History Today 2015-03

March 2015 Vol 65 Issue 3

Retail Revolution Shopping with the Georgians

Violent Women

Terror and the suffragettes

The Sons of Mars

Mercenaries of the ancient world

Publisher Andy Patterson Editor Paul Lay Digital Manager Dean Nicholas Picture Research Mel Haselden Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph Contributing Editors Fern Riddell, Kate Wiles Publishing Assistant Rhys Griffiths Art Director Gary Cook Subscriptions Manager Cheryl Deflorimonte Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell Accounts Sharon Harris Board of Directors Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston CONTACTS History Today is published monthly by History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH. 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, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH, 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 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

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Foes forever: More (left) and Cromwell.

FROM THE EDITOR ONE OF MY FAVOURITE places in the world is the Living Hall of the Frick Collection in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Either side of its fireplace, crowned by a St Jerome of El Greco, hang two portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger of Henry VIII’s two great statesmen: on the left, Thomas More, to the right, Thomas Cromwell. The portraits, though contemporary, already suggest the stereotypes that More and Cromwell would come to represent, in historical fiction, if not in history. More, luxuriant, confident, born to the purple, is every bit the Renaissance Man. Cromwell, jowly and clad in black, looks furtive, anxious and insecure, a man who by birth, though certainly not intellect and cunning, is out of position. Judging by reactions to the BBC’s six-part adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novels, Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies, the contest over the legacies of More and Cromwell is as bitter as ever and damaging to serious widespread engagement with this crucial period of history. Though this binary representation of More and Cromwell has a long pedigree – the Protestant propagandist John Foxe thought Cromwell a ‘valiant captain of Christ’, while More, a saint no less since 1935, has a special place in the hearts of English Catholics – it is Robert Bolt’s play of 1960, A Man for All Seasons – and, even more so, the film adaptation of 1966 – which revived this Manichean duel. More, beautifully played by Paul Schofield, was the elegant and erudite idealist, a saintly figure unconcerned with the trappings of a world with which his antagonist, Cromwell, in a wonderfully paranoid performance by Leo McKern, was all too smitten. It was a seductive but ludicrously hagiographical portrait of More, who, for all his brilliance, was a hairshirt-wearing, heretic hunter. Now, with Wolf Hall, we appear to have gone to the other extreme. Mantel’s sympathy for Cromwell appears to stem from her rejection of a Catholic upbringing and Cromwell, brilliant like More, but in reality cruel and scheming, is portrayed as a gentle family man, while the Lord Chancellor, in the form of Anton Lesser, is a vile and despicable tormentor of the blacksmith’s boy made good. However entertaining historical fiction may be, and sometimes incisive (there is a wonderfully illuminating performance by Jonathan Pryce as Cardinal Wolsey: ‘Lent to Orson Welles’s over-stuffed carnival in A Man for All Seasons’, according to Simon Schama) we see its problem. It needs heroes. History doesn’t. And history will have to wait for Diarmaid MacCulloch’s major biography of Thomas Cromwell to get the full picture, like that of the other Cromwell, warts ’n’ all.

Paul Lay

HistoryMatters

Anglo-Saxon Schools • John Lilburne • Longman-History Today Awards

The Legacy of 1815

Are we in danger of neglecting the true importance of one of history’s epochal years? Jeremy Black WATERLOO holds our attention, but there were other episodes in British military history that year which were also important in framing the ‘long 19th century’. The most obvious was the defeat in January of Wellington’s brother-inlaw, Sir Edward Pakenham, outside New Orleans, which underlined the extent to which war between Britain and the US would end in compromise. Indeed, a peace had already been negotiated at Ghent, although it had not yet been ratified. As the campaigns of 1812, 1813 and 1814 demonstrated, Britain could hold Canada against US invasion. Moreover, the Americans were not strong enough at sea to inflict fatal damage on the British maritime blockade. Equally, British attempts to co-operate with Native Americans had little success and British invasions of America struggled to achieve lasting results. One legacy of 1815 was, therefore, a North America in which Britain was going to have to accommodate a rapidly expanding new state. The implications were realised mid-century, when the US extended its rule to the Pacific and overcame secession. The year also delivered an effective demonstration of British strength in the western hemisphere. Overshadowed by Waterloo, the British capture of the French colonies in the West Indies indicated that Britain’s capacity for power projection was unrivalled, a situation that continued until the

landed on June 5th, occupying all key positions. In Guadeloupe, the situation proved more difficult. An insurrection, mounted on June 18th, ironically the same day as Waterloo, succeeded with the support of the local authorities and Napoleon was proclaimed emperor the next day. In response, Leith landed his men on August 8th. His forces advanced rapidly and, two days later, the French surrendered. Leith had been helped in his task by bringing news of Waterloo. British naval strength was also displayed in French waters in 1815. France was blockaded by the British fleet and, under the command of MajorGeneral Hudson Lowe, later Napoleon’s custodian on St Helena, British forces at Genoa co-operated with a squadron under Edward, Lord Exmouth, the commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, to occupy Marseille. In conjunction with local royalists, they then advanced on Toulon, restoring it to Bourbon control. The Royal Navy also denied Napoleon his own freedom. Napoleon planned to go to America, but found himself trapped at Rochefort, from where he boarded HMS Bellerophon on July 15th, throwing himself on the ‘generosity’ of the Prince Regent. Instead, he was taken to Torbay, where he was not allowed to land, transhipped and taken to imprisonment on St Helena, a South Atlantic outcrop made secure by Royal Navy dominance.

Overshadowed by Waterloo, the British capture of the French colonies in the West Indies indicated that Britain’s capacity for power projection was unrivalled Second World War. The sugar islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique had been returned to French control as part of the peace settlement in 1814, having been seized by British amphibious forces in 1810 and 1809 respectively. They were attacked anew in 1815. Against Martinique, LieutenantGeneral Sir James Leith, governor of the Leeward Islands and commanderin-chief in the West Indies, sent troops from nearby St Lucia. They

All at sea: The Last Leap of a Great Man (Napoleon). French engraving, early 19th century.

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HISTORYMATTERS

Another aspect of British strength was apparent in 1815, notably the budget presented to the Commons on June 14th, at a time when the likely duration of the war with Napoleon was uncertain. This budget made provision for the expenditure of £79,893,300, which was to be met by the renewal of the war taxes, as well as by new loans. In South Asia, the British continued to demonstrate their strength, conquering that year the kingdom of Kandy, which had earlier defied the Portuguese, Dutch and, indeed, in 1803, the British. In the longer term, these elements proved more significant than Wellington’s triumph at Waterloo. The limited size of its peacetime army affected what Britain could do on the Continent after 1815. British forces were sent there, notably to Portugal, but there was, as for Wellington in Portugal, Spain and at Waterloo, a reliance on coalition warfare for anything more than peripheral operations, a reliance repeated in the Crimean War (1854-6). At sea the situation was very different. Britain was by far the leading naval power and was to maintain this position despite the disruption and cost arising from repeated changes in naval technology, notably to steam and iron. The development of countervailing weapons and techniques, such as shell guns by the French in the 1830s, did not lead to the overthrow of the British position. Naval dominance ensured that Britain was best placed to take advantage of an integrating world. It was the British character of globalisation that proved so significant to the world in the 19th century, helping ensure that British influence was not simply a matter of Empire, whether formal or informal. In part, the British world was grounded on force, but its purpose was peaceful, notably as an agent of economic growth. Maritime trade appeared to the British to be their destiny and a means of global good, and free trade acquired totemic significance. The charting of the oceans combined the search for information, its accumulation, depiction and use. Britain’s global commitments and opportunities, both naval and 4 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

The British world was grounded on force, but its purpose was peaceful, notably as an agent of economic growth commercial, made it easiest and most necessary for it to be Britain that was acquiring and using the information. Veterans of the Napoleonic war played a major role in the early surveying. In addition, tide prediction tables expanded dramatically from the 1830s. Improvements in equipment and representation played a role, notably the development of the self-registering tide gauge, which was able, by tracing all tidal irregularities, to provide the accurate data necessary for a dynamic theory of the tides. William Whewell, a major member of the British scientific élite, who played a key part in the work on tides, also applied himself to creating a self-registering anemometer to record the velocity and direction of the wind. Despite the development of steam power, knowledge of the wind remained significant for navigation. All this information was integrated, so that the world was increasingly understood in terms of a western matrix of knowledge in which Britain played the key role. Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

The advantage offered to British power by technological developments, by information systems, especially the accurate charting and mapping of coastal waters, and by organisational methods, notably naval supply depots, gave Britain an unsurpassed global reach. It became possible to envisage the construction of a global system, with the British Empire as its framework. The range of knowledge acquired was shown in careers such as that of Clements Markham (1830-1916). He became a naval cadet before being sent to Peru by the India Office in 1859 to collect seeds and young specimens of varieties of the cinchona tree (from which quinine is made). Once established in southern India, this production resulted in a marked fall in the price of quinine, which encouraged its use by Britain. Malaria rates fell. Appointed to the Geographical Department of the India Office in 1868, the year in which he served as geographer on the military expedition to Ethiopia, Markham served as President of the Royal Geographical Society from 1893 until 1905. Britain’s position was under challenge before the Great War. In January 1904, after hearing a lecture by Halford Mackinder to the Royal Geographical Society on rail links across Eurasia, Leo Amery, later a Conservative politician, emphasised the onward rush of technology and the resulting need to reconceptualise space. He told the society that sea and rail links and the subsequent global distribution of power would be supplemented by air, leading to a new world order. Amery’s assumptions were not vindicated for a while: Britain, despite the rise of the US, was a stronger power in relative terms in the 1920s than it appeared to be in the 1900s, though that was soon to change. But the legacy of 1815 was real and, thanks to the character of British power, the Western-dominated world of the 19th century was more liberal, politically and economically, than it would otherwise have been. Jeremy Black‘s books include The Power of Knowledge: How Information and Technology Made the Modern World (Yale, 2014).

HISTORYMATTERS

School tools: whale-bone writing-tablet and styluses from the middle Anglo-Saxon period.

Making Men of Letters Schoolboys forget their books, lose their pens and laugh at dirty jokes. This was true even in the rigorous atmosphere of the Anglo-Saxon classroom. Kate Wiles AS WITH ALL THINGS relating to Anglo-Saxon England, evidence of what happened in the classroom is scant, but what does survive paints a familiar picture. Education in that period came in many shapes and forms: some students took apprenticeships and learned practical skills, while others went into monasteries and learned to read and write. King Alfred believed that all the youth in England should be taught to read and write in English and those continuing into the monasteries should learn Latin. The teaching of Latin saw a revival in the 10th century, amid worries that the state of learning in England had declined until it seemed as though not a single priest in England was able to compose in Latin or indeed, read it. No books survive which are definitively known to have been used in the classroom, but we have some idea of the types of texts used. The curriculum used for teaching Latin had its roots in classical teaching models. It used three main methods: glossaries taught vocabulary, grammars taught syntax and morphology (the structure of language) and colloquies – scripted conversations – gave conversational practice, in which students could put their vocabulary and

structural learning to use. This combination is still recognisable to anyone who has taken a modern language course. The works of two of the greatest teachers from the late 10th century give us the best insight into the Anglo-Saxon classroom and curriculum. Ælfric of Eynsham (also known as Grammaticus or the Homilist) wrote a glossary, a grammar and a colloquy for the teaching of Latin with a parallel text in Old English, an innovation that made it more accessible for students yet to learn Latin. The only student we can confidently say to have come from Ælfric’s school is Ælfric Bata (Bata seemingly a nickname from the Hebrew for ‘barrel’, either being a reference to his size, or to his love of drink). Bata wrote a colloquy which followed his teacher’s model but in a different style. Where Ælfric’s work upheld the monastic lifestyle and ideals, Bata’s was raucous and dramatic. Bata’s colloquies are intended for students to learn Latin through the use of dramatic scenes in which aspects of daily life in the classroom are played out: in a normal day, the master or his helper would give each pupil a passage of about 40 lines to memorise and recite back the following day, with the threat of a beating if this was not performed satisfactorily.

As well as allowing students to play out the roles of teacher and student, or farmer or tradesman, Bata writes of monks throwing alcohol-fuelled parties, negotiating kisses from women, riding into town to get more beer and going to the privy with younger pupils, unaccompanied. His scenes often directly break the Benedictine rules to which Bata and his pupils were expected to adhere. In one colloquy, he sets out a dialogue between master and pupil in which they exchange a vast array of scatological insults, including the memorable ‘May a beshitting follow you ever’. Certainly, his pupils were not going to forget the relevant vocabulary. In addition to learning to read and speak Latin, students were also expected to learn to write and shape their letters to a high calligraphic standard in order to produce manuscripts. At the earliest stages, they learned to form the shapes of letters by copying examples from their master, writing on wax tablets with a stylus and a knife to scrape it clean, or on scraps of parchment or vellum left over from the production of full manuscripts. Because these early stages were informal and the scraps probably meant to be discarded, none have survived, although tablets have been found in Ireland and styluses at Whitby. Examples of the work of more advanced students can be seen in manuscripts made at the scriptorium of St Mary Magdalene in Frankenthal. Here, the master starts at the top of the page to demonstrate the style, layout and script of the page and the pupil takes over, shakily at first. The two hands then alternate in sections down the page, as the pupil improves. When students were deemed good enough, they would be asked to produce manuscripts for their monastery, or they could work for their own benefit. In one scene from Bata’s colloquies, an older student barters and gains a commission to copy a manuscript for a fee of 12 silver coins. Education was highly valued among Anglo-Saxons. Yet, despite its serious purpose, schoolboy humour remains evident throughout. In that sense at least, the classroom has changed very little in the last thousand years.

Kate Wiles is a contributing editor at History Today and an expert on scribes and manuscripts. MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 5

HISTORYMATTERS

Enduring Liberty

The legacy of ‘Free Born’ John Lilburne still resonates 400 years after his birth. John Rees This year marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Leveller leader John Lilburne, who did more than most to make religious and political liberty part of the English social landscape. We hear much these days to the effect that freedom of speech means secularism. Yet freedom of speech entered the world in the first modern revolution not as a secular ideology but as the inseparable counterpart of freedom for religious dissent from the state church. And Lilburne’s life bears witness to that fact. Lilburne first became famous in the 1630s as a supporter of John Bastwick, William Prynne and Henry Burton, the ‘Puritan martyrs’ who railed against the state church of Charles I and his Archbishop, William Laud. Lilburne secretly imported seditious tracts from Holland. When he was captured in 1637 he was jailed. He was then hauled before the Star Chamber, a prerogative court in which the main evidence was the defendant’s confession (a procedure creeping back into English law in secret trials). It is from his defiance of this court’s right to try him that he became ‘Freeborn John’. His eventual punishment was to be tied to the back of a cart and whipped in the London streets from the Fleet to Whitehall. There he was put in the stocks, the welts on his back ‘swelled almost as big as a penny loafe with the bruses of the knotted Cords’, still throwing radical pamphlets from his coat pocket. Lilburne was then, and remained all his life, part of the dissenting gathered churches that met in the back alleys and taverns of the City of London and in the unruly suburbs outside the walls in Tower Hamlets and Southwark. Lilburne’s early career allowed him to develop his capacity to use the court and the prison as a political platform. He had need of this skill. In the two decades between 1637 and 1657 there 6 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

Honest John: Lilburne in an engraving by Richard Cooper, late 18th century.

were only four years in which Lilburne did not spend some time behind bars. Lilburne most often wrote either from jail or under immediate threat of arrest and imprisonment. His bravery commended him to many who were not wholly sympathetic to his cause and Lilburne was mindful of the need to present his suffering as an example of wider social injustice. In the 17th century it was almost impossible not to combine religious and political radicalism. But, in an age where the church performed some of the combined functions of the modern civil service, education system and mass media, to be against the church was likely to mean being against the state. It was Charles I’s father, James I, who coined the adage ‘No Bishop, No King’. Lilburne’s rhetoric never lost the dimension of religiously inspired resistance to persecution. But, as the experience of participation in the Civil Wars and the revolutionary mass movement gathered pace, other themes emerged. The notion of freedom and equality under and in the law quickly became a central concern. Joined to this was the matter of legal precedent and, to demonstrate this, Lilburne relied

on copious citation of Edward Coke’s Institutes. Then there was the historical argument that this notion of freedom had been lost under the Norman yoke. As experience accumulated, there was an increasing reliance on citing the Long Parliament’s and the Parliamentary army’s previous acts and engagements as a precedent for Leveller actions. All these influences flowed in The Agreement of the People (1647), the Levellers’ radical attempt at a written constitution. In the 1650s Lilburne even began to show an interest in classical Republican thought. But the religious and political freedom, for which Lilburne fought were never absolutes. Royalists and Catholics were not always included, though Lilburne went further than most in defending their rights, too. And freedom was always a question that Lilburne directed to those in power, not those with whom he passionately disagreed but had little power. As he wrote in The Innocent Man’s Second Proffer (1649), his pamphlets fell into categories depending on who had the power to jail him: first the bishops and the king, then the Presbyterian parliamentary moderates, then the Cromwellian state. When his old models, the Puritan martyrs, became defenders of the Presbyterian moderates in Parliament, they attacked Lilburne and he gave as good as he got. Cromwell’s first speech in Parliament had been in defence of Lilburne at the time of his initial imprisonment, but when Lilburne saw Cromwell’s rise to power as a threat to liberty he fired the ‘paper bullets’ of his pamphlets at his old defender. Cromwell tried Lilburne twice for treason. Both attempts failed and Lilburne’s acquittals were met with loud and long rejoicing in the London streets, as Honest John lived to fight another day. Lilburne’s notion of freedom always involved asking the questions: freedom for whom? To say what? And for what purpose? The questions Lilburne asked are still at the heart of the modern debate on liberty.

John Rees is organiser of the John Lilburne 400th anniversary conference to be held at the Bishopsgate Institute, London on March 14th. For further information visit www.bishopsgate.org.uk

HISTORYMATTERS

LongmanHistory Today Awards 2015 The Commonwealth War Graves Commission and a study of the BBC World Service were among this year’s winners. THE Longman-History Today Trustees Award for 2015 was given to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). From its beginnings in the wake of the Great War, the CWGC has maintained the simple dignity and true equality of the 1.7 million graves and memorials it tends, in 23,000 locations across 153 countries, visited by around 1.6 million people a year. It has employed some of the 20th century’s greatest architects, such as Reginald Blomfield, creator of the first great memorial at Ypres, the Menin Gate, and Edwin Lutyens, whose Thiepval memorial on the Somme commemorates 72,000 dead. Among its early advisers, when it was the Imperial War Graves Commission, was Rudyard Kipling, who knew the tragedy of war all too well and whose magnificent short story, The Gardener, remains so evocative of such places. The CWGC still employs 850 gardeners. In 1949, its regrettable but necessary task began again with the completion of the Dieppe Canadian War Cemetery. After last year’s commemoration of the outbreak of the First World War and this year’s remembrance of the end of the Second, it seemed an especially appropriate and deserving recipient. The CWGC performs three crucial tasks: it remembers with eloquence the events of the past; it acknowledges the relationship of one generation to another – the debts owed, the continuing bonds, the similarities, the differences, the common humanity – and it demonstrates a serious commitment to public history. The Trustees Award was presented to Victoria Wallace, director general of the CWGC, by the editor of History

Top: Victoria Wallace, director general of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, receives the Longman-History Today Trustees Award from Paul Lay. Above: historians assemble.

