History Today 2014-10

Women Engineers in the First World War

October 2014 Vol 64 Issue 10

Rise of the Tata Empire

Republicans On the Run

The roots of India’s industrial giant

Hunting regicides in the New World

The Lost King of Scotland

James V and the Fight for Scottish Independence

Picture, postcard? Uta of Ballenstedt (c.1000-46), Naumburg Cathedral, mid-13th century.

Publisher Andy Patterson Editor Paul Lay Deputy Editor Charlotte Crow Digital Manager Dean Nicholas Picture Research Mel Haselden, Sheila Corr Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph Art Director Gary Cook Subscriptions Manager Cheryl Deflorimonte Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell Board of Directors Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Gordon Marsden MP, Martin Randall CONTACTS History Today is published monthly by History Today Ltd, 25 Bedford Avenue London WC1B 3AT. Tel: 020 3219 7810 [email protected] SUBSCRIPTIONS Tel: 020 3219 7813/4 [email protected] ADVERTISING Lisa Martin, Portman Media Tel: 020 7079 9361 [email protected] Print managed by Webmart Ltd. 01869 321321. Printed at W. Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, UK. Distributed by MarketForce 020 3148 3539 (UK & RoW) and Disticor 905 619 6565 (North America). History Today (ISSN No: 0018-2753, USPS No: 246580) is published monthly by History Today Ltd, GBR and distributed in the USA by Asendia USA, 17B S Middlesex Ave, Monroe NJ 08831. Periodicals postage paid New Brunswick, NJ and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to History Today, 701C Ashland Avenue, Folcroft PA 19032. Subscription records are maintained at History Today Ltd, 25 Bedford Avenue, London WC1B 3AT, UK.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Dr Simon Adams University of Strathclyde Dr John Adamson Peterhouse, Cambridge Professor Richard Bessel University of York Professor Jeremy Black University of Exeter Lord Briggs Formerly Chancellor of the Open University Professor Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen Professor David Ellwood University of Bologna Professor Martin Evans University of Sussex Juliet Gardiner Historian and author Gordon Marsden MP for Blackpool South Dr Roger Mettam Queen Mary, University of London Professor Geoffrey Parker Ohio State University Professor Paul Preston London School of Economics Professor M.C. Ricklefs The Australian National University Professor Nigel Saul Royal Holloway, University of London Dr David Starkey Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge Professor T.P. Wiseman University of Exeter Professor Chris Wrigley University of Nottingham All written material, unless otherwise stated, is the copyright of History Today Total Average Net Circulation 19,551 Jan-Dec 2013

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FROM THE EDITOR ON A RECENT TRIP to Germany I performed an act of which I normally disapprove. I took a photograph of a work of art on my smartphone. How to justify such an action? Well, I had waited 25 years to come face to face with the subjects of the snap, among the most alluring creations of medieval Europe, the statues of Count Ekkehard II of Meissen and his wife Uta, founders of Naumburg Cathedral. And there was no one else around when I took the photograph, this being Germany, and the eastern half at that. Naumburg’s Dom, with its opposing choirs, is the equal of any building of its time in Italy or France but, bafflingly, tourists don’t visit, not many anyway. It was the same everywhere, whether Nuremberg’s vast German National Museum, with its extraodinary Carolingian collection, its Dürers, Cranachs and Griens; or Weimar, city of Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche and the Bauhaus, as rich an assembly of culture as exists on the Continent; and Leipzig, a place of peerless musical pedigree, setting for Bach’s greatest triumphs, birthplace of Wagner, the scene of Mendelssohn’s final years and home to a brilliantly innovative museum dedicated to him. Further justification could be found in a piece published in the Financial Times by the engaging art historian Bendor Grosvenor, which welcomed the National Gallery’s recent decision to allow photography as ‘a great step forward’. Though Grosvenor claims that this will allow connoisseurs to ‘uncover even more of a painting, its composition, technique and colours’, he rather gives the game away when he says: ‘I, for one, think anything that can be done to bring more people into galleries to look at paintings and enjoy them is a good thing’, though he fails to tell us why. Forgive those of us wading through London’s overcrowded galleries, where the arts of memory and contemplation have been replaced by the ritual of the raised smartphone, for being sceptical of the National Gallery’s plan to ‘provide a warmer welcome for visitors’ (i.e. expand the cafes and gift shops – the price of ‘access’ – and play down the difficulties of engaging with the past). As the American art history student Christopher Moore (a teenager, no less) writes on his blog, Retrograde Canvas: ‘An art museum should not have to pander to people’s every wish.’ And the photograph I took? It was rubbish. I bought a postcard on the way out.

Paul Lay

HistoryMatters

Longue durée • Child of Warsaw • Banking in 1914 • Man’s Devo-Max

No one, it seems, from bureaucrats to board members, or voters and recipients of international aid, can escape the threat of short-termism

Look Beyond a Lifespan

History should be a guide to public life. But it can only be so if more academic historians embrace a long-term perspective. Jo Guldi and David Armitage A SPECTRE is haunting our time: the spectre of short-termism. We live in a moment of accelerating crisis that is characterised by a lack of long-term thinking, as rising sea levels threaten low-lying coastal regions, the world’s cities stockpile waste and human actions poison the oceans, earth and groundwater for future generations. We face rising economic inequality within nations even as inequalities between countries abate, while international hierarchies revert to conditions not seen since

Age-old crisis: a villager prays as rising sea levels submerge graves, Tenggang, Indonesia, June 2014.

the late 18th century, when China last dominated the global economy. Almost every aspect of human life is planned and judged, packaged and paid for, on timescales of a few months or years. There are few opportunities to shake loose from these short-term moorings. It can hardly seem worthwhile to raise questions of the long term at all. In the age of the permanent campaign, politicians plan only as far as their next bid for election. They invoke children and grandchildren in public speeches, but electoral cycles of two to seven years determine which issues prevail. The result is less money for crumbling infrastructure and schools and more for any initiatives that promise jobs or returns right now. The same narrow horizons govern the way most corporate boards organise their futures. Quarterly cycles mean that executives have to show profit on a regular basis. Long-term investment in human resources contributes nothing to next year’s profit and so

it is cut. International institutions, humanitarian bodies and NGOs must follow the same logic and adapt their programmes to annual, or at most triennial, constraints. No one, it seems, from bureaucrats to board members, or voters and recipients of international aid, can escape the threat of short-termism. Until very recently, any member of the wider public seeking solutions to short-termism in the history departments of most universities might have been disappointed. Historians once told arching stories of scale but, nearly 40 years ago, many stopped doing so. For two generations, between about 1975 and 2005, most historical studies focused on biological timescales of between five and 50 years, approximating the length of a mature human life. The compression of time in historical study is illustrated bluntly by the average number of years covered in doctoral dissertations conducted in the US, a country which adopted the German model of doctoral education early and then produced history doctorates on a world-beating scale. In 1900 the average number of years covered in doctoral history dissertations in the US was about 75 years; by 1975 it was nearer to 30. Command of archives, total control of a ballooning historiography and an imperative to reconstruct and analyse in ever-finer detail had all become the hallmarks of historical professionalism. Short-termism was an academic pursuit as OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 3

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well as a public problem in the last quarter of the 20th century. It was during this period that professional historians ceded the task of synthesising historical knowledge to unaccredited writers and simultaneously lost whatever influence they might once have had with colleagues in the social sciences, most spectacularly with economists, over policy. The gulf between academic and nonacademic history widened. After 2,000 years, the ancient goal for history to be the guide to public life – what Cicero had called magistra vitae – had collapsed. With the ‘telescoping of historical time … the discipline of history, in a peculiar way, ceased to be historical’ (Daniel Lord Smail). History departments found themselves increasingly exposed to unsettling new challenges: the recurrent crises of the humanities marked by waning enrolments; invasive demands from administrators and their political paymasters to demonstrate ‘impact’; and internal crises of confidence about their relevance amid adjacent disciplines with their swelling class sizes, greater visibility and more obvious influence in shaping public opinion. But there are now signs that the longer view is returning to the discipline. Professional historians are again writing monographs spanning periods of 200 to 2,000 years or more and the doctoral scope is widening. There is an expanding historical universe, from the ‘deep history’ of the human past, stretching over 40,000 years, to ‘big history’ going back to the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. In the last decade, interest in big data and themes such as long-term climate change, governance and inequality are causing a return to questions about how the past changes over centuries and millennia and what this might indicate about human survival in the future. This has brought a new sense of responsibility and urgency to historians. The discipline holds particular promise for looking both backwards and forwards in time. After all, historians are masters of change over time. During the last 500 years historians have, among other things, spoken truths to those in power. They have been reformers and leaders of the 4 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

state and they have revealed the worst abuses of corrupt institutions to public examination. ‘The longer you can look back the further you can look forward,’ said one 20th-century master of political power who was also a historian: Winston Churchill. The public future of the past remains in the hands of historians, ‘if we are willing to look out of our study windows and to think of history, not as the property of a small guild of professional colleagues, but as the rightful heritage of millions’. These words,

Historians have revealed the worst abuses of corrupt institutions to public examination of the American historian J. Franklin Jameson, were first delivered in December 1912 but they remain relevant today. To put contemporary challenges in perspective and to combat the short-termism of our time we urgently need the wide-angle, long-range views only historians can provide. Historians of the world, unite! There is a world to win – before it’s too late. Jo Guldi and David Armitage are the authors of The History Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 2014). They will launch the book with a free public lecture at the London School of Economics on October 8th, 2014 at 6.30pm. For details see www.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents. Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

Warsaw’s Child of Freedom Hanna Czarnocka, an octogenarian now living in London, recalls her part in one of the most courageous resistance actions of the Second World War. Clare Mulley ALTHOUGH the water was ice cold, when 16-year-old Hanna Czarnocka reached the River Oder en route to a POW camp in the autumn of 1944, she relished the chance to wash some of the dirt and blood from her clothes. As her plaits soaked up the water, the gravel and mortar dust caught in them turned to mush, only to harden as her hair dried. ‘It was like a piece of wood’, Hanna, now 86, remembers, recalling how her friends broke the comb they tried to drag through her hair. A few days later they arrived at the Oberlangen camp in north-west Germany. As surviving combatants from the Warsaw Uprising, they were some of the first female POWs of the war. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. On August 1st, 1944 thousands of Polish men, women and children launched a coordinated attack on the Nazi forces occupying the capital. Their aim was to assist and welcome the advancing Red Army as free citizens of Warsaw. The determination, discipline and sheer heroism of the Polish people meant that the Warsaw Uprising lasted an incredible 63 days. However it ended in capitulation, the destruction of much of the capital and the deaths of an estimated 200,000 Poles. Today Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, emphasises that the Home Army commanders were counting on the rapid advance of the Soviets into the city when they took the decision to rise against the Nazis. ‘I am convinced’, he says, ‘that if they had known what consequences their decision would bring, they would never have taken it.’ For strategic and political reasons the Russians stayed put. ‘My war started when I was 11’,

HISTORYMATTERS

Hanna explains. In 1939 the Russian authorities arrested her father and she and her mother, Halina, fled to Warsaw. There they joined the fledgling Polish resistance. ‘Warsaw is the source of all our misfortunes’, Hans Frank, the Governor General of the German-occupied Polish territories, wrote. ‘The place from which discontent is spread through the whole country.’ By early 1940 Frank was running a terror campaign aimed at subduing the population through fear of arrest, torture, transportation or execution. The resistance grew in direct response. A propaganda unit was established. Regular reports on enemy plans were smuggled out. A Polish-Jewish resistance group helped many thousands to evade Hitler’s Final Solution and munitions were organised for immediate use, as well as to arm a future uprising. Hanna received firstaid training. Her mother became secretary to Chiefof-Staff of the Home Army, General Pełczyński, until she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. By the summer of 1944 the Russians, now officially Poland’s allies, had reversed the German advance and France was fighting towards liberation. Sensing change, the Polish government-in-exile authorised the commander of the Warsaw corps, General Bor-Komorowski, to announce an uprising at his discretion. Attached to a Home Army medical team, Hanna shared the mood of optimism. She had become used to clandestine work, occasionally hiding resistance papers in her underwear as she moved around the city. When she was sent to collect white and red armbands with the Polish eagle stamped on them, to be worn openly, she knew the rising was imminent. ‘I felt like I had been sent to collect freedom that afternoon’, she remembers. The uprising forced the Wehrmacht out of large areas of the capital. Hanna was soon nursing the wounded and helping with operations, taking

Polish patriot: Hanna Czarnocka’s German-issued identity papers.

messages between units and recovering the injured, sometimes under fire. By mid-September supplies were low and she was sent to the polytechnic to retrieve some methylated spirits to serve as rough antiseptic. ‘I had a rucksack made of war materials, just strong paper really, and off I went, through cellars and climbing the ruins’, she told me. Having packed ten glass bottles of meths into her bag, as much as it could hold, she ‘was happily returning when some Stukas flew overhead, dropping their bombs’. The next planes dropped incendiaries. Flying debris smashed one of the bottles and Hanna felt the spirit soak her shirt, strangely cold as it evaporat-

‘I think the British were wrong; they didn’t want to irritate Stalin and Russia. That was the compromise’ ed in the hot air of the now burning street. Essentially she was carrying nine Molotov cocktails strapped to her back. ‘At that point I realised I was going to die’, she recalled: ‘I was a bit afraid, but not much.’ When she made it back to her unit, she was simply chastised for the broken bottle. It was clear that the Poles could not hold out for much longer. The Home Army had launched its action with around 45,000 soldiers in the Warsaw district, armed with pistols and grenades but few heavy weapons. The Germans had around half that number, but were fully equipped and

supported by artillery, panzer divisions and the Luftwaffe. Although Moscow Radio had appealed to the Poles to rise up, the Soviets remained encamped on the far side of the River Vistula, a few hundred yards from the action, waiting, in Hanna’s words, ‘for the Polish elite officers [and opponents of communism] to be finished off’. Although a few supply flights got through, Britain was unable to provide significant support without refuelling at Soviet bases, for which permission was denied. After the Tehran conference of November 1943 it did not serve Russian interests to support a strong Polish resistance. ‘I really honour Britain’, Hanna says, ‘but I think the British were wrong. They didn’t want to irritate Stalin and Russia. That was the compromise.’ On the evening of October 2nd she was struck by the ‘sudden silence after so much noise’. The capitulation had been signed that afternoon. Under the terms of the ceasefire the Home Army were obliged to deliver Poles to be sent to POW camps. Hanna was among them. To her joy she was liberated on May 12th, 1945 by soldiers wearing Polish insignia. A few weeks later she was reunited with her mother, whom she did not at first recognise: ‘She was so wasted.’ Halina Czarnocka had been transferred to Bergen-Belsen and liberated a week before her daughter. I asked Hanna whether, looking back, the decision to take up arms had been the right one. ‘You can’t give up when there is no good alternative ...’, she told me. ‘I was present when somebody asked Bor-Komorowski when he had taken the decision to fight. He stood, said nothing for a moment and then answered: “In September 1939. We decided to fight. We had to fight”.’ As Radosław Sikorski makes clear, the Polish Home Army commanders took their decision in full expectation of support from their Allies, but for Hanna, as for so many Poles, when it came down to it, ‘We just simply had to fight’.

Clare Mulley is the author of The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville, Britain’s First Female Special Agent of WWII (Macmillan, 2012). OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 5

HISTORYMATTERS

Banks to the Rescue

financial markets. There were two different dangers as the declaration of war approached: first, the threat that a run on any of the joint-stock banks would become contagious and, second, a far greater risk caused by the over-exposure of the respected but highly geared London merchant banks. Of the £350 million (£15.07 billion in today’s money) of outstanding acceptances, between £60 million and £70 million was with German and Austrian clients, together with a further £50 to £60 million with Russians. Like Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia had cut normal commercial communications, which meant that around £120 million (£5.17 billion today) of debt was reduced to what would now be called ‘junk’ status. Against this huge sum, the

The opening battle of the First World War was won by the Bank of England before the British had so much as fired a shot. David Hearn

DESPITE a minor crisis in 1907, Britain’s banks were riding high in summer 1914. The market was buoyant and interest was flowing into London from loans granted in almost every country of the world. The financial services sector was booming, interest rates stood at three per cent and, as in 2008, nobody foresaw the disastrous collapse that lay just around the corner. The assassination of FranzFerdinand in Sarajevo on June 28th had caused scarcely a ripple in the financial markets anywhere in Europe, let alone London. However, Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia on July 23rd changed everything. European stock markets experienced a flood of selling, with investors, as always in uncertain times, seeking refuge in gold. By July 27th the panic had gripped London and the Bank of England was besieged by people seeking to change their paper money for gold. The discount market and the foreign exchange market collapsed on the same day. The unthinkable, a total collapse of the British financial system, was happening as the bankers looked on powerlessly. On July 30th the Bank of England reacted with the only weapon in its armoury: it raised the bank rate from three to four per cent and from four to eight per cent the following day. On July 31st the London Stock Exchange closed for the first time in its 113-year history and on August 1st the Bank again raised the bank rate to a record high of 10 per cent. There had been no planning for such a scenario and neither the Treasury nor the Bank of England had any other contingency plans. Further rate rises were now considered unfeasible. On Monday, August 3rd the government announced an unprecedented four-day bank holiday to give the Treasury and the Bank time to put a raft of measures into place to save the 6 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

Money order: a queue at the Bank of England to change bank notes into gold, July 31st, 1914; and a ten shilling ‘Bradbury’.

combined assets of the merchant houses was only £20 million. The joint-stock banks understood the situation only too well and started to call in their loans to the merchant banks, as well as refusing further lending. The problem before the bankers, economists and industrialists who met at the Treasury was how to stabilise both the joint-stock banks and the merchant banks without restricting them so much that they could no longer trade. The agreed package of measures was released to the press in time for first

editions to carry the details when the banks re-opened on Friday August 7th. The measures were both broad and radical: a ‘General Moratorium’ was proposed on contracted payments, so that banks did not have to pay out on deposits. All other financial contracts would fall due one year after the end of the war, if either of the parties requested the moratorium. The Treasury, instead of the Bank of England, would issue small denomination £1 and ten shilling notes, up to 20 per cent of the total value of bank deposits; these became known as ‘Bradburys’, because they were signed by Sir John Bradbury, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury. The banks agreed to pay out wages on August 7th in gold instead of paper money, if requested. The Bank of England agreed to buy all financial assets in risk of default that were held by the merchant banks. The Government provided guarantees to the Bank of England against any losses incurred in buying doubtful financial assets. On August 7th no bank experienced a run and, from a potential ceiling of £225 million, the Treasury only issued £13m in ‘Bradburys’. The merchant banks were quick to take up the offer to sell their doubtful debts and, overall, the package proved sufficient to stabilise the market. Although the Stock Exchange would not re-open until January 1915, London remained, for the time being at least, the world’s banking and financial centre. The 1914 financial crisis affected almost the whole world, with all but the Japanese and New Zealand stock exchanges closing and runs on numerous banks resulting in closures. Both the causes of, and the solutions to, the 1914 crisis bear similarities to the crisis of 2008, with a long period of prosperity coming to an apparently unforseen end. The response in both cases saw the Bank of England buying massive amounts of doubtful debt and the government authorising the printing of large sums of money. Yet though the crisis of 2008 was serious, the events of 1914 were potentially disastrous, coming on the eve of the First World War.

David Hearn is studying history at Liverpool University. He was a banker for 30 years.

HISTORYMATTERS

Man’s Path to Autonomy Scots need not look far to find a successful example of ‘devo-max’. Peter Edge NEXT SUMMER sees the 250th anniversary of the purchase by the British Crown of the royalties held by the Lord of Man. This ‘Revestment’ could have spelt the end of the ancient kingdom of Man. As British soldiers raised their flag over Douglas in July 1765, the prospects for the survival of the Isle of Man as a separate territory looked bleak. In fact, Revestment paved the way for increasing autonomy throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The Isle of Man is equidistant between England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Following a turbulent period, switching from the Scots to the English and back again as a spoil of war, the Isle of Man passed into the dominions of the English Crown at the end of the 14th century. It did not thereby become part of England. Instead it was a feudatory kingdom, where a powerful English noble held it, initially as ‘King’, but from 1504 as the more politic ‘Lord’. The Lords of Man were the monarchs of the island, with obligations to their feudal overlord, the English, later British, Crown. These obligations gave the overlord authority to legislate on matters of defence. The internal affairs of the island were, however, principally the business of the Lord of Man. For much of its history the Isle of Man was an impoverished rural community. In the 18th century, however, it enjoyed an economic boom, exemplified by Manx figures such as George Moore. Some, such as the customs officers of Dublin, categorised much of this business as ‘the contraband trade’. Goods were being landed on British shores without payment of British taxes. In order to suppress the trade, the British began to negotiate with the Lord of Man for the purchase of his ‘royalties’ by the Crown. The Isle of Man had seen a change

Stable entity: The Isle of Man’s coat-of-arms, adopted in the 13th century, with the motto: ‘Whichever way you throw me, I will stand.’

in rulers before, but this was recognised as more significant. A contemporary poem feared that the Manx would be loaded ‘with English taxes … Yet they pretend to make us their fast allies by joining the Isle of Man to Cumberland’s black coast’. Following the passage of an Act of Parliament to purchase the royalties from the Lord of Man, on July 11th, 1765 the Manx flag was lowered and a British one raised in its place. There was suppression of the trade and the constitutional distinctiveness of the island was by no means assured. There was – and is – a constitutional argument that a feudal monarchy cannot be held by the overlord, so that the consequence of Revestment was the extinction of the Lordship of Man. The British, however, had purchased the royalties for a specific purpose: the suppression of the trade that damaged Crown revenues. The removal of a noble Lord of Man made exercise of the powers of the overlord less sensitive. But routine governance of the territory could be achieved quickly, and easily, using Manx laws, offices and structures, albeit with a significant change in the personnel. Thus, the Crown had the powers of an overlord, but in practice exercised much of the legislative, executive and judicial authority over the island through the powers of the Lord of Man. The century after Revestment is not characterised by Manx autonomy, but the government

from London was largely carried out through Manx mechanisms. There was always the potential for these mechanisms to pass into Manx hands. This process began in the mid-19th century. A key moment was the reform in 1866 of the House of Keys, one of two chambers in the Manx Tynwald, roughly analogous to the House of Commons. It had become a selfperpetuating oligarchy, where vacancies were filled by the decision of the members rather than an electorate. London agreed to pass tax-raising and spending powers to Manx institutions, subject to a payment to the UK for defence and external affairs, on condition that the Keys reformed to become an elected chamber. Over the next 150 years power was transferred from offices controlled by London to ones responsible to the House of Keys. Today legislative, executive and judicial authority in the Isle of Man is almost entirely in the hands of the Manx. Although devolution is not a common way of expressing the relationship with Britain, the Manx have for some time enjoyed the practical benefits of a Scots-style ‘devo-max’ settlement. Manx autonomy under a separate feudatory monarch did not survive the imperial turmoil of the 18th century. Unlike the American colonists, the Manx were in no position to resist the exercise of authority from London. But the centuries of governance under an English noble, who regarded the Isle of Man as a family property, had created laws, mechanisms and offices suited to the exercise of governmental power over the island. For a British government whose interest in the island was primarily negative, the appeal of stepping into the place of the Lord of Man, rather than simply abolishing the island’s distinctiveness, is clear. Although in the short-term the practical differences between this and union with ‘Cumberland’s black coast’ may have been comparatively minor, in the longer term the British decision to adopt Manx governance preserved the island’s autonomy.

Peter Edge is Professor of Law at Oxford Brookes University. OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 7

MonthsPast

OCTOBER

By Richard Cavendish

OCTOBER 26th 1764

William Hogarth dies in London A Londoner to his fingertips, Hogarth was born in Bartholomew Close near Smithfield Market in 1697. His father, Richard Hogarth, was a schoolmaster who taught classics and wrote textbooks that failed to attract attention and then opened a coffee house, which collapsed and left him sentenced to the Fleet Prison for debt. The humiliation of it all seems to have helped to make young William exceptionally self-reliant. When he was about 15 he was apprenticed to a silversmith, who taught him to engrave heraldic designs on gold and silver articles. He did not consider it a worthwhile occupation and in his early 20s he took drawing lessons and earned a living as an engraver producing trade cards, tickets and book illustrations. A key moment came in 1724 when he attended a drawing school run by Sir James Thornhill, an eminent history painter whose works included the paintings on the inside of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Hogarth greatly admired Thornhill. He admired Thornhill’s daughter Jane as well and in 1729 the two of them eloped together and got married. In the 1730s, while scratching a living painting portraits, Hogarth began to create narrative scenes from everyday life. It was these that led him to his greatest achievements, artworks that were brilliantly vivid stories about the real lives of Londoners. With humour allied to a strong moral attitude, they were a tremendous success and made him plenty of money, though the English art world tended to look down on them. Years later he wrote that his pictures taught lessons that could not be ‘conveyed to the mind with such precision 8 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

and truth by any words whatsoever’. His first big hit was A Harlot’s Progress in 1731, which in six scenes told the story of a country girl who arrives in London, is snapped up by a procuress, becomes a prostitute and dies of venereal disease aged 23. In 1735 came A Rake’s Progress, its eight scenes telling the tale of Tom Rakewell, who inherits his wealthy merchant father’s fortune. He hurls the money away on luxurious living, paid-for sex and gambling. Some of the people who separate Tom from his money were real, well-known figures of the time and the episodes include a drunken scene at

the notorious Rose Tavern in Drury Lane, known for its enticing ‘painted beauties’. In the end, when Tom has thrown all his money away, he is confined in the Bethlem Royal Hospital for the Insane, known as Bedlam, where he dies. One of Hogath’s most admired creations is Marriage à la Mode, a series of scenes completed in 1745 and a scathing attack on aspects of contemporary society. It is the story of the young son of a bankrupt nobleman, who arranges a marriage of convenience for him to the daughter of a rich City merchant. The son and his wife, joined without the

Pop art: Tom Rakewell escapes arrest for debt on his way to a party at St James’s Palace, A Rake’s Progress, 1733.

slightest affection between them, quickly become utterly bored with each other and in the end the son is murdered by his wife’s lover and the wife kills herself after her lover is hanged at Tyburn. The celebrated Gin Lane of 1751 was a ferocious assault on what Hogarth called ‘the dreadful consequences of gin-drinking’ that had become a raging epidemic among Londoners of the lower orders. Hogarth produced plenty of other work, including portraits and history paintings, but it is his narrative art for which he has always been specially famous. From 1736 he and Jane had a house in Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square). In 1749 they bought a modest country retreat outside London near the parish church in Chiswick. It is now Hogarth House in Hogarth Lane near the Hogarth Roundabout. His health grew worse in his later years and he had a stroke in 1763. He and Jane were at the Chiswick house one day in October 1764 when Hogarth needed to go back briefly to the Leicester Fields house in London, while Jane stayed in Chiswick. He was in a cheerful mood, but in the night he woke in agony with pains in his chest and died a few hours later of what the doctors diagnosed as a ruptured artery. He was two weeks short of his 67th birthday. His body was taken to Chiswick and he was buried on November 2nd in the nearby church of St Nicholas, where his tomb, surmounted by a graceful urn atop a pedestal, is still to be seen in the churchyard. The poetic inscription by his friend David Garrick, the actor, begins: ‘Farewell, great Painter of Mankind who reached the noblest point of Art …’ Jane lived on at Hogarth House until her own death in 1789, when she was buried with her husband. The house has been preserved as a museum and is open to the public.

