BBC History Magazine 2016-01

WHY BRITAIN HATED WALLIS SIMPSON MAGAZINE Study h i s to ry in 2016 Yo

BRITAIN’S BESTSELLING HISTORY MAGAZINE January 2016 • www.historyextra.com/bbchistorymagazine

ur guid getting backe to into the past

How violent was life in the Middle Ages?

From the rubble of the Reich

THE DEATH OF EDWARD II A 14th-century murder mystery

How Germany rebuilt after the war

THE SWINGING 60s AND THE BIRTH OF POP CULTURE

A brief history of War and Peace

PLUS

… s n io t lu o s e r s ’ r a e Y w e N oleyn, B e n n A g n ri tu a fe – e d a that should have been m thers o Stalin, King Harold II and

CITY OF SPIES Cold War Berlin HISTORICAL

TRIPS THE HISTORY THAT SHAPED US

The defining city of the Cold War... • Guided tour of Berlin city centre in iconic East German Trabants.

• Dinner at the top of Alexanderplatz TV tower, focal point of the former GDR.

• Private tour of Tempelhof Airport, the hub of the Berlin Airlift.

GUIDED BY Roger Moorhouse is a historian and author, specialising in the history of World War II.

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he re are fe w c it i e s that have as rich a history as Berlin. There are surely none as important in the period that followed the Second World War. For forty years, Berlin was the epicentre of world politics from the Airlift of 1948 to the Berlin Wall’s historic demise a generation ago.

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All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Berliner.” JOHN F KENNEDY 26th June, 1963

Over 30 expert led tours exploring 1,000 years of history. Call, email or visit www.historicaltrips.com for more. Call: 01722 713820

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JANUARY 2016

ON THE COVER: BATTLE SCENE, 13TH CENTURY: LEEMAGE–GETTY IMAGES. WALLIS SIMPSON, ANNE BOLEYN: GETTY IMAGES. THIS PAGE: JENI NOTT

WELCOME Welcome to our first issue of 2016. Over the past few days, many of you will have made new year’s resolutions, and some of you – unlike me – might not have broken them yet. It’s a tradition that goes back centuries, so we thought it would be interesting to consider the resolutions that a few of history’s best-known characters should have made as they began pivotal years in their lives. We asked a panel of historians to come up with suggestions for the likes of Anne Boleyn in 1536, Douglas Haig in 1916 and King Harold II in 1066. You will find their ideas on page 29. Harold II famously lost his life at the battle of Hastings, in a particularly unpleasant manner (if the legend is to be believed). Yet a violent death was nothing unusual in the Middle Ages, a period that was seemingly awash with blood. That, at least, is the popular conception of medieval life – but does this stereotype stand up to scrutiny? In our cover feature, Professor Hannah Skoda takes a fresh look at medieval violence. Turn to page 22 to find out more. Finally, this month should see the airing of the BBC’s latest bigbudget costume drama, an adaptation of War and Peace. Tolstoy’s epic novel about the Russian war against Napoleon is regularly hailed – by those with the stamina to complete it – as one of the finest books ever written. But don’t worry if it’s still sitting unopened on your bookshelf: on page 50, Dr Sarah Hudspith provides a brief history of War and Peace, with all the information you will need to feel smug on the sofa.

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CONTACT US Daniel Snowman In some ways, history has never been more popular. This is gratifying, because any society ignorant of its past is in danger of misunderstanding the present. But how far does the history we invoke come to bolster presentday attitudes?

Hannah Skoda In many ways the Middle Ages were barbaric. However, on closer inspection attitudes to violence turn out to have been more complex. Medieval people were frequently brutal, but they also recognised violence as a problem.

P Daniel discusses the uses and abuses of history on page 61

P Hannah Skoda considers levels of medieval violence on page 22

Stephen Bates Edward VIII’s abdication in December 1936, after a reign of just 10 months, was the key constitutional crisis for the monarchy in the 20th century. How the king was manoeuvred into resigning his crown remains a fascinating tale of royal hubris and government ruthlessness.

P Stephen writes about the abdication crisis on page 36

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JANUARY 2016

CONTENTS Features

Every month 6 ANNIVERSARIES

11 HISTORY NOW 11 The latest history news 14 Backgrounder: Russia in Syria 16 Past notes

18 LETTERS 21 MICHAEL WOOD’S VIEW 42 OUR FIRST WORLD WAR

67 BOOKS The latest releases, plus Lara Feigel discusses postwar Germany

44 Do we know the real story of the death of King Edward II?

79 TV & RADIO Our pick of January’s history programmes Discover how to enjoy history courses at sites such as Dillington House, on page 54

22 Medieval violence Hannah Skoda asks whether the Middle Ages were really as brutal as portrayed

29 New year’s resolutions Expert historians suggest the resolutions key historical figures should have made

36 Wallis and Edward VIII Stephen Bates explores the love affair that cost the king his throne

82 OUT & ABOUT 82 History explorer: swinging sixties 87 Five things to do in January 88 My favourite place: Vancouver

93 MISCELLANY 93 Q&A 94 Samantha’s recipe corner 95 Prize crossword

98 MY HISTORY HERO Russell Watson chooses Mario Lanza

44 Was Edward II murdered? Ian Mortimer and Nicholas Vincent debate whether the body of evidence casts doubt over the king’s demise

34 SUBSCRIBE Save when you subscribe today

50 War and Peace

54 Get back into history Charlotte Hodgman offers ideas to help you reignite your passion for the past

61 Are we blinded by history? Daniel Snowman questions how we use the past to serve political purposes

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USPS Identification Statement BBC HISTORY (ISSN 1469-8552) (USPS 024-177) January 2016 is published 13 times a year under licence from BBC Worldwide by Immediate Media Company Bristol Ltd, 2nd Floor, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN, UK. Distributed in the US by Circulation Specialists, Inc., 2 Corporate Drive, Suite 945, Shelton CT 06484-6238. Periodicals postage paid at Shelton, CT and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to BBC HISTORY, PO Box 37495, Boone, IA 50037-0495.

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How closely does the epic novel reflect Russian history? Sarah Hudspith compares fact with Tolstoy’s fiction

36 The love affair that rocked the monarchy

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82 The Liverpool nightclub where the Beatles set the sixties swinging 61 How we reinterpret and mythologise the past

50 War and Peace: the historical significance of Tolstoy’s opus

22 “HOMICIDE LEVELS IN THE MIDDLE AGES WERE AT LEAST 10 TIMES WHAT THEY ARE TODAY” BBC History Magazine

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Dominic Sandbrook highlights events that took place in January in history

ANNIVERSARIES 13 January 532

2 January 1492

Constantinople’s chariot-race riots spark a bloodbath

Granada falls to the Christians

The timorous Byzantine emperor Justinian finally finds the resolve to confront a rampaging mob head-on

The last Iberian Islamic kingdom is taken by Ferdinand and Isabella

onstantinople lived for chariot racing. By the mid-sixth century, there were only two teams that mattered: the Blues and the Greens. “For the sake of these names and the seats which the rival factions occupy in watching the games,” wrote the historian Procopius, “they spend their money… and even do not think it unworthy to die a most shameful death.” But these circus factions were not merely medieval hooligans. They were important political groups, with strong links to aristocratic cliques and fierce views on the issues of the day. On the morning of 13 January 532, when the emperor Justinian arrived in his imperial box overlooking the Hippodrome, tension was already simmering. Resentment at heavy taxes and administrative corruption was running high, while his handling of a previous circus

riot had enraged the faction leaders. Even as he took his seat, some spectators openly jeered. And as the day wore on, the mood of the crowd became increasingly aggressive. Now the terraces took up a new chant: “Nika! Nika!” (“Conquer! Conquer!”) And then the fighting started: the most violent riots in the city’s history. For five days, while Justinian and his courtiers huddled in the Great Palace, the city burned. Justinian mooted the idea of fleeing. But his wife, the former brothel dancer Theodora, stiffened his spine. “If now it is your wish to save yourself, my emperor, there is no difficulty,” she said witheringly. “For myself, I have always agreed with the old saying: imperial purple makes the best burial shroud.” That did the trick. Justinian regained his nerve and sent in the army. Thousands died, slaughtered in the Hippodrome. But his throne was safe.

A cast of the funerary monument of the great Roman charioteer Porphyrius. In Constantinople, chariot-racing wasn’t just a sport – it was a matter of life or death

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very year on the second day of January, the city of Granada celebrates the most important festival in its calendar with marches and processions, bands and banners. But this is more than just another Spanish fiesta. It marks one of the crucial moments in European history: the moment when Islamic Spain breathed its last. Muslims had occupied Spain for almost eight centuries when, in April 1491, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the final assault on the last redoubt of Al-Andalus. Granada was renowned as one of the most beautiful cities on the continent, dominated by the jewelled palaces of the Alhambra. But it was also a city exhausted, friendless and isolated, a fruit ripe for the plucking. For eight months, Boabdil (Abu ’Abdallah Muhammad XII), the last emir of Granada, appealed vainly for help. At last, with the city facing starvation, he accepted the inevitable. On 2 January Boabdil rode out of the city with some 80 retainers to Ferdinand’s camp on the banks of the river Genil. There he glumly handed over the key to the city. Among those watching was a young Genoese man called Christopher Columbus who later, in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, recalled seeing “the royal banners of Your Highnesses planted by force of arms on the towers of the Alhambra”. For the Muslims of Granada, the fall of their city was a disaster. For almost a century their lives would be scarred by persecution, involuntary conversion, unsuccessful revolts and forced expulsion. As for Boabdil, he eventually fled into exile in Morocco. As he quit the city for the last time, he reputedly turned back and gave a great sigh of misery. “Now you weep like a woman,” his mother said, “over what you could not defend as a man.”

BBC History Magazine

BRIDGEMAN

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ILLUSTRATION BY LUKE WALLER

Dominic Sandbrook is a historian and broadcaster who has presented numerous history documentaries on BBC Two and BBC Radio 4

Our illustration shows a Muslim couple leaving Granada in the wake of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella’s capture of the city. Granada’s fall to Spanish forces in January 1492 was “one of the crucial moments in European history”

BBC History Magazine

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Anniversaries 5 January 1066 Edward the Confessor dies in London after a series of strokes, leaving no obvious heir. A savage struggle for the throne ensues, culminating at Hastings.

20 January 1841 In China, a row about opium imports provokes British forces to occupy a little island in the south-east: Hong Kong.

30 January 1948 On his way to evening prayers in New Delhi, Mohandas Gandhi is assassinated by a militant Hindu nationalist.

4 January 1642

Charles I leads troops into the House of Commons to arrest the Five Members The king’s rash attempt to seize dissenting MPs precipitates the end of his reign and the outbreak of the Civil War

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y the end of 1641, relations between Charles I and his parliament were close to collapse. After 11 years of personal rule, Charles had recalled parliament to try to levy new taxes to fund his wars against the Scottish Covenanters. Months of bickering reached a climax on 22 November, when the Commons passed

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a Grand Remonstrance attacking the king’s supposed fealty to ‘foreign princes’. At the turn of the year, Charles decided to seize the initiative. He was convinced that the MPs later known as the ‘Five Members’ – John Hampden, Arthur Haselrig, Denzil Holles, John Pym and William Strode – had led the campaign

against him, encouraging the Scottish rebels and stirring up the London mob. The last straw was a rumour that they were planning to move against his Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria. On 4 January, Charles acted. In violation of convention, he led a troop of armed men into the Commons and took the seat of the Speaker, William Lenthall. But as he looked around, the Five Members were nowhere to be seen. “I see the birds have flown,” Charles said drily, and asked Lenthall where they were. Lenthall fell to his knees. “May it please your majesty,” he said, “I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this house is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here.” Charles strode out in high dudgeon, the five MPs still in hiding. Six days later he left London and began raising an army.

BBC History Magazine

GETTY

A drawing shows Charles I leading soldiers into the House of Commons in an attempt to arrest five MPs he believed were fomenting rebellion against him. It was an aggressive action in the run-up to the Civil War

26 January 1885

General Gordon is killed at Khartoum The revolt in Sudan sparks patriotic fervour in Britain

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ritish political conversation in the first months of 1885 was dominated by one subject: where was Gordon? Was he still alive? Could he be rescued, before the Mahdi overwhelmed Khartoum? Charles George Gordon was perhaps the most celebrated British officer of the Victorian age. At the beginning of 1884 he had accepted a commission from Gladstone’s government to organise the evacuation of Sudan. The country was nominally controlled by Britain’s client state, Egypt, but had been consumed by an Islamic nationalist revolution led by Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed Mahdi (messianic Islamic redeemer). But within months Gordon became trapped at Khartoum, surrounded by a vast force of dervish warriors. Rescuing him became a national obsession. On 26 January 1885, even as a British relief force was trudging south, the Mahdi ordered the final assault on Khartoum.

In his famous painting of 1893, George William Joy imagines the moments before General Gordon’s death beneath the blade of a dervish warrior’s sword in Khartoum in 1885

Starving, exhausted and demoralised, the garrison offered scant resistance. Accounts of Gordon’s last moments differ widely. One onlooker claimed that he was cornered in the palace by four dervishes, who ran him through with their spears. But Gordon’s own bodyguard insisted that his master fought to the bitter end, a loaded revolver in one hand, “a drawn sword in the other, and a grim look on his face”. At last, he sank to his knees, and the dervishes cut off his head.

At home, the news of Gordon’s death sparked a wave of national hysteria. Gladstone’s government fell only months later, while statues were erected across the British empire. Above all, an enormously popular painting by George W Joy turned Gordon into a patriotic martyr. He is pictured standing at the top of the palace stairs, gazing calmly down at the mob of dervish warriors below. To the Victorians, there was no more compelling image of British heroism.

COMMENT / Richard Davenport-Hines

BRIDGEMAN

“Most work colleagues regarded Gordon as a dangerous, irresponsible crank” Charles Gordon is a great cautionary figure of history. This grotesque misfit was idolised in his lifetime by English public opinion and became a headline favourite of unscrupulous newspapermen, who all but sanctified him after his murder. He was a fantasist who bamboozled the gullible in their millions with his selfdramatisation and insistent personal myth. Gordon believed he lived each day in the hands of God. He saw his life as a fight for the gospels. His actions were ruled by his sense of God’s presence: he once told Viscount Esher: “As I came to your house He walked with me arm in arm up South

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Audley Street.” He developed a death wish and craved martyrdom in ways that now seem horrifying. His death became an important symbol in the rise of Britain’s new imperialism, in much the same way as the Munich accord between Chamberlain and Hitler in 1938 was a symbol of the collapsed pretensions of the British to global dominance. Gladstone’s government was unfairly accused of failing to support or save Gordon, and British interests, national honour and the imperial mission were subsequently deemed to be held cheap by the Liberal party.

The coercive and angry grief in England following Gordon’s death resembled the mass hysteria and compulsory mourning that followed the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.

Richard DavenportHines is a historian and literary biographer. His new book, Edward VII: the Cosmopolitan King, will be published by Penguin Monarchs in February

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The latest news, plus Backgrounder 14 Past notes 16

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

Codebreaking the seal Wax seals such as these were attached to medieval documents – and many bear palmand fingerprints that may reveal details about their owners’ status

CSI history: experts analyse fingerprints to crack medieval mysteries

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF WALES

What can modern forensic techniques tell us about life in the Middle Ages – and could they be used to solve crimes? Matt Elton reports

BBC History Magazine

edieval documents are renowned for their intricate illuminations and ornate calligraphy. But now experts are turning to another, less-celebrated feature to find out more about the Middle Ages: the wax seal. The physical effort used to stamp these seals often left on them the fingerand palm-prints of the people who drew up the documents. A new project will use the latest technology to examine thousands of examples created in business transactions from the 12th to 14th century, and may help transform our understanding of social relationships in the period.

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How common were such seals? Project members Philippa Hoskin, of the University of Lincoln, and Elizabeth New, of Aberystwyth University, suggest there were rather more than you might think. “Most people know that noblemen used seals,” says New, “but even many historians don’t appreciate that in medieval England and parts of Wales and Scotland, men and women low down the social scale could and did have seals. It was a personal possession at a time when possessions were very few.” Such seals weren’t used to secure documents, but were lumps of wax affixed to the foot of a parchment, heated and imprinted

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History now / News WHAT WE’VE LEARNED THIS MONTH… London was ethnically diverse from the start

with ‘matrices’ – stamps bearing the designs of the parties involved in the transaction. Each side of the agreement would often take the half of the document featuring the other party’s seal. “The seal was not only the form of identification with the document,” says Hoskin. “It was midway between a signature and a credit card: it both put your seal on the record and indicated the property or credit you had.” It also said something about your status, because not everyone who was allowed a seal appears to have been able to handle it in the same way. Some seals even bear evidence of multiple prints. The three-year, AHRC-funded project will examine these differences, particularly in relation to gender and social position. “Palm prints are all unique, and we are fairly confident that we can tell from their size whether it belonged to a man or a woman,” says New. “The pilot study found no evidence of a woman holding any of the seals – even when a woman was cited in the document. “This raises questions. If you were a woman, would your husband or head of household have used your seal for you? And would the lord of the manor have

“The seal was midway between a signature and a credit card – putting a seal on the record and indicating property” 12

done so for people in his charge? These relationships tell us about the ways that medieval society thought about status.” It’s hoped that documents stored at the National Library of Wales, Westminster Abbey and the cathedrals of Hereford, Exeter and Lincoln will help answer these questions, as well as offering clues about medieval crimes. “There are examples of what we now call ‘identity theft’,” says Hoskin. “When the bishop of Exeter was dying in the 13th century, for instance, four of his household stole his ‘matrix’ and used it to produce documents that favoured them.” In using new technology to examine in unprecedented detail the prints of an unstudied population group, the team will also be able to explore whether, as has long been believed, each fingerprint is truly unique to each individual. “It’s never been proved, and people have challenged courts over supposed misidentification of fingerprints,” says Hoskin. “There may be a repeating pattern linked to genetics, for instance. But if comparing our medieval prints against a database of modern examples results in no matches, it could strengthen the argument.” It’s the chance to reveal more about medieval life that most excites the researchers, though. “The history of this period is dominated by high-ranking men,” says Hoskin. “I hope this project will encourage people to view seals as being as important as the records to which they’re attached, and to pay more attention to lower-ranking individuals.”

Columbus ‘didn’t introduce’ syphilis to Europe The spread of syphilis across Europe shortly after Christopher Columbus returned from the Americas may not have been the first instance of the disease in the continent, a new study suggests. Analysis of a child’s skeleton dating from approximately 1320 revealed traces of the disease and is thought to be its earliest known case in Europe – though debate about its origins continues to rage.

A painting of Christ’s betrayal has been saved A team of conservators has saved a rare 15th-century portrait showing Judas’s betrayal of Jesus after it was found covered in dirt and bat faeces. The image’s survival is unusual because parishioners often defaced depictions of Judas, and many church paintings were destroyed in the Civil War. Further clues to its unlikely past were found on its reverse, beneath later plywood backing: 16th-century writing, listing the 10 commandments, which suggests the image had been turned over and reused as a painted board.

A rare image of Judas, now on show at the Fitzwilliam Museum

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HEREFORD CATHEDRAL/THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM, CAMBRDIGE

Stamp of authority The team – led by Philippa Hoskin of the University of Lincoln and Elizabeth New of Aberystwyth University, above – will examine seals from around England and Wales, including this example from Hereford Cathedral

The citizens of London hailed from a diverse array of backgrounds from the city’s inception, a DNA study of remains stored at the Museum of London suggests. Analysis of the remains of four people, some of whom were alive around the time of the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43, shows that two originated from outside Europe, one from continental Europe and another from Britain.

ANCIENT ROME

School reports A new translation of Latin textbooks called colloquia reveals details of ancient Roman life in the classroom and beyond, as depicted in this relief (below) from AD 180 showing a teacher with pupils

Swimming, shopping and school: what a textbook tells us about life in ancient Rome A remarkable set of records is revealing fresh insights into the daily life of Roman citizens. By Matt Elton ow did the Romans go shopping? Exactly how filthy were their public baths? Answers to these and other questions are now being explored thanks to a fresh translation of an unlikely set of documents: ancient Latin school textbooks, or colloquia. The existence of these documents, drawn up between the 1st and 4th centuries AD to help ancient Greek speakers learn Latin, has long been known. However, exploring their contents has proved problematic because of the poor quality of the manuscripts used in their translation. Eleanor Dickey, professor of classics at the University of Reading, has produced a new version of the text, and her translation reveals a wealth of detail about life in ancient Rome – or, more accurately, how it was presented in school textbooks. “From the school scenes we learn what children actually did in ancient lessons,” says Dickey. “For example, schools had no set start time, so each child just walked in when they arrived (and interrupted everyone to greet them). Teachers never spoke to the whole class, but always individually or in groups, and children didn’t have regular seats but instead fought over the desirable places.” And the social settings described in these textbooks extended beyond the classroom. “We learn that you were so dirty when you got out of a Roman bath that you had to shower and then remove the remaining muck with a scraper,” Dickey says. “It’s long been suspect-

BRIDGEMAN/UNIVERSITY OF READING

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ed that the water in many Roman baths was pretty disgusting, but the colloquia offer the first clear evidence of the practical results of that dirty water.” Descriptions of shopping trips, meanwhile, suggest that well-to-do Romans would have headed out with a retinue of slaves, who they would dispatch home with perishable goods as they were purchased. It might all seem relatively small-scale, but Dickey believes these sources could alter our understanding of the ancient world. “When we think of the Romans, it’s mainly of the rich and the famous: generals, emperors and statesmen,” she says. “But those people are clearly atypical; they’re famous precisely

“Bizarrely, a boy described in the colloquia seems to have gone to school naked except for shoes and socks”

because they were remarkable. Historians try to correct this bias by telling us about the masses of ordinary Romans, but rarely do we have works written by or about these people. These colloquia give us real, contemporary stories about their lives, and I hope my work gives a fairer vision of ancient society.” The documents raise questions, however. A scene in which a boy gets dressed in the morning describes him taking off his nightgown – a garment that Romans were not thought to wear. And, bizarrely, another boy seems to have gone to school naked except for his shoes and socks – which he was wearing only because it was “a cold day”. “I hope that people with more knowledge of late Roman society will be able to make sense of passages that I can’t,” Dickey says. “Historians will also come to the text with questions I’ve not thought of. I’m waiting with interest to see what those will be.” Learning Latin the Ancient Way by Eleanor Dickey will be published by CUP in January

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History now / Backgrounder

The historians’ view…

Why is Russia flexing its muscles in the Middle East? Syria’s bloody civil war suddenly became even more tangled recently with the start of a massive Russian bombing campaign on targets in the country. Two historians offer their personal takes on the background to these airstrikes Interviews by Chris Bowlby, a BBC journalist specialising in history

The longing for western recognition has been the main driving force behind Russian foreign policy for centuries DR ALEXANDER TITOV This is Russia’s first military engagement outside the former Soviet Union, but Moscow’s links with the Middle East and Syria have deep roots. Soviet involvement in the region began in earnest in the mid-1950s. The background was the process of decolonisation following the Second World War, with 25 new states emerging from 1957–62 alone. The Soviet Union offered an alternative model of modernisation: anti-western but progressive. This made the USSR a popular power in the developing world – in contrast to eastern Europe, where it was imposing its own version of colonialism. The degree of Soviet influence was, however, debatable as the Middle Eastern states often used superpower rivalries to their own advantage, sometimes switching their allegiance. For example, Egypt under President Nasser was the main recipient of Soviet military and economic aid in the 1950s and 1960s. However, Egypt radically

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changed its foreign policy orientation under Nasser’s successor, Sadat, culminating in the Camp David accords of 1978, after which it became the first Arab nation to sign a peace treaty with Israel. After Egypt’s defection to the US, Syria and Iraq became the USSR’s most important Middle East clients – and, in Syria’s case, that remains the situation today. The Soviets trained the officer corps, and supplied weapons and economic aid to its Syrian ally. In that period, around 70 per cent of Syrian arms came from Russia, while by the mid-2000s some 10,000 Syrian officers had been trained at Russian military academies. Hundreds of Russian advisers served with the Syrian army, even before 2011. Such close military relations have clearly facilitated the latest Russian intervention on the side of the Assad regime, although this is by no means the main reason behind it. Russia also views western involvement in the Middle East as a destabilising factor (eg the Iraq War in 2003 and Libya in 2011), based on the misguided projection of western values around the world. The west, meanwhile, blames Russia for supporting regimes that have lost their moral legitimacy. The Middle East is also important for Russia because it is at the centre of world politics. By engaging as a central player in Syria, the Kremlin is seeking to transform its status from regional power to world one. The longing for western recognition has

A Russian military support crew attach a satellite guided bomb to an SU-34 jet fighter at Syria’s Hmeimim air base. Syria was one of the Soviet Union’s closest Middle Eastern allies for much of the Cold War

been the driving force behind Russian foreign policy for most of its history. This became particularly acute after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, when the country suddenly lost its superpower status. Even Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, when the country was at its weakest, saw Russians attempting to maintain their special status in the eyes of the west. Lacking other means to assert itself, Russia’s actions in Ukraine and Syria display in a modern guise Alexander III’s famous phrase that “Russia has only two allies – its army and its navy”. So a general pattern is discernible in Russia: a failed attempt at reform (westernisation or liberalisation) is usually followed by a period of reaction which sees a revival of a strong anti-western sentiment. The failure of Perestroika in the 1980s, and of democratisation in the 1990s, made Putin’s antiwesternism seem almost inevitable. The question is, how long will this period of reaction last before a new cycle of reform begins again. Dr Alexander Titov is a lecturer in modern European history at Queen’s University Belfast. He is working on a new biography of Nikita Khrushchev

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Egyptian president Nasser (right) and Soviet premier Khrushchev revel in their nations’ warm relations, May 1964

This is not just about Putin. Most Russians, especially in the elites, agree with what he’s doing

ALAMY/AP

PROFESSOR GEOFFREY HOSKING This is not really a revived Cold War. Ideological conflict (human rights versus traditional social values) plays a secondary, indeed almost insignificant, role. This is Great Power politics, more like the second half of the 19th than the 20th century. It is definitely about Russia, not just about Putin; most other Russian statesmen would take a similar line. Of course his propaganda machine plays an important role, but most Russians, especially in the elites, agree in general terms with what he is doing. The regime’s propaganda merely inflates an already strong feeling of resentment and revived patriotism. The roots of the current conflict lie in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when international statesmen had to decide how to ensure the peace and security of Europe as a whole. The Russians wanted a new organisa-

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tion – what became the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) – to take over from Nato as the main framework institution. I’m not sure whether they tried seriously to negotiate it. In any case, the west was not interested. Western statesmen, led by the USA, decided that Nato had served them well – indeed, in the view of most, Nato had ‘won’ the Cold War – and therefore it should provide the framework for Europe’s future security. Russia was weak in the 1990s and felt bound to go along with this, but Russians resented it, all the same. When they felt stronger, they decided they would no longer tolerate it passively, especially since Nato had violated a tacit agreement of the early 1990s by expanding eastwards from the German Democratic Republic after German reunification to take in most of the Warsaw Pact countries and even part of the former Soviet Union, the Baltic states. A Nato-Russia council was set up to mitigate these feelings and bring Russia into Nato negotiations to a limited extent, but it has not succeeded in doing that. That is the background to both the Ukrainian and Syrian crises. The EU and Nato acted thoughtlessly in trying to expand into Ukraine without making much of an attempt to reach an agreement with Russia.