Today, Paul Lay, at a reception held at the Old Hall of Lincoln’s Inn, London, the inspiration and setting for the opening scene of Dickens’ Bleak House. Wallace, accepting the award, called on historians to keep telling the stories of those lives the CWGC commemorates. The Longman-History Today Book Prize, awarded to a first or second work of scholarship deserving of a wider audience, with a prize of £2,000, went to Alban Webb for London Calling: the BBC World Service and the Cold War (Bloomsbury). It was described by the judges –

Professor Jeremy Black of Exeter University, Professor Miri Rubin of Queen Mary University of London, Taylor Downing, author and film-maker, and Paul Lay – as ‘scholarly and accessible, a resonant, brilliantly researched tale that grows more pertinent by the day’. It is reviewed by Taylor Downing on page 59. The Longman-History Today Historical Picture Researcher of the Year prize is given to a researcher who has done outstanding work to enhance a text with a creative, imaginative and wide-ranging selection of images. This year the prize and a cheque for £500 was awarded to Laura Canter for her work on the Folio Society edition of Paul Fussell’s 1975 classic, The Great War and Modern Memory. The judges, Mel Haselden, picture researcher of History Today, and Paul Lay, thought Canter had produced a breathtakingly original array of images, which enhanced an already outstanding work. The History Today Digital Award and a cheque for £250 was given to Eleanor Parker for her website A Clerk of Oxford (http://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.co.uk), a wonderful, scholarly and accessible evocation of the enchanted world of 11th- and 12th-century England, the time of the Danish Conquest, with a particular focus on the reign of Cnut. The Undergraduate Dissertation Prize, worth £250, is given by History Today in association with the Royal Historical Society. As has been the case in recent years, the shortlist of six entries was very strong. Paul Lay, presenting the award, commended the dissertation of Patrick Hoffman of the University of Cambridge, De Administrando Imperio in the Context of 10th-century Byzantine Diplomatic, Political and Literary Culture. But the winner was Rebecca Pyne-Edwards Banks of the University of Derby for Cutting Through the Gordian Knot: The British Military Service Tribunals During the Great War. The judges – Professor David Feldman of Birkbeck, University of London and Director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism; Dr Alan Thacker, Reader and Executive Editor of the Victoria County History at the Institute of Historical Research; and Paul Lay – thought it a ‘rich, rigorously researched panorama of attitudes of and towards conscientious objectors, both in Derbyshire and nationally’. MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 7

MonthsPast

MARCH

By Richard Cavendish

March 5th 1815

Franz Anton Mesmer dies in Germany The German physician who inspired the modern practice of hypnotism came from a Roman Catholic family in Swabia, near the Swiss border. They lived at a place called Iznang on an arm of Lake Constance and the father, Anton Mesmer, was gamekeeper to the Bishop of Constance. Born in 1734, the third of their nine children was named Franz Anton, but was usually known as Anton. His Catholic education by monks and at two Jesuit universities left him with no zeal for the Church and in his twenties in 1759 he went to study first law and then medicine at the University of Vienna. By the time he wrote his doctoral dissertation in the 1760s Mesmer was deeply interested in the possible influence of the planets on disease. Drawing on the work of a distinguished English physician, Richard Mead, he suggested that an invisible fluid in the human body is influenced by the planets, just as the moon affects the tides. He later invented the term ‘animal magnetism’ for this phenomenon. In 1768 Mesmer married a rich widow, ten years older than himself, Anna Maria von Posch. They lived in style in Vienna on her money and he set up in medical practice. He believed that diseases were caused by blockages in the body’s invisible fluid which could be broken by putting a patient into a trance state that would restore the fluid’s normal healthy flow. He experimented with using magnets, but dropped them as he concluded that it was his own personal magnetism – he was a dramatic and commanding character – that brought about the desired result. Mesmer had an appetite for publicity. He gave lectures and demonstrations and staged cures in a way that upset more conventional Viennese doctors. In 1778 he left Vienna for Paris. Anna Maria 8 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

Hypnotic: Franz Anton Mesmer in a contemporary engraving.

apparently did not go with him. He had complained about her extravagance and stupidity and it seems they now parted company. He took an apartment in a fashionable area and opened a clinic in the Place Vendôme. He soon attracted attention from those who thought him a brilliant innovator, but the French medical establishment largely regarded him as a charlatan. He would sit in front of a patient with his knees touching theirs and then make ‘passes’ with his hands over the patient’s shoulders and down the arms. Many of his patients felt strange sensations and some went into convulsions. So many came flocking to the clinic that he sometimes treated them in groups, who touched their bodies with iron bars protruding from a tub of fluid while they were linked together by holding a rope. An English observer said that Mesmer could cause convulsions by moving his

hands without touching the patient. Mesmer became the talk of Paris. He wrote little himself, but he gained disciples who wrote admiringly about him and his technique began to be called ‘mesmerism’. It spread across France to such an extent that in 1784 Louis XVI set up a commission of enquiry, whose members included the chemist AntoineLaurent Lavoisier, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly and Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the doctor who gave his name to the guillotine. The chairman was the US ambassador Benjamin Franklin. The commission did not talk to Mesmer or any of his patients, but focussed on whether mesmerism’s invisible bodily fluid actually existed. It reported that there was no evidence for any such invisible fluid and that mesmerism’s effects on a patient must be attributed to the patient’s imagination and could well be harmful. The commission’s report had a shattering effect on Mesmer. He had discovered something important, but he had never properly understood how it worked. He now began a slow retreat into himself. He closed his Paris clinic, returned to Vienna for a time to sort out financial matters after the death of his wife and then travelled in Europe before retiring to the area near Lake Constance where he had grown up. He lived quietly for many years at Frauenfeld in Switzerland on the lake’s southern shore before settling finally at Meersburg in Swabia. He did not marry again and he had no children. He suffered agonies with bladder problems before dying at the age of 80 at Meersburg. Mesmer had gone and his theory of an invisible fluid in the body had gone, too, but as the 19th century wore on a more scientific approach developed. The most important single figure was James Braid, a Scottish physician in Manchester who coined the terms ‘hypnotism’ and ‘hypnosis’ from Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, after experiments in the 1840s. There is no doubt now that hypnotism works, for good or sometimes for ill, but it is still not fully understood.

March 22nd 1765

The Stamp Act

The act never went properly into effect, but it had greater consequences than many which did. Passed through Parliament against little opposition and signed into law by George III, the Stamp Act imposed on the British colonies in North America a tax on printed documents, including legal papers, contracts, bills of sale, licenses, wills, ships’ papers, advertisements, newspapers and magazines. Books were not affected, but playing cards and dice were. The items had to carry revenue stamps, sent from Britain. The act was to come into effect from the beginning of November and the money would pay for troops stationed in the colonies to defend them against attack. The British government, struggling with mountainous debts, considered this entirely reasonable, but the colonists did not. The colonies had their own democratic assemblies, but they had no Members of Parliament

at Westminster and the old principle of ‘no taxation without representation’ was increasingly invoked. In May the Massachussetts politician Samuel Adams told the Boston Town Meeting that: ‘If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state of tributary slaves?’ In Virginia a lawyer and member of the House of Burgesses, Patrick Henry, reminded the House that Julius Caesar had his Brutus and Charles I his Cromwell and said that no doubt ‘some good American would stand up in favour of his country’. He proposed resolutions to the effect that only Virginia had the right to tax Virginians and the resolutions were passed. Other colonial assemblies came out against the new tax and when the first revenue stamps arrived they

March 8th 415

Hypatia of Alexandria murdered

In the company of men: Hypatia (or possibly the artist) in white robe, from Raphael’s The School of Athens (1509-11).

‘O! the Fatal Stamp’: a response to the Stamp Act published in the Pennsylvania Journal, 1765.

The city of Alexandria in the late fourth century ad was inhabited by pagans, Jews and Christians. There was mounting tension between them and the Christians themselves were divided by theological disputes, mainly centred on the doctrine of the Trinity as declared at the Council of Nicaea in 325. The Emperor Theodosius I, the last ruler of both the western and the eastern halves of the Roman Empire, issued decrees in the 380s and 390s that banned all pagan religious ceremonies and made Nicene Christianity the state religion of the whole empire. This put Christian bishops in positions of political power. Hypatia of Alexandria has been called the first notable female in the history of mathematics. She wrote commentaries on various earlier works on mathematics and astronomy, but they have not survived, nor have any original writings of her own. Herself a pagan, she was an exponent of the Neoplatonist philosophy, which appealed to many Christian intellectuals, and she had numerous admiring pagan and Christian pupils.

were often seized and destroyed. Protest turned to violence. The official responsible for distributing the stamps in Massachusetts was hanged in effigy on Boston Common from what was called the Liberty Tree, a mob wrecked part of his house and he resigned. A mob threatened to lynch the official in Connecticut unless he resigned, which he did. The official in Maryland had to run for his life. Many other distributors were pressured into resigning and the tax was never effectively collected. The strength of feeling surprised many of the colonial upper class, but there was no stemming it and it seemed to offer a justification for violence. There were not remotely enough British troops to enforce the act, colonists were boycotting British exports with damaging effects on British business and opinion across the Atlantic shifted. In March 1766 the Stamp Act was repealed, but it had been a key link in the chain of events that led to an independent US.

In 412 a new Christian bishop was installed in the city. Cyril of Alexandria (later St Cyril) was a formidable theologian who recruited a private army hundreds strong, persecuted Christians who did not accept his religious views and demanded that all the Jews be expelled from the city. The dispute with the Jews broke out into a minor civil war in Alexandria, which brought Cyril into conflict with the pagan governor of Egypt, Orestes, who was himself physically attacked. The details are extremely unclear, but Hypatia was considered an influential supporter of Orestes and paganism and a mob of monks and other Christians halted her chariot in the street, seized her, stripped her naked and either tore her to pieces with oyster shells or beat her to death with roof tiles before burning her corpse on a bonfire. To what extent Bishop Cyril himself was involved in the murder is uncertain, but he never seems to have denounced it. A later Christian writer labelled Hypatia a devil-worshipper. MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 9

SONS OF MARS

The Rise of the Sons of Mars

The struggle for control of the straits dividing Sicily from southern Italy brought the two great empires of the Mediterranean, Carthage and Rome, head to head. It was a world in which ruthless mercenaries prospered, as Erich B. Anderson reveals.

H Statue of Mars, or Pyrrhus, Capitoline Museum, Rome, first century ad.

IERO II, the ruling general of the Greek citystate of Syracuse, led a campaign in 265 bc north towards a coastal Sicilian city, Messana, held by a group of Campanian mercenaries known as the Mamertines. The Campanians were part of a vast Oscan tribal group originally from the Apennine mountains, who had now settled in the southern Italian region of Campania. By the end of the fifth century bc the hill tribes had invaded the nearby plains, displacing the Etruscan and Greek inhabitants of the region, taking control of nearly all of the land between Salerno and Cumae. As the decades passed, the mountain dwellers gradually let go of their old way of life and adopted the civic lifestyle of the people they had conquered. The newly sedentary Campanians appealed to the Romans for their help against their aggressive neighbours, the Samnites. In 343 bc Rome came to their aid and, in turn, the Campanians became subjects of the Republic. From then on the Campanians were considered civites sine suffragio, meaning they had all of the privileges of Roman citizens but without the right to vote in Rome. MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 11

SONS OF MARS

Locations of the major battles fought by the Sons of Mars.

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EGARDLESS OF THEIR new status as subjects under Roman hegemony, the Campanians, and in particular the Mamertines, never relinquished their martial skills. In fact, the two major powers in Sicily, the Carthaginians and the island’s Greek citystates, had relied on southern Italy as a plentiful source of mercenaries ever since the Oscan peoples seized the Campanian plain. They continued to do so in the centuries that followed, as they continuously fought each other over domination of the island. For decades, the foreign soldiers had raided and pillaged the entire region both by land and sea. As the ruler of the most powerful city of eastern Sicily, Syracuse, Hiero II would not tolerate the mercenaries any longer and, by the middle of the third century, had the necessary resources to end their constant piracy. When he confronted the Mamertines near the River Longanus, his forces crushed them. The few surviving Mamertines fled to safety and debated what to do next. The fear of future attacks had caused so much panic that they turned to the most powerful empire of the western Mediterranean, Carthage, as well as the Roman Republic to save them from Hiero. In doing so, the Mamertines sparked one of the most significant wars of the ancient Mediterranean, the First Punic War (264-241 bc), becoming some of the most notorious and renowned mercenaries of the classical world. Near the end of the fourth century bc, Agathocles, the new tyrant of Syracuse and a Sicilian warlord, had recruited a substantial number of Campanian mercenaries. From the moment Agathocles had seized power in 317 bc, the former soldier had employed mercenaries and continued to do so throughout his entire reign, as he established a powerful empire in eastern Sicily. As Agathocles warred with the Carthaginians and rival Greek city-states to take control of the entire eastern half of the island, he had added the city of Messana to his possessions some time between 315 and 312 bc.

WHEN AGATHOCLES was 72, in 289 bc, the self-proclaimed king of Syracuse and Sicily was assassinated by members of his own family, following arguments surrounding his succession. After his death, the large group of Campanian mercenaries he had hired clashed with the Syracusan citizenry. To convince the Italian soldiers to leave, the Syracusans offered them the conquered city of Messana, which they quickly accepted. A year later, in 288 bc, the citizens of Messana allowed the mercenaries to enter their city only to regret their decision shortly after. Once inside, the foreign troops slaughtered the men, enslaved the women and seized the city. From then on, the mercenaries called themselves the Mamertines, or ‘the sons of Mamers’, the name for the war-god Mars in the Oscan language of the Campanians. Due to the near constant influx of Campanian mercenaries into Sicily for over a century, this was not the first time that foreign soldiers had seized a city on the island. For instance, Campanians took the western Sicilian city of Entella in 404 bc. However, the degree to which the Mamertines devoted themselves to violence and warfare, as they either intimidated their neighbours into giving them tribute or took their possessions by force, quickly made them notorious throughout the region. By the end of the third century bc, the self-styled ‘Sons of Mars’ had sacked and pillaged as far as Gela and Camarina along the southern coast of Sicily. While the Sons of Mars were a terrible irritation, many of the Greek city-states of Sicily still considered the Carthaginian Empire as their main threat, especially the people of Syracuse. Therefore, after a large Carthaginian army had besieged the city once again, Syracuse and the Hellenistic community of Sicily chose a new champion to defend them: King Pyrrhus of Epirus. At the time, the general was fighting a war with the Romans on behalf of a Greek city in southern Italy, Tarentum. Even though he had achieved two victories over the armies of the Republic, the loss of his soldiers had been so great that the ambitious king decided to abandon the Tarentines and heed the call of the Sicilian Greeks, believing that the Carthaginians would be an easier foe to overcome. Pyrrhus arrived in Sicily in 278 bc and began his conquest of the island. However, only two years later, he had failed to accomplish this goal, as he could not capture the formidable Carthaginian stronghold of Lilybaeum. His failure was mostly due to the fact that the Sicilian Greeks had turned against him for his increasingly autocratic conduct towards them. Throughout Pyrrhus’ Sicilian campaign, the Mamertines had been allied with the Carthaginians against the Hellenistic general. So, even though the king of Epirus attacked and defeated the mercenaries, the Sons of Mars managed to retain Messana and their independence. When the Greeks of Sicily had completely risen against their denounced, prior saviour, many of them even wanted the Carthaginians or the Mamertines to then save them from Pyrrhus. The aspiring king of Sicily withdrew from the island in the autumn of 276 bc and returned to

Hiero II, ruler of Syracuse, would not tolerate the mercenaries any longer and, by the middle of the third century, had the resources to end their constant piracy

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Coins depicting the head of Hiero II, struck c.240-218 bc, and that of his wife, Philistis, struck 218-215 bc.

Italy to fight Rome for Tarentum once again. Pyrrhus lost the Battle of Benevento in 275 bc, putting an end to all of his campaigns west of Epirus. This final withdrawal from Italy of the Hellenistic commander greatly benefited the Romans, who were then free to conquer Tarentum in 272 bc, along with the rest of the Italian south, previously controlled by the Greeks.

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HILE THE ROMANS were preoccupied with Pyrrhus and Tarentum, they were unable to deal with a volatile situation for which they were partly to blame concerning the actions of another group of dangerous Campanian soldiers. When Pyrrhus invaded Italy for Tarentum, the citizens

of Rhegium panicked and, because of their alliance with the Roman Republic, immediately called for Rome to send sufficient aid for a proper defence of the city. For its strategic location on the south-western tip of Italy, with only the narrow Straits of Messana separating it from Sicily, Rhegium was a pivotal ally and the Romans quickly obliged. Under the command of an officer named Decius, the Romans sent a garrison of 4,000 Campanian soldiers to the city. Just as the Sons of Mars had done a decade before, these Campanian troops also attacked the citizenry after the city gates were opened freely to them. But this time the Campanians did not massacre all of the male citizens; those who were not killed were instead forced into exile. Furious over their soldiers’ treatment of one of their

Pyrrhus abandons his fight in Tarentum against the Romans to aid the Sicilian Greeks, 19thcentury engraving.

MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 13

SONS OF MARS Coin depicting head of Agathocles, Tyrant of Syracuse, struck 317 bc.

allies, the Republic took action. After the capture of Tarentum, Roman soldiers besieged Rhegium in 271 bc. A year later, the Roman army broke through the city’s defences and the remaining 300 Campanians left alive were taken captive. In the heart of the capital, the Roman Forum, the treasonous soldiers were flogged and decapitated. WITH THE THREAT OF Pyrrhus gone, the mercenaries returned to marauding. The Sons of Mars managed to conquer a substantial portion of north-eastern Sicily, creating an empire whose territory stretched from Mount Etna in the south and as far west as Halaesa on the north coast. The foreign pirates had now become too great a threat for Syracuse to ignore. After the next tyrant took control of the city and reorganised the army to include a new native militia force alongside the conventional contingent of mercenaries, a truce was established with the Carthaginian Empire to deal with the Mamertines. Hiero II was one of the most loyal supporters of Pyrrhus within Syracuse and managed to retain his high position in the city even after the king had retreated from the island. At first, his position in the city was limited for he was only acknowledged as Strategus, the overall commander of the army. It was only after the general confronted the Mamertines for the first time at the victorious battle of the River Cyamosorus in 269 bc, that he was able to secure complete control of Syracuse and, the following year, take the title of Strategus Autocrator.

competely and Hiero could not definitively defeat them either. Then in the spring of 264 bc the two forces met on the plains of Mylae near the River Longanus. On the battlefield the blessing of the war god was kept from his devoted followers and bestowed instead on their enemies, as Hiero’s Syracusan army annihilated the Sons of Mars. Once the remnants of the Mamertine army reached Syracuse, a fierce debate began over whether or not they should send appeals for help to either Carthage or Rome. The Carthaginian Empire had been a faithful ally during the years of Pyrrhus’ Sicilian campaign, but the link between the mercenaries and the Roman Republic had grown stronger. As Campanians, not only were the Mamertines fellow Italians but they were also still technically non-voting Roman citizens. In the end, the two factions were unable to agree on one ally so they sent a plea for help to both of them. Sending appeals to both states may also have been a logical decision for the Mamertines, since the Romans and Carthaginians had been allies for centuries, with the first of three treaties between the two agreed at the founding of the Republic in 508-7 bc. The most recent alliance was formed in 279-8 bc, forged of the mutual hostility they felt towards Pyrrhus and the various Hellenistic city-states of southern Italy and Sicily. Although the Romans never aided the Carthaginians against Pyrrhus in Sicily, the agreement between both of them meant that the Romans were allowed to conquer the Magna Graecia region of southern Italy without any intervention from Carthage.