OCTOBER 9th 1514

Princess Mary Tudor marries Louis XII of France The princess was the youngest surviving child of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Born in 1496, she was seven when her mother died. She turned to her older brother Henry and a lasting affection grew up between them. She was 13 when their father died in 1509 and Henry succeeded him as Henry VIII. Mary was highly attractive and at this point she was intended to marry

Old and young: Contemporary Flemish tapestry of the marriage of Louis XII to Mary Tudor.

OCTOBER 27th 1939

Nylon stockings take their bow Nylon was invented in the United States in the 1930s by scientists at the DuPont company’s experimental laboratory near Wilmington, Delaware. They were led by Wallace Carothers, a chemist who suffered so severely from depression that he killed himself in his early forties in 1937. Work continued at the laboratory and the first product was a toothbrush with nylon bristles, marketed as Dr West’s Miracle Tuft Toothbrush in 1938. Stockings made of nylon were produced from 1939 and the first women to try them were DuPont employees. To test the market, samples were put on offer locally. The first major sales test was at a Wilmington department store in October. It went extremely well, the company opened a specialist stockings factory and soon women all over America were demanding the glamorous new products as replacements for

Calf love: a woman puts on nylon stockings, US, 1940.

Charles of Castile (the future Emperor Charles V), grandson of the Emperor Maximilian I, but for complicated political reasons Maximilian withdrew from the arrangement. Henry and his adviser Thomas Wolsey now decided that England’s interests would best be served by a close alliance with France and, as part of the deal, Mary was bestowed on the king of France, Louis XII. She was 18 and he was 52. He had been married twice before and was now in poor health. Mary arrived in Boulogne, seasick after crossing from Dover early in October, and joined Louis at Abbeville, where the splendid wedding was held, conducted by the Cardinal Archbishop of Bayeux. A French observer called Mary one of the world’s most beautiful young women and her long reddish-gold hair was greatly admired. She duly joined her husband in the marriage bed and next morning the word was that he had ‘crossed the river’ three times that night. Most of Mary’s English retinue was sent home, but one who stayed

was a young girl called Anne Boleyn. Another was Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, a close friend of Henry VIII with secret orders to guard Mary if the French king’s health should fail him. The union lasted less than three months before Louis died in January. He had no sons left alive and needed an heir and gossip had it that his death was brought on either by his vigorous exertions in bed with his bride or that in her delight in dancing she had literally danced him to death. Charles Brandon was ordered to bring Mary back to England, but she had fallen in love with him and she insisted that they were secretly married in Paris. There was uproar in England and Henry was furious, but the pair returned home in April and Henry relented and attended their official marriage at Greenwich Palace in May 1515. They named their eldest child after him. Mary led a mainly quiet life until her death at 37 in 1533. When her tomb in St Mary’s, Bury St Edmunds was opened in 1781 her embalmed body was found perfectly preserved and onlookers cut off locks of her beautiful hair as souvenirs.

the stockings, mostly made of wool or cotton, that many of them had been wearing. When nylon stockings first went on sale in New York City, around 800,000 pairs were sold on the first day and by 1941 sales numbered 64 million pairs. DuPont had not registered the name nylon as a trademark as it hoped that ‘nylons’ would become a synonym for ‘stockings’, which to an extent it did. During the war nylon was needed to make parachutes, flak vests and other equipment and nylon stockings were in short supply. Some women painted their legs to look like nylons and used black eye-liner to draw a seam up the back. US soldiers stationed in England encountered women who found nylon stockings a turn-on and there has been speculation about how many wartime babies could trace their existence back to a gift of nylons. Since then nylon has been used to make musical instrument strings, carpets, packaging paper and many other things. It was one of the great inventions of the 20th century. OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 9

JAMES V James V of Scotland c.1536-37 by Corneille de Lyon.

During his brief lifetime, James V was a popular ruler who aimed to maintain Scotland’s independence and safeguard its place on the European stage. Linda Porter describes his reign and the fraught relationship between the young king and his English uncle, Henry VIII.

I

The Lost King of Scotland

N NOVEMBER 1531 Henry VIII issued a herald, Thomas Hawley, with the following instruction prior to a meeting with his elder sister, Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots: ‘You are to remind her of her son’s possibility of succession of the Crown of England.’ As Henry was still in the throes of trying to obtain a divorce from Katherine of Aragon, this acknowledgement that he had a nephew who could succeed him is revealing of his frame of mind at the time. It also opens a window on a little-known aspect of Henry’s personality and his largely ineffective policy towards Scotland.

Enmeshed in this was a prolonged rivalry with Margaret, whose struggles to retain power in Scotland throughout her son’s troubled minority Henry had not only failed to support, but actively undermined. It must have cost him something even to admit that James V (r. 1513-42) had the best claim of any male relative to the English throne. This was not the solution to the dynastic crisis that he sought, yet it could not be entirely ignored. Though Margaret welcomed this recognition of her son’s wider prospects, she knew that it might amount to nothing. It did, though a OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 11

JAMES V

Margaret Tudor with the Duke of Albany, probably painted in 1522 at the time of the English herald Thomas Benolt’s visit to Scotland (the figure pointing may represent him).

considerable rivalry between uncle and nephew developed later in the 1530s.

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AMES V WAS A HANDSOME MAN who strongly resembled the youthful Henry VIII. He was half a Tudor, though this was not a part of his heritage that he sought to exploit. Throughout his adult life James was keen to emphasise and advance his Stewart lineage and to continue the attempts of his father, James IV, to enhance Scotland’s prestige in Europe. Unlike his daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, James V kept his own counsel when it came to his proximity to the throne of England. Any ambivalence he may have felt is unsurprising. The relationship with his uncle was never going to be easy and, as the years passed, James’ misgivings and Henry’s suspicions grew. James endured the most difficult of childhoods and for much of the disruption of this formative period he could blame his uncle. It was an English army that outmanoeuvred and cut down his father’s larger but less flexible force at the Battle of Flodden in September 1513. Fighting to the last, James IV died alongside the flower of the Scottish nobility. The little boy he left behind became King of Scots at the age of 17 months. James V was crowned at Stirling within two weeks of his father’s death. The ceremony at Stirling Castle was known as the Mourning Coronation. But this was just a taste of the sadness to come. Henry VIII had not been present at Flodden. He was in France fighting a vainglorious little war, the cause, in fact, of the Scottish invasion of England. Louis XII of France had called upon his Scottish allies to support him by using diversionary tactics in England. The English victory in Northumberland really belonged to the Earl of Surrey and 12 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

to Katherine of Aragon, regent for her husband at the time. Having played no part, Henry was not inclined to hail it as a great triumph. Furthermore, and this would be key to Henry’s prolonged difficulties with Scotland, he did not have the manpower to occupy his northern neighbour. So the Scots were left to set up a government to guide James V through a long minority. When disagreements over who should actually exercise power arose, Henry was eager to take advantage. His interference caused his sister and nephew great pain. Small wonder, then, that James V did not view Henry VIII as his saviour. INITIALLY, QUEEN MARGARET acted with decision and firmness. She had, for ten years, been the consort of one of Britain’s most charismatic Renaissance kings and she was hardly an ingénue on the Scottish political scene. But she was hampered by pregnancy (in April 1514 she gave birth to another son, Alexander, Duke of Ross, her last child with James IV) and she was English and the sister of Henry VIII. Her late husband had named her as regent in his will, on condition that she did not remarry. He was well aware of the divisions that would occur among the Scottish nobility, if his widow chose one family over the rest. Margaret’s prime concerns were to uphold the interests of James V and to keep her sons with her. Being a Tudor, she was also keen to exercise power herself, albeit in her son’s name. That she failed on both these counts was partly the result of her own misjudgement, but Henry VIII made matters worse by his unwillingness to support her and his crass attempts to gain control of James V himself. In the summer of 1514 Margaret made the greatest mistake of her life when she secretly married Archibald

Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, the head of one of Scotland’s most powerful and divisive families. Her son would come to detest its members with a loathing that far surpassed his reservations about his uncle. The reasons for Margaret’s decision are unclear. She evidently felt that she needed support and her choices were limited. The response in Scotland was immediate. Margaret lost the regency and soon appealed to her brother for help. She awaited with apprehension the arrival of a new regent, the French-born John Stewart, Duke of Albany, next in line to the throne. Henry was equally alarmed and instructed Lord Dacre, one of his leading northern nobles, to ‘foment quarrels between Albany and Angus and between Albany and the Chancellor [James Beaton] so as to drive the duke out of Scotland’. All he succeeded in doing, however, was to harden the resolve of Albany, a responsible and just man who strove valiantly to govern Scotland in the most difficult of circumstances. The duke, who arrived at Dumbarton in May 1515, may have known little about the country, but one thing was clear to him from the outset: he must gain control of James V and his brother. Meanwhile, at the English court, mischievous rumours

Henry VIII’s letter to James V of December 1536 congratulating his nephew on his proposed marriage to Madeleine of France (bottom right, by Corneille de Lyon) and urging him to restore to favour the Earl of Angus (bottom left).

were beginning to circulate about Albany’s true intentions towards the Scottish royal children. The disappearance of the Princes in the Tower was invoked: perhaps this Frenchified Scot might be another Richard III? By the summer there was a standoff between Margaret and the Scottish parliament about the guardianship of her sons. Undaunted, Margaret retreated to her almost impregnable castle at Stirling, where she soon found herself under siege. The final straw for Albany came after an attempt to kidnap James and Alexander and remove them to England. This clumsy scheme must have had at least the tacit approval of Henry VIII. When the exasperated duke arrived outside Stirling with an artillery train and the great cannon, Mons Meg, Margaret knew that the game was up. Her husband, in an early indication of the difficulties that would soon beset their marriage, had already slipped out of the castle, leaving her to face Albany alone. Angus was all for handing over his stepsons. James V may not have understood the full implications but the underlying concern that his uncle might kidnap him was to play a significant role later in his life. ‘Left desolate’ (in her own words), Margaret surrendered Stirling with all the Tudor flair for the grand occasion. Holding the three-year-old James by the hand, she gave him the castle’s keys and told him to pass them to Albany. She intended to make clear that the child was king and that only he had the authority to dispose of the castle. The queen was heartbroken at parting from her children and begged Albany to treat them well. Her fears were unjustified. Albany always behaved with respect and kindness to James and he tried to ensure that the king was given a suitable education. But James had lost his mother, to whom he had been close, and this absence would become all the greater when a heavily pregnant Margaret fled with Angus to England in the autumn of 1515. A daughter was born soon after. The king never really knew his half-sister, Lady Margaret Douglas, who was brought up at the English court, and his younger brother died at the end of 1515.

M

ARGARET RETURNED to Scotland in 1517, though she seldom saw her son. Soon James would be drawn into another, more personal conflict that had grave repercussions for his own situation. The queen’s second marriage was a disaster and Henry VIII did nothing to help, preferring to support Angus when it came to Scottish politics. But though Angus was a powerful magnate he was unpopular and Henry consistently over-estimated his influence. James V’s relationship with Henry VIII during his boyhood had its better moments. He was delighted when his uncle sent him a jewelled sword and hunting equipment. Henry certainly gauged his nephew’s interests correctly. James did not like academic study but he was affable, keen on physical sports, a good horseman and a fine musician. The chivalric aspects of kingship appealed to his nature as they did to Henry. He also had the Stewart flair for connecting with his people. Henry was a distant figure, cordial at times and sinister at others. James’ childhood came to an abrupt end in 1524. When Albany returned to France that year, Margaret persuaded the Scottish council that the 12-year-old James was of age to rule. Two men were determined to oppose her. One was Angus and the other was his backer, Henry VIII. Following a standoff in which Margaret trained the guns of EdinOCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 13

JAMES V burgh Castle on her husband, Henry began to have second thoughts and his chief minister, Wolsey, reported that ‘no evidence has appeared since he [Angus] came to Scotland that he is so well loved there as was reported’. Indeed, he was not, but Angus knew that, if he could secure ‘the person of the king’, power would be his. Nominated as the first of four guardians it was planned should guide James on a rotating basis, he simply held on to him. For four desperate years the teenage monarch was basically a prisoner of the Douglas family. When opposition arose, they took him into battle with them, chillingly informing James: ‘Before the enemy shall take thee from us, if thy body should be torn to pieces, we shall have a part.’

T James V and Mary of Guise around the time of their marriage.

HE KING GAINED his freedom in April, 1528, in a daring escape from Falkland Castle in Fife. Safely ensconced back in Stirling, he was, at last, at the age of 16, his own man. His mother’s divorce from Angus had been given papal approval the previous year and she had fallen in love with a member of her household, Harry Stewart. James permitted their marriage but his price was to gain Stirling for himself and to insist that his mother keep out of politics. Angus fled back to England. Henceforth, Henry VIII would have to deal directly with an ambitious, competent and hardened young rival, determined to

rule and to emulate his father’s European ambitions. North of the border, Henry had met his match. The ‘Red Fox’, as his subjects called James V, was to prove a wily adversary for the next 14 years. The troubled region of the Borders remained a source of conflict between England and Scotland, despite James’ success in improving law and order there. The main areas of contention between uncle and nephew in the 1530s, however, were foreign relations and religious dissent. Henry VIII’s break with Rome did not meet with approval 14 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

at the court in Edinburgh. Henry and Thomas Cromwell tried to encourage James to follow their example and Cromwell devoted more effort to encouraging the Reformation to gain hold in Scotland than is generally realised, but James saw no advantage in breaking with the papacy. Thus a ‘confessional border’ grew between the two countries, with many English Catholics fleeing to Scotland and the small but vocal number of Scottish reformers moving south, where Henry was only too happy to give them shelter. James did not by any means think the Scottish church was perfect but he was not about to be told what to do in reforming it by a heretic uncle. If Henry was displeased with James’ resistance to his advice on religious matters, he was even more aggravated by his marriage plans. The one constant in all Henry’s dealings with Scotland was to negate French influence there. But James was determined to find a French bride and he had set his sights high. The woman he wanted as his queen was Madeleine, daughter of Henry’s long-time rival, Francis I of France. By 1536, when he was 24, James had been forced to abandon the idea of marrying his favourite mistress, Margaret Erskine, as the pope refused to grant her a divorce. This lady was only one of many. Angus had sought to distract the young king with women and had certainly succeeded. James had at least nine illegitimate children, all by different mothers, an achievement his uncle certainly could not match. When James set sail for France, he kept his departure as quiet as possible, fearing interception by English vessels during the voyage. His time there widened his view of what he and his country could achieve. Finally, Francis agreed to the marriage between James and Madeleine. It was celebrated with considerable pomp at Nôtre Dame on New Year’s Day, 1537. Henry sent a formal letter of congratulation, inspired by ‘our office, our proximity of blood and our friendship towards you’, but his chagrin was evident. Alas, the new Queen of Scots was already in the terminal stages of tuberculosis and survived for only seven weeks after she arrived in Scotland. Undeterred, James quickly sought a replacement. His second wife, an altogether healthier prospect, was Mary of Guise, the daughter of a prominent family from north-eastern France. Already widowed and the mother of two young sons, Mary was reluctant to leave them but had to obey the commands of Francis I. She was, however, good-looking, gracious and clever. She and James made an attractive couple but there was little warmth in their relationship and he continued his amours. In 1540, the high point of James’ reign, Mary bore him a son and heir, who was soon followed by a brother. The queen also had an ally in her mother-inlaw. Margaret, betrayed by her third husband as she had been by Angus, was delighted by Mary’s attention. In the same year that Henry VIII divorced Anne of Cleves and turned against Thomas Cromwell all seemed set fair in

‘By my troth, I would be glad to see the king mine uncle, but I would wish that the French king might be at it’ (James V on the prospect of meeting with Henry VIII) Scotland. Henry was to find – all too briefly – personal happiness with his fifth queen, Katherine Howard. It seemed like a good time for the two monarchs to come face to face at last.

T

HROUGHOUT THE 1530s there had been talk of a meeting but neither a date nor a place had been set. James made all the right noises to visiting English diplomats, but there was a sting in the tail: ‘By my troth, I would be glad to see the king mine uncle, but I would wish that the French king might be at it [the meeting].’ Henry had no such desire, yet he pressed ahead and in the autumn of 1541, taking Katherine Howard with him, he journeyed up to York. Certainly he expected to meet James V, though he also wished to assert his authority in the north of England. In this secondary aim he appears to have succeeded, but he waited in vain for James. Several factors affected the Scottish king’s failure to turn up. There was division in his council about the benefits of such a meeting and in April 1541 James and his wife had suffered a double blow, when both their sons died within days of each other. Margaret, who died later that year, expended a great deal of emotional effort in supporting the grief-stricken parents, but though she had always longed for a meeting between her son and her brother she does not seem to have pushed James towards it this time. And at the core of James’ reluctance was the fear inculcated in him since childhood, that his uncle might kidnap him and keep him in England. Henry VIII was not the man to forget such a snub. As relations between England and Scotland steadily worsened during 1542, Henry again proclaimed that he ‘had just claim to Scotland’, as he had in 1513. James decided to prepare for war. He summoned the Scottish host in October and in November his forces crossed into north-west England. The boggy terrain around the River Esk was, however, more familiar to the smaller English force hastily sent from Carlisle to oppose him. On November 24th, at Solway Moss, the Scots suffered another wretched defeat, providing an unexpected hostage bonanza for Henry VIII. James V himself did not take part in the fighting and

A recreation of the royal heads on the ceiling of the King’s Inner Hall at Stirling Castle, with James in the centre.

what happened to him afterwards has often been misunderstood. The defeat was sobering but not necessarily insurmountable and he returned to Edinburgh to consider his options. He did not suffer an emotional breakdown, as has been suggested, but, though he did not yet realise it, he was dying. He had picked up a lethal infection, either cholera or dysentery, while on campaign. He saw his wife, who was in the latter stages of another pregnancy, at Linlithgow, and was fortunate not to infect her. Their only surviving child, Mary Queen of Scots, was born on December 8th. Six days later James was dead. The legend that his last words were a romantic prophecy on the fate of the Stewart dynasty, ‘it cam wi’ a lass and it’ll gang wi’ a lass’, is unlikely to be accurate. Yet the loss of James V was as much a tragedy for Scotland as that of his father had been. He was only 30 but had proved himself an able ruler. His court was cultured and opulent (anyone wishing to gain a feel for it should visit the wonderful restoration at Stirling Castle). James had maintained his country’s place in Europe. His goal seems to have been a vibrant, independent Scotland and he had never bent to the will of his more powerful uncle, the king of England. James’ death provided a great opportunity for Henry VIII, as he envisaged uniting England and Scotland through the marriage of his son, Edward, to the infant Mary. But in this, as in so many other aspects of his stuttering Scottish policy, the old king would be unsuccessful. Linda Porter’s Crown of Thistles: the Fatal Inheritance of Mary Queen of Scots is newly published in paperback by Pan.

FURTHER READING Jamie Cameron, James V: the Personal Rule, 1528-1542 (Tuckwell Press, 1998).

From the Archive

Andrea Thomas, Princelie Majestie: the Court of James V of Scotland, 1528-1542 (John Donald, 2005).

www.historytoday. com/tudors

C. Patrick Hotle, Thorns and Thistles: Diplomacy Between Henry VIII and James V, 1528-1542 (University Press of America 1996).

More on the Tudors

OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 15

| CYPRUS

A British Genocide in Tasmania

British Law and Order in Cyprus Alexios Alecou explains how Britain sought to police the strategically important island in the eastern Mediterranean. BY THE 1870s Turkey was on the verge of bankruptcy, the result of seemingly unending wars, especially with Russia, in a vain attempt to hold together the Ottoman Empire. Fearing Russian expansion into Asia Minor following Turkey’s defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, on June 4th, 1878 Prime Minister Disraeli signed a defence pact with Turkey, which assigned Cyprus to Britain. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had returned Cyprus to its ancient pride of place and possession of the island, described by Disraeli as the ‘jewel 16 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

Andrew Wright, Governor of Cyprus, inspects a police unit in Nicosia, Coronation Day, 1953.

of the Mediterranean’, was of vital military and economic importance to Britain, since it guaranteed a presence in the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. The Treaty of Berlin (signed by Britain, Austria, Germany, Russia and Turkey on July 13th, 1878) cemented Britain’s possession of the island. The day before the signing, the Turkish flag was lowered at Nicosia, its capital, and the Union Jack was hoisted in its place, ending 307 years of Ottoman occupation. The years of Turkish rule were critical in moulding the economic and social character of the island as it moved slowly towards the modern era. The British took over its administration on the pretext of a need to guarantee the sultan’s possessions. The truth is Britain stayed on as the last colonial master of Cyprus in order to secure its own sea routes east of Suez and, later on, its interests of the oil-fields in the Middle East.

The British occupation was effected without any serious incident. The local population was largely satisfied with the change. In the process, of course, Turkish-Cypriots lost their special status and became, together with the island’s majority, mere colonial subjects. Their defensiveness against the more populous Greek-Cypriots, when it was not outright resentment, stems from that moment. For their part, the Greek-Cypriots welcomed British rule, seeing it as a release from Turkish domination, though not just that. In addition to voicing their wish to see Cyprus unite with Greece, as the Ionian Islands had done in 1864, the Greek-Cypriots were also hoping that the British administration would soon abolish all taxes and ensure equal rights and duties before the law. Sir Garnet Wolseley landed at Larnaca on July 22nd, 1878. He was proclaimed high commissioner of the island on the same day, the start of 81 years of British rule, which marked a cultural renaissance but was to end in violence before independence was declared in 1960. Furthermore, as soon as the British had arrived, printing presses were set up, the first newspapers started to circulate and the first books were printed. Communication with Europe became easier and new ideas started to filter through to Cyprus, mainly from Athens. Eventually, in 1914, Britain annexed Cyprus and in 1925 it was declared a British colony. Enforcing the law In his capacity as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Winston Churchill visited Cyprus in 1907 and emphasised that the island had come under British rule in 1878 ‘ruined and prostrate from centuries of horrible ill-usage’. During the last years of Ottoman rule and during the first two decades of British rule crime was rampant on the island. In order to deal seriously with law and order, a country needs an effective and efficient police force, one that is free from corruption. A police force, of course, does not exist in a vacuum but reflects both the community from which its members are drawn as well as the calibre of the rest of the government apparatus. An outstanding success of the British occupation was the elimination of corruption from the island’s government. This was achieved by the expulsion from Cyprus of the small number of senior representatives of the Ottoman state and by the appointment of British officials to the leading administrative, financial and judicial posts. Over a relatively brief period of time they imparted honesty, order and efficiency to the conduct of public business. Of the administrative departments established by the British, the central one, which oversaw and coordinated the whole work of the government, was the secretariat. Set up beneath it was the position of receiver-general, as well as departments of customs and excise, audit, public works, survey and land registration, forests, police and prisons, the post and health care and the office of the king’s advocate, the government’s legal adviser. By the 19th century the term ‘police’ had come to be used to refer to a civil force to which the state entrusted the maintenance of public order, law enforcement, prevention and punishment and, finally, the detection of crime. The English police system was originally based on the

ancient office of constable (the comes stabuli of Roman origins). Generally speaking, police systems in England and Wales prior to the 19th century can be defined as largely private, non-professional and unspecialised. The Metropolitan (London) Police Act of 1829, introduced by Robert Peel, established the modern form of professional police. The London Metropolitan Police Force was established in the same year. Regarding the style of policing to be found in England in the last quarter of the 19th century, it can be characterised as both ‘punitive’ and ‘preventative’. Punitive policing has been described as ‘policing by suspended terror’ and embodies two principles of deterrence, namely harsh penalties for those convicted of crimes and a high probability that offenders will be apprehended by the police. In this way, the state hopes to discourage both actual and potential offenders through fear of consequences. Under the preventative policing model, unarmed foot patrols (‘the bobby on the beat’) came to be a distinctive feature of British police forces, still, to some extent, evident today, as did a strengthened criminal investigation department supported by specialists in forensic science. The importance attached by the British to foot patrols can be seen in the establishment of field watchmen to curb property crime in country areas by increasing surveillance and offence reporting; it can also be seen in the fact that foot constables, rather than mounted ones, made up 64 per cent of the Cyprus Police. By the 1930s, however, Cypriots were to experience another more sinister style of British policing, which was by then familiar to workers who went on strike in England and Wales: repressive policing. From the outset of British rule the island’s police force was a military one, commanded by ex-military officers, with the accompanying disciplinary control, police members living in barracks, weapons and training. Such a police force had the potential to become alienated from the local community when used to enforce unpopular, repressive laws and, especially, when given considerable emergency powers regarding search, arrest and detention, as happened in the aftermath of the October 1931 crisis and in the response to EOKA’s armed struggle of the late 1950s in support of union with Greece.