Nato’s declaration in 2008 that it intended to accept Ukraine and Georgia as members was especially reckless, and has already provoked two major international crises. It should have been obvious to western statesmen that Ukraine is Russia’s top foreign policy concern, for all kinds of reasons, and that Russia could not allow Ukraine simply to become part of the west without a fight. I do not want to suggest that Russia is blameless. Far from it: the annexation of Crimea was a blatant violation of international law and of existing security agreements, and the west was right to react sharply. Moreover, Russia’s regime is not a good model for Ukraine. But the crisis is not only of Russia’s making. We have contributed to it. In Syria, as far as I can make out, Russia is also trying to re-establish itself as a Great Power, able to defend its interests outside the immediate perimeter of the former Soviet Union. Assad is Russia’s client, and offers it a foothold in the Mediterranean. Russia also intends to show that it can intervene effectively as a peacemaker where the USA has failed. Whether it can actually achieve that is far from clear. Geoffrey Hosking is emeritus professor of Russian history at University College London

DISCOVER MORE BOOKS E A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the

Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev by Vladislav Zubok (Univ of North Carolina, 2007) E Frontline Ukraine by Richard Sakwa (Tauris, 2015)

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History now / Backgrounder PAST NOTES SHOPPING

OLD NEWS

Mummified Cats Sheffield Evening Telegraph / 6 February 1890

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As Britain’s consumers prepare to do battle in the January sales, Julian Humphrys serves up a brief history of our shopping culture Where is Britain’s oldest shop? The site with the strongest claim appears to be the Boxford Stores in the Suffolk village of that name. Records suggest that this partly medieval building has been open for business in one form or other since the reign of Henry V. If you want to see what a medieval shop might have looked like, check out the merchant’s house in French Street in downtown Southampton. Built at the end of the 13th century for a local wine merchant, it features a vaulted cellar for stock, accommodation for the family and a shop at the front of the property. When did shopping malls arrive? The shopping mall has a surprisingly long history. London’s Royal Opera Arcade, completed in 1818, and Burlington Arcade (1819) sought to woo well-to-do shoppers away from the city’s muddy, crowded streets into a more genteel environment. Looking back even further, the trading floor of London’s Royal Exchange, opened by Elizabeth I in 1571, was in 1660 surrounded by a two-storey shopping mall featuring 100 kiosks and shops.

Was Selfridges the first department store? Though Harry Selfridge’s Oxford Street store, opened in 1909, was perhaps the first to sell shopping as a pastime rather than a chore, Britain’s first true department store had begun trading over a century earlier. Harding, Howell & Co’s Grand Fashionable Magazine, which opened on Pall Mall in 1796 with four departments selling furs and fans; haberdashery; millinery; and jewellery, ornaments and perfume. When did we go self-service? Though the world’s first true self-service store – the intriguingly named Piggly Wiggly – opened in Memphis, Tennessee in 1916, it wasn’t until after the Second World War that the idea caught on in Britain. Sainsbury’s first self-service store opened in Croydon in 1950. As Alan Sainsbury found out to his cost, the concept wasn’t universally popular. When one customer realised that the days of simply handing over a shopping list were numbered, she reputedly showed her disapproval by taking the wire basket she’d been given and throwing it at him.

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SAINSBURYS

News story sourced from britishnewspaperarchive. co.uk and rediscovered by Fern Riddell. Fern regularly appears on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking

Britain’s first self-service supermarket, Sainsbury’s in Croydon, opened in 1950

ILLUSTRATION BY BEN JONES

strange tale was reported to have taken place in Liverpool at the end of the 19th century, when 20 tonnes of cats came under the hammer at an auctioneers. These were not living animals, but 3,000-year-old mummified moggies. They had arrived from a newly discovered cat cemetery in Egypt, where the cat was once regarded as a sacred animal, living in the temples of the ancient Egyptians and embalmed at death. One hundred miles outside of Cairo, near the archaeological site of Beni Hassan, a gentleman who was “engaged in agricultural work” – Victorian code for farmer – had fallen into a pit while ploughing. It was discovered that the pit led to a number of subterranean chambers that were lined with shelf upon shelf of cat mummies. These were found by local farmers to be of excellent use as manure, until it was decided they could also be exported to England for use by the farmers there also. Sadly, the cargo fetched a low price, of only £3 10s per tonne, and less than a penny a head for the poor pussies.

La Vallette Bathing Pools, overlooking Castle Cornet, St Peter Port - Guernsey TH h 25t March – 10 MAY 2016

Peel back the layers of the Channel Islands’ past during the Heritage Festival – a celebration of a group of small Islands with a big history, this year honouring our timeless relationship with the sea. From our Ice Age past to Roman wrecks, famous seafarers to privateering, shipbuilding to great shipwrecks; explore museums and lighthouses, take guided walking, cycling and bus tours and much more. PICK UP YOUR FESTIVAL GUIDE OR FIND OUT MORE AT: VISITCHANNELISLANDS.COM @VISITGUERNSEY @VisitJerseyCI

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Your views on the magazine and the world of history

LETTERS In the December issue of BBC History Magazine, the article by Dominic Sandbrook about the end of the Soviet Union (Anniversaries) states that at 7.32pm the red flag was lowered to be replaced by the federation flag. I know the timing to be a mistake because at the time I was a security officer in the British embassy in Moscow. The old embassy was directly opposite the Kremlin. I had just completed a night shift as the duty security officer and, as I left to go home, I paused outside the embassy door and looked over to the Kremlin and saw at that precise moment the red flag come down and the federation flag go up. I looked around me but, apart from the KGB guards at the gate, there was no one to share this historic moment. Therefore, I know that the

LETTER OF THE MONTH

flag change was approximately 7.30am, not pm, because ‘I was there’! This is probably petty, I know, but it is something I still tell my grandchildren. Dan Foote, Cornwall Editor replies: We’re happy to be corrected

by somebody who witnessed these momentous events. In fairness to Dominic, the ‘pm’ was added during the editing process and so was not his error.

P We reward the letter of the month writer with a recent history book. This issue it is 1956: The World in Revolt by Simon Hall. Read the review on page 71

Was Joyce a traitor? I write regarding the caption for the photo of William Joyce that appears in your December issue (Britain’s Tearoom Fascists). Joyce was certainly an unpleasant man with reprehensible political views, but a “traitor”? Well… Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, was born in New York in 1906 to naturalised American parents. He moved to Britain in 1921, and applied for a five-year passport in 1933 claiming to have been born in Galway, Ireland. Further one-year extensions were granted in 1938 and 24 August 1939. It was the latter that proved crucial at his trial. Joyce travelled to Germany in the 10 days between getting his passport and the outbreak of war, and began his broadcasts two weeks later. Arrested at the end of the war, he was returned to Britain and charged with high treason between 2 September 1939 and 29 May 1945. He was found guilty only on the third of three counts, namely high treason by broadcasting between 18 September 1939 and 2 July 1940. The latter date was when Joyce’s passport expired (he took German citizenship later in 1940). The successful argument was that possessing a British passport (to which he wasn’t entitled) placed a duty of

allegiance on him regardless, even if he was outside the realm. It wasn’t just a document to allow foreign travel. The law lords upheld the conviction (though Lord Porter dissented). However, jurists felt not so much that Joyce, having been convicted, should have been reprieved, but that he should not have been convicted at all. Bad law was made. Steve Coward, Northern Ireland

Prussian apologies I was very interested in the article about the Franco-Prussian War (La Débâcle, December) and was reminded of a story that has been passed down in our family. My great-grandparents went from Bradford in Yorkshire to the Belgian town of Anderlecht in 1865 to work in the textile industry. My grandfather and

his siblings were born there over the next few years. In 1870, a Prussian officer arrived and demanded that our family move out so that Prussian soldiers could be billeted in the house. My great-grandfather told him that this was an English family and that we were not involved in the Franco-Prussian War. The Prussian officer apologised and went elsewhere to billet his men. Stuart Morton, Morpeth

Bombed-out but back in business It was interesting to read the question in Miscellany about what people did when they arrived at work during the Second World War and found their workplace bombed out (December). My granddad, Ernest Winn, worked as a maintenance electrician at Ingram’s London (the London India Rubber Works) at Hackney Wick. During the war, as well as his normal work, he was also one of the many firewatchers at the factory, which was bombed several times. He wasn’t on duty during the night of 19 March 1941, when there was yet another bombing raid, and the factory was badly damaged. However the staff at the factory were able to get the factory going again the next morning – in the yard. Jenny Winn, Shropshire

The Loch Ness alligator I found The Quest for the Loch Ness Monster (December) interesting. However, I think the post-1930s sightings are pure fiction – a selfsustaining cottage industry has got going around the original sighting by St Columba in AD 565. I think that that sighting was the real thing and the ‘monster’ was an alligator. Imagine the mother of all storms on the eastern seaboard of the Americas, washing great rafts of vegetation out into Was Nessie an alligator carried across the Atlantic by a storm?

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

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BBC History Magazine

DREAMSTIME

Watching history unfurl

SOCIAL MEDIA What you’ve been saying on Twitter and Facebook @HistoryExtra: Who do you think is the greatest military leader in history?

@MrNilsson27 Julius Caesar due to his ability to defeat opponents foreign and domestic. Speed of movement and Siege of Alesia are superb @bearzus Stonewall Jackson. An amazing tactician & beloved leader whose loss deeply impacted the Confederacy @ckopny Alexander the Great because of young age and achievements. But after his death the empire collapsed A soldier serves soup at a camp on the western front, c1916. A debate has been raging on these pages over how well such Tommies were fed

the Gulf Stream. Most would break up, but maybe one made it across and was deposited into the mouth of the river Ness. On board was a juvenile or even an adult alligator – perhaps even a pregnant female? It could have survived very well, ambushing animals of the riverbank – and, dare I say it, the odd human! The original description of a long, beaked creature with stubby flippers and savage bite fits well. Also there is a natural precedent for this, as the Galapagos Islands were colonised in this fashion. However until someone digs up a 1,450-year-old alligator skeleton, this is just an interesting theory that happens to fit the facts. Steve Butler, Rugby

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Kippers for breakfast, lunch and dinner The “Three hot square meals a day” comment by Andrew Roberts (Books Interview, October) caught my eye and I was pleased to see Dr Rachel Duffett’s letter in the December issue about it. I believe that Dr Duffett’s comment [on Tommies’ diets in 1916] that there was a “huge gap between what the ration scales specified and what soldiers would have recognised” is correct. When I was a young soldier, I often went hungry. The most extreme personal experience was when, due to a ‘glitch’ in the logistics, our three hot meals a day turned out to be kippers three times a day! I love kippers but, after

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a few days, began to get a bit bored with this diet. As for a hot breakfast at 4am being a ‘logistical achievement’, this would have been achieved by a staff officer putting an entry in the operation order to the effect that all units in the assault would have breakfast at 4am instead of the usual 7am. Operation orders get passed down the line and this would have landed in the lap of company quartermaster sergeants, who would have told their cooks to bring forward the timing. In the line, cooking is normally carried out at either company or platoon level – that is around 100 men at company level or 30 at platoon level. Those for whom ‘hot breakfast’ conjures up images of sausage, bacon and tomatoes, forget it. It was probably a ladle-full of porridge made with oats and water and a mug of tea laced with rum! Hardly a logistical achievement, unless one takes into account that this was the war in which there was insufficient ammunition for the artillery until Lloyd George was put on the job.

@vhb49 Never quite been able to decide between Hannibal & Alexander the Great – both charismatic leaders & smart strategists @chezjwann Hernán Cortés, for numbers, tactics, legacy for conquest and colonization, and his relevance in globalization @HistoryExtra: What history books are you reading at the moment?

@norm52 Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 by Max Hastings @bearzus I’m enjoying Queen Victoria’s Youngest Son: The Untold Story of Prince Leopold by Charlotte Zeepvat. A very moving biography. @ShazLJ The King is Dead by @ sixteenthCgirl – wonderfully written and beautifully illustrated. You’ve also been saying…

@mimblemog Well it looks about right... Now my parents can be guinea pigs. #MarlboroughPie @History Extra historic recipes win?

Stewart West, Malaysia

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:

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

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Ground-breaking and heart-breaking. The most important book on the Holocaust you will ever read.

From the author of The Other Schindlers

Out in hardback and e-book 13 January Read an extract and find out more at www.thehistorypress.co.uk/ Who-Betrayed-the-Jews

Comment

Michael Wood on… the tale of Troy

“Homer’s unsparing vision still speaks to us powerfully today”

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. His next TV series, The Story of China, will air soon on BBC Two

captive Asiatic women from many places along the Aegean coast are listed in Greek Linear B palace archives, uncannily suggesting the fate of the Trojan women in later poetry and drama. So the sack of Troy itself may have been a real event that inspired the bards, perhaps because it was the last great expedition by the ‘high kings’ of Mycenae. Then, in the Greek Dark Ages in Thessaly, parts of the tale were shaped into longer and more elaborate poems, especially dealing with local hero Achilles. In the Iron Age these were transmitted to the Ionian islands, which is where Homer comes in. His version was so admired that it was faithfully communicated by his descendants, and soon after 600 BC it was written down in Athens. Since then the tale has been constantly reinterpreted and reworked, right down to the 2004 Hollywood epic starring Brad Pitt – though for all its CGI wizardry, that film missed the heart of the tale. The scriptwriters had Paris and Helen run off together into the sunset, but the point of great myths is that we all know how they will end – and in Greek myths there are few happy endings. So what does the tale of Troy tell us about the relationship between myth and history? Well, myth sometimes grows out of fairytale and is then pegged onto real events as a way of telling history. Conversely, it can begin with a historical seed which is transmuted into fairytale. But at its heart, as with Homer’s tale of Troy, is a psychologically realistic view of life, of love and hatred, cruelty and heroism. As the recent tragic events in the near east show us, with refugees fleeing from the Asiatic coast near Troy to Lesbos, the women of Asia are still victims of war. The fall of a city such as Aleppo – with its bazaars, colleges, mosques and mansions, one of the most beautiful of all living ancient cities and one that was already old when Troy fell – shows us that ‘sackers of cities’ still do their worst. The destruction of cities, the killing of captives and the enslaving and abuse of women and children are still unchanging facts of the human condition. That, ultimately, is why Homer’s unsparing vision still speaks to us so powerfully today.

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Reading Caroline Alexander’s excellent new translation of the Iliad, I find myself thinking again about the history of the Troy story. It still inspires the old questions: how did the tale come about? Did a Trojan war actually take place ? And why does the story matter so much to us? From the very beginnings of literature, the horror of war and the fragility of human achievement have been central concerns of the poets. One of the world’s earliest and most powerful poetic traditions, the city laments of ancient Iraq, already recognised that “the plundering of cities and the singing of lamentations” came as part and parcel of the gods’ gift of civilisation, and so it has been all the way down to our modern narratives of Nanjing and Guernica, Dresden and Berlin. “Ask me for a true image of human existence,” wrote the Roman thinker Seneca, “and I’ll show you the sack of a great city.” But was there a historical war of Troy? If there was, it probably took place in the 13th century BC; that much has been made clear by the recent re-excavation of the site of Troy. We now know that what was found in the 19th century by Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Dörpfeld was just the royal citadel; a 6,000-metre-long lower circuit has now been traced, with gates and defensive ditches enclosing a lower town that looks much more like the place whose memory was handed down to and described by Homer. Add to this the recent re-evaluations of a collection of diplomatic letters from the Hittite archives between a king of the Achaeans (Homer’s name for the Greeks) and the Hittite king. These refer to hostilities between the two on the Aegean coast in the 13th century BC, focusing on north-west Anatolia, and on a city that very probably was Troy. But how much of the actual story of the war itself is based on fact is another matter. The core of the plot – the seizure of a queen and the expedition to win her back – is an old theme in Indo-European poetry. However, the capture of women was a part of Bronze Age warfare, and

ILLUSTRATION BY FEMKE DE JONG

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Medieval violence

COVER STORY

HOW BLO MEDIEV

From drunken brawls to rapes and mass killings, viole Hannah Skoda, our medieval ancestors were just as 22

BBC History Magazine

AKG-IMAGES

A 14th-century French illustration of a brawl shows factors that could have contributed to violence: freely available alcohol and the fact that most people carried weapons

ODY WAS AL LIFE?

nce cast a long shadow over the Middle Ages. Yet, says appalled by wanton acts of brutality as we are today BBC History Magazine

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Medieval violence

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Measures of violence Levels of interpersonal violence were certainly higher in the Middle Ages than today, but it’s very hard to quantify this precisely – even more so if we add war and the horrors of genocide into the equation. In part, this is because the changing nature of legal prosecutions means that we are not comparing like with like. Definitions of criminal violence have also changed; for example, rape and domestic violence were defined very narrowly in the Middle Ages. The historian Laurence Stone calculated that homicide levels in medieval England were at least 10 times what they are today. Certainly, we cannot doubt that it was a dangerous time in which to live. An exceptional case, even by medieval standards, is provided by 14th-century Oxford. Levels of violence there were considered unacceptably high by contemporaries: in the 1340s, the homicide rate was around 110 per 100,000. (In the UK in 2011, it was 1 per 100,000.) Why were levels of interpersonal violence so high in the Middle Ages? Historians have offered various explanations. Steven Pinker has put forward a psychological theory, claiming that humankind learned only recently to tame its most savage impulses, 24

A 14th-century illustration for a section of the French poem Romance of the Rose depicts a violent “crime of jealousy”

“Homicides varied from premeditated attacks to tavern brawls that ended in disaster – often over-exuberant episodes gone horribly wrong” but this doesn’t really account for the complexity of reactions to violence in the medieval period, as we shall see. Others have pointed to the prevalence of alcohol, and the fact that many people were wandering round armed with daggers and other knives on a daily basis. There were no permanent police forces, as there are now, and in many cases the capture of a perpetrator depended on the co-operation of the community. Moreover, in an era of rudimentary medical care, many died from wounds that might today be successfully treated. There are more complex explanations too. These were cultures in which honour was paramount and violence was recognised as a means of communicating certain messages. If you hacked off a woman’s nose, for example, most people would recognise this as a signifier of adultery. They were also profoundly unequal cultures, characterised – particularly from the 14th century – by high levels of social unrest. Sociologists and historians have been able to demonstrate a correlation between levels of inequality

and levels of violence, which is particularly compelling for late medieval Europe. Homicides varied from premeditated attacks to tavern brawls that ended in disaster. Often these were over-exuberant episodes gone horribly wrong. In 1304, for example, one Gerlach de Wetslaria, provost of a church in the diocese of Salzburg, applied for a pardon for killing a fellow student many years earlier when a playful sword fight had ended in tragedy. Carrying out acts of violence seems to have been as much about proving oneself in front of one’s peers, and belonging to a group, as it was about the victim – which probably explains why men in gangs were responsible for much of the mayhem. This sense of fraternity characterises a group of men led by Robert Stafford. Stafford was a chaplain; perhaps because of his clerical status, he wittily named himself ‘Frere Tuk’ after the figure from the Robin Hood legends. His gang’s actions mostly took the form of poaching and offences against property, though there were more brutal undertones – apparently “they threatened the gamekeepers with death or mutilation”.

Female victims It is much rarer to find women perpetrating violent crime; more often they were the victims. It is very difficult to assess levels of rape, because the offence was subject to changing definitions, most of which would appear far too narrow to our modern eyes. Women had to be able to physically demonstrate their lack of consent, and risked their reputations and punishment themselves in doing so. The odds were loaded against them. Cases that were eventually reported tended to be particularly brutal. In 1438, one Thomas Elam attacked Margaret Perman. He broke into her house, attempted to rape her and “feloniously bit Margaret with his teeth so that he ripped off the nose of the said Margaret with that bite, and broke three of her ribs there”. The case came to court because she died from her wounds. Elam was condemned to be hanged. Definitions of domestic violence were also radically different in the later Middle Ages. Most acts of aggression that we would deem to be criminal were then thought of simply as acceptable discipline. If a wife disobeyed her husband, it was thought right and proper that she should be punished. Domestic violence does, though, sometimes appear in the records of ecclesiastical courts when a wife sued for divorce, or in criminal records when the violence resulted in permanent maiming, miscarriage, or death. How to distinguish between levels of ‘acceptable’ domestic discipline and unacceptBBC History Magazine

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n the 1300s in northern France, a nasty character named Jacquemon bribed a jailer to let his unwanted son-in-law die a painful death in prison. Jacquemon then, with the help of his son, killed his nephew, Colart Cordele. The impoverished Cordele had followed Jacquemon during the harvest, trying to glean the wheat from behind him, but angered his uncle by coming too close. Jacquemon grabbed his nephew by his hood, hurled him brutally to the ground and “spurred his horse to ride again and again” over the crumpled body. It’s an episode that might have been lifted from Game of Thrones – no wonder the era has become a byword for brutality. Indeed, during a brutal scene in the film Pulp Fiction, one of the characters menaces that: “I’m gonna get medieval on your ass.” There’s no need to explain what this might involve because the stereotype of the violent, sadistic Middle Ages is well known to all of us. But how accurate is this stereotype? As the Jacquemon episode shows, there is plenty that is shocking and disturbing in the surviving records for the later Middle Ages. But even more striking is that medieval contemporaries were also horrified by such events. Of course, we only know about this case because it provoked a legal reaction: it wasn’t seen as acceptable or even normal.

BRITISH LIBRARY/AKG

A French miniature from c1470 depicts knights in combat at a tournament. Knightly chivalry underpinned some of the era’s bloodiest episodes

able domestic violence was an ongoing problem. One famous solution often cited was the ‘rule of thumb’, whereby – it’s claimed – it was acceptable to beat your wife, as long as the stick you used was thinner than your thumb. However, in reality, discussions were more sophisticated and less conclusive than this. In 1326 in Paris, one Colin le Barbier hit his wife with a billiard stick so hard that she died. He was tried in a criminal court and found guilty of murder. However, he appealed and claimed that his wife deserved her suffering because she had nagged him so relentlessly in public. He said that he had not meant to kill her: “He meant only to scare her, so that she would be quiet; however, the stick accidentally entered into her thigh a little above the knee.” The reason she had died, he added, was “because she failed to tend [the wound] properly” rather than because he had mistreated her. His subsequent acquittal tells us a lot about attitudes in this period. Homicide, rape and domestic violence could be found across the social spectrum. However, some kinds of violence were more BBC History Magazine

common in certain milieux. Violent theft was most often perpetrated by people on the economic margins of society, who stole out of desperation. It peaked during periods of particular deprivation, such as the horrific famine of the 1310s in which as much as 25 per cent of the population died. England in the 14th and 15th centuries was also notorious for the prevalence of frightening gangs, often comprising gentry or even noblemen. These marauded around the countryside, plundering and leaving a trail of blood in their wake. In 1332, for example, the Folville gang was accused of kidnapping a royal official; they had already killed a baron of the exchequer. These were young men who quite literally thought themselves to be beyond the law, often involved in feuds and vendettas, and for whom honour was a key concept.

A question of honour Honour-driven violence was also prevalent at the top of the social tree. During periods of weak kingship, violence by noblemen could reach terrifying levels. In early 15th-century

France, with a king (Charles VI, ‘the Mad’) intermittently suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and believing himself to be made of glass, powerful warring nobles were able to seize control. The result was spiralling violence that culminated in the 1407 assassination of the Duke of Orléans and, ultimately, the English entry into France. Things were not much rosier for the English. In the second half of the 15th century, the weakness of the reigning monarch, Henry VI, and the accumulation of huge retinues by hostile aristocrats were, at least in large part, responsible for the Wars of the Roses. The lines between interpersonal violence, civil war and full-blown war were indistinct. At the other end of the social spectrum, in the later Middle Ages the growing structural inequalities created by rapid commercialisation and urbanisation, as well as competing forms of government, generated a series of riots and revolts. Plotted on a map, these are concentrated along the main trading belt of Europe, from London to Paris and the Netherlands through the markets of 25

Medieval violence

Champagne to the commercial heartlands of northern Italy. The most famous examples – the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in England, the Ciompi revolt of 1378 in Florence, and the Paris rebellion and Jacquerie revolt in northern France in 1358 – all involved complex alliances of rebels from various social groups demanding greater representation, railing against corruption, and protesting their economic marginalisation. Revolts along social lines sometimes overlapped with violence driven by religion. Famously, medieval Europe was marked by waves of popular religious persecution, with anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head with depressing frequency. Yet perhaps the most violent dimension of medieval life was that of the law, which carried out its own gruesome rituals. Punishment was intended to be spectacular. Most serious crimes were punishable by hanging, but plenty more imaginative ways of disposing of criminals were employed. In many areas of Europe, those found guilty of forging money were boiled alive. This obsession with providing a spectacle of violence – to emphasise the guilt of the accused, and to deter and awe observers – led to some almost farcical episodes. An old man questioned in the 1290s remembered how, when he was young, he saw a man hanged for murder. The body was cut down from the gibbet by a competing jurisdiction and rehanged – only for the original jurisdiction to construct a straw effigy that they hanged.

