and of politicians in general, at the close of his ﬁlial biography: “The eulogies and censures of partisans are powerless to affect his ultimate reputation. The scales wherein he was weighed are broken. The years to come bring weights and measures of their own.” A third of a century later, Churchill made the same point, more elaborately, in his speech in the House of Commons on the death of Neville Chamberlain: “In one phase, men seem to have been right; in another, they seem to have been wrong. Then again, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion, there is another scale of values.” Such changes in interpretation, based on time’s lengthening perspectives, are well illustrated by comparing two very different appraisals of Winston Churchill himself, which had in fact been commissioned under similar auspices. The ﬁrst was published in the supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography, covering the years from 1961 to 1970, and which came out in 1980; the second appeared in the completely revised and multi-volume Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), which came out in 2004. The ﬁrst entry was contributed by Sir Edgar Williams, who was one of the co-editors of the 1961–70 volume and who had earlier seen service in the Second World War as General Montgomery’s foremost intelligence ofﬁcer. The second was provided by Paul Addison, a distinguished historian of 20th-century Britain, with numerous books to his credit, including a study of Churchill on the Home Front, 1900–1955, published in 1992. Williams never wrote much, but this did not prevent him from assigning the article on Churchill, which was the longest entry in the 1961–70 volume, to himself. It was by no means uncritical, noting that Churchill made too many political enemies before and during the First World War, and that in some ways he had only himself to blame for his political isolation during the 1930s. But its tone was

BBC History Magazine

generally favourable and eulogistic, with extensive quotations from the memoirs of Lord Ismay (Churchill’s chief military assistant during the Second World War) and Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated essay Mr Churchill in 1940. He was, Williams concluded, “a most extraordinary human being” who became “a legend in his lifetime”. For Williams and his wartime generation, this seemed the deﬁnitive – and appropriately grateful – verdict. He dismissed Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–65 (1966), a prying account penned by Churchill’s personal physician Lord Moran, as “distasteful”. And he damned Robert Rhodes James’s pioneering piece of revisionism from 1970, Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900-1939, as merely “useful”.

A scholarly avalanche By contrast, Paul Addison is too young to remember the Second World War and – in his essay for the ODNB, published a quarter of a century after Williams’s entry – he wrote of Churchill as a historical personality rather than a contemporary ﬁgure. In so doing, he was much assisted by the completion of the ofﬁcial biography (which had not reached 1940 when Williams wrote his entry), as well as by the avalanche of scholarly work that has appeared on Churchill in recent decades. Eschewing both excessive hagiography and unrelenting iconoclasm, Addison depicted Churchill as a man of often unstable judgment who made many mistakes and many enemies: (“Hyperactive and transparently on the make, he was far from the English ideal of a gentleman.”) But, he concluded, in an even-handed verdict which certainly seems appropriate for our times and from our perspective: “Churchill sometimes blundered, but his giant stature does not rest on the claim that he was always right. Right or wrong, he was an exceptionally great man by virtue of the extraordinary range of qualities he possessed.” The contrasts between these two interpretations of Churchill’s life are fascinating and instructive, and I ﬁnd them to be especially so. In part, this is because I am myself a historian of modern Britain, which means it is impossible to avoid encountering Churchill and to wonder what to make of him. But it is also because I have recently become the editor of the ODNB and, in commissioning future entries, I am well aware that the issues raised by comparing how Williams and Addison wrote about Churchill are no less valid – and vexing – when dealing with the recently deceased. These issues are especially pronounced in

“Should I ask someone who knew Margaret Thatcher to write her biography? Or should I prefer a historian who will seek a longer perspective?” the case of Margaret Thatcher, whose entry I must soon commission. Should I ask someone to write it who knew her, admired her and can vividly convey what she was like, up close and personal, in the full plenitude of her power? Or should I prefer a historian, who will seek to set and situate her life in a longer historical perspective? There are serious arguments in favour of both options, and this reminds us of the essential truth of Churchill’s observation that posthumous reputations do go up and down, as is abundantly plain in his own case, as well as that of his father. The lengthening vista of time may enhance a person’s standing – or it may diminish it. For example, since their deaths, Clement Attlee’s reputation has gone up, whereas that of the artist Augustus John, once the British establishment’s bohemian darling, seems to have sunk irretrievably. But in the case of Jimmy Savile, the collapse in his reputation came much more quickly: at his death in 2011, he was hailed by some as a secular saint, but no one would claim that now. The recent entry published on him in the ODNB vividly describes his posthumous exposure and fall from grace. As Shakespeare observed, centuries before Churchill had the same idea, “reputation is an idle and most false disposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving”. David Cannadine is one of Britain’s leading historians and editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. His latest book is George V: The Unexpected King (Allen Lane, 2014) DISCOVER MORE TELEVISION The documentary Churchill:

Winning the War, Losing the Peace is due to air on BBC Two this spring ON THE PODCAST To listen to David Cannadine discuss the

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on our podcast, go to: historyextra.com/ podcast/life-workhouse-and-britishbiographies

27

A history of India

The many lives of

India In his new BBC Radio 4 series, Sunil Khilnani will tell the story of India through 50 of its most interesting historical characters. He talks to Rob Attar about a number of the figures who made it onto the list and tackles some of the big questions of India’s past Listen to Sunil Khilnani ON THE PODCAST

Accompanies the BBC Radio 4 series Incarnations

You’ve said in the past that very few weak tradition of biography. It is very popular Indians from history are well known in when it comes to British or American history, the west. Why do you think that is? yet in India you often have celebratory I think it is partly because India has often hagiographies, but biography has never been seen in terms of big collective groupings. really developed. We think of it as having religions, castes, languages and regional groups but we rarely Your new series tells the story of think of the individuals that have India. How is that defined made up India’s history. and when did India Then it is also partly actually become India? because of the way Indian In the series I take a simple history has been told: it view. Until 1947 I use the was initially the stories of term ‘India’ to refer to the dynasties such as the Indian subcontinent, Mauryans or Mughals essentially from the and, subsequently it has north-west border with been social history and Afghanistan down to the history from below which eastern border with is also all about groups. Burma. Then, from 1947, I would say, as well, that in I take India the nation state India has never boasted India there has been a very – so without Pakistan and a strong tradition of 28

biography, argues Sunil Khilnani

Mughal prince Dara Shikoh, and his eldest son, Sulaiman Shikoh. “These are people Indians are still engaged with,” says Sunil Khilnani. “They have a sense of the past that is very strong”

BBC History Magazine

BBC/BRIDGEMAN

Prince Dara Shikoh was executed by his brother… what might have happened if he had become emperor instead? B BB BBC B C History H i sto Histo Hi story t ry y Magazine M agazi Mag a in ne e

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A history of India

How did you select the people for the series? It must have been difficult It was incredibly difﬁcult but in the end I managed to decide on 50, of whom some are very well known in India and some almost completely unknown. All of them were people who interested me and in the end this is my take on how to think about Indian history. I chose these 50 knowing that there would be some controversy over them but I didn’t select them perversely. I’m sure everyone will have their own list of 50 and that’s great because I want there to be an argument about this. This is my attempt to stimulate a debate. The series opens with the Buddha. Is he the first person we can really speak about historically in India’s past? I wanted all of my choices to be real historical ﬁgures and I think it is the case that the Buddha is the ﬁrst individual in Indian history of whom we have actual evidence. We know he lived, we know roughly where he was born, we know where he ﬁrst taught and where he died. For me he is the ﬁrst historical ﬁgure who has the complexity of a human being and who steps out of the depths of history and speaks to us.

body of Sanskrit manuscripts about science and mathematics of which only about 10 per cent have been published. Prior to the age of European exploration, was there much contact between India and the civilisations of the west and Middle East? This is one of the commonplaces about Indian history: that somehow it was hermetically sealed until it encountered the west in the 15th and 16th centuries. It’s an idea that I wanted to explode in my series because the fact is that right back to the time of the Buddha, India was in contact with a variety of different cultures. The Buddha lived in today’s Bihar [a state in north-east India], and northern India at that point had many connections with Persia and the Middle East. Then in the centuries after his death, the Greek world was also in contact with this area. There was regular trade with Europe, even in the south of India, and there were also many connections with south-east Asia and Africa. Really from its earliest history, India was a crossroads and not a sealed bubble waiting for Europe to discover it. Taking the Buddha again, within a couple of centuries of his death, his teachings had spread down to Ceylon (as it was then called) and to the far east and China. India was both absorbing things from other countries and sending its ideas and cultural and material products out into the rest of the world.

When the British first arrived in India at the start of the 17th century, would it be true to say that Britain was actually behind India in terms of its development? I think it’s mixed but certainly when the British really started to develop a presence in In one episode of the series, historian the 18th century, India’s share of world trade William Dalrymple says that the was very signiﬁcant. surviving Indian classical literature is It’s also true that the British came to India, far more extensive than that of the not because it was poor and undeveloped but Romans and Greeks. Would you agree? because it had very sophisticated textiles and It is certainly true that there was an extraormanufactured products as well as its abundinary wealth of writing and dant natural resources. thinking in ancient India. It is The British were interested in also true that it is little known what India had to make and in the west. People may sell and they also encounhave heard of the epics like tered a country that had Mahabharata or the quite sophisticated Ramayana, but beyond military technologies and that there is a whole architecture. In the early range of intellectual encounters between writings on medicine, Britain and India, it was philosophy, science and a meeting of two cultures mathematics that we still that were equals. A sixth-century statue of have very little knowledge of. Later, the 18th-century the Buddha, one of For example there is a vast British scholar William Jones 50 signiﬁcant Indians

From its earliest history, India was a crossroads and not a sealed bubble waiting for Europe to discover it – a remarkable man whom you’ll meet in the series – came to India, discovering ancient works he judged to be as good as those of Homer and Shakespeare. Now of course this quickly tipped over, and within 50 years the British no longer thought of Indians as equals. But in the initial moment there was a sense that India had at least as much to offer, as Britain had to offer it. What happened to India, then, that meant that it fell behind the west in these years? A number of things happened in the second half of the 18th century that knocked India off course. One element was military confrontation with the west, when both Britain and France were struggling for control of the country. The British in particular managed to defeat some very important Indian kingdoms and princely states. Remember the British were operating not as a state but through a rogue company, the East India Company, which had very little controls over it and was able to grab large chunks of land and dispossess Indians. It is in this period, from the 1780s to 1840s, when India ended up becoming a subordinate culture to the British. Now of course Indians themselves bear a lot of responsibility for the fact that they didn’t develop strategic responses to the British. They didn’t come together, and allowed themselves to be outﬂanked and outmanoeuvred. This is just a kernel of the story but it’s a complex situation and I think that actually as historians we still don’t have a fully satisfying answer to this question. Another major debate of this era is about the impact of British rule in India. Do you see it as more of a positive or negative influence on the country? These long-term encounters between cultures are always mixed in their outcomes. There is no question that the colonisation by Britain

chosen by Sunil Khilnani

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BBC History Magazine

BRIDGEMAN

Bangladesh and so on. I’m not being too strict with that and, for instance, I will be including Mohammad Ali Jinnah who was the ﬁrst leader of Pakistan, because for all but the last year of his life [he died in 1948] he was part of the history of India. In the series I also want to raise the second part of your question as to when India really becomes a civilisation and a culture that is conscious of itself. I don’t want to prejudge this question but I hope the answer will gain some clarity through the programmes.

An aristocrat rides on horseback in this work by the masterly 18th-century artist Nainsukh, “who painted with wonderful precision and equal boldness”

BRIDGEMAN

did many negative things to India. It affected the economic opportunities of many Indians, divided them against each other, introduced a kind of racism into Indian life and led to 150 years of subjugation. On the other hand, the encounter with Britain opened India up to ideas. Several people in my series from the 19th and 20th centuries, including activist Jyotirao Phule, politician BR Ambedkar and even Gandhi himself, learned English and were opened up to western ideas, adopting Enlightenment principles and using them against the British. They said: “You profess to believe in the equality of man and the rights of human beings and yet you are not following these principles.” The intellectual encounter was a very rich and complicated one for Indians and it opened up a new way of thinking about society: what it was to be free, what it was to be an individual, what justice was and so on. You see the legacy of this in the Indian constitution and the embrace of democracy now. I’m not saying that democracy was a gift from the British to India – the Indians had to ﬁght for it – but the principles of democracy became more powerful because Indians were exposed to these ideas. How much do the historical figures in your series shape the India of today? Quite a lot actually. I thought that would be the case and then in the extensive travel I’ve done to make this series I found it to be even more true than I expected. Someone like the Buddha, for instance, is BBC History Magazine

now an inspiration to India’s former untouchables [the lowest in the Hindu caste system], who are now known as Dalits. To them he was someone who wanted to do away with the caste system and promote what they see as a more egalitarian society. Or take someone like the third-century BC emperor Ashoka. Today he is everywhere in India – his symbol is on Indian currency, so he’s there in your hands. And then when India launched its ﬁrst satellite into space they named it after the sixth-century AD mathematician Aryabhata. These ﬁgures that we might think are from the remote past do have afterlives and are used in popular memory for many different purposes. How do modern Indians feel about history in general? Are they as passionate about it as we are in Britain? It’s often been said, including by the British, that the Indians don’t care about their past. However, what you see is actually a pretty intense connection. That doesn’t mean that Indians are always looking for exact factual records or doing their best to preserve historic documents or buildings (although they should be) but it does mean that they are engaging with the past in a way that is still an argument for them. The Buddha is still a contested ﬁgure today. So too is the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh, who was defeated and executed by his brother Aurangzeb, leading people to question what might have happened if he had become emperor instead. Or, take Ram Mohan Roy, the 19th-century Bengali reformer who was

involved in the abolition of sati [where some women would commit suicide on their husbands’ funeral pyres]. These are people who Indians are still engaged with and whom they still think about. In this way, Indians do have a sense of the past that is very strong. If you could meet a person from your series, who would you chose, and why? I would be very interested to meet the 18th-century painter Nainsukh, who is part of the miniature painting tradition and painted with wonderful precision but equal boldness. We have only come to know of him recently through the work of art historians and we still have very little information about him. I would just love to watch him work and to ﬁnd out what he believed himself to be doing in these extraordinary paintings.

Sunil Khilnani is Avantha professor and director of the King’s India Institute, King’s College London. His books include The Idea of India (Penguin, 2012) DISCOVER MORE RADIO Incarnations is due to begin on

BBC Radio 4 on 11 May. The second half of the series is set to be broadcast in the autumn ON THE PODCAST

Listen to more from this interview with Sunil Khilnani on our weekly podcast historyextra.com/podcasts

31

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COVER STORY

The great misconceptions BRIDGEMAN

of the

Civil War It was an accidental war. It was fought by gentlemen. Cromwell was the key to victory… Our experts explode 10 myths of the seismic 17th-century conflict Interviews by Daniel Cossins

In this 17th-century woodcut, parliamentarians (right) urge their dog to “Bite him Peper”, while royalists respond “To him Pudel”

BBC History Magazine

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Civil War misconceptions

1

War broke out by accident Wrong, says John Adamson

John Adamson is author of The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007) The Earl of Warwick was prepared to use force against Charles I as early as 1640

34

An illustration showing Civil War-era militiamen. By the end of the conﬂict, both sides were forcing men to ﬁght for them

2

Cavaliers were aristocrats, Roundheads were yeomen Wrong, says Ronald Hutton When I was a schoolboy, there was a textbook on the Tudor and Stuart period, part of which followed the fortune of a mythical family from 1485–1660. When the family divided during the Civil War, the two brothers were pictured arguing; the text pointed out that the elder, the Cavalier, wore satin and lace, while the younger, the Roundhead, wore linen and leather. It went on to state that the Cavaliers were mostly formed of aristocracy and gentry, while the Roundheads were drawn from the lesser gentry and the middle classes. The reality was that, to challenge the authority of the king, parliament had to have a substantial number of great nobles on its side. In the words of John Adamson, it was a “noble revolt”. The older nobility, who had served in government and at court, tended to ﬁght against the king (their long-establishment gave them a greater conﬁdence in challenging the crown). The classic royalist noble tended to hail from a family that had not been involved in government or court, or a nouveau riche who had got their title since 1600.

Both sides had more or less equal support among the rest of society. And on both sides, rank-and-ﬁle troops on the ground came from the lower classes and fought for the same reasons: partly ideological, but mostly because big money was offered upfront for service at the beginning of the war. Then, when the money ran out, they were conscripted by force by both sides. But there is a twist to the story. Both sides gradually pushed out the nobility from their armies during the course of the war, because in order to win, they had to grab talent wherever they found it rising. By 1649, just 8 per cent of the senior ofﬁcers in parliament’s New Model Army had been to university, by then the mark of a gentleman. When you look at the king’s ﬁeld ofﬁcers throughout the war, you ﬁnd that three-quarters of them didn’t have a coat of arms. In other words, they weren’t even drawn from the class that traditionally ran local government, let alone central government. Ronald Hutton is professor of history at the University of Bristol BBC History Magazine

BRIDGEMAN/TOPFOTO

This misconception has a long pedigree. It came about because, at the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, a number of those involved in raising forces against the king were still alive. They peddled the idea that the war was an accident and that no one was to blame; that the war “came out of the mist”, as the parliamentarian Bulstrode Whitelock had it. But it’s untrue. Recent archival research has revealed that Charles I’s aristocratic opponents, particularly the group around the Earl of Warwick, were preparing to use military force as early as the summer of 1640. They did this by calling in the Scottish army and by suborning English militia regiments that had been mobilised to meet the Scottish challenge. Warwick’s group had a military strategy in case the king refused to call a parliament: four Yorkshire militia regiments were to join the Scots and march on London. This was the backdrop to the ﬁrst two years of the Long Parliament, called by Charles I in November 1640 in an attempt to raise money for war against the Scots. The king was aware that this group had committed treason. In fact, that was one of the reasons it was so difﬁcult to reach settlement over the constitutional impasse in 1640. The stakes had been raised for both sides. Charles I showed himself ready to risk a civil war from May 1640 with the plan to use Spanish troops against his own subjects. He also tried to arrest ﬁve members of parliament in January 1642. The parliamentarians expected to win a decisive victory that would force the king to accept his subordinate position. The war that followed was longer and bloodier than the belligerents had expected, but its outbreak was anything but accidental.