The model of policing introduced to Cyprus to ensure colonial rule was not that of London’s Metropolitan Police Force but that of the Royal Irish Constabulary

Social control The model of policing introduced to Cyprus to ensure colonial rule was not that of London’s Metropolitan Police Force but that of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), which had already been introduced to the Indian province of Sind in 1843 and, ten years later, in Bombay. Like the RIC, the police in Cyprus was, in effect, an alternative to an army of occupation, without any community mandate. Regarding its structure and function, it was again modelled on the RIC. As subsequent events in Cyprus would prove, in the final analysis the OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 17

| CYPRUS police was an organ of social control. One key feature of militaristic policing is its political power. This type of policing utilises such army tactics as informers, agent provocateurs, crowd control and extra-legal violence. While the Cyprus Military Police made good some of the defects of the zaptiehs, the Ottoman police, it can be argued that the model of policing and law enforcement that was transplanted by the British to Cyprus, as well as other colonies, was used to delegitimise indigenous customs; to impose centralised social control; and to incorporate local society as a branch of the wider imperial network. As in other parts of the British Empire, the police were also used to procure and supervise forced labour for road construction. The development of policing in the colonies came in three stages: first, local (Ottoman, in the case of Cyprus), by which pre-colonial mechanisms of control are maintained; second, colonial-style policing techniques are introduced; and third, the post-colonial stage, sees the prioritising of policing by consent. During the second stage ideas as well as personnel were transferred through the colonies and a diluted RIC blueprint for policing was seen as the ideal mechanism for solving a specific set of law-andorder problems. The RIC comprised Irish Protestant and English recruits to police a predominantly Catholic Ireland, keen for its own independence. British officers and TurkishCypriot constables would make up a substantial part of the Cyprus Military Police well into the 20th century. In fact, when having to confront EOKA in the late 1950s, a special constabulary was established consisting of British officers and Turkish-Cypriot members only. Before considering the establishment and development of the Cyprus Military Police in detail, it should be noted that, from the local population’s point of view (as in the case of other British colonies), there was a popular demand for a paramilitary police force. This can be attributed to the fact that the population was predominantly rural, communications were poor, social conditions were largely primitive and the incidence of serious inter-personal violence was high. A civilian-officered, localised force would not have had the same attraction for the general public. The main function of the police under the Ottomans had been to collect the heavy taxes imposed on the peasants. Given that the general purpose of the colonial administration was, as the authorities put it, ‘to maintain law and order and to keep things quiet’, an effective police force was badly needed. In view of the corrupt nature of the zaptiehs, the British authorities on Cyprus were keen to reform the police under British officers in order to improve its effectiveness and to make 18 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

some impact on the high crime rate. To illustrate the low quality of the personnel the British inherited, in 1879 24 zaptiehs were sent to be tried in Nicosia. They had been held in custody in Larnaca for a variety of offences, including insubordination, neglect of duty, desertion and receiving bribes. Within two decades the police was reformed under British officers and gradually became a force to be reckoned with. In order to assist the policing of towns, a municipal force was introduced in Larnaca in 1878. The Cyprus Police Ordinance of 1879 authorised the high commissioner to raise an armed force of up to 1,000 men to ‘serve as a constabulary force for the prevention and detection of crime, the apprehension of offenders, the maintenance of all public works and buildings within the Island’. The same legislation also provided for the appointment of non-commissioned officers and privates.

New guard: irregular Ottoman soldiers leave Cyprus in July 1878 as the British move in.

Final stage By the late 1890s a well-trained police force, albeit a military one, had been developed on the island. The Cyprus Military Police towards the end of the 19th century can be said to have possessed the three criteria that define modern policing, namely, they were publicly accountable, specialised and professional. More specifically, the police had an island-wide mandate and it was a professional force in the sense that it was located in an organisation whose mandate was clearly prescribed by statute and which was bound by detailed regulations pertaining to both the training and the behaviour of its members. Finally, the police was characterised by both internal and external specialisation, because there was internally less emphasis on noncrime administrative responsibilities and more specialisation on specific aspects of crime. Police were expected to work in law enforcement to the virtual exclusion of other jobs. Since the main aim of the colonial government was to maintain the status quo, the police functioned to buttress the forces of stability. Not surprisingly, therefore, the police were repressive. However, the colonial regime in Cyprus fell short of being a police state and the locals were not ruled through fear in general and by a secret police in particular. Fortunately, the police on Cyprus never enjoyed such a degree of autonomy from the rest of the administration as to become a state within a state.

Alexios Alecou is a visiting fellow at the University of London’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies and teaches history at the Open University of Cyprus.

HOLLYWOOD CENSORSHIP

Speaking in Code

Alarm about moral degeneracy and ‘family values’ provoked Hollywood to instigate its own self-censorship codes in the 1920s. But much more than prudery underpinned their lasting impact, says Tim Stanley.

OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 19

HOLLYWOOD CENSORSHIP

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ANE RUSSELL’S BREASTS were a constant concern to Hollywood’s censors. In 1941 she starred in a movie called The Outlaw. The director, Howard Hughes, wanted to make the most of her generous cleavage, so he designed a cantilevered, underwire bra to give it additional screen time. Russell hated the contraption, found it painful and secretly threw it away but, even without the extra lift, the Production Code Administration (PCA – Hollywood’s censors) still felt there was too much on show. Hughes, however, decided not to fight them. He calculated that a campaign to ban The Outlaw could be just the publicity it needed, so he actively encouraged conservatives to demand that it be denied an audience. The result: The Outlaw was held back in 1941; shown for one week in 1943; and then given a final, eagerly anticipated release in 1946. As Hughes predicted, erotic expectation turned it into a box office hit. The cleavage controversy did not end there. In 1954 Russell appeared scantily clad in The French Line – a movie that posed an additional problem for the PCA because it was in 3-D. What was merely titillating in 2-D, said the censors, was downright outrageous in 3-D: ‘The costumes for most female characters and especially Jane Russell were intentionally designed to give a bosom peep-show affect beyond extreme décolletage and far beyond anything acceptable under the [studios’] Production Code.’ Flouting the Code’s official list of dos and don’ts, the poster for The French Line carried the tagline: ‘JR in 3-D: Need We Say More?’ An alternative was: ‘It’ll Knock Your Eyes Out!’ The PCA refused The French Line a certificate and the Catholic National Legion of Decency called for a boycott. As you might have guessed, it was one of the most successful films of the year. On the one hand the Russell scandals confirm the view of the old Hollywood Production Code and its enforcers: puritan, silly, authoritarian. On the other hand, they challenge aspects of the traditional narrative. After all, these movies were not banned or even censored – the industry simply refused to endorse them. And the success they subsequently enjoyed in the cinemas that showed them suggests that the so-called sexual McCarthyism of the 1940s and 1950s was not as all-pervasive as we might think. It is usually believed that the anti-sex, anti-violence Code was harmful to art, intellectually unsophisticated, imposed from above and un-American in its disregard for First Amendment Rights. This is far from the full picture. Often the Code encouraged greatness, was intellectually nuanced, self-regulated and conformed to American values of Judeo-Christian ethics and free enterprise. For good and bad, it was as American as apple pie.

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RE-CODE MOVIES did not go uncensored. They were covered by local laws and edited in deference to public opinion – or at least whatever the movie makers thought they could get away with without triggering an angry backlash. Films produced in the 1920s and early 1930s were made in an era of social change and economic uncertainty. The boom of the Roaring Twenties gave blacks and poor whites new spending power and provided consumer goods to a generation of women, who wanted to be as socially, even sexually, liberated as men. The sudden, devastating poverty of the Great Depression necessitated a cinema that reflected the struggles of the audience and examined those who resisted the power of greedy bankers. Studios that favoured lavish musicals in the 20 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

Top: a poster for Gold Diggers of 1933. Above: Edward G. Robinson in a promotional portrait for Little Caesar, 1931. Previous page: Jane Russell in The Outlaw, 1943.

1920s did poorly in the early 1930s. The more socially realist producers, particularly Warner Bros, survived the worst years of the Depression far better. You can get a flavour of the pre-Code ethic from a handful of surprisingly bold movies. Local state censors complained that when Little Caesar (1931) depicted Edward G. Robinson going down in a hail of bullets: the kids in the stalls were cheering the gangster rather than the cops. Homosexual characters were on parade in Our Betters (1933), Sailor’s Luck (1933) and Calvacade (1933). In Morocco (1930)

Marlene Dietrich played a cabaret singer who dressed as a man in a white tie suit and kissed a girl in the audience. ‘I’m sincere in my preference for men’s clothes’, Dietrich once explained. ‘I do not wear them to be sensational. I think I am much more alluring in these clothes.’

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UDIENCES PAID GOOD MONEY to be allured. The magazine Variety once calculated that out of 440 pictures made from 1932 to 1933, 352 had a ‘sex slant’, 145 had ‘questionable sequences’ and 44 were examples of outright ‘perversion’. Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell showed off their lingerie in Night Nurse (1931). Jean Harlow casually undressed in Red Headed Woman (1932) and flashed a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bit of breast. In The Gold Diggers of 1933 a typically camp, highly sexualised Busby Berkeley sequence called Pettin’ in the Park featured the female cast getting caught in a downpour, removing their wet clothes in silhouette and finally emerging clad in metal garments, which the menfolk, try as they might, couldn’t get off – until one of them was handed a can opener. Gold Diggers was the third most popular movie of 1933, although it had to be distributed with alternative scenes to circumnavigate the objections of local censorship boards – the kind of tiresome expense that the studios were increasingly growing sick of.

The Code urged promotion of wholesome, American values that would improve the morals of the audience

Below: Will H. Hays, c.1930. Bottom: Joseph Breen (right) prepares to watch a British film with its producer Howard Huth, in 1946.

The desire for a unified, industry-wide censorship programme came from within the industry itself. Hollywood faced a constant battle against local censors and a constant fear that the federal government might get involved. In order to pre-empt state regulation, private enterprise decided to come up with its own set of artistic regulations. In 1922 the studios created the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (later known as the Motion Picture Association of America). They gave Will H. Hays, a Republican lawyer and Presbyterian deacon, a salary of $100,000 and an unlimited expense account to launch a campaign against censorship that, perversely, would end with Hollywood censoring itself. The first official list of ‘dos and don’ts’, drawn up in 1927, was largely ignored. It was only with the popularisation of sound and a growing ‘family values’ backlash among churchgoers that the campaign for active self-censorship within Hollywood gathered momentum. In 1929-30 Father Daniel Lord, a Jesuit priest and instructor at the Catholic St Louis University, wrote what was variously known as the Hays Code or the Production Code. This stipulated what must not be shown but also defined what should be seen instead. It clamped down on depictions of ‘pointed profanity’, ‘any inference of sex perversion’, ‘suggestive nudity’, ‘childbirth’, ‘brutality’, ‘sedition’ and ‘ridicule of the clergy’ – and it urged promotion of wholesome, American values that would improve the morals of the audience. A clause was inserted against miscegenation, in deference to the ugly racial attitudes of the time. This was protested strongly by the clerics involved in the original draft but it stayed put. After all, the economic goal of the Code was to expand audiences by pre-empting local censors and scenes of affection between blacks and whites were a no-no down South. In 1934 the Production Code Administration (PCA) was created, which required all films released on or after July 1st, 1934 to obtain a certificate of approval based upon their content. The head of the PCA, taking over from Hays, was the Catholic Joseph Breen, a man with decidedly mixed attitudes towards Hollywood. A religious chauvinist and rabid antisemite, he once wrote of the studio management, ‘These Jews seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence’ – an uncomfortable reminder that in the Code era Hollywood was dubbed ‘A Jewish-owned business selling Roman Catholic theology to Protestant America’. Yet what he was not was an inquisition priest seeking to hurl great, yet morally ambiguous, art onto the fire. On the contrary, Breen loved movies and saw his role as a script editor ensuring high quality. The producer Val Lewton once explained: Mr Breen goes to the bathroom every morning. He does not deny that he does or that there is no such place as the bathroom, but he feels that neither his actions nor the bathroom are fit subjects for screen entertainment. This is the essence of the Hays Office attitude … at least as Joe told it to me in somewhat cruder language. NO ONE CAN DENY that the Code ushered into Hollywood an era of moral conservatism that reversed the liberal, even liberating, trends that preceded it, especially for women. But an exploration of the Code’s philosophy and how it worked out in practice punctures a number of myths. For a start, it is important to remember that this was not a state-mandated infringement of First Amendment rights OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 21

HOLLYWOOD CENSORSHIP of freedom of speech. The Supreme Court had already asserted that movies were in fact commerce rather than art, so the First Amendment often was deemed not to apply anyway. More importantly, the Code was something that the studios adhered to voluntarily in order to make federal censorship unnecessary. Its supporters believed that it accorded entirely with classical liberal, free market principles. Also, strictly speaking it is inaccurate to call the Code ‘reactionary’. Nowadays, we tend to think of anything that tells us what to do with our private lives as offensively authoritarian. Back then, the progressive utopian spirit said that strong morals promoted liberty by creating individuals free from the antisocial addictions of sex and violence. The Code bore comparison with federal legislation to regulate the quality of food and drugs, with programmes designed to help the poor, or even with Prohibition, the great, failed experiment in creating a sober citizenry. In the words of the cultural historian, Thomas Doherty, the Code: ... evinced concern for the proper nurturing of the young and the protection of women, demanded due respect for indigenous ethnics and foreign peoples, and sought to uplift the lower orders and convert the criminal mentality. If the intention was social control, the allegiance was on the side of the angels.

Right: Edward G. Robinson whispers in Lauren Bacall’s ear, Key Largo, 1948.

The Code rejected the idea that art is amoral, for, it stated: This is true of the THING which is music, painting, poetry, etc. But the THING is the PRODUCT of some person’s mind, and the intention of that mind was either good or bad morally when it produced the thing. Besides, the thing has its EFFECT upon those who come into contact with it. In both these ways, that is, as a product of a mind and as the cause of definite effects, it has a deep moral significance and unmistakable moral quality. The Jesuitical tone of the Code reflected a mature and nuanced idea of what was wrong and right, but also a deep conviction that the public, too, was on the side of the angels. Theatre goers broadly concurred that homosexuality was perverse, drugs evil, whisky a gateway to sin. Not that the Code was heartless towards sinners or wanted to discourage films that showed the realities of life: Sympathy with a person who sins is not the same as sympathy with the sin or crime of which he is guilty. We may feel sorry for the plight of the murderer or even understand the circumstances which led him to his crime: we may not feel sympathy with the wrong which he has done. Hence, sin could be shown but only if it was shown to have bad consequences. WHAT WERE THE ARTISTIC consequences for cinema? It is alleged that the Code a) squeezed sex out of movies and that b) women’s sexual identity was reduced to that of virginal housewife. For example, the first movie to fall foul of the Code was Tarzan and His Mate (1934). The Tarzan films had hitherto been emblematic of the pre-Code spirit: sexual, violent and featuring male and female heroes who 22 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

Above: Bette Davis with Gary Merrill in All About Eve, 1950.

enjoyed almost equal status. (Time magazine noted that the leads obeyed ‘No civilized conventions except, perhaps, those of birth control’.) Tarzan and His Mate featured a sequence in which a body double for Jane swam in the nude. The PCA refused to approve the movie; MGM protested. MGM lost and cuts had to be made, proving, for the first time, that the Code had real teeth. Thereafter, the Tarzan cycle became emblematic of Code conservatism. Jane became a housewife, the couple had a son (out went the birth control) and by the time RKO took over the franchise in 1943, Tarzan was just a comic-book character fighting man-eating plants in his loincloth. For many feminist writers the Code also turned women into victims, creating movies that the critic Molly Haskell called ‘soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife’. Dark Victory (1939) starred Bette Davis as ‘everything a woman could dare to be!’; she drank, she smoked, she seemed to spend her entire life saying witty things in bars.

Left: Marilyn Monroe with Tom Ewell in The Seven Year Itch, 1955. Below: Woody Strode and Kirk Douglas in a publicity still for Spartacus, 1955. Bottom: Ernst Lubitsch keeps one foot on the floor in The Merry Widow with Jeanette MacDonald, 1934.

When Davis’ character discovered she had a brain tumour and was doomed to die, she decided that she had to give up the fast living and settle down with the doctor who so patiently loved her. Davis’ character was compelled by fate to reconcile herself to what she should, according to the Code, have always been: a satisfied wife. The Code could be so depressingly repressive that it even insisted that the cartoon flapper Betty Boop covered up her shoulders and straightened out her curls. Yet the idea that sex and violence were thematically crushed by the Code is fanciful; it simply shifted them from something stated to something implied, often in a highly creative manner. In his book Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints the political and social theorist Jon Elster gives examples of the Code actually increasing the sexual or dramatic tension of a scene. For instance, the script of Key Largo (1948) initially called for Edward G. Robinson to taunt Lauren Bacall with sexual suggestions; Bacall then spat in his face. Recognising that Breen would never tolerate the

scene, the words were whispered inaudibly instead. This invited the audience to imagine their content, adding a fresh charge to the moment, turning the audience from passive spectators to active participants in the spectacle. Elster quotes the director George Cukor recalling that: ‘The great rule was that if there was a kiss, the parties had to keep one foot on the floor. But in spite of those restrictions, I have a feeling that it was a lot more erotic, that there was an atmosphere of eroticism.’ Two examples confirm the theory. When Hitchcock made Notorious (1946), the rule was that no kiss could last more than three seconds. So Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kissed for two seconds, broke away, kissed, broke away, kissed again and so on for what felt like an eternity of sexual tension. An equally astonishing ‘tease’ was accomplished in The Seven Year Itch (1955), in which Marilyn Monroe stood above a grate and her white dress ballooned upwards. That scene, argued the film theorist Andre Bazin: OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 23

HOLLYWOOD CENSORSHIP Below: Some Like it Hot with Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, 1959.

... could only be born in the world of a cinema with a long, rich, Byzantine tradition of censorship. Inventiveness such as this presupposes an extraordinary refinement of the imagination, acquired in the struggle against the rigorous stupidity of a puritan code. Hollywood, in spite and because of the taboos that dominate it, remains the world capital of cinematic eroticism. Indeed, one might argue that Monroe’s sex appeal was always as much about the amount of her flesh that was not shown as the amount that was. Her smile, bosom and wayward skirt hinted at endless sensual possibilities just out of reach. This is the difference between the erotic and the pornographic. Nor did the Code entirely reduce women to passivity. When we first meet Jane Greer in 1947’s Out of the Past, she is a victim: a prim, pretty gangster’s moll who has fled her violent lover. Robert Mitchum beds her and would love to wed her, but halfway through the movie, everything changes. Greer kills a hoodlum, disappears and sets up Mitchum as a patsy for a crime. It turns out that the lady is a vamp: she’s the one who’s been pulling the strings all along. Yes, she’s evil and, yes, she’s given the Code-approved, just-desserts ending. But women viewers could watch Greer or Bette Davis in All About Eve (1950) or Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and see women who used their sexuality to dominate supposedly superior men.

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AY AND LESBIAN characters found a way into Code-era movies, too. Mrs Danvers in Rebecca (1940) was the Hollywood archetype of the lesbian: commanding and hauntingly obsessed with her previous employer. Plato in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) was her gay mirror opposite: feminine and obsessed with the far more masculine James Dean character. True, both Danvers and Plato were crude stereotypes that depicted homosexuals as victims. But the existence of those stereotypes, and the filmmakers’ assumption that an audience would understand them, indicated that for all the ‘moral consensus’ that the Codes’ authors presumed, gay and lesbian people were still around in the 1940s and 1950s and were still to some degree visible. Many of them would watch such movies and read into them meanings that their makers never intended. Hence Written on the Wind (1956), Spartacus (1960) and All About Eve have been reclaimed as ‘camp classics’: films either so melodramatic or sexually ambiguous that gay and lesbian viewers regard them as sympathetic. This emphasises a key argument in film theory: a movie can be written to mean one thing but be interpreted by different audiences to mean quite another. The viewer is not just a passive spectator but a participant in the creative process. In other words, the Code had no power to stop gays, women, poor people or ethnic minorities from drawing subversive interpretations from movies constructed to reflect a conservative view of the world. There was a moment of schadenfreude for those who despised the moralism of the Code when some of the works that it approved of matured

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Right: Jaime Sanchez and Emilio Fernandez in the Wild Bunch, 1969.

George Segal with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1966.

MPAA broke its own rules and let them pass. The Code was effectively abandoned in the mid-1960s, heralding a new era in which audiences were limited by age to certain films but the idea of trying to dictate content was dropped. The end of the Code era shows that Hollywood was only partly motivated by moral concerns. Its primary ambition was to make money and it only self-censored so long as smut and violence threatened its ability to do so. When the market turned liberal, Hollywood followed. In the field of morality, Hollywood rarely drives social change in the way that conservatives accuse it of: it slavishly follows popular taste.

M The end of the Code era shows that Hollywood was only partly motivated by moral concerns. Its primary ambition was to make money into gay classics. In Clueless (1995), the dizzy heroine invites an attractive James Dean lookalike to a sleepover in the hope of seducing him. She is confused when he refuses to put out. But the audience knows exactly what’s going on the moment he suggests that they watch Spartacus. Proof of Hollywood’s sensitivity to market forces is the fact that its holy Code was fairly easily undone by changing tastes. The Code reigned supreme so long as the studios deferred to it out fear of a boycott or cinemas refused to show uncertificated movies. But when both realised that the public’s appetite for sex and violence was growing and becoming more profitable, they began to disregard the moralists. Some Like It Hot (1959) and Psycho (1960) were both released without a certificate and still made enormous profits. There then followed a series of test cases in which the Motion Picture Association of America was confronted with movies that clearly flouted the Code but whose producers were determined to get them on the market anyway: The Pawnbroker (1964) for sex and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) for language. Rather than reject works of obvious quality and mass appeal, the

OREOVER, CENSORSHIP did not inhibit artistic achievement. There were two golden ages of Hollywood and both negotiated with the Code in a manner that proved conducive to great art. The 1930s and 1940s were the period in which the Code was enforced and its strictures compelled moviemakers to be a little more imaginative and elegant than they might otherwise have been. They learned that ‘less is more’ and created restrained, lyrical, often highly erotic films that were incredibly poetic. By contrast, the 1970s was a period in which directors challenged the conventions of the dying Code in both content and theme. Films such as Klute (1971) featured sex and prostitution. The Wild Bunch (1969) contained a cast of bloodthirsty anti-heroes. The criminals in The Godfather (1972), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Badlands (1973) were sympathetic rather than simply monstrous. Yes, the 1970s tore up the Code, but by being so self-consciously iconoclastic it acknowledged the legacy of the morality that had come before and the importance of the archetypes and standards that it created. Whether the movie industry was promoting certain ethics or challenging them, negotiation with popular American morality proved to be the source of inspiration and even genius. Tim Stanley is the author of Citizen Hollywood: How the Collaboration Between LA and DC Revolutionized American Politics (St Martin’s Press, 2014).

FURTHER READING Thomas Patrick Doherty, Pre-code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934 (Columbia University Press, 1999). Otto Friedrick, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s (University of California Press, 1986).

From the Archive

Leonard J. Leff, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (Anchor Books, 1991).

www.historytoday. com/Hollywood

William D. Romanowski, Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies (Oxford University Press, 2012).

More on Hollywood

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InFocus

Titanic’s Sisters

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ORKERS GO HOME after their shift in the Harland & Wolff shipyard, Belfast, in May 1911, cloth caps on every head and not a hard hat to be seen. There is a string of trams waiting for those who live further away and in the far distance the hull of the mighty Titanic can be discerned, under the gantry crane specially built for the construction, side by side, of her and her sister ship, Olympic. Already launched, the Olympic is being fitted out nearby, ready for its maiden voyage. Titanic will be launched at the end of May. The decision by the White Star Line to build three new ships, so that it could maintain its share of transatlantic passenger traffic against the competition coming from the Germans and from Cunard’s Mauretania and Lusitania, was taken in 1908 with the backing of J.P. Morgan, who controlled White Star’s parent corporation. Cunard went for speed while White Star went for size, with Titanic and her sister ships weighing in at around 46,000 tons. Belfast could cope, since it had the largest shipyards in the world at that time, in spite of all coal and iron having to be imported, though Sir William Arrol & Co’s giant gantry had to be installed. Arrol was up to the challenge, too: using his new hydraulic riveting technique he had built the Forth Bridge and much of Tower Bridge. Out of the total Harland & Wolff workforce of 15,000, about 4,000 worked on Titanic, nearly every one of them Protestant and so Ulster Unionists, determined to fight Irish

Though her sister ship Britannic was the largest ship sunk in the First World War, only 30 lives were lost Home Rule, even to take up arms in a year or two, when it seemed it might be forced on them. The story of Titanic’s first and last voyage in April 1912 does not need retelling but that of her sister ships Olympic and Britannic (launched in 1914) is worth recalling. Britannic became a hospital ship and was sunk by a mine in the Mediterranean in 1916; though she was the largest ship sunk in the war, only 30 lives were lost. Olympic became an armed troopship and in 1918 sank a German submarine. After the war she continued ploughing back and forth across the Atlantic and was eventually withdrawn from service in 1935. There is another largely forgotten story, which perhaps helps to keep Titanic’s in some sort of perspective. In May 1914 the 14,000-ton Empress of Ireland, pride of the Canadian Pacific’s White Empress Fleet, left Quebec for Liverpool. In the St Laurence River she saw approaching a 6,000-ton Norwegian collier before it disappeared into a fog bank. She stopped and kept sounding her fog horn, only for the collier to reappear and drive straight into her side, between her two funnels. The Empress sank within a quarter of an hour with just over 1,000 lives lost, not a match for the more than 1,500 who went down with Titanic, but close enough to be spoken of in the same breath. As for Harland & Wolff, its main business now is offshore wind power, while the Titanic Belfast Visitor Attraction opened on the site of the shipyard in 2012.