St Eligius pinches the devil’s nose in a 1337 French illustration from a story of the First Crusade. Religious fervour sparked widespread violence

We’re left, then, with a picture of an extraordinarily violent society. Though it’s very difficult to arrive at precise numbers, it’s clear that this is not a society one would wish to visit for any length of time. There is, though, a flip side to all of this. The evidence suggests that, though violence was common, people were not simply inured to it. On the contrary – they really cared about it. This is not to say that violence was simply deemed to be wrong: rather, it was a problem about which people worried and talked. The ethos of chivalry represents one way in which attempts were made to channel violence. Chivalric custom suggested that one should fight only with certain kinds of weapons; that one should seek only worthy opponents; and that one should exercise mercy and generosity. The reality was that chivalry underpinned some of the most brutal and bloodiest episodes in our history (notably the Hundred Years’ War), but the point remains that this was a set of customs arising out of concern and a sense that violence can be a problem. The most important clue that people worried about violence is the fact that they 26

“Imaginative ways of disposing of criminals were employed. In many areas of Europe, those found guilty of forging money were boiled alive” wrote about it. Medieval literature is full of descriptions of torture, but close readings of these texts show that torturers were demonised. Such a strategy would work only if people felt torture to be profoundly problematic – and they certainly did think it a problem. In 14th-century France, criminal courts usually subjected the evidence gained from torture to extra scrutiny because it

was deemed unreliable. Chronicle sources, the official histories written in the Middle Ages, tend to provide wildly exaggerated tallies of levels of violence, particularly in revolts. Again, though, the desired literary and political effect only worked because people found such violence disturbing. The majority of our evidence is in the form of legal documents. Burgeoning legal systems in this period only bothered to produce such documentation because high levels of violence were deemed unacceptable. In literary depictions of violence, such as the entertaining stories of Renard the Fox, popular throughout Europe, violence and cruelty were omnipresent precisely because they were shocking. The horrific story of the fox raping the wife of his friend, the wolf, then urinating on her children, often provoked troubled laughter from its medieval audience. In the poetry of the time we can also find comments about the disturbing nature of violence. In Dante’s 14th-century vision of Inferno, hell is characterised by endless cycles of violence. And in the French poet François Villon’s Le Ballade des Pendus, the decaying

BRIDGEMAN

Reactions to violence

Outbreaks of carnage Medieval violence was sparked by everything from social unrest and military aggression to family feuds and rowdy students

Ciompi revolt, 1378 This revolt in Florence stands out because it was momentarily successful, leading to a radical regime change. The revolt unfolded in three stages: reform, followed by violent revolution, then by a vicious backlash. Florence was a highly developed town with a proto-industrial wool industry, but many disenfranchised workers. The revolt was driven by the desire for greater representation, fiscal discontent and ever-shifting alliances of political factions.

Chevauchées of the Black Prince, 1355 56 The Black Prince was the eldest son of Edward III. During the Hundred Years’ War, he achieved military success at Poitiers. He also led a series of chevauchées in France, armed raids involving pillaging, raping and devastation on a horrifying scale. The aim was to destroy enemy resources and morale, and to provoke battle. Tellingly, the Black Prince is still known as a great chivalric hero.

Peasants’ Revolt, 1381

bodies swinging on the gibbet speak directly: Human brothers who come after us, Don’t harden your hearts against us. ... The rain has washed away our filth, The sun has dried and blackened us. Magpie and crows have scratched out our eyes And torn our beards and eyebrows. We are never still, but sway to and fro in the wind. Birds peck at us more than needles on a thimble. ... Brothers, there’s nothing funny about this. May God absolve us all.

In the aftermath of the Black Death, taxes were levied to fund the Hundred Years’ War – and in 1381 the peasants rose up to protest the latest poll tax. Violence ranged from burning legal documents to liberating prisoners and lynching figures of authority, notably the lord chancellor. The rebels, led by Wat Tyler, were inspired by the sermons of John Ball, who preached a message of freedom from servitude. The peasants presented their demands to Richard II but Tyler was killed and they were defeated.

St Scholastica’s Day riots, 1355 On 10 February 1355 two students took umbrage at being served watered-down wine in the Swindlestock Tavern in Oxford, throwing the wine in the tavern-keeper’s face and brutally beating him. The violence swiftly spread: some 200 more students joined the original pair, burning and robbing houses. Retribution was not slow to follow, as people from the surrounding countryside joined the townsfolk in attacking the A servant pours wine students with in a 15th-century bows and arrows. Italian illustration. Alcohol fuelled Two days of rioting riots in Oxford left 63 students dead.

Murder of Nicholas Radford, 1455 Nicholas Radford was a justice of the peace under Henry VI, during the period of factionalism that later escalated into the Wars of the Roses. His godson’s brother, Thomas Courtenay, came to his gates one night and brutally murdered him; Henry Courtenay, the victim’s godson, later subjected the corpse to a grotesque coroner’s inquest. This was the culmination of a private vendetta, but also a deliberate affront to royal justice.

GETTY/BRIDGEMAN

It’s an arresting image – a very visual representation of the prevalence of violence in the Middle Ages, but one that also shows it was, even then, profoundly upsetting. Dr Hannah Skoda is a specialist in medieval history based at the University of Oxford DISCOVER MORE BOOK E Violence in Medieval Europe

Wat Tyler and John Ball, leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt, are shown meeting in a 15th-century miniature

by Warren Brown (Routledge, 2010)

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The New Year’s resolutions they should have made… Leading historians reveal how pivotal years in the lives of eight major figures – from Anne Boleyn to Josef Stalin – could have turned out better, if only they’d have resolved to change their ways

AKG-IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN/GETTY

Compiled by Matt Elton

BBC History Magazine

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New year’s resolutions

Josef Stalin

1946 “I’ll work

with my allies”

In the year following the end of the Second World War, Stalin should have resolved to work more closely with his erstwhile allies. Aged 67 in 1946, he was set in his ways but, like Lenin, capable of shrewd calculation. In the 1930s he had attempted detente with the western democracies. He could have done so again. Seven months had passed since the defeat of Germany. Much goodwill towards the Soviet Union remained in the west, where the Red Army’s soldiers were seen as liberators. The security of the USSR was greater than in 1941, with a powerful Red Army. The Soviet Union, as Stalin himself put it, had passed a crucial “examination”. Victory built a stronger base of popular support at home than ever before. Instead, Stalin wasted the opportunity. The USSR tightened its grip on eastern Europe, creating a permanent friction in its relations with the west. An arms race, meanwhile, swallowed massive amounts of money, while living standards stayed low. The over-emphasis on heavy industry continued – an economic model that would lead to repeated crises and, in the end, to the collapse of Stalin’s system. Evan Mawdsley has written widely on Soviet history. A new edition of his Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945 has just been published by Bloomsbury

General Sir Douglas Haig (right) meets King George V (left) and French marshal Ferdinand Foch in August 1916. Haig’s resolution to recognise ability above status was crucial

Douglas Haig

1916 “I’ll transform

the Tommies”

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‘friends’ when it came to military promotion, and I would not tolerate a ‘job’ being done.” In 1916, Haig largely stuck by this resolution. He had an uneasy relationship with General Sir Henry Rawlinson, whom Haig thought was devious and lacking in integrity. Yet Haig recognised ‘Rawly’s’ skill as a soldier, and gave him the lead role on the Somme in July 1916. Rawlinson’s record at the Somme was patchy, but he grew into the job and proved a highly effective commander in the victorious 1918 campaigns. Gary Sheffield’s biography of Haig is set to be revised and republished as Douglas Haig: From the Somme to Victory by Aurum Press in 2016 BBC History Magazine

ALAMY/MIRRORPIX

A tinted photograph of Josef Stalin from c1946. Having played a decisive role in defeating Hitler, he was in a position to cement relations with the west – but didn’t

In January 1916 Douglas Haig – who had been commander-inchief of the British Expeditionary Force for less than a month – should have resolved to devote more time to sorting out the BEF’s training. As 1915 turned into 1916, there was no centralised body devoted to examining the lessons of the fighting, using them to inform doctrine, and then training the army accordingly. Unfortunately, Haig did not prioritise training, and it was not properly reformed until early 1917. However, we know from his diary that Haig did make one resolution, and that was to promote the best talent – regardless of whether he got on with them or not. “I had no

Elizabeth I

1586 “I’ll name James VI

as my heir” The question of who would succeed Elizabeth I was a thorny one – and her new year’s resolution of 1586 should have been to settle the issue by naming James VI of Scotland as her heir. The two monarchs had endured a fraught relationship over the previous six years, but by then they were negotiating a treaty of alliance, and James desperately wanted a guarantee that he was next in line for the English throne to be included among its terms. Though there was a danger that the king might engage in plots against Elizabeth to hasten his accession, it was more likely that he would wait patiently for her death, secure in the knowledge that his right was formally

BRIDGEMAN/ALAMY

A portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, painted by Federico Zuccari around 1586 when she was 53 – too old to produce an heir. Instead, she should have confirmed the succession of James VI of Scotland

recognised in England. But Elizabeth resisted the pressure. As a result, Anglo-Scottish conflicts and tensions continued after the Treaty of Berwick was signed in July 1586, and political and religious uncertainty marked the final decade of Elizabeth’s reign. Elizabeth’s refusal to make provision for the succession also harmed her reputation both at the time and since. For a queen who purported to care deeply for her subjects, it showed a remarkable insensitivity to their fears and concerns. Susan Doran is a senior research fellow in history at Jesus College, Oxford, specialising in the reign of Elizabeth I

A political badge backs Roosevelt during the presidential election year 1936. He won a record four elections as Democrat leader

1 93 6 Franklin D Roosevelt

“I’ll respect the political system” As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt contemplated the start of presidential election year, he would have been well advised to resolve to respect the place of the US supreme court in political life. In the 1936 election, FDR convincingly defeated his Republican opponent Alfred Landon. By then, the American people were willing to credit the sitting president with ameliorating mass unemployment and providing leadership in intensely troubled economic times. However, Roosevelt’s post-election plan to pack the court with his supporters – FDR requested congressional authority to appoint a new supreme court member for every justice aged over 70 and who had served for at least 10 years – was a step too far. Roosevelt was transparently seeking to shore up his liberal New Deal legislation against conservative judicial action. The reform plan failed, and instead brought together conservative Democrats, civil-liberty advocates and Republicans in opposition to the president and to the later New Deal. Though judicial opposition to the New Deal was soon in retreat, the ‘packing’ plan was conceived in hubris and executed with an uncharacteristic high-handedness that caused significant damage to Roosevelt’s presidential reputation. John Dumbrell is professor of government at the University of Durham’s School of Government & International Affairs

BBC History Magazine

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New year’s resolutions

Cnut

1016 “I’ll roll

the dice and head for London”

Anne Boleyn

1536 “I’ll make friends

with Cromwell”

Anne Boleyn would have been glad to see the back of 1535, which had been something of an annus horribilis for Henry VIII’s second queen. There is evidence to suggest that she had suffered a second miscarriage in early summer; her marriage was rapidly deteriorating; and she was increasingly at loggerheads with the king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. Though Cromwell had helped Anne secure Henry’s hand and shared her reformist tendencies, they had fallen out badly over the Dissolution. Anne had argued that funds from the monasteries should be diverted to charitable causes rather than to the royal coffers, as Cromwell had arranged. She had made no secret of the fact that she “would like to see his head off his shoulders”. By the end of 1535, though, Cromwell was by far the most powerful

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man at court and, crucially, had the king’s ear. When Henry instructed his chief minister to get him out of the marriage after Anne’s miscarriage early the following year, Cromwell used this as an opportunity to get rid of her for good. He concocted a case of adultery – involving not just one but five men, including her own brother – and she was condemned to death. If Anne had made it her new year’s resolution to forge an alliance with Cromwell in 1536, it might have saved her life. The ever-resourceful minister could have applied his brilliant legal mind to having her marriage to the king annulled. He might even have persuaded Henry to give Anne a second chance. Tracy Borman is a historian whose new book, The Private Lives of the Tudors, will be published by Hodder & Stoughton in May

Ryan Lavelle is a reader in medieval history at the University of Winchester

A silver penny from the reign of England’s Viking king, Cnut

BBC History Magazine

GETTY/BRIDGEMAN

A portrait thought to be of Anne Boleyn, by an unknown artist. She might have escaped her execution if she had appeased Thomas Cromwell

At the start of 1016, Cnut was a landless Viking prince with the English kingdom in his sights. By the end of 1016 he was established in London as ruler, and his rival, King Edmund Ironside, was dead – but getting there had involved a hard fight. Cnut could have saved himself a great deal of trouble if he’d made a dash for England’s principal city sooner. Edmund’s father, King Æthelred (‘the Unready’), had begun the year in London, where the English army was calling vainly for him to lead it. Cnut had received supplies from the royal heartland of Wessex in 1015, so was in a good position to strike. However, during the spring of 1016 his attention was taken by affairs in the north of England. It seems that Æthelred was ill. If Cnut had known that, and headed straight for London, he might have invoked his legitimacy as the son and heir of the Anglo-Danish king Sweyn Forkbeard (who ruled 1013–14), and applied pressure on Æthelred. As it happened, Æthelred died before Cnut arrived in London in April, but the delay allowed Æthelred’s son to declare himself king. That meant that Cnut had to fight, before making peace with Edmund. It was only thanks to Edmund’s sudden death at the end of 1016 that Cnut avoided the complications of a kingdom ruled by rival kings.

1 93 6 Edward VIII

“I won’t marry Wallis” With his father almost on his deathbed, the soon-to-be King Edward VIII’s new year’s resolution should have been: “I must marry a suitable wife, have children and thus ensure the succession.” Given his total infatuation with Wallis Simpson, the most that could have been hoped for was: “I must not marry an unsuitable wife.” The prime minister, Stanley Baldwin hoped for no more – he was resigned to serving a bachelor king with a mistress kept more or less discreetly in the background. He had no such luck. There can be not the slightest doubt that Edward’s resolution was, in fact: “I must marry Wallis, and marry her as soon as possible!” This was his all-consuming preoccupation – there was no room in his mind for any lesser issue. Philip Ziegler is a historian and author of the official biography Edward VIII (Harper, 2012) The Bayeux Tapestry shows Harold’s defeat at Hastings, which he might have avoided had he sat back and watched William struggle to feed his army

Read the full story of Edward’s passion for Wallis – and his abdication – on page 36

Harold Godwinson

ALAMY

1066 “I won’t be so hasty” During the first nine months of 1066, Harold did well – and his success was in large part because he’d stolen a march on his rivals. When Edward the Confessor died on 5 January, Harold immediately had himself proclaimed king, and was crowned the very next day. When his troublesome younger brother Tostig invaded in May, Harold hurried down to Sandwich to see him off, and when Tostig returned in September with the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada, Harold rushed north to surprise them at Stamford Bridge, winning a famous victory. Naturally, therefore, when Harold heard soon afterwards that Duke William of Normandy had landed in Sussex, he thought that speed would BBC History Magazine

be his friend, and sought to repeat his earlier success, hoping to catch William off-guard. But a swift engagement was precisely what his rival wanted. As invaders, the Normans had poor supply lines, and no local support of the kind that Tostig and Harald had enjoyed in the north. Had Harold waited just a little longer, he could have assembled a larger army and watched as the Normans struggled to keep their army fed by foraging. Instead, he rushed into battle at Hastings – and looked up at precisely the wrong moment. Marc Morris is a historian and author of numerous books including The Norman Conquest (Hutchinson, 2012)

Should Edward have resolved to remain a bachelor and kept Wallis in the background? DISCOVER MORE ONLINE E For more information on new year’s

resolutions, including a discussion on whether we can really control our behaviour, go to bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01pk82m

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Edward VIII and Wallis

his 36

BBC History Magazine

A king at war with s country Almost eight decades after Edward VIII gave up the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, Stephen Bates reveals how the king’s obsession with an American divorcee set him on a collision course with the government, his brother and the wider British public

Living in exile Edward and Wallis pictured in Lisbon in the summer of 1940. When Edward became king four years earlier, he was the darling of the nation. Yet when he abdicated in December 1936, few believed he was making the wrong decision

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Complements the BBC Two docudrama Royal Wives at War

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Edward VIII and Wallis

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“The prime minister offered to argue through the night, but it was obvious the government’s decision had been made: Edward could not marry Wallis and be king” Sibling rivalry George VI, pictured shortly after taking the throne following his elder brother’s abdication. Theirs wasn’t a happy relationship

prince… follows W around like a dog.” While Wallis was merely his mistress, ministers saw no reason to interfere – even when Edward told friends that he could not live without her and intended to marry her, come what may. Sometimes Wallis’s dull Anglo-American businessman husband, Ernest Simpson, accompanied the couple but increasingly he did not. In the summer of 1936, Edward set sail with Wallis (but without her husband) in a hired yacht, the Nahlin – which was, it was said, “furnished like a Calais whoreshop” – down the coast of Croatia and on to Greece and Turkey. They made quite a spectacle of themselves, the king often stripped to the waist (not the done thing for monarchs in the 1930s) and always accompanied by Wallis. A Romanian diplomat in Belgrade remarked that when his king travelled abroad he left his mistress at home. The continental and American papers had a field day.

The phoney affair Thanks to newspaper proprietors Beaverbrook of the Express and Rothermere of the Mail, both friendly with the king, the British public was kept in ignorance. Baldwin, though, returned home from a restful two-month summer holiday to find a sheaf of complaints

about the king’s behaviour from expatriates abroad. By October, the prime minister was seriously alarmed: it had become obvious that Edward VIII was still determined to marry Wallis, and she was making plans to divorce her husband. The compliant Ernest went along with the scheme, and gallantly undertook to pose as the adulterer. He took a family friend, Mary Raffray, to the Hotel de Paris at Bray, near Maidenhead, where they were duly spotted in bed together by hotel staff on two successive mornings. The hotel was used to such ruses, and to supplying staff as witnesses in divorce cases, but the Simpsons had to be careful: if there was any suggestion of artificial collusion, the divorce could be denied – and it nearly happened. When the divorce hearing came up at Ipswich assizes (the first court with a slot for an early hearing), the judge – who had not been warned of the case’s significance – clearly smelled a rat and seemed poised to deny the petition. However, Norman Birkett, Mrs Simpson’s barrister, smoothly steered him to approve “what you might call the ordinary hotel evidence”. The decree nisi was granted but the couple would have to wait six months before it was made absolute and Edward and Wallis could marry. “King Will Wed Wally,” the New York Journal confidently predicted. BBC History Magazine

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“A

fter I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within 12 months.” So gruff old King George reputedly remarked to prime minister Stanley Baldwin about his son and successor, the future Edward VIII. He was scarcely a boy – Edward was 41 when he came to the throne in January 1936 – but his father was otherwise not far out: Edward’s reign lasted just 324 days before he abdicated to marry the woman he loved. It was the biggest constitutional crisis for the crown in the 20th century – no other monarch has voluntarily vacated the throne – and one that has shaped royal attitudes ever since. In the eyes of the family, David – the name by which they knew him – had shirked his duty, and cut and run. Evidence suggests that the majority of his countrymen and women thought so, too. When he succeeded his father, Edward VIII was a popular figure who had been in the public eye for many years. He was regarded as unstuffy, charming and unpretentious – at least, that was the image that the newspapers of the day chose to portray. No man, said The Times at his accession, ever came to the throne in more propitious circumstances: “In countless ways he has securely established his hold on the affections of his people.” But senior politicians and many who served him as officials already had concerns. “I doubt he’ll stay the course,” Baldwin told the Labour leader, Clement Attlee. They thought him lazy and erratic, with a negligent attitude towards his duties – opinions that were only reinforced when he became king. State papers went unread and, it was suspected, were shown to Edward’s friends. He turned up late to events or cried off at the last minute, and he was rude and offhand. Then there was the king’s womanising. Over the previous two decades he had taken a series of mistresses, notably Freda Dudley Ward and Thelma Furness, both married women with complaisant husbands. But now a new partner had seen off the others: Bessiewallis (a combination of two family names, commonly shortened to Wallis) Simpson, who herself was already on her second marriage – and was an American to boot. None of this was known to the British public. In many ways, Wallis was a surprising choice. She was regarded as neither beautiful nor particularly charming, but she was witty, ambitious, single-minded and determined to add the king to her conquests, though friends claimed she was soon bored by him. Edward, however, was infatuated. As early as 1934 his equerry, John Aird, wrote: “The

Fateful handshake Wallis shakes Hitler’s hand during a visit to Germany in October 1937, during which Edward was seen giving the Nazi salute

TOPFOTO/ALAMY

Power of the press The Daily Express reports Edward’s abdication speech. Along with the Mail and the Mirror, the Express was among the few papers to support Edward

Baldwin had first discussed the case with the king a few days earlier. They met at Fort Belvedere, the miniature castle in the grounds of Windsor Great Park where Edward chose to live, rather than more publicly at Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace. It was a stilted meeting: they inspected the herbaceous borders before the prime minister asked for a whisky and soda, then steeled himself to say: “I don’t believe you can go on like this and get away with it.” He asked for the divorce to be delayed and for Wallis to go abroad, but the king declined to answer. At this stage Baldwin had not consulted his full cabinet – some of whom were still ignorant of the affair – but he was starting to sound out prime ministers from the empire, notably Canada’s Mackenzie King. He did not see the king again for a further month. Various solutions were discussed. The king could not be persuaded to give up Mrs Simpson and find someone more suitable. She in turn made only a half-hearted attempt to let him go. Edward made it clear that he was determined to marry her as soon as possible, and would rather abdicate otherwise. The possibility of a morganatic marriage – whereby Edward could marry Wallis but she would not be queen, and any children would not succeed to the throne – was briefly considered but the BBC History Magazine

The look of love? Wallis and Edward gaze adoringly at one another in a staged photo portrait. However, she reputedly became bored by him quickly, and it was claimed that she continued to have other affairs even after they became involved

idea was quickly abandoned. Only one member of the cabinet, Duff Cooper – a friend of the king – was in favour, and the ‘white dominions’ prime ministers (of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada) were resolutely opposed. “The Australian outlook on life is distinctly middle class and on morals distinctly Victorian,” the US consul in Canberra reported to Washington. Éamon de Valera, head of government of the Irish Free State – still then within the ‘white commonwealth’ – offered to back Edward if he would support the Irish takeover of Ulster. But ultimately even he came down on the side of abdication, though he used the crisis to remove all mention of the British monarch from the Irish constitution.

The story breaks The storm broke in Britain only on 1 December, when the aptly named Bishop Blunt of Bradford told his diocesan synod that the king ought to live a more Christian life. Poor Blunt, who knew nothing of Mrs Simpson, merely meant that Edward VIII should show an example by attending church more regularly, but his words gave the British press the excuse they needed to break the story. Pressure on the king was now steadily applied. He was cornered and forced to make a

choice. Delay, said the censorious Neville Chamberlain, chancellor of the exchequer, would be bad for the Christmas trade. The uncertainty could not drag on. Baldwin murmured that the king “must wrestle with himself in a way he has never done before and, if he will let me, I will help him”. The prime minister offered to argue with him through the night if necessary, but it was obvious the government’s decision had been made: Edward could not marry Wallis and be king. “The only time I was frightened,” Baldwin said later. “Was when I thought he might change his mind.” Within 10 days of the story breaking, the king had abdicated. A late attempt to rally a loyalist party failed. Winston Churchill, Edward’s chief political supporter, was howled down in the Commons on 7 December when he demanded a delay to sound out public opinion – the speaker told him to shut up. It would have been unlikely to have been successful: letters in the National Archives from members of the public to the government show overwhelming hostility to Wallis, variously describing her as an octopus, fake, a legalised prostitute and “a woman climber from a boarding house in Baltimore”. The novelist Virginia Woolf recorded an overheard conversation involving a grocer’s 39

Edward VIII and Wallis

AFFAIR OF THE HALF-CENTURY January 1931 Edward and Wallis first meet at a weekend house party given by his then mistress, Lady Thelma Furness, (right) at her country home, Burrough Court, near Melton Mowbray.

20 January 1936 King George V (left) dies and his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, is proclaimed King Edward VIII. Government and the court are aware of Edward’s liaison with a twice-married American.

August–September 1936

27 October 1936 The Simpson v Simpson divorce petition is heard at Ipswich assizes. The decree nisi is granted on grounds of Ernest Simpson’s (phoney) adultery, based on a fake tryst staged at a hotel.

10 December 1936 Edward VIII abdicates, declaring in a BBC address (part written by Churchill) that he had found it impossible to discharge his duties “without the help and support of the woman I love”.

3 June 1937 Edward and Wallis marry at Château de Candé in France. In October they make a controversial visit to Germany, where they meet Hitler. Edward denies giving the Nazi salute, claiming that he was just waving.

June 1940 The couple flee to Portugal as German forces invade France. The duke is made governor of the Bahamas to keep him out of the way of the Nazis.

1946 86 Edward and Wallis live in Paris, where in May 1972 the duke dies of cancer. The duchess dies in 1986. They are buried together in the royal burial ground at Frogmore, near Windsor.

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Sailing off into the sunset Wallis and Edward wave for the cameras during a voyage in c1970. By then, Edward was unwell, having undergone cardiac surgery. He was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1971

assistant, also on 7 December: “We can’t have a woman Simpson for queen… She’s no more royal than you or me.” Labour and the Liberals backed the government. Attlee told Baldwin: “Despite the sympathy felt for the king… the party – with the exception of the intelligentsia, who can be trusted to take the wrong view on any subject – were in agreement.” More succinctly, Ernest Bevin said: “Our people won’t ’ave it.” Only the communists and Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts came out in support of the couple, the former in the hope that it would bring down the monarchy altogether, the latter believing that the king would catapult them to power. Most national and regional newspapers and periodicals also supported the government. Only the Mail and Express – whose proprietors had suppressed news of the affair and thus perhaps prevented a king’s party from forming – and the Daily Mirror rallied to the king.