3

The 1641 massacres in Ireland were a one-sided affair

GETTY

Wrong, says Micheál Ó Siochrú The Irish rebellion of 1641 began as an attempt by Irish Catholics to defend their interests and recover lands that had been lost to Protestant settlers from England and Scotland. But it descended into a horrifying sectarian bloodbath. It is one of the great deﬁning moments in Irish history. But what actually happened remains highly contested. The focus of historical attention has been on the scale and ferocity of Catholic attacks on the Protestant settlers, and on the suffering of that community. Part of the reason for that is the surviving source material. When Protestant settlers ﬂed the rebellion for Dublin, many gave testimony about their experi-

ences and about 8,000 of the depositions survive today, housed at Trinity College Dublin. The sheer amount of this evidence has meant that the narrative has been dominated by the Protestant experience. What isn’t present in the depositions, or in most surviving evidence, is the Catholic side of the story. There is no question that the Protestant settler community underwent a traumatic experience. But in the initial weeks of the rising, there were relatively few killings. What really triggered the cycle of violence were the brutal and absolutely indiscriminate retaliatory attacks carried out by the colonial government in November and

“What triggered the cycle of violence were the brutal retaliatory attacks carried out by the colonial government” December 1641. What quickly became clear was that they were targeting the entire Catholic population. You had summary justice, mass executions and the destruction of entire communities. This unrestrained violence generated a reaction and the violence spiralled, escalating into a full-scale sectarian bloodbath. The narrative of Protestants suffering at the hands of savage Catholics has played a key role in creating the British Protestant

identity still very much in evidence in the north of Ireland today. But it doesn’t explain what really went on in the ﬁrst six months of the rebellion. This was not a one-sided massacre but a period of unrestrained warfare, from both sides, with all its attendant horrors. Micheál Ó Siochrú is author of God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (Faber & Faber, 2009)

Catholics massacre Protestants in Ulster in a contemporary illustration. However, Catholics were also the victims of mass killings in 1641

35

Civil War misconceptions

4

Large numbers of people were unaffected Wrong, says Ann Hughes

Ann Hughes is professor of early modern history at Keele University A weight used to calculate the tax owed on wool. Tax rose by up to 1,000 per cent during the Civil War

Parliamentarian propaganda (1644) shows royalists killing women and children

5

It was a restrained and gentlemanly conflict Wrong, says Peter Gaunt In some quarters, there remains an impression that the Civil War was an almost ‘civilised’ conﬂict, waged in an restrained and reluctant manner by a small number of elite gentlemen. Commanders on both sides generally did try to adhere to the military codes of conduct and rules of war set out by king and parliament, but they had none of the squeamishness for war that has been suggested. They were committed warriors, ﬁghting for what they often believed to be a just cause, glorying in the defeat and, where necessary, destruction of the opposing force. The Civil War was a conﬂict of major battles and incessant, dour skirmishing, raiding and counter-raiding, of siege and storm. Although the scale of the ﬁghting, and of the atrocities was not as great as that seen on the continent during the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48, many historians now suggest that the English and Welsh experience was not so different from that particular European war as was once thought. To take one example, in December 1643 a party of royalist troops entered the village of Barthomley in Cheshire, whereupon a group of around 20 locals,

including women, sought refuge in the tower of St Bertoline’s Church. The royalist troops entered the church and forced the locals to come back down to ground level, both by burning pews and rushes at the foot of the tower to smoke them out – and by offering them quarter. However, when they emerged, 12 men were killed on the spot. Following the king’s truce in late summer 1643 with the Irish Catholic rebels who controlled most of Ireland – and his attempts to ship over troops from Ireland to ﬁght for him – parliament took a hard line against so-called ‘Irish’ royalist troops. Parliamentarian troops often treated any royalist soldiers and camp followers who were thought to have Irish connections brutally. Summary execution, with the killing, wounding or maiming of the women found travelling with them, almost became a matter of routine. So the image of a restrained, gentlemanly affair is fundamentally wrong, and should have no place now in our interpretations of the Civil War. Peter Gaunt is author of The English Civil War: A Military History (IB Tauris, 2014)

“Parliamentarian troops often treated royalist soldiers and camp followers with Irish connections brutally” 36

BBC History Magazine

TOPFOTO/BRIDGEMAN

At least one in 10 – or perhaps as many as one in ﬁve – men in England and Wales fought in the Civil War. It has been calculated that loss of life, in proportion to the national population of the time, was greater than in the First World War. Perhaps 85,000 people, mostly men but also women camp followers, died in combat. Up to 130,000 people were killed indirectly, primarily as a result of disease spread by troops. Many parts of the country saw ﬁghting, but everyone was affected by recruitment of troops and troop movements, which brought disease and compulsory boarding, usually without payment. National taxation was heavier than ever before: perhaps 10 times prewar rates. And it reached down the social scale; an excise on many consumer goods had an effect on even those people too poor to pay taxes based on land or goods. Administration was affected in many areas, too, which meant poor relief was disrupted. The birth rate was 10 per cent lower in the 1650s than it had been 20 years earlier and the population stagnated. Disruption of trade and bad harvests meant the late 1640s were some of the hardest on record for ordinary people. So, the social, economic and cultural impact of the war is signiﬁcantly underestimated. It involved a massive and enduring expansion of the state’s capacity to extract resources from the population, and there was signiﬁcant familial and demographic upheaval. It was so traumatic in an English context that it was easier to try to forget about it.

6

Cromwell won the war for parliament

The quick-thinking strategist who brought military success to the parliamentarians was, in fact, Thomas Fairfax

TOPFOTO/BRIDGEMAN

Wrong, says Diane Purkiss Although Oliver Cromwell was important, the general who in fact led the New Model Army to victory was Thomas Fairfax, who was in charge of the infantry forces. It was Fairfax who shaped the New Model Army, who trained them, and who developed the strategy critical to their overall success. Parliament had to create the New Model Army because its own army had been destroyed. They were scraping around. People who were manifestly unﬁt for military service were called up, and it was Fairfax who was trusted with turning this job lot of rufﬁans into a proper military force. One of the crucial decisions he took was to promote to ofﬁcer rank on merit, rather than on social rank. Fairfax had to ﬁght a real political battle in the Commons and the Lords to push this through, but he succeeded, creating an army that was pretty much a meritocracy. In June 1645, Fairfax and his New Model Army caught up with the king outside Naseby in Northamptonshire, where parliament won a sweeping victory. Cromwell was responsible for the overall battle plan, but it was Fairfax who took the initiative in changing that plan during the battle. The royalists had assumed that the parliamentarians’ numerical advantage would be outweighed by the fact that they were a rabble of idiots. But when they realised the New Model Army was, thanks to Fairfax, actually very disciplined and well organised, they collapsed and ﬂed. Fairfax wasn’t one to brag about his own military skills, but in a crisis he had a terriﬁc sense of what needed to be done – and he did it. Eventually, his New Model Army besieged Oxford, capturing what was then the royal capital. What was also remarkable was that he did it all very decently. In contrast to the late-stage royalist army, which was renowned for looting and pillaging, Fairfax’s army was so disciplined and controlled that it’s rare to ﬁnd an account of it leaving a trail of death and destruction through the countryside. Fairfax retired to the country rather than accept the laurels due to him as victor – one of the reasons that the misconception about Cromwell winning the war arose. Diane Purkiss is author of The English Civil War: A People’s History (Harper Perennial, 2007) BBC History Magazine

7

Only British people fought Wrong, says Mark Stoyle

Half-German Prince Rupert fought for the king’s forces

In the last few decades, historians have been keen to emphasise the British-ness of the Civil War, but it’s often forgotten that there were quite large numbers of people from outside the British Isles involved. Most famous are the king’s relatives: Henrietta Maria, his French wife, who was head of a royalist army in the north in 1643, and his two half-German nephews, Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice. But scores of foreign specialists – experts in military engineering, artillery and fortiﬁcation – and cavalry commanders led both royalist and parliamentarian efforts. England had been at peace with itself for a long time, so English gentlemen didn’t have the military skills required. The majority of foreign soldiers came from France. There were also Protestants from France and the Netherlands who wanted to ﬁght against a king who often seemed to be allied with Catholicism. Then there were participants from outside western Europe.

One of the most famous foreign mercenaries was a Croat called Captain Carlo Fantom, who fought for parliament. When asked why he’d come to ﬁght, he said: “I care not for your cause, I come to ﬁght for your half crowns and your handsome women.” Some came from even further aﬁeld. The most exotic cavalry regiment was one that contained soldiers from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Ethiopia. When the New Model Army was ﬁrst formed, there were few foreigners involved. Indeed, several parliamentarians revelled in the idea that it was an army “entirely of our own nation”. Towards the end of war, there were three regiments of French cavalry ﬁghting for the king, which the parliamentarians made great use of in their propaganda. Such perceptions meant that ‘outlanders’ had an inﬂuence out of all proportion to their numbers. Mark Stoyle is professor of early modern history at the University of Southampton

37

Civil War misconceptions

8

For parliamentarians, it was a war of religion Wrong, says Rachel Foxley brought it to that issue at last and gave it to us by way of redundancy, and at last it proved that which is most dear to us.” Historians have often dismissed this as a mistake or hindsight on Cromwell’s part, but I think he was quite serious: it was God, not people, who had the power to bring religious reform out of civil war. The godly could not set out to ﬁght a war of religion. So parliamentarians and Puritans like Cromwell were quite careful to avoid saying that religion could be a justiﬁcation for war. Instead, they justiﬁed their war by saying they were ﬁghting for a set of liberties protected by law and that Charles I, in their view, had been attacking. They didn’t think it was legitimate to ﬁght for

religion with the sword because religion could only be fought for with spiritual weapons. But they did think it legitimate to take up arms against a ruler who was breaking the law of the land. Along with political liberties and rights, this also included

Although this drawing on a Civil War banner portrays Roundheads ﬁghting the Beast of the Apocalypse, religion wasn’t the primary justiﬁcation for the conﬂict

38

religion because the English Reformation had been established through parliamentary statute. Rachel Foxley is associate professor of history at the University of Reading

BRIDGEMAN

It has been tempting to assume that the parliamentarians thought it was legitimate to go to war to defend religious liberty. It’s quite an easy assumption to fall into because it’s true that there was a huge amount of religious motivation whipping up parliamentarians. A lot of Puritans deﬁnitely thought that they would be instruments of God in ﬁghting the Civil War. And it’s tempting to see Cromwell as a godly warrior because his rhetoric is so religious. But when you look closely at what he believed, it’s clear that he didn’t think you could ﬁght a war of religion. In a speech from 1655 when looking back at the war, Cromwell said: “Religion was not the thing at the ﬁrst contested for, but God

9

Wales was against the king

Charles I shown in a 1630s Anthony van Dyck portrait. The king’s appeal to the Welsh was his advocacy of a Protestantism they enthusiastically supported

Wrong, says Lloyd Bowen

BRIDGEMAN

When W e you suggest that t at the t e Welsh We s were we e among the most ardent royalists, people are usually really surprised. Our historical memory has been refracted through a more modern tradition of leftwing radical politics. Many historians working in the shadow of that tradition have feted Welsh parliamentarians and republicans, suggesting they were more representative of the country than was the case. There was no more fervent hotbed of royalist sentiment during the Civil War than in Wales, earning it the soubriquet of the “nursery of the king’s infantry”. The propaganda of the time suggests Wales was really enthusiastic in its support for Charles I. One pamphlet noted how the appearance of the king made the men of north Wales “ﬂock to [his] standard like wilde geese”. Wales saw itself as having a special relationship with the crown, one to be defended with blood. An important part of that was Charles I’s defence of a conservative Protestantism, one sold to the Welsh sh as a rediscovery of their ancient aborigiinal religion, rather than the more radiccal version promulgated by the parliam mentarians. They became passionate defenders of a particular type of church, with the king at its apex. There was a smattering of support for parliament in some towns like Wrexham and Cardiff, but these were minority voices. For the king, Wales was a reliable source of money and troops, and it provided a bridgehead to bring troops from Ireland. Lloyd Bowen is senior lecturer in early modern and Welsh history at the University of Cardiff BBC History Magazine

Parliament wanted union with Scotland

10

Wrong, says John Morrill There is a perception that, in the mid-17th century, the English parliament forced Scotland to integrate into a greater Britain. Actually, parliament had been trying to avoid union for years and only entered into it reluctantly. Throughout the 1640s, the Scots had been calling for a union because they believed that there could be no future for Scotland except in a deﬁned federal relationship. The English parliament resisted for two main reasons. It was determined not to let Scotland impose strict separation of church and state and clerical supremacy. And it did not wish to allow the Scottish parliament to have any kind of veto over policies in England. In retturn for Scottish suppo ort during the warrs, parliament had prromised federal union and a united u cchurch. But when parliament abolished the monarchy in England and Ireland after the eexecution of Charles II hides up a tree after the 1651 battle of Worcester, when the royalist-supporting Scots were defeated

Charles I in 1649, it told the Scots they were an independent nation free to go their own way. The Scots refused to accept this and voted to ﬁght to instate Charles II as king of England, Scotland and Ireland. After Cromwell defeated the Scots at Worcester in 1651, the English had to make a choice: they could either withdraw or they could occupy Scotland to prevent constant attacks on England. Eventually, they decided to quell the threat by uniting England and Scotland. So it was a reluctant conquest. There may have been no great enthusiasm for union, but it was deemed necessary. John Morrill is professor of British and Irish history at the University of Cambridge DISCOVER MORE VISIT The National Civil War Centre

at Newark Museum is opening this spring. For more details on the centre, turn to page 84 LISTEN AGAIN To listen to Melvyn Bragg

and guests discuss the trial of Charles I on Radio 4’s In Our Time, go to o bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kpzd6 Daniel Cossins is a freelance journalist

39

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The Lusitania disaster

The torpedoing of the British liner by a U-boat 100 years ago this month has long been damned as one of the most monstrous crimes of the First World War. Yet, argues Saul David, the finger of blame for the sinking shouldn’t be pointed at the Germans alone 42

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The Lusitania disaster

The torpedoing of the British liner by a U-boat 100 years ago this month has long been damned as one of the most monstrous crimes of the First World War. Yet, argues Saul David, the finger of blame for the sinking shouldn’t be pointed at the Germans alone 42

ALAMY

Did Britain doom the Lusitania?

An illustration shows explosions ripping through the Lusitania shortly after it had been struck by a German torpedo on 7 May 1915. The liner sank in a mere 18 minutes

43

The Lusitania disaster

O

n 7 May 1915, Oliver Bernard, a young British theatre designer, was taking a post-lunch stroll on the deck of the luxury Cunard liner RMS Lusitania when he saw to starboard what appeared to be the “tail of a ﬁsh” in a sea so still it looked like an “opaque sheet of polished indigo”. Convinced the object was a submarine periscope, he stared hard until he picked up “the fast-lengthening track of a newly launched torpedo, itself a streak of froth”. He started open-mouthed as an American woman beside him asked: “This isn’t a torpedo is it?” Bernard felt sick, unable to answer. It was left to a broad-shouldered American male to state the obvious: “By heavens, they’ve done it.” Seconds later the torpedo hit the side of the ship below the bridge, causing a “slight shock through the deck” and then a “terriﬁc explosion”. An immense column of water rose 60ft above the deck, followed by an eruption of debris. Then came a “sullen rumble in the bowels of the liner” and a second, even louder explosion. Others watched in horror as “bits of wood, iron and cinders were blown up through funnels and fell down” on the roof of the Verandah Café and the smoking room at the end of the boat deck. Warned seconds before the impact by a shout from a look-out, Captain William 44

(‘Bowler Bill’) Turner, a 58-year-old veteran of more than four decades at sea, had raced up the narrow steps from his cabin to the bridge in time to see the bubbles from the torpedo as it hurtled towards the ship. Choking and temporarily blinded by coal dust, Turner ordered the helmsman to turn hard-a-starboard and make for the nearby Irish coast. He tried but the ship would not respond. Its steering mechanism had locked. Next, Turner tried to slow the ship’s speed so that lifeboats could be launched. But his order for the engine room to make full speed astern was in vain. The steam pressure had dropped from 190 pounds to 50, and the engines were useless. The Lusitania was running under its own momentum as water poured through the gigantic hole in its side.

Seek and destroy Such an attack on a British-owned liner was inevitable once the Germans had declared unrestricted submarine warfare on hostile shipping on 4 February 1915, adding two weeks later that the waters round Britain, bar a small stretch north of Scotland, was a war zone in which all enemy ships “would be destroyed even if it is not possible to avoid thereby the dangers which threaten the crews and passengers”. Even neutral ships, continued the announcement, might be hard to identify and sunk as a result (a reference to the practice of British ships ﬂying ‘neutral’ ﬂags to fool the Germans).

The policy was the brainchild of Admiral von Tirpitz, the German grand admiral, who saw it as the most effective way to counter the British blockade of the German coast. Yet it worried others in the German government because it overturned established maritime law and custom that exempted non-military ships from unprovoked attack, allowing only that they could be stopped and searched to establish their identity and the nature of their cargo. If neutral, they should be allowed to continue; but, either way, proper provision had to be made for the safety of the ship’s passengers and crew. Tirpitz rejected these archaic Cruiser Rules on two grounds: to comply with them would make submarines highly vulnerable to attack while their crew searched a suspicious vessel; and many hostile ships, the Lusitania included, were using fake neutral ﬂags to fool the Germans. The response of US president Woodrow Wilson to Germany’s declaration was unequivocal: it violated the rights of neutral countries, and Germany would be held to “strict accountability” for any loss of American life. But the Germans were unconcerned, sinking a British passengercargo ship, the SS Falaba, off southern Ireland on 28 March 1915, with an American mining engineer among the fatalities. On 1 May, the day the Lusitania left Pier 54 in Manhattan on its ﬁnal voyage, the German embassy in Washington took out an adverBBC History Magazine

GETTY

As the sea claims the Lusitania a and Uncle Sam shakes his ﬁst in rage, a smiling Kaiser Wilhelm II writes a letter of condolence to the Americans in a cartoon that appeared in the French magazine Le Rire e on 22 May 1915

How the Lusitania sailed into trouble 1 May, 12.20pm Lusitania leaves New York with 1,959 passengers and crew. All have ignored a German warning in the New York Times that “vessels ﬂying the ﬂag of Great Britain” will be “liable to destruction”.

5 May, evening German submarine U-20, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Schwieger (right), sinks a small three-masted schooner off the south coast of Ireland.

5 May, 10.30pm Men carry the body of one of the 128 US victims of the Lusitania sinking, in Queenstown, Ireland, May 1915. Tensions between America and Germany soared in the following weeks

“Germany took out an advert in the New York Times reminding passengers that ‘vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction’” tisement in the New York Times to remind “travellers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage” that “vessels ﬂying the ﬂag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction” in the war zone “adjacent to the British Isles”, and that any travellers who crossed by such means did so “at their own risk”. Most of the 1,257 passengers booked on the Lusitania ignored the threat, trusting on the ship’s maximum speed of 21 knots to get them through safely.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/AKG/GETTY

Skirting with danger With the German position clear, the British Admiralty had issued secret guidelines to merchant skippers: to “avoid headlands, near which submarines routinely lurked and found their best hunting”; to steer “a mid-channel course”; to operate at “full speed”; and to zigzag rather than sail in a straight line. For various reasons, Captain Turner ignored all these guidelines as the Lusitania skirted the south coast of Ireland on 7 May. He knew that danger lurked. On 6 May the U-20, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger, had torpedoed two medium-sized merchant ships, the Candidate and the Centurion. That evening, Turner received the wireless message: “Submarines active off south coast of Ireland.” Five further Admiralty warnings were sent that night and the following day, culminating in the last at 12.40pm on 7 May. Part of the reason for Turner’s overconﬁBBC History Magazine

dence was that he expected a naval escort, telling his passengers on the evening of 6 May that they would soon “be securely in the care of the Royal Navy”. At 10am on the 7th, having slowed for fog, he ordered the speed back up to 18 knots. But this was still 3 knots less than his ship was capable of, even with one of four engine rooms out of commission (to save coal). The method behind this madness was Turner’s plan to sail through the Irish Sea during the hours of darkness, timing his arrival at the Mersey Bar to catch the early tide. That way he could steam straight over the Bar without waiting for a pilot, reducing the danger of attack in an area known to be infested with submarines. Yet by minimising The converging paths of the Lusitania and the U-20 before the submarine sank the liner. The dotted line shows the Lusitania’s intended route to Liverpool

The British Admiralty begins broadcasting a message at regular intervals to all ships that a U-boat is active in the Irish Channel.

6 May, morning Schwieger’s U-20 torpedoes two merchant ships off Ireland.

6 May, 7.52pm Captain Turner (left) of the Lusitania receives a wireless signal that submarines are “active off south coast of Ireland”. He receives ﬁve more warnings.

7 May, 8am Encountering fog, Turner orders the Lusitania’s speed to be decreased from 21 to 18 knots, and then to 15.

7 May, 10am Having emerged from the fog, Turner increases the liner’s speed to 18 knots, still three knots below its maximum.

7 May, 1pm Turner orders the ﬁxing of the Lusitania’s position, a laborious process that takes two hours and requires a steady course, constant speed and proximity to land.

7 May, 2.10pm A torpedo, ﬁred from U-20, strikes the starboard side of the Lusitania below the bridge, causing two explosions.