ROGER HUDSON

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Henrietta Heald on the centenary of the completion of the Panama Canal, describes the gruelling challenges faced by those competing to succeed in the project to join the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, from the 16th century to the present day.

For England’s Sake

Describing the First World War as ‘an engineers’ war’, which required ‘arms more than men’, Lloyd George acted on the urgent need to employ women in the armaments industries. Henrietta Heald explains how they in turn responded to the challenges.

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WOMEN ENGINEERS The women’s canteen at Phoenix Works, Bradford, in 1918. The painting, by Flora Lion, was commissioned by the Ministry of Information.

Fell, Gateshead. Fourteen months later, as the need for workers in British industry grew more acute, Ruth and her younger sister, Sylvia, along with a multitude of other women from all backgrounds, found themselves plunged into the maelstrom of the mighty Armstrong Whitworth munitions factory at Elswick-on-Tyne. Armstrong’s had long dominated the arms industry. Indeed, so crucial was the firm to Britain’s fortunes that the first task of the Ministry of Munitions was to ensure that the Tyneside factory was generously supplied with skilled labour. More than two million men had joined the armed forces and the military authorities were pressing for more, while the government simultaneously needed a huge increase in the supply of war materials. On taking office as Minister of Munitions, Lloyd George had characterised the conflict as ‘an engineers’ war’, insisting that its outcome would ultimately depend on the achievements of engineers: ‘We need men, but we need arms

The minister was aware that he could not provide the vast quantity of munitions required without female labour

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HE SHELL CRISIS of May 1915 triggered a political earthquake in Britain that would lead eventually to the fall of the Asquith government. At its heart was the revelation that heavy British losses on the Western Front had been caused by a catastrophic shortage of artillery shells. Immediate measures to deal with the crisis included the creation of a Ministry of Munitions under David Lloyd George and a massive recruitment drive for industrial workers. The women who answered the call in their hundreds of thousands not only provided the vital production capacity to salvage the situation but also made great strides towards their own economic emancipation. On August 4th, 1914, when Britain declared war on Germany, 24-year-old Ruth Dodds, writer, diarist and campaigner for women’s suffrage, was living in middle-class comfort at the family home in Low

more than men.’ Although there was strong resistance from various quarters to the employment of women in the factories, the minister was well aware that he could not provide the vast quantity of munitions required without female labour. The Women’s War Register was set up in March 1915 to enrol women for war work regardless of their previous experience. In the same month, Lloyd George had coaxed the engineering unions to accept ‘dilution’ – the entry of unskilled workers of both sexes into jobs traditionally held by skilled men – on condition that wage levels would be maintained and dilution would last only as long as the war itself. This was the notorious Treasury Agreement, which would later come back to bite the workers it had temporarily benefited. THE SUFFRAGETTE LEADER Emmeline Pankhurst seized the opportunity of the War Register to champion women’s employment, joining forces with Lloyd George, a former adversary, to organise a march demanding women’s ‘right to serve’. Held in London on July 17th, 1915, the event was a triumph, despite torrential rain. Above all, it did a great deal to attract women to the munitions factories. By the end of the war well over one million had been recruited and, according to one authoritative account, more than 90 per OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 29

WOMEN ENGINEERS The Armstrong Whitworth munitions factory in Newcastle, where Ruth and Sylvia Dodds were employed. Painting by Sir John Lavery, 1917.

From the Archive More on the Great War

www.historytoday. com/first-world-war

cent of all munitions workers were women. ‘I hate war and I hate killing’, wrote Ruth Dodds in her diary, ‘and yet I am right to make munitions.’ Initially held back by pacifist instincts (she later became a Quaker), Ruth had changed her mind about working in the factories, having convinced herself that the war against Germany was just and inescapable and that a constant supply of shells would help to save British lives on the Western Front. Ruth and Sylvia enjoyed their training at Armstrong’s, which they joined in October 1915. Initially, they were taught how to work an indexing machine for time fuses. Their instructor was an inspirational young woman called Annie Peacock. Although only 20, Annie had already worked at Armstrong’s for four years. Ruth later made her the 30 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

subject of her poem ‘Annie of the Shell Shop’. Annie told Ruth about the many trials of working in the engineering shops, including the fear of Zeppelin raids, following the first attacks on East Anglia in January 1915. ‘One night last winter about eleven o’clock all the lights went out’, noted Ruth in her diary. The warning siren had sounded three times, which meant that the lights had been turned off deliberately. ‘For four and a half hours, those 2,000 girls waited in the dark, expecting Zeppelin bombs any moment.’ It was bitterly cold with the lights off. ‘Some screamed and some fainted, and some sang in chorus and some to themselves, and presently some lighted their [gas stoves] and heated up their tea on them. Annie went into the next shop among the older girls and had a good sleep.’

Sylvia, Hope and Ruth Dodds in their garden, Gateshead, 1917.

Annie also told Ruth about the rigours of the night shift. The women worked nights on alternate weeks, from seven in the evening to seven in the morning: ‘Twelve hours out of every 24 in the great gloomy echoing shops, where the artificial lights are always on and the rushing of the machinery never stops.’ And it was little better during the day: ‘Outside the sunlight falls and the winds play on the river, but at this time of year the girls can hardly even see the sun once a day, for they go to work in the morning fog, and dark has fallen long before they come out.’ Before the war there had been 250 girls at Armstrong’s and now there were 8,700.

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ORK IN THE FACTORIES was exhausting and sometimes dangerous, but many women found it highly rewarding. ‘Though we munition workers sacrifice our ease, we gain a life worth living’, said Naomi Loughnan, one of the 25,000 women employed at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. Naomi vividly evoked the trials of labouring in the machine shops. ‘The day is long, the atmosphere is breathed and re-breathed, and the oil smells. Our hands are black with warm, thick oozings from the machines’, she wrote in her memoir, going on to describe ‘the great wall of noise – the crashing, tearing, rattling whirr of machinery – that seems to rise and confront one like a tangible substance.’ Even more daunting was the experience of the ‘Danger Buildings’, where high explosives were packed into shells. ‘There is the same rush and excitement [as in other munitions work], the same weariness and thrill, only it is intensified by the knowlege that we hold our lives in our hands’, wrote Naomi. ‘Loaded fuses, explosive powders, detonators, bombs, and mines become objects of familiarity, to be handled with more speed than fear.’ In fact, accidents in ordnance factories were more frequent than the public ever knew and some had horrific consequences. The worst event occurred on January 19th, 1917 at Silvertown in east London, when an explosion at the Mond munitions factory killed 69 people and injured more than 1,000, many of them women. Workers at the National Filling Factories, the specially created shell-filling facilities, of which there were more than 50 across the country – were vulnerable to poisoning from many different toxic substances, including TNT. Daily exposure to TNT could not only cause serious illness and death, but also turned workers’ skin bright yellow or orange, with the result that they were nicknamed ‘the canaries’.

Extract from Annie of the Shell Shop (1915) by Ruth Dodds ‘More and more munitions!’ So the soldiers plead, Armies in their thousands Are making good the need. Who says we’ll be beaten? We know it isn’t true. Annie of the Shell Shop Is going to see us through! Seven days’ day shift Six days’ night; Twelve hours’ darkness Twelve hours’ light. Somewhere out across the sea Half the world’s at stake; Working all the sleepy night For England’s sake.

The explosion in January 1917 at the Mond munitions factory in Silvertown, east London, killed 69 people and injured more than 1,000, many of them women Firemen’s cottages in Fort Street, Silvertown, ruined by the explosion of early 1917. OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 31

WOMEN ENGINEERS Despite the danger, Naomi Loughnan considered that the sacrifice for herself and her colleagues at Woolwich Arsenal was small compared to the sufferings of the men at the front: ‘We live in safety, we have shelter, and food whenever necessary, and we earn more than women have ever done before’, she wrote.

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Women being trained to use machinery at Shoreditch Technical Institute in 1916.

OVERNMENT PROPAGANDA designed to entice women into the engineering shops was more successful than the Minister of Munitions could have hoped. L.K. Yates, a female welfare supervisor whose survey of women’s work on behalf of the ministry was later published as The Woman’s Part: A Record of Munitions Work (1918), noted that as soon as they knew that their services were needed women came forward in their hundreds of thousands: ‘They have come from the office and the shop, from domestic service and the dressmaker’s room, from the high schools and the colleges, and from the stately homes of the leisured rich.’ The recruits hailed not only from all over the British Isles but also from far-flung parts of the Empire, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. Yates also noticed the breakdown of the traditional social hierarchy: ‘I have seen working together side by side the daughter of an earl, a shopkeeper’s widow, a graduate from Girton, a domestic servant and a young woman from a lonely farm in Rhodesia.’ The first female recruits learned simple, repetitive processes, such as how to make and fill shells. Those who showed particular dexterity were taught tool-making and gauge-making, where the work had to be finished to a fraction of the width of a human hair. More surprisingly, women also undertook many operations dependent on physical strength and stamina. During her travels around Britain, Yates saw women in the shipyards ‘chipping and cleaning the ships’ decks, repairing hulls, or laying electric wire on board battleships’. Other women were ‘working hydraulic presses, guiding huge overhead cranes, lifting the molten billets, setting, or fitting the tools in the machines’. A CAMPAIGN WAS LAUNCHED early in the war to use existing technical schools and institutions for the training of both male and female engineers. It was supported by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, which had already financed a scheme to train female oxyacetylene welders. By the autumn of 1915 a training section had been established within the Ministry of Munitions and state-financed training centres were opening up all over Britain, from Aberdeen to Plymouth, including 11 in London, offering courses lasting six to eight weeks. ‘These technical schools proved that ... an intelligent girl can learn almost any mechanical process in a few weeks, a prolonged apprenticeship not being necessary’, remarked Katharine Parsons, a co-founder of the Women’s Engineering Society, established in 1919. To many women the most appealing and glamorous activity was aircraft production. Before the war, women had been allowed to perform tasks such as the sewing of aeroplane wings by hand or by machine, or the painting of the woodwork. ‘Today they undertake almost every 32 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

other process both at the carpenter’s bench and in the engineering shop’, wrote L.K. Yates, who watched in awe as the women worked on the metal parts of the aeroplane, ‘drilling, grinding, boring, milling on the machine, or soldering tiny aluminium parts for the fuselage, and in each process gauging and regauging, measuring and re-measuring’. Women also worked on aeroplane engines and helped in the manufacture of the magneto, ‘the very heart of the machine’. In 1916, exhibitions of women’s work were held in several large industrial centres. The extraordinary variety of exhibits ‘proved conclusively that women were able to work on almost every known operation in engineering, from the most highly skilled precision work to the rougher sort of labouring jobs’, observed Katharine Parsons. Precision work on range-finders for weapons at Barr and Stroud, Glasgow.

Ridiculing the myth that they were capable of no more than repetitive work on fool-proof machines, Parsons observed that many women developed great mechanical skill and a real love of their work. She cited the example of a gun-repair firm in which two girls dealt with weapons varying from the 13-inch naval gun, weighing 50 tons, to the six-pound tank gun. ‘They could design repairs to guns and mechanism and calculate the factor of safety of a damaged gun by logarithm and slide rule. They were designing suitable repairs, making the working drawings and carrying out the work, and if necessary making the special tools to do it.’ The official history of the Ministry of Munitions listed 374 distinct processes, many with their own subdivisions, on which women were employed on June 1st, 1916. These ranged from various aspects of steam-turbine manufacture to many of the tasks involved in shipbuilding. There was a great deal more to ‘munitions’ than the guns, bombs, shells and other items required on the battlefield. Any tool, machine or activity that was deemed vital to supporting the work of the armed forces came under the umbrella of the ministry. Indeed, one of the most important categories of munitions was optical instruments, including telescopes, periscopes, range-finders, compasses, binoculars,

Under a scheme of 1917, the Ministry of Munitions agreed to pay 75 per cent of the initial cost of the nurseries for munition workers’ children

gun-sights, mirrors and searchlights. In this highly demanding area of precision engineering, which required intensive training as well as the utmost skill, women excelled. ‘The glass must be cut, ground and curved exactly to the requisite design, which in itself takes many days of high mathematical computation’, wrote Yates. ‘It must be smoothed and polished, cleaned with meticulous care, and adjusted to a nicety in the particular instrument for which it is fashioned.’ The difficulties and pitfalls were incalculable. ‘From start to finish the glass obeys no fixed laws, but answers only the skilled handling of the scientist and craftsman.’ In a victory speech delivered in Newcastle after the war, Katharine Parsons lavished praise on women’s achievements in the field of optical munitions. ‘We are all familiar with the beautiful beams of light travelling over the sky in the search for Zeppelin and aircraft’, she said. ‘Here on the Tyne we may feel a great pride in the Lady Henry’s creche mirrors and searchlights, as most of us know for the offspring that Tyneside girls polished the mirrors and of workers at the so added to the brilliancy of the searchlights.’ Royal Arsenal, Woolwich by Sir John Lavery, 1919.

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NE PERSON who knew all about optics was Rachel Parsons, Katharine’s daughter, the first woman to read mechanical sciences at Cambridge University. Rachel came from a noble scientific line. Her grandfather was William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, President of the Royal Society 1848–54, who built the 6ft-diameter Leviathan of Parsonstown, the largest telescope in the world for more than 70 years. Her father was Charles Parsons, inventor of the steam turbine, which had revolutionised ship propulsion and made possible the generation of electricity on a vast scale. Parsons’ engineering works at Heaton, east of Newcastle, included an optical instrument department, in which Rachel had long taken an interest. At an early stage, she joined the Training Section of the Ministry of Munitions – one of the handful of university-educated women who instructed many others in engineering tasks, as well as doing research and development work. A distinguished woman in the research field was Eily Keary, who had also studied engineering at Cambridge before joining the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, where she performed important experiments on ship stability and aeronautics. In November 1917, Eily was elected the first female member of the Aeronautical Society and two years later she, Rachel Parsons and Blanche Thornycroft were the first women to join the Royal Institution of Naval Architects. Even in the supremely masculine arena of the shipyards, women made their mark. Yates toured a battleship where women were working, noting that they were all wearing ‘trouser suits’, the only thing that made it possible to shin up and down the steep ladders. The job was to renew electric wires and fittings, which needed great care and accuracy. ‘There was no chaffing, no “larking”, between the men and women, but a sense of comradeship’, remarked Yates. Women’s entry into the munitions factories in vast numbers sparked a social revolution that had its roots in the realisation by government and employers that, to be fully productive, the female workforce had to be fit, healthy and alert. New recruits were given a medical examination and workers’ health was regularly monitored. Expectant mothers OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 33

WOMEN ENGINEERS

Photographs from a First World War album compiled at Heaton Works, the site of the Parsons family firm in Newcastle. Clockwise from below: taping conductor ends, brazing blades and stator winding.

received special treatment. They were exempt from doing night shifts, for example, and from handling TNT. The Ministry of Munitions set up a Welfare and Health department, which appointed welfare supervisors in the factories. These women played a vital role in vast establishments such as the Woolwich Arsenal and the cordite-producing factory at Gretna in the Scottish borders, which employed 11,500 women, many of whom were living far from home. As part of the supervisory regime, protective clothing was universally adopted, first-aid rooms were opened and canteens established. Organised recreation included swimming, tennis, dancing, piano playing, bowls, cricket, concerts, dramatic entertainments and art classes.

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FEMALE FACTORY EMPLOYEE who gave birth was expected to resume work two months after the delivery. Mothers could have their babies or infants looked after in one of the state-sponsored nurseries that were opened in industrial areas. Under a scheme of 1917, the Ministry of Munitions agreed to pay 75 per cent of the initial cost of the day or night nurseries for munition workers’ children. Good diet and hygiene were high priorities in the nurseries. An unexpected consequence of the war was that the health and wellbeing of ordinary individuals, especially young people, was taken much more seriously than it had been earlier. The quality and quantity of workers’ food was an important issue. Canteens – virtually unheard of before the war – were made obligatory in certain filling factories, as well as in establishments where women were employed 34 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

on night shifts. They soon spread to workshops and factories all over the country. Often state-aided, the canteens were run by voluntary staff, some from aristocratic families with no experience of domestic work. Larger canteens were well supplied with labour-saving appliances. ‘Electric washing-up machines, electric bacon-cutters, as well as electric bread-cutters, tea-measuring machines, counter hotclosets for warming food brought by employees may now be seen in many kitchens where the needs of thousands of diners must be considered’, wrote Yates. Providing housing for the huge influx of female workers all over

Although women could now become MPs, doctors, lawyers and scientists, in the ranks of industry they were in a worse position than before the war

were allowed to vote and, unexpectedly, a bill allowing women over 21 to stand for Parliament had been enacted three weeks earlier. Women were making progress in areas such as medicine and the law – but the door was slammed shut against female engineers. Although Prime Minister Lloyd George acknowledged that it would have been ‘utterly impossible’ for the country to have waged a successful war without the ‘skill and ardour, enthusiasm and industry’ of British women, the Treasury Agreement forged with the unions in March 1915 had come back to haunt them. Within months, the restoration of Pre-War Practices Act made it illegal for a woman to be employed in any engineering trade where female workers had not been employed before the war – with the result that hundreds of thousands were summarily deprived of their livelihoods.

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Rachel Parsons photographed by Bassano in 1919 and (right) the letter she received that year in response to her request for a meeting to discuss women’s admission to the Amalgamated Society of Engineers.

the country, especially in already overcrowded industrial districts, was an enormous challenge and the rigid restrictions on building during the war made the situation more difficult. Lists of suitable lodgings were drawn up by special committees in munitions areas, leading to the creation of a Billeting Board, which collaborated with local authorities and individuals to find thousands of temporary homes. Schools and workhouses were converted into living spaces and large numbers of temporary cottages and hostels were erected. The cottages – one-storey wooden or concrete structures with three to five rooms – were allocated to married couples, while unmarried women lived in hostels fitted out with kitchens, dining rooms and common rooms. Several hostels might be grouped into a ‘colony’ with cubicled dormitories for between 100 and 130 people in each unit and a separate communal dining room. This popular arrangement offered good opportunities for socialising. The women workers in the munitions factories during the First World War forged a path for all women who came after them by proving that they could hold down difficult and demanding jobs, often in the face of danger. All had to endure fear and discomfort and many had to acquire complex skills in a short time. Some had been radicalised by perceived injustices. On the whole they were well trained and relatively well paid – and they gained a taste of freedom that would never be forgotten. Lured into the workplace in large numbers, they experienced the pleasure and camaraderie of independent communal living. Their horizons were broadened by meeting people from all walks of life. Then it all came to a juddering halt. On December 14th, 1918, a month after the signing of the Armistice, there was a general election in the UK. For the first time, women over 30

ATHARINE AND RACHEL Parsons, mother and daughter, articulated the widespread anger at this turn of events and transformed words into action by founding the Women’s Engineering Society to campaign for employment rights. ‘Great hopes [had been] entertained by many women that a new profession was open to them, where they could earn good wages and where they would have some scope for their skill and intelligence’, explained Katharine, but with the signing of the Armistice all such hopes had been dashed. Training women for munitions work had cost more than £30 million but some 1.5 million prospective wealth producers had now been thrown onto the scrapheap. ‘It has a been a strange perversion of women’s sphere’, said Katharine, ‘to make them work at producing the implements of war and destruction and to deny them the privilege of fashioning the munitions of peace.’ In January 1919 Rachel Parsons became the first president of the Women’s Engineering Society. She exposed the ‘extraordinary’ fact that, although women could now become MPs, doctors, lawyers and scientists, in the ranks of industry they were in a worse position than before the war. Women did not wish to undercut men’s pay; on the contrary, they were demanding ‘equal pay for equal output’, she wrote. ‘Women have won their political independence. Now is the time for them to achieve their economic freedom too.’ Henrietta Heald is the author of William Armstrong, Magician of the North (McNidder & Grace, 2012). She is currently writing a biography of Rachel Parsons.

FURTHER READING Maureen Callcott, ed, A Pilgrimage of Grace, The Diaries of Ruth Dodds (1905–74) (Bewick Press, 1995). The Official History of the Ministry of Munitions (Vols. 1–12, 1922). Gilbert Stone (ed), Women War Workers (Harrap & Co, 1917). Christopher Addison, Four and a Half Years, vols. 1–2 (Hutchinson, 1934).

George A.B. Dewar, The Great Munition Feat 1914–18 (Constable, 1921). Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls, Women Workers in World War I (I.B. Tauris, 1998). Alan G.V. Simmonds, Britain and World War One (Routledge, 2010). www.theiet.org/resources/library/arcjives/exhibition/women/index.cfm

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MakingHistory Are historians inevitably faced with a choice between academic analysis or popular narrative, or should they aim to master both skills, asks Suzannah Lipscomb.

Poirot or Scheherazade? WHAT SORT OF history should historians write today, especially if they write books for a thinking lay audience, such as the readership of History Today? Recently I’ve been researching a new book about the intriguing historical riddle – and politically serious prescription – that was Henry VIII's last will and testament. It is a much-contested document. Questions have abounded since its creation over when it was signed and whether it really was adequately subscribed: did signature by Henry VIII's ‘dry stamp’, a device that created an indentation of the king’s signature to be inked in by a clerk, a sort of official forgery, constitute signature? If it didn’t, might the will, which ruled out inheritance by the Stewart line, be overturned in favour of Mary Queen of Scots? And was the will frantically tampered with as Henry lay dying or as his corpse grew cold? The context of its production is also debated. Historians have written directly contradictory accounts of the last months of Henry VIII’s life: the indomitable ‘old fox’ was firmly in control until the end, deftly dealing out justice and revenge with his dying breath, says one; the decrepit, pain-ridden king was the pathetic puppet of manipulative factions, who sought to dispose of their enemies and garner power for themselves in the reign-to-come, contends another. Writing about such a contentious episode is exciting. The historian can familiarise herself with what everyone else has argued and, knowing her enemy, go straight to the original sources themselves to try to solve the puzzle. This is the thrill of researching history that G.M. Trevelyan was describing when he wrote: That which compels the historian to ‘scorn delights and live laborious days’ is 36 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

the ardour of his own curiosity to know what really happened long ago in the land of mystery which we call the past. To peer into that magic mirror and see fresh figures there every day is a burning desire that consumes and satisfies him all his life, and carries him each morning, eager as a lover, to the library and the muniment room.

A lack of confidence in the acceptance of narrative explains why many historians have turned to writing novels So far, so good. But how much of this process should a historian convey to the reader? Should her pages be crammed with historiography and debate, inviting the reader to come with her as she follows the thread out of the labyrinth, or should her workings be like the swan’s paddling feet, cloaked by the serenity of her glide across the water? I have just read Dan Jones’ new

Don’t let the facts ruin a good story: Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon Before the Papal Legates at Blackfriars in 1529, by Frank Owen Salisbury, 1910.

book, The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors, and I was struck by the vivid descriptions in it, the poignant scene-setting, the sense of suspense, the nimble character sketches and his enviable turns of phrase. It races along like a novel. Yet, I know that much of the material has divided medievalists for decades: when did the Wars of the Roses start and stop? How much was William de la Pole, Earl and later Duke of Suffolk to blame for the failures of the infant Henry VI’s reign? Was Richard III a usurper who killed the Princes in the Tower? It is not that Jones’ book is unscholarly – it bristles with research and the references and reasons explaining his interpretation are all there in the endnotes for those who wish to follow them – but, on the surface, this is history as narrative. In so doing, Jones is following a well-trodden path: one bearing the footprints of the best-selling, literary historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries, like Trevelyan and T.B. Macaulay, who wrote, in 1828, that ‘a truly great historian would reclaim those materials which the novelist has appropriated’. But many historians today do not travel this road. I wonder if a lack of confidence in the acceptability of narrative history explains why so many historians have turned to writing novels. It seems to me that the historian today has a choice to make. Should one aim to be a sort of Hercule Poirot, laying out the steps that led him to the murderer, or a Scheherazade, a gifted storyteller, in this case offering up her best deciphering of the evidence to tell a plausible and compelling tale? Above all, is it possible to be both? Suzannah Lipscomb is Convenor for History and Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the New College of the Humanities, London.

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New Haven thoroughfares named after three of the regicides.

The Regicides’ New Haven?

On the Restoration, Charles II pardoned the many supporters of Cromwell’s Protectorate, with the exception of those directly involved in the execution of his father. These men now found their lives to be at great risk and several fled the country, as Charles Spencer explains.