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HE CARTHAGINIANS answered the call immediately and sent troops. Carthage was much more content with Messana being occupied by themselves or the Mamertines than with it being controlled by Syracuse once again, so the decision was an easy one. Carthaginian ships harboured at the Aeolian Islands were so close to Messana that they were able to place a garrison within the city before Hiero reached its defensive

Carthage only needed to subdue Syracuse to control Sicily, giving them the ideal base from which to attack southern Italy

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S AN AUTOCRATIC ruler with full powers, Hiero primarily focused on stabilising the city in the anarchic period following the assassination of Agathocles. The tyrant was then free to focus on striking his fatal blow against the Mamertines. With fewer than 12,000 soldiers, Hiero invaded north-eastern Sicily in 265 bc. As the campaign progressed a stalemate ensued. The Sons of Mars were unable to drive off the invaders 14 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

Image of Pegasus, struck in Carthage, 260 bc.

walls. Unwilling to assault the Carthaginians, Hiero led his army back to Syracuse. Upon his return the citizenry rewarded him for his crushing victory over the Mamertines at the battle of the River Longanus by proclaiming him as their king, even though he had ultimately failed in finishing the mercenary pirates off. After the Mamertine embassy addressed the Roman Senate to plead their case, by the middle of May the Romans were well aware of the Carthaginian garrison already stationed in Messana. The ruling body of the Republic was much less decisive than its alleged allies, taking over a month before a resolution was reached. The majority of the senators wanted to aid the Campanian mercenaries but not because of the need to help fellow Italians. To many Romans, war with Carthage was not only a necessary step to nullify a future threat; it was also a very profitable prospect. The Carthaginian Empire was the most powerful in the western Mediterranean, mostly due to the wealth it had amassed through its dominance of trade in

The First Punic War, fresco from the Conservatories Palace, Rome, Jacopo Ripanda, c.1510.

the region and the strength of its navy. With its powerful fleet, Carthage had already conquered much of North Africa, portions of Spain, mostly along the southern and eastern coasts, as well as Sardinia and the smaller islands of the region. Since the Romans had conquered the southern part of the Italian peninsula, the Carthaginian occupation of Messana meant that the imposing empire was then right on their border with only a narrow stretch of sea separating the two states across the straits. The Carthaginians only needed to subdue Syracuse to control all of Sicily, giving them the ideal base from which to launch an invasion of southern Italy. Yet the armies of the Republic had proven that Rome was not weak and vulnerable: quite the opposite. The Romans had just extended their hegemony over the entire Italian peninsula, so even though Carthage was viewed as a threat it was one that the people of Rome were confident of overcoming; victory would lead to vast amounts of booty and plunder. MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 15

SONS OF MARS

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N THE other hand, an influential group of Roman senators, comprised of ex-consuls and other leading politicians, rejected the motion for war. The most obvious reason was the blatant hypocrisy of aiding the Mamertines when the Romans had just executed their Campanian kinsmen for the seizure of Rhegium in the same way as the Sons of Mars had taken Messana. Furthermore, war in general did not always end in victory and these powerful individuals may have felt that the overconfidence of many senators might lead to the ruin of the Republic. Carthage had long been an ally and had shown no signs of hostility or aggression; and, as an enemy, it would be an extremely dangerous adversary. Initially, the smaller faction prevailed, for the Roman Senate did not ratify the motion to send aid to the Sons of Mars. However, the war hawks of the Senate would not give in so easily. The most prominent politician to support the war was one of the Roman consuls, Appius Claudius Caudex. Like most consuls of the Roman Republic, Claudius wanted to lead a glorious campaign during his consulship to raise his, and his family’s, prestige. So the opportunity to become the first Roman general to lead the legions beyond the confines of the Italian peninsula was too great to pass up. Claudius brought the motion before an assembly of the people, most likely the Comitia Centuriata, which included many of the wealthiest members of the population. It took very little to convince these merchants of the equestrian class, for they would profit greatly from government contracts providing military supplies or by taking part in the lucrative slave industry bolstered by numerous prisoners of war. Thus, with the people voting in favour, the Senate announced a formal declaration of war in late June, with Claudius in command of the troops sent to aid the Sons of Mars. By late August, Claudius had raised his roughly 20,000-strong consular army, consisting of two legions with contingents of Italian auxiliaries, and gathered a small fleet of triremes and transports from Tarentum, Naples, Elea and Locri and reached Rhegium. Once the Mamertine embassy returned to Messana to report what the Romans had decided, the Sons of Mars adopted their new allies’ fresh aggression towards the

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Carthaginians and expelled their entire garrison within the city. Carthage was outraged over the treatment of its soldiers; so much so that they crucified the commander of the garrison for allowing it to happen. Carthage immediately besieged Messana with its army, blockaded the port with its navy and sent ships to Cape Pelorias to keep watch over the straits between Messana and the Romans at Rhegium in southern Italy. The Carthaginians also brought Hiero and his Syracusan army back into the fray, for a new alliance was made between the two former enemies to prevent the intervention of the Romans into the affairs of Sicily. The fact that Syracuse and Carthage were able so quickly to set aside a centuries-long feud shows how threatened the two were by the Romans. With both of the major powers of the island poised against him, Claudius desperately needed to reach the Mamertines but was thwarted in his attempt to cross the straits with his army by the powerful Carthaginian navy. Yet fortune was on the Roman consul’s side, for he not only eventually managed to make the crossing at night, but the Romans also were able to secure the capture of an overly ambitious Carthaginian vessel that had ran aground in its attempts to attack the Roman ships. For a rising power in the Mediterranean that lacked a navy, the vessel was an incredibly valuable prize that later served as a blueprint for the ships of the Roman fleet that was created a few years later.

Top: Punic Demeter mask, third-second century, Musée National de Carthage, Tunisia. Above: Roman galley from the First Punic War, Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, c. 1825

SHORTLY AFTER THE Romans had reached Messana, Hiero combined his Syracusan forces with the Carthaginians besieging the city. At first, Claudius attempted to resolve the conflict with diplomacy. The consul appealed to both sides stating that his only desire was to protect his new allies from further aggression. If both of the armies of Carthage and Syracuse put an end to their assaults on the Sons of Mars, Claudius promised to withdraw to the Italian mainland. Understandably, neither of the Sicilian powers fell for the ploy. Not only did they accuse the Romans of acting in their own interests to exploit the situation, but they also refused to let the treacherous pirates get off so easily. Since both the Carthaginians and Syracusans had over 10,000 soldiers each, Claudius knew he could overwhelm one of them, but would be outnumbered if they combined forces. Thus,

realising the futility of negotiations, the consul took the initiative and assaulted the Syracusan camp, leaving a small force augmented by the Mamertines in the north to prevent Carthage from intervening. In response, Hiero mustered his army and ordered his cavalry to attack the small force of horsemen the Romans had brought across the sea. The vastly superior Syracusan cavalry successfully drove off their Roman counterpart but were not so lucky against the legionaries. Unable to break through the enemy lines with his cavalry, Hiero watched as the Roman infantry crushed his own hoplites (citizen-soldiers), forcing the king to retreat with the remainder of his army back to Syracuse, from where he later pleaded for peace with Rome in 263 bc.

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ITH HIERO GONE, Claudius was free to attack the camp of the Carthaginian commander Hanno with the help of the Sons of Mars. At first, Hanno managed to drive the Roman army out and advanced on the battered Italians. Yet the relentless forces of Rome eventually pushed the Carthaginians back behind their defences and defeated them. As Roman allies, the Sons of Mars were secure in their captured city, but after the First Punic War they could no longer act as pirates and faded from history. However,

Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, faces defeat at the Battle of Benevento, 19th-century engraving.

for their pivotal role in the beginning of the great wars with Carthage, the legend of the Mamertines lived on in Rome and morphed over the centuries. By the Augustan age, in the first century bc, Roman propaganda held that the Sons of Mars had aided the citizens of Messana to receive land as a reward, instead of taking the city by force. Ultimately, popular folklore has failed to eradicate the behaviour of the notorious mercenaries from the historical record and the true nature of the Sons of Mars has prevailed. Erich B. Anderson is an historian specialising in warfare of the ancient and medieval world.

FURTHER READING Nigel Bagnall, The Punic Wars 264-146 bc (Osprey, 2002). M.I. Finley, Ancient Sicily (Chatto & Windus, 1979). Adrian Goldsworthy, The Punic Wars (Cassell, 2000). B.D. Hoyos, Unplanned Wars: The Origins of the First and Second Punic Wars (Walter de Gruyter, 1998). John Lazenby, The First Punic War (Stanford, 1996). Christopher Smith, John Serrati (eds), Sicily from Aeneas to Augustus (Edinburgh University Press, 2000). MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 17

SUFFRAGETTES

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N THE EARLY HOURS of a mild November morning in 1913, a threeinch pipe was primed to explode later and destroy the multiple panels and ornate metal work that made the Glass House ‘one of the chief attractions’ of Alexandra Park in Manchester. A smouldering mass of twisted metal and broken glass was discovered and quickly attributed by the popular press to the wave of ‘suffragette outrages’ being committed across the country by the militant branch of the women’s rights movement. Kew Gardens had already suffered two attacks, on an orchid house and pavilion, and the campaign of arson and intimidation conducted by the militant wing of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and their supporters was reaching its height. Although no one was ever convicted of the Alexandra Park attack, its perpetrator is believed to have revealed herself in a later unpublished autobiography. Dedicated to the ‘Political, Economic, Religious and Sex 18 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

Freedom of Women’, it was the work of Kitty Marion, music hall artist and militant suffragette. Her anger at the treatment of women on the stage, an industry where she was expected to trade sex in return for leading roles and allow patrons of the music halls to assault her in cabs and hotels without complaint, led her to become a bomber, an arsonist and a public campaigner for the suffragette movement. Her autobiography

Why have historians failed to fully engage with the issue of suffragette violence?

Police survey Saunderton Railway Station after a suffragette arson attack, March 9th, 1913.

The Weaker Sex?

Fern Riddell investigates the campaign of terror orchestrated by the Edwardian suffragette movement before the First World War and asks why it has been neglected by historians.

is a testament to her importance as a militant Above: Surveillance photograph set advocate for women’s rights, yet the majoriissued by the police ty of historians of the women’s movement to public galleries, have disregarded this source. Only recently identifying dangerous has it begun to be referenced as an important militant suffragettes, narrative, containing eyewitness accounts including Kitty Marion (13), 1914. of the clandestine operations of the militant suffragette movement in Edwardian England. Few personal accounts of the actions of these suffragettes survive and its history was written by the figureheads of the WSPU – the Pankhurst family in particular. It is their legacy, and the protectors of that legacy, which have shaped memories of the actions of this group of determined, dangerous women, whose campaign methods ranged from window-breaking to arson attacks, bombings, even suicide attempts.

So why have historians failed to fully engage with the issue of suffragette violence? The work of the 1926 Suffragette Fellowship, which collected and recorded for posterity memories and artifacts from militant suffragettes, was dominated by ‘the argument of the broken pane’. This single phrase has come to define ‘authentic’ militancy and, at the same time, marginalise any act that falls outside this image. Acts of militancy are thus reduced to the story of no more than a few broken windows, while the historical focus shifts to the bodily violations forced on the suffragettes, especially those imprisoned for political violence: denial of political rights and, later, force feedings. The actions of women such as Kitty Marion are largely forgotten. While the majority of historians would baulk at describing any suffragette as a ‘terrorist’, most would accept that the actions of the militants could be viewed as a form of political extremism. The press used the MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 19

SUFFRAGETTES

Kitty Marion is arrested after heckling Lloyd George at the Royal National Eisteddfod, Wrexham, September 5th, 1912.

Above: The Tea Pavilion in Kew Gardens, after an arson attack by suffragettes Olive Wharry and Lillian Lenton, February 20th, 1913. Right: One of two bombs discovered in Lloyd George’s cottage, February 20th, 1913.

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At the more extreme end, bombs and incendiary devices were placed in and outside of banks, churches and even Westminster Abbey same language to describe the actions of Irish Republicans in the late 19th century as they did for the suffragette attacks of the early 20th. Both were referred to as ‘Outrages’, actions that disturbed and terrorised their own societies. If contemporary society judged the actions of the militant suffragettes to be equal to those of groups such as Irish Republicans, whose historical identity has become central to discussions of terrorism, why should we continue to ignore or lessen the nature of their violence? All violent acts of militant suffrage can be viewed as acts of terror. They were specifically designed to influence the government and the wider public to change their opinions on women’s suffrage, not by reason, but by threats of violence. These threats were then carried out and ranged from window breaking to the destruction of communications (post-box burning, telegraph and telephone wires being cut); the damage of culturally significant objects (paintings in national galleries, statues covered in tar, glass boxes smashed in the Jewel House of the Tower of London); and arson attacks on theatres, MP’s houses and sporting pavilions. At the more extreme end, bombs and incendiary devices were placed in and outside of banks, churches and even Westminster Abbey. All of these acts were carried out against the backdrop of women chaining themselves to railings, rushing the doors of Parliament, refusing to pay taxes and marching in their thousands against a government which had refused to listen to their petitions or to take them seriously.

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O WHAT CONSTITUTED a ‘Suffragette Outrage’? One of the earliest recordings of this term came from the Morpeth Herald, of November 20th, 1909, when Therese Gurnell attacked a young Winston Churchill with a horse whip on the platform of Bristol railway station. In the same month Selina Martin and Leslie Hall disguised themselves as orange sellers and, armed with a catapult and missiles, attacked the Prime Minster Herbert Asquith’s car in Liverpool. The following year, one of the first instances of a suffragette causing physical harm to a member of the public is recorded in Battersea: a clerk suffered burns as he attempted to stop a suffragette from throwing an undefined liquid over the papers of a Member of Parliament. Risk or injury to the public has been vehemently denied by those who would safeguard the memory of the suffragettes, but the newspapers (and even the accounts of the militant suffragettes themselves) prove that there were numerous instances where injuries occurred and in which personal risk, even the possibility of death, was great. One of the most horrifying suffragette attacks occurred in Dublin in 1912. Mary Leigh, Gladys Evans, Lizzie Baker and Mabel Capper attempted to set fire to the Theatre Royal during a packed lunchtime matinee attended by Asquith. They left a canister of gunpowder close to the stage and hurled petrol and lit matches into the projection booth, which contained highly

Top: St Catherine’s Church, Hatcham, engulfed in flames after a suffragette arson attack, May 14th, 1913. Above: satirical postcard showing a suffragette in costume, c.1913.

MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 21

SUFFRAGETTES combustible film reels. Earlier in the day, Mary Leigh had hurled a hatchet towards Asquith, which narrowly missed him and instead cut the Irish Nationalist MP John Redmond on the ear. Redmond’s focus on the campaign for Home Rule had led to his refusal to insert a clause giving women the vote, assuring his status as a target. THE YEAR 1912 saw an ever increasing escalation of violence among militant suffragettes. Glasgow Art Gallery had its glass cases smashed; bank and post office windows were smashed from Kew to Gateshead; in September, 23 trunk telegraph wires were cut on the London Road at Potters Bar and on November 28th simultaneous attacks on post boxes occurred across the entire country. By the end of the year, 240 people had been sent to prison for militant suffragette activities. The newspapers began to carry weekly round-ups of the attacks, with the Gloucester Journal and the Liverpool Echo running dedicated columns to report Illustrated London News, on the latest outrages. In early 1913 a March 14th, 1914: details of the cuts made by Mary suffragette attacked the glass cabinets Richardson to The Toilet of in the Tower of London’s Jewel House, Venus, or Rokeby Venus, while in Dundee, four postmen were by Velázquez, while on severely injured by phosphorus chemidisplay in the National Gallery, March 10th, 1914. cals left in post boxes. In Dumbarton 20 telegraph wires were cut; Kew Gardens orchid house was attacked and its tea house burnt down. In Ilford, three streets had their fire alarm wires broken and in Saunderton the railway station was destroyed, while placards entitled ‘Votes for Women’ and ‘Burning For the Vote’ were left in prominent positions. Croxley Station near Watford also suffered a similar fate, although the attack was initially not attributed to the militants until a suffragette newspaper was delivered to the station master with the scribbled inscription: ‘Afraid copy left got burnt.’ Kitty Marion was also continuing her own attacks, such as the one which saw a train, left standing between Hampton Wick and Teddington, almost totally destroyed by fire in the early hours of Saturday April 26th:

knit militant activists? A recent study from the sociology department at the University of Manchester has uncovered some surprising evidence. During the period 1906-14 there were 1,214 court appearances by suffragette activists, yet the majority of those had only ever appeared before the judge for suffrage related crimes once before. This would suggest that the theory of large-scale militant activity carried out by only a handful of dedicated women is unlikely.

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ET THERE IS also evidence that multiple attacks were carried out by single perpetrators. Kitty Marion’s hand is evident in attacks from Manchester to Portsmouth; the scope of her attacks overlays neatly into areas she had become well acquainted with during her music hall and theatrical days, which afforded her the luxury of an already established network of lodging houses and local knowledge, allowing her to visit areas and conduct militant activity. Women operating in local areas could also become sources of serious violence. Olive Hocken appeared before magistrates on March 28th, 1913, charged with an arson attack on Roehampton Golf Club’s Pavilion, Kew Garden’s Orchid House, the cutting of telegraph and telephone wires and the destruction of letters. Her notoriety reached the United States, with the Boston Herald carrying a report of her trial and claiming her home in Kensington was a ‘depot where people foregathered, armed

The train was afterwards driven into Teddington Station, where an examination resulted in the discovery of inflammable materials in almost every set of coaches. Among the articles found in the train were partly-burnt candles, four cans of petroleum, three of which had been emptied of their contents, a lady’s dressing case containing a quantity of cotton wool, and packages of literature dealing with the woman suffrage movement. Newspaper cuttings of recent suffragette outrages were also found scattered about the train … The method adopted was very simple. First the cushions were saturated with petroleum, and then small pieces of candle were lighted immediately under the seats. Marion’s personal scrapbook contains references to the burning of these railway carriages and, if we believe that she kept this as record of her own attacks, it would indicate she had a hand in the destruction. Her cross-country knowledge, brought about by her lifestyle as a touring music hall artist, allowed her to locate sites of cultural importance that could be used as targets by the militant suffragettes. Were these attacks carried out by a large and disjointed group of suffrage supporters operating individually or by a small group of close22 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

Emily Wilding Davison throws herself under the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby, June 4th, 1913.

Kitty Marion on stage as a ‘German maid’, 1914.

subsequent arrest and imprisonment. Kitty now became a martyr to the cause: church services were disturbed by shouts in support of her freedom and a bomb discovered at the Lyceum Theatre, Taunton, was revealed in the press to have the words ‘Votes for Women’, ‘Judges Beware’, ‘Martyrs of the law’ and ‘Release our Sisters’ painted on its sides.

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and prepared for any particular marauding outrage on hand’. Suffragette violence reached its height in the spring and summer of 1913. In May a bomb had been found outside the Bank of England and bowling greens and racecourses were targets for arson and destruction. When the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage met in Hyde Park it was heckled by a crowd shouting ‘go home and make bombs’ and ‘who put the bomb in St Pauls?’. In retaliation to the violence, the government targeted the one organisation that it believed to be responsible for encouraging the violent women. The WSPU was banned from holding open-air meetings, as letters from the leadership were often found among the belongings of those on trial. The militants hit back and a number of prominent society members who opposed suffrage saw their homes destroyed by fire and incendiary devices. Statues were disfigured and museums, churches and stately homes were forced to close to the public for fear that they may become the latest target. The methods of attack also seem to have evolved, as shown by the reports surrounding a bomb left on May 21st at the Royal Astronomical Observatory on Blackford Hill, Edinburgh:

N 1914 the continued destruction of homes, pavilions and churches abated a little, though it still saw Mary Richardson slash Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in London’s National Gallery, amid other examples of cultural violence: the British Museum had mummy cases damaged and bombs were discovered in Westminster Abbey and the Metropolitan Tabernacle; in the latter a postcard was placed bearing the words ‘Put your religion into practice and give the women freedom’. Although attacks on buildings and communication or travel networks saw limited risks to the British public, there were some attacks that would have caused severe individual harm, if they had been successful. In 1913 the plot to kidnap the Home Secretary, Reginald McKenna, was discussed both in the press and in the House of Commons, as the suffragettes were reported to be contemplating kidnapping one or more Cabinet ministers and subjecting them to force-feeding. The threat was taken so seriously that, for their own protection, private detectives began to shadow the ministers. The women involved were given many different names in the press from ‘wreckers’ to ‘wild women’ and ‘professional petroleuse’, a language which conjures up images of women resembling the daughters of the French Revolution: a subjugated social group bent on political representation, brandishing the colours of the WSPU and shouting out an anglicised war cry reminiscent of ‘Liberté, Unité, Égalité’. The suffragettes were, in many ways, an evolution of the social revolutionary spirit that had been sweeping Europe since the 18th century and their use of the public, masculine language of war, combined with violent actions is worthy of greater historical analysis.

The scheme had been well thought-out. On gaining an entrance the perpetrators had taken the bomb to the top of the spiral stairway under the dome and carried a fuse thirty feet long down into the chronograph-room, where it was fired by means of a lighted candle, the remains of which were found. The quantity of gunpowder used must have been considerable, as fragments of the earthen jar which held it were embedded in the wall and woodwork, and the glass of two windows was blown out and carried a considerable distance. A bag, some biscuits, and Suffragette literature were left behind. The following month, on June 4th, Emily Wilding Davison died after falling under the hooves of the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby. Her death triggered responses from all sides of the suffragette movement, but the most violent reaction came from Kitty Marion, who, along with her companion Clara Givens, burned down the pavilion at Hurst Park Racecourse after learning of this ‘Supreme Sacrifice’. It led to her

Daily Mirror cartoonist W.K. Haselden comments on the early violence of suffragettes, July 2nd, 1909.

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SUFFRAGETTES

Th Daily Mirror reports on the attempt by suffragettes to rush Parliament on November 18th, 1910. Far right: Mrs Flora Drummond, ‘The General’ of Mrs Pankhurst’s Women’s Army.

When a bomb was discovered in the home of Lloyd George, Mrs Pankhurst quickly claimed ‘the moral responsibility for it as one of the leaders who are preaching the suffrage war’. Her daughter, recovering from illness in France at the time of the reports, proclaimed: Perhaps the Government will realise now that we mean to fight to the bitter end … If men use explosives and bombs for their own purpose they call it war, and the throwing of a bomb that destroys other people is then described as a glorious and heroic deed. Why should a woman not make use of the same weapons as men. It is not only war we have declared. We are fighting for a revolution.