7 May, 2.28pm The Lusitania sinks with the loss of 1,198 lives, including 94 children.

45

The Lusitania disaster

“A dive revealed the presence of more than 4 million .303 rifle bullets and tons of munitions in cargo holds ‘dubiously marked cheese, butter and oysters’” the risk to his ship near Liverpool, he increased it as he steamed past Ireland. But arguably the truly fatal decision that Turner took on the 7th was to order the ﬁxing of Lusitania’s position – a laborious process that took two hours and necessitated a steady course, constant speed and proximity to land – in case the weather deteriorated again. This explains why, when the U-200 attacked it at 2.10pm, the Lusitania was neither zigzagging, at top speed, nor in mid-channel. Watching through his periscope, Schwieger remembered “an unusually heavy detonation” as the torpedo struck, followed by a “very strong explosion cloud”. He wrote in his diary: “The ship stops immediately and quickly heels to starboard, at the same time diving deeper in the bows. She has the appearance of being about to capsize. Great confusion on board, boats being cleared and part lowered to water. They must have lost their heads. Many boats crowded come down bow ﬁrst or stern ﬁrst in the water, and immediately ﬁll and sink… Submerge to 24 metres and go to sea. I could not have ﬁred a second torpedo into this throng of humanity attempting to save themselves.” The Lusitania sank in just 18 minutes, taking 1,198 of its 1,959 passengers and crew with it. Among the dead were 128 Americans 46

and 94 children (including 35 out of 39 babies), causing British newspapers to condemn “The Hun’s Most Ghastly Crime” and the sinking as the latest in a “long and terrible list” of unprincipled acts of war. President Wilson was quick to condemn the sinking: “No warning,” he thundered, “that an unlawful and inhumane act will be committed can possibly be accepted as an excuse or palliation of that act” or abate “the responsibility for its commission.”

A contrite kaiser Alarmed that the US might be about to enter the war on the Allied side, the kaiser’s government apologised for the loss of American life and ordered its submarines not to sink neutral shipping or passenger liners. It also claimed that it was justiﬁed in torpedoing Lusitania as a tit-for-tat for the Royal Navy’s blockade of the German coast (causing starvation) and because the liner had “large quantities of war materiel in her cargo”. The British government vehemently denied the latter charge, knowing that the sinking of a non-military ship with the loss of almost 1,200 lives was a useful means of swaying American opinion in favour of entering the war. It eventually had the desired effect, in April 1917, when the US declared war on

Saul David d is a historian, broadcaster and author whose books include 100 Days to Victory: How the Great War Was Fought and Won 1914-1918 (Hodder, 2014) DISCOVER MORE WEBSITE To view a gallery of images related to

the sinking of the Lusitania, go to historyextra.com/lusitania BBC History Magazine

GETTY

Two survivors of the Lusitania a disaster. Did the British government bear some responsibility for the 1,198 passengers and crew who perished in the sinking?

Germany, condemning the recent resumption of unrestricted submarine attacks as “warfare against mankind”. After the conﬂict, successive British governments, worried about their ongoing relations with the US, continued to deny that there were munitions on board the Lusitania. They were lying. Government papers released in 2014, and recent dives on the wreck, have conﬁrmed that the Germans were right all along: the ship was indeed carrying war materiel. When the ﬁrst salvage operation was about to take place in 1982, the British Foreign Ofﬁce voiced its concern that the ship could “literally blow up on us”. It added: “Successive British governments have always maintained that there was no munitions on board the Lusitania (and that the Germans were therefore wrong to claim to the contrary as an excuse for sinking the ship). The facts are that there is a large amount of ammunition in the wreck, some of which is highly dangerous.” A subsequent dive in 2008 conﬁrmed the presence of more than 4 million .303 riﬂe bullets and tons of munitions – shells, powder, fuses and gun cotton – “in unrefrigerated cargo holds that were dubiously marked cheese, butter and oysters”. Some have concluded that it was these munitions that caused the second explosion on the Lusitania, and that therefore the British authorities must accept a share of the blame for the rapid sinking and the huge loss of life. This claim was challenged in 2012 by scientiﬁc tests at a US governmentfunded research facility in California that seemed to show the second blast was a boiler explosion that did not itself cause signiﬁcant damage. But even if the 2012 research is accurate, it does not absolve the British of all responsibility. The presence of munitions may not have caused the Lusitania to sink, but it did transform the liner into a legitimate military target. The ship might still have escaped had not its experienced captain ignored secret Admiralty guidelines – in effect, turning it into a sitting duck. A German U-boat may have ﬁred the fatal shot. But it was British actions that both justiﬁed that aggression and helped the torpedo ﬁnd its mark.

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WWI eyewitness accounts

PART 12

“Our First World War” In part 12 of his personal testimony series, Peter Hart takes us to May 1915, when German gas attacks continued to terrorise Allied troops, and things went from bad to worse at Gallipoli. Peter will be tracing the experiences of 20 people who lived through the First World War – via interviews, letters and diary entries – as its centenary progresses ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAMES ALBON

George Ashurst 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. On the western front the second battle of Ypres was still raging. On 1 May, Private George Ashurst and the 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers faced a chlorine gas attack. Some stayed and fought; others, like George, ran for it – and who could blame them?

“It’s gas! It’s coming over here!” It looked like a brownish-green stuff coming, not too thick, you could see through it. These lads out of the front trench were on their way, jumping across our trench all together – running away towards Ypres. Well everybody was grabbing their handkerchiefs, coughing and spitting. One or two attempt to get up the back of the trench and the ofﬁcer was there with his revolver: “Get back! Get back you! Stand to!” We all thought we’d had it. “We’re bloody poisoned now we are!” But we

48

“It’s gas! It’s coming over here! We all thought we’d had it. We kept spitting it out and yellowgreen stuff was coming up our throats”

had to breathe it; it had to go in our lungs. It was nasty stuff to breathe. We kept spitting it out and yellow-green stuff was coming up our throats. A shout came: “Retire!” I think it was a soldier that shouted it – it was no one in authority. I jumped up the back of the trench and I hopped it. They were scattering the place with machine gun bullets and shelling like hell – shrapnel. A little piece hit me in the back of the neck. Stopped trying to get a bit of breath for a minute. Then off again. We threw our equipment away – our riﬂes even. If he was coming after us we didn’t know and we didn’t care. We got into Ypres. Frenchmen were dashing out giving us salt and water, but it wouldn’t go down our necks to make us sick. This stuff kept coming up our throats. It was oozing out – greenish froth.

Joe Murray Joe was born on 8 October 1896 and grew up in a mining community at Burnopﬁeld, County Durham. After working as a pony driver and putter down the mine, he had enlisted into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in October 1914. By May it was apparent that the Gallipoli landings of 25 April 1915 had failed. The Allies were trapped close to the beaches far from their objectives. The Turkish reserves were pouring into the peninsula and time was running out. Stung into desperation the British commander, Sir Ian Hamilton, ordered a series of attacks, which would be known as the second battle of Krithia, on 6 May. Ordinary Seaman Joe Murray attacked with the Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division.

ﬁrst to get to Yates and he got a hold of him. A bullet struck Horton dead centre of the brow, right through his head and took a bit out of my knuckle. Poor old Horton. He kept crying for his mother. I can see him now. Hear him at this very moment. He said he was 18, but I don’t think he was 16, never mind 18.

We had to climb over the dead and the wounded. We got about 10 yards in front, and down we went. The bullets were hitting the sand, spraying us; you were spitting it out of your mouth. “How about another dash?” Off we went. Near enough 15 yards, one drops, everybody drops. Rapid ﬁre was going on. Yates was in front and all of a sudden he bent down – he’d been shot in the stomach – fell down on the ground. As soon as we got near him he got up and rushed like hell at the Turks and ‘Bang!’ Down altogether – out for the count. Young Horton, he was the

BBC History Magazine

MAY 1915 George Horridge

Kate Luard

George was the son of a prominent Bury family, which had made its money from a successful textile business. He volunteered for the 5th Lancashire Fusiliers just before war broke out.

Kate Luard was born in 1872. She volunteered to join the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service in August 1914, and was despatched to France, where she went on to serve at a ﬁeld ambulance behind the line near Festubert.

Lieutenant George Horridge of the 1/5th Lancashire Fusiliers arrived just in time for the second day of the battle of Krithia.

On arrival off Cape Helles in daylight it dawned on one more forcibly that this was it. Everyone wonders what will happen when one actually arrives at the war. Will it be horrible? Will one be afraid? Will one be able to carry out one’s duty? Will one be killed or maimed or perhaps only mildly wounded?

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On 7 May, Horridge and the men of the 1/5th Lancashire Fusiliers were ordered to advance.

There were a few hisses of bullets and as we went further the amount of riﬂe ﬁre seemed to get bigger still. I began

to lose control of the platoon because I simply couldn’t see them in the scrub. All I could do was blow my whistle and I hoped that the NCOs were doing their job. Next to me was an old soldier called Collinson. We got out of the trench and we had to go at the double because ﬁre was very heavy. The bullets were hissing round, ‘Swish, swish, swish, swish, swish!’ I wasn’t too bad a runner, outstripped Collinson and I’m sorry to say that Collinson, in the last 10 yards, got hit through the chest or stomach. We got him in, but he died later. Private Fred Collinson from Bury died of his wounds on 15 May 1915, aged 41. He has no known grave but was probably buried at sea and is commemorated on the Helles Memorial to the missing. Lancashire Fusiliers head for the beaches at Cape Helles where they would launch a desperate attack on Turkish positions

A letter written in early May 1915 makes clear Kate’s heart-felt motivation.

I’m writing in the ward. Opposite me is a boy of 22 with his shoulder, left arm and left leg all in shell holes – he has curly hair, blue eyes and a serene face. His temp is 103 degrees and his pulse 136. His dressing this morning was half an hour of agony. I treat you to all these medical details now as a medical professional. I look on it as a great privilege to be mother to these young heroes, wouldn’t you? She was close behind the sector where Field Marshal Sir John French had ordered the First Army to conduct a series of attacks on the German lines in May 1915. Before the battle, the nurses waited with dread the arrival of the broken bodies.

I have been cutting dressings all night. One of the most stabbing things in this war is seeing the lines of empty motor ambulances going up to bring down the wrecks who at this moment are sound and ﬁt and all absolutely ready to be turned into wrecks. Following the disastrous beginning of the battle of Aubers Ridge on 9 May the casualties poured in to the dressing stations.

We have had a night of it. Every ﬁeld ambulance, barge, clearing hospital, and train are blocked with them. The medical ofﬁcers neither eat nor sleep. I got up early yesterday and went down to the barge to see if they wanted any extra help and had a grim afternoon and evening there. One medical

ofﬁcer, no sisters, four trained orderlies, and some other men were there. It was packed with all the worst cases – dying and bleeding and groaning. After ﬁve hours we had three-fourths of them out of their bloodsoaked clothes, dressed, fed, haemorrhage stopped, hands and faces washed, and some asleep. Two died and more were dying. The wounded often showed incredible resilience.

Last night a stiff muddy ﬁgure, all bandages and straw, on the stretcher was brought in. I asked the boy how many wounds? “Oh, only ﬁve!” he said cheerfully. “Nice clean wounds – machine-gun – all in and out again!” And all the while the ﬂickering horizon promised a further harvest of the maimed and dying for the nurses to tend. Peter Hart is the oral historian at the Imperial War Museum. His books include Gallipolii (Proﬁle Books, 2013)

DISCOVER MORE BOOK Unknown Warriors: The

Letters of Kate Luard, RRC and Bar, Nursing Sister in France 1914-1918 (The History Press, 2014) WEBSITE You can read previous

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

coverage is continuing – please check the TV & Radio updates on historyextra.com

NEXT ISSUE: “Please God, not only for myself but for my parents may I survive!” BBC History Magazine

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How to win an election

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With Britain about to go to the polls, Dominic Sandbrook reveals how the last 25 general elections were won and lost

BBC History Magazine

51

General elections

1922

At the end of the First World War, the coalition prime minister David Lloyd George called a so-called ‘khaki’ election in the hope of proﬁting from post-victory sentiment. This was the ﬁrst election in which women could vote. With the Liberal party divided between pro and anti-coalition candidates, Lloyd George and Tory leader Andrew Bonar Law issued endorsements to candidates who backed the government. Even so, the Liberal vote collapsed, while Labour picked up more than 2 million votes and the Tories won 332 seats. But because Bonar Law and Lloyd George were keen to maintain the coalition, the latter stayed on as prime minister.

15 November

14 December

1918

How Britons voted

WHY THE TORIES WON

The 1950 election saw the two-party system at its peak, with turnout at almost 84 per cent. Exhausted after ﬁve years of activism, which had seen the birth of the postwar welfare state and the independence of India and Pakistan, as well as the imposition of rigorous economic austerity, the Attlee government saw its majority cut to just ﬁve seats. The Conservatives campaigned vigorously against Labour’s plans for more nationalisation, and though Attlee held on to power there was a growing sense of weariness with rationing, austerity and social reform.

The Liberals remained divided, allowing Conservative leader Bonar Law to hoover up middle-class votes.

Having led the country to victory in the Second World War, Winston Churchill was widely expected to win the ﬁrst election in a decade. Instead, the result was the biggest shock of the century. While Attlee’s Labour party promised to build a New Jerusalem, nationalising major industries, introducing a National Health Service and building a welfare state, the Conservatives seemed oddly negative. In a notorious broadcast, Churchill even claimed that socialism in Britain would mean introducing “some form of a Gestapo”. The public were not convinced, and Labour won a handsome 146-seat majority.

Millions of voters were drawn to Clement Attlee’s plans for social reform and a welfare state.

1955

Eden on the campaign trail, Uxbridge, 1955

26 May

1951

Though many Britons were tiring of reform and austerity, Attlee had earned the gratitude of swathes of working-class Britain.

25 October

WHY THE TORIES WON

WHY LABOUR WON

WHY LABOUR WON

The great mystery about the 1951 election is why Attlee called it when he did not need to. Many of Labour’s senior ﬁgures were old and tired, and there was now a distinct atmosphere of exhaustion. Once again the key issues were nationalisation, housing and economic controls, and Labour won the popular count with almost 14 million votes. But the electoral system handed victory to the Conservatives, squeaking in with a 17-seat majority. At the age of almost 77, Churchill returned as prime minister.

1945

Suffragette Christabel Pankhurst casts her vote

5 July

23 February

1950

The Conservatives successfully played the patriotic card, while the Liberals split into competing factions.

The Conservatives pulled the plug on the coalition in October 1922. With many senior Tories tarnished by their alliance with scandal-stained Lloyd George, Bonar Law returned as party leader and won a 36-seat majority (he was to die of cancer the following year). The Liberals collapsed again and Labour became the major opposition party for the ﬁrst time.

After Churchill retired, his successor, Sir Anthony Eden, called a snap general election, winning a comfortable 54-seat majority. Rationing was over, the economy was booming and the Tories coasted to victory on the back of prosperity. Labour, with the 72-year-old Attlee still at the helm, were bitterly divided between leftwing Bevanites and centrist Gaitskellites, and the result was never seriously in doubt. Ironically, though, Eden only lasted another 18 months, resigning because of ill health after the debacle of the Suez Crisis.

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WHY THE TORIES WON

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Attlee misjudged the date of the election and his government seemed exhausted. The Tories, though, adopted a moderate tone.

WHY THE TORIES WON

Voters were beginning to enjoy postwar prosperity, while the new Conservative prime minister cut an enormously popular and attractive ﬁgure.

BBC History Magazine

MacDonald’s government lasted only 10 months before the Liberals brought it down. The campaign is best known for the Zinoviev Letter, a forged missive from Moscow calling for communist agitation in Britain. With the press making socialism a major issue, the Tory vote surged. The Conservatives won 412 seats, and Baldwin returned as PM.

30 May

Keen to adopt protectionist import tariffs to boost British manufacturing, the new Tory prime minister Stanley Baldwin called a fresh election to win a popular mandate. But fears of higher food prices propelled Labour and the Liberals to 191 and 158 seats, respectively, while the Tories slumped to 258 seats. Ramsay MacDonald formed Labour’s ﬁrst minority government, with tacit Liberal support.

1929

A Conservative election poster depicts the clawed red hand of socialism, 1929

Close-run thing

1924

Shock result

29 October

6 December

1923

Landslide

WHY THE TORIES WON WHY NO ONE WON

Many former Liberal voters turned to Labour, resulting in electoral deadlock.

Middle-class voters preferred Conservative leader Baldwin’s paternalism to the prospect of socialism.

Baldwin was widely expected to win his second consecutive election. But the so-called ‘Flapper Election’ ction’ – the ﬁrst in which all women over the age of 21 could vote – surprised many. Though Baldwin won the biggest share of the vote, his ‘Safety First’ campaign smacked of complacency, while MacDonald’s Labour promised to banish unemployment by spending millions on public works. The result was a hung parliament, with Labour ahead by just 27 seats. MacDonald returned to lead a second Labour minority government. WHY LABOUR WON

WHY THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT WON

WHY THE TORIES WON

Living standards continued to soar and the electorate saw no need to change horses, from Conservative to Labour, in midstream.

BBC History Magazine

1964

The 1959 election was another non-event. The great motor of afﬂuence was roaring at full throttle – as the Tories’ new prime minister, Harold Macmillan, boasted, most people in Britain had “never had it so good”. Though Labour fought a slick campaign, their new leader, Hugh Gaitskell, remained a controversial ﬁgure inside his own party. After the Tories won their third successive election with a 100-seat majority, some commentators wondered whether rising afﬂuence would make it impossible for Labour to win again.

15 October

8 October

1959

The economy was beginning to recover from the rigours of the Depression, and Baldwin’s reassuring, paternalistic style had enormous popular appeal.

1931

The 1935 election was effectively a vote of conﬁdence in the National Government, now led by Stanley Baldwin. The major issue was the government’s handling of the economy, which was now in recovery. Although Hitler had come to power, Baldwin knew that the public had not forgotten the slaughter of the First World War, and promised “no great armaments”. His reassurance did the trick: the government won 430 seats, the majority of them Conservatives, while Labour under Clement Attlee won just 154 seats.

27 October

14 November

Clement and Violet Attlee celebrate a remarkable landslide in July 1945

1935

Many voters were won over by Labour’s plans for public works. Two months earlier, the Labour government had split over the need for spending cuts to ﬁght the Great Depression. But MacDonald stayed on at the head of a Tory-dominated National Government. In the ensuing election – effectively, the National Government versus the rest – Baldwin’s Tories won 11 million votes and 470 seats, while Labour and Liberal factions won only a few dozen seats each. Yet MacDonald retained his place as a ﬁgurehead PM. WHY THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT WON

The electorate preferred Baldwin and MacDonald’s talk of discipline to the left’s socialist rhetoric.

After what he called “13 wasted years” of Conservative government, Harold Wilson took Labour back into power. Macmillan had resigned the year before; his successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was a plodding, uninspiring ﬁgure, and many people expected the smart, technocratic Wilson to win comfortably. His campaign promised economic expansion, pledging to build a New Britain in the ‘white heat’ of the scientiﬁc revolution. But after Home staged a late comeback, Wilson won with only a narrow ﬁve-seat majority. WHY LABOUR WON

While the Conservatives seemed painfully old-fashioned, Harold Wilson’s Labour party promised a heady blend of social reform and economic modernisation.

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General elections

1970

After governing for almost 18 months with a wafer-thin majority, Wilson went to the country to secure a bigger mandate. The economic picture was bright, the government seemed united and the Conservatives had just dumped Home for the relatively little-known Edward Heath. The campaign was a complete non-event and, after coasting to victory on the slogan “You know Labour government works”, Wilson secured a majority of 96 seats.