An unsuitable queen Just why was Wallis regarded as an unsuitable consort? The chief difficulty in a more religiously observant time was the fact that she had already divorced one husband, left another and was now hoping to marry a man who was supreme governor of the Church of England. There were also doubts about her faithfulness. Papers in the National Archives show that the Metropolitan Police was spying on her: a report detailed clandestine visits to a Ford car salesman called Guy Trundle. There may also have been concerns that she was sympathetic to the Nazis. An FBI report

released in 2002 claimed that she had been the lover of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi German ambassador to London, but no conclusive evidence has been found to support this suggestion. Anti-American prejudice was a factor, too. The diarist Harold Nicolson wrote: “The upper class mind her being American more than they mind her being divorced. The lower class do not mind her being American but loathe the idea that she has had two husbands already.” The newly created Duke of Windsor was left to wrangle with his younger brother and successor, George VI, over money and the life tenancies of Balmoral and Sandringham. It was a bitter fight, which left a legacy of distrust between the brothers. Pleading poverty, Edward hid his £1m assets and secured an annual pension of £11,000. He also threatened to sue George for trespass if the new king ventured to either house until the life tenancies were purchased from Edward for £300,000. Edward was made Duke of Windsor, but the royal family’s refusal to give Wallis the title ‘Royal Highness’ embittered him for the rest of his life. Stephen Bates is a journalist, writer and former royal correspondent for The Guardian. His latest book is Royalty Inc: Britain’s Best-Known Brand (Aurum, 2015) DISCOVER MORE TELEVISION E Royal Wives at War, a docudrama

about the abdication crisis, is due to air on BBC Two in January BBC History Magazine

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Edward and Wallis take a Mediterranean cruise aboard the Nahlin. Their relationship becomes public knowledge in Europe and the US.

WWI eyewitness accounts

OUR FIRST WORLD WAR

Desperate retreat In part 20 of his personal testimony series, Peter Hart takes us to January 1916, when British troops were withdrawn from Gallipoli after nine months of a heroic but ultimately ill-fated campaign. 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

Joe Murray Joe grew up in a County Durham mining community. He arrived in Gallipoli with the Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division in April 1915 and was soon moved to engineering duties as a sapper.

In January 1916, Ordinary Seaman Joe Murray was attached to the VIII Corps Mining Company at Gallipoli. The Anzac and Suvla sectors had been evacuated and, unknown to Murray, preparations were being made for the evacuation of Helles. Obstacles were being placed in the trenches, and movement around the peninsula gradually became more difficult.

We’d been up and down these trenches hundreds of times. But, bless my heart and soul, we came off today carrying our rations, and: “Oh! Trench blocked. What the hell’s done that?” And you have to walk back, find another way – and find that one blocked. We got lost because all the trenches that we knew were blocked. It was really frightening. There was nobody behind us. There were no troops to be seen anywhere. We used to walk down to this dump through empty trenches, and I thought to myself: “Well, I don’t know where the hell everybody’s gone!” When we got to the beach there were tons of people! Some of them landing from boats

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coming inland. There were people carrying boxes from the lighters in the normal way. Everywhere on the beach seemed very, very lively and in the firing line, but a proper vacuum in between. The garrison of Helles was being thinned out ready for the final evacuation of Gallipoli. On 7 January the Turks launched a heavy bombardment on the left of the British front line where Murray was based.

The Turks charged over, shouting wildly. They had about 100 yards to cover before reaching my particular part of the line, though they had less ground to cover a little further to the left. We were ready for them! They came in their hundreds, some carrying timber for use in bridging our trenches. Perhaps they thought that after these hours of shelling there would be no one to stop them – but they had not reckoned with the Staffords of the 13th Division and eight sappers who could handle rifles as well as the rest. We blazed away at the advancing Turks,

who did not now appear to be in such a hurry to get to the coast. Some were becoming hesitant when our warships helped them make up their minds. I thought the navy had deserted us long ago, and it was very heartening to hear their salvoes. We certainly needed their help. The Turkish attack collapsed, though it had been a close-run thing. Murray was evacuated the following day, leaving the support line a short while after dusk to make his way down to the rendezvous. If the Turks attacked, Murray and his comrades were doomed. Every precaution had been taken.

All the gear we had that jingled – water bottles, entrenching tools, even your bayonet scabbard – was taken away because it made a noise. We had sandbags on our feet and were told: “Empty the breech” and “you’ve got to make your way to Krithia Road”. We had a day’s iron ration with us, a little bag with some small dog biscuits to keep us going for a day.

During the march to the beach, Murray passed through various control points. Like many others, he was ambivalent about leaving Helles.

I thought to myself: “I don’t like sneaking away like this after all this bloody trouble.” I was distressed in my own mind. I remember when I came towards Backhouse Post, I thought to myself: “Oh dear me, poor old Yates and Parsons, killed and buried here.” When we first went to Backhouse Post on 30 April I remember how happy and anxious we were to get stuck into the Turks. And here we were, only a handful left. At about midnight on 8 January 1916, Murray left Gallipoli, boarding a lighter (a type of barge) through the abandoned hulk of the River Clyde. It would be a sordid, uncomfortable experience.

PICTURE CONSULTANT: EVERETT SHARP/BRIDGEMAN

PART 20 JANUARY 1916 We were so packed we couldn’t move our hands at all. I remember the chap in front of me was as sick as a dog. Half of them were asleep and leaning. We were packed like sardines in this blinking lighter. It was dark, of course. Dark inside – no lights, no portholes. I remember a couple of fellows behind me pushing and shoving, and I thought: “Do as you bloody well like!” All of a sudden the damned thing started to rock – and did it rock! There must have been a shell dropped pretty close, though I couldn’t hear it. There must have been hundreds in this blinking lighter, and every now and again it was rocking. All of a sudden it hit the pier. Those that were asleep were half awake, and those that were sick were still being sick – and, oh dear me, it was stifling hot! And then another one came along and I thought to myself: “Why the hell don’t we get out of it?” It may only have been a little while but to me it seemed hours. And then all of a sudden we felt the gradual rock, and I thought to myself: “Well, here we are; we are at sea now anyhow.” We left there like a lot of cattle, being dumped into a lighter and just pushed to sea, and nobody gave a tinker’s cuss whether we lived or died. It was the end of the Gallipoli adventure. It had achieved nothing, but resulted in some 60,000 fatalities among the Allied troops sent on this foolish diversion.

William Collins Bill Collins was born into a working-class family in Croydon. He worked in a shop and as a gardener before joining the Royal Army Medical Corps as a stretcher bearer in 1913.

Sir Douglas Haig General Sir Douglas Haig was commander of the British 1st Army. That already made him one of Britain’s most senior soldiers, yet in December 1915 he had been promoted again to be commander-in-chief of the British Army on the western front. Haig was one of the foremost ‘Westerners’ – men determined to discourage all schemes that they considered diluted the war effort on the western front. To them it was self-evident that Germany was the beating heart of the Central Powers, and that without her, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey would soon collapse. Germany could not be beaten until her main armies had been defeated in the field. Haig succinctly summarised his policy for the British Expeditionary Force in his diary.

The principles which we must apply are: 1. Employ sufficient force to wear down the enemy and cause him to use up his reserves. 2. Then, and not till then, throw in a mass of troops (at some point where the enemy has shown himself to be weak) to break through and win victory. It would be a long, hard and brutal battle.

The SS River Clyde, run aground as a beachhead during the disastrous initial Gallipoli landings. Troops passed through her during the evacuation

While a medical orderly serving with the No 1, Cavalry Field Ambulance in the Vermelles sector, Sergeant William Collins treated many men – but there was one tragic case that he would never forget.

I was walking up Hulloch Alley and I came across a stretcher party of the 9th Division, four of them carrying a man on a stretcher. I stopped them and asked: “Is there anything I can do?” They looked at me and said: “Well, have a look at him.” I looked and he was very badly wounded. I said: “Well, come down to our aid post because we’re the nearest point here.” I took them down to our hole in the ground at Vermelles and we put him on the crate, took his jacket off him, stripped him down. I think it was Captain Graham who leaned over him; he’d got multiple wounds. He gave a little sigh and died. Captain Graham looked at him and said: “There’s nothing we can do. You go through his pockets. What he has, we’ll send home to his next of kin.” I looked at his chest and saw the ribbon there. “That’s the Victoria Cross, sir!” “Yes, so it is!” I took his document out, and learned he was Private Robert Dunsire VC, Royal Scots. There was a letter from home, so I got his address. In his pockets there

was an envelope with a document telling him he’d been promoted, and in the envelope was a lance corporal’s stripes. He’d never had time to put it on his sleeve. It was a most tragic thing to me. I sent his things home to his next of kin. Private Robert Dunsire VC had been serving with the 13th Royal Scots. He had been awarded the Victoria Cross in recognition of his courage on 26 September 1915, when he went out and rescued two wounded men from no man’s land at Loos despite being under very heavy fire. He was just 24 years old when he died of his wounds. Peter Hart is the oral historian at the Imperial War Museum. He will be speaking at BBC History Magazine’s First World War in 1916 Day – see historyextra.com/ bbchistorymagazine/event/ first-world-war-1916-day DISCOVER MORE WEBSITE E Read previous instalments of

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

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

“In his pockets there was an envelope with a document telling him he’d been promoted, and in the envelope was a lance corporal’s stripes. He’d never had time to put it on his sleeve” NEXT ISSUE: “He finished cutting off the leg – it was just slush”

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The fate of Edward II THE BIG DEBATE

Was Edward II re In 2005, the bestselling historian Ian Mortimer caused a storm when he argued that Edward II had not been assassinated at Berkeley Castle in 1327 – received opinion for almost 700 years – and was still alive in 1330. His theory has attracted numerous critics, among them the medieval academic Nicholas Vincent. Here the two put forward their conflicting views on the fate of an English king

The lie that Edward II was dead was a political convenience welcomed by those who trusted his son, Edward III IAN MORTIMER 44

If there’s one thing most historians agree on, it’s that Edward II was one of medieval England’s least capable rulers. He is chiefly remembered for squandering his father, Edward I’s, military gains in Scotland (notably by losing the battle of Bannockburn), and alienating his wife and barons by promoting personal favourites such as Hugh Despenser the Younger. But how did Edward die? We know that Queen Isabella’s patience with her husband snapped in 1326, and that she invaded England with her lover, Roger Mortimer, who was living in exile in France. Edward was forced to abdicate and was then imprisoned at Berkeley Castle, where he was murdered on 21 September 1327 (with, as legend would have it, the assistance of a red-hot poker). That, at least, has been the accepted view of events for centuries. Yet, in 2005, Ian Mortimer challenged the consensus by arguing – in the journal The English Historical Review – that Edward had cheated death and was still alive in 1330. Mortimer’s theory has sparked a lively debate in the historical community, as the following exchange proves… BBC History Magazine

JO BRADFORD

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JO BRADFORD AND AJ LEVY

ally murdered?

ALAMY/A J LEVY

The alabaster effigy on the tomb of Edward II at Gloucester Cathedral

Ian Mortimer: How can we be sure whether Edward II did or did not die in Berkeley Castle? The answer is not a straightforward: ‘because this document says so’ – after all, any single piece of evidence could be wrong. It is, rather, a matter of showing first that the evidence for the death, which we have hitherto accepted, is fundamentally flawed; and second that there are multiple independent accounts from people who knew him, stating that Edward was alive at a later date. According to the royal accounts, Edward II died in Berkeley Castle on 21 September 1327. Lord Berkeley’s accounts show that the news was taken in his own letters to the royal household, which was then at Lincoln. An extant letter written at Lincoln by Edward III on 24 September states that news of his father’s death had been received during the previous night. It was therefore accepted in the royal household and circulated from 24 September. Additionally, one chronicle specifies that members attending the parliament at Lincoln (which finished on 23 September) were told the news as they dispersed. As Lincoln is over 150 miles (240km) from Berkeley, no check on the veracity of the news of the death was possible before it was circulated and preparations for a royal funeral began. The body itself was embalmed and completely covered in cerecloth (waxed fabric used for wrapping corpses) before it was shown publicly, and exhibited only superficially. So the evidence that led everyone to believe Edward II was dead at that time – and which was widely held as fact until 2005 – depends entirely on that initial message from Lord Berkeley. However, Lord Berkeley admitted in parliament three years later (in November 1330) that he had not previously heard about Edward’s death. We can therefore have no confidence in the reliability of his original BBC History Magazine

message. If he did not know about the death of the ex-king in his custody, how could he have faithfully reported it? Given that the hundreds of documents attesting to the death are based on this one unreliable message, it behoves us to consider the evidence for possible alternative events, including testimonies of his survival. There are multiple items to consider. First, there is Lord Berkeley’s own testimony, which implies that the king could still have been alive in 1330. Second, an original letter from the highly regarded archbishop of York states that the latter had received “certain news” that Edward was still alive in January 1330, and the archbishop consequently made efforts to rescue him. Third, Lord Pecche took part in a plot to free Edward from Corfe Castle in Dorset in 1330. This is significant because Lord Pecche

I disagree that the evidence is ‘fundamentally flawed’ or that it points inexorably towards Edward II’s survival NICHOLAS VINCENT 45

The fate of Edward II

Nicholas Vincent: Ian Mortimer makes the case that we should suspend disbelief and allow that evidence points to the survival of Edward II beyond the supposed date of his death, in September 1327. I agree that the evidence here requires careful consideration. I disagree that it is “fundamentally flawed” or that it points inexorably towards the king’s survival. To disprove a negation is never an easy task. Nonetheless, consider the following. All of the main political actors at the time behaved, after September 1327, as if the king were dead. There was a public funeral at Gloucester. When in 1330 Lord Berkeley denied any knowledge of Edward II’s death, he was on trial for his life, desperate to prove that he had been absent from Berkeley. He did not deny that others had carried out the deed. As late as 1330, the archbishop of York, Sir John Pecche and Edward II’s half-brother, Edmund of Woodstock, may all have hoped (or feared) that Edward might still be alive. Edmund was executed for a deluded attempt to free the late king from captivity at Corfe – but Edmund had many enemies. In 1322 Edmund had played a leading role 46

in the execution of his cousin, Thomas of Lancaster, and in the following year had seized back Berkeley Castle for the king. After 1326 his alliance with the new regime was never secure, and his trial and execution were very much acts of political vengeance. It is surely significant that even the public executioner, believing that Edmund was too naive to merit death, refused to behead him – he was kept waiting for a whole day until at last a common criminal was found who was prepared to wield the axe. Indeed, Roger Mortimer, when tried later that year on the charge of assuming royal power, was accused of deliberately duping Edmund into the belief that the late king still lived. As for the Fieschi letter, or Edward III’s later meetings with a ‘hermit’ who claimed to be his father, these fit all too neatly into a wider

The sole source for the public announcement and chroniclers’ statements was a self-confessed lie from Lord Berkeley IAN MORTIMER

pattern. Throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, the legend of the hidden or undying king remained a powerful one – in political reality, not just in the legends of Arthur, Charlemagne or Frederick Barbarossa. King Harold, it was rumoured, had not been killed at Hastings but lived on as a hermit outside Chester into the 1180s (by which time he would have been more than 160 years old). The German emperor Henry V, far from dying in 1125, was likewise rumoured to have lived on as a hermit. As with Edward II after 1327, there were sound political reasons to encourage such rumours, not least to discredit the dynasties that had thereafter ‘usurped’ the succession. Count Baldwin of Flanders, Latin emperor of Constantinople, disappeared into Greek captivity in 1205, assumed dead. The regency government that he left behind had little incentive to confirm his demise; hence, as late as 1225, when a man appeared in Flanders claiming to be the real Baldwin, many were prepared to believe him. He led a revolt against the real Baldwin’s daughter, until the following year when he was unmasked as a Burgundian pretender and executed. In the Middle Ages, rumour was a powerful weapon. In 1263, Edward II’s grandfather, King Henry III of England, was rumoured to have died. So keen were various people to credit this that the annalist of Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire inserted it as a certain fact in his chronicle, penning a rhyming obituary notice. In fact, Henry did not die until 1272. As for the ‘hermit’ claiming to be Edward II, whom Edward III is said to have met many years later in Flanders, consider this: I live for much of the year in Paris, where one of our neighbourhood beggars regularly declares himself king of Poland. Rather than denounce him as a pretender, or insist that he share the fate of Lambert Simnel or Perkin Warbeck (both imposters who challenged Henry VII in his claim to the throne), I greet him with a friendly wave and a murmured “Your Majesty”. Perkin Warbeck, it may be remembered, was executed in 1499 only after strenuous attempts to tolerate his mythomania. Lambert Simnel, having dropped all pretence, was allowed to live out his life as a minor court servant. He died in c1530, four decades after his coronation in 1487 in Dublin (the only English coronation ever held there) as ‘King Edward VI’. Ian Mortimer: This argument is not about ‘suspending disbelief’ – it is about hard information. It is not about what happened to Baldwin of Flanders or Perkin Warbeck – BBC History Magazine

JO BRADFORD

had been in charge of that castle from 1325 to 1329, so had the means to ascertain whether or not Edward II was being held there. Fourth, the Earl of Kent, Edward II’s respected half-brother, was sentenced to death in parliament for trying to rescue Edward from Corfe Castle and make him king again in March 1330. Fifth, there is an extant copy of a letter written by the secretary of Luca Fieschi, a friend of Edward II, who claimed to have met him in the disguise of a pilgrim at the papal court in 1331. This letter gave a detailed version of Edward’s account, telling how he had been taken by his gaoler from Berkeley to Corfe Castle, then sent to Ireland and only released after the fall of Roger Mortimer, the man who dethroned him. There are at least three other information streams that attest to Edward’s survival after 1330. These points should be seen in the context of a huge number of otherwise inexplicable circumstantial details that historians have traditionally ignored, such as Edward III’s failure to prosecute Sir John Maltravers for failing in his duty to keep Edward II safely when he was in his care. Taken together, they strongly suggest that Edward III’s maintenance of the lie that his father was dead was a political convenience – one welcomed by everyone who trusted the young king and feared the renewal of the unrest brought about by Edward II during his disastrous reign.

ALAMY/A J LEVY

The room at Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire, in which Edward II was imprisoned – and in which he may have died

or any other postmortem royal claimant. It is about what happened to Edward II in 1327. One cannot use the cases of 13th and 15th-century pretenders as evidence for the events of 1327 – that is reductionism. It is like saying: “These cats look grey, therefore all cats are grey.” Nor should we rely on circumstantial evidence when we have direct evidence for how the story of the death came to be circulated. The key thing that Professor Vincent should appreciate is why he thinks Edward II died in 1327. He relies on the fact that “all the main political actors in 1327 behaved… as if the king were dead”. But why did those political actors behave in that way? Because they had been told Edward was dead by the royal household at Lincoln on 24 September. Their behaviour is therefore merely circumstantial evidence: they weren’t at Berkeley themselves. Why did the royal household believe Edward was dead? Because Lord Berkeley had sent them news to that effect. As I have explained, the dates of sending and receipt of information prove that there was no check on this news – and, three years later, the sender himself stated he had not heard about the death. The entire edifice of evidence that Professor Vincent trusts was thus founded on a self-confessed lie. The important aspect here is the methodology. The traditional methodology is basically the same as that employed by those who maintain that Shakespeare did BBC History Magazine

It has not been proved that Edward II cheated death in 1327 any more than Elvis Presley can be proved to be alive

not write Shakespeare. Proponents select the circumstantial evidence that best tallies with their preferred belief, and they ignore the testimonies of those contemporaries whose information was obtained at first hand. Every historian should resist such methods, even if the results challenge a long-accepted orthodoxy. It’s a great shame that here we have a senior academic dismissing a scholarly reappraisal of the inconsistent contemporary evidence. He does this even though the said reappraisal has gone through a peer-review process and been published by The English Historical Review. Nicholas Vincent: Ian Mortimer demands that I ask myself why I think that Edward II died in 1327. I think that Edward died because people at the time declared this to be so. They also behaved as if it were so. For much the same reasons, I believe that Barack Obama is president of the US and that water flows downhill. I regard the evidence of Edward’s survival to be unreliable, and I believe (foolishly, according to Mortimer; prudently in my reckoning) that this survival story fits in to a wider pattern of such stories that extends across the Middle Ages and into more recent times. In my opinion, it has not been proved that Edward II cheated death in 1327 any more than Elvis Presley can be proved to be alive and well and living in Hemel Hempstead. Many people believe that Elvis still lives. Ian Mortimer believes that Edward II did not die at Berkeley Castle. In both cases, a passionate belief is founded upon evidence that unbelievers consider implausible. I remain an unbeliever. Dr Ian Mortimer is the author of numerous history books and a fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries Nicholas Vincent is professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia DISCOVER MORE

NICHOLAS VINCENT

BOOKS E Medieval Intrigue by Ian Mortimer

(Bloomsbury Continuum, 2010) includes the peer-reviewed paper on Edward II mentioned in this article E A Brief History of Britain 1066–1485 by Nicholas Vincent (Robinson, 2011) covers the reign and ousting of Edward II SOCIAL MEDIA E What do you think happened to

Edward II? Let us know via Twitter or Facebook twitter.com/historyextra facebook.com/historyextra

47

BBC History Magazine’s

Roman Britain Day Saturday 27 February 2016, 10am–5.30pm M Shed, Princes Wharf, Bristol BS1 4RN With Barry Cunliffe, Richard Hobbs, David Mattingly, Bronwen Riley and Miles Russell

Barry Cunliffe is emeritus professor of European archaeology at the University of Oxford and the author of several books on ancient Britain, including Britain Begins.

David Mattingly

Talk Country Life in Roman Wessex

Talk Experiencing the Roman Empire in Britain and Beyond

Barry will show how studies of five Roman villas have shed remarkable light on life in this corner of Roman Britain, offering new insights into the rural economy and farming technology of the time.

Richard Hobbs is a curator of Romano-British collections at the British Museum and the co-author of Roman Britain: Life at the Edge of Empire.

Talk The Richness of Britain In this talk, Richard will reveal how a selection of fascinating objects from Roman Britain can teach us a huge amount about everyday life in the empire’s most northerly province.

Miles Russell is senior lecturer in archaeology at Bournemouth University. He regularly appears on TV and in this magazine and is co-author of UnRoman Britain.

Talk The ‘Face’ of Roman Britain Keith Jeffery

Britain was part of the empire for four centuries and yet there is a curious lack of portrait sculpture from this period. Miles will discuss what this might mean for Britain’s place in the Roman world.

is professor of Roman archaeology at the University of Leicester. His books include An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire.

Museums, popular books and TV programmes tend to reinforce the view that the Roman period was a time of social and cultural advancement for the majority of Britons. But was that really the case? In this talk, David will offer a more nuanced interpretation of the impact of the Roman conquest on the native population.

Bronwen Riley is head of content at English Heritage and series editor of English Heritage guidebooks. Her most recent book is Journey to Britannia: From the Heart of Rome to Hadrian’s Wall, AD 130.

Talk Visit Britannia, AD 130 Bronwen will describe an epic journey from Rome to Hadrian’s Wall, bringing the smells, sounds, colours and textures of travel in the second century AD vividly to life. > Visit historyextra.com/ bbchistorymagazine/events for full details

STEVE SAYERS/GETTY

Bronwen Riley

Find out how Britain was incorporated into the Roman empire and what life was like for those living under occupation. This event includes a buffet lunch and regular teas and coffees

Book online at historyextra.com/bbchistorymagazine/events 48

BBC History Magazine

r s fo ent us ev l in y- sto Jo da ri o nB tw i

EVENTS

Buy your tickets now

BBC History Magazine’s

First World War in 1916 Day Sunday 28 February 2016, 10am–5.30pm M Shed, Princes Wharf, Bristol BS1 4RN With Peter Hart, Nick Hewitt, Keith Jeffery, Catriona Pennell and Andrew Roberts Discover the story of 1916. This was the year of the battles of the Somme and Jutland and of great changes back at home. This event includes a buffet lunch and regular teas and coffees Keith Jeffery is professor of British history at Queen’s University Belfast and the author of the new book, 1916: A Global History.

Catriona Pennell is a senior

Talk 1916: A Tipping Point?

Talk The Ultimate Test: Was 1916 the Hardest Year of the War for Ordinary Britons?

Keith will reflect on the extent to which 1916 – a year of costly sacrifices for both the Allies and the Central Powers – marked a crucial watershed during the First World War.

Nick Hewitt is a naval historian, author and broadcaster who is head of heritage development at the National Museum of the Royal Navy.

Talk Jutland: Drama in the North Sea Jutland was the most important naval clash of the war. In this talk, Nick will return to those crucial 16 hours when the outcome of the battle hung in the balance. He will also address the question of who actually won the day.

Peter Hart is the oral historian of the Imperial War Museum and has written several books on the First World War.

Talk Life in the Trenches, 1916 By 1916 the war in the trenches on the western front had settled down into a grim battle for survival. Peter’s talk will look at how the soldiers coped with the privations and dangers of trench warfare.

lecturer at the University of Exeter who specialises in the social and cultural history of the First World War.

With mounting death tolls and ever-increasing demands being made on civilians, it could be argued that 1916 was the year that tested the British empire to destruction. Catriona’s talk will focus on how the populations of Britain and Ireland responded to this challenge.

Andrew Roberts is a historian, bestselling author and broadcaster. His latest book is Elegy: The First Day on the Somme.

Talk Elegy: The First Day on the Somme At 7.30am on 1 July 1916 the British troops rose from their front-line trenches after a week-long bombardment that was supposed to destroy the German barbed wire and trenches. Before the sun went down, 57,471 of them were casualties and it was the worst day in the history of the British Army. Andrew Roberts asks what went wrong. > Visit historyextra.com/ bbchistorymagazine/events for full details

or call 0871 620 4021* BBC History Magazine

Venue: M Shed, Princes Wharf, Wapping Road, Bristol BS1 4RN mshed.org Tickets (per day): £70 Subscribers to BBC History Magazine £75 non-subscribers How to book: Call 0871 620 4021* or visit historyextra.com/events Subscribers, please quote the code SUBSMSHED and have your subscriber number to hand when booking (you can find this on the address label of your magazine). If you have a digital subscription, please forward your subscription order confirmation to [email protected] and our digital marketing team will supply you with a code for reduced rate tickets. TERMS AND CONDITIONS We reserve the right to replace any speaker with an alternative of equal stature in the unlikely event that they are unable to attend. Please let us know when booking of any special access requirements. BBC History Magazine subscribers should have their subscriber number to hand when booking. Tickets are non-refundable and places are limited. A £2.25 transaction fee applies to all bookings.