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UCH WORDS demonstrate that the WSPU was publically pronouncing in favour of violence. Reading Christabel Pankhurst, it is difficult to understand why it is that the powers of these words, and their influence on readers, have been forgotten. Why has their impact been diminished by time? If the speaker had been a male protagonist, would historians have hesitated to describe the militants as terrorists? The use of imagery and rhetoric – from the uniforms adopted by the WSPU, to the language used to discuss militancy – suggest that the women fully recognised that their actions in pursuit of political change were illegal, dangerous and life-threatening. This is certainly evident with the formation in 1913 of what became known as ‘Mrs Pankhurst’s Army’: A meeting was held at Bow, London, last night, for the purposes of inaugurating the projected suffragette ‘army’, to be known as the People’s Training Corps. About 300 persons assembled, mostly young girls and women … Miss Emerson, in an address, said that their intention was to train the corps that they could proceed in force to Downing Street, and there imprison Ministers until they conceded women’s suffrage. They had all heard of bloody Sidney Street, but the bloody scenes that might be expected at Downing Street would be worse. The identification of the women as warriors or soldiers engaged in domestic warfare was not a new one. Since the early 1900s Mrs Flora Drummond was known to both the press and the WSPU as ‘the General’ and on one occasion was seen riding on horseback ahead of a proces24 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

From the Archive More on the suffragettes

www.historytoday.com/ suffragettes

The WPSU had become a beacon of militancy, with a clearly defined brand of female empowerment, employing the rhetoric of war sion of over 2,000 suffragists, while the marching song ‘The Women’s Marseillaise’ played behind her. The WSPU had become a beacon of militancy, with a clearly defined brand of female empowerment, employing the rhetoric of war and danger. The violent women of the militant movement occupied the same space as men, they demanded equality and used codes previously attributed to masculine identification; honour, war, duty, respect. But the violent women of the militant movement have been largely forgotten. In the aftermath of the horrors of the First World War the suffragette movement as a whole sought to distance itself from the actions of its most dedicated agents. These have been marginalised, ignored and dismissed for decades. Turning to the autobiography of Kitty Marion we find her justification for her actions – and those of others: I was becoming more and more disgusted with the struggle for existence on commercial terms of sex … I gritted my teeth and determined that somehow I would fight this vile, economic and sex domination over women which had no right to be, and which no man or woman worthy of the term should tolerate. Fern Riddell is a contributing editor at History Today.

FURTHER READING June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: a Biography (Routledge, 2002). Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866-1928 (Routledge, 2000). C.J. Bearman, ‘An Examination of Suffragette Violence’, English Historical Review (April 2005). Antonia Raeburn, The Militant Suffragettes (Michael Joseph, 1973).

InFocus

Sheep Safely Graze: Iraq 1960

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N ARAB SHEPHERD minds his flock against the backdrop of a Kirkuk oil refinery in 1960, gifting the photographer with the kind of arresting juxtaposition editors love. But there are hidden depths and symbolism to this scene which will only become apparent in the following decades. As Iraq had emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after 1918, there had been much argument over whether Kurdish lands – to the north, and to the east of the Tigris – should be part of it. It was not until 1926 that the League of Nations finally ruled in favour of their inclusion. But then in 1927 oil was discovered near Kirkuk and the chances of this becoming a permanent settlement immediately took a turn for the worse. At 30 million, the Kurds are the world’s largest ethnic group without a country of its own, spread out through Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Kirkuk’s oil for them was potentially a powerful lever, but also it was an asset Iraq would want to keep in a close embrace, though it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that it really came into contention. At that time Kirkuk’s population was made up of 59 per cent Kurds, 20 per cent Turkmen and less than 25 per cent Arabs. In 1970 the Autonomy Agreement was signed by Iraq’s new socialist Ba’ath Party rulers and the Kurds. This allowed for a census in 1977, intended to be the basis on which the extent of the Kurdistan region within Iraq was to be arrived at. But Mustafa Barzani, the Kurds’ leader, who had been in armed revolt from 1961 to 1970, mistrusted the Iraqis and in 1973 claimed the oil fields for his people. Initially he had support from the CIA, Israel and the Shah of Iran when he renewed the revolt, but in 1975 the Shah withdrew and was soon followed by the other two backers.

At 30 million, the Kurds are the world’s largest ethnic group without a country of its own, spread out through Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey 26 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

Barzani was defeated by Saddam Hussein and by 1979 he was dead, of cancer. By 1987 4,000 Kurdish villages had been erased and in 1988 there was the notorious chemical weapons attack on Halabja. It is reckoned that 180,000 Kurds were killed in that decade in what has been labelled the Anfal Campaign of genocide. George Bush Sr may have saved the Kurds from further wholesale massacre by declaring a No Fly Zone in 1991, as Saddam sought revenge after the First Gulf War, but between that time and the beginning of the Second Gulf War in 2003, 500,000 Kurds were systematically expelled and replaced by Arab families. Since then thousands of Kurds have returned to Kirkuk, which until 2012 was under the control of a combination of Kurdish Peshmerga militia, the Iraqi army and US forces. The Kurds encouraged western oil companies to explore further and they are now, it seems, sitting on 55 billion barrels, a quarter of Iraq’s total reserves. In 2013, frustrated by the corruption and delays of the Maliki regime in Baghdad, they opened a pipeline to Turkey and in February 2014 Baghdad retaliated by cutting off all payments to the Kurds. In June a virulent ingredient was added to the brew when fundamentalist Islamist ISIS forces seized Iraq’s second city Mosul and seemed set to take Kirkuk, as six Iraqi divisions melted away. With the blessing of Nuri al-Maliki, the Kurdish Peshmerga moved into the city and saved the day. In December 2014 the new Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, and the Kurdistan region leader, Massoud Barzani, son of Mustafa, signed a pact, allowing the Kurds to send 300,000 barrels a day to Turkey from Kirkuk, plus another 250,000 from other fields, with all selling to remain under Iraqi control. In return Iraq has resumed payment of the 17 per cent of the national budget that is the Kurds’ share and found one billion dollars for the Peshmerga, the only effective forces confronting ISIS. But how long will the question of independence for largely democratic, secular and prosperous Kurdistan remain in abeyance and will the Peshmerga be interested in carrying the fight into non-Kurdish areas of Iraq?

ROGER HUDSON

| JOHN AUBREY

A Diary Imagined John Aubrey, best known for his concise and incisive pen portraits of his 17th-century contemporaries, left no diary of his own. Ruth Scurr set herself the challenge of imagining one from the remnants of his life.

Sole surviving portrait: John Aubrey, 1666.

JOHN AUBREY (1626-97), the author of Brief Lives, a collection of short, informal biographies on luminaries such as Shakespeare, John Dee and Francis Bacon, saw himself more as collector than writer. He lived through times of great turmoil: he was 22 when Charles I was executed; he saw Oliver Cromwell’s rise to power as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England and his son Richard Cromwell’s brief succession; he experienced the Restoration of Charles II, the short reign of James II and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that brought William of Orange and his wife Mary (daughter of James II) to the throne. Aubrey died in 1697, ten years before England and Scotland joined their parliaments to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain. From an early age he saw his England slipping away and committed himself to preserving for posterity what remained of it, in stories, books, monuments and buildings.

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He compiled natural and antiquarian remarks in notebooks, or on scraps of paper, cross-referenced, revised and corrected over time. He was concerned with accuracy like a scrupulous modern investigative journalist, so his notes are full of gaps and question marks where it has not been possible to remember or find a particular piece of information. Towards the end of his life, Aubrey began to panic, not about pain or death, but about the future of his precious collections. What should he do with all the piles of paper it had been his life’s work to assemble? Fortunately for him and for us he was a friend of Elias Ashmole, who had promised to give his own important collection of antiquarian artifacts to Oxford University on the condition that it erected a new building to house his donation. The Ashmolean Museum opened in 1683 and at the end of his life Aubrey decided there was no better place for his paper collections.

The record of Aubrey’s life is no less chaotic and fragmentary than his work. Among the manuscripts and letters he deposited in the Ashmolean were some scant autobiographical jottings, ‘to be interponed as a sheet of wast-paper only in the binding of a booke’. Aubrey’s idea that his record of his life might serve as end-pages to a book about something or someone else is typically self-effacing. Nevertheless, he hoped that his name would live on after his death and that posterity would benefit from the paper collections he had assembled. Most of these were preserved in the Ashmolean and then moved to the Bodleian Library in 1860. Except for the recent attention to Brief Lives, none of Aubrey’s manuscripts, which fill over 20 boxes, have been adequately edited and many are in need of conservation. Aside from his few pages of autobiographical notes, the main sources for Aubrey’s life are the remains of his correspondence, which are uneven and often oblique: there are over 800 letters to or from him in the Bodleian. Sometimes it is possible to tell exactly where Aubrey was and what he was doing on a particular date. Sometimes weeks, even months, go by where he cannot be traced. His relationships, especially the most intimate, flash past, illuminated only for an instance, like a dark landscape beneath a clouded sky when the moon breaks through fleetingly. Unlike Pepys, John Evelyn and other celebrated men of the 17th century, Aubrey did not leave a diary.

In constructing Aubrey’s diary I have used as many of his own words as possible

Scholar's sensibility When I was searching for a biographical form that would suit the remnants of Aubrey’s life I realised that he would disappear inside a conventional biography, crowded out by his friends, acquaintances and their multitudinous interests. Aubrey lived through fascinating times and has long been valued for what can be seen through him; there is no shortage of scholars who appreciate the use that can be made of him. But the biographer has other purposes: to get as close to her subject and his sensibility as possible; to produce a portrait that captures at least something of what that person was like. In the contemporaneous pencil portrait of Aubrey that survives he looks like an unremarkable 17th-century gentleman, his bland face square between the curtains of a heavy wig. A portrait in words, one that does him more justice, is what I determined to write. Inspired by the vivid sense of self that emerges from the diaries of Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn and Robert Hooke, I thought: if only we had Aubrey’s diary, his modesty, self-effacement and attention to others would not be such a problem. No one gets crowded out of his or her own diary. In constructing Aubrey’s diary I have used as many of his own words as possible. It is a diary based on the historical evidence; a diary that shows him living vividly, day by day, month by month, year by year, but with necessary gaps when nothing is known about where he was or what he was doing. I have not invented scenes or relationships as a novelist would, but nor have I followed the conventions of traditional biography. When he is silent I do not speculate about where he was or what he was doing or thinking. When he speaks I have modernised his words and spellings

and indicated the original sources in endnotes. I have added words of my own to explain events or interactions that would otherwise be obscure and to frame or offset the charm of Aubrey’s own turns of phrase. When the year but not the precise month or day of a piece of evidence is known, I have arranged it with other entries, sometimes clustering themes or events that fit together. From chaos to narrative There are three distinct kinds of entry in the diary: discursive descriptions of events and conversations within specific months or years based on his writing and correspondence; shorter notes about personal events that occurred on particular days; and entries providing brief accounts of public events which begin ‘on this day’. My work has been to weave Aubrey’s chaotic notes into a biographical narrative. For example, here is his note on smallpox: Of periodicall small-poxes. – Small-pox in Sherborne dureing the year 1626, and dureing the yeare 1634; from Michaelmas 1642 to Michaelmas 1643; from Michaelmas 1649 to Michaelmas 1650; etc. Small-pox in Taunton all the year 1658; likewise in the yeare 1670, etc. I would I had the like observations made in great townes in Wiltshire; but few care for these things … 1638 was a sickly and feaverish autumne; there were three graves open at one time in the churchyard of Broad Chalke. This note dates from 1686, when Aubrey studied the register books of half a dozen parishes in South Wiltshire and sent extracts to Sir William Petty. I have created two diary entries based on this material, the first for 1638 when Aubrey, living at Broad Chalke aged 12, saw the graves: ‘This autumn, Broad Chalke is sickly and feverish; I walked through the churchyard earlier today and saw three open graves.’ And a second entry for 1643, the year Aubrey caught smallpox when he was an undergraduate in Oxford: Smallpox is periodical. There was smallpox in Sherborne during 1626 (the year of my birth), and during the year 1634, and it has been back again since Michaelmas last year. Such facts and observations in the great towns should be recorded, but few care for these things. By backdating the information Aubrey gives us I have shown his sensibility developing, from childhood, through youth, to middle and old age. He believed that antiquaries, like poets, are born not made. By the time he was an undergraduate he was already an active antiquary, aware of the need to record small details that others would overlook. Aubrey’s approach to his own life and other lives was imaginative and empirical in equal measure. In imagining his diary by collating the evidence I have echoed the idea of antiquities – the searching after remnants – that meant so much to Aubrey. I have collected the fragmentary remains of his life, from manuscripts, letters and books, his own and other people’s, and arranged them carefully in chronological order. I have done so ‘playingly’ (a word he used of his own writing) but with purpose. Ultimately, my aim has been to write a book in which he is still alive. Ruth Scurr is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge. Her book John Aubrey: My Own Life is published by Chatto & Windus in March 2015. MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 29

GEORGIAN SHOPPING

Shopping, Spectacle & the Senses Georgian London offered an array of retail experiences for women in pursuit of the ultimate in fashionable clothing, every bit as sophisticated as those open to the 21st-century shopper, as Serena Dyer explains.

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HE LONDON TRADESMAN in 1747 described a milliner as a retailer who would ‘furnish everything to the ladies that can contribute to set off their beauty, increase their vanity or render them ridiculous’. The milliner worked alongside the mantua-maker, the haberdasher, the draper and the stay-maker to provide elite and middling rank women with the tools of sartorial fashion. Drapers and haberdashers provided fabrics, notions and readymade goods; mantua-makers provided a design and construction service for gowns; and the milliner’s role bridged the two. From buttons and trims to ornate concoctions of headwear, this array of retailers provided a vital resource for women who aspired to be à la mode. The experience of shopping for fashionable clothing in the 18th century was more than a simple commercial exchange. How a woman shopped, as well as what she bought, were important social and cultural indicators. Just as the modern shopper can choose to shop on the Internet, by catalogue, by television, by phone or in store, the 18th-century shopper had a similar range of choices: the shopper could choose to visit a variety of shops on a trip into a local town or city, on foot or as part of the carriage trade. Alternatively, many retailers were willing to call upon their more favoured clients at home and bring goods along with them; if neither of these was possible, a proxy-shopper, usually a close friend or relative, could be commissioned to purchase items and send them on, or shoppers could correspond directly with the retailer, requesting samples and placing orders for goods. Each of these methods had its own social and cultural indicators, as well as practical advantages and drawbacks.

Clockwise from top left: pastel of a young woman by Francis Cotes, c.1760; silk gown, 1740s, updated 1760s; detail of a mantua of embroidered silk; pair of indoor shoes made with brocaded silk and leather, Spitalfields, c.1735; girl in a grey satin dress, painting by Bartholomew Dandridge, c.1740s; Harding Howell & Co’s fabric shop, Pall Mall, London, from Ackermann’s Repository, 1809.

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GEORGIAN SHOPPING Each of these different ways of shopping is characterised by two types of experience: the sensory and the social. The ability to discern quality and suitability through touch and sight was essential for a good shopper – whether shopping for oneself or acting as a proxy – as clothing was the second largest expenditure in the 18th-century home, second only to food. The experience of wearing clothing involves constant sensory interaction with the fabrics, materials, shapes and cut. Following the modern predominance of online retailing, the development of sensory-enabling technology for the fashion industry is being researched and many clothing websites now include video to convey the characteristics of, for example, garment movement. This development reflects an inherent need for consumers to experiment with touch, light and movement as they shop. While static images, such as the modern photograph or the 18th-century fashion plate and ink sketch, can convey an inanimate representation of a style, they lack the interactivity necessary to appreciate how a garment fits and moves.

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HOPPING WAS ALSO seen as central to the idea of polite sociability. The shopping process provided a platform for public display, spectacle, pleasure and entertainment. Through the act of visiting the shop space, consumers could not only interact with the product but also participate in public social interaction and cultural exchange: shoppers were often more concerned about social display and the exclusivity of the venue than with the shopping opportunities it provided. It was about seeing and being seen. Sociability was also important for the retailer: A General Description of All Trades, published in 1747, stated that ‘a good set of acquaintance’ was as important for the ambitious mantuamaker as ‘a clever knack at cutting out and fitting’. Although the branding of the modern fashion industry was in its infancy, the need to be seen at the fashionable shops, or wearing the latest hat, was still crucial. Shopping in town was immensely popular. The novelist Fanny Burney recorded ‘gossipping [sic], shopping and dressing’ as the main activities of a fashionable woman’s morning in town. The milliner’s shop was a social hub in which details of who was in town, what was being worn and who dined with whom were quickly disseminated. It was impossible to pick out and purchase an item without talking to staff and fellow customers: all goods were kept behind the counter, which became a platform for the inspection and comparison of goods, with the attendant watching constantly.

Above: a sackback gown with wired rosettes, characteristic of the 1770s. Right: haberdasher’s trade card, first half of 18th century.

HOW OBJECTS WERE VIEWED was also carefully controlled by the shop staff. In Burney’s comedy The Witlings (1778-80), the milliner, Mrs Wheedle, laments that a tippet (a shoulder scarf) made by one of her shop girls will ‘be fit for nothing but the window, and there the Miss Notables who work for themselves may look at it for a pattern’. Milliners provided the raw materials – fabric, thread and ribbons – as well as the finished articles meaning the completed articles on display could act as aspirational models, which could be emulated. This would then encourage the purchase of more materials. In addition, while the displays helped to draw in passing shoppers, their positioning in the window also prevented any tactile interaction with the goods, which might make any flaws in construction evident. This practical and educative approach did not detract from the perception of shopping as a pleasurable recreation. Through examining items, shoppers could gain an awareness of the market and the options 32 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

A Morning Ramble, or the Milliners Shop, after Robert Dighton, London, c.1782.

Felix M’Donogh in his The Hermit in London; or, Sketches of English Manners (1821) recalled sardonically a similar scene in which the habitual shopper would examine a whole Magasin de Mode, or a Gallery of Fashion, occupy half a dozen attendants in running about for her, change her mind a dozen times and abuse a score of articles, then turn upon her heel with a proud toss of the head and thus quit the shop. Although this piece is satirical, its depiction of shopping without buying seems in line with other sources. Using shops in this way offered an opportunity to view goods and fashion magazines with no commitment to buy, to make comparisons between the stock of different retailers and to satisfy curiosity about the latest fashionable products. If the customer was unable or unwilling to make the journey to their chosen retailer’s premises, it was not uncommon for the mercer to visit the customer’s home. Through these visits, the retailer gained privileged access to the body and home of the client. Contemporaries feared that the close relationships that necessarily emerged from this interaction between women of the clothing trade and ladies of the middling and upper ranks would result in the erosion of proper social distinctions.

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UTSIDE THE ESTABLISHED and dedicated space of the shop, the tactics of the mercer and the priorities of the customer changed. The client was removed from the influence of her companions’ tastes, opinions and preferences but she was also left without their guidance. Even if customers did not visit a shop personally, they may still have had access to social venues and, by observing the fashions there, they would have pre-existing ideas of current fashions and of what they desired when a retailer visited their house. Retailers were similarly restricted: while they obtained personal and private access to their client, they were only able to have a limited selection of goods to hand. This meant that the goods had to be carefully chosen based on requests from the client, previous purchases and an estimation of what the customer could afford. Although similar considerations did have to be made when interacting within the shop, the restrictions of transporting goods called for an even greater accuracy in predicting a customer’s desires. Lady Mary Coke regularly requested that tradespeople visit her in order for her to make purchases. In 1767, when organising the manufacture of her birthday gown, she wrote ‘the weather as severe as ever, sent for the lace man & chose some silver lace to trim my gown’ and that she also ‘sent for the mercer to bring the silk for my Birthday Gown’. Visits from tradespeople allowed her to remain indoors in inclement weather but, more than that, sending for multiple tradespeople also allowed her to compare trims and fabrics from different retailers, which were destined for one garment. This method had all the convenience of a street of shops and the comfort of staying at home. Viewing items from different retailers together at her convenience gave her freedom, creativity and inventiveness. Lady Mary Coke could buy a lace trim after directly comparing it to the fabric on which it would be sewn and, in the process, could assess further goods against things she already owned without the influences and distractions of a public shopping environment. In the 1780s, while staying with Hester and Henry Thrale, Frances Burney recorded the visit of a milliner to her hosts’ house:

Within the shops of the clothing trade, retailers produced item after item that might interest the client and provide a platform for tactile interaction available, which helped both informed consumption and leisurely enjoyment. The industrialist Josiah Wedgwood was a master at creating exhibitions of his pottery, charging a fee for people to view items that had already been made to commission for his famous or wealthy customers. These items were used as marketing samples, which allowed potential future clients to view and feel a range of products. Similarly, within the shops of the fashionable clothing trade, retailers would produce item after item that might interest the client and provide a platform for tactile interaction with the goods. A writer in the periodical the Weekly Visitor lamented in 1811 that the practice of the female shopper was ‘to enter shops, call for several articles, discomposing the goods, and at length take her leave without buying a single thing’.

This morning a milliner was ordered to bring whatever she had to recommend, I believe, to our habitation, and Mr Thrale bid his wife and daughter take what they wanted, and send him the account. MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 33

GEORGIAN SHOPPING

From top: the Haberdasher Dandy by Thomas Tegg and C. Williams, 1818; a mercer’s trade card, c.1760; woman’s stockings, c.1750, machineknit, coral-pink silk.

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Having relative financial freedom and the opportunity to view goods within the comfort of their own home encouraged the Thrales to buy freely; even Burney was tempted into purchasing ‘a complete suit of gauze lino’. Being able to touch any fabrics or goods suggested by the milliner, in combination with previous shopping experience and knowledge of quality and suitability, would be essential factors when selecting from an array of goods from which to choose. These skills of discrimination, which were practised through routine visits to shops, were put to use within the private space of the home.