18 June

31 March

1966

Landslide

Shock result

Close-run thing

The ﬁnal years of the 1960s, dominated by a humiliating devaluation of the pound and a rift with the trade unions, had been damaging for Wilson. Even so, he was widely expected to stroll to victory against the lacklustre Heath in the sunshine of 1970. But complacency proved his undoing. A bad set of trade ﬁgures, as well as the sense of national disappointment after England crashed out of the World Cup, broke Labour’s momentum. In the last few days before the election, the housewives’ vote swung to the Conservatives and Edward Heath deﬁed the polls to win a 30-seat majority.

Miners demand higher wages outside the National Union of Mineworkers HQ, London, 21 January 1974

WHY LABOUR WON WHY THE TORIES WON

bad news reawakened memories Economic of the late 1960s, and while Edward Heath

Labour had a new leader in Neil Kinnock and a slicker, television-led campaign. Yet the Tories’ emphasis on tax cuts appealed to voters in afﬂuent southern England. Another big Conservative majority of 102 seats left Labour trailing well behind, while the Alliance – whose bid to break the twoparty duopoly had clearly failed – ﬁnished a distant third. WHY THE TORIES WON

The economy was booming and voters were not convinced by the idea of Neil Kinnock as prime minister.

1983

channelled a kind of underdog spirit, Wilson seemed oddly complacent.

9 June

1992

Labour were widely expected to return to power, but election night produced one of the century’s greatest surprises. The new Conservative leader, John Major, playing on his modest Brixton background and soapbox campaign style, won a majority of 21. Many commentators thought Labour’s campaign had taken victory for granted, exempliﬁed by the ﬂag-waving triumphalism of their Shefﬁeld rally. The Tories’ relentless attacks on Labour’s tax plans swayed waverers, giving them more than 14 million votes – a record that still stands.

11 June

9 April

1987

After less than two years in power, Harold Wilson’s popularity was still high. Voters felt that he should have the chance to govern with a proper working majority.

Thatcher’s re-election in 1983 crowned an astonishing comeback. A crippling recession at the start of the decade had seen her reputation plummet to depths unequalled since records began. But victory in the Falklands, coupled with a reviving economy, turned her fortunes around. With the opposition divided between Labour and the new Social Democratic Party, the Tories won a 144-seat majority. WHY THE TORIES WON

Voters rewarded Thatcher for sticking to her guns on the economy and in the Falklands.

WHY THE TORIES WON

middle class was drawn to The John Major’s underdog style and

2001

The Conservatives suffered the biggest collapse in modern political history. The economic debacle of Black Wednesday (1992) and a tide of scandals had blighted the Tories’ reputation, while Labour had a fresh-faced leader in Tony Blair, as well as a new, moderate image. The campaign saw Labour emphasise their economic responsibility, while the Tories tore themselves apart over Europe. Blair won a record 179-seat majority.

7 June

1 May 1997

promises of tax cuts.

In a replay of the 1997 election, Blair won a second successive landslide, giving him a majority of 166. The Tories’ new leader, William Hague, had originally ﬂirted with modernisation but moved back to the right when the polls refused to shift. However, his emphasis on tax cuts, immigration and Europe failed to change voters’ minds. With the economy booming, Labour’s victory was never in serious doubt, and for the second time in four years the Conservatives were left to ﬁnd a new leader.

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WHY LABOUR WON

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The Conservatives were discredited after ﬁve years of economic blunders and front-page scandals, while Labour leader Tony Blair cultivated a moderate, modernising image.

WHY LABOUR WON

With the Tories lurching to the right, most voters were happy to give Blair another ﬁve years in ofﬁce.

The Blair clan prepare for a second term in ofﬁce

BBC History Magazine

1974 28 February

After three and a half dramatic years, including ﬁve states of emergency, a three-day week and virtual civil war in Northern Ireland, Heath called a surprise early election, hoping to secure public support in his struggle with Britain’s striking miners. The election was fought against a bleak backdrop, with the economy in meltdown. The result was another shock: a hung parliament, with Labour winning 301 seats to the Tories’ 297. When the Liberals refused to prop him up, Heath resigned, and Wilson returned with a minority Labour government. WHY NO ONE WON

1974

The 1979 election is often seen as a great turning point in Britain’s modern histtory: Margaret Thatcher became the ﬁ ﬁrst female prime minister. The polls h had been tight until the end of 1978, and Labour’s experienced, avuncular James Callag aghan was tipped to win a narrow majority. But B then h the Winter of Discontent – a wave of crippling nﬂation strikes protesting Callaghan’s anti-in pay policy – brought the country grin nding to sing a halt. After a slick campaign promis g to rebuild the economy, Thatcher won a 44-seat majority.

10 October

3 May

1979

Hung parliament: voters blamed Heath for the economic chaos blighting the nation, while Labour seemed too divided to take full advantage.

WHY LABOUR WON

WHY THE TORIES WON

WHY LABOUR WON

With the economy doing well and the Tories still seen as unelectable, most voters continued to reward Labour.

BBC History Magazine

2010

Thatcher enters Downing Street, 4 May 1979

6 May

5 May

2005

sis Margaret Thatcher’s emphasi on reform struck a chord witth millions of voters.

Despite the controversy over Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair won a clear majority of 66. Labour trumpeted Gordon Brown’s apparent success managing the economy, while the Tories’ new leader, Michael Howard, emphasised immigration and crime – campaigning under the slogan ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ The public clearly weren’t, and the Conservatives were left looking for a new approach and a new leader.

Having given the miners the pay rise they wanted, Wilson called the second general election of the year in an attempt to secure a working majority. It was another grim, gloomy election, dominated by reports of the IRA bombing campaign on the British mainland. Heath tried to whip up public support for a government of national unity, but the polls were always against him. Instead Wilson’s reassuring manner secured him his fourth triumph in ﬁve elections, though Labour’s majority – just 3 seats – was narrower than many had expected.

Having secured an end to the miners’ strike, Wilson presented himself as the only man who could guarantee prosperity.

The Conservatives went into the 2010 election conﬁdent of victory. Not only did they have a new leader in David Cameron, but the ﬁnancial crash of the late 2000s had badly damaged the reputation of Labour’s new PM, Gordon Brown. As so often, the economy was the major issue. But the campaign was dominated by the televised debates between the party leaders, from which the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg emerged as an unexpected winner. The result was the ﬁrst hung parliament since 1974. Within days, Brown had resigned, leaving Clegg and Cameron to form the ﬁrst coalition since the 1940s. WHY NO ONE WON

Hung parliament: the ﬁnancial crisis shattered Labour’s majority, but the TV debates broke the Tories’ momentum, allowing the Lib Dems to emerge as kingmakers.

Dominic Sandbrook is a historian and broadcaster whose books include Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–79 (Penguin, 2013) DISCOVER MORE TV AND RADIO The BBC is covering

the 2015 election campaign on TV and radio. You can also keep up to date with all the latest developments at: bbc.co.uk/ news/election/2015

55

Slavery in Britain

A nation of slave

owners

Thousands of ‘ordinary’ Britons profited from the slave trade – and, says David Olusoga, they weren’t about to accept abolition without out a fight Accompanies the BBC Two series Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners

Listen to David Olusoga ON THE PODCAST

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BBC History Magazine

T

a grey marble plaque, set into the red Georgian brickwork. It proudly lists the names of Clapham’s abolitionist heroes – men who, we are told, “laboured… until the curse of slavery was swept away from all parts of the British Dominions”. The last name in that alphabetical list is that of the man who became the moral lodestar around which the Clapham Sect orbited: William Wilberforce. The Clapham Sect was famous in its day, and its legend has not dimmed. The homes of its most celebrated members – Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay and Thomas Fowell Buxton – are all stamped with approving blue plaques. The crusade they led, against what late Georgians felt comfortable calling ‘negro slavery’, has been the subject of innumerable books and is part

“What has been forgotten is that there were two sides in the political battle fought over slavery. Thousands of British men and women opposed abolition – because they owned slaves”

BRDIGEMAN

ucked away under the trees in a shady corner of Clapham Common, southwest London, stands Holy Trinity church. Inside, above the ornate mosaic ﬂoor and the neat rows of pews, are three stained-glass windows. They depict the lives of saints – not biblical saints, but the ‘saints’ of the abolition movement. From the late 18th century, Holy Trinity Clapham was the parish church of the Clapham Sect – the ‘Clapham Clapham Saints’, Saints , as they are sometimes called. This loose afﬁliation of friends and like-minded men committed their considerable energies to bringing to an end ﬁrst the British slave trade then slavery itself. On the southern wall of Holy Trinity is

George Morland’s 1791 painting Slave Trade. Though abolitionists have dominated histories of the British slave trade, their opponents ran a sophisticated campaign that was often in the ascendancy BBC History Magazine

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Slavery in Britain

and slavery, the vast majority of slave owneers resided in the Caribbean. The 4,000 miles separating Britain from that region made it possible for the workings of slavery to be concealed from the public and, when slaveery was abolished, for it to be ﬁled away as a closed chapter in the history of the empire, rather than of Britain herself. The ghosts of slavery slept more ‘unquietly’ in the US, on whose own soil plantations had been laid out and slave markets built. In the years after the abolition of slaveryy in 1834, the families who had made their fortunes from sugar and slaves completed this historical disappearing act by covering up the incriminating chapters off their own dynastic histories. Men who in the 18th century had unashamedly regard ded themselves as slave owners were, during the 19th and 20th centuries, re-branded by their descendants as ‘planters’. Men who had driven the ‘triangular trade’ weree likewise concealed behind an innocuous euphemism: ‘West India merchants’. If there is a reason why, of all Britain’s forgotten slave owners, we should rememb ber George Hibbert, it is that he was one of thee earliest proponents of the mechanism thatt Abolitionists’ dilemma ultimately offered Britain a way out of slavvery. From the 1790s until 1830, one of the most In the aftermath of the abolition of the slavve signiﬁcant ﬁgures in the pro-slavery lobby trade in 1807 it was evident to Hibbert and d was another member of the congregation of others that the abolitionists would, soonerr or Holy Trinity Clapham. George Hibbert was later, embark upon a second crusade to end a slave trader and slave owner. He is one of slavery itself. During the debates about thee the anti-heroes in the story of British slavery slave trade, Hibbert had suggested that, if the – an ‘anti-Wilberforce’. In defending slavery enslaved were to be freed, the slave ownerss Hibbert demonstrated himself to be both who would lose their ‘property’ should be a brilliant political tactician and a skilled compensated. The abolitionist ﬁrebrand propagandist. At times he became the Thomas Clarkson responded with mock campaign’s vocal ﬁgurehead, bitterly clashing incredulity. Addressing the slave owners, directly with Wilberforce from the benches of he admitted: “That compensation is due parliament and on the pages of newspapers. somewhere, there is no doubt. But from On Sundays, George Hibbert took his whom is it due? It is due from you to Africa!” place in the pews of Holy Trinity Clapham, Clarkson’s bombast disguised a justiﬁable alongside Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect. concern among the abolitionists. Their George Hibbert’s name, however, does not ofﬁcial position was that it was impossible for appear on the walls of Holy Trinity church. one human being to hold ‘property in men’, His elegant London town house ouse – which but they undeerstood that an attack on the stands on the opposite side of o Clapham institution off slavery was, by default, Common from the home thaat an assault on n the principle of private Wilberforce shared with his cousin property. Th he dilemma they faced was Henry Thornton – is bereft that suppo orting compensation, of a blue plaque. though possibly the key to freeing The near invisibility of Briitain’s the en nslaved, would require them slave owners in the common n to acccept that the slaves were modern understanding of pro operty. The author of an slavery is partly a lingering an nonymous letter of 1831 consequence of geography. su ummarised the paradox: Throughout the two ““Admit the slave-holders centuries during which claims to compensation, Britain was heavily and you admit the justice An 1811 portrait of George involved in slave trading of slavery.” Hibbert, an anti-hero in the story

This 1826 illustration from The Black Man’s Lament, an anti-slavery narrative poem by Amelia Opie, depicts a campaigner accompanied by a chained slave urging men to sign his petition for abolishing the slave trade

“The near invisibility of Britain’s slave owners in the common modern understanding of slavery is partly a consequence of geography – the 4,000 miles separating Britain from the Caribbean”

of British slavery

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BBC History Magazine

ALAMY/MUSEUM OF LONDON

of the national curriculum. Abolition has long been the prism through which British slavery is remembered. The other forces – social, economic and military – that also played roles in the demise of slavery have been ushered to the wings to permit the story of abolition to dominate the historical stage. That some of the impetus for abolition came from the enslaved people themselves, who rose up in a series of rebellions, is all too often overlooked. What has similarly been forgotten is that there were two sides in the political battle fought over slavery. Thousands of British men and women opposed abolition because they themselves owned slaves. They and their supporters in manufacturing, ﬁnance and parliament portrayed slavery as critical to the national interest. Britain’s slave owners funded a pro-slavery lobby that opposed the abolitionists at every step. Their pro-slavery campaign was just as sophisticated as that of the abolitionists, and at times the arguments of the pro-slavery men were in the ascendancy. The leading voices of that campaign have been little remembered, while their battle to defend slavery, like British slave ownership itself, has been little examined.

Three British slave owners People from very different backgrounds benefited from ‘property’ they owned in the Caribbean

John Gladstone The prime minister’s father By 1834, John Gladstone and his family had acquired 2,039 slaves for which they were awarded £93,526 by the Slave Compensation Commission. The heart of their slave empire was in British Guiana, at that time the most proﬁtable of the British Caribbean colonies. John Gladstone used the compensation to diversify, investing in the booming railways. His son, William Ewart Gladstone, rose to become prime minister, making a speech in defence of slavery. The Gladstones replaced slaves with indentured Indian labourers on their Guyana plantations.

Nathaniel Wells The mixed-race absentee

As is almost always the case when great moral issues are fed through the threshing machine of political negotiation, the discussion – between the abolitionists, the slave owners and the government, beginning after the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in the summer of 1833 – ended with a grubby, technocratic compromise. The abolitionists did accept that compensation was the only way to end slavery and the government accepted that it would have to foot the bill, ﬁnally agreeing to pay the slave owners £20m – in modern terms, around £16bn. The slave owners also won another grudging concession: a system of ‘apprenticeship’, whereby slaves who worked the ﬁelds were to continue their labours for an additional six years, domestic slaves for a further four years. Yet what had been agreed was remarkable. The Slavery Abolition Act liberated 800,000 human beings from bondage, and the compensation of the BBC History Magazine

slave owners represented what was at that time the largest payout in British history. The process of paying the compensation turned out to be just as extraordinary as the decision itself. Though the number of slaves and the total amount of compensation payable were known to the government, the number of slave owners and where they resided were not. The famous owners – the men who had demanded compensation and lobbied in defence of slavery – were the only known quantity; the Hibberts, along with the Gladstones, Lascelles and other slave-owning dynasties, all came forward to claim their share of the £20m. George Hibbert was awarded £63,067 and another 10 members of the Hibbert family also received payouts. Yet what is more remarkable, and more signiﬁcant to historians of slavery, is that tens of thousands of others – middling to small-scale slave owners – were also lured out of the

In many ways a typical absentee slave owner, Wells was the favourite son of a prominent St Kitts plantation owner. Sent to Britain for his education, on his father’s death he inherited a fortune worth around £200,000, including sugar estates and slaves. What makes his story unusual is that he was mixed race: his mother was a slave, the legal property of his father. As a mixed-race man – albeit a very rich one – Wells would have had few rights in the Caribbean, and he never returned to St Kitts. He used his fortune to buy a country home, the grand Pierceﬁeld House, near Chepstow.

Anna Eliza Elletson The powerful woman On the death of her ﬁrst husband in 1775, Elletson inherited 300 slaves and the Hope sugar plantation in Jamaica. She remarried to become Duchess of Chandos, and from Chandos House dispatched a stream of instructions to her attorneys in Jamaica. Carefully navigating the complex gender roles of her age, she presented herself as a woman in need of professional assistance, yet sent her attorneys detailed instructions on managing her estates. The work of the men and women she called her property delivered Elletson an annual income, in the 1780s, of £6,000 per year – around £5m today.

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Slavery in Britain

shadows of history by the money on offer. In order to claim compensation, all slave owners, no matter how many or how few slaves they were claiming compensation for, had to register their claims with the Slave Compensation Commission, the government bureaucracy established to distribute the money. The process demanded that each slave owner committed their name to the ofﬁcial record and ﬁlled out a claim form, identifying the number of slaves to which they laid claim and where those enslaved people resided. In the frenzied rush to stake claims, discretion was abandoned and the taboo that had developed around the owning of slaves was set aside. Britain’s slave owners, all 46,000 of them, bombarded the commission with claims.

Punctilious clerks

“The picture that emerges from the records is of a Britain in which slave ownership was far more widespread and far more ordinary than we had once imagined” 60

A 1952 stained-glass window in Holy Trinity church, Clapham, shows a slave kneeling alongside St Nicholas and abolitionist William Wilberforce, a member of the congregation from 1792

shone the brightest light have been the 3,000 or so who were resident in Britain. The picture that emerges from the collated claims is of a Britain in which slave ownership was far more widespread and far more ordinary than had once been imagined. It cascaded further down the social spectrum than had previously been understood, and was distributed broadly across the nation, from the Isle of Wight to the Orkney Isles. Among the names that appear in the records are many famous ones. The ancestors of the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott appear in the ledgers, as do those of Graham Greene and George Orwell (the latter listed under his real family name, Blair). In the end, however, the obscure families tend to be more interesting than the famous ones: the very ordinary people – middle class and lower middle class – who either invested in the slave economy or, through inheritance or other mechanisms, were drawn into it. The claimants about whom the records reveal the most are those who entered into correspondence with the Commissioners for Slave Compensation. Among their letters are blatant attempts to inﬂuence the process. There are angry complaints at rejected or questioned claims, and unctuous reminders penned by claimants awaiting news. These letters expose not just the addresses of the claimants but also give voice to the ordinary slave owners. One example was Dorothy Little, a widow living in Clifton in Bristol who struggled in vain to persuade the

commissioners to increase the valuation placed on the 13 enslaved men and women she owned in Jamaica. Her letters, and those written on her behalf by her barrister son Simon, repeatedly reminded the commissioners that Dorothy was an aged widow with few means of support other than the forced labour – of what she called “my slaves”. In one petition, Simon Little warned the commissioners that if they were not to increase the valuation they would have “deprived an aged widow of her property without any fault alleged on her part”. These letters capture the mindset of people trapped in a bureaucratic system, unable to understand that such a system was not open to special pleading. But they are also the words of people who have, all too often, lost sight of the fact that the true victims of the system were the enslaved Africans, unseen and unconsidered, 4,000 miles away. David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster who recently presented The World’s War on BBC Two and authored the accompanying book DISCOVER MORE TELEVISION Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners,

presented by David Olusoga, will be broadcast on BBC Two soon ON THE PODCAST

David Olusoga discusses British slave ownership on our weekly podcast historyextra.com/podcasts BBC History Magazine

ALAMY

This story is captured in the records of the Slave Compensation Commission, a great haul of yellowing ledgers and neatly tied bundles of letters held at the National Archives. The commission’s records represent a near-perfect snapshot of slavery as it was on one day – 1 August 1834, the day of its demise. Just as Al Capone was convicted not on charges of murder or intimidation ﬁled by the FBI but on charges of tax evasion brought by the bureau’s accountants, Britain’s secretive slave owners were identiﬁed, catalogued and recorded not by the efforts of the abolitionists but by the punctilious clerks and accountants of the Slave Compensation Commission. For 180 years, the commission’s records lay in the archives, largely unexamined until they became the focus of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project. Led by Professor Catherine Hall and Nick Draper, and completed through the efforts of a team of co-directors, researchers and students at University College London, the project has collated all 47,000 claims. The slave owners upon whom they have

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BOOKS David Starkey photographed at his Kent home. “I would like readers to think about Magna Carta not as some kind of sacred origin of the English constitution but as a product of crisis, of revolution narrowly averted,” he says

Photography by Richie Hopson

RICHIE HOPSON

INTERVIEW / DAVID STARKEY

“The Magna Carta of 1215 was designed to create a revolutionary regime” David Starkey talks to Matt Elton about his book exploring the origins of the inﬂuential 13th-century charter, how it developed over the next decade – and whether it is still important today BBC History Magazine

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Books / Interview PROFILE DAVID STARKEY Born in Kendal, Starkey studied history at Cambridge before lecturing in the subject at the London School of Economics. He has presented documentaries such as Monarchy and this year’s David Starkey’s Magna Carta for BBC Two. His previous books include The Six Wives of Henry VIII (Vintage, 2004) and Crown and Country: A History of England Through Monarchy (HarperPress, 2010)

IN CONTEXT

Magna Carta was initially drafted in 1215 in an attempt to broker peace between England’s barons and the unpopular King John. It failed, and the country was plunged into civil war. Following John’s death the charter then underwent a series of revisions over the next decade. An updated version was issued in 1216 by the government of his successor, the young Henry III, in an attempt to placate the rebels. Having won the war, the king issued a new edition in 1217 in order to cement peace. The ﬁnal version was produced in 1225 in return for a grant of taxation.