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49

War and Peace

A brief history of

War and Peace As a major BBC adaptation of Tolstoy’s epic novel is about to air, Sarah Hudspith answers some burning questions about the book and its connections to 19th-century Russia Complements a BBC One dramatisation of War and Peace 50

BBC History Magazine

Why is War and Peace so long? It was normal practice in 19th-century Russia for novels to be published in serial form, and War and Peace was no exception: it was serialised in the literary magazine The Russian Herald between 1865 and 1867, before the whole novel was published in book form in 1869. The total length would not have had such an impact on its first readers, who would have waited for the next instalment as eagerly as we wait today for TV serials or for the next book in the Game of Thrones series. Tolstoy had big ideas for the novel, wanting to understand the many factors that had shaped his country and his social class, and he believed that the role of an artist was to make people “love life in all its innumerable, inexhaustible phenomena” (as he wrote in a letter of 1865). The vast sweep of War and Peace gave him the space to capture as many of those “innumerable, inexhaustible phenomena” as he could. Tolstoy was also a perfectionist. His financial security gave him the luxury to take his time over his writing, and to draft and redraft until he was satisfied. His long-suffering wife, Sofia, copied out at least seven drafts of the novel, and after his death all the manuscripts she had preserved relating to War and Peace filled 12 wooden crates.

BBC

Lily James and James Norton play Natasha Rostova and Prince Andrei in the BBC adaptation of a novel that, in its portrayal of the Napoleonic Wars, is often given as much weight as a historical account BBC History Magazine

Why did Tolstoy choose to base War and Peace on the Napoleonic Wars? Actually, Tolstoy began intending to write about a later period: the Decembrist Uprising of 1825. The Decembrists were noblemen who led a revolt during a short interregnum following the death of Tsar Alexander I in December 1825. In order to understand what would prompt a nobleman to join such a movement, Tolstoy felt compelled to go further back in time. Looking at the events between 1805 and 1812, he experienced a curious reaction: “I felt ashamed to tell the story of our victories over Napoleon and his armies without mentioning also our own disasters, our own disgraces,” he wrote later. The defeat of Napoleon, which had incurred the temporary sacrifice of Moscow, had been a formative moment in the emerging Russian national identity. Dubbed the ‘Patriotic War’, it inspired numerous interpretations in art and literature which helped to define it in the nation’s psyche. Tolstoy had seen active service in the Crimean War and was interested in what courage means for different people, how people express their love for their country and 51

War and Peace

IN CONTEXT

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy with his wife, Sofia, in their home near Tula in 1907. As a count, he enjoyed a life of great privilege

52

the moral implications of warfare. Thus began his project to explore the period from a human perspective. What were the main differences between the time Tolstoy was writing in and the period he was writing about? In terms of everyday life for the educated classes, there were no major differences. The social life of balls and salons depicted in the novel were still typical of high society in Tolstoy’s time. The men had similar career opportunities, and conditions for women were largely the same. However, hope for reform under Alexander I at the beginning of the 19th century had been stifled under his repressive successor, Nicholas I, and Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War had led to an intense debate over the country’s future. A watershed in Russian history was Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Though in practice it did little to alleviate the living conditions of the peasantry, it required a huge shift in attitudes towards seeing peasants as individual members of society. War and Peace shows the

role played by the common people and the lessons the nobility could learn from them. What sources did Tolstoy draw on when writing War and Peace? The sons of gentry families in Russia typically found careers in the military or the civil service. Tolstoy toyed with the latter before following his elder brother to the Caucasus to join the artillery, which suited his youthful preoccupations with gambling and womanising. He distinguished himself in campaigns in the Caucasus, was promoted, and transferred to the defence of Sevastopol in 1854. Here he experienced first-hand the violence of battle; the conflicting emotions of terror, lust for glory, and valour; the empty categories of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’; as well as the disconnect between those supposedly in command and those on the front line. All of these find their way into War and Peace. Tolstoy also read numerous historical accounts of the Napoleonic Wars, both French and Russian, and visited the battlefield of Borodino where Russia dealt a heavy blow to Napoleon in September 1812. Similarly, BBC History Magazine

GETTY

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was one of the most prominent and successful Russian writers of the 19th century and is widely held to be one of the world’s leading authors. He was a count who owned a number of country estates and peasant serfs or ‘souls’, and he enjoyed a lifestyle of comfort and privilege. The 19th century was a time when well-educated people in Russia began to question Russia’s place in the world and the state of Russian society, in response to events such as the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, and the urgency of solving the problem of serfdom. War and Peace offers some of Tolstoy’s views on these subjects. First published in its entirety in 1869, War and Peace tells of the intertwining lives of several aristocratic families during the Napoleonic Wars between 1805 and 1812. We follow the warm, impulsive Natasha Rostov, the novel’s heroine, as she blossoms from a cheeky child into a loving young woman, and we see her brother Nikolai treading the difficult path between personal ambition and family responsibilities. In the Bolkonsky family we meet the bored, cynical Andrei – who sees military glory as a respite from his unhappy marriage – and the shy, selfless Maria, both ruled by their tyrannical father. Linking the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys is Pierre Bezukhov, the socially awkward but wealthy bachelor, who is Andrei’s best friend and Natasha’s confidant. Against a backdrop of conflict which turns the social order upside down, the characters encounter love, loss, trauma, despair and hope.

French and Russian cavalries clash at Borodino on 7 September 1812 (old-style date 26 August) in the bloodiest single-day battle of the Napoleonic Wars. War and Peace evokes in moving detail the impact of conflict on aristocratic soldiers and their families

War and Peace is a phenomenon that is bound to Russians’ perceptions of themselves, and others’ views of Russians military strategists. He created an interpretation of the period in which it was the spirit of the Russian people that repelled Napoleon.

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Tolstoy drew on personal experience for the lives of the families in the novel. Having lost both his parents at a young age, he was fascinated by the intricacies of family life and took cues from the families of his acquaintances. In particular, his wife’s bubbly younger sister Tatiana provided the role model for Natasha Rostov. How historically accurate is the novel? War and Peace is broadly accurate in terms of the historical events and figures involved in them. But while true to the facts, Tolstoy put a spin on them to serve various purposes in the novel. For instance, his interest in the military campaign ends in 1812 – though Russia went on to greater success against Napoleon in western Europe in 1813–14 – because it was the battle at Borodino that generated the most patriotic fervour. Likewise, he is dismissive of Russian commanders of foreign extraction, such as Barclay de Tolly, while portraying FieldMarshal Kutuzov as an instinctive leader inspiring in his men intuitive reactions in battle that could not have been planned by the BBC History Magazine

Why does the novel contain historical essays? The historical essays woven into War and Peace – in which Tolstoy digresses from the fictional story to discuss the meaning of history – are the most challenging aspect of the novel, which otherwise is an engrossing and enjoyable read. As Tolstoy worked on his factual sources and contrasted them with how he wanted to demonstrate the impact of war on everyone’s lives, he began to question the discipline of history itself. He took issue with the practice of attributing the course of events to decisions taken by the tiny minority of those in positions of power. Tolstoy also realised that it is human nature to misrepresent events in the retelling of them. We see this when Nikolai Rostov unwittingly finds himself exaggerating his role in a battle when telling it to his ambitious cousin Boris. So War and Peace became a work about the very nature of history, which at times required sections where Tolstoy could express himself more philosophically. He was aware that these chapters stretched the conventional boundaries for a novel, but, ever confident in his own abilities, he claimed: “Either I am crazy or I have discovered a new truth. I believe I have discovered a new truth.” How was the novel received in Tolstoy’s time? Readers had a great appetite for War and Peace as it came out in serial form, not losing interest when Tolstoy extended it to a fifth,

and then a sixth, volume. In 1869, the six-volume book form entered a second print run almost as soon as it came out. However, critical reactions were mixed, mainly due to Tolstoy’s interpretation of historical events and due to the historical essays, which drew from the French writer Flaubert the complaint that “He repeats himself! He philosophises!” In the third edition of the book, the essays were moved to an appendix. However, by the fifth edition, edited by Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia, they were restored to their original place. What has been the significance of the novel over time? War and Peace is more than a classic of Russian literature; it is a phenomenon that is closely bound to Russians’ perceptions of themselves, and others’ views of Russia. Though its analysis of patriotism is sophisticated and many-faceted, this did not stop Stalin from recognising the book’s potential to serve as propaganda during the Second World War (known as the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in Russia). He had the 1812 sections of the novel mass produced and even posted on billboards around Moscow. War and Peace has also done more than any other work of literature or art to shape the Russian view of the Napoleonic Wars and is sometimes given as much weight as a historical account. Extracts of the novel remain on the Russian school curriculum, and it was chosen to represent all of 19th-century Russian culture in the opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014. The novel’s cautionary reflections on the role of ‘great men’ in determining the course of history has resonances the world over, causing political commentators to invoke it in analyses of 21st-century conflicts, including the Iraq War and most recently Russia’s annexation of Crimea. It is consistently included in lists ranking the world’s greatest novels, a status that it truly deserves. Dr Sarah Hudspith is associate professor in Russian at the University of Leeds

DISCOVER MORE TELEVISION E BBC One’s six-part dramatisation

of War and Peace airs this month BOOK E War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

(Wordsworth Classics, 2001)

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Study history

GET BACK INTO HISTORY If you’re looking to reignite your passion for the past, here are a few ideas on how you can kick-start your learning... Words by Charlotte Hodgman

BEST FOR... SERIOUS STUDENTS

Online courses for formal qualifications Distance learning online offers a flexible way to gain an undergraduate or postgraduate qualification in your own time and at your own pace. Fees vary from institution to institution but costs are generally lower than for full-time face-to-face qualifications. Most courses will have specific entry requirements. The Open University (OU; open.ac.uk) offers a six-year, part-time course leading to a BA (Hons) in history, with no entry requirements. If you already have an honours degree, in history or otherwise, you could study part-time for an MA in history with the OU. A number of bricksand-mortar universities also offer distance-learning degrees and masters courses – visit individual university websites to find out more. Karl Hack, senior lecturer in history at the OU, says: “We want students to always be learning new skills, or reinforcing old ones, at the same time as learning about fascinating periods of history. The OU enables you to choose what you’re interested in and fit your studies around other commitments, whether that be a family or full- or part-time work. If you’d like a taste of the history modules we offer, there are free online courses on OpenLearn (open.edu/openlearn), developed by our academics, lecturers and tutors.” If a degree seems daunting, you could test the waters with an A-level, AS-level or Diploma any of which can be completed online with companies such as Oxford Learning College (OLC; oxfordcollege.ac). International Correspondence Schools (ICS Learn; icslearn.co.uk) also offers an online A-level in history. You don’t need any previous experience or qualifications to enroll, though a GCSE or equivalent in history will be helpful.

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Dillington House in Somerset – a Grade II*listed property dating back to the 16th century – offers residential adult education courses in beautiful surroundings

BEST FOR... CASUAL ENTHUSIASTS

Short online courses If you don’t have the time or inclination to commit to a regular class or university qualification, then a short online course could be just the thing. Many providers offer courses designed by universities and academic institutions across the world. These are accessible on mobiles, tablets or desktop computers and materials include video, audio and online articles. For the majority of non-accredited courses no academic background in the chosen subject is required, and there are no exams or assessments. Increasingly popular Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs; mooc-list.com) provide university-level learning, often at no cost. Though MOOCs don’t usually feed into a formal qualification, they’re a great way of accessing high-quality courses without the need to complete an entire programme of studies. One MOOC platform is FutureLearn (futurelearn.com), a private company set up by the OU, which offers free history courses of between 2 and 10 weeks in length, developed by a variety of universities and cultural institutions. Nigel Smith, head of content at FutureLearn, says: “A MOOC is a great option for anyone who wants to discuss their perspectives on historical events with fellow enthusiasts around the world. FutureLearn’s platform works by allowing learners to connect with each other and have conversations around each piece of course content. Learning through conversation in this way turns the course into more of a social experience.” The BBC offers short online history courses focusing on various aspects of the First World War. Find out more at bbc.co.uk/history/0/28293511

BBC History Magazine

ALAMY/HELEN HOOKER – HELEN HOOKER PHOTOGRAPHY.CO.UK

BEST FOR... NEW EXPERIENCES

BEST FOR... DIRECT CONTACT

BEST FOR... OLDER LEARNERS

Residential courses Local colleges and study days or universities

University of the Third Age

There are plenty of one-off residential courses and study days that focus on specific areas of history – from art to the Victorians. Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education (ice.cam.ac.uk) runs weekend residential courses at Madingley Hall near Cambridge, while Dillington House in Somerset (dillington.com) and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (vam.ac.uk) also offer adult residential and day courses. Visit leisurecourses.net to discover more possibilities. You could even combine your studies with a holiday abroad by booking with a specialist tour operator such as Andante Travels (andantetravels.co.uk), Kirker (kirkerholidays. com) or Leger Holidays (leger.co.uk). The National Trust (nationaltrust.org.uk/toursand-overseas) works with other companies to offer guided tours of a wide range of locations in the UK and further afield.

A great option for more mature history enthusiasts is the University of the Third Age (U3A; u3a.org.uk), providing a whole range of educational, creative and leisure courses for people no longer in full-time employment. Activities are organised not by a central institution but by individual learning co-operatives run by volunteer members at more than 900 locations across the UK, where courses are offered for the joy of learning rather than the pursuit of qualifications. Historian Francis Beckett, editor of Third Age Matters, the U3A’s magazine, says: “Many local U3As have helped local museums, galleries, universities and other organisations with research projects, offering their time, energy and expertise in return for an opportunity to engage actively in an enterprise to the mutual benefit of all involved.” Joining is simple: search for a U3A in your area, find out what activities are available and download a membership application form. Family history groups, expert speakers, local and global history discussions and outings are just some of the options available.

BBC History Magazine also runs history events. As well as the annual York and Malmesbury history weekends, we are hosting a Roman Britain Day and a First World War 1916 Day at M Shed, Bristol, in February. For more information turn to p48.

BBC History Magazine

If you’d prefer a face-to-face experience for your foray back into history, take a look at the full- or part-time courses offered by your local college or university. As well as higher education and A-level options, many institutions also offer shorter courses catering to just about all historical tastes – from ancient to medieval, warfare to religion. What’s more, many courses are taught in the evenings – particularly handy if you have daytime commitments. Dr Sally Crumplin, history course organiser at the Office of Lifelong Learning, University of Edinburgh (ed.ac.uk/studying/ short-courses/subjects/history), says: “Our short courses in history require no prior knowledge; they can be taken simply for pleasure, or for credit, and even to work towards an undergraduate application.” Another useful resource bringing together huge numbers of options is Hot Courses (hotcourses.com), where you can search for suitable activities in your area. Alternatively, request a prospectus from your local college or university, or check out their website.

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THE HISTORY ESSAY

Onlookers throw white roses at Richard III’s coffin as it makes its way to Leicester Cathedral for reburial. For all their passion for history, many people fail to grasp that “what happens today is the product of all that has preceded it”, says Daniel Snowman

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ARE WE BLINDED BY OUR LOVE OF HISTORY? As our obsession with the past has grown, so has the tendency for us to mythologise it, or skew it for our own political purposes By Daniel Snowman

BBC History Magazine

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Abusing the past THE HISTORY ESSAY

explosion – of the ‘flying bombs’ that we listened to together in our makeshift shelter. My father, meanwhile, was on the Kent coast shooting down Nazi planes. All this, my mother told me, would one day be part of history. I listened to Churchill’s broadcasts by her side, celebrated the news of Hitler’s death and danced around the street bonfire on what I learned to call ‘VE Night’. From my grandparents and others, I gradually learned about the previous world war, also against “the Germans”, and how there must never be another one. And later, as a schoolboy, something about earlier times: from Disraeli and Gladstone back to the Tudors and Stuarts and beyond, and went on to do a history degree. I still love history, and hold a senior research fellowship at London University’s Institute of Historical Research. One of the things I am currently doing at the IHR is chairing a series of public seminars in which some of our top historians are debating the ways in which people use – and abuse – what they understand to have happened in ‘history’. The series kicked off with what seems an extraordinary paradox. On the one hand there is clearly a huge market for what you might call ‘popular’ history. Yet, at the same time, many people also seem to lack any real sense of the continuity between past and present: how what happens today is the product of all that has preceded it. Should we be worried about this? ‘History’ in its various guises is more popular nowadays than ever: in schools and universities, on film, TV and the internet, in sales of historical biographies, visitor numbers to heritage sites, family history, re-enactment societies and the like. In Britain, millions watch costume dramas such as Downton Abbey or Wolf Hall, while books and TV programmes have abounded on historical anniversaries (Magna Carta, Agincourt, Waterloo, the First World War). Or consider the huge popular interest aroused by the rediscovery and reinterment of the bones of King Richard III. There are parallels elsewhere too – in the USA, for example, where the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and the death of Abraham Lincoln were marked by a flurry of new books and TV programmes. Yet we also live in a culture that can be markedly lacking in historical awareness.

Press and politicians like to alarm us by reporting polls revealing that (for example) only one British teenager in six knows that the Duke of Wellington led the British Army in the battle of Waterloo and that only one in 10 can name a 19th-century British prime minister. Or that 80 per cent of respondents in a US poll did not know who was president during the First World War. It’s not just a question of being ignorant of the ‘facts’. More profoundly, important current issues are frequently discussed with little regard for the backstory: migration policy, for example, or continued British membership of the EU, Russian involvement in Ukraine or continuing war and violence in the Middle East. When people do turn to a version of history or a pivotal personality or event in the past when addressing contemporary concerns, they often seek and cite highly selective history: an invocation of the past to help bolster present-day attitudes. Think of the way one foreign ‘hate’ figure after another has been lazily compared with Hitler, for example, or how advocates of overseas military intervention have routinely invoked questionable analogies with 1939. or all this, as I’ve pointed out, popular interest in the past remains high. One example of this is the widespread appeal of ‘Heritage’. There have always been those, in Britain and elsewhere, committed to conserving or renovating valued remains from the past. This was the day job of Prosper Mérimée (author of Carmen) and of his protégé Viollet-le-Duc in Paris in the 1830s and 40s, while our own National Trust dates back to 1895. But our reverence for Heritage (with a capital ‘H’) has become more widespread than ever in recent decades, perhaps alongside a growing sense that much of our historical fabric was in danger of being lost. The traditional corner store was being elbowed aside by the shopping mall and pedestrian precinct, while fading aristocrats were forced to vacate their country houses, often seeing their crumbling townhouses replaced by concrete tower blocks. Euston station lost its classical arch and nearby St Pancras was only reprieved from demolition at the last moment.

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Dramas such as Downton Abbey have ridden the wave of the public’s love affair with the past

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BBC History Magazine

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’ve loved history since childhood. Brought up during the war, I remember my mother pointing out the overhead fighter squadrons as they flew out in the morning and then, in the evening, watching them return, often with a poignant gap or two in their formation. And the noise – and then the ominous silence followed by a distant

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THE HISTORY ESSAY

Dresden’s Frauenkirche, which was rebuilt following its destruction by Allied bombing in 1945 (note the fire-damaged darker stones, which were part of the original church). Is it false to history to restore a bombed-out building to its ‘original’ state?

BBC History Magazine

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Abusing the past THE HISTORY ESSAY

“When people use the past to address contemporary concerns, they often cite highly selective history, invoking it to bolster present-day attitudes”

A man pictured in Calais migrant camp, 3 November 2015. “Current issues are frequently discussed with little regard for the backstory: migration policy, for example, or continued membership of the EU…” says Daniel Snowman

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the past was becoming commercialised and commodified: the sort of thing that was wittily evoked by Alan Bennett in his play People, produced at the National Theatre in 2012. veryone, I think, agrees on the importance of a nation retaining a sense of its own past and something of the physicality of that past. Yet questions remain. What exactly should be conserved, and what scrapped? Why this building but not that? Isn’t it, in some sense, false to history to restore a derelict building back to its ‘original’ state? Think of Uppark, a magnificent 17th-century country house in Sussex, that was devastated by fire in 1989 but superbly restored and, in 1995, reopened to the public. And who can deny the magnificence of Dresden’s Frauenkirche, painstakingly rebuilt (partly with British help) exactly as it was when destroyed by Allied bombing in February

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BBC History Magazine

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It has been said that history becomes especially important at times of danger. Here, it was the very physicality of the past that seemed under threat. Pressure groups and governmental authorities began to take action (English Heritage was set up in 1983). Who could quarrel with the idea that, while there was still time, the nation’s Heritage had to be saved? Well, there were critics. Some, while sympathetic to the fundamental idea of preserving the legacy of the past, were disturbed by how they saw it being done. The historian Patrick Wright, for example, argued that our history was in danger of becoming enwrapped in quaintness and antiquarianism and that a sanitised narrative of national history was being harnessed for political purposes. David Cannadine, meanwhile, worried that the very idea of a national ‘heritage’ could encourage what he dubbed “a picture-postcard version of Britain”. And Robert Hewison wrote a powerful polemic about what he called the “Heritage Industry”, arguing that

THE HISTORY ESSAY

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“To its critics, ‘Heritage’ can be something of a sentimental, rearguard movement in danger of overvaluing the aristocratic and clerical past” 1945? Yet I wonder whether, had St Paul’s Cathedral been badly hit during the war (which it nearly was), we would subsequently have erected a replica of Wren’s masterpiece on the old site; more likely, I suspect, something ‘modern’ like Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral or Spence’s Coventry Cathedral. And one can understand the argument that, in the interests of ‘authenticity’, the great tower in Pisa should be engineered back to its intended perpendicular position – or allowed to fall – rather than remain permanently, artificially, propped up at an angle akin to the one it assumed some time after its original construction. So, why renovate Uppark, the Frauenkirche or the Pisa tower while continuing to clear away surviving industrial-era slums or factories? To its critics, ‘Heritage’ can be something of a sentimental, rearguard movement in danger of overvaluing the aristocratic and clerical past, a symptom of our anxious quest for a shared national identity, perhaps, that too often prioritises the ‘beautiful’ over the merely ‘historic’. Yet how can we hope to learn from the past without making the effort to preserve and conserve those valued products of it that have survived? All told, the idea of ‘Heritage’ remains a topic capable of arousing powerful passions. The relationship between history and myth – another of the themes discussed in the IHR seminar series – can spark ferocious debates too. What do you know – and how, and from what sources – about ‘Boadicea’ and her knife-endowed chariot or Drake playing bowls before defeating the Spanish Armada? Or about the Trojan Wars, or of Joan of Arc trouncing the English (if you are French), George Washington and the cherry tree (if you are American) or the Emperor Barbarossa (if German)? Who were the ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’ of history? Many widely repeated historical myths concern the origins, creators and subsequent continuity of nation states. As a child growing up in London, I proudly repeated that “we won the war” and how we’d had a continuous monarchy and never been successfully invaded for something approaching a thousand years. True? At best true-ish. But the very repetition of certain mythologies, from those of Homer or Virgil, via the ‘cake’ anecdotes associated with Alfred the Great or Marie Antoinette to the preternaturally unsmiling Queen Victoria, remind us of the historical resonance such stories can acquire. Any self-respecting historian would of course avoid repeating myths about the past as though they were ‘true’. Then why does no work of historical research ever seem to be definitive, the final word on the subject? Is there even such a thing as historical ‘reality’? Perhaps we all, despite protestations to the contrary, see the past through the shifting perspectives of the present – with each generation seemingly constrained to re-interpret and even (dare I say it?) re-mythologise the past. Often, the myths

and distortions of the past are essentially political. Thus, the Japanese in recent years have been rewriting their school history books (particularly the sections about the Second World War), and they’re doing something of the same in Ukraine and Poland as they attempt to distance themselves from Russia. Did the British empire help educate millions around the world into the benefits of democracy, or was it primarily a form of ruthless (and racist) commercial exploitation? How do you regard – and label – the mass murder of Armenian Turks a century ago? Did Lincoln fight the Civil War in order to free the slaves or just to prevent his nation from falling apart? This coming Easter marks the centenary of the Dublin uprising, and next year that of the Soviet Revolution: plenty of scope here, I would surmise, for new bouts of historical rewriting! ow far can art provide us with genuine insights about the past? I first came to know something about Henry V and Richard III and other historical figures from Shakespeare. His narratives about the Plantagenets certainly misrepresented some of the facts, and we might say the same of the picture of a battle on a Greek vase, a statue of Louis XIV, Schiller’s (or Verdi’s) portrayal of Philip II of Spain or Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. But perhaps artworks, however much they may mythologise the past, can nonetheless help provide a pathway towards our understanding of it. As authentic products of their own time and place, they surely tell us something of how people in a previous era regarded those of a still earlier period, thus providing data like any other for the historian to use. Last year, with all the extraordinary to-do about the reinterment of Richard III, I had another look at the 1955 Olivier film of the Shakespeare play. The fact that the Bard was no historian is acknowledged in the opening titles where an imitation late medieval manuscript informs viewers that, while the play may not be a work of historical scholarship, it is none the worse for that: “The history of the world, like letters without poetry, flowers without perfume, or thought without imagination, would be a dry matter indeed without its legends, and many of these, though scorned by proof a hundred times, seem worth preserving for their own familiar sakes.” So is academic history a ‘dry matter’ in danger of being like flowers without perfume, thought without imagination, if devoid of myth and legend? Let’s hope not. In any case, I sense that nowadays we have come to expect more exacting standards of historical accuracy from creative artists than anyone would have asked of Shakespeare. Works such as Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels (or the TV version of Wolf Hall) are liable to arouse academic criticism if found to be in any way historically misleading. Yet at the same time, while few would seriously claim to have learned authentic Scottish history from Mel Gibson’s Braveheart,

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Historical art – such as Shakespeare’s Henry V – can shed light on how our ancestors regarded their own past

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Abusing the past THE HISTORY ESSAY

“This coming Easter marks the centenary of the Dublin uprising, and next year that of the Soviet Revolution: plenty of scope here, I would surmise, for new bouts of historical rewriting!”