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F A CUSTOMER was unable to visit the shop they wanted, an alternative to sending for tradespeople was shopping by proxy. This method had long been established as a way of obtaining fashion news and products when personal access was not possible. By commissioning a friend or relative, elite and middling ranking women were able to maintain access to fashionable, quality goods. Local retailers, though numerous, tended to be aimed at a less cosmopolitan and sophisticated clientele. When their services were called upon by elite women, the selection they were able to offer was often poor in comparison with their London rivals. The capital provided a hub for both imported and domestically manufactured goods: high-quality fabric and expertly constructed clothing was only available from the skilled and trained urban mantua-makers of London or larger fashionable resorts such as Bath. The proxy shopping method entrusted friends and relatives with the task of employing their skills of visual and tactile discrimination on the consumer’s behalf. A reliable and skilled proxy shopper was a valuable connection and formed a central part of social networks. Men and women of varying degrees of wealth participated in this network, drawing upon familial and business links. The proxy shopping system was already well established in the late 17th century. In 1678 Ursula Venner, sister of the politician Edward Clarke, wrote to him to commission her sister-in law to purchase a gown for her: ‘I desire my sister will doe ye kindness to by me a serviceable & grave morning gown to be worn every day, wch I leave to her discretion’. This request contains specific directions, but is vague in regards to the particulars and reveals a dichotomy between trust and the need to be specific about the garment desired. Furthermore, while Venner’s choice of gown – which was explicitly intended to be practical and plain – did not necessarily need to be fashionable, she demonstrated a preference for the superior products available in London shops.

The proxy shopper would transfer a portion of the responsibility of decision-making by sending fabric samples to the absent customer It was not always finished garments that were requested. Often it was only quality Continental and London silks that were desired, leaving the garment’s construction to be managed by the end consumer. Even when feeling that she had ‘superfluous wealth’, Jane Austen sent only fabric to her sister Cassandra rather than sending made up gowns. In 1801 she wrote to her sister about some fabrics: ‘buy two brown [lengths of fabric] but the kind of brown is left to your own choice’. Similarly, in 1723, Lady Mary Wortley Montague wrote to her sister that: I had rather the money was laid out in plain lutestring, if you could send me eight yards at a time of different colours ... but if this scheme is impracticable, send me a night-gown à-la-mode. There was a significant amount of trust in this open request. While a

Fabric advertisement from the magazine The Repository of Arts, published by R. Ackermann, 1809.

lutestring – a certain weight and finish of silk – was specified, the choice of colours was left to her sister. The directions regarding the night-gown are also vague, simply requesting that the garment was ‘fashionable’. The lack of specific direction in Lady Mary’s request indicates the trust she had in her proxy shopper. The role of the proxy shopper carried great responsibility. Mistakes could be expensive and could cause disputes between friends. In 1724 Mary Delany wrote to Ann Granville sending ‘some sprigs for working a gown, which I will send you, though my fancy is not a good one’. Delany clearly felt the weight and burden of responsibility and was self-deprecating about her skills as a proxy shopper. In April 1739 Frances Egerton replied to a friend who had commissioned her to act as her proxy. She apologetically wrote that she could not ‘stay in Town to receive your commands about your Gown, but I have had a return of my old disorder for which I’m obliged to go to Bath ... we hope you’ll aprove [sic] of what we have done’. SOMETIMES THE PROXY SHOPPER would transfer a portion of the responsibility of decision-making by sending fabric samples to the absent consumer. In 1785 Lady Grantham requested some fabric samples from Lady Robinson, who was in London for the season. No further order was placed, implying either that none of the samples were suitable or that they had only been requested by her in order to remain aware of current trends and favoured colours and patterns. While shopping by proxy had become well established, many women chose to order directly from favoured shops. Trusted retailers were provided with orders and requests via letter, enabling direct access to metropolitan fashions by the provincial elite. The April 1834 edition MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 35

GEORGIAN SHOPPING of the World of Fashion contained an advertisement for the fashionable dressmaker and milliner Mrs Bell, in which she invited her provincial clientele to order items from her directly:

Fashion plate of ladies’ morning dress, 1796.

Ladies residing in the country are respectfully solicited to favour her with orders for any description of dress or corsets, which they may rely upon having strictly fashionable, on the most reasonable terms and their tastes and wishes attended to, precisely as if they were present in London to give their orders.

‘Ladies residing in the country are instructed to send their measures so as to be fitted with the same facility as if in London’ Without direct access to the goods, shoppers corresponding with retailers often requested fabric, trim and ribbon samples. These samples made it possible for close inspection of the goods prior to purchase, even when the customer was unable to meet with the retailer and so unsolicited samples were sometimes sent out to encourage repeat sales. However, samples were also often requested by the consumer so they could assess the touch, feel and look of different fabric types. Samples of sets of similar materials were requested, probably with a specific project in mind. For example, in the letters between Lady Sabine Winn and her milliner, Ann Charlton, sets of samples were sent, divided between gauzes, ribbons and silk fabrics. Similarly, the samples Lady Winn received from the Faulding Brothers, a London haberdasher, were all cotton chintz.

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ROM 1809, the ladies’ magazine Ackermann’s Repository of Art began to include fabric samples alongside fashion news and visual plates, a resource that proved useful to both retailer and consumer as it allowed customers to engage with goods. Although a relatively new format, the women’s periodical had become very successful for feminine education both in moral and fashionable matters. These periodicals were dedicated to the ‘polite improvement’ of their readers, providing a forum in which leisure and instruction could be combined. Purchasing at a distance created problems when an item did not suit a client’s requirements. Information cards were developed in the latter part of the 18th and early 19th centuries to improve the communication of sizing. Before this, many mantua-makers would use a pattern from an old gown to gauge sizing. Mary Peers, a provincial mantua-maker, advertised that ‘Ladies in the Country may be fitted with the greatest exactness by sending a Gown as a Pattern’. Her advertisements advised that ‘ladies residing in the country are instructed to send their measures, so as to be fitted with the same facility as if in London’. However neither of these methods would have been successful in producing the fit that was possible through fittings. Mistakes were still easily made with such restricted interaction. When Lady King ordered some gloves from Mr Senior, a London haberdasher with whom she maintained a correspondence, she found that they were ‘a trifle too small in all ways’. Shopping by correspondence and being unable to try on and compare goods easily led to simple sizing mistakes. On some occasions when the goods delivered were not suitable, the retailer would write off the loss and ask the customer simply to dispose of the items she does not like as she wishes. In 1783 the milliner Ann Charlton wrote to Lady Sabine Winn: I am sorry the handkerchief was not what you meant but I assure you that the handkerchief with 3 tapes to tie under the chin is quite old & what we made last year & that I sent you was quite a new shape & what we sold so many of. 36 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

In such cases, the client’s lack of fashionable sociability had to be compensated for by trusting in the retailer’s knowledge and skill. Distanced from the visual spectacle of fashionable London, the consumer was susceptible to being misled by the retailer. Ann Charlton’s vindication of her goods could have been motivated by sending older fashions which would no longer sell in London. While this may not have been the case with the handkerchief, the fact that Ann Charlton had no desire to have the unwanted goods returned – and that there was no system in place for that to happen – implies that these goods cannot have had much value. In 1783 she wrote: ‘Please do let me know the price of the watch chains you keep, I should take it as a favour if it quite suits your Ladyship if you could dispose of the other’. Clearly the effort and expense of arranging a return of unwanted items outweighed the potential possibility of profit and resale. The relationship between fashion retailer and shopper was a complex one, involving both trust and commercial scheming. Shoppers would browse, inspect and visually dissect both the goods and their peers in order to train themselves as good shoppers and to maintain an awareness of fashion. Across each of the methods of shopping for fashionable dress that have been outlined here, the importance of careful sensory browsing and sociable interaction were maintained. Shopping was necessary in order to obtain the material tools of fashionability, and versatility in being able to shop was vital to how a woman presented herself to society. Serena Dyer was an Assistant Curator at the National Portrait Gallery and is currently completing her PhD at the University of Warwick.

FURTHER READING Jennie Batchelor, Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia UP, 1997). Mark Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (University of California Press, 2007).

| LABOUR'S ROOTS ALASTAIR CAMPBELL said that the Labour Party ‘didn’t do God’ but the truth is that until very recently it did. The flood of obituaries that followed Tony Benn’s death last year reminded us of Labour’s religious roots. To those who understand this tradition, it is no surprise that E.P. Thompson began his classic Marxist history, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), in a pre-industrial landscape of dissenting, self-governing chapels and that miners’ union banners are rich in religious allegory. It did come as a surprise to some of Benn’s obituarists, however, that for over 30 years the leader of the Labour Left was a committed Christian, while others barely registered the fact. As Peter Wilby remarked in the Guardian of March 22nd, 2014, ‘the driving force of Benn’s life was Christian Socialism … something few contemporaries, least of all journalists, fully understood’. On the eve of the most important UK General Election in a generation, I want to mark the significance of this great but neglected political tradition by reflecting upon one of the hundreds of thousands of Christians who gave their lives to the Left.

A priest with a secular vision: Richard Ellis in the 1960s.

Christian socialism can be seen as a late 19th-century form of Protestant liberation theology born of English Puritanism Liberation theology is usually associated with Roman Catholicism and the struggles of the Latin American poor. Christian Socialism, in comparison, can be seen as a late 19th-century form of Protestant liberation theology, which sprang out of English Puritanism but found its defining causes in American republicanism: in 18th-century Revolutionary Independence, in the 19th-century Abolition of Slavery and in the 20th-century struggle for Civil Rights. In Victorian England, meanwhile, the liberation movement found its voice in a thin black line of young Anglican priests and activists, who found themselves exposed to the near impossibility of urban mission and, in the ‘Nonconformist Conscience’, an old clustering of religious and political opposition, which found new life in the astonishing rise and reach of Methodism. Poorest strand Primitive Methodism was Methodism’s poorest and most proletarian strand. Founded in the time of the Luddites as a splinter from the original Wesleyan body, the Primitives knew all about breaking things. Just about every 19th-century popular struggle to break free – radicalism, trade unionism, co-operation, liberalism, workers’ education, teetotalism and various socialist associations that morphed into what eventually became the Labour Party – had Methodist support and, in many cases, Methodist inspiration. Four of the original six Tolpuddle Martyrs were Primitive Methodists. Before them, in Durham and Northumberland, Primitive Methodists had already led Thomas Hepburn’s miners’ union to victory in 1831 and would lead it again in 1844.

The Forgotten World of Christian Socialism

Robert Colls offers a personal reflection upon the religious roots of the Labour Party. MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 37

| LABOUR'S ROOTS Factory workers were familiar with slavery in the Bible and made comparisons between their own lives and the lives of African-Americans south of the Mason-Dixon line. The Old Testament book of Exodus served as the foundation narrative for both parties. Until only a generation ago, ‘chapel’ was a natural feature of working-class life in these islands. Richard, more commonly Dick, Ellis was born in industrial Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, in 1921. His father had been saved from an unhappy home by the Primitive Methodists who ran his local Sunday school. His mother’s great uncle, Reverend Thomas Auty, went to prison in 1906 for refusing to pay the school rate. Her uncle, Reverend Thomas Richard Auty, ministering in the Staveley circuit in north Derbyshire, sold all he possessed in 1926 in order to stand with the miners during the General Strike. Dick knew these men but there was no overwhelming sense of family obligation to follow them. He left school at 14 to work in the mills. At 19 he was called up and, like his father before him, refused to serve. This was not the first time his father or his church had shown him the way. In 1932 the Primitives had united with the Wesleyans and United Methodists to form the Methodist Church. Nineteenth-century Methodists of all types had tended towards the Liberal Party. Christian activists of Dick’s generation tended towards Labour and, for the theologically inclined, groups like Tawney’s Socialist Christian League. Many activists also took with them older church alignments – towards the peace party (the Primitive Methodist Conference of 1914 had condemned arms manufacturers as ‘direct foes of the Gospel’); towards teetotalism (Hugh Bourne, founder of Primitive Methodism, had committed from early days); and towards a form of Christian guild socialism, inspired in Dick’s case by his ministers at Dewsbury Zion, Hugh Davison and John Spoor, and by the memory of how his father’s own tiny pen repair business had been eaten up by the expansion of Woolworth’s in the 1920s. Conscientious objectors Eventually, Dick was installed with around 30 other ‘conscientious objectors’ in Selby, North Yorkshire. Willing to serve in the Merchant Navy but not willing to man the deck guns, farming it had to be. He liked the work and he and his comrades turned the hostel into a little university of the pacifist Left. After the war Dick went to ministerial training college in Richmond and, on ordination, married Joan Boyes, also of Dewsbury. For the next 40 years the Ellises served in the northeast of England, starting out in Bishop Auckland (where daughter Catherine was born in 1950, Ruth in 1952), then on to Stockton-on-Tees (1953-59), South Shields (195969), Roker, in Sunderland (1969-77), and Gateshead and Jarrow (1977-85). Dick’s ministry was part of the great liberationist tradition and he never wavered in that, but deep down he believed not in politics as such, but in what 38 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

In the north country: Richard Ellis, c.1980.

Like Archbishop William Temple, Ellis spent his life arguing that ‘all secular policy should be founded on Christian truth’ he called the love and suffering of Jesus Christ. What did he mean? His Jesus was not, it has to be said, the rather wispy Holman Hunt type who caught your eye from the study wall. Nor was his Christian Socialism the same as that of F.D. Maurice, or Charles Kingsley, or John Ruskin or any of the movement’s 19th-century high thinkers. Like them, he believed in the transformative power of fellowship. Like them, he saw the home as the model for how we all should live and, like Archbishop William Temple, he spent his life arguing that ‘all secular policy should be founded on Christian truth’. Unlike the great Christian Socialist patriarchs, however, he came out of an avowedly working-class sect, not a public school, and he was not sentimental about the ‘people’. His Jesus was a tender hearted fellow who showed you how to feel, not a socialist proposition. As for everlasting redemption, it was a condition which Dick never espoused and, as far as I know, never experienced. Man or redeemer? As with so many secular-minded Christians it was difficult to know just where his Jesus the man bowed out and his Christ the Redeemer crept in. Far more interested in social

equality than human nature, he never talked (to me at least) about Good or Evil. He did admire Alan Richardson’s Christian Apologetics (1948), however, and Stanley Evans’ Social Hope of the Christian Church (1965), though he was unaware of the latter’s pro-Soviet sympathies. More interested in Barth and Tillich than the Second Nicean Council, Dick believed (‘believed’ was an over-worked word in these discussions), that our best hope lay in the example of a man who died on the cross in love because we are all members one of another and in suffering because we must take responsibility no matter where it leads. One part of Richard Ellis’ Christian Socialism was confident of God’s love in the world and glad to be in it, while the other part was embattled: the legacy of a darker West Yorkshire Puritanism. He put his faith in the Labour party. At 90, he voted for Ed Miliband as leader. As for the Conservative Party, although no one ever actually heard Dick say that Tories could not get through the eye of a needle ... Loaded guns He arrived in my home town of South Shields in 1959 to close a youth club, which he said had no Christian purpose. Then he opened another sort of club and in no time at all teenagers were turning up: for each other and the 1960s zeitgeist, no doubt, but also for him and the challenge that Religious radical: Tony Benn outside the House of Commons, 1961.

he threw down. I would not say with Emily Dickinson that we were loaded guns at that moment, but we felt as if we were. It is true Dick did not always see that he did not always see. He listened though. A formidable intellectual, with charm and fun, he got hold of us and opened us up to an existentialist Left-Christianity that was not much on offer then and, as far as I can see, not much on offer now. In 2009, in retirement in South Shields, Joan suffered a stroke. The following year Dick lost a leg, which made his role as carer almost impossible. No longer capable of walking, they sat by the fire and talked politics and ‘poyetry’ and family, of course, with a bit of cricket thrown in. They could hardly stand up, but you left them feeling lifted. In recent years they had both taken a liking for the liberal Anglican priest Giles Fraser, although for some reason they

seemed to think that the Guardian, for whom Fraser writes, wanted the same sort of society that they did. Reading Benn’s obituaries, I was minded how alike the two men were. Forget trivial differences of celebrity and less trivial differences of wealth and privilege, as they would have done. Forget that one was a Primitive Methodist at heart and the other, in the end, was commended to God’s mercy by a dean of the Church of England. Forget, too, that they were both pipe-smoking teetotallers. Note instead how both men based their politics on justice and their justice on the Bible, especially the Sermon on the Mount. Neither man took much notice of Marx; Benn did not read Marx till he was 55 and Dick, who was far better read than the politician, saw Marx as an eschatological prophet, not a scientific socialist. Both knew their R.H. Tawney, were admirers of Donald Soper and Colin Morris and saw the Labour Party as a visionary movement rather than a vote bank. Somewhat austere, they paid little attention to focus groups. (It is hard to see how Roman focus groups, had they existed, would have seen the Crucifixion as anything but a bad thing for the spread of Christianity.) Above all, both men were humble in that they tried to bend who they were to their faith, not the other way. Working all hours, counting all hours and, in the end, believing all hours as the kingdom of God on earth slipped from their grasp, they had to face the fact that after a lifetime striving, society had not turned socialist and the people had not turned Christian. Christian Socialism? These days the movement is called ‘Christians on the Left’ and it does well, but you might as well want the moon. It has to be said, the language of love and suffering sounds very old, not to say manful. My students simply would not understand it. And the idea of a Christian Socialist society sounds a little bit intolerant, not diverse, possibly illegal, certainly not on message. God continues to elicit deep commitment, but which God and what sort of commitment? Not that middle-class metro-secularism solves any of Labour’s current problems. A party that hardly knows what it is allowed to believe and only looks to its own careers to believe it, is not going to flourish. And all parties, not just Labour, would do well to remember the Primitive Methodists and re-think ways of restoring religion as a local force capable of re-building the poor and sustaining them. Reverend Richard Hiram Ellis died on February 24th, 2014 in Jarrow three weeks before Tony Benn. How do you weigh the achievements of a priest? Dick was an emotional man who, in addition to his passion for justice in this world, stretched out for something in another, which complicated everything else. As a young probationer he would visit an old woman called Mrs Jeffrey in the village of Upend in Suffolk. She would give him tea and say grace on her knees. He told me he saw this as a sacrament. I told him he was getting soppy. He told me I didn’t get it. Now that he has gone, I get it: earthen floor, highest hope, the sacred all in each other. Robert Colls is Professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University, Leicester.. MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 39

INDIANS IN BRIGHTON

A Mutual Fascination The people of Brighton offered a warm welcome to the Indian soldiers sent to convalesce at the Sussex resort in the First World War. But the military authorities found much to be nervous about, writes Suzanne Bardgett.

E A wounded Indian soldier dictates his letter home to a scribe, Brighton, c 1915.

IGHT MONTHS AFTER the outbreak of war the Brighton Herald of January 16th, 1915, reported an encounter between a small group of Indian soldiers and the people of the town. It took place outside the York Place secondary school, which had been converted into a hospital for wounded Indians, newly arrived from the First Battle of Ypres. The Herald’s reporter was covering a visit by two members of the royal family: Princess Beatrice, who had lost a son in the same battle just months before, and her sister, Princess Louise, who had recently

lost her husband, the former Governor-General of Canada, John Campbell, 9th Duke of Argyll. The recently bereaved pair, daughters of Queen Victoria and thus a direct link to the first Empress of India, would have been thought highly suitable ambassadors to the Indian troops. But it was an impromptu incident that day which caught the reporter’s attention: On the outskirts of the crowd were three Indians, one of whom, possibly in honour of the Royal visit, had adorned his khaki turban with a spray of ivy. To the small children, as well as to the elders, the Indians were a centre of the keenest interest. And the Indians were as much interested in the children as the children were in them. At length the inspiration seized a small boy to hand a baby brother up to one of the Indians to be held in his arms. The Indian took the child with eagerness. That set the fashion. The next minute girls and mothers, too, were handing up their small children freely, either to shake hands with the Indians or to be taken in their arms ... [One soldier patted a baby’s] woollen covered toes with a joy that MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 41

INDIANS IN BRIGHTON

Wounded Indian troops are prominent in a recruiting rally held in Brighton in 1915.

would have done credit to a proud young father handling his first-born. What stories there will be to tell these babies when they grow up – how they had been fondled by wounded Indian soldiers who had come over to fight for Britain in the Great European War. There seems no doubt of the mutual captivation that existed between the Indian soldiers sent to Brighton to convalesce from their war injuries and the people of that town. The encounters would be short-lived, however. In late February 1915 the military authorities took the highly unpopular step of locking the soldiers into the hospitals and guarding them with military police. What had gone on and why did the military react in this way?