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RIVE ROUND NEW HAVEN, Connecticut, today and you will come across three thoroughfares, Dixwell Avenue, Goffe Street and Whalley Avenue. These names do not belong to Titans of industry, politics or philanthropy, but to men from an even more select group – one that you might not immediately think worthy of eternal memory: for John Dixwell, William Goffe and Edward Whalley were all killers of a king. Their victim was Charles I, a cultivated and spiritual man who ruled England from 1625 to 1649. The early years of his reign had an air of prosperity and calm that was the envy of the millions of mainland Europeans, caught up in the chaos and slaughter of the Thirty Years’ War. But all was not well beneath the surface. Huge tectonic plates in the form of religious and civil liberties were driving into one another, setting a High Church king, who believed himself answerable only to God, against his Puritan and Presbyterian subjects – especially those who expected the Crown to

38 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

listen properly to the demands of Parliament. After 11 years of ruling by himself, when he milked ancient and unpopular Crown privileges to produce revenue, Charles was eventually obliged to summon Parliament. This led to escalating animosity and, in August 1642, the king raised his banner in a call to arms against those he viewed as rebels and traitors. So started what would become known as the English Civil Wars. As would be the case in America in the 1860s, these domestic conflicts brought about astonishingly high casualty rates. Between 1642 and 1651 as many as 200,000 Englishmen died in battle, or from the direct consequences of war. It remains the largest loss of life, per head, that the country has suffered. CHARLES I LOST THE FIRST CIVIL WAR. This was partly because of the professionalism of the force Parliament launched against him in 1644 – the ‘New Model Army’ – and partly because that same year the Scots forged an

A contemporary engraving of Charles I’s trial in Westminster Hall showing John Bradshaw presiding.

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alliance with his English enemies. At first nobody knew what to do with the defeated king. He was kept in custody, but as a pampered prince rather than as a vanquished foe. When confined in the midlands palace of Holdenby, retinues of servants were sent to look after him, while rooms were bedecked with splendid new hangings. Charles repaid the benevolence and respect of his captors with endless double-dealing. His intercepted correspondence revealed a firm intention to renege at the first opportunity on any agreements made, since he felt that concessions drawn from him while held captive were invalid.

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FTER A SECOND civil war erupted, fanned by Charles’ deceitfulness, sections of the New Model Army demanded that the king be held to account. They called him a ‘man of blood’ – one who was happy to inflict death and misery on his people, in his quest for restored power. Now he was imprisoned in Carisbroke Castle on the Isle of Wight, before a humiliating return to London. A trial in Westminster Hall followed. His judges included many senior figures from the military (among them Colonel Dixwell and Major-Generals Goffe and Whalley) and more than 130 others who could be entrusted with overseeing a matter as controversial and complicated as the trying of a king. That this unique hearing could be contemplated at all was due in part to a preacher from Massachusetts. Hugh Peters had joined that exodus of around 17,000 Puritans from England to New England, which took place in the mid-1630s. They crossed the Atlantic in order to establish communities in tune with their religious beliefs, away from the interference and harassment they had suffered at home. In Peters’ case, he had been imprisoned briefly for attacking the Roman Catholicism of Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria. Peters’ licence to preach was subsequently removed. In New England Hugh Peters became a prime mover in the founding of Harvard College, which was established to provide an annual crop of spiritual leaders. Soon 40 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

Charles I’s death warrant: Edward Whalley’s signature is at the bottom of the first column; William Goffe’s is in the middle of the third; and John Dixwell’s is at the bottom of the fifth.

Charles I at his trial by Edmund Bowers.

after, Peters was appointed pastor of the first church in Salem – with Boston, one of the two great settlements in the colony. He was influential in the wider community, bringing skills he had learnt in his native Cornwall to help expand the fishing and shipbuilding trades. Peters also cultivated good relations with the Native Americans, converting some to Christianity. He returned to England after just seven years, as an agent of the Massachusetts government, yet Peters would often refer to that place as ‘home’. Towards the end of his life, he said: ‘It hath much lain to my heart above any thing almost, that I left the people I was engaged to in New England, it cuts deeply, I look upon it as a Root-evil.’ He now set to work buoying up the Parliamentarian cause, his extraordinary oratory urging troops on to victory, while

in danger of being repeated now, for if the king were given his liberty, the innocent foot soldiers of the Parliamentary cause would surely suffer in his place. Severe royal retribution would be inevitable. Peters’ words had their usual effect. His oratory was as explosive as it was persuasive, even if sophisticated people found it a little too much. Oliver Cromwell was seen to chuckle with approval at the preacher’s overblown utterances. Peters comforted many who would otherwise have been daunted in this heady time. They came to accept that seeking justice for the king’s misdeeds was right and that the monarch should stand trial. For his part, as God’s chosen representative, Charles repeatedly refused to recognise both the validity of the High Court of Justice to try him and its right to do so. After days of argument between the king and Lord President John Bradshaw the hearing ended. The dozens of judges stood as one to convey that the death sentence bestowed on Charles was unanimous. Fifty-nine of these men later signed the king’s death warrant. On a January morning in 1649 Charles was taken onto a scaffold outside Whitehall Palace and executed. Those who led the prosecution, those who judged the king and those who officiated at the beheading were now reviled by royalists as ‘regicides’.

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also extracting further funds for the military from MPs back in London. They were thrilled by his passionate reporting of battlefield triumphs and were quickly encouraged to fund further victories. When royalist forces were finally defeated and the king detained, Peters sought meetings with Charles. During these he offered to guide the king towards the true path to spiritual enlightenment; but Charles refused to be swayed from his fundamental convictions. On the final leg of the king’s transportation from Windsor Castle to trial in London, Peters rode ahead of the royal prisoner’s six-horse carriage, leading Charles in triumph towards his judgement. Peters was excited to see God’s work done. He had no doubt that the king must die. In the lead-up to the trial London was awash with troops. Peters set to work persuading his congregations that the Bible vindicated those who deposed and punished tyrannical rulers. For a sermon at St Mary’s, Westminster, he chose as his text the New Testament tale of Barabbas, the story of a criminal, who had been released in place of Christ through the misguided chantings of the people. Peters claimed that an injustice of similar magnitude was

An anonymous print showing Charles I on the scaffold and, below, the execution of regicides.

NGLAND NOW ENTERED unfamiliar waters, becoming a republic. The men involved in Charles’ death experienced mixed fortunes. Cromwell became the dominant force, resisting calls for him to take the empty throne; he eventually settled instead on the title of Lord Protector. Hugh Peters became his chaplain, while also leading a regiment in Cromwell’s grimly effective Irish campaigns. A handful of the regicides died while serving in Ireland, claimed by dysentery and infection. Others felt betrayed by what they saw as the Protector’s thirst for personal power. He imprisoned some of these and sidelined others. After Cromwell’s sudden death in 1658, nobody was able to fill the void left behind. His son, Richard, had neither the aptitude nor the appetite for supreme office and soon surrendered the Lord Protectorship. As chaos became a possibility, powerful players started to communicate with the Stuart heir, to see how they could welcome him back to England as Charles II. The exiled prince promised not to interfere in property matters, other than those affecting the Crown and the Church. He also gave his word to ensure that the army would be paid. Crucially, in a land where half the nation had borne arms against his family, he promised not to punish those who had fought for Parliament. There were small references, in his carefully crafted letters, to the possibility that a very small number of those actually involved in his father’s execution might suffer, but wholesale retribution against the regicides was never mooted. The restoration took place with enormous speed and an astonishing wave of royalism followed in its wake. A scapegoat was needed to atone for the decade of kinglessness. Soon the order of business of the House of Commons was dominated by references to the killers of the king, around 50 of whom were still alive. Some were clearly OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 41

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The Restoration of Charles II at Whitehall on May 29th, 1660, by Isaac Fuller.

going to pay with their lives, while the rest were ordered to surrender to the authorities (with the inference that they would be fined or similarly punished) or else join the condemned. Ten of the ringleaders were swiftly tried and convicted. The punishment for treason was death by hanging, drawing and quartering, a process whereby the victim was suspended until he lost consciousness, before being cut down, castrated and gutted while still alive and finally dispatched with an axe. As the remainder of the regicides waited to see what, precisely, their fates would be, others watched for ways to benefit personally from the fraught state of affairs. The Dublin-born George Downing had strong American connections: his uncle, John Winthrop, was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Downing’s parents followed across the Atlantic, settling in Salem in 1638; Downing would claim that they went there because his father, Emmanuel, had been banished from England for his religious beliefs. George was sent to Harvard where in 1642 he attained second academic place in the inaugural class of graduates. The following year he re-entered the college on its staff, at an annual wage of £4. According to the Harvard records, his job was ‘to read to the junior pupils as the President shall see fit’. Downing had a passion for travel and left Harvard in 1645 to become a ship’s chaplain. In 1646 he arrived in England, penniless. The New Model Army had one regiment 42 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

A portrait by Thomas Smith believed to be of Sir George Downing (162384), late 17th century.

of dragoons and its commander, Colonel John Okey, was persuaded to appoint the young man regimental chaplain. This act saved Downing from destitution. It also gave him a modest platform, from where he could be noticed. Oliver Cromwell was so impressed with him that, in the year of Charles I’s execution, he made George his spymaster in Scotland. He became an MP and, in February 1657 seconded a proposal, in the form of The Humble Petition and Advice, that Cromwell be proclaimed king. To many who had risked their lives to defeat the monarch it was an intolerable suggestion and Cromwell reluctantly decided to remain Lord Protector rather than become King Oliver. He rewarded Downing for his support in this failed hope, sending him as ambassador to the Netherlands. This was an important, if dangerous, posting. Isaac Dorislaus, who had played a major role in preparing the case at trial against Charles I, was a previous incumbent. His life had been abruptly cut short in May 1649 when a dozen royalists, eager to avenge the death of the king, had poured into an inn where Dorislaus was lodging and dispatched him with their broadswords before escaping. Downing lived in fear that these same assassins would return for him. However, Downing was a very canny operator. Samuel Pepys, who worked for him, recalled of his master that: ‘He had so good spies, that he hath had the keys taken out of [the Dutch leader] De Witt’s pocket when he was a-bed, and his closet opened and the papers brought to him and left in his hand for an [hour], and carried back and laid in the place again and the keys put in his pocket again.’ Thanks to his network of spies, and his access to fellow diplomats, he was quick to note the tipping point when a Stuart restoration to the English throne moved from being a remote possibility

From the Archive More on the Civil Wars

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Judges Cave, West Rock State Park, New Haven, one of the hiding places of Whalley and Goffe.

to a strong probability. He wrote to the future Charles II, admitting he had previously worked against the monarchy, but claiming that he now saw the error of his ways. He forwarded fresh correspondence from a high-ranking Parliamentarian, which contained useful military secrets, as proof of his newfound loyalty to the royal family. That Downing was shamelessly opportunistic, Charles appreciated. At the same time, he knew his value and kept him in the Netherlands as his man. It was while in this posting that Downing established as one of his prime objectives the capture of any fugitive regicides: many were passing through Dutch territory as they headed into Germany and Switzerland. After several near misses, when his intended victims eluded him at the last second, Downing realised that the Dutch were informing on him. Having experienced their own long battles with a king, which had ended in revolt and a republic, the Dutch were naturally sympathetic to men who had risked everything in fighting a royal figure that they viewed as tyrannical. Downing, therefore, secured a blank arrest warrant, which he filed away for use when he finally tracked down the king killers. Among the regicides who had found refuge in Germany following the Restoration was John Okey, Downing’s regimental commander, who had saved him from poverty on his arrival in England. In 1661 Okey travelled to the Netherlands with John Barkstead, a fellow regicide. Formerly lieutenant of the Tower of London, Barkstead was particularly loathed for his brutal treatment of royalist prisoners under his control there. Okey believed he could rely on Downing, but thought he should just check that his and Barkstead’s journey – to meet their wives, who were coming to join them in exile – would be uninterrupted. Downing assured Okey that he was not on his list of wanted men. He then set about his trap, which was sprung when the two regicides were in Delft. By luck, Downing bagged a third victim that night: Miles Corbet, an MP and lawyer from Norfolk, had joined his comrades. Staying late, he was caught, too. Downing would later be declared ‘the greatest quarreler of all the diplomats in Europe’ by Louis XIV’s first minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Here he showed his tenacity –

insisting to the wavering Dutch that they simply could not have authority over men who had murdered his monarch’s father and effectively spiriting them away to England. Okey, Barkstead and Corbet were committed to the Tower, formally identified, then hanged, drawn and quartered.

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OWNING’S REWARD was a baronetcy – he and his prime male descendants would forever have ‘Sir’ before their given name – and further opportunities to amass a fortune that was as legendary as his stinginess. It is ironic that this man who handed over one of his life’s great benefactors to be cruelly killed, should have his name perpetually remembered in the street where British prime ministers reside and function. At the Restoration, Edward Whalley and William Goffe were among those who were not prepared to risk all on possible royalist clemency. Whalley was Goffe’s father-inlaw and also a cousin to Oliver Cromwell. In the mid-1650s Cromwell had divided England into 12 military governorships under the control of trusted major-generals, Whalley and Goffe among them. The pair remained loyal after their leader’s death, proving to be among the most stalwart supporters of his son, Richard. During the civil wars they had been noted for their bravery. John Milton wrote in admiration: ‘You, Whalley, whenever I heard or read of the fiercest battles of this war, I always expected, and found, among the thickest of the enemy’, while Oliver Cromwell recorded of Goffe at the battle of Dunbar in 1650 that, ‘at the push of pike, [Goffe] did repel the stoutest regiment the enemy had there’. At the Restoration, the two soldiers decided discretion was the better part of valour. By chance they left for New England just a day before their arrest warrants were issued. They used aliases, their 76-foot ship delivering a ‘Mr Stephenson’ and ‘Mr Richardson’ to the coast between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in July 1660 after a ten-week voyage. However, they immediately reclaimed their true identities when they found themselves greeted as honoured guests, in a colony that welcomed those averse to crowned rule in Europe. Men who had dared to sit in judgement of, and then to condemn, an errant king, were treated with remarkable respect. John Crowne, a royalist sympathiser living in Massachusetts, wrote with disgust that the two major-generals were met with ‘universal applause and admiration’, and ‘were looked upon as men dropped down from Heaven’. Crowne was further shocked to hear Whalley say on several occasions that, if presented with the question again, he would still approve of Charles I’s execution. The pair were lionised in Cambridge for seven months. When news arrived via Barbados that only seven of those intimately involved in the late king’s trial and execution would be punished, Whalley and Goffe felt sure that they could never be on such a rarefied list. But soon royal proclamations in Charles II’s name specifically condemned them, ‘For their execrable creations in sentencing to death, signing the instrument for the horrid murder, or being instrumental in taking away the precious life of our late

In New England, men who had dared to sit in judgement of, and then to condemn, an errant king were treated with remarkable respect

OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 43

REGICIDES and Goffe moved into the wilderness, hiding in the home of John Russell, a preacher, in Hadley, then a tiny community of 100 or so houses covering a square half-mile on the River Connecticut. It was a miserable existence, which continued into the mid-1670s. We have copies of their letters home. In one, Goffe wrote to his wife, Whalley’s daughter, with sad news of the older man’s decline: ‘He is scarce capable of any rational discourse, his understanding, memory and speech doth much fail him, and seems not to take much notice of any thing that is either done or said, but patiently hears all things and never complains of any thing.’ Whalley died not long after. Goffe entered myth as ‘the Angel of Hadley’ soon afterwards. The settlement was attacked by Native Americans when the men of fighting age were away, and the settlers were facing imminent death when an unknown old man was said to have appeared in their midst. Taking command of the situation, and showing military expertise, he organised everyone into a successful repulse of the attack. The mystery man then slipped away. It was only after John Russell died in 1692 that it became known that Whalley and Goffe had hidden with him. This was when people began to assume that the elderly saviour must have been Goffe.He disappears from view soon after this, dying a free man. Although Charles II did not know it, one of his father’s killers was still at large in America. Colonel John Dixwell’s death had been wrongly reported in London. The Kent soldier and politician hid in Switzerland and Germany, before settling in New Haven in 1670. He called himself James Davids and pretended to be a retired merchant. At the age of 70 he married and fathered four children. Dixwell remained committed to his republican views, writing that, ‘the Lord will appear for his people, and the good old cause for which I suffer, and that there will be those in power again who will relieve the injured and oppressed’. He died in New Haven in March, 1689 after 29 years in exile – perhaps the most successful of all the killers of the king. Charles II had already had the final word on those who disappeared in New Haven. Largely for its role in hiding the regicides, the king deprived the colony of its independence: in 1665, he had New Haven forcibly absorbed into Connecticut.

dear father’. A reward of £100 was offered for the arrest of either man. When New England learned of this, the status of Whalley and Goffe altered from that of favoured guests to contagious fugitives. It was known that anyone who helped those guilty of high treason could share their fate: death by hanging, drawing and quartering.

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OYALISTS IN NEW ENGLAND assumed that Whalley and Goffe would now be seized and sent for execution in England. But there were many Parliamentary sympathisers who wanted to protect them. When this disobedience was reported in London, Charles II was furious. Meanwhile Whalley and Goffe decided to go into hiding, leaving Boston for New Haven, travelling on horseback through a snowfall. There the senior administrator was William Leete, a committed republican. The leading preacher, the Reverend John Davenport, was also supportive, having prepared his congregation for the arrival of worthy fugitives through sermons that called on them to protect those fleeing royal bondage in Europe. In New Haven, word reached Whalley and Goffe that search parties were on their tail. To throw them off the scent, the men appeared in public, loudly proclaiming their intention to leave for the ‘Manhados’ (Manhattan) – then under Dutch control, so free from Charles II’s rule. In truth, though, they retraced their steps and hid in Davenport’s home for five weeks. This was where they learned with shock that ten of their comrades at Charles I’s trial had been put to death. Charles II sent ‘two zealous Royalists’ to hunt down Goffe and Whalley, Thomas Kellond, a merchant, and Thomas Kirke, a ship’s master. They were continuously frustrated by the obstructions thrown up by Leete: he questioned their warrants and provided the regicides with further time to flee by refusing to work on the Sabbath. There were many near misses – hiding up to their necks in water, as the redcoats went thundering overhead on a bridge; escaping detection in a kitchen cupboard, while the troops looked everywhere else in the home of Johanna Allerton (whose much older husband had arrived on the Mayflower), but each time the pair escaped. When the searches grew hot, Whalley and Goffe hid in a cave. A sympathetic farmer had food left for them, daily. But eventually this safe place was rumbled by a hunting party of Native Americans, who reported the bedding and clothes they had found in the cave: all were aware that rich rewards would come to those who apprehended these most wanted of men. Leete remained loyal. When the duo despaired and told him they were going to surrender themselves, he stopped them and urged them to continue to evade capture. They then moved to stay with Micah and Mary Tompkins, pioneer settlers in Milford. For two years they hid in the couple’s cellar, their whereabouts unknown even to the nine Tompkins children. They did not even dare to walk in the family’s apple orchard, for fear of discovery. Charles II’s resolve to capture his father’s killers never abated. Worried that they would one day be found, Whalley 44 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

From top: Miles Corbet, John Barkstead and John Okey. 19th-century engravings redrawn from contemporary portraits

Charles Spencer is the author of Killers of the King, newly published by Bloomsbury.

FURTHER READING Ezra Stiles, A History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I (published by Elisha Babcock, 1794). C.V. Wedgwood, A King Condemned: The Trial and Execution of Charles I (Palgrave MacMillan, republished 2011). Lemuel Aiken Welles, The History of the Regicides in New England (Grafton Press, 1927). Anon., ‘An Exact and Most Impartial Accompt of the Indictment, Arraignment, Trial, and Judgement (According to Law) of Twenty-Nine Regicides’, (London, 1660).

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India’s Industrial 46 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

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N FEBRUARY 2014 Prime Minister David Cameron opened a major new Jaguar Land Rover engine plant in the West Midlands, describing it as ‘a great story … which epitomises what we need to happen to the British economy’. Its owner is India’s biggest business conglomerate, Tata, and the British public might be surprised that this Indian giant, having also taken over what was once British Steel and Tetley Tea, is now the UK’s largest private employer and its biggest manufacturer, ahead of British Aerospace. Tata’s British connections date back a century and a half, during which time a small family business in Bombay grew into a global empire of almost a hundred companies. Britons need not travel far to visit the founders of the Tata dynasty. They lie buried at Brookwood cemetery, Surrey, in an exotic trio of mausoleums built in an Achaemenid-revival style, in imitation of ancient Iran, with ceramics of Persian warriors, winged images of the Zoroastrian God of Light and an inscription of the Tata family motto: ‘Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.’ The tombs are the resting place of Jamsetji Tata, the ‘Founder’, and his two very different sons, Dorab and Ratan, both of whom were knighted under the British Raj. Jamsetji was born in 1839 into the tiny Parsi minority of India’s west coast, descended from Zoroastrian refugees who had fled the newly Islamised Iran of the ninth century. Attracted to the port of Bombay by the commercial opportunities offered under British rule, the Parsis became stalwarts of urban India’s business and professional classes. The Tatas, like many other Bombay merchants, prospered mainly in the China trade, at first exchanging Indian opium for Chinese luxury goods. Jamsetji was very much a ‘Macaulay child’, the pejorative label applied by nationalists to India’s western-educated elite. His father had him privately tutored in the English-language education recently introduced by the liberal reformer and historian, Thomas Macaulay, and he spent the turbulent period of the Indian Rebellion of 1857,

Giant

Left: Jamsetji Tata, the ‘Founder’, with his wife, Hirabai on his right, and standing, Dorab, his wife, Meherbai, and Ratan with his wife, Navajbai, seated in front of him, c.1900. Below: Esplanade House, the Tata home in Bombay, completed in 1887.

Tata is one of the world’s wealthiest conglomerates, with an especially strong presence in Britain. Zareer Masani traces its origins among the Parsis of Bombay and charts its fortunes in an independent India. OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 47

Empress Mills at Nagpur, opened in 1877.

at Elphinstone College, Bombay’s first institution of higher education. Having mastered the coloniser’s language, he became an omnivorous reader of everything, from Dickens and Thackeray to treatises on botany and steel manufacture. Though he remained loyal to British rule, Jamsetji was critical of what he called the ‘unfortunate perversions’ of Empire, its ‘individual arrogance’ and attempts ‘to perpetrate a new caste domination’. His political manifesto was set out in a letter to the Times of India in 1894. The Parsis, he argued, as migrants to India who had benefited most from British rule, had a particularly large stake in its survival. ‘We are very much alive’, he cautioned, ‘though it may be from selfishness, to any serious risks incurred by our Government through the wanton and selfish behaviour of some part … of the community ruling over us. British rule, in the abstract, is nearly as good as it can be in India …’

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AMSETJI’S OWN meteoric career was a demonstration of what enterprising Indians could achieve in this new imperial era of economic globalisation, based on free trade, free markets and secure property rights. The Parsis, unhampered by Hindu caste taboos against overseas travel, were quick to seek out new foreign markets, machines and expertise; and Jamsetji was the most widely travelled Indian businessman of his time. In 1859 he sailed to Hong Kong and Shanghai to expand his father’s trading company. After four years in China he travelled to Lancashire to study its textile industry, which had put Indian handlooms out of business, then back east to Japan, in the throes of rapid industrialisation, and then to Egypt, to study its cotton trade. This ceaseless travel kept the Tatas well ahead of Indian competitors in their knowledge of the latest foreign trends. Bombay’s merchant princes had been ploughing their trading profits into the new textile factories which were bringing Britain’s Industrial Revolution to India. The Indian mills did particularly well out of global cotton shortages during the American Civil War and the Tatas profited most by importing the latest machinery. Their crowning glory was the state-of-the-art Empress Mills, opened in Nagpur in 1877 and named in honour of Victoria, the newly proclaimed Queen Empress. It was a measure of Jamsetji’s political evolution that a decade later he opened an even more ambitious textile mill, the Swadeshi, named after the new nationalist campaign for Indian-manufactured goods. The Swadeshi relied on Indian, rather 48 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

TATA

Jamsetji’s own meteoric career was a demonstration of what enterprising Indians could achieve in this new imperial era of economic globalisation

than foreign, share capital and aimed to compete with the Lancashire producers of fine British yarn. ‘If I am not a native of India, what am I?’ Jamsetji angrily responded to criticism that Parsis, as ‘foreign’ settlers, should not support Indian nationalism. He financed the Congress Party, then committed to Home Rule within the Empire, and plunged into political controversy over the devaluation of the Indian rupee by the Imperial government. When the government compensated its own civil servants for the depreciation of their salaries, Jamsetji complained: ‘It gives with an open hand to those who already have in plenty and takes away from those who have scarcely anything left to give.’