British troops man a makeshift barricade in Dublin, April 1916. Successive generations have re-interpreted – even re-mythologised – events such as the Easter Rising through the prism of the present

O

ne way and another, what we loosely call ‘history’ is evidently massively popular. But what does it mean to all those who so avidly consume it, use it and abuse it? For some, especially among older history lovers, perhaps, the past can provide a heart-warming element of nostalgia or of consolation, while others might find themselves experiencing a sense of shared pride or vindication. Some doubtless seek affirmations of personal identity as they sift through the past (think of the popularity of family history, and of histories touching on gender, ethnicity or nationhood). And who among us has not relished learning more about a much-loved hero of earlier times, or a about much-reviled villain? History means many things to many people. But its focus has moved on since I first learned all about kings and generals, to an emphasis on economic and social history, then to cultural history, a burst of post-modernism from some historians and, more recently, a much heralded ‘return to narrative’.

What new historiographical ‘turn’ should we be anticipating in the years to come? As the digital era takes increasing hold, how will people seek their historical ‘fix’? Already, many are probably more inclined to turn to the internet or BBC iPlayer than to lengthy books. Museums and heritage centres flourish as bookshops and publishers falter. Let’s hope that, in what is said to be an increasingly ‘present-oriented’ age, debate about the present and future will be properly buttressed by an informed awareness of all that has preceded it. For, as the great French historian Marc Bloch wisely put it many years ago: “Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past.” Daniel Snowman is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London and the author of numerous books on history DISCOVER MORE BOOK E Historians by Daniel Snowman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) SEMINARS E For more on History Now & Then, the IHR’s seminars on

current issues raised by the study of the past, go to http:// blog.history.ac.uk/2015/09/history-now-then/

Next month’s essay: Stephanie Barczewski explains why Britons celebrate heroic failure

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the film proved as inspirational to some emerging Scottish nationalists as an early Verdi opera might have done for those yearning for Italian statehood.

LISTEN TO MORE FROM THIS INTERVIEW on our podcast

Experts discuss and review the latest history releases

BOOKS

Lara Feigel in her publisher’s office in London. Despite very real hardships, “this was a moment in which people thought they could forge peace through coming together in an international way,” she says of postwar Germany

HELEN ATKINSON

INTERVIEW / LARA FEIGEL

“Writers hoped to revive culture and create a whole new Germany” Lara Feigel talks to Matt Elton about her new book exploring the ways in which the Allies hoped to use culture to rebuild the German psyche immediately after the Second World War BBC History Magazine

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Books / Interview PROFILE LARA FEIGEL A senior lecturer in English at King’s College London, Feigel’s research focuses on the 1930s and the Second World War, and the ways in which culture interacts with the lives of individuals. Her previous books include The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War (Bloomsbury, 2013) and she writes regularly for national publications such as The Guardian.

IN CONTEXT

Following the surrender of the Germans in 1945, the Allies began a postwar programme of reconstruction that combined physical rebuilding with an effort to reshape the nation’s culture. Key figures in this process included the German writer Klaus Mann (1906–49), Austrian film-maker Billy Wilder (1906– 2002) English novelist Stephen Spender (1909–95) and US journalist Martha Gellhorn (1908–98). Cold War divisions between the west and the Soviet Union – particularly evident in a divided Berlin – complicated the process, and led to rising tension between the former allies.

How much debate was there about the way in which the German psyche could be transformed? Plenty – and the people that I’m particularly interested in were the most hopeful in that respect. The writers Stephen Spender and Klaus Mann, for instance, really hoped that, by finding Germans who had resisted Hitler, they could revive culture through them and create a whole new Germany. At the same time, a lot of the military who had been fighting the Germans for the past five years didn’t really believe there was any such thing as the ‘good German’ – only good and bad elements in the German character, with the bad usually dominating. Your book follows 20 individuals who contributed to German culture after the war. How did they get involved? Some went to Germany because they’d been there before the war and wanted to find out what happened to people they had known. The Allied authorities, meanwhile, looked for German speakers to undertake tasks such as setting up the press; many of those people were already cultural figures. The Allies also had a distinct cultural programme, particularly after 1947 when – in the light of the Cold War and Soviet efforts to rebuild culture in the areas they controlled – the Americans sent in key figures to show to the Germans why they would be better off governed by them rather than by the Soviets. What initiatives were launched to try to reshape German culture? The Allies sent in western literature and films. They had a books committee that (slightly randomly) selected stories for the

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edification of the German people, including novels by authors such as Agatha Christie and Virginia Woolf. The hope was that this inherently democratic literature – in the sense that it had been made in a democracy – would somehow make the Germans more democratic. It was also hoped that this ‘great culture’ was going to make them somehow more tolerant, which seems rather dubious because the Germans already had a great culture of their own. Was it hard for people to switch from seeing the Germans as the ‘enemy’ to people to be cared for? Yes, it was. For instance, immediately after the war [novelist and journalist] Martha Gellhorn went to Germany to work as a reporter. She found herself hating the Germans, partly because of their sycophancy. Often the Germans didn’t make it easy for these people to care for them, because they seemed to be more anxious to convince the Allies that none of them had been Nazis than to express sorrow for or acknowledgement of what had happened. Others were more open-minded and prepared to sympathise with the Germans, but when they saw the concentration camps and the immense bureaucracy it had taken to govern them, they felt that it wasn’t enough for people to have looked the other way. Some returning Germans felt that if they’d managed to make a stand against Hitler then their compatriots should have too. How did these commentators deal with the idea of collective guilt in their interactions with the German people? A lot of them came in with a need to see the Germans accepting responsibility, which only increased when they saw the remains of the concentration camps. But, at the same time, commentators seeing people living among the rubble of German cities, with

“German people were paying the value of a goose on the black market to go to the theatre”

no energy or water, couldn’t begin to think how you would hold these people to account when they were barely able to survive. Do we get a sense of how the Germans reacted to this bid to ‘reculture’ them? They didn’t take it terribly seriously! Most German writers were delighted by the Allies coming in, and hoped they could collaborate – there was a desire for contact with foreign writers because Germany had been cut off during the war. But I think the Allies went about things in a way that was too patronising and, perhaps, too piecemeal to really gain the attention of German writers, who ended up waiting for them to leave before they revived their culture in the 1950s. It seems incongruous, now, that there was an effort to bring ‘culture’ to a starving people. Is that view fair? It was unlikely, but it was extraordinary quite how many people went to the theatre. This was partly because theatres were warm and tickets relatively cheap – and even expensive plays such as the 1948 production of JeanPaul Sartre’s The Flies were still massive sensations. People were paying the equivalent value of a goose on the black market to go to the theatre, which is remarkable when you think how hungry they were. There was a real appetite for culture, especially from overseas, and some people were still prepared to participate in the Allies’ cultural offerings when they weren’t seen to be too patronising. To what extent was this period a bridge between more recognisable periods? Very much so – and it’s a bridge that’s often now forgotten. We think of Germany in the 1950s as miraculously turning into a very prosperous reconstructed nation, and we think of it in the 1970s as really facing its past and being a tolerant centre in Europe. But immediately after the war, Germany was devastated in a way that is hard for anyone who hasn’t been in that kind of war zone to even conceive of visually. And the Germans had been too brainwashed by 12 years of National Socialism to really move towards tolerance. So it was a bridge between two worlds that we know much more about. It was also a moment of potential that was subsequently lost – a moment when a lot of people going into Germany were unusually idealistic and really wanted to forge a world

BBC History Magazine

Children scrabble for scraps of coal in the streets of Hamburg during the ‘hunger winter’ of 1946/47. “Germany was devastated in a way that is hard for anyone who hasn’t been in that kind of war zone to even conceive of visually,” says Lara Feigel

that wasn’t dominated by national identity, but instead a new, peaceful pan-Europe in which culture was going to play a large part. That, I think, was really lost as a result of the Cold War and its divisions during the 1950s.

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You introduce the idea of a ‘crisis of culture’. What were the key moments? There was a writers’ conference in 1947, another of those quite hopeful moments, attended by people from all the zones – including Soviet writers. At this conference, the journalist Melvin Lasky – a former communist who had become a real Cold Warrior in the US – stood up and said that, if they were going to talk about intolerance, they needed to talk more about communism than fascism. He also said that the Soviets were now the real enemies and that a cultural front had to be forged against them. That, I think, marked the beginning of a clear cultural divide in Germany. At what point did German culture begin to evolve, and its people really acknowledge the recent past? It wasn’t until after 1968, through a quieter cultural moment and an acknowledgement of the previously unspoken Nazi past. By the 1970s, some of these ideas had become mainstream in Germany. The delay was simply a generational thing: you can’t expect people who had lived under a regime in which nothing outside the official line could be said to suddenly change their minds. It’s easy for us to forget how

BBC History Magazine

much we’re shaped by the prevailing attitudes of our time and how hard it is to shift to thinking outside those limits. In Germany it took a new generation to do that. What lessons does this story have for us in the 21st century? The idea that this period was a missed opportunity is one that I think we should return to. This was a moment in which people really thought they could forge peace through coming together in an international way, and that this peace was going to happen partly through the shared values they could explore through culture. It seems to me that this was perhaps a moment of hope that we want to return to. And the cultural works produced by the people I follow in my book are important to our understanding of the period because collectively they illustrate the idea of a moment of missed opportunity, when the impact of the war on both the victims and the perpetrators was felt in the same country. We can understand that more viscerally through their works. How would you like this book to change readers’ views of the period? It should certainly change our sense of the individuals that I follow: the experiences of Martha Gellhorn, Stephen Spender, Billy Wilder and Marlene Dietrich were crucial to their postwar development and they would not have gone on to create the works they did without this combination of ruin and guilt,

“It makes Germany’s story even more triumphant if we remember that it was a hard struggle” hope and hopelessness. The experience of seeing the concentration camps in the days after they were liberated, before their horrors became more widely known, shaped these people for the rest of their lives. Gellhorn spoke of losing her idealism, and others felt they’d stopped believing in the possibility of happiness – that they could no longer believe in humanity as a result of what they’d seen. I struggled with the question of whether it matters today to Germany, whose tolerance and commitment to Europe is undoubtedly real – but the point is that it took a while for the country to get there. It makes Germany’s story even more triumphant if we remember that it was a hard struggle, and that there were moments in the late 1940s when it was far from inevitable that the country would succeed in overcoming its past. The Bitter Taste of Victory: In the Ruins of the Reich by Lara Feigel (Bloomsbury, 464 pages, £25)

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Public Events Programme Lectures & Tours at Society of Antiquaries of London BOOK NOW TATE.ORG.UK FREE FOR TATE MEMBERS PIMLICO/WESTMINSTER

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New! Book a Tour for £10 Join us for coffee, tea and biscuits and a tour (1.5 hrs) of the Society’s historic apartments. Book today! • 19 January (10.30 am) • 23 February (10.30 am) • 22 March (10.30 am) • More dates available online at www.sal.org.uk/tours Society of Antiquaries of London, Burlington House (W1J 0BE).

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Artist & Empire Facing Britain’s Imperial Past Rudolf Swoboda Bakshiram 1886. Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015

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New history titles, rated by experts in their field

REVIEWS

Civil rights activist Rosa Parks is fingerprinted on 22 February 1956 during the Montgomery bus boycott. David Priestland asks whether this event was truly part of a global movement

Rock and rebellion DAVID PRIESTLAND considers a book that makes a case for

1956 as a pivotal year in the development of the 20th century 1956: The World in Revolt by Simon Hall

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Faber, 528 pages, £20

There are a few iconic years in the 20th century – years that stand out as high points of global revolutionary transformation: 1917, 1968, 1989. Yet 1956 is not usually seen as one of them, by historians or by the public. It is the relative anonymity of 1956 in historical terms that Simon Hall,

BBC History Magazine

a senior lecturer at the University of Leeds, seeks to challenge in this wellwritten and wide-ranging history of the year. Hall argues that 1956 has been unfairly overshadowed by 1968; that this, too, was a year that saw “ordinary people, all across the globe, speak out... take up arms and lose their lives in an attempt to... build a more just world”. But how convincingly does he make his case? He certainly cites a great deal of evidence of radical rebellion, and traces a number of challenges to the status quo in a series of readable narrative chapters. Beginning with the US civil rights movement – Hall’s area of expertise –

he offers an account of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56, sparked when tailor and activist Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger in a racially segregated bus. He then moves on to other rebellions, including the Algerian war against French colonialism, uprisings against Soviet rule in Poland and Hungary, Nasser’s challenges to British and French imperial influence in the Middle East during the Suez crisis, and the arrival of Castro, Che Guevara and their band of insurgents in Cuba to begin their communist revolution. There are also chapters on the ‘angry young men’ of rock ’n’ roll and other early examples of generational rebellion. However, for 1956 to be regarded as a revolutionary year alongside 1917 or 1968, Hall needs to show that all of these rebellions had something in common, and in this he is not entirely successful. Of course, there are always local variations in any global revolutionary movement, and this was particularly the case in 1968. But the major role of students was a uniting factor among the ‘68ers’ across the world, as well as outrage at what the rebels saw as American imperialism in Vietnam. Hall fails to demonstrate similar unities in 1956. Were the radical communist Che Guevara, the anti-communist insurgents in Budapest and the generally apolitical teenage fans of ‘Rock Around the Clock’ really part of a similar cause? Had Hall devoted more space to global linkages and developments, rather than largely treating the rebellions separately, and had he not mainly seen 1956 through the prism of empire, nationalism and ethnic conflict, he could have answered those questions and made a better case. He is right that the question of empire was central to many of these rebellions. Martin Luther King saw the civil rights movement as “inextricably bound

“Hall argues that 1956 has been overshadowed by 1968” 71

Books / Reviews COMING SOON… “Next issue, I’ll be talking to Simon Sebag Montefiore about The Romanovs: 1613 1918, his look at the rise and fall of a dynasty. Plus, we’ll have expert reviews of new books including the late David Cesarani’s final work, Robert Service’s take on the Cold War, and many more.” Matt Elton, reviews editor

“History suggests that sharp inequalities and injustices are needed to provoke revolution” both blocs, which newly affluent western teenagers so deeply resented. This year, then, marked the beginning of a rebellion against the hierarchical, imperialist and disciplined world that the Cold War had partly perpetuated and partly created. The history of global rebellion has particular relevance today, as commentators ask whether we are about to see another revolutionary year in response to financial crisis and austerity. However, 1956 – as with 1917, 1968 or 1989 – does not offer much hope for today’s radicals. History suggests that sharp inequalities and injustices – such as those between imperialist and colonised – are needed to provoke revolution. The inequalities of wealth brought by capitalism are less clear-cut, and many are persuaded of their fundamental legitimacy. Sixty years on, we are therefore unlikely to witness a repetition of this turbulent year. David Priestland is a professor of history at the University of Oxford, and the author of Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power (Allen Lane, 2012)

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Journeys in the dark JANINA RAMIREZ enjoys a trip through Anglo-Saxon Britain

in the company of a knowledgeable, idiosyncratic guide In the Land of Giants: Journeys Through the Dark Ages by Max Adams Head of Zeus, 416 pages, £25

Max Adams’ authorial voice is unique. Rarely does such a complete personality spring from the pages of a book, especially not a history book. But, from the off, this is as much about Adams as it is about the Anglo-Saxons. Buried among tales of people he has met, paths he’s trodden and oatcakes he’s consumed lies a wealth of almost incidental detail about the kings and saints, battles and highlights of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’. At times the Anglo-Saxon past comes to the fore; at others it recedes behind lengthy descriptions of Newcastle’s river or damning accounts of caravan parks. But this is what gives the book its charm. The reading experience is like spending a week travelling in the company of an erudite, knowledgeable expert who imparts jewels of information amid comments on the state of the Middle East while remarking on the weather, sipping coffee and scrutinising a map. I was anxious that salient moments, important locations and central figures might be overlooked in what is at heart a travelogue: the book is dense with evocative descriptions of walks through the British Isles. But while this is a great armchair ramble, it is also an excellent history book. This is not a scholarly tome, but an ambitious wander across time and space. There aren’t many footnotes, and no bibliography to speak of. Yet this adds

to its impact: caught off-guard, readers are relaxed, comfortable, not expecting to ‘learn’. And then, suddenly, fascinating details emerge, surprise and intrigue. At no point does Adams talk down to his readers. He mentions well-known archaeological digs, such as the one at Yeavering, as if the reader knows all about them. Amid detailed information of his own personal excavations – which make me want to run off and find the full reports – Adams drops in colloquialisms (a wealth of high-status archaeological finds are “nobby bits”, timber halls are “barn conversions”), taking readers out of the lecture theatre and into the pub. This is big history handled with a light touch that makes it warm and accessible. I would have liked more about many topics: the suggestion of a crypt beneath Jarrow, the early hermitage in Glastonbury. But, like a conversation between pints, the trajectory springs away from certain details to continue its compelling, overarching story. As a stickler for good structure, I felt the narrative plotting was hard to follow in places. If you come to it with no knowledge of the Anglo-Saxons, you may lose your way. But Adams has succeeded in creating a bold account concerned with those timeless qualities that bind people together across centuries. “Through political turmoil, famine and plague,” he writes, “ordinary indigenous people survived the early medieval period doing what people do: getting on with life.” Janina Ramirez is the author of The Private Lives of the Saints: Power, Passion and Politics in Anglo-Saxon England (WH Allen, 2015)

A reproduction of an Anglo-Saxon helmet. Max Adams’ book is “big history handled with a light touch”

BBC History Magazine

BRIDGEMAN

together” with “Africa’s present ferment for independence”, and there was also a strong anti-imperialist element to the risings in eastern Europe. However, we also need to understand how empire interacted with the Cold War. Though many had expected the defeat of the ultra-imperialist Nazis and Japanese to bring the end of all empires, the fear of postwar communism persuaded Washington to allow the weakened European powers to hold on to their empires. Meanwhile, a fear of the west contributed to Stalin’s creation of a highly exploitative and repressive imperial system in eastern Europe. Cold War anxieties also help to explain the conservative cultural atmosphere in

Henry Kissinger in 1969, when he was Nixon’s national security advisor. Niall Ferguson’s defence of Kissinger should have taken his critics more seriously, says Benjamin Houston

An idealistic hawk? takes a look at the first volume of an ambitious, opinionated biography of the diplomat and thinker Henry Kissinger BENJAMIN HOUSTON

Kissinger, 1923 1968: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson

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Allen Lane, 1008 pages, £35

The broad scope of Niall Ferguson’s multivolume treatment of Henry Kissinger is appropriate. Disproportionately influential as a thinker and diplomat, and disproportionately controversial and reviled, Kissinger is undeniably a central figure in post-Second World War foreign affairs. Authorised by Kissinger himself, Ferguson’s approach foregrounds him as a foreign policy theorist, advancing the key argument that he was at heart an idealist (in the philosophical, rather than diplomatic, sense).

BBC History Magazine

This volume comprises five sections, spanning Kissinger’s upbringing in a Bavarian industrial town before his family fled the Nazis, and later his adjustment to America, higher education, and army career. As war turned to occupation, Kissinger worked in counterespionage and as a lecturer helping the military transition to an anti-Sovietisation stance. His meteoric rise at Harvard was accompanied by various jobs co-ordinating seminars and think-tanks, allowing him to hobnob with a range of international figures. That, along with his writings on US strategic studies, won

“As swashbuckling polemic, this is crucial, entertaining reading”

him a following among influential people in academic and governmental circles. Increasingly important advisory roles followed, first to politician and philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller as he continued angling for higher office, and later to John F Kennedy. The tumult of the 1961 Berlin crisis and 1962 Cuban missile crisis provided Kissinger with opportunities to privately and publicly critique Kennedy’s ‘flexible response’ approach – which advocated the possibility of mutual deterrence using all forms of warfare – as he refined his own thinking. Later information-gathering trips to Vietnam as the conflict there descended deeper into the morass confirmed his instincts. The war was proving the limitations of American strategic thinking but also the inadequacies of government bureaucracies to facilitate US interests. Here Kissinger found himself implicated in ill-fated clandestine peace efforts from the US government and ‘duped’ by North Vietnamese intermediaries as he struggled to facilitate a negotiated peace. The book closes with Kissinger’s ascension to Nixon’s national security advisor. Ferguson’s defence of Kissinger is important. His close look at previously inaccessible material, and his historicisation of early Cold War diplomatic thinking, is useful. However, emphasising idealism only goes so far in a biography where ideas have such fraught consequences. His avowed defence of Kissinger would be more fully realised had he taken the man’s critics more seriously before rejecting them. Ferguson shows Kissinger cobbling favour with opposing politicos, making a number of enemies that Ferguson opts against treating, and being supremely comfortable uttering public statements that run directly counter to his private thought. Ferguson also likes rhetorical questions and echoes his subject’s fondness for counterfactual history, both of which frame discussions to suit Ferguson’s predilections. As swashbuckling conservative polemic, this is entertaining, crucial reading but hardly the last word – especially as book two will need to untangle the knottiest parts of Kissinger’s divisive legacy. Benjamin Houston, Newcastle University

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Books / Reviews Anton Otto Fischer’s painting shows British warships pursuing the USS Constitution in 1812, when Britain fought a naval war with the US that was linked to the Napoleonic conflict

Naval gazing ALAN FORREST applauds a study of the crucial role played

by the Royal Navy after the major Napoleonic sea battles

Yale, 440 pages, £25

Napoleon’s downfall is generally attributed to military failures on land – in Russia, at Leipzig, in the Iberian peninsula and at Waterloo – so the later years of his war at sea tend to be overlooked. They were not marked by major sea battles of the kind that captured the public’s attention: Nelson’s glorious victories at the Nile and Trafalgar, or dramatic actions such as the assault on Copenhagen. Nelson remains the unchallenged hero of these years, yet he died in 1805 and the contribution of the British navy during the decade that followed is at risk of being overlooked. We should not be deceived. Though there were no decisive naval battles, and Britain no longer had to defend her shores against a French invasion, the

navy had not become redundant. James Davey’s book demonstrates that the French defeat at Trafalgar was not so comprehensive that it ended Napoleon’s seaborne ambitions, and insists that the war at sea was not over in 1805. Davey shows that the Royal Navy had a continuing role to play in the years after Nelson – years in which it consumed about a quarter of the nation’s defence expenditure. The navy was, indeed, larger and more powerful in 1812 and 1813 than it had been at the time of Trafalgar. This book concentrates on activities less celebrated than the battles at sea, but which proved no less critical to the success of the Allied cause and the final defeat of Napoleon. In those years the French emperor was pouring huge sums into a programme of naval ship-building,

“There were no decisive naval battles, but the navy had not become redundant”

A day in the (Tudor) life CHRIS SKIDMORE on an exploration of life in 16th-century

Britain – written by a historian who has recreated it herself How to be a Tudor: A Dawn-toDusk Guide to Everyday Life by Ruth Goodman Viking, 336 pages, £20

Stereotypes can be hard to shift, particularly those developed over the centuries. Life in the Tudor age, for instance, is commonly considered to have been nasty, brutish and

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short, with a daily routine of poor hygiene, bad food and nights spent in cold, damp, bug-infested conditions. Ruth Goodman, the self-titled ‘method historian’ whose TV series on living life in various eras make compelling viewing, has written an equally engrossing guide to Tudor life that dispels these myths. In a fast-paced narrative Goodman weaves fascinating historical examples into the trials and tribulations she experienced during her periods living as a Tudor. Not washing for three months at

opening yards in Flushing and Antwerp, though naval historians have questioned the quality of the crews and the battlereadiness of the craft. It was critical in these circumstances that Britain should maintain its naval strength, and Davey shows how effectively it did so. Though there was no major sea battle in Europe, British warships were not idle. They were involved in a series of engagements with the French outside Europe, in the East and West Indies and, particularly, in the Indian Ocean. After 1812, Britain fought a naval war with the US that was integrally linked to the broader Napoleonic conflict, while in Europe the navy continued to play a major role in blockading the French coast, defending merchant convoys, and guaranteeing food and supplies to the

a time, she reveals, does not leave a stench – as long as clothes are regularly laundered. More similar lessons are scattered throughout this book, which acts as a DIY manual, fashion guide and cookbook for anyone wishing to transport themselves back to the 16th century. Charting a day in the life of an ordinary man or woman, the book’s chapters progress hour by hour, providing detailed glimpses of how beds were stuffed, bread baked, meat roasted and cheese churned. By the end of the book, one is left with a sense of how much effort was expended simply to keep fed and stay alive. Whatever free time remained was often taken by the heavy hand of a state that enforced archery practice every Sunday after church.