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ACHETAR SINGH, a soldier recovering in Brighton, wrote to a friend in India on March 15th, 1915: ‘How can I describe this war? It is like a furnace in which everything becomes ashes on both sides.’ For Singh and hundreds of other recovering soldiers, contact with civilians in Brighton had been relaxed for the first two months of 1915 and it had been a source of fascination and pleasure. We know this from the letters the Indians wrote home, which were read and translated by the British censor: ‘These people love us from the bottom of their heart’, reported one, and, according to another: ‘The people of this place pay us great honour & attention & keep on saying “How do you do?” & treat us with great respect.’ Three large buildings in Brighton had been converted into hospitals for the Indian wounded: the York Place

42 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

School, the Royal Pavilion and the Brighton Workhouse, which became the largest of the hospitals and was known as the Kitchener Hospital. The Royal Pavilion was thought to provide a particularly appropriate setting for the convalescing soldiers. Its exotic interior – filled with hospital beds and recovering soldiers – was to become the subject of several paintings. Local newspaper reports showed compassion and empathy for the Indians. When a train bearing a large contingent of wounded Indian soldiers arrived at Brighton railway station from a hospital ship in Southampton, the Herald’s reporter was there to describe the scene: It is a moving sight to see stretcher after stretcher shifted from the train to the ambulance vans, each stretcher with its motionless figure, some with their faces covered, others looking out upon their unaccustomed surroundings with expressions of patient endurance and with that aspect of mystery and melancholy which lurks in the eyes and feature of so many Indians ... in some cases where both legs were wounded the Indians were carried by their English comrades. LANGUAGE COULD BE A BARRIER, but not always, for there were some Brightonians who had lived in India. A Sikh soldier was able to converse with a Hindi-speaking reporter on the Herald, telling him, for example, about the recent fighting, with its constant machine-gun fire and exploding hand grenades. A Brighton policeman, who had spent several years in India ‘was immediately the centre of a group who recounted their experiences’. The seafront presented a host of entertainments. These

Clockwise from top left: photographic records of Indian soldiers convalescing at Brighton’s Dome and Kitchener hospitals and of the Kitchener’s X-ray room.

The English they were meeting in Brighton behaved altogether better than those they had met back in India

included now-forgotten diversions, such as rides in carriages drawn by goats. The two piers had booths with gaming machines, including recently installed ones that allowed the public to fire rifles at German soldiers. There were the trappings of commerce: a monster soda bottle on the roof of a house to advertise the drink was another singular sight that we know the Indian soldiers found amusing. The Indians noticed straightaway the warmth of the Brighton people. In a letter from February 1915, a Mahratta medical subordinate wrote: The people are so very good & kind that they make no difference between black & white. Everyone seeks every opportunity of becoming fast friends with us & of serving us in any way in their power. In the evening we always go for a walk. The people treat us very well indeed. Men and women alike greet us with smiling faces and take great pleasure in talking with us. One thing that struck the Indians was that the English they were meeting behaved altogether better than those they had met back in India. Sub-Assistant Surgeon J. N. Godbole wrote to his friend in Poona: We do not hear the words ‘damn’ and ‘bloody’ at all frequently as in India. But this only applies to those who have not seen India. Those who have gnash their teeth at us, some laugh and some make fun, but there are not many who do this. The people here are charming. It is impossible to ask why they become so bad on reaching India. From the pages of the Herald we learn of a spontaneous MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 43

INDIANS IN BRIGHTON act by a young Brightonian. The Indian soldiers were out on parade and quite a few small boys had joined in: One boy rather older than the rest marched all the way by the side of a good-looking young Indian in the rear. They could not speak a word to each other, but the boy marched along with all the mingled pride and solicitude of the ‘big brother’. He had clearly taken the Indian under his care. And the last thing one saw before the great gates of the Pavilion closed upon the party was the boy and the Indian shaking hands in farewell. India and Britain will be closer than ever before.

Troops in a charabanc in front of the statue of Queen Victoria on Brighton’s Grand Avenue, c.1915.

HERE WE HAVE a moment of connection: one young man singling out another and showing his brotherly concern. Brighton was full of families who each weekend greeted thousands of visitors: publicans, shop-keepers, hotel and café-owners and a host of other individuals who made their living through providing entertainments or selling icecreams on the seafront. In short, people were used to welcoming strangers. Some families had Indian troops staying in their homes. One Parsee medical subordinate wrote to his friend in Bombay on January 26th, 1915: Tomorrow we proceed to Bournemouth to take our HQ there. We are very sorry to leave Brighton & especially our billeting place and such comfort and motherly & fatherly feelings as we received from Mr and Mrs ____ who so proudly sheltered us for 14 days.

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RIGHTONIANS LEARNED to say ‘salaam’ on meeting the Indians. This was easy enough, but a feature in the Herald in March 1915 introduced readers to Hinduism and its rituals, explaining how the morning bath was a daily baptism and quoting from the Rigveda. Efforts at cultural understanding would grow as the hospitals became better established. That January, snow had fallen on Brighton and the Herald published a photo of the Indians making a snowball on the Pavilion lawn. The report described how the Indians ‘looked out upon the captivating scene spread before them with wonderment and delight’. The tone may seem condescending today. In 1915 it would not have. Another report that same January caught a moment of real sympathy for a group of Indians being taken on a drive on an especially cold day: They came with bandaged hands, with arm in a sling, or with hurts to feet and legs that had left them unable to walk save with the support of the Red Cross soldiers. Careful handling indeed was needed to get these maimed warriors into the seats of the covered-in car. To the keen interest of the group of onlookers the delicate task was at length accomplished. As the car moved away up the London road, the crowd, unable quite to muster up the cheer that they felt in their hearts, waved their hands in token of good wishes. Smilingly the Indians, who ever manifest the most friendly disposition, acknowledged the salutation. These soldiers were evidently too badly wounded for such a journey, which must have jolted them for a full three 44 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

Civilians and wounded Indian soldiers pose for the camera at the Kitchener Hospital, 1915.

hours. The crowd of onlookers seems to have sensed this and felt it was too much. Inevitably it was encounters with the women of the town which produced the most complex set of responses: ‘The women here have no hesitation in walking with us. They do so hand in hand. The men so far from objecting, encourage them. The fact is that this is the custom here’, wrote Sub-Assistant Surgeon M.M. Pandit to a friend in Sholapur. One Sikh wrote to his father of afternoon encounters with English women, who gave them fruit and of one woman who said to him: We have never seen such men. Only have we heard of them that they are the Sikhs of India who once fought against England. Now do we see them with our own eyes as we see our son. ‘Who once fought against England’ is presumably a reference to the Anglo-Sikh wars of the 1840s. Here is an unknown Englishwoman, seemingly wanting to push aside past prejudice. But the easy relations of early 1915 came to an abrupt end. Writing home in the spring of 1915, Dhunjibhoy Chinoy reported that new restrictions were in place: We are not allowed to go anywhere and are hard pressed and we do not like it ... At first the ‘salas’ allowed us more freedom

Seton later defended his action: It was evident, from the very first, that drink and that the sex problem were factors which would have to be reckoned with. A large proportion of the followers, the sweepings of Bombay city, were found to be habitual drunkards; and the ill-advised conduct of the women of the town, although partly innocent in intention, was bound to result in the gravest of scandals. ALCOHOL MAY HAVE been partly to blame: there was a court case against a contractor who had brought strong liquor into the hospital. But the prospect of liaisons with local Brighton women was the main reason. In February 1915 the Brighton Women’s Co-Operative Guild asked that something be done ‘to prevent the nuisance in connection with the Indians in Pelham Street’ and asked that the garden in nearby Trafalgar Street be ‘immediately boarded up’. The gardens were close to the entrance to the York Place hospital and it seems that Brighton women – with whatever motive – were congregating there to meet the Indians. The military in fact knew a lot more about the Indian troops’ relations with civilians than they were letting on and what they read gave them much to worry about. Marseilles in particular, where the Indian troops had disembarked, was mentioned a good deal by the censor: and we acted according to our pleasure and stayed out sometimes all night. We were even placed outside in billets; but some men abused the privilege and it was entirely stopped ...

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N LATE FEBRUARY 1915 Sir Bruce Seton, commanding officer of the Kitchener hospital, took the decision to clamp down on the Indian soldiers’ freedoms by locking them into his hospital. He went to the very top and wrote to Lord Hardinge, Viceroy of India, voicing his concerns about ‘the too frequent intercourse with Indian attendants and patients’. Sir Walter Lawrence, the Commissioner in Charge of the Welfare of Indian Troops, thought it was unfair, although his objections were not particularly strenuous: ‘The Indians are behaving like gentlemen and it is rather a pity that Bruce Seton should have alarmed Lord Hardinge needlessly.’ There was some discussion of the Coronation in 1911, when around 700 Indian soldiers had been billeted at Hampton Court. That had not been a town however: it was the urban environment which gave the military concern. Barbed wire was put on top of the walls surrounding the hospital and a band of military police formed from among the patients to enforce the new rules.

The interior of the Dome hospital, painting by Douglas Fox-Pitt, c.1919.

It would appear from the tenor of certain letters passing between the Base Camp at Marseilles, where the scum of the Army has naturally tended to collect, and the front, that the Indian soldiers in camp at Marseilles have been able in some cases to obtain access to the women of the neighbourhood and that a certain amount of illicit intercourse with them is going on. Letters to the Indians intercepted from Marseilles offered tantalising evidence of liaisons, but the precise nature of them was rarely clear. The prospect of a similar situation developing in Brighton was alarming. There were just too many opportunities for sexual adventure. There was very likely a class aspect to this concern. In his 1909 history of Brighton, Lewis Melville bemoaned the social decline of the town. The arrival of the railway had changed things for the worse. Brighton had become ‘the Cockney’s paradise, the Mecca of the stock-broker and the chorus girl’. Unlike nearby Brockenhurst and Barton-on-Sea, also the sites of hospitals, Brighton was associated with pleasure-seeking Londoners and, for the British Indian Army officers, would have seemed to harbour all kinds of lowMARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 45

INDIANS IN BRIGHTON

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life. The idea of the Indians consorting with barmaids and other lower-class women touched a particular nerve. The issue of European prostitutes and barmaids operating in India had produced a major scandal in the 1880s and, like all scandals, it cast a long shadow in the military mind. There was also irritation at the apparent affection that white women felt towards the Indians. A Liverpool journalist, reporting from Paris in 1914, observed: The Cult of the Asiatic, always strong in France, is now, thanks to the added sentiment for the brave ally, almost an obsession. A young princeling in my hotel is embarrassed by many kind smiles and glances. A motor-car will drive up and disgorge a bevy of heavily-furred ladies in the lounge where he is sitting. All through dejeuner their eyes will wander to him. The interest of course is half military and patriotic, and half due to the romance that dwells in everything remote. English women were also criticised for their behaviour when encountering Indians. A British Indian Army medical official wrote to his wife that Brighton was ‘covered with girls who make a lot of the natives. They are seen to go arm in arm with ward servants and are very fond of coloured people’. I have been able to find just one example of a letter from an English woman to an Indian soldier in the censored correspondence at the British Library. It was sent by a Londoner to a ‘Muslim clerk’ in France. It starts ‘Dear Gummie’ and thanks him for sending her money. A few lines later the writer says that there are not many soldiers in London now. One wonders whether this is a woman who had come to rely on payment for sex from soldiers on leave in London, but it is impossible to know. Perhaps ‘Gummie’ had sent the money on behalf of his superior. The letter ended ‘love and kisses for the Captain and yourself ’. We can imagine how the censor’s office must have reacted. Here was proof to the censors that some kind of relationship had developed and it can only have fuelled their concerns. There was evidence in the Indian soldiers’ letters, too. Writing home to a fellow-soldier in January 1915, a Muslim sub-assistant surgeon reported ‘I have been to the theatre. Enough, don’t you ask me anything. I am not tied up [by scruples] as you are. I go about to enjoy myself ’. With whom was this enjoyment being had? For the military a host of possible scenarios presented themselves. The war was starting to give more freedom to women and this posed all kinds of risks. So-called ‘khaki-fever’ and war babies were discussed in the press around this time and women police patrols were formed across the country to curb ‘unruly behaviour’. The prospect of mixed-race babies being born was disturbing but, more than that, the notion of sexual relations between Indians and British women challenged the very foundations of the British imperial edifice. Behind Seton’s concerns – and those of other senior military officers – was the fact that, by this time the Indian presence in the UK had become a highly polished project.

Brightonians pass Indian soldiers at the gates of the Kitchener hospital, 1915.

HE TONE OF MUCH of what was written in the newspaper reports was both possessive (references to ‘our Indian troops’) and condescending (phrases such as ‘gallant warriors’). The newspapers of the day helped reinforce a notion of the Indians that placed them firmly in the imperial hierarchy. They made much of the colour of Indian skins and far less of the terrible fighting they had been part of just weeks before. As reporters wrestled with describing the mass of men with whom they could not converse, they drew on appearance to speculate on the Indians’ characters and the physical attributes of the different racial groups. Not infrequently this gave rise to comparisons with children: ‘Filled with a child-like faith in their own religion, they seem as innocent as children, but in reality they have the hearts of lions for bravery.’ Every opportunity was taken to promote the notion of the Indians’ loyalty and dependability. Conducted visits to London – a regular activity for the convalescing soldiers – took them to Madame Tussauds and to West End stores. But they were also made to give formal salutes to the statue of Queen Victoria outside Buckingham Palace and were photographed doing so.

A British Indian Army medical wrote to his wife that Brighton was ‘covered with girls who make a lot of the natives’

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There was a degree of self-satisfaction at Britain’s largesse in treating the Indians so well and an expectation of gratitude. In A Short History in English, Gurmukhi & Urdu of the Royal Pavilion Brighton (1915) there is a description of it as a hospital for Indian soldiers. The author imagined the Indians recalling their time there after the war: ‘Their faces will then glow with pride as they tell of that day when they were lying wounded in a Royal Palace and the king and queen came to their bedsides and spoke to them words of tender sympathy and cheer.’ Willcocks later remembered how obsessed the senior military and political

In the following month an unnamed Indian soldier wrote home to Ahmedabad:

elite were with the Indians. If we look at the records of the Indian Soldiers Fund, set up in October 1914, we get some sense of this enthusiasm. The Fund’s organising committee comprised a long list of aristocratic men and women. Infinite care was poured into the scheme, with large quantities of tobacco, spices, chutney, pagri covers, balaclavas, coconut oil and sweets purchased to be sent to the front. The effort was well meant, but the rush to support and the determination to be listed on committees and lists of donors spoke of an almost fanatical interest. This ambitious campaign, now inextricably linked to the influential and highly inter-connected British elite, had to be guarded against any scandal or taint.

Brighton is a large city but I am ignorant of its contents. To have curbed relations in the way the British military had was not surprising, but it was heartless. The French authorities tended to be much more lenient. There were even some marriages between Indians and French women. We know from the letters written about encounters with French families, moreover, just how much these interactions were generally appreciated. We know also from the thousands of letters and diaries in the Imperial War Museum archives how much soldiers – throughout the 20th century – took comfort from chance meetings with civilians in wartime. It was mothers, sisters and grandmothers who were missed, not just wives. Many of the Indian soldiers in any case had their own taboos about sexual liaisons with women not of their caste. The opportunity to get to know the people of Brighton – with all the healing benefits it would have brought – was lost. Fraternisation threatened the very cornerstone on which the Empire was built: a presumption of the supremacy of the British over the Indian. Within this construct stood an ideal of British womanhood. In his memoir Willcocks recalled the example of Lady Minto, the wife of an earlier viceroy, who had crossed the Malakand Pass into tribal districts, rarely visited by white women:

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EING A CAUSE CÉLÈBRE was not easy for the recovering soldiers and produced its own pressures. With so much adulation and fussing, the Indians had to be circumspect about anything that might provoke criticism from the locals. Gambling had helped pass the time in the hospitals, but it was officially forbidden. A Hindu soldier reported to his friend in India: ‘We only have a game on the sly now and then, so that the Officers may not know. You see we are held in great respect here. But if they were to know what we do, what would become of the respect?’ There was an incident in which a 15-year-old local errand boy stole money from a Sikh soldier. At the court hearing that followed, the soldier – despite needing the money – was at pains not to make a fuss. The relationship between Indians and their hosts had become strained. The Indians were under intense pressure to conform to expectations. The British were anxious that the Indian soldiers’ presence was packaged and presented to the best effect. It became apparent that the main reason for devoting so much effort to nursing the Indians back to health was to return them to the fighting fronts. The letters home began to show resentment that Indian soldiers were being seen as cannon fodder. Ragbir Singh of the 59th Rifles wrote: I have been wounded twice, and now this is the third time that I am being sent to the trenches. The English say it is all right. How can it be all right? For the Indians to have been locked in, after a period of freedom in Brighton and in contrast to conditions in France, seemed undeserved. Soon the soldiers were writing with real bitterness of the frustration they felt. Writing home in June, Pirzada, a sepoy, warned, Our people are very angry. They do not allow us out to the bazaars etc. They do not let the French or the English talk to us nor do they let us talk to them. The English have now become very bad. They have become dogs. Our Indian soldiers are very much oppressed, but they can do nothing.

A British soldier photographed with wounded Indians at the Dome hospital, 1915.

She spoke to all the Indian officers and men of the wild transborder chiefs, and years afterwards the memory of her visit was still a theme of conversation amongst the Maliks beyond Chakdara and en route to distant Chitral. You can do much in the East by personal example, you can do little without it. This was the preferred image of British womanhood: brave, aloof, untouchable. The encounters in Brighton’s Pelham Street gardens presented a very different scenario – one best avoided. Suzanne Bardgett is Head of Research at Imperial War Museums.

FURTHER READING Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars (Bloomsbury, 2014). E M Collingham, Imperial Bodies: the physical experience of the Raj, c 1800-1947 (Polity, 2001). David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: soldiers’ letters, 1914-1918 (MacMillan, 1999). General Sir James Willcocks, With the Indians in France (Constable, 1920).

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MakingHistory How much are actions – especially extreme ones – the result of impersonal historical forces and how much are they dependent upon the impulses of individual actors, asks Mathew Lyons?

Charlie Hebdo and the judgement of history MILLIONS OF PEOPLE took to the streets of France in January to protest about the murders of eight satirists at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, of four Jewish patrons of a kosher food store and of three police officers. Many in the media have identified the slaughter in Manichean terms, reflecting a battle between religious sensibilities and free speech, between the forces of reaction and modernity, between Islam and the West. Historians have to judge such claims, both in the present and where they arise in the past. Discerning motive is perhaps the hardest task we face. It is an intellectual challenge but also a narrative one. How far to use the individual act to explain wider societal, cultural and intellectual forces? How far to claim those forces diminish the role of the individual and the extent to which his or her uniquely personal experiences shaped and defined their choices? Journalists and politicians on both left and right have been happier discussing the murders in Paris in terms of cultural wars than in terms of individual actors. For some, they arose out of racism, ‘Islamophobia’ and varieties of economic and political imperialism. For others, they were another bloody skirmish in the West’s war with ‘Islamofascism’. It might be glib to suggest the attraction of such responses lay in their simplicity. Yet few people like to let events redefine their world views; editorial writers and politicians like it less than most. Historians are made of sterner – if more supple – stuff. One of my first thoughts on hearing of the killings at Charlie Hebdo was Milton’s dictum in Areopagitica: As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable 48 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

For all this waste of wealth and loss of blood.

creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, the image of God. Milton’s language is emotive, powerful: massacre, homicide, martyrdom. Censorship is a kind of murder. However, the concept of murder as a kind of censorship does not seem to be in his vocabulary. Frontispiece to John Milton's Areopagitica, 1644.

Milton’s language is emotive, powerful: massacre, homicide, martyrdom. Censorship is a kind of murder Not that Milton would have approved of Charlie Hebdo. Far from it. His lines Licence they mean when they cry Liberty; For who loves that must first be wise and good: But from that mark how far they rove we see,

could almost have been written with the events in Paris in mind. For Milton – as for some of those who would import rigid Islamic standards of blasphemy into Europe – a free press was intended to enable God’s Englishmen and women to find a truer path to revealed wisdom. He did not understand why the people, in their wisdom, had thought to use it otherwise. There have always been people like those at Charlie Hebdo who, wherever the boundaries of free speech are, can be found pushing against them. Causing offence is almost a raison d’être and the magazine’s savage glee at doing so places it in the arc between South Park and Jonathan Swift. Given the magazine’s provocations, were the forces of history such that the killings were inevitable? Or should we allow more for the role of contingency and chance in what happens – in the present as much as in the past? As historians, we try to make patterns out of encounters and events, to sift for meaning beyond the oddities and quirks of the human actor. But surely we must resist the temptation to fit each of us wholly and neatly into a wider ideology or identity, to make coherent rational wholes of humans who are rarely less than contradictory and impulsive at the best of times. Perhaps, the true definition of civilisation is the absence of a demand for too much intellectual clarity and precision in each other. As individuals and as societies, the more tolerant we are of both our own contradictions and those of our fellow humans, the more civilised we shall be. Mathew Lyons is author of The Favourite: Ralegh and His Queen (Constable & Robinson, 2011).