How do you see Magna Carta echoing through history? The events of 1215 were revolution averted – and I happen to think that’s rather a good thing. I think that the evidence of revolutions is that, on the whole, they tend to be terribly bad. I don’t think that France has ever recovered from 1789, and certainly it’s never recovered from the Terror. Russia, manifestly, has never recovered from the revolution, and nor has China. Of course, there is – particularly among younger people and the Marxist-inﬂuenced – a kind of romantic fascination with revolution, a regret that we didn’t have one, and a feeling that we somehow missed out. I think that this is terribly wrong: we were extraordinarily fortunate to have missed out. If you look at the 10-year span from 1215 to 1225 you see that Magna Carta began as this absolutely radical thing. The charter of 1215 was so way-out, but we’ve forgotten that because we’ve sentimentalised it. What did the 1215 Magna Carta set out to do? It set out to do three things. Firstly, to bridle a king, John, who was dangerous and unpredictable and made his whim the law, and secondly, to make it impossible for any other king to rule in the same way. It was successful in both of those things. The third thing was the great change, and something very different: it set out to create machinery that absolutely bound any king in iron to its measures. The 1215 Magna Carta failed in that respect because it would have created a neo-republican government. It began as a thoroughly extremist programme before being edited and reaching common ground.

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It’s perfectly clear that it was highly controversial from the beginning: hence the denunciation of Magna Carta by the papacy, and the way in which you had the conservatives, such as William Marshal, who worked to reinstate all the good-sense bits of the charter but left out the extreme attempts to constrain the king. You then get the whole question of how it is to be enforced. And the 1225 Magna Carta actually sketches out a long-term way of doing this, which is that the charter is reissued in return for a grant of taxation. In other words, it’s a deal done between the king and his people – it’s a proto-parliamentary model. That’s how, in the fullness of time, deals do tend to take place – although that will never limit kings such as Henry VII, Henry VIII or Henry III. Any king who wants to drive a coach through it can, and so perpetually in the Middle Ages you get a return to a model of an aristocratic cabal committee. It never works, it always goes wrong and falls over into faction – until the absolutely decisive moment of the Glorious Revolution in the 17th century. To what extent is what we think we know about June 1215 incorrect? An awful lot is accurately documented in the most extraordinary detail. One of the reasons that I got so excited about this project is that I think it’s the ﬁrst event in English history in which you can see the whole political process at work. You can see how in a few days it has to be worked up, and envisage the poor clerks of the chancery having what we could call an essay crisis, with ﬁve days to sort this whole thing out. What we have got completely wrong is that we somehow imagine that Magna Carta established at a stroke this foundation of the rule of law and constitution of England, rather than it being a document produced in a moment of extreme crisis and haste. About

“It’s perfectly clear that the 1215 Magna Carta was controversial from the beginning”

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a third of it was really designed to be both a peace treaty and an extremely uneven and lopsided peace treaty. Because of course John didn’t have a leg to stand on; he had no party, he’d lost control of his capital. So it was designed to create a revolutionary regime. You write that John is the “oddest and strangest of kings”. What did you make of his character? He was a clearly manic depressive, with extraordinary bursts of energy alternating with total passivity, and prone to acts of extreme indulgence – sleeping on silk sheets, for instance, which was a degree of comfort that would have appeared positively perverted in the Middle Ages. At the same time, he paid minute attention to the detail of the administration. There was an obsession about the man and a total self-indulgence. I think he was a spoilt brat. Why did the 1215 Magna Carta fail? Who can we pin the blame on? The settlement was absurd; it could never have worked. It was bound to fail because it tried to present itself as a middle ground, but its very nature was that it was designed to bring John to heel. It could have never been an equitable settlement because it was designed to be a one-sided bridle on the king, and it could only become a long-term settlement once that element was struck out. One of the things that we forget is that the Magna Carta of 1215 had 62 or 63 clauses, while the long-term one has in the region of 40. A third of it was struck out in 1216, and that whole process was so like the modern civil service. There were all these other clauses on dues and debts, and what the composition of the representative body was going to be. Despite the fact that these people were speaking Norman French, there’s something terribly English about it all. Are there any sections of the 1225 Magna Carta that you think are still particularly relevant today? This is the great difference between Britain and the US. In America, Magna Carta is in the constitutions of 15 or so states in its entirety. We, meanwhile, have repealed all but three chapters. We take an entirely different view of this, and the chapters that survive are those that are full of sound and fury and, I suspect, signify nothing. “The

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“The sections of Magna Carta that remain in our constitution are full of sound and fury and, I suspect, signify nothing”

RICHIE HOPSON

Church of England be free” – well! All this business about not selling justice – does it do anything about court fees? No. I know I’m being deliberately provocative by saying that I think that all of these grand ﬂamboyant statements of rights are sound and fury, but I do think that they are will-o’-the-wisps. If you look at the grand statement of universal freedom, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of the French Revolution, no sooner was it passed than it was locked up in a chest and forgotten about, and a committee of public safety put in place. There has never been a more universally entrenched rights constitution than that of Soviet Russia under Stalin – but unless you have the machinery in place to deal with it… Magna Carta worked not because of all the high-sounding guff about justice but because it provided the machinery to bound the king at law, led to the creation of a parliament, and strapped the king down on the issue of taxation. Did it actually make a difference to the lives of people in the 13th century? Oh yes. It had an immense and immediate impact on law and on the development of law. Individual clauses are very quickly pleaded. What’s striking is how many copies were circulated. It forced governments to

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behave differently, and set rules for good behaviour and, once the charter was reissued in 1225, it became impossible to impose general taxation without consent. I think you are repeatedly struck by the ambition of 1215. Whatever you may think about the motives of the people like Robert Fitzwalter, clearly I rather respect ambition. I respect radicalism; I don’t necessarily like it, but I respect it. They are intellectually ambitious, which is impressive whatever one thinks. How do we go about setting an absolute monarch in chains? Why should we care about Magna Carta? We care about it because it’s there. There’s a myth, it’s an anniversary… all these banal things. We should care about it in substance because much of the myth is true. The year 1215 really is the beginning of a very particularly English politics – and I’m daring to use the word English – which has actually survived 800 years. The futures of England and the English political system are ﬁrst sketched out in 1215 – or rather, in that crucial decade-long crisis of the charters from 1215 to 1225. You can trace so much back to that point: the whole dialogue of Whig and Tory; particular models of statesmanship that constantly repeat

themselves; this crisis of charters leading directly to the establishment of parliament. The whole structure of parliamentary government really begins with the reissue of the charter in 1225. What new impression of Magna Carta and its legacy would you like readers to leave this book with? I would like them to think about Magna Carta not as some kind of sacred origin of the English constitution but as a product of crisis, of revolution narrowly averted, and of the thing that we’ve all become so contemptuous of – the political process. That process is one of compromise, of wheeler-dealing, of not getting quite everything that you want. It’s about recognising that your opponents may have a point. We’ve become very contemptuous of all those things, and that’s very dangerous, because that’s the route of a Robespierre or a Lenin. English history is a very different lesson: one of perpetual compromise and accommodation. Magna Carta: The True Story Behind the Charter by David Starkey (Hodder and Stoughton, 304 pages, £18.99)

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New history titles, rated by experts in their field

REVIEWS

SOLO SYNDICATION, DAVID LOWE, BRITISH CARTOON ARCHIVE, UNIVERSITY OF KENT, WWW.CARTOONS.AC.UK

A Second World War cartoon by David Low showing Churchill supported by his government. Jonathan Schneer’s new book depicts a “team of giants”, says David Stafford

Cabinet of wonders recommends a study of the often fractious relations within Britain’s Second World War government DAVID STAFFORD

Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet by Jonathan Schneer Oneworld Publications, 352 pages, £20

A famous wartime cartoon (above) by the legendary David Low shows Churchill and members of his government marching determinedly forward in unison. “All Behind You, Winston,” reads the caption. It’s a vivid celebration of national unity at the supreme moment

BBC History Magazine

of crisis in 1940 when Britain stared defeat in the face. More importantly, it highlights a hugely signiﬁcant political fact. For there, along with Churchill leading the way, we see the big hitters of the Labour party: Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison. Churchill himself was a passionate Conservative, albeit a maverick one, but he knew that he needed Labour to win the war. He also brought in Liberals and talented individuals of no party. Over the next ﬁve years the faces often changed, but the wartime government remained an extraordinary

and unlikely coalition until victory in Europe was won. Here was a team of giants. After it was all over, many of them burnished their memories to emphasise how seamless their co-operation had been and how they had worked tirelessly together to save the nation. This was not wrong, but it was only part of the truth. For Britain’s wartime government was also a team of rivals, strong men with passionately held beliefs that did not always coincide and often conﬂicted. They were divided by ideology as well as personality and often fought among themselves – ministers at war in the double sense deliberately conveyed by the book’s title. Some also developed ambitions of leadership and appeared at times to threaten Churchill’s hold on power. No leader, not even the wartime Churchill, can afford to ignore the men behind him. For what knives might they be wielding? It’s always refreshing to read a book that covers familiar terrain yet brings a different eye and perspective to bear on it. Here, Jonathan Schneer has succeeded with considerable aplomb. An American, he has been inspired by fellow historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s study of Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War government to explore the inner dynamics between the major personalities of Churchill’s coalition – or, more accurately, his war cabinet. And what a cast of characters. We have the irrepressible and scintillating press magnate Max Beaverbrook, trusted by no one but Churchill MAGAZINE and once described as “2 per cent CHOICE genius and 98 per cent crook” and by himself as “the cat that walks alone”. No wonder he was always resigning. Then there is Stafford Cripps, the austere and high-minded socialist who at one point appeared to come close to

“Schneer makes it clear that Churchill was surely the only man for the job” 67

Books / Reviews COM MING SOON… “Nex x xt issue, our experts will be exploring new books on the reign gn of Charles I, rural life in Britain and a Regency-era scandal. Plus, I’ll be talking to Antony Beevor about Ardennes 1944: Hitle t er’s Last Gamble, his take on a brutal episode in the dying days of the Second World War.” Matt Elton, reviews editor

“Churchill was never good at meetings: he wandered off the point and preferred to hear his own voice” anointed successor, kept his ambitions mostly under control. But he and Churchill danced an intricate pas de deux, and the prime minister clearly preferred the company of others. Churchill was never good at running meetings: he often harangued his colleagues, wandered off the point and preferred to hear his own voice. But to his enormous credit, he never sought out ‘yes men’ and appeared to relish the battles he had to ﬁght with the members of his team. He rarely took things personally, and could be exceptionally gracious with those who opposed his views. As Schneer convincingly shows, away from the cabinet table he did an incredible job of managing his fractious team. It helped that the war cabinet quickly lost control of the conduct of the conﬂict, which was left to Churchill and the chiefs of staff. Who else could have kept this coalition together? This highly readable book makes it clear that Churchill was surely the right and only man for the job. David Stafford d is the author of Roosevelt and Churchill (Sphere, 2000)

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Meeting the Greeks explores an ambitious attempt to pinpoint exactly what made ancient Hellenic culture so successful MICHAEL SCOTT

Introducing the Ancient Greeks by Edith Hall Bodley Head, 336 pages, £20

importance in wider Mediterranean and world history. She asserts that one does not ﬁnd this mix of characteristics in such concentration elsewhere in Mediterranean and near eastern antiquity, marking the Greeks out as a critical vehicle both for the development of the ancient world and the shaping of our world today. Indeed, while clearly not the only culture in the ancient Mediterranean world to achieve great things, their particular make-up of personality traits made them especially adept to function as a conduit for the transmission of those achievements to future generations. Hall’s chosen characteristics are ﬂeshed out across the book’s 10 chapters, each of which also deals with a period from the Mycenaean world of 1600–1200 BC through to the adoption of Christianity in the Greek world in the fourth and ﬁfth centuries AD. Her emphasis throughout is on showing how the inﬂuence of individuals mixes with broader historical shifts and community traits to create the Greeks’ extraordinary achievements. It makes for a fascinating read, delightfully illustrated with unusual and exquisite drawings, often from the author’s personal collection.

Recent books have taken different angles on how best to crack the complex ediﬁce of Greek culture and society for nonspecialist readers. Unlike the Romans, with whom we feel a more immediate connection, the Greeks can seem distant, nonsensical and unreal. Rather than focusing on particular lives or periods, Edith Hall opts for the ancient Greeks’ key characteristics. Working out what they had in common is not easy: their world was a patchwork of independent micro-communities with their own identities, spread across the Mediterranean as well as a large expanse of time. As Hall points out, geography also contributed to their division: Greece has one of the highest ratios of coastline to land area (thanks to all the islands) of any country in the world. In such a fractured environment, what made the Greeks recognisable as a community? Hall argues that they were not only united by 10 unique personality Michael Scottt (michaelscottweb.com) is traits, but that these traits can help associate professor of classics and ancient us unlock their psyche and societal history at the University of Warwick make-up. The Greeks were seagoing, suspicious of authority, individualistic and inquiring. They were open to new ideas, witty and competitive. They admired excellence, were elaborately articulate, and addicted to pleasure. In her illuminating introduction, Hall looks at the development of these traits and explains how she feels they are linked to the thorny question of the A fourth-century BC frieze from the ancient Greek Greeks’ uniqueness and city of Halicarnassus. Edith Hall’s new book aims to identify the culture’s “key characteristics”

BBC History Magazine

BRIDGEMAN

challenging Churchill’s leadership but then slowly self-destructed. Constantly present is Clement Attlee, the sharptongued Labour leader and, for most of the war, Churchill’s deputy, a deceptively quiet man with what Schneer describes as “a spine of steel”. He needed it. For while Ernest Bevin, the bulldozing trade unionist and highly effective minister of labour, never lusted after his leadership of the party, the home secretary, Herbert Morrison, clearly did. As Bevin and Morrison loathed each other, Attlee spent much of his energy simply keeping his own inner team together. As for the Conservatives, the glamorous and explosively temperamental foreign minister Anthony Eden, Churchill’s

Rogue element MICHAEL GOODMAN praises

a compelling biography of scientist Bruno Pontecorvo, suspected of Soviet espionage in the Second World War Half Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy by Frank Close Oneworld, 400 pages, £20

Frank Close is a renowned physicist who has written a number of successful books on scientiﬁc matters. Half Lifee is a fascinating account of a complex character. Close’s title, and the depiction on the book’s cover of the mirror-image of half of each side of his subject’s face, are tantalising. Without being too pedantic – as it’s clearly a deliberate choice – the lack of a question mark in the book’s subtitle, Physicist or Spy, y rather leaves the reader wondering whether they are mutually exclusive. This is particularly confusing because Close’s contention is that he was both. Bruno Pontecorvo (1913–93) has long been a subject of fascination. An Italianborn Jewish communist, he worked in Canada during the Second World War as part of the Manhattan Project (the US-led atomic project). Despite being courted by a number of US universities after the war, he chose to move to the new Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in Oxfordshire. This was the non-military aspect of Britain’s postwar atomic endeavours, and Pontecorvo worked on nuclear reactors. In late July 1950 the Pontecorvo family, as was their annual custom, got a ferry to the continent. Travelling around Italy and surrounding areas, the family arranged to meet Pontecorvo’s parents in

BBC History Magazine

Bruno Pontecorvo in Moscow, 1955. “Frank Close offers the most authoritative account” of the scientist’s life, says Michael Goodman

August but the reunion never took place – Pontecorvo had vanished without trace. His destination was the Soviet Union, although it would be years before anyone in the west would know this for certain. Much ignored by most accounts of Soviet atomic espionage or of British traitors of the era, perhaps the central question is whether Pontecorvo actually spied for the Soviet Union prior to his disappearance. Soviet defectors who have revealed much about other spies of this era have remained generally quiet on the subject. The notable exception is the former KGB colonel Gordievsky, who has said that Pontecorvo began to spy for the Russians during the war, but no other evidence has yet been found to support this. The other reason that Pontecorvo has received much less attention than, for instance, Klaus Fuchs is that, unlike Fuchs, Pontecorvo barely worked on atomic military matters. Aside from offering the most authoritative account of Pontecorvo’s life, Half Lifee therefore tries to tackle

“Unless the KGB ever opens its archive, this is likely to remain the definitive history”

two questions: was he a spy or simply a disillusioned defector, and what was he like as a scientist? Close admits that the answer to the ﬁrst question comes from a “kaleidoscope of facts” and is noticeably coy about making a ﬁrm judgment. The inference is that, on the balance of probability, Pontecorvo didd spy for the Russians while in the west. Yet, as Close concludes, there was probably very little (if any) evidence that the British government could have used as the basis for a conviction, had they wanted to. On the second question the author is far more categorical; he is, after all, well placed to judge Pontecorvo’s scientiﬁc contributions. Regardless of his political convictions, Close is clearly impressed by Pontecorvo’s value as a scientist. It is 65 years since Bruno Pontecorvo vanished. In this beautifully written account, Close has trawled archives around the world, interviewed as many survivors as possible, and produced a conclusive account of his subject. Unless the KGB ever opens its archive, this is likely to remain the deﬁnitive history of an elusive and long misunderstood character. Michael Goodman is the author of The Ofﬁcial History of the Joint Intelligence Committee: Volume I (Routledge, 2014)

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Books / Reviews The meeting of Wellington and Blücher as portrayed in a 19th-century painting. The event is one of the disputed episodes in a battle that “left much scope for divergence of opinion,” says Tim Clayton

Whose Waterloo? TIM CLAYTON on a concise overview of a conﬂict that lingered

long in national memories, and still inspires debate today

Oxford University Press, 240 pages, £18.99

When the British think of the land battles of the Napoleonic wars they think ﬁrst of Waterloo: the iconic battle, greatest of all British victories. Even though there were three times as many Germans as Britons at Waterloo, for Germans Leipzig became the enduringly iconic battle. The French and those Belgians who remembered Napoleon with affection preferred to cherish victories but immortalised Waterloo as a location of tragedy, of terrible but gallant defeat. For the Dutch, it represented the triumph of the House of Orange; it is their lion that still dominates the battleﬁeld. The cultural history of the battle and its afterlife in the narrative of nations form the main themes of this lucid, measured

and fascinating exposition of a subject that is possibly even more complex and divisive than the campaign itself. Waterloo meant very different things to different people. Simón Bolívar wrote: “Europe has been salvaged by this immortal battle whose consequences will prove to be more important than those of any other event in the annals of the universe.” Others anticipated a serious setback for liberty. Jeremy Bentham commented: “The plains, or heights, or whatever they are, of Waterloo will one day be pointed to by the historian as the grave, not only of French but of English liberties.” The French tyrant had fallen, but across Europe liberal ideas fell with him. On 18 June 1815 most of the battleﬁeld was covered in such dense smoke that

“The aftermath of Waterloo is possibly more divisive than the campaign itself”

A philosopher and PR man BARRY STRAUSS rates a study of a Roman philosopher

and writer whose inﬂuence continues into the 21st century Seneca: A Life by Emily Wilson Allen Lane, 272 pages, £25

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a complex, proliﬁc, and not entirely lovable thinker and statesman of Nero’s Rome. A man of towering ambition, he went to the capital city to make his name. For better and worse, he did, and Emily Wilson does justice to

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his paradoxes in this wise and lively book. A Stoic philosopher, orator and man of the world, Seneca served as tutor and enabler to Nero; in effect, as Wilson says, “his chief speech writer and public relations ofﬁcer”. Seneca hoped to make Nero into a good prince, but when he turned into a tyrant who murdered his stepbrother and mother, among others, Seneca did not protest. Nero rewarded him with power and riches until, inevitably, Nero turned on him, accusing him of conspiracy and forcing him to take his own life.

those who took part had little idea of what had happened outside their immediate vicinity. The British were happy to believe an Anglocentric narrative devised by Wellington and foreign secretary Castlereagh. Highlanders and Scots Greys took an ever more prominent part in the story, aided by Walter Scott and a fashion for Scotland that peaked under Victoria. Forrest begins this short book with a serviceable account of a complex and much debated campaign that left much scope for divergence of opinion. It does contain occasional errors. Wellington and Prussian ﬁeld marshal Blücher emphatically did not meet and discuss their plans the night before the battle at La Belle Alliance: Blücher was 10 miles away at Wavre. Whether or not they met

Yet Seneca’s greed and corruption were ﬂeeting things; his literary works live on. They include some of the Latin language’s most exquisite, insightful prose; above all, his Letters to Lucilius. In works such as On Anger, Seneca displays psychological insight of enduring value. Wilson’s approach is humane and knowing. She is sympathetic to Seneca without letting him off the hook, and understands people in their ambition and vanity but also in their excellence. Seneca, she says, was both a super-rich man and “Rome’s most perceptive analyst of consumerism and the psychology of luxury”. Towards the end of his life, Senecaa understood the emptiness of materialism and the possibility of ﬁnding peace only within oneself. If all of this sounds modern, Wilson agrees.