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ATA PATRIOTISM also took the form of fierce resistance to the long-standing discrimination against native companies by British businesses unaccustomed to Indian competition. When the dominant P&O shipping line charged Tatas more than British firms for their freight, Jamsetji fought a sustained and bitter campaign to break its monopoly, lobbying the imperial authorities and even trying to set up a rival Tata Line with Japanese investment. When a Lancashire supplier demanded that Tatas pay a premium on textile machines that were being sold far cheaper to local British buyers, Jamsetji stormed back at him ‘that unless I was placed on exactly the same footing as his other customers in Lancashire, I would never more buy an engine of his, and try to persuade my fellow-manufacturers in India to do the same’. One story, probably apocryphal, attributes India’s grandest hotel, the Taj Mahal, which still dominates Bombay’s Colaba waterfront, to Jamsetji’s annoyance about the colour bar then operating in some British-owned hotels. This jewel in the crown of Tatas’ present, worldwide chain of luxury hotels was the favoured project of the Founder’s final years – and once the only Indian hotel with electricity. Despite failing health, he personally scoured London, Paris and Berlin to buy the latest bathroom and electrical fittings, chandeliers and lifts for what he was determined would be the world’s most modern hotel. An English traveller praised Jamsetji’s Bombay mansion as ‘the finest private residence in India’, crammed with foreign Women at work in the exotica that included Palestinian fruit Empress Mills, c.1900. OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 49

TATA Below: R.D.Tata seated with his French wife, Sooni. His cousin, Sir Dorab Tata, and his wife, Lady Meherbai, stand behind.

trees, Croatian horses and Italian greyhounds. ‘His purchases’, wrote a biographer, ‘were made, not so much for himself, as to let India know what was new in the great world across the seas.’ His carriages were the first in Bombay to be fitted with rubber tyres, ‘whose silent progress amazed the crowd’, and he bought his first motor car in 1901. Jamsetji’s attitudes towards modernity were summed up by his response to what might have been a family scandal. In 1902 his middle-aged cousin and business partner R.D. Tata fell in love with a beautiful young Frenchwoman and decided to marry her. It was a major breach with orthodoxy in what was India’s most racially exclusive community. But to everyone’s surprise, including that of the bridal couple, the pater familias arrived in Paris for their wedding, welcomed young Suzanne Briere into her new role as Sooni Tata and defiantly showed her off at a lavish Parsi New Year party on the Thames, attended by 70 prominent members of the community, including two MPs.

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HE MOST AMBITIOUS OF ALL Jamsetji’s modernising projects came in 1896, when he volunteered half his fortune to endow an Indian science university, provided the government matched his contribution. The viceroy, Lord Curzon, wavered in the face of the enormous sums involved and there followed several years of lobbying by Jamsetji. Curzon eventually yielded and the result was the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore, the founding nucleus of India’s future silicon valley. Had the Tatas remained in trade and textiles they would probably have gone the way of most other Indian textile mill-owners in the mid-20th century, shut down by a combination of rising costs, labour unrest and growing competition from a rapidly modernising Far East. But before he died in 1904, Jamsetji had prepared the ground for one of the most ambitious transitions in economic history and one which no other Indian industrialist had dared contemplate. India was to become a major steel producer and Tata was to lead this second wave of India’s industrial revolution, as it had the first. The seed was sown in Manchester in 1867, when Jamsetji attended a lecture by the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle and was struck by his comment that ‘the nation which gains control of iron soon gains control of gold’. Jamsetji had already identified Germany and the US as the in50 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

‘I can hardly imagine,’ said Viceroy Chelmsford, ‘what we should have done during these four years if the Tata Company had not been able to give us steel rails’ dustrial powerhouses of the future. In 1902 he arrived at the Industrial Exhibition in Düsseldorf in Germany’s industrial heartland, bearing samples of Indian coal and iron ore for testing. Having convinced himself that both were suitable for steel-making, he then took a major study tour of iron works across the United States and returned to India with a leading American geologist, C.M. Weld, in tow as his consultant engineer. Weld identified the dense forests of Bihar in east-central India as the source for raw materials and spent a year prospecting there. His team, including Jamsetji’s Cambridge-educated son, Dorab, travelled on horseback and camped in tents, encountering heat and dust, monsoon rains and even tigers. They were rewarded with the discovery of hills rich in deposits of 60 per cent iron ore, located conveniently close to the coalfields of Bengal and the port of Calcutta. When Jamsetji died soon after, Dorab took on the challenge of raising the capital to make his father’s steel dream a reality. In 1906, finding

Left: The opening of a a new Tata iron and steel machine shed in 1913.

process of Indianisation rapidly reduced their numbers. A century later, Jamshedpur, with a population of nearly a million, is still effectively administered by Tata as a model of urban planning amid India’s chaotic, concrete jungles.

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the London money markets reluctant to lend, he decided to risk floating the company on the infant Bombay stock market, buoyed up by the new public appetite for Swadeshi. ‘From early morning till late at night’, wrote an American observer, ‘the Tata offices in Bombay were besieged by an eager crowd of native investors. Old and young, rich and poor, men and women, they came offering their mites.’ Another account compared them with Londoners queuing for first night theatre seats, ‘some of them with stools and lunch-boxes’. In three weeks more than £1.5 million had been raised (approximately £456 million in today’s money) and by 1913 the number of investors totalled 17,000. It was an enormous popular vote of confidence in the company and it was matched by the transformation of the new factory site from ‘a few tents and thatched huts dotted amidst a jungle clearing’. Within three years an English visitor was describing ‘street after street of commodious one-storey brick houses, all well ventilated, all supplied with running water and lit by electric light’. India’s first and only planned industrial city was named Jamshedpur in honour of Tata’s founder, who had instructed Dorab: ‘Be sure to lay wide streets planted with shady trees, every other of a quick-growing variety. Be sure that there is plenty of space for lawns and gardens. Reserve large areas for football, hockey and parks.’ Dorab consulted the British Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, about schemes for labour welfare. The company was among the first in India to introduce free medical care, an eight-hour day, paid leave, accident compensation and profit-sharing by workers. Engineers and supervisors were initially imported from Britain, Germany and the United States; but a deliberate

HE SUCCESS of Tata Steel led to a major improvement in relations with the Raj. The British head of Indian Railways had scoffed at the company’s ability to make ‘steel rails to British specifications’ and vowed ‘to eat every pound of steel they succeed in making’. A few years later, during the First World War, he had to eat his words when a major shortage of railway lines in the eastern theatres of the conflict meant that Tata Steel filled the gap, supplying 1,500 miles of rail and 300,000 tons of steel to Allied forces, who commandeered almost the entire company output at a quarter of market prices. Tata Steel, founded just eight years before, rose to the challenge and suppressed a strike by its anti-British German technicians, replacing them with Americans. A grateful Viceroy Chelmsford arrived at Jamshedpur’s new railway station in 1919 to offer public thanks. ‘I can hardly imagine’, he declared, ‘what we should have done during these four years if the Tata Company had not been able to give us steel rails … not only for Mesopotamia, but for Egypt, Palestine and East Africa.’ The Tatas’ war effort won them a place in London’s most select circles at a time when India’s budding business tycoons were grudgingly accepted into the imperial elite. The Founder’s philanthropy, which had left half his estate to the Bangalore science institute, was matched by his sons, who both died childless and left their fortunes to charitable trusts to advance learning, relieve suffering and perform ‘other works of public utility’. For the past 80 years that broad remit has financed activities ranging from nuclear research and free cancer treatment to India’s most prestigious arts centres. The two trusts, chaired successively by Tata family members, still own two thirds of the shares in Tata Sons, the group’s central holding company. It is a federal ownership model unique among Indian businesses, underpinning the Founder’s

Sir Ratan and Lady Tata host a garden party at York House, Twickenham, 1914. OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 51

TATA Tata hydro-electric works in the Bhor Ghats, Bombay, providing electricity for the city, c.1950.

concept of trusteeship. It has ensured that investment decisions are driven far less by personal whims or quick profits than by long-term strategic goals and that much of the profits continue to be ploughed back into philanthropy. During the Great Depression of the 1920s Tata Steel survived against all odds because Dorab pledged his entire personal fortune to secure a bail-out loan. The imperial government suspended its commitment to free trade and came to the rescue, joining forces with nationalists in the central legislature to enact a new protective tariff against steel imports. ‘Why foreign steel when Tata is cheaper?’ advertising posters exhorted an increasingly nationalist Indian public. ‘Tata Steel means Indian capital and Indian labour. Use Tata Steel and you help India.’ The appeal paid off: Tata Steel expanded rapidly through the 1930s and 1940s, survived Nehru’s socialism post-independence and remains India’s top listed company.

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In 1915 the new Tata power station was switched on in Bombay’s industrial district, replacing coal with clean electricity

HE OTHER MAJOR pillar of Tata strategic planning was power generation. Tata Power, now India’s biggest private supplier, originated in Jamsetji’s plan to electrify Bombay by harnessing the hydro-electric power generated by heavy monsoons in the nearby hills of the Western Ghats. Again, it was Dorab who brought the scheme to fruition in 1910, rallying Indian investors to back a series of major engineering feats: boring a mile-long tunnel through a mountain, building three major dams to turn the flow of two rivers and creating a five-mile artificial waterway. In 1915 the new Tata power station was switched on in Bombay’s industrial district, replacing coal with clean electricity. With Jamsetji’s immediate family extinct by the 1930s, the next 52 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

Above: Students at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, c.1944.

wave of innovation would be led by a charismatic, young French relative, J.R.D. Tata, or ‘Jeh’. The child of the controversial marriage of Jamsetji’s cousin, he grew up mostly in France, but was summoned back to join the family business. ‘I had two personalities’, he later reflected. ‘I was an anti-British Indian, but I was a little more of a Frenchman than an Indian.’ In 1938, at the age of 34, he took over as chairman of Tata Sons. Jeh was a keen aviator and in 1932 he had channelled his private passion into the launch of India’s first air mail service, which grew into its national airline. At the helm of India’s biggest business empire, a virtual state within the state, Jeh led the group into expansionist mode, spurred on by hopes of an independent Indian government backing local industries strongly. Tata Chemicals was launched in 1939, followed in 1945 by another industrial giant, which began by building train engines, went on to trucks and now, as Tata Motors, makes cars for global markets.

UNFORTUNATELY FOR TATA and India the public-private partnership exemplified by Air India did not last long. Nehru and Jeh were increasingly at odds over the prime minister’s socialism. Nehru admonished Jeh: ‘Never talk to me about profit. It is a dirty word!’ By the mid-1950s Nehru was establishing the system that came to

The LongmanHistory Today Awards These awards are made jointly by the publishers Longman and History Today magazine to mark links between the two organisations and to foster a wider understanding of, and enthusiasm for, history.

Ratan Tata arrives at a news conference in Mumbai to announce the launch in India of Jaguar Land Rover, 2009.

be known as the ‘Permit-Licence Raj’, which continued intact into the 1980s under his daughter Indira Gandhi. In 1953 Air India was nationalised, as was Tata’s insurance company. Tata Steel only escaped the same fate because its labour union wired the government to protest. Government obstruction frustrated Tata plans to launch a cheap Indian car in 1959 and a much-needed fertiliser plant in 1967. In 1956 Jeh publicly warned of ‘the potential danger of concentrating enormous power into the hands of a small political-cum-bureaucratic minority’. In 1972, at a Tata Steel AGM, he compained: ‘I doubt that there is anywhere in the world, outside India, any industrial executive in charge of a major enterprise with less real power than I have.’ Tata survived half a century of Nehruvian socialism through a combination of canny diplomacy and a shrewd nose for opportunities to diversify in new technologies. Tata Consultancy Services, the group’s information technology arm, was set up as early as 1968 and Tata Telecom followed in the 1980s, when the government began to liberalise. In the last decade, it was Jeh’s successor, Ratan Tata, drafted home from the United States to succeed his childless cousin, who led the Tata move into global markets such as the UK. A buying spree targeted big acquisitions such as Corus Steel (a financial drain), Tetley and Jaguar Land Rover (a resounding success), shortcuts to name-recognition and technology that would otherwise have taken years to develop. Tata, more than any other Indian business, is steeped in its philanthropic history: ‘What came from the people’, Jeh once said, ‘has gone back to the people many times over.’ The Founder, Jamsetji, would also have been proud that his pioneering brand of Indian capitalism, forged under the Raj, has come to the rescue of such emblematic British marques as Jaguar and Land Rover a century later.

Books must have been published during the year October 1st, 2013 to September 30th, 2014. Publishers should send one copy of each book they wish to nominate, together with a signed statement confirming category and eligibility. Please mark the submission clearly to distinguish from ordinary review copies that may be received. Publishers may be asked to send further copies of titles in due course. In the case of the Picture Researcher Award, researchers may submit their work directly and include a note explaining in what ways they consider the work to meet the standards required. Entries must be received by October 31st, 2014. The prize will be awarded in January 2015. Please send your entries to this address: Annual Awards, History Today, 25 Bedford Avenue, London WC1B 3AT NB. History Today’s Undergraduate Dissertation of the Year Award is administered by the Royal Historical Society and entries submitted directly to History Today will not be considered.

BOOK OF THE YEAR

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A prize of £2,000 is given for an author’s first or second book, written in English, on any aspect of history. The winning book will display innovative research and interpretation in its field and will have contributed significantly to making its subject accessible and rewarding to the general reader. A proxime accessit of £250 may also be awarded.

HISTORICAL PICTURE RESEARCHER OF THE YEAR

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A prize of £500 is given to a picture researcher whose work, on any aspect of history, demonstrates originality, creativity, imagination and resourcefulness and involves a wide range of sources, working from a minimal suggestion list or directly from the text. 2014 winner: Cathie Arrington,

(Galileo Galilei’s, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, Systems, Folio Society). the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (Harper Press). 2014 winner: Calder Walton,

Zareer Masani is author of Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist (The Bodley Head, 2013).

FURTHER READING B.R. Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India: From 1860 to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Colonialsim and Indian Economy (Oxford University Press India, 2010). OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 53

REVIEWS

Alice Stevenson discovers Tutankhamun • Charlotte Roberts finds longitude • Jennifer Altehenger remembers Tiananmen

The King’s Library in the British Library, London.

FROM GREY-HAIRED professors to the greenest of family historians, most researchers start their archival journey online. While much remains locked behind paywalls and is difficult to access, historians of Britain can freely consult more historical resources than anyone else in the world and, with a bit of clever searching, most of us can also gain access to many commercial resources. Almost every day some new fragment is posted online. For books it is impossible to beat Google Books, which claims to have digitised over 30 million volumes. Because London was the centre of book publishing for much of the last 400 years, the printed sources of British history are heavily over-represented. Coverage after 1923 (when US copyright law kicks in) is patchy, but most 18th- and 19th-century books and pamphlets are available in ‘full view’. Beyond books, the site includes parliamentary reports and legislation, obscure social history pamphlets and serials. Elsewhere, it is always worthwhile searching Project Gutenberg, The Hathi Trust and the Internet Archive (particularly for modern and non-textual materials). Newpapers are the most locked-away publications for researchers, but there are free resources available. Although composed of exclusively Australian publications, the Trove site gives free access to a huge collection of 19th and 20th century newspa54 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

SIGNPOSTS

Free Data on Dead people Tim Hitchcock sets out on an online archival journey, seeking high-quality, free resources for researchers, especially those working on British history.

pers in which British concerns are extremely well represented. Membership of many local libraries also comes with access to major newspaper collections. The National Library of Scotland, for instance, allows readers to access both The Times Digital Archive and the much larger British Newspaper Archive. Manuscripts and detailed local records are less comprehensively available. But it is always worth checking the National Archives; and local archives. Over five per cent of the National Archive’s collections are now available free of charge online and this figure is growing every year. The British Library is rapidly catching up, with sites such as its Discovering Literature, A Million First Steps (images), the Crace Collection of Maps of London and its comprehensive set of digitised doctoral theses, ETHoS. When British History Online, the Old Bailey Online, London Lives, the Newton Project and Transcribe Bentham are added to the mix, the body of primary and manuscript materials freely available at the click of a mouse rises to billions of words. This is not to mention the hundreds of specialist sites created either by funded academic projects, or by individuals passionate about their subject. Less familiar to most historians are the websites giving access to images and maps. The British Museum Collection Online is remarkable for its high quality scans of millions of objects; while

more specialist collections, such as the Lewis Walpole Library and Tate Britain’s Turner Bequest, are notable for providing high resolution images free of charge. For 20th-century and local photographs, it is always worthwhile checking out HistoryPin. A quick search on Old Maps Online gives access to 20 different major collections from around the world, including the Crace Collection and the New York Public Library’s holdings, that generally can be downloaded and re-used. The real difficulty is knowing where to look. If you want to make sure that the sites you are searching contain academically credible resources, it is best to start with one of the major ‘federated’ search services. For British history the most comprehensive is Connected Histories – allowing users to search over 35 billion words of primary material covering the period 1500-1900. For images and museum objects, you cannot beat Europeana. Federated search sites also allow you to interrogate commercial sites at a distance – saving you the cost of signing up, only to find there is nothing relevant. Pretty much every topic has a website dedicated to it, generally driven by simple passion. There are sites such as Rictor Norton’s Gay History & Literature and Peter Higginbotham’s The Workhouse; but these are just two among thousands. To these you have to add history

blogs and tweeters. Following #Twitterstorians can give you access to a lively community of researchers, which leads, in turn, to a remarkable world of historical blogging. For a guide to what’s hot in history, it is worth checking out Sharon Howard’s History Carnival. The development of history online has transformed how we do research, resulting in many more people writing and researching more history, both in the academy and beyond. The discipline is changing. But this is not simply about free access to more data. New tools for analysis are also emerging. Google’s Ngram Viewer (and the more sophisticated Bookworm tool) are making it possible to trace single words and ideas across millions of books; while Voyant Tools allow you to analyse historical material as a collection of text in new ways. The British past is the most digitised in the world; and the last 15 years has seen a fundamental transformation in how we research and write about it. We will never complete the job and there are real problems with low quality scans, unrepresentative collections, skewed search and disastrously inaccurate Optical Character Recognition systems. But the online has also made British history more democratic, more interesting and better researched. Tim Hitchcock

TWELVE OF THE BEST SITES: British History Online: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/ British Museum Collection Online: http://www.britishmuseum. org/research/collection_online/search.aspx Connected Histories: http://www.connectedhistories.org/ Europeana: http://www.europeana.eu/ Gay History & Literature: http://rictornorton.co.uk/ Google Books: http://books.google.co.uk/ History Carnival: http://historycarnival.org/ HistoryPin: http://www.historypin.com/ NGram Viewer: https://books.google.com/ngrams/ Old Bailey Online: http://www.oldbailyonline.org Old Maps Online: http://project.oldmapsonline.org/ Trove: http://trove.nla.gov.au/

The Egyptian Myths

A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends Garry J. Shaw Thames & Hudson 224pp £12.95

The Nile

Downriver Through Egypt’s Past and Present Toby Wilkinson Bloomsbury 332pp £20

IN INTRODUCING Victorian Britain to Egypt, Amelia Edwards memorably sailed ‘A thousand miles up the Nile’ from Cairo to Abu Simbel. Toby Wilkinson takes us on a shorter journey in the opposite direction, from Egypt’s natural southern frontier at Aswan down the Nile Valley to Cairo. Neither itinerary includes the Delta. Despite being home to half the population and half the arable land in the country and strategically vital as the meeting point of Africa, the Near East and the Mediterranean, the north of Egypt lacks tourist appeal. It is the river valley, the terrain that has fascinated the modern west since Napoleon’s watershed campaign, that Wilkinson revisits: the major archaeological sites of Upper Egypt, with occasional, more remote forays. The book is devoted to a ‘Golden Age’ of rediscovery that ended in the mid-20th century and to the now exotic artists, writers and excavators who peopled it. Modern archaeology cannot compete. The book is firmly grounded in the past – monuments and memories, recovery and interpretation – but it is not a history and its characters

move in topographical rather than chronological settings. Nor is it a detailed guide to the monuments. The author draws rather on extensive personal experience to present glimpses of life along the ever-present Nile, interweaving ancient society and its Greek, Roman, Christian and Islamic successors with observations on modern life. If the remote and glorious past provides the framework, the present is never far away and a postscript refers to the shadow cast by the crisis that has beset Egypt since 2011. Garry Shaw’s book treats life in the pharaonic era indirectly, through the myths by which the Egyptians explained the world and their place in it. In the absence of any ancient handbook, religious beliefs and practices have had to be reconstructed from very fragmentary material. One of the most important elements is the mythology that developed over millennia into the forms preserved iconographically in late temples, such as Edfu and Philae, as well as textually in the works of classical authors such

When Egyptian tourism picks up ... these books will be fitting additions to the library of a Nile Traveller as Plutarch. Central to this is the murder of the rightful king, Osiris, by his brother Seth, the consequent social upheaval, the battle for the eventual triumph of right order and the transformation of Osiris into a symbol of resurrection as ruler of another world. The myths are presented here in a down-to-earth and often humorous manner, consistent with the spirit of the texts, exposing the gamut of human emotion from the rage of the solar deity to the lamentations of the widowed Isis. The author ranges more widely than the book’s title might OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 55

REVIEWS suggest, offering a brief account of temples and individual access to divinity and of the ‘magical’ character of some religious practices. He also guides the reader in lively fashion through the perilous journey to the afterlife and the inescapable judgement of Osiris. The book is extensively illustrated, capturing effectively the variety of source material – such as, papyri, temples, tombs, statues, amulets – on which our understanding rests. Political upheavals are not new, Egypt is once again deeply divided, its archaeological sites subject to looting and destruction, and yet the Nile flows on. However, one factor distinguishes past from present. Modern Egypt depends heavily on tourism and Luxor (ancient Thebes) has suffered most from the dramatic decline that has followed recent turmoil. When tourism picks up, as it surely will, these two books, both intended for non-specialist audiences, will be fitting additions to the library of a Nile traveller. In the meantime, both can be read with interest and pleasure in an armchair. Anthony Leahy

1177 B.C.

The Year Civilization Collapsed Eric H. Cline Princeton University Press 237pp £19.95

1177 B.C. seeks to explain the complexities that brought an end to the Late Bronze Age (LBA) in the eastern Mediterranean. The protagonists are the ‘Sea Peoples’, best known from contemporary Egyptian documents, and the main

problem is the extent to which they were responsible for archaeologically attested destructions extending from the Aegean in the west to Mesopotamia in the east. Cline sets the stage, literally, with a prologue and three ‘acts’ covering, respectively, the 15th, 14th and 13th centuries bc. Acts 1 to 3 provide a series of vignettes – e.g., the Trojan War, the Exodus, the battle of Qadesh – cleverly woven together to convey how all relevant LBA polities (the Aegean, Anatolia, Cyprus, the Levant, Egypt) were interconnected economically. The fourth ‘act’ and fifth chapter conclude the drama, proclaiming that drought, famine, earthquakes, migrations and internal rebellions led to a ‘system’s collapse’. All this is filtered through a long, inconclusive discussion of ‘complexity theory’, while an ‘epilogue’ ostensibly presents the aftermath but largely repeats what is heralded throughout the preceding two chapters. While Cline’s drama does not tell us much that we didn’t already know, the compilation of evidence and the way he tells the story is new, at times engaging, in particular if you are inclined to seek explanation of the events involved through documentary sources – Egyptian, Akkadian, Hittite, Ugaritic. Cline’s story embraces the dramatis personae (kings, queens, pharaohs), as well as the merchants, ships and mariners involved in the extensive trade relations that characterised the 300-year-long ‘international age’ leading up to the ‘apocalyptic disaster’. In two eye-opening charts, Cline outlines the social network of relationships attested in Egypt’s Amarna Letters and the individuals involved in the correspondence of the merchant Urtenu at Ugarit in Syria. Cline is clearly in command of the textual record and his reading of it is the book’s real strength. The most relevant archaeological data is presented, though in a more cavalier manner (excepting that of Israel), while the discussion of ‘natural causes’ is inconclusive and somewhat uncritical but up-to-date. The precise dates (including the title) are best guesses from a limited set of viable radiocarbon dates, some anchor points in

Cline is clearly in command of the textual record of the period and his reading of it is the book’s real strength documentary sources and circular reasoning, but it’s probably the best we can do at present. Nonetheless, this gives the narrative an exactitude in sequences and correspondences too smoothly linked for comfort. For example, we are told that the Egyptians were victorious in encounters with the Sea Peoples in 1207 and 1177 bc, which presumes, first, that there were two ‘waves’ of them (a modern construct) and, secondly, that historians of antiquity should accept at face value the veracity of bombastic royal records designed to serve Egyptian beliefs. The needs of the ancient

historian are not well served by the excessively self-referenced footnotes, directing the reader to Cline’s earlier publications (and thence to original sources). This limits the book’s value to other scholars/researchers and bodes ill for university students, already disinclined to use a library. Another problem is the tendency to treat unverified assumptions, or issues of ongoing debate, as established facts; e.g. the use of Minoan artists to create the frescoes at Tell edDab’a in Egypt’s Nile delta, the Mycenaean ‘conquest’ of Crete and the Hittite ‘conquest’ of Cyprus. Since 2000, Cline has authored or co-authored six ‘popular’ books or ‘very short introductions’, parts of which are woven into his narrative. Much of the present narrative reads like classroom lectures to undergraduates – not a style to my liking – but, in the end, having persevered to track down some of the original sources to which Cline refers, I learned something myself from 1177 BC. A. Bernard Knapp