WALLADA Portrait of Wallada by the contemporary artist José Luis Mun̄oz at the Sepharad House Museum in CÓrdoba’s Jewish Quarter.

Islamic poet of love Eleventh-century Córdoba was at the heart of the rich culture of Muslim Andalusia. Among its greatest creative figures was Wallada, princess, patron and poet. Leigh Cuen rediscovers one of the most influential women writers in European history.

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ALLADA BINT-AL MUSTAKFI may be the most influential writer that historians ever forgot. ‘Wallada became a legend in Córdoba, more myth than history’, said the Spanish journalist Matilde Cabello. ‘I heard about Wallada from my father as a child. But I didn’t know she was a real person.’ Wallada ran a literary salon in the 11th century, during Córdoba’s last years as the literary hub of the western world. Many contemporary scholars, such as Dr Abdulwahid Lu’lu’a and María Rosa Menocal, believe this generation influenced the birth of Europe’s courtly love lyrics.

Masterpieces like Tristan and Iseult, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Divine Comedy and most legends of King Arthur’s court that readers know today are all indebted to Andalusian women such as Wallada. In his 1977 essay ‘Wallada, the Andalusian lyric, and the question of influence’, James Mansfield Nichols even suggests that Wallada ‘and her sister poets’ could be the missing link between ancient Arabic poetry and the European romance lyrics that emerged in the Middle Ages. But, in the following centuries, European institutions usually dismissed and discarded works written by women, especially Muslim women. Cabello spent five years researching for her book, Wallada: La Ultima Luna, the first in-depth biography of Wallada. ‘There were small pieces of information scattered around’, said Cabello. ‘Wallada was only mentioned as a side note in texts about Andalusia or her lover, Ibn Zaydun.’ So Cabello published a second edition in 2005, in both Spanish and Italian, which used fiction to fill in the gaps. In less than two months the book sold more than 2,000 copies MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 49

WALLADA in Córdoba alone. Over the past decade Spanish writers have published new novels, poetry, anthologies and essays that celebrate Wallada. But Cabello says most professors and writers still focus exclusively on her sexuality, treating her like an aristocratic prostitute. For almost a thousand years Andalusians and Arabicspeakers around the world told the tragic love story of the Spanish poet-philosopher Ibn Zaydun and his muse, Wallada, daughter of Muhammad III, one of the last caliphs of Córdoba. The torrid affair between Ibn Zaydun and Wallada is as significant to Arabic literature as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is to the English canon. However, Córdoba’s romance was not just a fairy tale. Cabello wanted to meet the people behind these myths: ‘Ibn Zaydun was portrayed as a great thinker, while Wallada was briefly mentioned as this typical “bad woman”,’ said Cabello. ‘I wrote the biography to rescue Wallada from the shadow of a patriarchal literary tradition.’ The greatest Moorish writers of the day praised Wallada’s eloquence and provincial influence. There are whole books of poetry written for her, yet less than ten fragments of Wallada’s own writings have survived: a few scant lines from her letters to Ibn Zaydun and the trademark verses she stitched into her clothes.

Below: the Mosque-Cathedral at Córdoba. Bottom: the garden of Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos in Córdoba.

running water, funneled through pipes from the Sierra Morena mountains. The streets were lined with long rows of booksellers; literature was central to Córdoban society and only a small minority was illiterate. Meanwhile, in Christian Europe, just a few privileged clergymen were as educated as the average citizen of Córdoba. Scholars came from all over the world to visit its celebrated libraries and Greek envoys were astonished by the city’s wealth and beauty. Inside the local mosque stood a pulpit constructed from 36,000 pieces of ivory and timbers studded with gold nails. Red and white stripes painted on the ceiling arches gave worshippers the feeling of riding a rising wave. The 10th-century German poetess Hroswitha described Córdoba as ‘the ornament of the world’.

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ALLADA was a woman who embodied feminism before the word existed. She embroidered poetry across her robe. One sleeve read: ‘I am, by God’s will, fit for high positions! And I walk with pride along my own road.’ The other sleeve read: ‘I let my lover touch my cheek, and gladly bestow my kiss on him who craves it.’ Today, a new generation of writers are claiming Wallada as their inspiration, including Syrian poets such as Mohja Kahf and Maram al-Masri, who publish revolutionary poems against violence, patriarchy and Islamic extremists. ‘For me, Wallada is a role model’, said al-Masri:

Córdoba was a bustling cultural centre, overflowing with palaces, a university, gardens and hundreds of public baths

She is very relevant today, when many Muslim women are attracted to fundamentalist tradition. I wrote Le retour de Wallada because I thought it was very urgent. Wallada remains an archetype of freedom. She conquered through words, the graces of poetry and love. Now women around the world are claiming Wallada’s legacy, reviving the genius that history overlooked. Wallada was born in 994, during Islamic Spain’s Golden Age. Her hometown, Córdoba, was the Umayyad capital, built along the banks of the River Guadalquivir. Córdoba was a bustling cultural centre, overflowing with palaces, a university, lush gardens and hundreds of public baths with 50 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

WALLADA’S MOTHER WAS a Christian slave in the royal harem and her father Muhammad III, was a caliph who rose to power after a violent revolt. Wallada inherited her mother’s pale eyes and fair complexion and her father’s fiery personality. As a young woman she lived in a royal palace with marble pillars and a roof covered in gold tiles, but her adolescence was anything but idyllic: plague ravaged Córdoba in 1011 and Wallada became a woman during the bloodiest years of the capital’s history. Her father was murdered in 1025. After her father’s murder, Wallada used her family’s wealth to gain unprecedented independence. She sold her property rights, dispensed of male guardianship and opened the capital’s most influential literary salon in her own mansion. According to the chronicler Ibn Bassam: Wallada was the first among her literati peers ... her circle was the most illustrious meeting in Córdoba ... the doors of her busy mansion were always open, frequented by the highest nobility and the generous of mind.

Wallada lived during the final generation of Córdoba’s glory days. The collapse of the Islamic Caliphate marked the zenith of Córdoba’s literary innovation. As political turmoil swept the countryside, the elites turned to fierce poetry competitions to express their longing and frustration. This was no longer the bookish poetry of academia. As Wallada entered her thirties, Córdoba’s poetry scene grew passionate and fearless. The Andalusian scholar Ibn Bashkuwal wrote that Wallada competed with diverse writers and surpassed the best of them. Wallada’s literary salon also became an unofficial school for women of all backgrounds, from royalty to slaves. Women came to Wallada to learn how to read, write and

compose music. When local officials accused her of lacking modesty and propriety, she ignored them. Her salon had a great influence on the writer Ibn Hazm, author of The Ring of the Dove. Ibn Hazm publicly defended Wallada’s honour and refuted accusations made against her. There is no evidence of a love affair between them, but there is evidence of an intimate, long-term friendship. Ibn Hazm admired Wallada’s writing and praised her character. He had always been a political supporter of the Umayyads, who shared Wallada’s lineage, with one exception: he hated Wallada’s father, the deceased caliph, who he called a drunkard. Political violence forced Ibn Hazm to leave the capital for several years. When he returned and became Wallada’s trusted companion, he started to write philosophy about love.

The interior of the Great Mosque at Córdoba.

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OME SCHOLARS believe Ibn Hazm’s book became the troubadour’s manual of courtly love. Ancient Islamic poetry styles, such as the Arabian raqib and washi, have their French and Spanish counterparts in the later guardador and lauzenjaire, the archetypal ‘jealous lover’ in troubadour lyrics. Ibn Hazm’s rules of love included: ‘True love is rooted in the spiritual soul’ and ‘union is the ultimate bliss’ and were infamous. Modern writers such as Ezra Pound and A.R. Nykl claimed Andalusian lyrics were the fountainhead of modern romantic poetry. In the Middle Ages female slaves had an especially important role in the art of storytelling: they performed across borders, from Islamic states to the Christian courts of neighbouring kingdoms. Female slaves were Ibn MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 51

WALLADA

‘A Group of Troubadours’, an illustration from the Cantigas de Santa Maria, made under the direction of Alfonso X, ‘the Wise’, 1221-84.

Hazm’s first poetry teachers, before his years of exile. Afterwards, it was the headstrong Princess Wallada who dared to open her home in Córdoba to slaves and nobles alike. In her home, Jews, Christians, Muslims, men and women, all explored poetry together without distinction. Wallada probably met the ambitious politician Ibn Zaydun at her own salon. He was not yet a renowned poet, but encounters with the articulate princess would soon inspire his groundbreaking works. Wallada wrote to him: ‘Wait for darkness, then visit me, for I believe that night is the best keeper of secrets.’ When the moon rose, they wandered together into the garden and drank sweet wine. According to Ibn Zaydun, they spent the night picking 52 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

flowers from each other’s lips. He wrote: ‘Though I may afterward complain of long nights without you, how much do I now complain of this night’s shortness with you!’

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IKE SHAKESPEARE’S lovers, Wallada and Ibn Zaydun came from rival families. Ibn Zaydun had supported the Umayyad’s enemies before Wallada’s father was murdered and afterwards was appointed ambassador of the Jahwarid petty state. So the couple met secretly, only at night and wrote long love letters whenever Ibn Zaydun travelled on diplomatic missions. A new form of poetry emerged in their letters, one that later generations would consider the pinnacle of Andalusian literature. Under the

Historians usually refer to Wallada as the brash ‘Andalusian Sappho’, citing sexuality as her most salient characteristic. The real Wallada refused to be defined by her gender. She never married, did not wear a veil and rarely wrote erotic literature. Rather, she used sensual wordplay to emphasise irony instead of literal sexuality. She used gender as metaphor rather than a subject; her poetic narrator often switches genders when the speaker changes roles. Most criticism of Wallada’s writings reveals more about modern stereotypes than about Wallada herself.

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BN ZAYDUN FELT HUMBLED by Wallada’s devotion, given her royal lineage and higher social status. He wrote that it was as if God made her out of musk, while the rest of mankind was merely made from clay. Their correspondence is marked by a radically new tone, one where the gallant male humbles himself before his lover. Some scholars, such as Dr Abu-Haidar, even believe Ibn Zaydun had an inferiority complex vis-à-vis Wallada. Meanwhile, Wallada kept busy with her salon, despite her strong affections. In one six-verse poem, Ibn Zaydun complains of weakness and insomnia because of Wallada’s avoidance. In another three-verse poem, he reproaches Wallada for ‘having allowed her world to forget a slave whose world she is’. Wallada’s salon had a deep impact on the writers around her, even figures from opposing political backgrounds. In A.R. Nykl’s study, Hispano-Arabic Poetry and its Relations with the Old Provencal Troubadours, he noted: If we compare Ibn Zaydun’s life to that of his famous contemporary, Ibn Hazm, we find that in their initial formation they passed through a very similar process in Córdoba. Despite all the disorders that were reigning in the city … they acquired a most thorough education in literary art.

veil of silver moonlight, Ibn Zaydun claimed Wallada as sovereign over his political allegiances. Wallada’s letters were filled with long poems, in which nature reflects her inner emotional state in a way reminiscent of later Renaissance poetry. She awaited liberation from the ‘slavery of desire’ and wrote that, if the heavens felt her love, it would immobilise the sun, moon and stars. Wallada’s letters show firm control over multiple traditions of rhythmic metre and her verses reveal her own unique style: a tone of self-irony. In one line she describes her sincere emotional longing, while the next mocks her own obsession as insignificant within the vast, mystical nature of time.

Top: facsimilie of an ivory box originally made for Princess Wallada, c.966 ad. Commissioned by The Conjunto Arqueológico Madinat al-Zahra, produced by Factum Arte, 2010. Above: a scene of music and courtship from Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, 1462.

Centuries later, C.S. Lewis wrote that courtly love, popularised in the generation after Wallada, was the most radical change in the history of European literature. ‘Compared with this revolution’, Lewis wrote, ‘the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature.’ Although Lewis never specifically mentioned Wallada or her compatriots, he defined this new attitude of male writers towards their female lovers through the following traits: humility, courtesy, adultery and the religion of love, i.e. spiritual ecstasy in worshipping the lover. These themes may have been new to Christian Europe, but they already had a long legacy in ancient Sufi literature. When Ibn Zaydun betrayed his beloved princess, their correspondence would elevate these traditional motifs with fresh, candid emotion. Some scholars say that Ibn Zaydun seduced Wallada’s favourite African slave. Others believe he merely critiqued Wallada’s writing, then lavishly praised her slave at a public poetry reading. Whatever the offence, Wallada’s letters delivered scathing insults in perfect metre. ‘If you had been fair to our love, you would not have taken an interest in my slave girl […] I am the moon of the heavens’, Wallada proclaimed, ‘yet you preferred a darker planet.’ Ibn Zaydun spouted dozens of pages begging for her forgiveness. His poems expressed extreme humility and courtesy along with spiritual metaphors that likened Wallada to divinity. ‘Remove your mask of anger’, he pleaded, ‘so that I may be the first to bow down and worship.’ But Wallada was not moved; imagine her rolling her eyes at MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 53

WALLADA

Wallada’s themes may have been new to Christian Europe but they already had a long legacy in ancient Sufi literature

his melodramatic promises. Instead, she penned a series of melodic quips, literally saying that Ibn Zaydun ‘has an ass that loves the cocks of Persian breeches’, including the verse: You are a pansy, a bugger, a fornicator, a cuckold, a swine and a thief. If a phallus could become a palm tree, you would turn into a woodpecker. Generations of critics have used these verses to claim Wallada was vulgar, lewd and, more recently, homophobic. She certainly had a bold and arrogant personality. However, considering how popular and common homoerotic verses were at this time in Córdoba, it would be peculiar for her to use homosexual comparisons as insults. Modern critics overlook her poetry’s key characteristics: Wallada’s visceral humour foils Ibn Zaydun’s dramatic pandering. She casts his lust as ridiculous, describing him as animalistic and sexually passive, the exact opposite of the chivalrous lover he claims to be. He claims to worship her as his goddess-lover. She casts his passion as pure testosterone, without balance or romance.

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ALLADA’S METAPHORS shocked her peers because of her innovative style, not their sexual content. Córdoba was a liberal, open society. In years to come, the lyrics of early French troubadours in the 12th century, including Marcabru, Bernart Marti, Peire d’Alvernha, Raimbaut d’Aurenga and Giraut de Borneil, were also laced with irony and sexual innuendo. Later literary giants, from Dante to Shakespeare, wrote similarly graphic insults in cultured, poetic forms to 54 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

Above: The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice, illustration on vellum, Italian, 13th century. Right: Cervantes’ The History of Don Quixote, Blounte edition, London, 1620.

enhance the images’ ironic contrast. Yet none of them are considered crude. In centuries to come, Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote would be credited with pioneering artistic satire in romantic literature. Yet in Wallada’s letters it is clear to see such satire derived from the same hand that first forged courtly love lyrics. Heavenly prose and ironic critique arrived as inseparable twins. Despite centuries of legends about this affair, the true love story from Córdoba is not a romance between a poet and his muse; Wallada’s story is about a woman who loved herself. Ibn Zaydun’s fiercest political rival, the Caliph’s vizir, Ibn Abdus, began attending Wallada’s salon. When the princess and Ibn Abdus grew closer, Ibn Zaydun lashed out in a jealous rage. He wrote a slanderous epistle about the vizir and signed Wallada’s name. But the spurned lover did not fool anyone and the outburst only hurt his standing in the court. When Ibn Zaydun wrote that Wallada was just a piece of sweet meat that he took a bite of then threw away to be gnawed on by a rat (the vizir), Ibn Abdus had his rival thrown in prison. Ibn Zaydun eventually escaped and fled

today women poets experience the same demonisation that Wallada did for her self-possessed sexuality. ‘I’ve had many experiences where I was judged harshly for my poetry and personally insulted’, said al-Masri. ‘When women write about love, it makes a revolution against those who devalue her emotions and think they possess her. Poetry is also a form of resistance.’ Al-Masri was shocked and confused when a reviewer in London described her social and political poetry as erotic. ‘We write freely because we are not free’, she said. ‘In their minds, people trap us in boxes.’

Córdoba and it was then that he wrote his most famous love poems, fraught with longing, nostalgia and overtones of delusion. Ibn Zaydun continued describing his love for Wallada as the true religion and accusing his enemies and cruel fate for keeping them apart. One such Nuniyya (a poem where every line rhymes with the Arabic letter Nun) became one of the most famous love poems in the history of Arabic literature and immortalised Ibn Zaydun, while Wallada’s canon was lost to history. Wallada lived to be almost 100 years old. When she retired from the literary scene, she moved in with Ibn Abdus. She never married and was believed to have had a romantic relationship with her protégé, a slave turned poetess named Muhja. All historians know for certain about their emotional connection is that Muhja wrote satiric poems dedicated to Wallada, including sensual lines laced with possessive jealousy. Again, we see that Wallada left a new theme of love poetry in her wake: verses that used religious language to revel in the sweet pain of adultery and of loving a woman who cannot be possessed. Wallada died in 1091, on the same day that the Almoravids invaded Córdoba. Her death marked the end of Córdoba’s literary epoch. WALLADA FADED into the footnotes of history, mentioned only in reference to Ibn Zaydun or in local legends of Córdoba’s former greatness. Then, in the 1980s, a group of Andalusian women started publishing their poetic experiments in a small magazine for friends and family. They considered poetry a hobby, not a political statement. Their verses followed traditional styles and subjects, including flowers and love songs. They called their magazine Wallada. Andalusian women grew up hearing this strange name and faint myths about a princess that once held sway over the philosophers and politicians of al-Andalus. A few generations after feminism renewed academic interest in women writers, this infrequent magazine took on a more potent significance in 2003, when another Spanish poet, Magdalena Lasala, published her own fantasy novel about Wallada. The 2006 edition of Wallada, published in Málaga, featured some of Spain’s best up-and-coming female poets. Over the past decade, feminist writers around the world have adopted Wallada as their own inspirational hero. In the introduction to al-Masri’s bilingual French-Arabic book inspired by Wallada, Le retour de Wallada (The Return of Wallada), the French writer Jean-Pierre Faye noted:

L

Detail from the Monument to Princess Wallada and Ibn Zaydun in Córdoba.

IKE WALLADA, who wrote during a time of upheaval in Córdoba, al-Masri and her colleagues also write on the crossroads between overlapping conflicts. ‘When I wrote about Wallada, I imagined she travelled through time and arrived today’, said al-Masri. ‘What freedoms would she see? What would she notice? We still have a silent war between men and women, each side is trying to feel more important and less vulnerable than the other.’ Al-Masri is currently working on a new book, an anthology of poems about love written by Syrians caught between feuding armies, which explores how people experience love in a time of revolution. According to al-Masri, many of the writers are afraid that publishing these poems may endanger their lives: ‘Even in modern society’, she said, ‘writing about love is dangerous.’ Muslim women are still using poetry as a bridge between cultural influences, between the Islamic world and the proverbial West. Thanks to the work of modern women writers around the world, Wallada is now recognised as an influential artist in her own right, not only as a muse. Today, an unassuming white gazebo is tucked in a back corner of Córdoba’s historic Jewish Quarter. It shelters a sculpture of two caressing hands reaching towards each other. Their touch appears gentle and tender. These metal hands sit on top of a marble rectangle, which is engraved with a dedication in both Arabic and Spanish. This statue was erected in honour of Ibn Zaydun and Princess Wallada, Córdoba’s legendary lovers.

Leigh Cuen is a freelance writer based in Tel Aviv, Israel.

FURTHER READING

The centuries are coming together in a new song. Every page here is a mocking stanza. Wallada’s weariness traverses time, carrying into our age a brief overload of dazzling anachronism and tender vengeance.

Anne Klinck, and Anne Marie Rasmussen, Medieval Women’s Song (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

Le retour de Wallada features poems with al-Masri’s trademark colloquial lyricism and intimate descriptions of nature, delivered with Wallada’s playful lilt. However, even

S.M. Imamuddin, Muslim Spain, 711-1492 ad (E.J. Brill, 1981).

James Monroe, Hispano-Arabic Poetry: A Student Anthology (University of California Press, 1974).

MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 55

10 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

REVIEWS

Taylor Downing reviews the 2015 Longman-History Today Book Prize Winner Claire Jowitt praises pirates • Andrew Hussey jives with Johnny Hallyday

The tombs of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II at Fontevraud Abbey, France.