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BRIDGEMAN

Great Battles: Waterloo by Alan Forrest

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

Revilement and revolution LOUISE WILKINSON enjoys an examination of a contentious

king whose reign is perhaps most famous for Magna Carta King John: England, Magna Carta and the Making of a Tyrant by Stephen Church Macmillan, 352 pages, £25

there at the close of the battle next day, as the Prussian general Gneisenau maintained and Wellington denied, is one of the more minor issues around which debate has raged. Gneisenau wished to name the battle ‘Belle Alliance’ to celebrate the way in which it had been won through the determined collaboration of allies, but Wellington wished it to be known that he and his British troops had won the battle. Gneisenau was left fuming at the “contemptuous ingratitude” that Wellington had displayed to the Prussians without whom he would have been “smashed to pieces”. Tim Clayton is the author of Waterloo: Four Days that Changed Europe’s Destiny (Little Brown, 2014)

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The book alternates nicely between formal writing and plainspoken intimacy, and Wilson has a ﬁne eye for detail. Her prose is enlivened with occasional references to modern culture, from Law and Order to The Hunger Games. She memorably calls an upstart millionaire character from Petronius’s Satyricon a “Roman Gatsby”, and notes the uncomfortable parallels to Seneca himself. Uncle Tom, Buddhism and chutzpah all make non-classical and endearing appearances. This is a careful, measured study, well grounded in the evidence and with the appeal of a novel of manners. Barry Strauss is author of The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination (Simon and Schuster, 2015)

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The 800th anniversary of Magna Carta has inspired a wealth of literature on John, one of England’s most reviled monarchs – and Stephen Church’s new study is among the most welcome. Church provides readers with a lively, nuanced and balanced account of the king, his family, upbringing and reign. John, youngest of Henry II’s surviving sons, emerges as someone whose “cosseted” boyhood left him ill-prepared for the military and political challenges of his later life. Church’s account of John’s activities as a “troublesome brother” during Richard I’s German captivity affords important insights into John’s character, especially the period in which he hoped to claim the English throne. He is portrayed as a “risk-taker of extraordinary proportions”, but a rather unsuccessful one who lacked good judgment. Even as king, when his policies initially promised successful conclusions, they still tended to backﬁre. When John forged an advantageous marriage with Isabella, daughter of Count Audemar of Angoulême, he extended his

control over Poitou. Yet the offence that John caused to Hugh of Lusignan, the man whom Isabella had originally expected to marry, set in chain the events that culminated in the French king Philip Augustus invading Normandy. John’s involvement in the death of his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, is also presented in an interesting light. Rather than being the product of drunken rage, Church argues that the murder was planned deliberately by the king and his advisers to remove a dangerous and treacherous, if youthful, political rival. With regard to England, Church thoughtfully conveys the corrosive effect of taxation and John’s ruthless collection of debts on baronial loyalties. As well as John’s quarrels with Pope Innocent III, the author successfully relates the king’s fears of domestic conspiracies and foreign invasions in the central years of the reign. Church guides readers through the emergence of baronial opposition, the process of negotiating and drafting Magna Carta in 1215, and the problems that its contents presented for the king and the pope. He also acknowledges how John’s actions provoked the outbreak and, indeed, renewal of civil war. Overall, this is a hugely enjoyable and beautifully researched biography. Louise Wilkinson, professor of medieval history, Canterbury Christ Church University

John pays homage to Philip Augustus in this illustration. Stephen Church portrays the English king as “a risk-taker of extraordinary proportions”

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A N EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY, REVEALING

THE TRUTH ABOUT A DOCUMENT THAT

CHANGED THE

WORLD MAGNA CARTA IN 20 PLACES DEREK J. TAYLOR

OUT IN HARDBACK AND EBOOK 5TH MAY

Books / Paperbacks

PAPERBACKS Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses by Helen Rappaport

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Pan, 512 pages, £8.99

One of the greatest skills a historian can possess is to make readers feel as if they have stepped back in time to witness the characters, places and events they describe. In her stunning composite biography, Helen Rappaport achieves this to dazzling and, at times, almost unbearably poignant effect. The four sisters of the title are the ill-fated daughters of Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, and his wife, Alexandra. With an exceptional eye for detail, Rappaport interweaves the extraordinary and highly personal story of their upbringing with the complexities of the European royal families (of which Queen Victoria was the

Grand Dame) and the turbulence of pre-revolutionary Russia – a “very unsafe throne”, as Victoria called it. It begins with a love story: the courtship and marriage of Nicholas and his “little wifey”, and the upbringing of their four remarkable daughters. Although each birth led to disappointment among the world at large and threatened a succession crisis in Russia, their parents doted on them. Even after the birth of their longed-for brother, the girls remained adored and cosseted in the heart of the family. Rappaport brings their differing characters vividly to life. Olga, the eldest, was “scornful and difﬁcult”, for instance; the beautiful Tatiana “self possessed and reserved”. In an upbringing so sheltered that it bordered on solitary, the interplay between the sisters was the dominant factor in each of their lives. Perhaps inevitably, a sense of foreboding overshadows much of the narrative. The tragic, Two women depicted in a ﬁrst-century BC fresco. Women in Ancient Rome is a “clear and thorough” account of a subject about which sources are far from abundant

BBC History Magazine

brutal end of the four sisters’ lives, and that of their parents and brother, is told with heartbreaking simplicity. There were “no tears, no sobs and no questions” as they made their way to the cellar of the house in Ekaterinburg, where they were being held by revolutionaries, in the early hours of 17 July 1918. They did not know that this was the last journey they would make. Tracy Borman is the author of Thomas Cromwelll (Hodder, 2014)

– claims too much. It was Austria-Hungary’s determination to go to war with Serbia, and Germany’s decision to offer unconditional support, that led to the conﬂagration. Britain probably would not have got involved had Germany respected Belgian neutrality. Gary Shefﬁeld is the author of A Short History of the First World Warr (Oneworld, 2014)

Women in Ancient Rome by Paul Chrystal Amberley, 304 pages, £9.99

Englanders and Huns by James Hawes Simon & Schuster, 448 pages, £9.99

Here, James Hawes rewrites the traditional narrative of the rise of BritishGerman enmity. He attacks the view that relations were good until Germany launched a naval arms race with Britain in the late 1890s that struck at the heart of British security, and places the growth of antagonism much earlier, with 1864 as a turning point. British anger about Prussian aggression against Denmark was a key factor, as was the execution in London of a German for murder, which caused outrage in Germany. In Hawes’s words: “Precisely half a century before Sarajevo, the terms had been set.” The author backs up his thesis with an impressive array of evidence from newspapers, cartoons and advertisements, many reproduced in the book. While an informative and worthwhile read, Hawes sometimes overplays his hand. His subtitle –The Culture Clash That Led to the First World War

Such is the nature of our sources on the topic that a book entitled Women in Ancient Rome should really be entitled What Roman Men Thought About Women in Ancient Rome. It would certainly make it much easier to write. Paul Chrystal is well aware of this and does his level best to make up for it. But the pickings are inevitably thin, and if they lead him to worry about male ‘dominance’ over the woman, it may be that male assertions hide quite the reverse. Sexually, for example, it is never obvious who is dominating whom, whatever men say or fantasise about it. After all, they would, wouldn’t they? That said, for clear, wellorganised and thorough information on the subject, it would be hard to ﬁnd a book that covers so much ground so economically – from family, marriage and education to religion, health and sexuality. Thoroughly recommended. Peter Jones is the author of Veni, Vidi, Vicii (Atlantic, 2013)

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Passionate about history?

Upcoming editions of The Historian: Spring 2015 Magna Carta Covering the history of Magna Carta from its making in King John’s reign through to its meaning and reception in our own day. Summer 2015 Waterloo: why should we remember? Autumn 2015 Agincourt Winter 2015 Regionalism and nationalism

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Books / Fiction THREE MORE NOVELS SET IN NAZI-RUN BERLIN If the Dead Rise Not Philip Kerr (2010) A Arguably the best of tthe Bernie Gunther novels, this story n is divided between 1930s Berlin and 1 1950s Cuba where 1 tthe threads of all that happened 20 years h before ﬁnally twist b together. In 1934, Bernie is working as a house detective at the famous Hotel Adlon on Unter den Linden when two bodies are found. But he only learns the full truth about the reasons for the murders during his postwar exile in pre-Castro Cuba.

Joseph Goebbels (right) meets boxer Max Schmeling and his wife, actor Anny Ondra, in 1939. The Nazi minister’s lust for a ﬁlm star sets in motion the plot of Philip Kerr’s novel

FICTION Morality and murder NICK RENNISON praises a novel that follows a hard-nosed

investigator as he is forced to offer his skills to the Nazi state The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr Quercus, 464 pages, £18.99

A German-American hitman for New h York mobsters is Y captured by the FBI c and given a choice: a prison and possible p execution or a trip to e Berlin to assassinate B a key ﬁgure in Hitler’s regime. In this fast-moving, if occasionally implausible thriller, Paul Schumann arrives in Berlin as the city gears up for the 1936 Olympics and is swiftly thrown into a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the Nazi authorities.

Silesian Station David Downing (2008) A Anglo-American journalist and spy John Russell J arrives in Berlin a in July 1939 to ﬁnd tthat the Gestapo have arrested his h girlfriend Efﬁ as a g way of persuading w him to co-operate with them. As Europe heads towards war, he must juggle with the demands of life as a double agent and try to ﬁnd a young Jewish girl who has gone missing. The second in Downing’s John Russell series is a thoughtful and well-written historical thriller.

Nick Rennison is the author of Carver’s Questt (Corvus, 2013)

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Bernie Gunther is a cynical, wisecracking detective who has worked both for the police and as a private operative. He’s tough and ruthless but he has his own code of morality that he tries hard to follow. He drinks too much, smokes too much and chases women. He’s a lot like any number of protagonists in crime ﬁction who derive their inspiration, ultimately, from Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. But there’s one fact about Gunther that makes him wholly original: he lives and works in Nazi Germany. Philip Kerr has been writing his Bernie Gunther novels since the late 1980s and The Lady from Zagreb is the 10th in the series. The year is 1943 and Bernie, despite his loathing for Hitler and all he represents, is forced to work indirectly for the regime in order to stay alive. His skills as a detective have come to the attention of Reich minister of

propaganda Joseph Goebbels who has an unusual job for him. The libidinous Goebbels lusts after glamorous ﬁlm star Dalia Dresner, but she is only interested in tracking down the whereabouts of her long-lost father. He hails from Yugoslavia, and Bernie is despatched into its war-torn heart to ﬁnd him. There he learns that the man he is searching for is the leader of a sectarian militia whose atrocities sicken him. Bringing this unwelcome news back to Berlin he is ordered to follow Dalia to Zurich, where she has retreated to escape Goebbels’ attentions. New problems await, including gold-smuggling superior ofﬁcers and the reawakening of interest in an old murder case about which Dalia may know more than she’s telling. And, to add to all the other complications in his life, Bernie has proved as susceptible to the ﬁlm star’s considerable charms as Goebbels. Kerr brilliantly combines a complex plot and sophisticated characterisation with an entirely convincing evocation of a society in which everyday morality has been turned on its head.

Garden of Beasts Jeffery Deaver (2004)

BBC History Magazine

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Jonathan Wright previews the pick of upcoming programmes

TV&RADIO

The novelist Fanny Burney is the subject of a forthcoming episode of In Our Time

Learned chat In Our Time RADIO Radio 4, scheduled for Thursday 23 April

Fanny Burney (1752–1840) was a novelist, diarist and playwright with a talent for satire. Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke and Jane Austen were among those who admired her work, yet her name has perhaps rather slipped from our collective memory. That’s something that Melvyn Bragg and guests – academics Judith Hawley, John Mullan and Nicole Pohl – will attempt to address as the long-running discussion show devoted to the history of ideas continues.

Anthony Fauci will be looking back at the discovery of Aids

Global epidemic The Truth About Aids

Peace and a party Producer Chris Granlund tells us about a day when a spirit of joyous celebration gripped Britain VE Day: Remembering Victory TV BBC One, scheduled for Monday 4 May

O

n 8 May 1945, following Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender, Winston Churchill ofﬁcially announced the war in Europe was over. What followed was an extraordinary celebration as Britons spilled onto the streets and had a huge party to celebrate VE Day, an event still remembered for its scenes of good-natured carousing. “It was quite a sedate era in many ways and if someone asked you to come and have a dance with them, that was a big step for someone to take,” says Chris Granlund, producer of a documentary marking the 70th anniversary of the victory in Europe. “The social boundaries were much, much stricter back then, but of course on VE Day it seemed that they’d all collapsed.” It’s a day we see through the eyes of some of those who were there and went on to enjoy careers in the public eye. For Sir David Attenborough, one emotion was relief that he wouldn’t have to ﬁght. “He was just getting to the age where he would have been sent out to the front,”

MAGAZINE

CHOICE

says Granlund. In contrast, it was a “bittersweet” day for four-year-old John Craven, who didn’t know whether his father, who was in a PoW camp in the far east, was alive. Even so, he still remembers the party because he’d never been to one before. The documentary also looks beyond the day itself to a postwar era where, even in an age of austerity, “there was a sense of being free”, says Granlund, as the welfare state came into being, and there was more social mobility. VE Day: Remembering Victoryy is part of a wider season, Britain’s Greatest Generation. Other highlights include Churchill: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (BBC Two, Wednesday 13 May), which explores why the Conservatives were defeated at the 1945 election; and The BBC at War (BBC Two, May), focusing on Auntie’s reporting of the conﬂict. Among the radio documentaries in the season, The Rape of Berlin n (BBC World Service, Saturday 9 May), sees Lucy Ash investigating allegations that Soviet soldiers committed mass rape in Berlin. For more on the Britain’s Greatest Generation season, see page 22

RADIO BBC World Service,

GETTY/CORBIS/ALAMY

scheduled for Wednesday 6 May

It’s now more than 30 years since Aids was ﬁrst clinically observed, long enough to take a historical perspective on its spread – and the stigma and fear that surrounded the condition. A new ﬁve-part series begins with immunologist Anthony Fauci looking back at the early days of the epidemic and the discovery of HIV/Aids. Norman Fowler presents the second and third shows, in which the former cabinet minister remembers his battle with Margaret Thatcher to get a strong public information campaign on HIV/Aids launched, and examines current policies in the USA, Russia and Australia.

BBC History Magazine

“What followed was an extraordinary celebration as Britons spilled onto the streets and had a huge party” Children help put up bunting and ﬂags in London, VE Day, 8 May 1945

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TV & Radio

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Six celebrities prepare to encounter “rats, poo and rotting meat” in the Victorian era

24 Hours in the Past TV BBC One, scheduled for May

What was it like to be a worker in the Victorian era rather than a gentleman or a lady able to call upon servants? For a new living history series, six celebrities – former politician and Strictlyy star Ann Widdecombe, comedian Alistair McGowan, athlete Colin Jackson, radio presenter Miquita Oliver, Tyger Drew-Honey of Outnumberedd fame and actor Zoe Lucker – get the chance to ﬁnd out as they’re ejected from the modern world and sent back to the 19th century. The aim is for the celebrities to recreate

Chaos amid defeat Last Days in Vietnam DVD (PBS America, £17.99) In 1973, the Paris Peace Accords seemingly brought the war in Vietnam to an end. The USA pulled out its forces, the country remained partitioned, and Richard Nixon hailed “peace with honour”. But the ceaseﬁre didn’t endure: North Vietnamese troops were soon pouring south. The true end of the conﬂict was imminent. Rory Kennedy’s Oscar-nominated documentary, which mixes ﬁrst-hand testimony with archive footage, vividly captures the chaos of this era. And these really were

the Victorian experience as authentically as possible by getting them to spend four days and four nights in “challenging” environments: a dust yard (essentially a rubbish dump), a coaching inn, a pottery factory and, worst of all, the dreaded workhouse. Each will be expected to complete tasks that our ancestors might have had to do to make a crust. It won’t be pleasant – according to the advance press information, we should expect “rats, poo and rotting meat”. The series is presented by Fi Glover, while Ruth Goodman of Victorian Farm fame, a great believer in recreating the past as a way to understand how people really went about their lives, will offer an expert’s perspective on how the celebrities get on.

chaotic days. With Congress unwilling to grant any funds to the south to aid an evacuation, many Americans on the ground began helping out Vietnamese colleagues as best they could by, for instance, hiding people on cargo planes headed for the Philippines. As the endgame played out, things became more desperate. Waves of helicopters landed on the heliport of the destroyer USS Kirk. To make space for new arrivals, sailors then pushed the vacated aircraft into the water. Those wanting analysis of Cold War geopolitics should probably look elsewhere, but viewed as a record of how people improvise and try their best even as things fall apart, Last Days in Vietnam is an extraordinary ﬁlm.

Follow the search for a Spanish treasure ship on Yesterday

The title, Raiders of the Lost Past (Friday 24 April), may be rather sensationalistic, but many of the stories featured in Yesterday’s series about those who pursue legendary objects are fascinating. Might there really be a Spanish treasure ship in California’s Mojave Desert? Also on Yesterday, Mummies Alive (Monday 4 May) is a new series that promises to bring some of the world’s best-preserved mummies “back to life with exquisite animation”. Among Radio 4’s highlights this month, Paul Lewis of Money Box fame investigates the history of tax rebellions in Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay (Monday 18 May). Meanwhile, the weekday series Incarnations – India in 50 Lives (Radio 4, Monday 11 May) offers audio portraits of some of the most important ﬁgures from Indian history, beginning with the Buddha. (See our feature on page 28 for more.) On satellite TV, highlights include World War II: For King and Country (PBS America, Wednesday 29 April), which explores the experiences of Canadian servicemen during the Second World War. More than 100 Canadian pilots ﬂew in the Battle of Britain – one of them, Robert Barton DFC, recalls his exploits with 249 Squadron for the series. Forgotten Plague (PBS America, Thursday 7 May) reminds us that tuberculosis was once a huge problem – the biggest cause of death in the US for 200 years – and that it may be a problem again.