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EXHIBITION curse. This is mentioned, but it remains firmly THE BURIAL CHAMBER OF Tutankhamun is in the background, giving greater space to the popularly ranked among the most sensational of vibrant reverberations of the tomb’s unearthing all archaeological discoveries. Golden treasures, in fashion, jewellery, music, film, literature and legends of a pharaoh’s curse and mysteries the media. There is also an important nod to how surrounding the death of the boy-king have news of the find was received by Egyptians and all caught the public imagination and media attention. None of these familiar topics is central the contemporary political climate in which the discovery was made. The year 1922 was an imto the Discovering Tutankhamun exhibition at portant one for the Egyptian nation, not because Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and it is all the of archaeological discoveries, but because more interesting for it. Egypt claimed independence from the British The moments of revelation when Howard Protectorate that had occupied the country. One Carter first set eyes upon ‘wonderful things’ on consequence for Carter and his team was that November 26th, 1922 are a well-worn part of Egyptians now asserted greater control over the retelling of this remarkable find. Discovering archaeological fieldwork and the clearance of the Tutankhamun refreshingly sets that instance of tomb was halted while negotiations for access discovery within four much broader histories: were conducted. the years of archaeological toil to locate and With so much attention being given to subsequently record the tomb (1907-39); the modern archives there might be a concern Tut-mania of the 1920s as witnessed in film, that there are no fashion and literature; ancient monuments the decades either to admire. This is side of Tutakhamun’s certainly not the case. reign (1332–1322 bc); In the final galleries and the future presersome of the finest vation and interpretapieces of art from the tion of the tomb. Amarna period (about The depar1350–1330 bc), the ture point for the time into which Tutexhibition is Carter ankhamun was born, himself (1874–1939), have been brought a man whose name together. It includes is as famous as Discovering Tutankhamun works on loan from that of the ancient Ashmolean Museum, to 2 November 2014 major international ruler, alongside the excavation’s sponsor, Lord Carnarvon (1866–1923). Far less well known outside of Egyptology is the University of Oxford’s Griffith Institute. Yet this is where Carter’s archive has been housed since his death in 1939. Discovering Tutankhamun draws upon this resource, much of which has never been exhibited before in public. Carter’s handwritten diaries, sketches and records richly narrate the story of a decade of meticulous work (Carter’s Horus watercolour is shown here). Also displayed are Harry Burton’s photographs of the finds, together with watercolour paintings of the grave goods by Winifred Brunton. Those seeking the ‘glint of gold’ might be disappointed by the lack of original material from the burial. Yet where previous shows allowed us to marvel at the detail of ancient Egyptian craftsmanship, these archives permit us to marvel at the painstaking detail of the archaeological profession. The next set of galleries leads visitors from the archaeologists’ domain to the wider world of the 1920s. It would have been easy for the Ashmolean’s curators to focus here upon the other household tale of King Tut, that of his alleged 58 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

museums and from the Ashmoelan’s own collections. The Amarna Period was a tumultuous time for Egyptian religion, with Tutankhamun’s father abandoning the cults of the traditional gods and focusing devotion on a single deity, the sun disc or ‘Aten’. Egyptian art reflected this change, with a dramatic shift from the rigid conventions of representation to an artistic style in which the ruler and his family were portrayed in more intimate, stylised ways. The final part of the exhibition looks at new initiatives to preserve the tomb through reconstructions and replicas. However, the most exciting future of all comes with the final text panel: an invitation to the next generation of Egyptologists. Only 30 per cent of the Griffith Institute’s archives have been reviewed or published (see: (http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/discoveringTut/), but it is now available online for all to study. Thus, the work of discovering Tutankhamun is far from complete. Alice Stevenson Exhibition catalogue: Discovering Tutankhamun by Paul Collins and Liam McNamara, 104pp., £20

The King’s Grave

The Search for Richard III Philippa Langley and Michael Hicks John Murray 276pp £20

THIS IS really two books. In one, a Richard III Society luminary – star of the Channel 4 TV documentary, The King in the Car Park – describes the discovery of Richard’s skeleton, while in the other an academic historian studies Richard and his reign. A screenwriter, Philippa Langley gives us a breathless, day-by-day narrative of the dig at Leicester, in which her intuition played a big part. This is accompanied by the findings of forensic scientists, who examined Richard’s skeleton and, of course, by a passionate defence of his innocence. (There is a wonderfully funny account of how she submitted his handwriting to ‘graphoanalysis’, which revealed that ‘Criticism of a personal nature could hurt him’.) Yet while it would be churlish not to congratulate the Richard III Society on their campaign to unearth the king, they have shot themselves in the foot by proving beyond doubt that he was a crookback – previously dismissed as fiendishly cunning ‘Tudor propaganda’. In contrast, Jones is a fine historian with some excellent books under his belt, notably Bosworth 1485. Sadly, one has to disagree with an awful lot of what he says here, besides being surprised at what he leaves out. Always trying to see Richard’s behaviour in the best light, he claims that Dominic Mancini (an Italian scholar in London

REVIEWS during Edward V’s deposition) believed the real ‘justification for Richard taking the throne’ was to avoid an investigation by canon lawyers of his mother’s alleged adultery, which is not the impression received by most people who read Mancini. He ignores Mancini’s unequivocal statement that, from the start, contemporaries suspected Richard of aiming at the throne. Jones praises the king’s leniency towards Margaret Beaufort after she plotted against him when he had no alternative, since her husband Lord Stanley was a key pillar of his dangerously narrow political power base. He does not mention the Act of Parliament of 1484, by which the king he praises for loyalty branded his brother Edward IV as a murderous, womanising tyrant, ‘every good woman and maiden standing in dread to be ravished and defouled’. The authors differ on whether or not Richard killed the Princes in the Tower. Langley argues for his innocence, triumphantly quoting the graphologist’s insight that he was a man incapable of ‘setting out, without provocation, to do harm to anybody’. Modestly warning us that ‘psychological profiling of historical figures is still in its infancy’, she cites the opinion of two psychologists, whom she commissioned, that Richard may have suffered from ‘Intolerance of Uncertainty’ syndrome, an anxiety disorder characterised by excessive worry. (Perhaps his nephews suffered from it too?) Jones cannot quite bring himself to acquit Richard of murdering the Princes. He believes the king ordered their elimination after an attempt to rescue them, ‘a course of action he only undertook with the utmost reluctance and with the deepest regret’. This was the same man who, according to Mancini, had just over three months earlier written to assure the council he would risk his life in their defence. Desmond Seward

The Golden Age of Maritime Maps

When Europe Discovered the World Catherine Hofmann, Hélène Richard, Emmanuelle Vagnon (Eds.) Firefly 256pp £22.75

The Art and History of Globes Sylvia Sumira The British Library 224pp £30

‘THOSE WHO travel the seas in ships are called to witness the Lord’s work.’ This verse from Psalm 107 was quoted by the Norman captain Jacques de Vaulx at the beginning of his lavishly illustrated treatise on navigation published in Le Havre in 1583. The citation features at the beginning of the first essay in another beautifully illustrated volume, this time the multi-authored The Golden Age of Maritime Maps: When Europe Discovered the World. The 16th-century captain intended to praise the art of navigation, through which the breadth and nobility of God’s creative work was revealed. In quoting his words, Frank Lestringant, the essay’s author, reminds his modern readers that navigation on the high seas has always inspired a sense of wonder. A similar emotional reaction is brought on by this richly illustrated book, with reproductions of over 140 nautical maps made to guide European mariners across the seas (or to show off the navigational skill of their owners) from the 13th to the 18th centuries. At first, these charts, or portolans, portrayed only the coastlines of the

Mediterranean and Black Seas, but then, as Mediterranean sailors ventured with increasing regularity into the Atlantic, they delineated the oceanic shores of Europe and Africa, before providing westerners the first glimpses of faraway lands. However, few of the charts that were used on board ship have survived; the majority of extant nautical charts represent those that, richly embellished with a profusion of figures touched in gold and glorious colour, were produced to enhance the collections of kings and wealthy patrons. Similarly, the quality reproduction of the charts enriches the detailed account of this cartography provided by the experts contributing to The Golden Age of Maritime Maps, originally published in French to accompany an exhibition held at the National Library of France. Between them, they trace the fascinating history of the portolan chart tradition in the Mediterranean basin from the Late Middle Ages to the Age of Discovery, its later evolution to include the oceans and new worlds disclosed by the great European voyages and the debt to ancient, Arab and Asian cartographic traditions in providing an image of the Indian Ocean.

Globes, Sumira reminds us, enabled princes to gaze upon the world they wished to master The two-dimensional maritime maps described above reflect the expansion of Euopeans’ knowledge of the world that led to our modern global view. The history of the world’s representation as a three-dimensional globe is the subject of Sylvia Sumira’s new, and equally lavishly illustrated, The Art and History of Globes, which covers the story from the start of the 16th to the end of the 19th century. Sumira shows how globes were much more than just

spherical maps of the earth or the heavens: they allowed viewers to encompass from outside the magnitude of the whole planet and to see it in its relationship with the heavens (crucially important for seafaring). Globes, she reminds us, enabled princes to gaze upon the world they wished to master; they disseminated new knowledge; they imposed visions of spatial order across lands and seas, peoples and environments; and they summed up how the human race sought to find its place within the cosmos. Sumira’s objectives are to explain the significant role played by globes in the history of navigation, exploration and science, and to explore their importance as objects of beauty, technical skill and economic worth. She introduces the globe as a genre with reproductions of a typical celestial and a terrestrial globe to illustrate their parts. Unfamiliar technical terms are explained in a glossary. A comprehensive chapter on the general history of globe-making looks at the various symbolisms of the globe in the visual arts and at the cultural and social context that produced the globes throughout the centuries. A fascinating account of the method of their construction follows, after which the reader finds an illustrated survey of 60 globes, in chronological order, starting with the painted globe made by Martin Behaim in 1492, on the basis of navigational charts and travel accounts from the Middle Ages, to the colour lithographed globe produced after 1884 by a British firm to show telegraph lines and shipping routes. Thus we learn how, from being a cartographical reference work, a decorative object highlighting the social and cultural status of its owner and an instrument in teaching and scientific demonstration, the globe became a fashionable mass-produced commodity for public consumption. With a small-sized globe (‘pocket globes’ began to be produced in England in the late 17th century) a gentleman could hold the universe in the palm of his hand or, with John Betts’ imaginative ‘umbrella’ globe of c.1850, take it with him wherever he went. Alessandro Scafi OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 59

REVIEWS

Torpedo

Inventing the Militaryindustrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain Katherine C. Epstein Harvard University Press 328pp £30

The Physics of War From Arrows to Atoms Barry Parker Prometheus Books 340pp £22.99

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DID PHYSICS make the torpedo possible? Barry Parker’s book, The Physics of War, primarily an explanation of the principles of physics behind how different weapons work, claims that it did. Yet Katherine Epstein’s book, Torpedo, a detailed, empirical history of the torpedo in Britain and the United States before the First World War, features no physicists. Instead, Epstein introduces the reader to an array of engineers and non-technical staff, whose decisions were much more than narrow technical judgments. In Parker’s book, even the history of warfare summary-for-undergraduates that alternates with the physics explanations mostly does not support the book’s assertion that physics led to new weapons. Throughout history, scientific understanding often followed deployment and did not guide the development of new weapons.

Parker’s book (necessarily brief, as he covers all of human history) is a peculiar, American-centric one. He seems indifferent to most existing history on the relationship between science and weapons. Thus, his narrative makes statements that are curious or simply wrong: for example, he calls the Second World War ‘The Great War’. He omits relevant facts: predictably describing Isaac Newton as a heroic physicist and dismissing alchemy as mysticism rather than science, he never tells the reader that Newton – as is well known – was an active alchemist. Even the book’s fundamental premise that physics (the modern discipline) can be traced through history has long since been disproved by historians of science. The very different approach of these two books is well illustrated by comparing Parker’s explanation of torpedoes with Epstein’s analysis. Parker tells the reader that ‘[a] modern torpedo

Epstein shows how technical details help elucidate history ... she presents a nuanced understanding of weapons development and aquisition is a self-propelled projectile’. Epstein explains that American torpedoes were powered by turbine engines whereas British torpedoes used piston engines. She argues that this was due to Britain’s military and financial strength, which gave it superior research and development facilities and thus the ability to pursue incremental improvements to its engines, whereas the weaker and poorer American navy relied on big, risky technical leaps. Thus Epstein shows how

technical details help elucidate history; her approach and results align well with recent research on other weapons. Epstein presents a nuanced understanding of weapons development and acquisition. She argues that the history of the torpedo shows that the British and American navies were not inherently conservative, but rather too enthusiastic for new weapons, as their eagerness exceeded their technical knowledge. Whereas Parker fails to suggest that technical decisions have wider consequences. He appears puzzled by the fact that, when Robert Whitehead, inventor of the torpedo, sold the rights to his weapon in 1866, ‘the US Navy was not interested in it’. Epstein not only shows that, in fact, the American navy was interested in Whitehead’s torpedo in 1866 but provides important subtlety by highlighting many crucial influences on development, including resources, naval tactics, secrecy and intellectual property. She explains that the American navy – hardly uninterested in the torpedo – decided in 1866 to develop a domestic torpedo rather than buy its weapons abroad. Ultimately, in 1890-1, it did order Whitehead torpedoes, but they were manufactured under license by an American company. Developing torpedoes led to close collaboration between private companies and the navies in Britain and the United States. Epstein argues that the first military-industrial complexes thus emerged before the First World War rather than after the Second, as is commonly argued. The business of war, as Epstein’s account makes clear, continued in peacetime. Parker, implicitly denying this overlap, somewhat bizarrely asserts that because a German ship evaded Britain’s navy at Gibraltar in 1914, the Royal Navy was ‘obviously not well prepared for war’, because they ‘hadn’t fought a battle in a hundred years’. It seems the laws of physics do not explain the nuances of history. Hermione Giffard

EXHIBITION THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, in July 1714, the stars. Even less successful methods, such as those based on the earth’s magnetic field or on British Parliament passed ‘An Act for Providing a system of synchronised rocket launches, form a Publick Reward for such Person or Persons as part of the story. shall Discover the Longitude at Sea’. This Act, The longitude problem is one of local signifwhich is on public display for the first time at the icance to the National Maritime Museum. The National Maritime Museum’s new exhibition, Royal Observatory was built at Greenwich to marked an extraordinary moment in British contribute to this enquiry and the prime meridpolitics, when a scientific problem was made ian (longitude 0º) runs through it to this day. a national and political priority. For the next Several of the objects on display have a homely century scientists and politicians, as well as charm: Maskelyne’s observing suit, for example, seamen, artisans and visionaries worked alongside each other – with varying degrees of chagrin constructed from padded silk for optimal and amicability – to solve the longitude problem, comfort and warmth, resembles a luxurious onesie. Both book and exhibition acknowledge and to claim some of the vast financial reward. The large projection of a choppy seascape that that the Greenwich discoveries had a global significance. Captain Cook’s voyages benefited opens the exhibition illustrates one of the most significant problems facing mariners in the early from, and contributed to, advances in the pursuit of longitude, and one early chronometer, K2 by modern world. Away from the coast, with no Larcum Kendall, spent 17 years on Pitcairn Island landmarks to steer by, navigators relied on calafter it was seized by the culations based on speed and mutineers of HMS Bounty. direction of travel to deterThe discovery of a reliable mine their position: a process method for calculating longiknown as ‘dead reckoning’. tude helped to shape Britain’s With no reliable method to national, political and ecodetermine longitude, ships nomic destiny. Commercial were at the mercy of inaccuwealth and colonial strength rate charts and human error. came from safer navigation, The loss of life and profit made extensive exploration and solving the problem of longiaccurate charting. There tude an urgent and potentially even seems to be a paean to lucrative undertaking. liberalism embedded in the Richard Dunn’s and Ships, Clocks & Stars narrative of this exhibition, Rebekah Higgitt’s book, The Quest for Longitude as the rarefied speculations Finding Longitude (that runs until January 4th, 2015, of privileged thinkers and accompanies the exhibition) National Maritime Museum unrepeatable creations of elite gives full weight to the comcraftsmen are democratised, plexity of this solution, which standardised and eventually mass produced, required the bringing together of disparate driven by free debate and judicious governmenstrands of enquiry and the combined endeavtal incentive. The narrative becomes problematic ours of many remarkable individuals. John in Dunn’s and Higgitt’s book, however, where Harrison’s famous timekeepers have dominated the impact of the new methods on ordinary historical discussion and they are displayed in voyages is shown to be surprisingly slow and the exhibition in all their dazzling and intricate where the victims of colonialism and 19th-cenglory (Harrison 1 is shown above), yet the ability tury industrialisation are briefly acknowledged. This exhibition and the accompanying book offer an engaging and thoughtfully presented insight into an intellectual and practical enquiry that united politicians and scientists, scholars, craftsmen, astronomers and sailors. This process generated some remarkable achievements and exceptional benefits, but also had unforeseen problems and consequences. The 2014 Lonto keep time accurately at sea was only one part gitude Prize, a modern attempt to combine of the eventual answer. Just as important were cutting-edge research, practical application, govthe astronomical observations and calculations ernment money and public opinion, opens for pioneered by Tobias Mayer and established by submissions this autumn. It is an undertaking the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, whose that we are invited to observe with interest. Nautical Almanac allowed sailors to calculate Charlotte Roberts longitude from observations of the moon and

The discovery of a reliable method for calculating longitude helped shape Britain’s destiny

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REVIEWS

Bombing the People

Giulio Douhet and the Foundations of Air-Power Strategy, 1884-1939 Thomas Hippler Cambridge University Press 285pp £65

THE ITALIAN SOLDIER, Giulio Douhet, is one of the few wellknown names in the history of air power strategy, along with Hugh Trenchard, father of the RAF, and Billy Mitchell, the American air power pioneer. Command of the Air, originally published in 1921, was

62 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

the mature statement of Douhet’s theories about how the air could change the nature of war. Thomas Hippler’s detailed and thorough account of Douhet’s thinking shows us that his ideas were slow to mature and full of paradoxes and contradictions. Writing before the First World War, Douhet was a ‘pacifist’ on bombing, hostile to the idea that aircraft should be used to bomb civilians. By the time Command of the Air was published, he had become an advocate of a large-scale and immediate attack by bombers, using conventional bombs, gas and germ warfare, against the vulnerable urban heart of the enemy nation. This was a remarkable transition. Hippler argues that Douhet came to accept the ‘democratic paradox’ that a modern nation has to employ any means to defeat a wicked enemy. Since the enemy was responsible for violation, the citizens of the enemy state shared that responsibility and should become legitimate objects of aerial warfare. By 1915-16 Douhet’s later

ideas on bombing the vital centres of the enemy to demoralise and terrorise the enemy home front had already appeared in print. To create the possibility for doing so it was necessary to establish what Douhet called ‘command of the air’, or, more commonly today, air superiority. The contradiction lies in Douhet’s argument that counterforce attack to win command of the air should be carried out at the same time as massive bombing attacks, creating an unresolved tension between the air or the ground as the principal objective for an air force. This may be less of a contradiction than Hippler implies, for it is exactly what the Luftwaffe tried to do in September 1940 and the American air force in 1944 over Germany. The real problem with Douhet, Hippler suggests, is the idea that air power was a democratic instrument suitable for an age of total war, that seemed to justify immediate assault on the enemy home population from the first days of a war. Douhet claimed this would produce victory for the side that could hit hardest and soonest. This was not supported by any practical experience, nor any appreciation of the technical problems involved. Like the bombing-scare literature of the inter-war years, it was a fantasy, well beyond the capability of the Italian, or any other, air force in 1939. Bombing Germany took four years of ever heavier escalation. It did not produce instant victory after a few devastating raids, as Douhet had supposed. Perhaps, Hippler points out, the fact that Douhet never learned to fly reduced his ability to understand the inherent limitations of air power. Hippler is rightly cautious about ascribing too much strategic influence to Douhet. His major works were available in France, Germany and, later, the United States (in 1942), but Douhet’s writing simply preached to the converted, on issues such as the need for an autonomous air force or the fragility of civilian morale. Although not very original, Douhet expressed his views in powerful and articulate polemics against his many critics. He has been rescued

from obscurity because what he said has reinforced air force claims later in the 20th century for an independent organisation and a distinct doctrine. In practice this has proved to be a dead end. Douhet’s greatest critic, the Italian airman, Amedeo Mecozzi, favoured limited but effective strikes using fighterbombers against the key tactical and strategic targets supporting the enemy’s military operations. The First Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 has sometimes been viewed as the triumph of Douhetism, but it was in reality the vindication of the much-neglected Mecozzi. Although over-long and densely written, historians will be grateful to Hippler for putting Douhet and the debates he engendered firmly on the map. In the end, much of what he wrote on air power and total war was evident to anyone reflecting on the lessons of 1914-18. The American bombing of Japan in 1945, and of Korea and Vietnam later on, did not need Douhet except as corroboration. Richard Overy

The Blood Telegram Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide Garry J. Bass

Alfred A. Knopf and Hurst 499pp £12.99

THE 1971 BANGLADESH genocide is little remembered, although it was almost as bad as Rwanda. It turned the Cold War story of freedom-loving US versus the oppressive Soviet Union on its head. The land of the free was in a shameful alliance with the killers, while the evil empire was on the side of the angels.

Yet this ‘good versus bad’ battle was very sharply etched. In 1970 the Avami League, dominated by the Bengalis of East Pakistan, won the country’s first truly democratic election. The outraged Punjabis of West Pakistan, who had ruled the country since its birth in 1947, unleashed a brutal crackdown killing a quarter of a million Bengalis, possibly a million, with ten million refugees fleeing to neighbouring India. Thousands of women were raped and there was also a ferocious ethnic cleansing of the minority Hindu population. The Pakistani military went round forcing men to lift their lungis, the cloth that men in that part of the world drape round their waist, aware that Hindus, unlike Muslims, were not circumcised. And, like Jews in Nazi Germany, some Hindus were forced to wear a cloth to identify themselves. This was much worse than the trauma of Partition, with Archer Blood, the US consul general in

The 1971 Bangladesh genocide ... turned the Cold War story of the freedomloving US versus the oppressive Soviet Union on its head Dhaka, in a graphic telegram to the State Department, calling it ‘Selective Genocide’. This telegram gives the book its title. Blood sent many chilling reports documenting the genocide but Richard Nixon dismissed him as another wretched liberal and humanitarian relief came low down Nixon’s priorities. Keen to pursue his opening to Mao’s China, he was using Yahya Khan, the Pakistani military dictator, to send messages to the Chinese and readily accepted

Yahya’s view that there was no genocide, just an Indian plot to destroy Pakistan. India was not unhappy at breaking up Pakistan but the opportunity was presented by Yahya and for the world’s greatest democracy not to side with India, the world’s largest democracy, on this great moral issue remains the most astonishing story of the Cold War. Gary Bass, a reporter turned academic, displays great forensic skill, using secret White House tapes to show how Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, covered up their responsibility for the slaughter, a cover-up with more lethal consequences than the Watergate cover-up. Even now, much material remains a secret. Nixon, who told the British Foreign Secretary that, ‘the British got out too soon’ from India, never had much time for Indians or Indian democracy. Indians, he told Kissinger, were ‘devious’ and ‘a slippery,

treacherous people’, unlike the ‘straightforward Pakistanis’. Partly this was prompted by India’s non-aligned policy, whereas Pakistan was an ally. But there was also a personal factor. Nixon loathed the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, calling her ‘the old bitch’, while Yahya was a ‘thoroughly decent and reasonable man’. Kissinger, who called Indians ‘those sons of bitches’, admired Yahya’s Sandhurst training and likened him to Abraham Lincoln. To help the Pakistani Lincoln, Nixon broke his own government’s embargo on arms sales by supplying weapons through Jordan and Iran. Kissinger even shared secret US intelligence with the Chinese, hoping China would amass troops on its Indian border and force the Indians to abandon plans to stop the slaughter by invading East Pakistan. The Soviets, presented with an opportunity to become fighters for oppressed people,

OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 63

REVIEWS could hardly miss and promptly signed a defence treaty with India, a crucial reassurance for the Indians that, should China attack, the Soviets would come to their rescue. In December 1971 the Indian army went into East Pakistan. But before the Indians could reach Dhaka, Nixon went to the Security Council of the United Nations and India required a Soviet veto to prevent a UN call for withdrawal of Indian troops. The US did get the resolution through the General Assembly, with 104 nations supporting it and India getting only 11 votes, ten of them from the Soviet bloc. But that vote had no legal sanction. Even then Nixon would not give up and as Indian troops neared Dhaka he sent the Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal. In the end, like the Pakistan army, Nixon accepted defeat. But his failure to restrain his ‘decent’ friend Yahya Khan still haunts Bangladesh. Mihir Bose

The Cold War in South Asia

Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965 Paul M. McGarr Cambridge University Press 403pp £65

BRITISH ACADEMIC interest in post-colonial South Asia has long lacked the rigour found in works dedicated to the region and its people prior to 1947. Essential questions around the relative influence of Britain (and later the United States) in the history and making of independent India and 64 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

Pakistan remain cloudy at best. In fact, for South Asia, there is no ready comparison to the likes of John Lewis Gaddis (The Cold War) or David Hoffman (The Dead Hand). In some ways this is a curious state of affairs. After all, the common assumption was that Britain ‘got’ South Asia. Years of imperial rule, it was once thought, provided Britain with a unique opportunity to understand India and Pakistan’s respective approaches to a world divided by ideological creeds. This was the view of American elites and President Truman in the late 1940s. Yet, in a little more than a decade – by the early 1960s – the Democratic Kennedy administration was convinced that the United States had replaced Britain as the most influential western nation in South Asia. ‘The Cold War in the Periphery’, as the historian Robert McMahon once described American engagement in the region, is largely a narrative about America, India and Pakistan. Scant references to Attlee, Churchill, Eden and Macmillan underscored the point about Britain’s apparent loss of influence. Until recently, the historical account of British influence was limited to Anita Inder Singh’s The Limits of British Influence, published 23 years ago. Therefore, Paul McGarr’s monograph is a welcome addition to a body of literature that, for one reason or another, escapes the imagination and scrutiny of contemporary historians. The detailed narrative is easily accessible and immaculately researched. The use of rarer primary documents from Indian archives, as well as South Asian newspaper articles dating back to the 1950s, is especially noteworthy. McGarr’s book surveys a series of episodes highlighting Anglo-American engagement in South Asia and includes innovatively constructed chapters on Kashmir, India’s expulsion of Portuguese authority from Goa and the 1965 India-Pakistan War. The central conclusion is that Anglo-American approaches between 1947 and 1965 were, in essence, ‘misguided, ineffectual, and counterproductive’. Rather, according to McGarr, strategies of action adopted by Beijing and