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NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND, RECORD NO NH 85542-KN

In Nelson’s Wake: The Navy and the Napoleonic Wars by James Davey

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An empire falls CHARLES TOWNSHEND has mixed feelings about an account

of the impact of the First World War on the Ottoman empire The Ottoman Endgame by Sean McMeekin Allen Lane, 576 pages, £30

allied armies. In the Baltic, in the colonies and in the peninsula the navy was able to support Britain’s soldiers as operations were increasingly conducted jointly by army and navy units. And from 1807 the first naval vessels were involved in policing the Atlantic slave trade, boarding French ships from Nantes as well as English ones from Bristol. This was all part of a global policy of advancing British global trade and buttressing the empire. This had been Britain’s major objective during the wars, and this in large measure explains why, even at the height of Napoleon’s continental expansion, the navy remained central to Britain’s military success.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Alan Forrest is emeritus professor of history at the University of York

Goodman shows that it was perfectly possible to live very agreeably as a Tudor – enjoying excellent cooking, comfortable beds and clean clothes – but also reminds us that hens did not lay eggs in the winter, nor cows produce milk outside the calving season. It all highlights the fact that, though tangible, the Tudor age is now a distant memory. With a fine selection of paintings and woodcuts illustrating the Tudor experience, this is a fascinating addition to the social history of the age – if only because reading how Goodman lived for months on end in such a fashion reinforces the sense of relief that we don’t have to. Chris Skidmore is the author of Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (W&N, 2013)

BBC History Magazine

Around the centenary of the miserable Gallipoli campaign, the Middle Eastern dimension of the First World War – and its impact on the region’s later politics – seems at last to be inching closer to the centre of our attention. Sean McMeekin’s book follows hot on the heels of Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans (Allen Lane, 2015), while Ryan Gingeras’ Fall of the Sultanate is due from Oxford University Press next year. Our understanding of the Ottoman war experience has been hampered by a shortage of evidence: few western historians have mastered the Turkish or Arabic sources. But even for those who have, the kind of direct testimony we are familiar with is largely missing. Turkish soldiers did not write home. This problem is likely to persist: McMeekin, at least, does not produce much evidence of this kind. Yet events such as the Balkan wars, the Ottoman entry into the war on the side of Germany, and campaigns such as Mesopotamia and Gallipoli look different when seen from Istanbul. So, of course, does the underlying theme of the period – the rise of Turkish nationalism. The ‘Turkification’ of the Ottoman

state, kickstarted with the 1908 Young Turk revolution, accelerated during the war and culminated in Mustafa Kemal’s establishment of an ethnic Turkish republic in 1920–23. The multinational empire was disappearing long before the moment of final collapse. The difficulties of the Turkish-German relationship come across clearly here, and McMeekin is particularly interested in Russia, whose policy is analysed more convincingly than those of Britain and France. There is a lot of operational and diplomatic detail, but less on how the Ottoman army actually worked. Its structure mystified Allied intelligence, and its survival against three major powers – despite a population of barely 20 million – still amazes. Indeed, its Turkish component would outfight the Greeks after 1918 and face down the British and French. This resilience calls for deeper analysis than it gets here. A slight unevenness is most noticeable in the last part of the book: ‘the making of the modern Middle East’. There is an extended account of the Russian Revolution, but oddly little on the postwar settlement after the Treaty of Sèvres – an attempt to dismantle Turkey still bitterly remembered by its intended victims. Nevertheless, simply shifting the focal point away from western Europe to Asia Minor makes this a valuable, illuminating project. Charles Townshend is professor of international history at Keele University

An Ottoman machine gun corps defending Tel esh Sheria and the Gaza line in 1917

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Books / Paperbacks

PAPERBACKS “What Marc Morris gives us in his account of King John is good, oldfashioned political biography, done with panache. This is by far the best book on the ruler since the 1960s” it does at least provide a useful compendium of the women who had the fortune – and misfortune – to cross his path. Tracey Borman is the author of books including Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant (Atlantic, 2014)

A mid-13th-century illustration of King John. And yes, says Marc Morris, he really was that bad

The Six Wives and Many Mistresses of Henry VIII: The Women’s Stories by Amy Licence

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Amberley, 400 pages, £14.99

Although he has gone down in history as England’s most married monarch with a string of mistresses to boot, Henry VIII has traditionally been depicted as something of a prude. This is a view that Amy Licence challenges in this comprehensive new study of the women in his life. The narrative runs from the birth of Catherine of Aragon in 1485 to the death in 1580 of Catherine, the widowed Duchess of Suffolk, whom Henry may have considered marrying towards the end of his life. It is told from

BBC History Magazine

the women’s perspective, but Henry himself is too large a presence to be ignored, and Licence skilfully sketches his character, appearance and sexual prowess. The latter, she argues, was a good deal more impressive than scholars have given him credit for in recent years. As well as retelling the familiar stories of Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and the rest, Licence also aims to bring to life the more shadowy women whose names have been linked to Henry. They include Anne Stafford, Elizabeth Carew and Jane Popincourt, who were all rumoured to have been among his earliest paramours, though most of this is based upon supposition rather than any genuine discoveries among the contemporary sources. If Licence’s book does not contribute any new evidence to our understanding of this endlessly fascinating monarch,

King John: Treachery, Tyranny and the Road to Magna Carta by Marc Morris Windmill, 400 pages, £8.99

What are we to make of King John? Was he, as the revisionists maintain, the victim of circumstances, more sinned against than sinning? Or was he a cruel and capricious tyrant, well deserving of his fate? Marc Morris’s answer to this question is unhesitatingly old-fashioned. John was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, he says: a cruel and calculating despot, a sexual predator, an appalling manager of men and, above all, a loser in war. He got his just deserts when he was cornered by the barons at Runnymede in 1215. It is not so much Morris’s argument that makes this book outstanding among recent studies of John’s reign; after

all, it is a well-worn one: it’s the way in which the story is told. Morris’s structure is very clever. What he does is weave together two complementary narratives, much as a composer weaves together ideas in a symphony – one beginning with the loss of Normandy in 1203–04 and the other, trailed in the second chapter, beginning with the establishment of the Plantagenet empire in the 12th century. The two stories are held tightly together in the pages that follow, the second eventually catching up with and merging into the first. The technique is brilliant, and it works – it’s an example of the wordsmith’s art at its best. What Morris gives us here is good, old-fashioned political biography, but biography done with panache. And intellectually, there is no cutting of corners. Morris is more than the master of his sources: he engages with them, and brings his sharp critical intelligence to bear on them. His writing is clear, incisive, accessible and spiced time and again by a bon mot. This is by far the best general book on the monarch’s reign since WL Warren’s trailblazing biography, King John, written in 1961 – with the literary bravura of which Morris’s book may not unfavourably be compared. Nigel Saul, Royal Holloway, University of London

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Books / Fiction THREE MORE TALES ABOUT THE TROJAN WAR The War at Troy Lindsay Clarke (2004)

Achilles hands over Briseis to Agamemnon in a first-century AD Roman fresco. Emily Hauser’s tale of Troy has “real edge and originality”, says Nick Rennison

The first of Clarke’s two re-tellings of Homeric stories is a powerful version of the Iliad in which Phemius, a poet from Odysseus’s court at Ithaca, remembers a time “when the realm of the gods lay closer to the world of men” and when “great deeds and marvels were much commoner”. As history and mythology collide, the tales of Helen and Paris, Achilles and Hector, and the battles beneath the walls of Troy, take on a new intensity.

Ransom David Malouf (2009)

NICK RENNISON enjoys a novel take on the Trojan War,

told from the points of view of a princess and a priestess For the Most Beautiful by Emily Hauser Doubleday, 400 pages, £12.99

Over the centuries, thousands of poets and novelists have reimagined the stories of the Iliad for their own work. Classical scholar Emily Hauser is the latest to plunder its pages for her fascinating take on the Trojan War. In this novel, Briseis and Krisayis – two women peripheral to Homer’s story – become the narrators, in alternating chapters, of the action. Briseis, a princess from one of Troy’s satellite cities, is captured by the Greek hero Achilles. Enslaved and isolated in the Greek camp, she is drawn to the man who slaughtered her husband and brothers. Achilles is equally attracted to her, and when Greek commander Agamemnon insists she is handed over

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to him, Achilles withdraws from the fighting in a monumental sulk. Krisayis, daughter of a high priest, is the confidante of the princess Cassandra and lover of Troilus, son of the Trojan king Priam. During an ill-judged excursion outside the city walls, she too is captured and Troilus is killed. Krisayis later escapes, armed with knowledge of how to kill the apparently invincible Achilles, but fails in her attempts to persuade her fellow Trojans of this. Hauser’s novel is set very specifically in the year 1250 BC, and her evocation of Bronze Age society is highly convincing. Meanwhile, the gods scheme and gossip on Mounts Olympus and Ida as they idly decide the fates of the mortals below. This is a familiar tale told in an unfamiliar way. Presenting the story from the point of view of the women, rather than the warriors, gives Hauser’s novel real edge and originality. Nick Rennison is the author of Carver’s Quest (Corvus, 2013)

Malouf’s simple but profound story focuses on the aftermath of the death of the Trojan hero Hector, killed in personal combat with Achilles. The Greek warrior, still mourning the death of his comrade Patroclus at Hector’s hands, is intent on dishonouring the Trojan’s corpse, dragging it behind his chariot around the city. Hector’s father, the Trojan king Priam, enters the Greek camp to plead for the return of his son’s body for burial.

The Song of Achilles Madeline Miller (2011) Told in the narrative voice of Patroclus, an awkward young princeling in ancient Greece, this powerful and well-written debut novel describes his meeting with golden boy Achilles and the passionate relationship that develops between them. Anyone who knows Homer will know the fate that awaits the two of them when they grow to manhood and travel to war at the walls of Troy, but Miller gives the familiar narrative genuine freshness.

BBC History Magazine

BRIDGEMAN

FICTION The plunder of Troy

Jonathan Wright previews the pick of upcoming programmes Sam Worthington plays the war reporter Phillip Schuler in Deadline Gallipoli

Bloody beaches Deadline Gallipoli TV Drama, scheduled for 16 January

Militarily, the 1915 landings at Gallipoli, designed to knock Turkey out of the First World War, were a disaster. Yet they were also, in some sense, the making of New Zealand and Australia, a baptism of fire linked to their emergence as independent nations. Expect this two-part Aussie miniseries to explore this theme as it shows the campaign from the perspective of war correspondents such as Keith Murdoch, Rupert’s father. A strong cast includes Sam Worthington, Hugh Dancy, Rachel Griffiths, Bryan Brown, Anna Torv and Charles Dance.

A quartet of modern baking experts earn a crust in the 19th century

Flour power Victorian Bakers

TV&RADIO The exercise of power Lucy Worsley tells us about her series on the Romanovs, a clan that infamously equated freedom with disaster Empire of the Tsars: Romanov Russia TV BBC Four, scheduled for January In 1613, Michael I became the first Romanov tsar. His family would rule Russia until the revolution of February 1917. In the words of Dr Lucy Worsley, whose three-part series traces the Romanovs’ story, they were “absolute, inflexible monarchs” in total control of a country “so vast, so heterogeneous, that it lends itself to absolutism”. The family “brought peace after a time of horrible civil unrest”, adds Worsley, but Russia’s people often paid a high price for such stability. Take life under Peter the Great (1672–1725). He’s credited with dragging the country into the modern age, but he could be tyrannical. “Even his wonderful new capital of St Petersburg was created at the cost of the lives of many of the thousands of serfs who were forced to help build on the mosquito-ridden marshland where it stands,” says Worsley. The historian is far more complimentary about Catherine the Great (1729– 96). “[She] was certainly an impressive

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CHOICE

woman,” Worsley says, “possibly the most powerful woman in history. This explains why there’s such a lot of scurrilous gossip about her lovers, most of it true, which are even said to include a horse – definitely false, a calumny put about by her enemies.” Interested in the new ideas of the Enlightenment, Catherine is one of those rare Romanovs who “at least flirted with the idea of bringing new liberties” to her country. In the end, though, she reverted to authoritarian type. But why were the Romanovs so unable to allow their subjects more freedoms? “I think that they really believed that allowing even slight relaxations would lead to disaster,” Worsley says. “You can actually see their point if you look at the reign of Alexander II [1818-81], the famous ‘Tsar Liberator’ who freed the serfs. This raised expectations among his subjects that other reforms would follow. When they didn’t, people started to form terrorist organisations to demand change, and Alexander himself was assassinated.” The BBC’s new adaptation of War and Peace (BBC One) will transmit in January. See our feature on page 50

BBC/UKTV

TV BBC Two, scheduled for Tuesday 5 January

The manner in which our daily loaf was prepared changed more than you might imagine through the 19th century. These changes are charted in a three-part living history series that sees a quartet of modern baking experts recreate the techniques of yesteryear. The four begin by sampling life in a rural bakehouse, circa 1837, where heritage wheat flour and brewers’ yeast are the order of the day. Via an urban bakery where loaves with questionable adulterants are baked in coal-fired ovens, the four conclude in 1900 at a high-class city baker-confectioner. The series is presented by Alex Langlands of Wartime Farm and food historian Annie Gray.

BBC History Magazine

“St Petersburg was created at the cost of the lives of many of the serfs who were forced to help build it” Lucy Worsley outside St Petersburg’s Hermitage, one of the great triumphs of Romanov architecture

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TV & Radio

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Anthropologist Bronis aw Malinowski with a group from the Trobriand Islands in 1915–18

From Savage to Self RADIO Radio 4, scheduled for Monday 25 January

In its 19th-century guise, anthropology often referred to the study of ‘savage’ cultures, an imperial exercise undertaken in places deemed by Europeans to be remote and unsophisticated. In the 21st century, however, anthropologists are as likely to be studying behaviour on the high street or in the office-place as heading abroad. Over 10 weekday episodes, the GP, musician and, yes, anthropologist Farrah Jarral tells the story of how this happened, situating within a historical

Real lives on screen Visions of Change: The Evolution of the British TV Documentary – Volume 1: BBC 1951 1967 DVD (BFI, £34.99) Today, we take the BBC’s documentary output rather for granted. Yet Auntie had to develop the expertise to make factual films. In doing so, as evidenced by the 11 documentaries featured on a new two-disc set from the BFI, the BBC’s programme-makers invented and refined factual storytelling techniques. Some starry names feature. For example, the 1957 short ‘Song of the Valley’, which shows

context questions such as, what is it that we share, and what is it to be human? Along the way, she looks at the work of such key figures as Margaret Mead (1901–78), who studied adolescence and became one of 20th-century America’s most recognisable public intellectuals, and Bronis¯aw Malinowski (1884–1942), credited with being the first researcher to emphasise the importance of experiencing the everyday life of his subjects along with them. Jarral also considers the dark side of the discipline, including its use by the Nazis to justify their racist ideology. A key theme is the way anthropology has permeated our lives, so, for instance, the corporate world now uses its insights to analyse customer behaviour – something that may give us pause for thought. a prisoner being escorted to jail, was directed by John Schlesinger. A dozen years later, he would take the best director Oscar for Midnight Cowboy. There’s also an early film from Dennis Potter of The Singing Detective fame. His Between Two Rivers (1960) neatly sums up one reason the collection is so fascinating: the way it mixes the personal and political. That’s because, by portraying life in the Forest of Dean, the documentary not only says much about the writer’s own attitudes towards the place where he spent his childhood, but it vividly shows a community in the midst of huge upheaval as traditional ways of life, reliant on a mining industry in decline, break down.

Martha MacIsaac plays a gun-toting Kate Warne in The Pinkertons

As our feature on page 36 reveals, Edward VIII’s abdication rocked the monarchy to its core. At its heart was the feud between Wallis Simpson and Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, aka the Queen Mother – a rivalry explored in Royal Wives at War (BBC Two, January). Also on BBC Two in early 2016 (TBC), Great American Railway Journeys sees Michael Portillo taking to the rails in the US. For those with satellite, Texas Rising (History, 5 January) is a drama that tells the story of the Texas revolution and the rise of the Texas Rangers. The Pinkertons (Drama, 24 January) is based on cases from the detective agency’s archives. Yesterday’s highlights include a re-run for David Starkey’s Monarchy (4 January), the historian’s epic survey of the lives of notable British rulers. There’s also a chance to see Hidden Killers of the Home (Yesterday, 19 January), Suzannah Lipscomb’s two-parter about lethal things our forebears kept at home. It was in the Second World War when the US navy first realised it needed a capacity for covert reconnaissance undertaken by elite troops. Navy SEALs: Their Untold Story (PBS America, 6 January) reveals what happened next. January radio highlights include Manners (Radio 4), a history of how we behave towards each other. Science Stories (Radio 4, January) is the return of a series that focuses on scientific discoveries and those who made them.

A scene from Midnight Cowboy, which was directed by John Schlesinger

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OUT&ABOUT HISTORY EXPLORER

The swinging sixties Alwyn Turner and Jamie Bowman visit the Cavern Club in Liverpool, beating heart of the music scene that redefined British popular culture

A membership card for the Cavern Club for the 1963 season. By August the Beatles had played there 272 times

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jazz, skiffle and, eventually, rock ’n’ roll rocketing in popularity among teenagers across the UK, the Cavern Club was in the right place at the right time to both create and host a musical revolution. Between 1961 and 1963 the Beatles played there 272 times, sowing the seeds of the movement we now know as the ‘swinging sixties’.

Building the mood “A great deal of what we associate with the sixties was there in the fifties,” says Alwyn Turner, historian and author of My Generation: The Glory Years of Rock. “You could see it with Mary Quant opening her first shop in 1955, and with the arrival of rock ’n’ roll on record and then live with Bill Haley’s visit in 1957 to tour Britain. Even with the arrival of ITV, you could feel a new mood in the country. Everything was starting to move and change, and the Cavern was clearly part of that.” The Quarrymen’s first advertised performance at the Cavern took place on 7 August 1957, although they had played there several times before, unadvertised. The band played a set of skiffle songs – a sort of folk blues played with washboard and tea-chest bass. Despite the club-owner’s jazz-only policy, skiffle was seen as respectable largely because it was reviving music that had gone before, says Turner. “Skiffle changed things because it allowed more people to play. Musical instruments were expensive, but skiffle was a cheap option – and you had to play only three chords. Virtually every musician who became successful in the sixties came out of skiffle.” In late 1959, Sytner handed over

GETTY IMAGES/ALAMY

“R

emember, all you cave dwellers – the Cavern is the best of cellars!” That’s how legendary compère, DJ and punning quipmeister Bob Wooler would bid farewell to the sweaty Liverpudlian crowd at the end of each tumultuous session of rock ’n’ roll at this music club beneath a fruit warehouse on Mathew Street. Wooler chose his words well. Now synonymous with the Beatles, few venues can lay claim to such exalted status in the history of British pop music. As the thousands of tourists who continue to file down its steep spiral staircase daily prove, its reputation as ‘the spot where it all started’ is secure, almost six decades on from the moment John Lennon first climbed onto its tiny stage with his pre-Fab Four group, the Quarrymen. The Cavern Club opened on 16 January 1957 with a show from the Merseysippi Jazz Band. Some 600 people packed into the damp club, with hundreds more reportedly locked out – testament to the vision of its original owner, Alan Sytner, who was convinced that the bohemian vibe of Paris’s Left Bank could be recreated in a cobblestoned alley in Liverpool’s business district. Sytner was a young jazz fan who had visited the French capital and been smitten by the smoky atmosphere of Parisian night spots such as the jazz club Le Caveau de la Huchette. He saw an opportunity to bring that ambience to the former air-raid shelter at 10 Mathew Street. With

BBC History Magazine

The Merseybeats pack out the Cavern in April 1963, at the peak of the club’s success BELOW: The new Cavern Club, which opened on 26 April 1984

“You could feel a new mood in the country – and the Cavern was clearly part of that” ALWYN TURNER

BBC History Magazine

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Out & about / History Explorer

The Beatles play one of their first performances at the Cavern Club in February 1961, with Pete Best on drums

the reins at the Cavern Club to former accountant Ray McFall. And in May 1960 McFall bowed to the inevitable: rock ’n’ roll was allowed in. In another big move, the Cavern began to open during weekday lunchtimes, catering to a young crowd who personified the growing confidence and economic freedom that allowed the swinging sixties to flourish. Secretaries, clerks, office boys and shop assistants flocked to the club for these midday sessions, paying a shilling to watch the Beatles and buying a bowl of soup and a bread roll for ninepence. “It seems incredibly distant now,” says Turner, as a Lennon impersonator launches into a ragged version of Help! on the Cavern’s stage. “Can you imagine going to a smokefilled cellar to listen to loud rock ’n’ roll music on your lunch break?”

Rise of the working class This was “the first time the working class had money and a degree of cultural respect,” Turner explains. “There was a change in society, which was beginning to say that working-class accents were respectable. “The concept of a ‘disposable income’ was hugely important. You had an economy that

had been growing throughout the 1950s, unemployment was incredibly low, and young people had their own money for the first time in their lives,” Turner explains. “At the beginning of the 1950s there was nothing to spend that money on – but now there were gigs to go to.” Because the Cavern didn’t have an alcohol licence, this was a genuine youth movement, packed with young people and schoolboys and girls fuelled by little more than a love of music and the energy of the club. ‘Beat’ groups began to dominate, and the club hosted its first performance by the Beatles on Thursday 9 February 1961. Perhaps the most pivotal moment came on an afternoon in November that year when a smart local businessman called Brian Epstein picked through the empty fruit crates and made his way down into the Cavern to see the Beatles for the first time. A few hours later he had decided to manage them. He would go on to look after many other Cavern graduates including Cilla Black and Gerry and the Pacemakers. “It was clearly a very exciting local scene, with plenty of competitors, and

that always helps,” says Turner. “The Beatles thrived on that throughout their career, even after they moved to London and enjoyed a rivalry with the Stones and The Who.” The Beatles played the Cavern for the last time on 3 August 1963, just a month after recording She Loves You, which would go on to be their bestselling single – indeed, the bestselling single of the 1960s. They had outgrown their spiritual home, and would soon outgrow both Liverpool and the UK; with the release of I Want to Hold Your Hand

“SECRETARIES, CLERKS AND SHOP ASSISTANTS FLOCKED TO THE CAVERN FOR MIDDAY SESSIONS, PAYING A SHILLING TO WATCH THE BEATLES” 84

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Cilla Black and Gerry Marsden (singer with the Pacemakers) dance at the Cavern in the early sixties

SWINGING SIXTIES: FIVE MORE PLACES TO EXPLORE

VISIT

The Cavern Club, Liverpool

10 Mathew Street, Liverpool L2 6RE P cavernclub.org

“THE IDEA OF THE SWINGING SIXTIES HAS BECOME THE GREAT CREATION MYTH OF MODERN BRITAIN. THIS IS HOW WE IDENTIFY OURSELVES NOW”

1 Portobello Road LONDON Where London swung During the sixties Notting Hill became hip, and Portobello Road rivalled the King’s Road in the pop culture stakes. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton lived in the area. The W11 postcode was immortalised in album covers and movies, and venues such as The Globe, The Tabernacle and All Saints Church Hall hosted the likes of Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix. portobelloroad.co.uk

ALAMY

2 Jimi Hendrix’s flat in November 1963 (December 1963 in the US) they would go on to conquer America. The stage was set for the sixties to swing. “America was the holy grail,” says Turner. “We had always been in thrall to America because of Hollywood and the fact everything seemed bigger and more beautiful there. Before the Beatles, films such as Room at the Top and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning had started to be successful in the US. Lionel Bart and Anthony Newley were enjoying success on Broadway, and Beyond the Fringe had taken British satire to America, but it needed one major spark to bring it all together. That spark was the Beatles.” As for the club that had birthed and fostered them, by 1965 the Cavern had seen

Crowds queue along Mathew Street outside the Cavern in c1960 LEFT: DJ Bob Wooler and owner Ray McFall in 1964. Bob introduced the Beatles to Brian Epstein

BBC History Magazine

better days. With London the new focus of popular culture, interest declined and the club went bankrupt. Reopened in 1966, it traded on former glories until 1973, when it was demolished to make way for a planned railway ventilation duct that was never completed. Today’s tourists might not know it, but the Cavern to which they make their pilgrimage is actually a replica, rebuilt using the original bricks and reopened in 1984. Then again, why spoil the lustre of what is still a living, working music venue?

23 BROOK STREET, LONDON

Where a music legend lived The attic flat rented by the flamboyant guitarist is set to become a mecca for music fans when it opens to the public in February 2016. Hendrix’s bedroom has been faithfully recreated, and there’s an exhibition about his life and work. The museum will be shared with a tribute to composer George Frideric Handel, who lived next door. handelhendrix.org

3 Casbah Coffee Club LIVERPOOL Where the Beatles started out

Best of British “For three or four years, Britain was the world centre of popular culture,” muses Turner. “The idea of the swinging sixties has become the great creation myth of modern Britain. This is how we identify ourselves now. For a long time the great moment in modern British history was held to be 1940, with us standing alone against the Nazis. As that generation died, the sixties became ever more important; you could see that being recreated in the 1990s. “Margaret Thatcher had resolutely set herself against the 1960s, which for her was a mistake: it was when immorality became the norm. But however successful Thatcherism was, it couldn’t kill off the idea that the sixties was a great era. In 1986, an opinion poll showed that 70 per cent of people thought it was the best decade of the century. It shows the power and mythology of the 1960s: that’s when we knew that, in terms of culture, Britain was absolutely unchallenged.” Historical advisor: Alwyn Turner (right). Alwyn is a writer specialising in the cultural and political history of Britain in the 20th century. Words: Jamie Bowman

As important as the Cavern in the Beatles story, the band played several times at this venue in the basement of a house belonging to Mona Best – mother of original Beatles drummer Pete – in suburban West Derby. Today you can visit and even hire a band to play for you. petebest.com/casbah-coffee-club

4 Portmeirion WALES Where sixties surrealism hit TV Architect Clough Williams-Ellis’s bizarre creation in north Wales still has a definite swinging sixties vibe about it thanks to its role in cult TV show The Prisoner, one of the most influential programmes from the decade. The Beatles were fans and Brian Epstein stayed in an apartment there. portmeirion-village.com

5 Cliveden BERKSHIRE Where models met ministers In 1961, the Profumo affair – partly played out in the grounds of Cliveden House – came close to bringing down the British government. The image of 19-year-old Christine Keeler swimming naked in the estate’s swimming pool spawned one of the era’s classic photographs and emphasised the changing attitudes of the decade. nationaltrust.org.uk/cliveden

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Out & about

FIVE THINGS TO DO IN JANUARY Elizabethan 007 EXHIBITION / FREE ENTRY

Scholar, Courtier, Magician: the Lost Library of John Dee Royal College of Physicians, London 18 January–29 July S 020 3075 1649 P rcplondon.ac.uk

MAGAZINE

CHOICE

major new exhibition focusing on 16th-century scholar John Dee, a man who has been dubbed ‘the original 007’, opens in London this month. An enigmatic figure at the court of Elizabeth I, Dee was renowned for his talents as a mathematician, magician, astronomer, astrologer, explorer, occultist, imperialist, alchemist and spy, and was regarded as one of the most learned men of his age. But his dabblings into the occult would see him imprisoned in 1555 for casting the horoscopes of Mary I and the then Princess Elizabeth. The exhibition will, for the very first time, give the public the opportunity to view some of the 100 books that have survived from Dee’s once magnificent library (see examples, top and bottom left). These include accounts of his ‘conversations with angels’ – Dee believed he could contact divine spirits via mediums known as ‘scryers’ – and works on how to turn base metals into gold (the ancient ‘science’ of alchemy). Many of the books were annotated by Dee himself. Among the other artefacts on show are Dee’s own crystal (see top right image), which he claimed was given to him personally by the angel Uriel, a ‘scrying mirror’ for predicting the future and a crystal ball once used for researching the occult and conversing with spirits.

ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS/ SCIENCE MUSEUM, LONDON, WELLCOME IMAGES/ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY

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GALLERY historyextra. com/bbchistory magazine /john-dee

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, complete with folding diagrams; John Dee’s crystal; a portrait of Dee, c1594; a drawing of a ship in Cicero’s Opera Omnia

EXHIBITION

LECTURE

EXHIBITION / FREE ENTRY

EXHIBITION / FREE ENTRY

Treasures: Adventures in Archaeology

Fritz and Tommy: Across the Barbed Wire

Pax Mongolica 1210 1350

Work in Focus: Godfrey Sykes

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 5 January–1 May S 01865 278000 P ashmolean.org

Graves Gallery, Sheffield 21 January–3 May S 0114 278 2600 P museums-sheffield.org.uk

A collection of coins dating to the 13th-century Mongol empire goes on display at the Ashmolean Museum this month. The coins’ wildly differing designs reflect the diversity of the cultures of those who lived under Mongolian rule – this was an empire that, by the end of the 13th century, stretched from the Korean peninsula to central Europe.

This January, Sheffield Museums will be marking the 150th anniversary of the death of one of the city’s best-known artists and designers, Godfrey Sykes, who began his studies at the Sheffield School of Art in 1843. This exhibition of his works includes paintings, watercolours, designs and metalwork.

National Museum Cardiff 26 January– 30 October S 029 2039 7951 P museumwales.ac.uk/cardiff

National Museum Cardiff is opening its new gallery with an exhibition that tells the story of some of history’s greatest archaeologists. Visitors will be able to explore treasures from ancient cultures through to recent discoveries in Wales.

BBC History Magazine

Army & Navy Club, London 21 January S 020 7730 0717 (booking line) P nam.ac.uk/events/celebrityspeakers

First World War historian and broadcaster Peter Doyle examines letters written by German and British soldiers to shed light on the experiences of troops on both sides of no man’s land – from education levels to censorship rules.

This tiny rock crystal skull is one of a number of pieces on show in Cardiff

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Out & about

MY FAVOURITE PLACE

Vancouver, Canada by York Membery For the latest in our historical holidays series, York discovers a string of historical gems in the heart of a glittering New World city

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Street – once the CPR’s Pacific terminus. The last transcontinental train departed in 1927, but the Waterfront station, as it’s now known, remains a downtown transport hub – and its grand neoclassical facade, mighty columns and vaulted atrium still impress. Three blocks down Granville Street is the flagship Hudson’s Bay Company store, a six-floor cream terracotta building dating to the 1920s. The HBC’s roots go back to 1670, and for decades it controlled North America’s fur trade – before diversifying into retail – and it’s arguably one of the two most important companies (along with the CPR) in Canadian history. I’ve always been a sucker for pre-Second World War skyscrapers, and Vancouver has several fine examples. The years

before the First World War saw an influx of migrants (mainly from Britain) and money, triggering a building boom that resulted in the development of cutting-edge structures like the Vancouver Block (1910–12). Its neon-lit clock remains a city landmark to this day. (Visit during office hours, when you can see the lobby.) For decades, tourism has been a mainstay of the city’s economy – reflected in high-end interwar hotels like the Hotel Georgia and Hotel Vancouver. Opened in 1927 by the future Edward VIII the former was built in the Georgian Revival style – and for many years it was the place to stay, playing host to several big name celebrities including John Wayne, Nat King Cole and the Beatles. Following a lavish refurbishment, it has now been restored to its former glory. A block west, on Burrard Street, is the iconic Hotel Vancouver – the last of Canada’s great railway hotels. Thanks to its chateau-like appearance and distinctive green copper roof, the Hotel Van, as it is known locally, has been a city landmark ever since it was The entrance to the art deco Marine Building, once the tallest structure in the British empire

The famous steam-powered clock in the historic quarter of Gastown. “For all its shiny glass towers, Vancouver is rich in history,” says York Membery

opened in 1939 by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. (Incidentally, it doubled up as the Heathman Hotel in the 2014 film Fifty Shades of Grey.) A hundred yards or so along Burrard Street is Christ Church Cathedral, a striking neo-Gothic building dating to the 1890s. It’s currently draped in scaffolding while undergoing a much-needed £4m renovation to replace the roof and build a new bell tower. However, when it reopens (scheduled for sometime this winter), it will be well worth a peak. Inside are a host of

BBC History Magazine

CORBIS

ouching down in Vancouver on a clear day is an unforgettable experience. Nestled between the Pacific and British Columbia’s snow-capped coastal mountains, the city’s glittering downtown core rises up like a mini-Manhattan – the big difference being that it lies a stone’s throw from the Great Outdoors. Yet the question you’re no doubt going to ask about this cosmopolitan, fast-growing New World city with its shiny glass high-rises is: where is the history? Trust me – and I know the city well, having visited it on numerous occasions – it’s there. You just have to look a bit harder to find it than in the Old World. The city was named after British explorer Captain George Vancouver, who claimed its thickly wooded shores for king and country in the 1790s. The first real settlement of any note here was Gastown, a neighbourhood that still boasts a wealth of Victorian architecture. To get the best out of Vancouver I’d suggest taking a circular walking tour of some of the city’s keynote heritage buildings. First stop: the 1914 Canadian Pacific Railway train station in West Cordova

ADVICE FOR TRAVELLERS

BEST TIME TO GO The best time to visit is the summer or early autumn. The winters are damp – and, as in Britain, the weather can be unpredictable.

GETTING THERE Air Canada offers a direct year-round service from London Heathrow to Vancouver. Air Transat flies from London Gatwick year-round, and from Manchester and Glasgow from May to October. Westjet launches a Gatwick–Vancouver service in 2016.

WHAT TO TAKE If you go in summer, lightweight casual clothing, sun block and a cap. But, as the weather has a mind of its own, take a brolly and a waterproof, whatever the time of year.

WHAT TO BRING BACK

The irst real settlement of any note was Gastown, which still boasts a wealth of Victorian architecture reminders of Canada’s British links: such as a plaque commemorating James Cook’s visit to British Columbia in 1778, and a memorial to Canadian troops killed at Passchendaele. Last but not least is the jewel in Vancouver’s heritage crown: the 25-storey Marine Building, which was built in 1930. This is

JUNICHI ISHITO

Been there… Have you been to Vancouver? Do you have a top tip for readers? Contact us via Twitter or Facebook

Vancouver’s only art deco skyscraper, and once the tallest building in the British empire. The exterior boasts a series of beautiful bas reliefs depicting 1920s modes of transport – like zeppelins and biplanes – while the marble-floored lobby is apparently designed to resemble a Mayan temple. Of course, there is more to Vancouver than its heritage buildings – and you’ve got to visit Stanley Park (named after a former governor-general), English Bay and the Museum of Anthropology before heading

home. But for all its shiny glass towers, remember: Vancouver, like all great New World cities, has its history. Finding it just takes a little detective work.

First Nations artwork or printed items from the Vancouver Art Gallery gift shop; British Columbia wine; and smoked salmon.

READERS’ VIEWS Visit aboriginal history sites: Totem poles in Stanley park, UBC anthro museum, Lil’wat Ctr in Squamish, etc @robin_ec Check out Stanley Park, used by indigenous people before becoming a park in 1886 @ShazLJ

York Membery is a regular contributor to BBC History Magazine Read more about York’s experiences in Vancouver at historyextra.com/bbchistory magazine/vancouver

Next month: Sunil Khilnani visits North Karnataka in India

twitter.com/historyextra facebook.com/ historyextra

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Cathedrals of Britain by David Pepin A lavishly illustrated guide to Britain’s cathedrals, exploring the architectural artistry that created these awe-inspiring buildings and the profound impact they have on those who step through their doors.

LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL

A superb gothic cathedral with a magnificent 13th century West Front carrying 290 pieces of medieval sculpture; beautiful octagonal Chapter House; impressive scissor arches; 14th century Vicars' Close. Situated in the heart of medieval Wells, entry to the Cathedral is by donation and includes a free daily scheduled tour with one our highly trained guides. “You must visit this stunning building” (Trip Advisor). 01749 674483 www.wellscathedral.org.uk

ST. DAVIDS CATHEDRAL

Lichfield Cathedral, the only medieval Cathedral with three spires in England, is among the oldest centres of Christian Worship in Britain. It has been welcoming visitors since 700AD, and is home to treasures including the Lichfield Angel, St Chad Gospels, Staffordshire Hoard artefacts and the recently restored Herkenrode Glass.

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

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ROSSLYN CHAPEL, NEAR EDINBURGH

LINCOLN CATHEDRAL

Rosslyn Chapel was founded in 1446. The beauty of its setting and the mysterious symbolism of its ornate stonework have inspired, attracted and intrigued visitors for generations. A new visitor centre tells the chapel’s story – from its 15th century origins to the Da Vinci Code and beyond. Guides provide free talks throughout the day. Open daily all year (closed only 24/25/31 Dec and 1 Jan).

Built at the command of William the Conqueror, Lincoln Cathedral stood as the tallest building in the world for over 300 years, and remains one of the most impressive buildings today. Medieval carvings, two breath-taking stained glass ‘eye’ windows, and a library designed by Sir Christopher Wren are just a few of the reasons to visit. Floor tours included in admittance, tower and roof tours available.

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GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL

BRISTOL CATHEDRAL

A sacred space and a living building, where people of all faiths and none, gather to worship, explore, enjoy glorious music or find peace and quiet. Visit our spectacular Cloister (where Harry Potter was filmed), Whispering Gallery and majestic Great East Window. 2016 Highlights: 800th Anniversary of the Coronation of Henry III, 301st Three Choirs Festival. We look forward to welcoming you soon. Free entry.

Our story begins with a twelfth century monastery that became Bristol’s Cathedral. There are many exquisite points of interest from Romanesque carvings, to medieval glass, ammonites and even monkeys. Find sanctuary in this sacred space, enjoy our shop, café and award winning garden. Admission is free. See below for more on services, free education activities, recitals, exhibitions and other events.

01452 528095 www.gloucestercathedral.co.uk

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CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF ST NICHOLAS

DURHAM CATHEDRAL

St Nicholas is the Cathedral Church for the Diocese of Newcastle. It is an outstanding and historically significant building, containing nationally important heritage assets, including its rich collection of monuments, ledger stones and stained glass. These hold the key to Newcastle’s story and bear eloquent testimony to the importance of the church in the life of the people who forged the distinctive identity of this region.

Be one of the first to explore Open Treasure, Durham Cathedral’s new world-class exhibition route opening in spring 2016. Journey through some of the most intact surviving medieval monastic buildings in the UK and discover the remarkable story of Durham Cathedral and its incredible collections.

0191 232 1939 www.stnicholascathedral.co.uk

0191 386 4266 www.durhamcathedral.co.uk

CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF ST BARNABAS

COVENTRY CATHEDRAL

This Pugin Cathedral was built in 1844. With the Blessed Sacrament Chapel still as Pugin designed. The Cathedral is open every day and you’re more than welcome to pay a visit, especially during this Jubilee Year of Mercy. For more information about the Year of Mercy visit www.bemerciful.co.uk

From the medieval times Coventry has been a place of pilgrimage welcoming visitors from all over the world to its places of worship. Discover the new Cathedral, opened just over 50 years ago, and the contemporary art treasures contained within, including the huge ‘Christ in Glory’ tapestry by Graham Sutherland, the Baptistry Window by John Piper and the West Screen created by John Hutton.

01159 539839 www.stbarnabascathedral.co.uk

02476 521 200 [email protected]

MISCELLANY

Q&A

QUIZ BY JULIAN HUMPHRYS Try your hand at this month’s history quiz

ONLINE QUIZZES historyextra.com /bbchistorymagazine/quiz

1. On 15 November 1712, Lord Mohun and the Duke of Hamilton fought an infamous duel in London’s Hyde Park. Who won?

2. What links Merciless, Short, Addled and Cavalier? 3. In which castle was a king of England born and a queen of Scotland killed? 4. What was established in 1751 by physician John Wall and apothecary William Davis? 5. Which 19th-century literary figure attended, and later taught at, Roe Head School, Mirfield, Yorkshire? 6. This gigantic equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington can now be found at Aldershot – but where did it originally stand?

ILLUSTRATION BY GLEN MCBETH

Q What is the origin of the phrase ‘dressed to the nines’? O Adamberry, Gibraltar

The term ‘to the nine(s)’or ‘to the ninth degree’ turned up in a few texts before the 18th century, but the implication of excellence was clear for the first time in 1719 when Scots poet William Hamilton wrote: “The bonny lines therein thou sent me/How to the nines they did content me.” Robert Burns also used it as a superlative in his 1791 Poem on Pastoral Poetry: “Thou paints auld nature to the nines/In thy sweet Caledonian lines.” Neither, though, referred to clothes. A search through old newspapers reveals that ‘dressed (up) to the nines’ was not in common usage until the 1850s, and was at first mainly used in Scotland and the north of England. Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Historical Slang suggests that the number nine has connotations of perfection, perhaps from the nine ancient muses or the medieval ‘Nine Worthies’.

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ALAMY

6 QUIZ ANSWERS 1. Neither. They were both killed. 2. They’re all nicknames of English parliaments. 3. Fotheringhay. Richard III was born there in 1452 and Mary, Queen of Scots executed there in 1587. 4. The (Royal) Worcester Porcelain Company. 5. Charlotte Brontë 6. On top of Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner in London.

BBC History Magazine

An alternative suggestion is that the phrase is somehow linked with cloth being sold in lengths of nine yards. This is more than enough fabric for any garment, so to use the whole lot would imply excess or extravagance. Another Scottish connection is the 99th (Lanarkshire) Regiment of Foot, known as ‘the Nines’, which in the mid19th century had a reputation for excellence on the parade ground. The Nines dressed well, but also dressed their lines well – that is, the ranks remained neat when drilling. It’s unlikely that the phrase originated with the 99th, but that connection might have increased its popularity. Alternatively, ‘nines’ might just be a corruption of ‘eyne’, an archaic word for eyes. Take your pick from this array of explanations! Eugene Byrne, author and journalist

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Miscellany

GOT A QUESTION?

SAMANTHA’S RECIPE CORNER

Write to BBC History Magazine, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN. Email: [email protected] or submit via our website: historyextra.com/bbchistorymagazine

Every issue, picture editor Samantha Nott brings you a recipe from the past. This month it’s a herbal concoction said to ward off plague and disease

Four Thieves Vinegar

Jean Valnet’s version of the original recipe 3 pints white wine vinegar handful wormwood handful meadowsweet handful juniper berries handful wild marjoram handful sage 50 cloves 2oz elecampane root 2oz angelica 2oz rosemary 2oz horehound 3g camphor

INGREDIENTS • 5 sage leaves • 1 tsp lavender flowers • 4 sprigs rosemary • 4 sprigs thyme • tsp peppercorns • 450ml apple cider vinegar • 1 garlic clove, crushed • 2cm chunk of ginger root • 1 cinnamon stick • tsp cloves • 2 sprigs of mint METHOD Place herbs in a pint jar and fill with warmed (not boiling) apple cider vinegar. Close with a plastic lid or place a natural parchment paper under lid to keep vinegar from touching metal. Allow to extract for four weeks. Strain vinegar into a glass jar. Store in a cool, dark place. HOW TO USE Take 1–2 tbsp with honey several times a day when ill, or 1 tbsp per day for immunity boosting. Some people use the vinegar as a surface disinfectant, insect repellent and even as a foot soak for nail fungus. TEAM VERDICT “Tastes like pickles!”

Difficulty: 1/10 Time: 10 mins prep 4 weeks extraction Recipe based on a version by Laurie Neverman: commonsensehome.com

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Charles Dickens, photographed in New York in the late 1860s. Would he have accepted a knighthood if offered?

Q Why was Charles Dickens never knighted? York Membery, by email

In his 1990 biography of Dickens, Peter Ackroyd makes reference to “rumours of a knighthood” that began to circulate following Dickens’ audience with Queen Victoria in 1870. But Ackroyd’s point remains mere speculation. Dickens died three months after the royal meeting. Though the queen later spoke warmly about the author, describing his death as a “great loss” and recalling that “he had a large, loving mind and the strongest sympathy with the poorer classes”, no evidence has emerged to indicate that a knighthood was on the cards. Perhaps it was Dickens’ relatively early death (aged 58, in 1870) that denied him a title. However, even if he had lived longer, he might have turned down such an honour, preced-

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ing literary figures such as Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw who also declined a knighthood. Though Dickens thought highly of his queen, he was critical of the treatment of British nobility and the system of bestowing peerages. These views are expressed in articles such as ‘Proposals for Amusing Posterity’ in Household Words, and in Bleak House through the character of Esther Summerson. Dickens stated in his last will and testament that he wished his body of work to be his legacy. He did not want a state funeral nor any memorial of him to be created, suggesting he preferred the title of ‘author’ over a place on the queen’s honours list. Louisa Price, curator of the Charles Dickens Museum, London

BBC History Magazine

ALAMY

With the new year upon us, I wanted to find a recipe that has traditionally been used as a ‘pick-me-up’, or as a way of warding off disease. The stories behind Four Thieves Vinegar, said to date to the 17th century when plague struck Toulouse in France, intrigued me. The legend tells of four thieves who robbed the homes and corpses of those who had died of plague, but who allegedly survived the disease thanks to a herbal vinegar blend. The exact contents of the original recipe are unknown, but a version by herbalist Jean Valnet in the early 20th century (below) is said to resemble the original more closely than any other. I’m no expert in herbal remedies, so I chose to base my Four Thieves Vinegar on a more modern-day version.

PRIZE CROSSWORD

Which famous Parisian painter was the son of Suzanne Valadon? (see 3 down)

DVD worth

Across 1 Tomás de ____, the first Grand Inquisitor of Spain (10) 6 Federation of states lasting from 1922 (with roots going back to 1917) until 1991 (4) 10 Two kings of Sweden and Norway – the second gave up rule of Norway in 1905 (5) 11 Where two Second World War battles of 1942 led to the retreat of the Axis forces (2,7) 12 Southern Italian city where, in the early Middle Ages, Europe’s first organised medical school was founded (7) 14 Yorkshire town, traditional birthplace of Henry I and location of an important battle of the Civil War (5) 15 Term for aggressive patriotism, originating with Britain’s pugnacious attitude towards Russia in the 1870s (8) 16/23 Irish Protestant society, formed 1795, named in tribute to William III of England (6,5) 19 Italian town, birthplace of the founder of a major religious order. It suffered extensive earthquake damage in 1997 (6) 21 Scottish writer whose most famous play, first produced in 1904, has become a perennial favourite with family audiences (1,1,6) 23 See 16 across 25 The 18th/19th-century English social reformer and philosopher who founded Utilitarianism (7) 27 A cessation of hostilities, especially that of 11 November 1918 (9) 29 The first (modern) example of which was probably Dafne by Jacopo Peri in 1597 (5) 30 The US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 failed to overthrow the government of this island (4) 31 US space shuttle that suffered a tragic malfunction shortly after take-off on 28 January 1986 (10)

GETTY IMAGES

Down 1 Archaeologists have found evidence of the existence of this ancient Greek city, in what’s now Turkey, once thought to be mythological (4) 2 Catholic dissenters from the Church of England (9) 3 Suzanne Valadon, an important artist in her own right, was the mother of this celebrated 19th/20th-century painter of Parisian street scenes (7)

CROSSWORD PRIZE

£12.99 for 10 winners

Roman Britain from the Air Christine Bleakley and Dr Michael Scott take to the skies to see what life was like for Romans and Britons 2,000 years ago. Their journey takes them from London to Wales and north to Hadrian’s Wall, visiting sites including Europe’s best-preserved legionary barracks. Available on DVD, RRP £12.99

4 First name of Hollywood star after whom an inflatable life preserver was named (3) 5 Athenian author of very harsh laws in the seventh century BC (5) 7 David ___, last leader of the British Liberal party (5) 8 Thames-side place where a historic royal charter was signed in 1215 (9) 9 One of a number whose lives were the subject of a celebrated book by the Roman author Suetonius (6) 13 The surname of the US secretary of state to presidents Kennedy and Johnson (4) 15 Peasant girl who attained heroine status for raising French morale during the Hundred Years’ War (4,2,3) 17 City where, in 1935, the infamous Nazi anti-Jewish citizenship and race laws were passed (9) 18 African president who was deposed in 1979, fleeing first to Libya and later settling in Saudi Arabia (4) 20 Lakeside Italian resort, location of the 1935 conference of Italy, France and the UK held in response to Nazi Germany’s intention to re-arm (6) 22 Irish town on the Shannon, taken by William III’s forces in 1691 (7) 24 (In short) the process of standing down a country’s armed forces, notably

at the end of the Second World War (5) 25 British naval officer popularly remembered for what happened on his 1787–89 voyage to Tahiti (5) 26 Family name of the English queen who had four marriages (4) 28 An old cloth measure based on the length of a man’s arm (3)

HOW TO ENTER Open to residents of the UK, (inc. Channel Islands). Post entries to BBC History Magazine, January 2016 Crossword, PO Box 501, Leicester LE94 0AA or email them to [email protected] by 5pm on 27 January 2016. Entrants must supply name, address and phone number. The winners will be the first correct entries drawn at random after the closing time. Winners’ names will appear in the March 2016 issue. By entering, participants agree to be bound by the terms and conditions shown in full in the box below. Immediate Media Company Limited, publishers of BBC History Magazine, would love to keep you informed by post or telephone of special offers and promotions from the Immediate Media Company Group. Please write ‘Do Not Contact Magazines’ or ‘Do Not Contact IMC’ if you prefer not to receive such information by post, email or phone. Write ‘No Email BBCW’ if you do not wish to receive similar offers via email from BBC Worldwide. Please write your email address and mobile phone number on your entry so that BBC History Magazine can keep you informed of newsletters, special offers and promotions via email or free text messages. You may unsubscribe from receiving these messages at any time. For more about the BBC Privacy Policy, see the box below.

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EDITORIAL Editor Rob Attar [email protected] Deputy editor Charlotte Hodgman [email protected] Reviews editor Matt Elton [email protected] Production editor Spencer Mizen Picture editor Samantha Nott [email protected] Art editor Susanne Frank Deputy art editors Rachel Dickens, Rosemary Smith Picture researcher Katherine Hallett Digital editor Emma Mason [email protected]

Vol 17 No 1 – January 2016 BBC History Magazine is published by Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited under licence from BBC Worldwide who help fund new BBC programmes.

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Henry IV: Usurper king Chris Given-Wilson shows why the overthrow of Richard II dogged his successor’s reign Blood at Verdun David Reynolds explores the 1916 battle that was the ‘Stalingrad’ of the First World War

Benjamin Franklin George Goodwin reveals how a British patriot became an American hero

Mrs President? Jad Adams introduces the first female candidate for the White House, who stood for office in 1872

October 2014 – Sept 2015

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97

My history hero “He was an obsessivecompulsive type of character. On the one hand, he was incredibly driven, but on the other he was quite fragile, and had a hugely addictive nature”

Tenor Russell Watson chooses

Mario Lanza 1921 59 Mario Lanza pictured performing towards the end of his career. “His voice hadn’t been over-coached,” says Russell Watson

M

When did you first hear about Lanza?

As a child. In the days before videos and DVDs, my mum would always want to watch certain films when they were repeated on the telly, one of which was The Great Caruso. So I grew up with an appreciation of classical music, and never really differentiated between classical and pop. As far as I was concerned, it was all just music. What kind of person was he?

He was an obsessive-compulsive type of character. On the one hand, he was incredibly driven, but on the other he was quite fragile in some respects. Lanza had a hugely addictive nature, and one of his main problems as an actor was the amount of weight he would put on very quickly. He could eat pounds of steak or heaps of chicken at one sitting – and would consequently pile on the pounds over the course of a weekend. A movie director would tell him to lose weight and he would go off to a ‘health farm’ where he would be put into a semi-coma in a bid to slim down fast. It’s also said that he had Mafia links and – conspiracy-theory time – it’s even been suggested that they may have done away with him. What made him a hero?

A little bit like me, he didn’t come into classical music via the conventional route – that is, he didn’t study at a music college before becoming a tenor. He was actually best known for making records and appearing in films, and only appeared in operas later in his career. But he had a fantastic voice, a natural-sounding voice – one of the things that made him so popular was that his voice hadn’t been over-coached.

98

What was Lanza’s finest hour?

Without doubt, The Great Caruso, in which he starred as the great Italian operatic tenor Enrico Caruso. It’s a superb movie. Lanza’s singing is amazing – if Caruso had still been alive, I think he would have loved the picture too. MGM threw the kitchen sink at the movie, and The Great Caruso was a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic, making Lanza one of Hollywood’s biggest heartthrobs. Indeed, it was the number one film at the British box office in 1951. One of the songs he sang in the film, ‘The Loveliest Night of the Year’, was a million-seller. And it’s a picture still worth watching – I’ve seen it dozens of times. Is there anything you don’t particularly admire about Lanza?

He had some unattractive character traits. It was almost as if there were two sides to the guy: the side that was loving, giving and generous – and the other side that was really quite aggressive, unpleasant and unruly. As a performer myself, I can appreciate the huge amount of pressure he was under – and sometimes a performer’s way of dealing with that pressure is to release the gas valve. But there are stories, for instance, of Lanza and his wife quarrelling and trashing the hotel suite where they were staying, causing thousands of dollars’ worth of damage. Can you see any parallels between Lanza’s life and your own?

Well, we both came from working-class backgrounds. His mother also doted on him, a bit like mine did with me. And neither of us studied at music college. But perhaps that’s where the parallels end… If you could meet Lanza, what would you ask him?

If I ever got to sit in a room with him, I’d like to ask him: out of all the people you worked with, who was your favourite? And who was the biggest a**hole?! Russell Watson was talking to York Membery Russell Watson topped the classical album chart with his debut album, The Voice, in 2001 and has since become one of Britain’s most popular classical crossover artistes. He begins a new tour, Songs from the Heart 2016, in March and is currently recording a new album. russellwatson.com

BBC History Magazine

MIRRORPIX/REX

ario Lanza was a tenor, actor and Hollywood star. Born Alfredo Arnoldo Cocozza in Philadelphia, he was introduced to classical music by his parents – Italian immigrants – while he was still a child. After singing at the Hollywood Bowl in 1947, he signed a film contract with MGM and went on to star in a number of hit films, most famously The Great Caruso (1951). The volatile, hard-living Lanza struggled with his weight throughout his life. He died at the age of 38 following a heart attack.

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