Refugees pour ashore from navy barges, north of Saigon in April 1975

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BBC History Magazine

BBC/UKTV/GETTY

Dirt and graft

Magna Carta through the ages

Free Admission 26 May – 31 July 2015 Society of Antiquaries of London www.sal.org.uk/magna-carta This exhibition ition hhas as been been m made ade d poss possible ibl ib ble wi with ith th ith it the h ki kkind indd suppo support rtt of of: f:

Examine the Past Pearson is recruiting History examiners for GCE/GCSE History for Summer 2015 With your knowledge of History and teaching skills, you could become an examiner for Pearson and help to shape the future of thousands of students. Being an examiner can inspire fresh ideas and new approaches to teaching your subject. For more information about the roles, GFFT CFOFmUT BOE IPX UP BQQMZ Z QMFBTF WJTJU

www.edexcel.com/aa-recruitment or email [email protected]

OUT&ABOUT HISTORY EXPLORER

Medieval universities Dr Hannah Skoda and Daniel Cossins pay a visit to Merton College, Oxford, founded in 1264, to discover more about Britain’s universities in the Middle Ages

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Walter de Merton, who founded Merton College in 1264

responded by increasing the power of the university, granting sovereignty over the town and its market. The mayor of Oxford was forced to swear an oath to uphold the privileges of the university and every year town ofﬁcials were to attend a Mass to pray for the souls of the students slain on St Scholastica’s Day, and to pay reparations. In short, the skirmish had cemented the medieval university’s supremacy.

To foster learning A short walk from the site of the Swindlestock Tavern, now home to a Santander bank, a heavy wooden door beneath ornate stone carvings marks the entrance to Merton College. Founded in 1264 by Walter de Merton, former and future lord chancellor, it was the university’s ﬁrst fully selfgoverning college. It was endowed with lands and governed by statutes, which became characteristic of all later colleges, to provide an environment in which scholars could study and pass on their learning. “Right from the start this is about providing a very speciﬁc kind of community to foster learning in the service of God,” says Hannah Skoda, fellow and tutor in history at the University of Oxford. Today, standing in the front quadrangle, one can see the lofty ambitions and status of England’s medieval universities embodied in the college’s buildings, many of which date from the 13th and 14th centuries. The quads, with buildings of honey-coloured stone on all four sides looking inwards to a baize-green lawn,

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hat started with a quarrel over wine quickly spilled over into bloody carnage. On Tuesday 10 February 1355, two students at the University of Oxford complained about the quality of the wine at the Swindlestock Tavern. When the innkeeper responded with “stubborn and saucy language”, one of the students threw the wine vessel at his head. Locals rang the nearby church bell to muster the townsmen, who violently attacked another group of students. More bells pealed, this time from the university church, rousing students and scholars into the fray. Tensions between town and gown had been simmering since scholars and students began to congregate in Oxford in the 12th century, fed by disputes over commercial rights and the special legal status of students. Finally, those tensions came to a head. The following day townspeople and thousands ﬂooding in from the surrounding countryside attacked students and scholars. They broke into academic halls, killing and maiming anyone they found. They plundered books and food and wine. They even disembowelled and scalped their victims. When the violence came to an end on the Thursday, more than 60 scholars and students were dead. In terms of casualties, it was a victory for the town. But in every other way, the town was defeated and humiliated as King Edward III

The chapel at Merton is a reminder that learning was seen as a spiritual activity in the medieval period

BBC History Magazine

“A community to foster learning in the service of God” DR HANNAH SKODA

BBC History Magazine

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Out & about / History Explorer

VISIT

Merton College, Oxford

speak of a community engaged in a common task. The great hall, too, where students and scholars dined together on long tables, as they still do today, was a place of communal activity. And then there is the magniﬁcent chapel, illuminated by beautiful stainedglass windows, which reﬂects the idea that learning was a spiritual activity. “What’s really exciting here is the sense of continuity of purpose,” says Skoda. “Here we’re in a space that has been used for the same kinds of activities for over 750 years.”

England’s first university It’s difﬁcult to pinpoint a date for the establishment of the University of Oxford, England’s ﬁrst university. “We know there were scholars here from the late 11th century, but over the course of the 12th century they arrived in increasing numbers,” says Skoda. “And I suppose there is a cumulative sense here: the more you have intellectuals and scholars studying in a particular place, the more others want to come. So in a sense the university seems to have grown organically.” However, in 1167 Henry II banned Englishmen from travelling abroad to study, as a result of a quarrel with Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, which encouraged English masters and students to settle in Oxford. By 1201, scholars were headed by a magister scolarum Oxonie, who received the title of chancellor in 1214, and in 1231, the masters were recognised as a universitas or corporation. Meanwhile, in 1209 an early conﬂict between town and gown had led to an exodus of some scholars and students, who founded another university, in

Merton Street, Oxford, OX1 4JD merton.ox.ac.uk/about/visitor-information

Skoda. “They had to do a Bachelor of Arts, which included grammar, rhetoric and logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Then they would do a master’s degree, which takes another three years. After that they could proceed to a higher degree in something like medicine, theology, or law. It’s an intensive and drawn-out process.” Tuition was partly made up of lectures from 6am to 9am, where learning was based around exposition of and commentary on a text. Then there were the disputations. “This is an extremely combative form of learning,” says Skoda. “You take a particular question, such as the dissolution of the Templar order, which is a huge controversy in that period, and you argue it out. Then at the end it’s the job of masters to determine in exposition the way in which this argument should be resolved.” It was a kind of gladiatorial

“MERTON’S MEDIEVAL STUDENTS PORED OVER BOOKS KEPT UNDER LOCK AND KEY IN GREAT OAK CHESTS AND CHAINED TO LECTERNS” 82

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Merton’s Mob Quad was built (from 1288 to 1378) as accommodation for members of the college, and still houses students today

Cambridge. The ﬁrst Scottish universities were established later: St Andrews in 1413, Glasgow in 1451 and Aberdeen in 1495. To start with, Oxford and Cambridge set out to produce learned theologians. Over the course of the period, though, they became increasingly occupied with training people in the administrative and legal needs of state. In Oxford, this prompted statements to the king about the university’s importance. “We’ve got a whole series of letters from the university to the king saying, ‘we really matter to you and what you’re trying to do, so you must give us lots of money’,” says Skoda. Indeed, All Souls College, Oxford, was founded in 1438 explicitly to provide “unarmed soldiery”. Universities were granted special status. The colleges, with their imposing walls and formidable gates, embody the sense that they were set apart. In a more practical sense, the clerical status of the universities provided scholars and students with exemption from secular jurisdiction, meaning they were not subject to the same legal proceedings as ordinary people. “If a student is guilty of a crime, they go to a special court,” says Skoda. “They can’t get away with things with complete impunity, but they certainly look as if they’re set apart and rather special.” This was a major bone of contention, leading to all kinds of strife with townspeople – culminating in the bloodshed of 1355. When you get to the top of the stairs in the Upper Library at Merton, built in the 1370s and now the oldest continuously functioning academic library in the western world, you get a glimpse into the lives of Oxford’s medieval scholars. Well-worn terracotta tiled passageways ﬂanked by oak bookshelves extend in either direction. Above is an oak-panelled, barrel-vaulted ceiling, installed in 1502–03. The shelves surviving today, still stacked with tomes, were installed in the 16th century. But it was also here that Merton’s medieval masters and students pored over books that would have been kept under lock and key in great oak chests and chained to lecterns or desks. “The ﬁrst thing to say is that students in this period would all have been male,” says

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MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITIES:

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1 St Edmund Hall, Oxford Where some of the first students lived

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The library at Merton College offers a glimpse into the lives of medieval scholars

combat for intellectuals, and leading scholars revelled in the idea that they were knights of intellect. Leisure activities were scarce. Authorities felt students should focus on worship and study, though that softened over the period. Inevitably students found time for extracurricular pursuits. In Cambridge, for example, they frequently swam in the river Cam. However, many of the records we have reveal illicit activities. “We know students liked bear baiting, dice and gambling, singing, and playing tennis in public [which was forbidden],” says Skoda. “There is a lot of activity between Oxford scholars and prostitutes, and that’s something the

A place of study: many generations of scholars have sought out knowledge in Merton’s library since it was established six centuries ago

BBC History Magazine

authorities are extremely concerned about. “In colleges like Merton we have surviving discipline books, which give us insights into petty acts like smearing faeces on a master’s chair. At the other end of the spectrum we have really brutal violence. Students are frequently accused of parading through the town heavily armed, trying to depict themselves as knights.” And there seem to have been a lot of ﬁghts between students at rival colleges. “In 1459, for example, we know that John Smore of Gloucester College hit John Alden of Oriel College over the head with a stick.” There is a danger that we overplay the misbehaviour, says Skoda, because such acts appear in the records, whereas the more mundane activities do not: “We’re probably talking about a noisy minority.” And, lest we forget, Oxford produced some of the most inﬂuential thinkers of the period, including John Wycliffe, a dissident theologian whose followers, known as the Lollards, fought for reform of the Catholic church. Right from their creation, England’s universities held a special place in medieval society. They educated people in the service of God and, increasingly, produced the lawyers and administrators required to govern. Such elevated status often led to conﬂict with the towns, and universities were not immune to the upheavals wrought by conﬂicts such as the Wars of the Roses. But they grew in importance over the course of the Middle Ages and continued to be cherished by king and church, even if wider society was often suspicious of scholars. “We might think about The Miller’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with the ﬁgure of Nicholas, an Oxford scholar sitting in his room looking at his astrolabe,” says Skoda. “It’s a lovely ambivalent view of the scholar. On the one hand, here’s somebody who is clever and funny, somebody who can outwit the other characters. But at the same time he is arrogant, full of tricks, and not to be trusted. In many ways that embodies the very ambivalent attitudes towards later medieval universities.” Words: Daniel Cossins. Historical advisor: Hannah Skoda (left), fellow and tutor in history at the University of Oxford

Before the colleges were conceived, medieval students were usually housed and educated in halls of residence. St Edmund Hall is the only one to survive, named after St Edmund of Abingdon, former archbishop of Canterbury, who taught there in the 1190s. seh.ox.ac.uk

2 St Andrews University, St Andrews Where Scots built their own university Scottish students had to go abroad to study – Paris, Oxford or Cambridge. In 1410 a school of higher learning was created in St Andrews, soon gaining a charter of incorporation and privileges from the bishop of St Andrews. In 1413, Pope Benedict XIII conferred university status with a series of papal bulls, one of which can be seen in the museum there. st-andrews.ac.uk

3 All Souls College, Oxford Unchanged in almost six centuries All Souls College was founded in 1438 by Henry VI and Henry Chichele, a graduate of New College and later archbishop of Canterbury. Most of the facade dates from the 1440s and the front quad is pretty much unchanged. A graduate fellowship here is one of the highest academic honours in the country. all-souls.ox.ac.uk

4 King’s College Chapel, Cambridge Where the famous choir sings carols Founded in 1441 by Henry VI, King’s is famous for its awe-inspiring chapel. It’s a superb example of late Gothic architecture, with the largest fan vault in the world and some of the ﬁnest medieval stained glass. Here the college’s famous choir performs the Christmas Eve carol service, broadcast worldwide. kings.cam.ac.uk

5 Middle Temple, London Where students studied English law Established in the 14th century, the Inns of Court were devoted to the study of English law rather than the Roman law taught in the universities. Middle Temple, one of the four original Inns of Court, was originally used as residences but is now barristers’ ofﬁces. Middle Temple Hall with its dramatic double-hammer beam roof was completed in 1573. middletemple.org.uk

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Out & about

TEN THINGS TO DO IN MAY ONLINE SLIDESHOW

Brothers in arms

historyextra.com /civil-war

The items on display include siege pieces, which were minted in Newark and used as coinage during the third Newark, Nottinghamshire MAGAZINE From 3 May CHOICE parliamentary siege of the town in nationalcivilwarcentre.com 1646. Musket balls, armour, coins, weapons and a wealth of other objects ewark’s Grade II listed Old Magnus are among hundreds of pieces on show. Building, a former 16th-century “The centre helps visitors get a feel for grammar school, has been transformed what living, and ﬁghting, in Newark into a new, £5.4m state-of-the-art visitor would have been like during the Civil centre, dedicated to the bloody civil wars War,” says Constantine. “We’ve got fought across England, Scotland, Wales replica armour and clothing for adults and Ireland between 1638 and 1652. and children to try out, as well as digital Michael Constantine, manager of the re-enactments, which allow visitors to National Civil War Centre, says: “The take on the role of a royalist gunner, and town of Newark was of vital importance bombard the town with ammunition. to both crown and parliament during “We’ve also included a cinema, which the Civil War, providing an important will show six Hollywood-scale short crossing point over one of England’s ﬁlms, featuring well-known actors. major rivers – the Trent – as well as These feature real-life stories from the occupying a strategic location on the era such as conversations between Great North Road and the Fosse Way. Charles I and his nephew and The town has some of the best-preserved commander, Prince Rupert, and the Civil War earthworks and a wealth of impact of plague on the town.” artefacts and objects from the period, A weekend of Civil War living history many of which we’ll be showcasing in events – including re-enactments, the new centre.” displays and parades – will mark the centre’s opening. This will take place at various sites across Newark on 3–4 May. A new Civil War trail app for the town “The town of Newark was has also been released. Details can be of vital importance to found on the website. OPENING

National Civil War Centre

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crown and parliament during the Civil War”

Leading historians debate myths of the Civil War on page 33

EXHIBITION:

EXHIBITION / FREE ENTRY

Roman Empire: Power & People

Frames in Focus: Sansovino Frames

Segedunum Roman Fort, Wallsend 30 May–13 September 0191 278 4217 twmuseums.org.uk/segedunum-roman-fort

National Gallery, London Until 13 September 020 7747 2885 nationalgallery.org.uk

Explore the might of the Roman empire through more than 130 objects that are on loan from the British Museum.

Picture frames from the 16th century take centre stage in this exhibition which looks at elaborate frames as works of art in their own right.

ONLINE SLIDESHOW historyextra.com /frames

A still from one of six real-life Civil War stories that are brought to life through ﬁlm at the National Civil War Centre

EXHIBITION

EXHIBITION / FREE ENTRY

Age of Glamour

Picturing Venice

Lotherton Hall, Aberford, Leeds 8 May–31 December 0113 378 2959 leeds.gov.uk/ museumsandgalleries

Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool 1 May–27 September 0151 478 4136 liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ ladylever

An exhibition that explores the glitz and glamour of the 1950s and the impact of Parisian design on British fashion.

Paintings of Venice reveal developments in European art between the mid-17th ONLINE and 20th SLIDESHOW centuries. historyextra.com /venice

Titian’s c1528 Girolamo Fracastoro, complete with frame

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BBC History Magazine

Charlotte Hodgman previews some of the latest events and exhibitions EXHIBITION

A Damned Serious Business: Waterloo 1815, the Battle and its Books

ONLINE SLIDESHOW historyextra.com /waterloocambridge

Cambridge University Library 30 April–16 September 01223 333000 lib.cam.ac.uk

A letter written from the battleﬁeld at Waterloo, political propaganda and a book from Napoleon’s personal library in exile are among a selection of objects that go on show in Cambridge this month to mark the 200th anniversary of the battle. The exhibition will explore how Waterloo was written about in its immediate aftermath, and its legacy.

The frontispiece to William Mudford’s 1816 account of the battle of Waterloo

EXHIBITION / FREE ENTRY

EXHIBITION

All of This Belongs to You

First out, Last in

V&A, London Until 19 July 020 7942 2000 vam.ac.uk

Royal Navy Submarine Museum, Gosport Until 3 January 2016 023 9251 0354 submarine-museum.co.uk

The V&A belongs to all of us. But what does this mean? This show examines the role of public institutions in contemporary life and what it means to be responsible for a national collection.

Objects, photos, ﬁlm and personal accounts shed light on the role of the navy’s submarines ONLINE in the First SLIDESHOW historyextra.com World War.

BBC Histtory Magazine

/submarine

NATIONAL CIVIL WAR CENTRE/CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY/BODLEIAN LIBRARIES/ THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

EVENT

Museums at Night UK-wide 13–16 May museumsatnight.org.uk

Museums, galleries and heritage sites all over the UK will be throwing open their doors after hours this month for a host of special evening events – from a retro fashion evening in Richmond, to Tudor dancing at the Mary Rose Museum. Full listings can be found at the website. EXHIBITION / FREE ENTRY

Marks of Genius: Masterpieces from the Collections of the Bodleian Libraries Bodleian Library, Oxford Until 20 September 01865 287400 genius.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

The Bodleian Library is currently displaying somee 130 remarkable items from its collections, to demonstrate how ideas of genius, people of genius and moments of genius have left their mark on papyrus, parchm ment and paper. Among the items ms on show is one of the earliest printed atlases, the Geographia, dated 1486.

ONLINE SLIDESHOW historyextra.com /bodleian

Codex Mendoza, Mendoza which contains a history of the Aztec rulers and their conquests, c1541

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Out & about The stretch of the Great Wall at Mutianyu was ﬁrst built in the sixth century but was largely reconstructed with granite around 1569

MY FAVOURITE PLACE

The Great Wall of China by Vanessa Collingridge

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trangely enough, I didn’t have high hopes of my ﬁrst visit to the Great Wall of China. Even though (or because) it’s one of the most famous structures on Earth, I thought it could never live up to its billing, nor those iconic photographs of watchtowers and wall snaking into the misty, grey-green mountains. At that time I was living in Hong Kong. The Easter holidays were coming, my mum was ﬂying out to meet her new baby grandson and we were going stir-crazy living on a tiny and densely populated island. We needed fresh air and big views. We needed to start working through our Asia bucket list. Quite why Beijing seemed like the ideal holiday destination is hard to fathom. It was even more crowded than Hong Kong, as well as being polluted and bitterly cold. What’s more, re, we were a tour guide’s nighttmare: four little boys – aged sevven, ﬁve, two and zero – two frazzzled and sleep-deprived parents and an (admittedly super-ﬁt) 800-yearold lady. And, just to maake things even harder, we had only a week to explore a coun ntry spanning over 3.5 millio on square miles.