Moscow were ‘carefully calibrated’. At first glance, such generalities might be discounted as being offered without much attention to nuance. Yet each chapter tells well the intricate story of how personalities and national governments in Britain and America sought to advance what they considered to be their nation’s respective interests in South Asia. McGarr gently but effectively surveys the relative importance of domestic politics and, as importantly, domestic opposition to executive decisions. He focuses on the inescapable importance of towering actors like Nehru, Macmillan and Kennedy, as well as the lesser known but vital role played by a handful of British and American envoys, who often found themselves sparring with policy elites in Whitehall and Washington. The key difference with the few comparable works in the market place is that McGarr places his arguments in a context that is as relevant today as it was between

The central conclusion is that Anglo-American approaches to the region between 1947 and 1965 were ‘misguided, ineffectual, and counterproductive’ 1947 and 1965, the period of his study. The elegant writing style lends itself to a general readership, including those who may have a vaguer interest in South Asia but a greater appreciation for a subtle accounting of Anglo-American rivalry and a bid for influence. Further, The Cold War in South Asia should be considered required reading for all western diplomats preparing to work for their countries’ interests in a part of the world that is arguably at centrestage of contemporary international politics. Rudra Chaudhuri

The People’s Republic of Amnesia Tiananmen Remembered Louisa Lim Oxford University Press 248pp £16.99

AS THE 25TH anniversary of the Tiananmen protests passed this year, the topic continues to be a taboo in China. Even so, former participants, eyewitnesses and others still remember what they are supposed to forget. Their memories undermine the official party line, yet they are in the minority in a country that has undergone a phenomenal economic and social transformation since the early 1990s. Louisa Lim’s book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, illustrates how since 1989 state-mandated and self-imposed amnesia has become pervasive across the country and common among generations of its citizens. Lim powerfully advocates the urgent need to remember, yet also illustrates that ‘memory is dangerous in a country that was built to function on national amnesia’. Thoughtful and absorbing, the book is an investigative study by a journalist who seeks to uncover some of the politics and contemporary histories of memory in China. Each chapter takes the reader on a different journey through time and memory. We learn of a young soldier who, because he was deemed unfit to handle a weapon, was given a camera and tasked to record the crackdown that began the night of June 3rd. Portraits of two young student leaders, no. 2 and no. 19 on the government’s ‘most wanted’

list, exemplify the diversity of dissenting student voices, as one stayed in China and suffered imprisonment and maltreatment, while the other escaped into exile. A chapter on the Tiananmen mothers narrates the painful process of fighting an all-pervasive party state in an attempt to find out how and why children perished during the crackdown. Then there is Bao Tong, former secretary to the Politburo Standing Committee and the first high-ranking party member to be arrested in 1989. Subject to continuous police surveillance since his release from prison, he provides erudite, sharp analyses of the protests’ political context. Lim also calls attention to those protests that occurred outside Beijing, in particular in the city of Chengdu in Sichuan province. There, protests had been ongoing throughout May but had ebbed by early June. When they heard of their government’s suppression of the protests in Beijing, people returned to the streets of Chengdu, only to be violently attacked themselves by local police forces. The book thus contributes to a broader historiography of spring 1989 that moves beyond Tiananmen Square and those events that international media recorded in powerful images such as the ‘Tank Man’. The People’s Republic of Amnesia strongly argues against those who would contend that unprecedented economic prosperity and considerations of domestic stability since the early 1990s explain and perhaps even validate selective memories of what happened in the late spring of 1989. Although the book gives little background information upfront for readers unfamiliar with the basic narrative of events, much of this eventually features in the different chapters. Despite the unnecessarily complicated citation, the book is accessible, fluidly written and offers rich accounts of one of the most complex chapters in contemporary Chinese history. Jennifer Altehenger

The Cambridge History of Australia Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (eds) 2 vols Cambridge University Press 1,536pp £200

A MAJOR multi-authored history of Australia appears once in a generation. The celebrated and contested bicentenary of British colonisation in 1988 marked the last effort: Australians: A Historical Library, which sliced the nation’s past at 50-year intervals from 1788 onwards. Now we have an updated picture of the ‘land down under’ fit for the 21st century. No longer an island nation scourged by the ‘tyranny of distance’ (in Geoffrey Blainey’s influential 1966 vision), the 67 contributors make plain the geological, geographical and human connections which have shaped the continent and the people who call it home. The editors have commissioned not only established experts but also undertaken editorial ‘match making’, linking historians from different generations. The result is the ideal mix of experience and ambition and an account that is as much about how Australian history has been written and understood as it is about ‘what happened’. Rather than ‘slicing’ the past, the editors have chosen a novel approach: January 1st 1901, the day the Australian colonies federated, becomes the ‘hinge’, dividing the two volumes logically into ‘Indigenous and Colonial Australia’ and ‘The Commonwealth of Australia’. Each begins with a series of chronological chapters narrating the major developments of the period, followed by a raft of thematic

chapters. The best of these present traditional historical subjects in new and surprising ways. Graeme Davison’s chapter on religion approaches the multi-denominational character of an apparently secular society through the idea of the ‘tribes of white Australia’, noting that in 1901 ‘the religious landscape ... was almost as tribal as that of the first Australians’. In ‘Newcomers, c.1600-1800’, Shino Konishi and Maria Nugent displace the primacy of 1788 in the national narrative, demonstrating instead the incursions of outsiders over two centuries and the ways they were perceived by indigenous Australians. The authors largely overcome the challenge of a huge disparity in documentation: European explorers and colonisers self-consciously ‘made’ their histories in letters, maps and diaries, and in the (re)naming of places; indigenous experiences were passed down through generations in story, song, dance and art, forms of history-making only recently incorporated into academic and popular understandings of Australia’s past. There is some overlap between chapters, especially those thematic ones that deal with similar timeframes. Some important narratives fall between the chosen themes. For instance, the immigration revolution of the postwar years, which saw the settlement of millions of migrants from Europe and Britain (many of them ‘ten-pound poms’), is broken up throughout the second volume: in chapters on ‘The Menzies era’ (the reign of Australia’s longest serving prime minister, 1949-1966), ‘Government, law and citizenship’ and ‘Travel and connections’. The extensive indexes in each volume are thus indispensable. Further reading lists for each chapter and chronologies in both volumes will also prove useful for researchers and enthusiasts alike. Rich in depth, historiography and detail (who knew that strict animal quarantine meant the equestrian events of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics were held in Stockholm?), these volumes will become the backbone of Australian history for a new generation. Eureka Henrich

CONTRIBUTORS Jennifer Altehenger is Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese History at King’s College London. Mihir Bose is an awardwinning journalist and author. Rudra Chaudhuri is author of Forged in Crisis: India and the United States Since 1947 (Oxford University Press, 2013). Hermione Giffard is a historian of technology, whose PhD thesis was on the history of the jet engine. Eureka Henrich is a Rydon Fellow at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London. Tim Hitchcock is Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex. A. Bernard Knapp is Emeritus Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology at Glasgow University and author of The Archaeology of Cyprus: From Earliest Prehistory through the Bronze Age (Cambridge, 2013). Anthony Leahy teaches Egyptology at the University of Birmingham. Richard Overy is author of The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945 (Allen Lane, 2013). Charlotte Roberts is Lecturer in English at University College London and the author of Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History (Oxford University Press, 2014). Alessandro Scafi is Lecturer in Mediaeval and Renaissance Cultural History at the Warburg Institute, London, and author of Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (British Library and Chicago, 2006). Desmond Seward’s Richard III: England’s Black Legend has been reissued this year by the Folio Society. Alice Stevenson is Curator of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, London.

OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 65

HAVE YOUR SAY

Letters Lost in Translation Michael Pollitt’s warning on misleading translations of the Quran reminded me of a time at a literary festival when I was introducing my book, Sacred Swords: Jihad in the Holy Land 1097-1291, to that most unpredictable of entities, the history reading public. I was billed to be in discussion with Professor M.A.S. Abdel Haleem of the School of Oriental Studies, to talk about what a ‘search for Saladin’ has, does and might mean. The grilling from the professor began with: ‘The opening quote in your fine book is Quran, Sura 8, Aya 60. It is wrong.’ It went charmingly downhill from there. He made it up to me, however, by gifting me a copy of what I consider to be the best English language translation of the Quran produced to date, his The Qur’an: English Translation and Parallel Arabic Text. The moral here is that writers of history who carry only a smattering of languages should never tangle with those who are committed to the full and truthful expression of the word in their chosen field. All power to you Mr Pollitt. The greater the zealous output of those who can really feel the language of which so much historical evidence is composed, the nearer we authors of narratives of the past will be able get to Leopold von Ranke’s dictum: ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ – to show ‘how things actually were’. I hope I got the context and language of that one right. James Waterson Dubai

Burning Issue Contrary to Graeme Gerrard’s article, ‘Washington is Burning’ (August 2014), the public buildings of the US capital were not destroyed by the British as part of an agreement between the two 66 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

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sides. The American government and army fled the city, leaving no authority to negotiate with the British. If there had been a settlement, the British would almost certainly have returned Washington unmolested in exchange for a cash payment. The looting and burning of a capital shocked Europe, particularly defeated and chastened France, which claimed never to have done anything so wicked. But, as the British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Earl Bathurst, told his undersecretary (who was then one of the commissioners at Ghent, bargaining with the Americans to end the war), no capital had ever been so abandoned to the enemy. Even with no one to propose terms, private property was untouched, for which Washington’s inhabitants thanked the British. The house from which shots were fired on the military commander, General Ross, was certainly demolished, but under the rules of war at this time this was an action for which the property and even the lives of all the inhabitants of the city could have been forfeited. Professor Neville Thompson University of Western Ontario, Canada

Alternative View Mathew Lyons’ critical reference to ‘today’s fashionable counterfactuals’ and Annika Mombauer’s revisiting of the July Crisis (both July 2014) made me think again about the April 2014 editorial in History Today, which gave Niall Ferguson’s BBC2 broadcast, The Pity of War, short shrift. As the editorial suggested, historians of the First World War such as Gary Sheffield and Hew Strachan, who appeared on the programme, were singularly scathing of Ferguson’s positing of an alternative scenario to the conflict. Perhaps I am doing these two historians

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a disservice, but it seems that the dismissing of Ferguson’s proposition was at one with a wider revisionist interpretation of the Great War, which has been attempting to justify Britain’s participation. While I am not a fan of Ferguson’s politics nor his dogged defence of the merits of the British Empire, he is without doubt an erudite historian. However, it appears that an implicit criticism of his analysis of the causes and, more significantly, the consequences of the First World War centre upon a distaste for expressing at length and in detail a possible alternative scenario. Counterfactual narratives are too often seen as a form of unsophisticated or somehow ‘improperly historical’ history. Each historian who defends the rightness of the war (or any other historical event) must have the idea that any alternative outcome would have been worse. At this point one might well consider Ruth Henig’s reference to a ‘balance sheet’. It would take a cataclysmic alternative scenario to be more adverse than 10 million dead, the devouring of massive resources and finances, a ‘peace’ based on ethnic divisions, the establishment of a regime in Russia which resulted in the horrors of Stalinism, the arbitrary division of the Middle East, whose legacy is even now wreaking mayhem, and conditions which gave rise to National Socialism, leading to another war killing a further 100 million people. Perhaps the distinction between who is to blame for the outbreak of the war and whether it was a futile war have not been made clear enough. I have little doubt in my own mind that the German and Austrian elites were the most blameworthy. But that does not mean that resisting

their morally tainted aggression proved worthwhile. Even if we were to give the benefit of the doubt to Grey, Poincaré and the coterie of autocrats around the tsar and impute worthy motives to their actions, we are still at liberty to conclude that the Great War was a dreadful error which led to nothing good, incurred unacceptable costs and casualties and prepared the ground for an even more calamitous rerun within 25 years. David White Galashiels, Selkirkshire

Forgotten People In Tom Lawson’s ‘A British Genocide in Tasmania’ (July) I find a disturbing parallel with the fate of another small tribe on a British colonial island off the mainland. The fate of the indigenous inhabitants of Newfoundland, the Beothuks, is clouded with accusations of genocide or explanations that the tribe just could not survive the inroads of other native bands and of white settlers. The prevailing argument was that these people were so primitive that they undoubtedly could not survive in the ‘advanced’ 19th century. In any event, the last Beothuk died in the early 1820s, although their DNA traces can still be found in Newfoundland and perhaps as far away as Iceland. Stanley Sandler Spring Lake, North Carolina, USA

Ripping Yarn I was intrigued while browsing through the June issue of History Today in Liverpool Central Library to find that some enthusiastic reader had ripped out Ian Mortimer’s ‘Whose History is This?’ article from the front of the magazine as well as the letters page of that edition. I wonder why? Kiron Reid Liverpool

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Coming Next Month Japan’s Reckoning

We should be wary of the Allied cultural stereotypes that have had such a long-standing effect on western interpretations of wartime Japan, warns Christopher Harding. The response of ordinary citizens to the Blitz of 1944-45, in which a quarter of Tokyo burned to the ground in one night at the hands of the US Air Force and as many as 100,000 people were killed, also highlights an ongoing tension between civilians and the Japanese governing elite, as the country sought to redefine itself and modernise in a world shaped by western economics and culture.

The King is Not to Answer for It

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www.historytoday.com/subscribe August’s Prize Crossword

On July 1st, 1418 Henry V began the siege of Rouen in his quest to gain control of the historic capital of Normandy, with the aim of starving it into submission. As winter took hold, the crippled city expelled several thousand of its old and infirm citizens in the hope that the English king would show clemency. He did not and left trapped and exposed in the ditch dug by the English between themselves and the city walls, these unfortunate souls mostly perished. Daniel Thiery considers Henry’s action at Rouen as a defining moment in our understanding of medieval notions of Christian charity and emerging statecraft.

Sherman’s March

November marks the 150th anniversary of General Sherman’s campaign of devastation in Georgia and the Carolinas in the final year of the American Civil War. These actions famously transformed Sherman into a semi-mythological destroyer in the eyes of the South, while the North made him a national hero as the man who achieved victory, not with a battle but with a march. Matt Carr describes the events of November 1864, the campaign, its military significance and the historical arguments that have raged about it ever since.

Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, In Focus, From the Archive, Pastimes and much more.

The November issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the UK on October 23rd. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.

PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The winner for August is Peter Hamill, Newport, Wales.

EDITOR’S LETTER: 2 Photograph by Hendrik Schmidt © dpa HISTORY MATTERS: 3 Getty Images/Anadolu; 5 courtesy of the author; 6 Mary Evans Picture Library. MONTHS PAST: 8 Bridgeman Art Library/Courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum; 9 top Bridgeman/Hever Castle, Kent; 9 bottom Getty /Gamma-Keystone. THE LOST KING OF SCOTLAND: 11 Bridgeman/Philip Mould Ltd; 12 On loan from a Private Collection to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; 13 top British Library Add Ms 19401 f.31; 13 bottom left Bridgeman/Royal Collection Trust ©Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2014; 13 bottom right RMN/Rene-Gabriel Ojeda/Grand Palais; 14 From the Collection at Blair Castle, Perthshire; 15 Getty/Jeff J.Mitchell. CYPRUS: 16 National Archives; 18 Mary Evans Picture Library/Grenville Collins Postcard Collection. AMERICAN CENSORSHIP: 19 Kobal Collection/RKO; 20 top Kobal Collection/Warner Bros: 20 bottom Getty/Moviepix; 21 top Getty/Life Images; 21 bottom Getty/Kurt Hutton; 22 top Kobal Collection/Warner Bros; 22 bottom Kobal Collection/20th Century Fox; 23 top left Kobal Collection/20th Century Fox/Sam Shaw; 23 top right Getty/Moviepix; 23 bottom Kobal Collection/MGM; 24 top Kobal Collection/ United Artists; 24 bottom Kobal collection/Warner 7 Arts; 24-25 Kobal Collection/Warner Bros. IN FOCUS: 26-27 Getty/Popperfoto. FOR ENGLAND’S SAKE: 28-29, Imperial War Museum; 31 top Maureen Callcott; 31 bottom Newham Photos; 32 top Lebrecht Music & Arts; 32 bottom & 33 Imperial War Museum; 34 Tyne & Wear Archives ref 2402; 35 left National Portrait Gallery; 35 right IET Archives NAEST 92/4/3. AMERICAN KING KILLERS; 38 Chris Pagliuco; 39 HT Archive; 40 top Bridgeman/Houses of Parliament, Westminster; 40 bottom Bridgeman/Carisbrooke Castle, Isle of Wight; 41 British Museum; 42-43 Bridgeman/Private Collection; 42 bottom Harvard Art Museums/ Fogg Museum, University Portrait Collection, Gift of Mr Robert Winthrop (photo Imaging Department ©President & Fellows of Harvard College; 43 Chris Pagliuco; 44 Bridgeman. INDIA’S INDUSTRIAL GIANT: 46-51 Tata Archives; 52 top Getty/Hulton Archive; 52 bottom Getty/Dinodia; 53 Getty/Bloomberg. REVIEWS: 54 Getty/Universal Images; 58 ©Griffith Institute, University of Oxford; 61 ©National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. COMING NEXT MONTH: 69 © NY Daily News/Getty Images PASTIMES: 70 © Elgar Collection/Bridgeman Images. We have made every effort to contact all copyright holders but if in any case we have been unsuccessful, please get in touch with us directly.

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Pastimes Amusement & Enlightenment

The Quiz 1 Who, in the 16th century, founded Persia’s Safavid dynasty?

4 Approximately how many Allied troops landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, June 6th, 1944? 5 Which soldier and regicide, who was also son-in-law of Cromwell, died of the plague during the siege of Limerick in 1651?

6 Which US-born pharmaceutical entrepreneur, philanthropist and collector sought to create a Museum of Man? 7 After which battle of 1882 did Britain become the effective ruler of Egypt? 8 Who, in September 1868, became the first foreigner to 70 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

9 Which American Confederate general, a Mississippi cotton planter and slave owner, became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan before seeking to disband the organisation due to its members’ violent behaviour? 10 What is the name given to the

11 Which US political activist, a key figure in the counter-culture of the 1960s, founded the Youth International Party, the ‘Yippies’, in 1968? 12 Meaning Children of God in Hindi, which new designation did Mahatma Gandhi propose for the caste known as Untouchables.

ANSWERS

3 What is the name of the Dutchborn Jesuit who was head of the Counter-Reformation in Germany?

ascend Mount Fuji, taking eight hours to complete the ascent?

1. Isma’il I (r.1501-24). 2. Benito Mussolini (1883-1945). 3. Petrus Canisius (1521-97). 4. 130,000. 5. Henry Ireton (1611-51). 6. Henry Wellcome (1853-1936). 7. Battle of Tel el-Kebir. 8. Rutherford Alcock (1809-97). 9. Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-77). 10. Empire of Nicaea. 11. Abbie Hoffman (1936-89). 12. Harijan.

2 Which European dictator was the son of a blacksmith and a schoolteacher?

Byzantine successor state founded by Theodore Lascaris in 1204, following the Latin conquest of Constantinople?

Prize Crossword ACROSS 8 Byname of Mozambican National Resistance, founded in 1976 (6) 9 Teos-born poet, c.582-485 bc (8) 10 ‘Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a ___’ – H.A.L. Fisher, 1935 (4) 11 38th president of the US (6,4) 12 Morning ___, left-wing newspaper founded in 1930 as the Daily Worker (4) 13 Former name for south-east Asia, particularly the Malay Archipelago (4,6) 17 Stage name of the Latvian clown Nicholai Polakovs (d.1974) (4) 18 Archie ___ (1904-86), Bristol-born actor who adopted the stage name Cary Grant (5) 19 Cutty ___, tea-clipper launched at Dumbarton in 1869 (4) 21 John ___ (1882-1937), poet, playwright and author of The Gentle Art of Theatre-Going (1927) (10) 23 Daughter of Uranus and Gaea in Greek myth (4) 24 Follower of Mosley (10) 28 Henry ___ (1906-95), US novelist, author of Call It Sleep (1934) (4) 29 Lilian ___ (1879-1972), Kentborn botanical artist (8) 30 ‘Something is ___ in the state of Denmark’ – Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4 (6)

Set by Richard Smyth DOWN 1 Bernardo ___ (1720-80), painter, nephew of Canaletto (8) 2 Mountain first climbed by Edward Whymper in 1865 (10) 3 Henry Wadsworth ___ (1807-82), US poet, author of ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ and ‘The Wreck Of The Hesperus’ (10) 4 E.H. ___ (1892-1982), historian and author of What Is History? (1961) (4) 5 Ancient region of Europe corresponding roughly to modern-day France (4) 6 Carl ___ (1895-1982), composer whose works include Carmina Burana (4) 7 ___ Doctrine, US foreign policy regarding Latin America (6) 14 Christopher ___ (1722-71), English poet, admitted to St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics in 1757 (5) 15 The ___, (pre)historical novel of 1955 by William Golding (10) 16 Nickname for the 7th Armoured Division during the Second World War (6,4) 20 Wilhelm ___ (1845-1923), discoverer of X-rays (8) 22 Legendary Frankish leader (6) 25 ‘Old King ___’, traditional rhyme derived from Celtic folklore (4) 26 Ancient Egyptian city in the Nile Delta (4) 27 William ___ (1860-1954), ‘the Gloomy Dean’ of St Paul’s Cathedral 1911-34 (4)

Five winners of this month’s crossword competition will each receive a copy of Patrick Little’s The English Civil Wars: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld).

Entries to: Crossword, History Today, 25 Bedford Avenue, London WC1B 3AT by October 31st or www.historytoday.com/ crossword

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OCTOBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 71

AGINCOURT

FromtheArchive Stephen Cooper admires an article from 1967 that sought to separate historical fact from fiction in Shakespeare’s portrayal of England’s much mythologised warrior king.

King Harry in the Round HAROLD F. HUTCHISON’s ARTICLE took a new look at Henry V and sought to explain how Shakespeare had taken liberties with the facts in presenting the king to an Elizabethan audience. Hutchison wrote that ‘Shakespeare’s fictions are still more potent than the professional historian’s facts’. Hutchison’s secondary sources (C.L. Kingsford, Wylie and Waugh, R.B. Mowat and Ernest Jacob) had portrayed Henry as a warrior hero, which coincided with the image that most English people had of him in the 1960s, based on Laurence Olivier’s performance in the film of Shakespeare’s Henry V. That film had been made in 1944 during the Second World War, at Winston Churchill’s request. Although it was only shown after the end of the war, it had enormous patriotic appeal and was a commercial and critical success. It was still being shown 15 years later and, when Robert Hardy played the role in BBC television’s An Age of Kings (1960), he followed closely in Olivier’s footsteps. Shakespeare was concerned with drama rather than facts, though some still consider that he was our greatest historian, as well as our finest dramatist. In 1967 Hutchison was concerned to set the record straight. He told us that the Bard got some things very wrong – at least about the young Henry V. So Shakespeare was mistaken about Prince Henry’s relationship with his father; about his supposed participation in criminal activities; and about his famously dissolute youth. Hutchison explained convincingly how Henry was a hero to the first Elizabethans and how Shakespeare had given a new lease of life to legends created by 15th-century chroniclers and biographers, handed down by the early Tudor historians Hall and Hollinshed. He aimed to strip away the myths 72 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2014

and provide an impartial assessment. In doing so he inevitably pointed up the dark side of Henry’s character. Indeed he argued that Henry had feet of clay and that he was ‘cold, priggish, ruthless and implacable’, though he was also an organising genius and an upholder of impartial justice. In Hutchison’s view, the Agincourt expedition was not a glorious march to victory but a ‘trek’, a foolhardy and reckless adventure that produced very little in the way of immediate results.

Some still consider Shakespeare our greatest historian, as well as our finest dramatist Since 1967 other historians have trodden the revisionist path. In an article published in History Today in 2010 to coincide with his book 1415: Henry V’s Year of Glory, Ian Mortimer argued that historians had previously been ‘intoxicated with the great man view of Henry V’. In Mortimer’s view, he was a callous and hypocritical warmonger, an autocrat and a prude. It seems to me that this goes too far and that Hutchison struck a better balance. In 1919 Gerald Gould argued that Henry V could be seen as an attack on medieval chivalry rather than as a celebration of it, but, as Emma Smith points out in her contribution to Shakespeare in Production (2002), it was only in 1964 that theatregoers saw a production of the play which was overtly anti-war. In the years that followed Hutchison’s article, they have been presented with several more ‘alternative’ productions. Smith tells us that Adrian Noble’s 1984 version, which had Kenneth Branagh in the leading role, told a ‘story of

political pragmatism and the muddy rainy realities of modern warfare’. Michael Bogdanov’s 1986 production portrayed a ‘war of expedience, ruthless manipulation, bribery and corruption and even palpable pacifism’. A reviewer in the Guardian even wrote that this was the first production he had ever seen which made him want the French to win! Hutchison’s central point, that Shakespeare was more influential than professional historians, remains true, but the conventional Shakespearean portrait of Henry as hero has prevailed over the attempts to portray him as some kind of villain. When I saw Mark Rylance play Henry at the newly re-opened Globe Theatre in Southwark in 1997, the Francophobia evoked in the audience of modern groundlings was positively embarrassing; and there was little that was unconventional about Jude Law’s highly-praised portrayal of Henry at the Noel Coward Theatre in December 2013. Is it just nostalgia which suggests that neither performance quite compared to Olivier’s? Stephen Cooper is a solicitor and historian. He is the author of Agincourt: Myth & Reality, 1415-2015 (Pen & Sword, 2014).

VOLUME 17 ISSUE 10 Aug 1967 Read the original piece at historytoday.com/fta