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So we pared back our ﬁrst family China experience to the basics of Beijing: the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, the Ming Tombs, a few Really Important Temples and buildings I can no longer remember… and, of course, the Great Wall of China. It took a gruelling three-hour drive to get there from Beijing. However, when we vomited out of our minibus (quite literally, in the case of one of my sons), we knew we’d made the right choice. Under 50 miles northeast of the capital, Mutianyu boasts one of the best-preserved stretches of what the Chinese call the Long Wall. Set among craggy mountains, this section dates back to the mid-sixth century, though most of what you see today was constructed in the 16th century during the Ming Dynasty. It’s not just the wall itself that i impresses: with i h 22 watchtowers h in this stretch of less than two

miles, and fabulous crenelated merlons, it’s perfect for little boys’ soldier games. First, though, we had to actually get up to the wall. Faced with the choice of dragging a heavy toddler in a buggy, a baby in a backpack and my mother up 4,000-plus steps, we decided to take the only sensible option – a stress-free ride up the mountainside in a cable car. To glide silently uphill amid the steep, forested slopes was a joy in itself. There were still a few steps to master at the top but before long we had made it: we had managed to get seven of us, spanning eight decades, to the Great Wall of China – surely almost as big an achievement as building the wall in the ﬁrst place. It was only once we were standing in the emptiness of one of the watchtowers that the scale of the thing began to sink in. It’s big – very big. At around 8 me metres tall and 5 metres wide (exclluding the watchtowers, whicch are bigger still), the Mutianyu section snakes into the ffar distance, but the whole struccture extends for over 13,000 milees – roughly equivalent to

Qin Shi Hu uang, ﬁrst emperor of the Qin dynasty, united the ‘Warring States’ and constrructed the earliest wall

10 Great Barrier Reefs or 158 Hadrian’s Walls laid end to end. Why did successive generations of rulers construct and maintain this giant ediﬁce? The simple reason: fear. To the north stretched the Eurasian steppe, rife with marauding armies. South of this line spread lands that had long been contested (during the ‘Warring States’ period of 475–221 BC) but which had been consolidated under the ﬁrst emperor of the Qin dynasty in the third century BC into the domain we now know as China. Like Hong Kong’s famous Gin Drinkers’ Line during the Second World War, the Great

BBC History Magazine

BRIDGEMAN/ ALAMY

Continuing our historical holidays series, Vanessa shares her thoughts on an imposing reminder of many centuries of conflict

ADVICE FOR TRAVELLERS

BEST TIME TO GO Spring and autumn are ideal. Winter can be bitterly cold, while summers swelter. Visit early morning or late afternoon to avoid the busiest times.

GETTING THERE Mutianyu is about 50 miles north-east of Beijing. Day tours are available from the capital; alternatively, take a taxi or bus from Dongzhimen.

WHAT TO PACK Take water. Consider sturdy hiking shoes to tackle the climb to the wall and for long strolls along the top.

WHAT TO BRING BACK Tea sets, calligraphy, carved jade ornaments, silk and Mao memorabilia are among the most popular quintessentially Chinese souvenirs.

READERS’ VIEWS

The wall provided an unequivocal statement of power and unity for a new empire striving to forge an identity Wall drew a line in the sand from east to west between ‘us’ (the Chinese) and ‘them’ (the Mongols, mostly). Moreover, by polarising armies and peoples as being – literally – on ‘our side’ or ‘the other side’ it provided an unequivocal statement of power and unity for a new empire striving to forge an identity. In addition, the road atop the wall not only allowed armies and traders to move efﬁciently, but

Been there… Have you been to the Great Wall of China? Do you have a top tip for readers? Contact us via Twitter or Facebook

also enabled the ﬂow of goods to be controlled and taxed. Of course, the other beneﬁt for this mother of four little boys was that I could let them roam for hours, safe in the knowledge that neither they – nor I – could get lost. We descended by gondola, but the adrenalin-hungry can take a toboggan ride down a giant slide on something resembling an oversized skateboard. However, I think the more graceful descent matches the mood of this magniﬁcent ediﬁce. It’s an urban legend that the Great Wall of China can be seen from space (it can’t), but the wall

itself is truly legendary. For our family it was a (relative) breath of fresh air, an opportunity to step out of the fast lane, to travel along its foot-smoothed ﬂagstones and back through time. And even though the misty mountains were shrouded in smog, to us, at least, it still looked picture perfect.

Check out the visibility forecast. Mist or even heat haze can greatly reduce what you see. Anne Stark Visit the more-remote, less-crowded sections of wall at Simatai or Mutianyu (two to three hours’ travel from Beijing). @trilobitelarvae I went to the Simatai section of the wall, which was very rugged and not as restored or touristy as other areas. Robert Gardner

Vanessa Collingridge is a broadcaster and author Read more about Vanessa’s experiences at the Great Wall at historyextra.com/greatwallchina

Next month: Saul David visits the Greek island of Corfu

twitter.com/historyextra facebook.com/ historyextra

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Q&A

Q What impact did the Easter Rising of 1916 have on Anglo-Irish relations? Victoria Rathmill, by email

A

The British government’s initial response, trying to introduce home rule – mainly to placate US opinion – was blocked by unionists in both Ireland and Britain. Suppression of the rising boosted popular support for Irish republicanism, sparking the War of Independence (or Anglo-Irish War, 1919–21) that resulted in the compromise of ‘dominion home rule’ and triggered an Irish Civil War. Had the rising not occurred, southern Ireland would have received home rule (this had been enacted in 1914 by Westminster but its implementation was delayed by the outbreak of the First World War). Northern-Irish Catholics would have fared better, because the Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland state (established by the 1920 Government of Ireland Act) would not have been created. It’s not clear whether the weak powers provided by the 1914 act would have allowed the Irish state to evolve peacefully into an independent republic. Even if it did, this would have happened far more slowly, so southern Ireland might have been forced to participate in the Second World War. Alternatively, the better Anglo-Irish relationship that would have resulted from home rule being implemented before 1916, and the absence of both violence and popular support for republicanism, might have seen southern Ireland remaining within the UK or, more likely, the Commonwealth. Dr Fearghal McGarry, reader in modern Irish history at Queen’s University Belfast

GLEN MCBETH

DID YOU KNOW...?

It is illegal to enter the Houses of Parliament in a suit of armour. The Statute Forbidding Bearing of Armour came into force in 1313 as a response to political turmoil during the reign of Edward II and, though no one has been prosecuted under this statue for centuries, it has never been repealed. Nick Rennison

BBC History Magazine

ILLUSTRATION BY GLEN MCBETH

Q When and how did the colour yellow become associated with cowardice? Kevin Butler, Dublin

This linguistic connection was possibly ﬁrst made in the 19th century, probably in the US. Old books on English slang contain no tangible links between the colour yellow and cowardice. The term ‘yellow belly’ was commonly used in England by the 18th century to denote someone from the Fens or the Wolds (sometimes also the Romney Marshes), probably on the grounds that their semi-amphibious existence made them like frogs or eels, which have yellow-ish stomachs, or referring to their alleged sickly complexions. In other British contexts, ‘yellow’ was sometimes used to imply jealousy but not pusillanimity. The use of the terms ‘yellow’ and ‘yellow belly’ to describe cowards may have originated in the US. Though

A

it has long since become part of the standard lexicon of western movies, it was not in common usage until the 20th century. That said, in at least one communication during the MexicanAmerican War (1846–48) Mexicans are referred to as “yellow bellied”, though whether as a description of skin colour or alleged snake or lizard-like treachery is unclear. For another possible angle, think of jaundice, the colour of heresy and betrayal (Judas is often portrayed in a yellow robe), or the ‘yellow jack’ ﬂag often ﬂown by a ship infected with fever – from which you’d keep well clear. In other words, nobody knows for sure how or when the association began. Eugene Byrne, author and journalist

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Miscellany

QUIZ BY JULIAN HUMPHRYS Try your hand at this month’s history quiz, compiled by Julian Humphrys 1. What caused a five-year legal dispute between the Scrope and Grosvenor families in the late 14th century?

The 1978 Football World Cup schedule led the returning ofﬁcer for Hamilton to push forward a by-election to avoid a clash with an important match

ONLINE QUIZ EVERY FRIDAY historyextra.com /quiz

2. Who made his first recorded English appearance at Covent Garden in May 1662? 3. How did Christopher Columbus use astronomical tables to intimidate the natives of Jamaica in 1504?

4

5. Who was Britain’s first Scottish prime minister? 6

Q Why are UK elections held on Thursday?

Has this always been the case? Janet Atkinson, Aberdeen

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act of September 2011 provides for general elections to be held on the ﬁrst Thursday in May every ﬁve years, though if one is called after the government has collapsed there is no requirement in law that it should happen on a Thursday. But Thursday has long been the customary day. The last general election not held on a Thursday was in 1931, on a Tuesday; in 1924 it was on a Wednesday, and on a Saturday in 1918. Before then, general elections spanned more than a single day. Why Thursday? Could it be a throwback to the six-day working week, when many worked till midday on a Thursday, leaving time in the afternoon to visit polling stations? Possibly, but local work patterns varied – in some areas Wednesday was a half-day – so this is at best a partial explanation. Some have observed that Thursday was commonly

A

6. What is this mythical creature and with which influential late medieval woman is it associated? QUIZ ANSWERS 1. The discovery that they carried the same coat of arms. 2. Punchinello, or Mr Punch. 3. Columbus calculated that a lunar eclipse was imminent, and predicted to the native Jamaicans that the moon would be obliterated as a sign of his God’s displeasure with them for failing to provide him with supplies. 4. The ‘equals’ sign (=). 5. John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, in 1762. 6. The Yale, which was the family emblem of Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII. PHOTO CHALLENGE ANSWER: Jean-Paul Sartre

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market day, when the population in towns, and, therefore, election turnout, was boosted. But again, markets were not held on the same day in all places. Another suggestion is that a Thursday election allows enough time for a cabinet to be appointed and ready to govern by Monday. Habit, though, remains the most likely explanation. The last parliamentary by-election not to be held on a Thursday was the Hamilton by-election in 1978. Citing a desire to avoid a clash with a World Cup football match, the returning ofﬁcer moved it forward 24 hours; turnout reached an impressive 72 per cent. Michael Thrasher, professor of politics at Plymouth University Turn to page 51 to follow the outcomes of elections since 1918

BBC History Magazine

PAIMGES/JULIAN HUMPHREYS

4. What was invented by the 16th-century Pembrokeshire scholar Robert Recorde?

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

CURIOUS CHARACTERS

Hannen Swaffer “Freedom of the press... is freedom to print such of the proprietor’s prejudices as the advertisers don’t object to.” These cynical words were written by Hannen Swaffer (1879–1962), a once-famous journalist who was a notable Fleet Street ﬁgure for 60 years. He joined the Daily Mail as a young man in 1902, was one of the forces behind the rise of the Daily Mirrorr and worked at various times for half a dozen other papers. An often scornful drama critic, he once boasted of being banned from 12 of London’s West End theatres simultaneously. For the ﬁrst few years of their existence in the 1960s the British Press Awards were known as the Hannen Swaffer Awards in his honour. Nick Rennison

PICTURE CHALLENGE Name this tousle-haired toddler who grew up to become an influential writer and philosopher

SAMANTHA’S RECIPE CORNER Every issue, picture editor Samantha Nott brings you a recipe from the past. This month it’s a hearty meat soup popular in the 19th century

Brown Windsor soup The origins of Brown Windsor soup are unclear. No one is quite sure where the recipe originates, but it is said to be have been one of Queen Victoria’s favourite soups, and was often served at palace banquets. The soup seems to have been viewed in a comedic light in the second half of the 20th century, and was featured in television and radio comedy shows such as Fawlty Towers and The Goon Show. w But despite this (or maybe because of it) and because I am a big fan of robust, meaty soups and stews, I was intrigued to see what Brown Windsor soup would taste like. I have to admit, sadly, I was a bit underwhelmed by the result. Perhaps with some tweaks to the recipe (less butter – lamb is quite fatty as it is – more seasoning and lots more fresh herbs, like thyme) the dish would be a bit more exciting. As it is, it seemed like a lot of effort for something that tasted rather plain and a bit fatty – and that looked veryy brown!

GETTY/CORBIS/SAM NOTT

INGREDIENTS • 2 tbsp butter • ¼ lb stewing beef • ¼ lb lamb steak or mutton • 4 cups of beef stock

• 1 onion, sliced • 1 carrot, sliced • 1 parsnip, sliced • 2 tbsp flour • 1 bouquet garni (bunch of herbs) • Salt and pepper to taste • ¼ tsp chilli powder • ½ cup cooked rice (optional) • ¼ cup Madeira wine (optional) METHOD Cut the lamb and beef into 1-inch cubes and roll in the ﬂour. Place the butter in a large saucepan over a lowmedium heat. Fry the meat off for three minutes and then add the rest of the ﬂour. Fry for a minute longer until the butter and ﬂour mix is a golden brown colour. Add the sliced vegetables and stir in the stock. Add the bouquet garni, partially cover the saucepan and simmer for two hours. Add the rice (if using). Stir in the Madeira wine (if using). Serve piping hot. Recipe based on food.com/ recipe/queen-victoriasbrown-windsor-soup-391231 Difﬁculty: 2/10 Time: 2 hours, 15 mins

Hearty but a little plain – Brown Windsor soup

BBC History Magazine

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Miscellany

PRIZE CROSSWORD

Elizabeth I’s private secretary foiled a plot to kill her. Who was he? (see 9 across) You may photocopy this crossword

1 Roman emperor who initiated an invasion of Britain in AD 43, later sparing resistance leader Caratacus (8) 2 Its sinking by Germany was a factor in the USA’s decision to enter the First

96

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Wor orld Warr Two This deﬁnitive ﬁnitive vvisual guide is a compelling and accessible account of the conﬂict, from the build-up of hostility, through the war years, to the reverberations felt in the aftermath. Published in hardback by Dorling Kindersley, £25

World War (9) 3 Norwegian painter Edvard ___ whose picture (1893) has become a symbol of spiritual anguish (5) 5 The Jewish holiday, after which a war between Israel and Egypt/Syria in 1973 was named (3,6) 6 Charity founded in a London coffee shop in 1824, gaining the patronage of Queen Victoria in 1837 (5) 7 The ___ Cycle, consisting of legends and tales of the Ulaid people, is a key part of medieval Irish literature (6) 8 Construction at Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the World (6) 14 Nickname for the ‘quiet’ phase of the Second World War between September 1939 and April 1940 (6,3) 16 Its status as Russia’s main seaport was ended by the building of St Petersburg in 1703 (9) 17 Josiah ___, founder of the renowned Staffordshire pottery ﬁrm, and grandfather of Charles Darwin (8) 19 Port where a workers’ uprising, backed up by the battleship Potemkin, took place in 1905 (6) 21 James VI and I had this favourite of his predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I, executed in 1618 (6) 23 Charles, the ﬁrst to ﬂy the Channel and back non-stop, and co-founder of a

famous car manufacturing company (5) 24 In French history, the ___ Estate represented most of the people (ie other than nobility and clergy) (5) Compiled by Eddie James

HOW TO ENTER Open to residents of the UK, (inc. Channel Islands). Post entries to BBC History Magazine, May 2015 Crossword, PO Box 501, Leicester LE94 0AA A or email them to [email protected] by 5pm on 20 May 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 July 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 Magazinee 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.

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Across 1 Trajan’s ___, commemorating his victory over Dacia (6) 4 A phrase describing too costly a victory derives from the name of this king of Epirus in ancient Greece (7) 9 Sir Francis ___, principal secretary to Elizabeth I – his intelligence network revealed a plot to assassinate the queen (10) 10 See 27 across 11 A Nobel Prize was awarded in 1948 to the Swiss discoverer of this insecticide, now banned by several countries (3) 12 Founded in 1764, it was originally the court museum of Catherine the Great (9) 13 ‘___ Townshend’, an 18th-century Whig statesman, nicknamed after the vegetable he championed for crop rotation (6) 15 Little is known of the history of this Babylonian temple city, south-west of present Baghdad (6) 18 Giovanni ___, the Italian name of the navigator and explorer employed by Henry VII of England (6) 20 The historic 1829 Manchester to Liverpool prize-winning locomotive (6) 22 10 April 1998 saw the signing of a historic one for Northern Ireland (9) 25 The ship which, in Greek mythology, was used in the bid to retrieve the Golden Fleece (4) 26 The one salvaged from HMS Lutine is housed at Lloyd’s of London (4) 27/10 Major US newspaper, Pulitzer Prize winner, which gave its name to one of composer John Philip Sousa’s famous musical marching tunes (10,4) 28 Lal Bahadur ___, Indian PM who held ofﬁce from 1964–66 (7) 29 Name applied to the English parliament which sat, ineffectively, for only eight weeks in April to June 1614 (6)

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Anne Boleyn GW Bernard argues that Henry VIII’s second wife did not pressurise the king to make her his queen Waterloo On the eve of the battle’s 200th anniversary, Tim Blanning asks why its lessons remain important

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Colonel Blood Robert Hutchinson tells the story of an army officer’s bid to steal the Crown Jewels

Public schools David Turner on the turbulent history of Britain’s most privileged seats of learning

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My history hero “Austen was a wonderful observer. She possessed a genius for reading human nature – especially its darker side – and bringing it to life in her novels”

Broadcaster Alan Titchmarsh chooses

“Jane Austen’s novels give you the most wonderful window into Regency England,” says Alan Titchmarsh

Jane Austen 1775–1817

When did you ﬁrst learn about Jane Austen?

Way back in my adolescence when I read Pride and Prejudice, quickly followed by Emma and Sense and Sensibility. I’ve long felt a connection with her because I live in Jane Austen country. My home is about a mile from where she lived in Hampshire, and I have a piece of land in the county that she must have walked through. She also knew Sir Thomas Miller, the man who owned our house in the early 19th century – in fact, one of her letters to her sister Cassandra laments Miller’s death. What was Austen’s ﬁnest hour?

For me it has to be Emma. It’s a novel that had me captivated from the moment I read its opening sentence: “[Emma] lived nearly 21 years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” That’s such a brilliant character sketch. Then, a few chapters on, you ﬁnd Mr Knightley admonishing Emma with the words: “It was badly done, indeed!” For me, that was heartbreaking. I have a confession to make, however: I haven’t read Persuasion or Northanger Abbey. I’m not too disappointed about that – I’d hate the thought of not having any more Austen novels left to read. What made her a hero?

For me, it was her genius for reading human nature – especially its darker side – and bringing it to life in her novels. She was a quite wonderful observer of the human condition and the society in which she lived. I’ve always been fascinated by the Regency period, and Austen’s novels give you an incredible window into that world

98

– especially the boredom that the daughters of middle- and upper-class families must have experienced. These were people who really had nothing to do except embroidery. You could also argue that it was heroic that she wrote at all. This was a time when women simply didn’t write novels – borne out by the fact that she wasn’t credited on the title page of Sense and Sensibility. She wrote her books quietly, in a tiny room with a creaking door, and she’d hide away her pen and paper whenever that door creaked. I think that’s incredibly courageous. What kind of person was she?

I think she must have been a pretty gregarious person in some respects – she couldn’t have written all those brilliant character sketches without having some experience of the world around her. And, judging by her razor-sharp and highly comic dissections of her characters’ frailties, she must have had a pretty good sense of humour, too. Are there any parallels between her life and your own?

I, too, have written a number of novels, so I’d say that we’ve both experienced the pleasure of the solitude of writing. I really feel a special tie with my characters, and am bereft when I have to say goodbye to them at the end of my novels. I suspect that would have been the same for Austen. However, the physical task of writing must have been so much more strenuous for her. While I can merrily tap away at a keyboard, she had to write all of those words with a scratchy pen. If you could meet Austen, what would you ask her?

I’m not sure I’d like to ask her anything at all. I think I’d be too star-struck – anything I’d ask her would, no doubt, appear trite. Having said that, I’d love to invite her round for a dinner party and then quietly sit in the background watching her in conversation with someone else. I’d love to know what she was like in real life. Alan Titchmarsh was talking to Spencer Mizen Alan Titchmarsh is a gardener, broadcaster and novelist. His latest book is The Queen’s Houses: Royal Britain at Home (BBC Books, 2014)

BBC History Magazine

GETTY/CORBIS

J

ane Austen is one of the best-loved novelists in the history of English literature. She was born into the lower ranks of the landed gentry in Hampshire – the county in which, apart from a ﬁve-year spell living in Bath, she spent all of her life. Austen’s novels Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansﬁeld Park (1814) and Emma (1815) were critically ignored during her lifetime but have since won global acclaim for their wit, biting irony and brilliant social commentaries on Regency England. Two further novels, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, were published after Jane’s death, probably from Addison’s disease, in 1817.

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1 – 27 june

king john by William Shakespeare

#KingJohn

A co-production between Shakespeare’s Globe and