SIGNPOSTS

Historical Fiction With characteristic pace and purpose, Jerome de Groot highlights some recent historical fiction, en-route encountering Eleanor of Aquitaine, Johannes Gutenberg, Simón Bolívar and the spirit of Marcel Proust. AS I WRITE THIS I am waiting to watch the first episode of the BBC’s adaptation of Wolf Hall. The anticipation for the series is high. It is another demonstration of the importance of the Tudors to the contemporary historical imagination and of the influence of the historical novel on popular culture. The series seems set to demonstrate the complex ways that a novel can render the past. 56 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

In this round up, two books by major figures show that the Tudors are not the only game in town and, in their particular approaches, demonstrate a particular division of historical writing – essentially between combat kingly fiction and matrilineal queenly fiction – that Mantel’s treatment of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell seeks in some way to traverse.

Conn Iggulden gave the keynote address at the Historical Novel Society conference last autumn and demonstrated a fierce intelligence and great insight about the ways that historical fiction works (see: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=s4y1kuGIYlY). Iggulden is hardly a well-kept secret, but his new book, Trinity (Penguin, £18.99), marks the moment

that he becomes significant as a writer. It is a masterful, vigorous, gloriously entertaining dash through the craziness of the Wars of the Roses. The second part of a trilogy, it promises a grand climax to come while rendering impressive scenes and characters. Iggulden carefully uses his spymaster character, Derry Brewer, to weave a path from duke to monk, from street to king’s chamber. The action shifts easily and with authority. Iggulden keeps the complex factional politics in order and writes the combat scenes with a clarity that recalls the work of Cornwell, among others. The battle of St Albans is handled with dexterity and is a fitting centrepiece to a novel about how fortunes in war (and politics) can turn on a sixpence. There is a fantastic scene between York and Henry VI in St Albans Abbey that conveys the importance of personality to this national contention. The style is sharp and muscular, without being overwhelmed by the blood and gore of the period. Elizabeth Chadwick’s The Winter Crown (Sphere, £16.99), while still about faction and contention, concentrates on the female perspective. The opening scene, with Alienor (Eleanor) of Aquitaine feeling the baby in her womb kick as she is anointed Queen of England, marks out the different territory of interiors, emotion and different types of body. It is the first of several childbirth or pregnancy scenes and children are generally important to the book. In this way

Chadwick makes her point about the status of a woman even of Alienor’s level, but also enables a narrative full of heroism. The Winter Crown is concerned with court politics, with the relationships between people, but has a wider perspective onto the troubling events of Alienor’s reign. It is rich and complex. Scholars of print culture have for decades pointed out the collaborative nature of publishing books. Alix Christie’s Gutenberg’s Apprentice (Headline, £13.99) continues in this vein, seeking to bring various figures key to the development of printing out from under ‘Gutenberg’s long shadow’ and to ‘paint a fuller picture of this historic collaboration’. In particular, this is the story of Peter Schoeffer and Johann Fust, Gutenberg’s sometime partners and decisive actors in the development of this

Knausgaard ... asks the same questions that Marcel Proust did a century ago. Can we understand our past? new and terrifying technology. Christie renders Mainz in the early 1450s in sharp detail and it is a fascinating account of the torrid birth of printing. He is particularly good on the minutiae of early print, the way in which type would wear or how paper feels. He subscribes to the sense that the event was a moment of genius that transformed the world, while also pointing out the drudgery and sheer hard work it involved. In direct contrast with the preceding books is Evélio Rosero’s strange and entertaining Feast of the Innocents (trans. Anne McLean and Anna Milsom, Quercus, £18.99). Rosero’s beguiling novel concerns the attempt of Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López to besmirch and change the reputation of one of history’s great heroic figures. The novel concerns the ‘myth’

of Simón Bolívar, the Liberator, and how his story – true or not, but generally passively accepted – is ingrained into Colombian national identity. There are sections of historical lectures and discussion, but also carnival excess and folk memory. Rosero meditates upon how history can become ‘fact’ and how certain inconvenient truths are forgotten. It is a kaleidoscopic book that takes in a deal of Colombian culture and society and is, at points, very funny (as well as poignant and terrifying). We finish with two important European writers. The fourth of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series of six books is to be published in English in the spring of 2015. His previous three books – A Death in the Family, A Man in Love, Boyhood Island – redefined contemporary writing about the past. Knausgaard turns his life into his subject and transforms the category of ‘creative memoir’. His need to understand himself and his world through forensic analysis of his own life asks the same questions that Marcel Proust did a century ago. How do we know ourselves? Can we understand our past? How does memory work? What does it mean to bring something from the past into the present? What does it mean to write something that happened? He is an exciting talent and worth seeking out. At the other end of an eminent career, Patrick Modiano received the Nobel Prize for Literature in late 2014. Unlike some of the recent Nobel laureates he is very approachable as a writer. Three novellas published as Suspended Sentences (trans. Mark Polizotti, Yale University Press, £12.99) are terrific, uncanny, strange pieces of work about experiencing the past and how to make sense of events. Missing Person (trans. Daniel Weissbort, Godine, £12.99) is a detective story about discovering the self. The books convey a kind of fearfulness about pastness and remind the reader of the work of W.G. Sebald in their interrogation of memory and postwar European identity. Jerome de Groot

Inventing Eleanor

The Medieval and Post-Medieval Image of Eleanor of Aquitaine Michael R. Evans Bloomsbury Academic 228pp £60

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE (11241204) has stood in the spotlight for eight centuries, but paradoxically the real Eleanor remains a shadowy figure. Duchess of Aquitaine, Queen of France and England, mother of two English kings, her achievements have been overlaid by successive washes of notoriety, glamour and spin, until separating fact from fiction has become a Herculean task. In Inventing Eleanor, Michael Evans attempts that untanglement with panache. Examining the ideas, myths and legends surrounding Eleanor, he focuses on the historians and artists who have constructed an Eleanor very different from the 12thcentury queen and sets out to discover how and why. The work considers the medieval primary sources before tracing the post-medieval development of Eleanor’s image to the present. Inventing Eleanor is a fine addition to the Eleanor oeuvre. It has a scholarly focus, but it is written in a winning and readable style. Evans argues convincingly that Eleanor was ‘far from unique among 12th century royal and noble women’ and seeks to unravel how she acquired her false reputation for exceptionalism. He opines that her modern biographers must take a lot of the blame and that we, the public, would often rather believe colourful myth

above prosaic truth. He explores the way in which Eleanor’s reputation has been distorted to suit the ideologies of particular historical periods and historians. The feminist movement of the late 20th century, for example, has spawned an interest in Eleanor as a female hero, exaggerating her influence, reinforcing her fabled exceptionalism. Evans questions facets of Eleanor that are taken for granted. For instance, he disputes the idea of Eleanor as a heroine of southern France. Eleanor, he states, ‘can in no way be considered a southern figure in an alien and hostile northern world’. Further, the power centres of her duchy were ‘closer to Paris than to the Mediterranean’. As Evans pursues Eleanor’s reputation through the centuries, it is fascinating to watch the layers of detritus build up, as each era adds its own perceptions to the pile, Shakespeare and purveyors of scurrilous 17th-century ballads among them. Evans explores Eleanor in drama and historical fiction post-1900, particularly James Goldman’s Lion in Winter, as responsible for more than its share of creating inaccurate public perceptions regarding Eleanor and Henry II. The section on the visual arts including medieval images was particularly interesting for me because Evans discusses a mural at Chinon, frequently depicted as Eleanor and Henry out hunting with their offspring. Evans points out that the expert art historian Ursula Nielgen identified all the figures as male more than ten years ago, but recent works continue to insist that it is a representation of Eleanor. Professor Evans concludes (with good reason) that finding the real Eleanor remains an uphill struggle. However, he is optimistic that, with continuing scholarship that doesn’t pander to myths and stereotypes, a more nuanced Eleanor may gradually begin to emerge from the mist. I certainly hope so. Elizabeth Chadwick MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 57

REVIEWS

British Pirates and Society, 1680-1730 Margarette Lincoln

Ashgate and Royal Museums Greenwich 284pp £70

WE THINK we know all about pirates. As a group their ambiguous status is perfectly encapsulated by the phrase ‘one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter’ and pirates wear ridiculous clothes, sport a swearing parrot on the shoulder and say ‘ahaa!’ all the time. Pirates are thus serious and silly, dangerous and threatening on the one hand and, on the other, they provide children with a favourite dressing-up identity. Margarette Lincoln’s engaging new book confronts this conundrum head-on. She shows how ‘Golden Age’ Atlantic and Indian Ocean piracy is ‘historically constructed and contextually defined’, as the British government used seaborne crime and its suppression first to build and then consolidate power across oceans into colonies. This was a serious business. The rise and fall of the figure of the pirate neatly maps onto the British government’s desire to benefit economically and ideologically from, and then neutralise, these unruly and disruptive elements, thus establishing global maritime supremacy and an Empire on which the sun never set. But, at the same time British Pirates and Society, 1680-1730 charts the effects of piracy domestically and culturally as, in popular writing and entertainment, previously alluring or seductive pirate figures became increasingly vilified, exaggerated and even ridiculous. From here it becomes easy to see how, newly 58 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

depoliticised and sanitised, pirate identities have become lucratively marketable as the fodder of children’s dressing-up boxes, pulp fiction and multi-million pound film franchises. But Lincoln’s 18th-century pirates aren’t quite emptied of either their political bite or physical savagery. Lincoln draws some intriguing parallels between historical piracy and the ways it has been translated and emulated by modern gang culture, as well as comparing past piratical behaviours and images with the ways Somali piracy is understood and represented today. Western desires to eradicate Somali piracy are also resource-driven: ‘The discovery of oil reserves on the arid planes of Puntland […] seems to have made the international community much more interested in helping with reconstruction of this “failed state”’. The brilliant thing about this book is its easy-to-read quality. It tells a ripping good yarn of political and personal greed and ambition from a period of the British Isles’ history centrally concerned with national identity and imperial destiny. Another highlight is Lincoln’s fascinating exploration of the ways a different island locale, Madagascar off the coast of Africa, was subject to competing and conflicting interests and ideologies, including the politically visionary and socially experimental utopia ‘Libertalia’. There are lots of nice touches as the book gestures more broadly to what is at stake in social and political terms, as well as in relation to gender and racial identities. Lincoln’s book will be read with enjoyment and should reach a broad audience interested in this popular topic. It makes a good counterpoint to recent books by Neil Rennie (Treasure Neverland: Real and Imaginary Pirates) and John C. Appleby (Women and English Piracy, 1540-1720: Partners and Victims of Crime). The impressive range of illustrations included, numbering 14 black and white illustrations and 8 colour plates, some rarely reproduced, also considerably enhance the book’s attractiveness. Claire Jowitt

Between Two Worlds How the English Became Americans Malcolm Gaskill Oxford University Press 512pp £20

MALCOLM GASKILL offers us hints about what compelled him to write this book. He mentions the ‘astonishing intensity of faith, forbearance and courage’ of colonists, declaring it was the quality of that courage above all which inspired him. At the close of his long note on further reading, he confesses that the four-volume tome by Charles Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, published in the 1930s, was seminally important for him. It argued the case that there was an English world in America in 1607 to 1692 ‘with little in it that can strictly be called American’. How odd then that he pursues, as a binding notion which he should focus upon, how the English became Americans. What he calls ‘unique environmental conditions’ blasted any chance of a close modelling of one country upon the other. The title of Gaskill’s book is a truism. As we proceed through eight chapters about ‘Planters’, men leaving England in the reigns of James I and Charles I, we absorb the familiar story of bold adventurers seeking to flee poverty or persecution. Gaskill’s chapter headings are as colourful as his prose, which is also taut, direct and orderly: ‘The Vast and Furious Ocean’, ‘Full of Wild Beasts and Wild Men’, ‘In Darkness and the Shadow of Death’. His narrative is relentless

but, as a mass of footnotes to British and Colonial accounts and manuscripts make clear, it comes steadily from a huge archival effort, with only a dash of his own imaginative insight. One thing he makes plain: these planters were so preoccupied with survival and toil that they did not so much ponder how they were ‘becoming Americans’ as simply whether or not, if the chance came, they should go home. Mentally, Indians, as friends or foes, harried them, too, constantly. At the start of section two, about the Puritan drive to convert as well as organise their New Jerusalem, Gaskill pauses. If original colonists were preoccupied by the adventure, its hazards and its disasters, he suggests, second generation ones had to decide ‘what being English meant and what it meant to belong physically and spiritually to America’. As if to prove how problematic his own question is, Gaskill launches

Malcolm Gaskill’s Between Two Worlds ... may

appeal most to those who want a rollicking adventure story, told with pace and much detail into an account of two men in retreat in the 1640s from the New England experiment, Thomas Larkham, who returned to become a New Model Army chaplain, and Thomas Leckford, who was appalled by the ‘dark and uncertain interpretations of scripture’ he encountered at New Haven. ‘Remaking England in the New World and the retention of Englishness were neverending exhausting endeavours’, sighs Gaskill, at the start of a chapter called ‘Marching Hopefully On’. He accepts that in the 1640s and 1650s rancour was

REVIEWS ‘dividing English people on two Atlantic shores’. By the 1660s, it was ‘perhaps inevitable’ that one side of the Atlantic ‘defined itself against the other’, with the issue of the Quakers encapsulating divergent paths of development, with witchcraft a dominant Colonial obsession. One of Gaskill’s difficulties is binding together the complex narrative histories of New England, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake and the West Indies. He is well aware how different from each other their paths of development were during the century. When he travels from the 1670s to the 1690s, Gaskill’s focus moves away from the ocean in between, to the colonists as ‘warriors’, men seeking to grasp and preserve their own destinies colony by colony. His hold on overlapping narratives remains impressive and confident. In fact the book may appeal most to those who want a rollicking adventure story, told with pace and much detail. Gaskill ends by suggesting that the two countries drew culturally and perhaps emotionally somewhat closer together, before moving later in the 18th century to war and a broken relationship. He becomes more argumentative, but his final big statements do not so much cohere as jar with each other. For a reader wanting to understand and probe the issues of coming over and then maybe going back, more analytical works by historians such as David Cressy and Susan Hardman Moore will surely provide greater satisfaction. Gaskill reminds us on his final page that the extraordinary courage of the Pilgrim Fathers must never be ‘ignored or denigrated’. Point taken: some will just enjoy the way he tells the story. But we are left puzzling about what he can have intended to do, in setting out to explain how the English who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th century ‘became Americans’. Anthony Fletcher

THE LONGMAN-HISTORY TODAY BOOK PRIZE 2015 one insider put it: ‘less on camping in Cornwall IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR the BBC broadand more on what is relevant to our audience’. cast in 43 languages and won respect around The BBC jumped through endless hoops to the world for its objective news reporting. try to be more assertive while maintaining its The External Services – as they were called editorial independence. But it became increasuntil renamed the World Service in 1965 – of ingly clear that in paying the piper the FO the postwar era were shaped by this wartime wanted to call the tune. However, it was never experience. However, there was an underlyeasy to demonstrate that the government was ing problem in that (until 2014) the External getting its message across. Audience research Services were funded directly by government was blissfully primitive. Even though the Soviets through the Foreign Office (FO); and the FO and tried to jam some of the Russian language the BBC would be unhappy bedfellows. Alban broadcasts, no one really knew who, if anyone, Webb relates the fascinating story by which the was listening. BBC tried to preserve its reputation for editorial The situation went from bad to worse when independence while accepting direct funding the FO decided it was not from government. getting value for money At first it all seemed as from the BBC and wanted a though nothing could go more centralised control over wrong. Major General Ian output. The climax came not Jacob was appointed Conover relations with the Soviet troller and at first performed Union but in the Middle a brilliant balancing act of East. When President Nasser preserving both government nationalised the Suez Canal interests and BBC integrity. in July 1956, the government Throughout the war, Jacob wanted the BBC to counter had been Military Assistant the virulent propaganda of Secretary to the War Cabinet, Cairo Radio and to prepare at the heart of Britain’s milithe region for British military tary, diplomatic, political and action. The BBC refused to intelligence establishment. toe the line and took the He would later rise to be BBC London Calling view that, while the Labour Director-General, building Britain, the BBC World Service Party was hostile to a military a close link between that and the Cold War solution, it was legitimate organisation and the military Alban Webb to broadcast an opposition and intelligence spheres that Bloomsbury 2014 253pp view as well as the governlasted well into the 1960s. ment’s position. Eden and The government agreed the Cabinet saw this as treachery, believing the that the BBC should project a positive image of BBC was hostile to the government at a time of Britain as a political and social democracy and as war. Even such an establishment figure as Ian ‘the greatest experiment in a planned economy Jacob was stunned when he was called to the in a free society that the world has ever known’. FO in October and told that the government At the same time it would report news neutrally was cutting BBC funding by 20 per cent and was without trying to influence or interfere in the taking direct control over many of the external domestic affairs of any other nation. As time information services. The Suez crisis brought to a head the inevitable clash between the interests of the BBC and FO and raised questions about what it meant to broadcast in the national interest. Webb guides the reader through the intricacies of FO and BBC politics with great verve. He uses the BBC Written Archives (which are rarely consulted by historians) to tremendous effect. The climax of his story, the account of the Suez went by the FO felt this brief was too passive and crisis, is a real page-turner. The book provides a new take on Britain’s position in the first decade when Cold War tensions mounted it demanded the BBC promote a more active pro-western line. of the Cold War. Scholarly and accessible, London Calling is a fine read and a worthy winner of the In 1948 there was a decision to broadcast less Longman-History Today Book Prize. on the British way of life and to take a more Taylor Downing aggressive stance towards the Eastern Bloc. As

... how the BBC tried to preserve its reputation for editorial independence, while accepting direct funding from government

MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 59

REVIEWS

In These Times

Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815 Jenny Uglow Faber & Faber 740pp £25

THE STRESSES and strains of the British home front during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are the subject of Jenny Uglow’s new book. Fascination with the French Revolution and Napoleon remains to this day, but the enormous pressures upon, and the social impact of, these wars have been somewhat eclipsed by the world wars of the 20th century. Yet until 1914 the conflicts of 1793 to 1815 were often referred to in Britain as ‘the great war’ that brought a conclusion to a century of wars between Britain and France. Their cost in men, money and material was colossal. Battles, campaigns and diplomatic discussions are carefully sketched, alongside admirals, generals and politicians, but these are peripheral to Uglow’s main theme, the British people who lived through the wars: men and women, bankers and weavers, relatively well-to-do farmers, factory workers and labourers. She has mined a wealth of academic monographs on dockyards, finance, mutinies and riots over both recruitment and soaring food prices. She has drawn on a large number of personal memoirs and letters to give us portraits of private individuals and their families. Some of these are relatively well-known, such as Jane Austen, who had two brothers serving in Nelson’s navy. However, many more of her cast of characters and families are largely unknown. Such as James 60 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

Badenach, a progressive farmer from near Aberdeen, who kept a diary in which he noted the effects, sometimes good, sometimes bad, of the war on his opportunities and his sales. William Rowbotham, a hand-loom weaver from Oldham, kept an account of local events and people; his careful record reveals both a fascination with statistics – births, marriages, deaths, food prices – as well as his concerns about what he considered to be a ‘disastrous war’. Some left no personal record, but their lives can be reconstructed from other sources. The entrepreneur James Trotter is one example. He made a fortune as an army contractor, never knowingly charging a reasonable price when he could get an unreasonable one. His brother, Alexander, used navy funds for his personal transactions. How the fictional Del Boy and Rodney would have enjoyed the success of their namesakes. Fortunately, other contractors behaved far better, such as Samuel Paget, who organised the victualing of Royal Navy ships in Yarmouth Roads and provisioned Admiral Duncan’s fleet in just five days in July 1797. At a dinner celebrating the subsequent victory of Camperdown, Duncan pointed to Paget saying: ‘That’s the man that won the battle.’ Although chronological in structure, each of the book’s relatively short chapters is largely thematic focussing on a cluster of individuals and/or a particular experience, such as the terrible food shortage of 1795-96, the abolition of the Slave Trade, or the initial impact of Sir Arthur Wellesley’s landing in Portugal. The final chapter assesses the human and financial costs of the war, the benefits for British imperial and economic power and charts the postwar lives of some of the characters: some who did well and those, generally the poorer members of society but who had often seen the wars at the sharp end, who returned to poverty, perhaps as a battle scarred, limb-missing match seller. Uglow’s book is an exemplar of popular history; well-researched, colourful and a delight to read. Clive Emsley

Englishness

Politics and Culture 1880-1920 second edition Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds) Bloomsbury 424pp £21.99

The English and Their History Robert Tombs

Allen Lane 1,024pp £35

IT IS IRONIC that one consequence of the failed Scottish referendum on independence is that the English, who have dominated the British Isles for centuries, are demanding greater devolution. Building nations and national identities demands history, so the publication of these books is timely. Englishness has travelled through a prolonged period of crisis in the last 50 years, as much of what it meant to be English in a more stable time has been undermined by the UK’s loss of Empire and global power, European integration, immigration and the desire of many Scots, Welsh and (Northern) Irish to take a different path through the world’s uncertainties. Both books are stimulating attempts to understand such uncertainties, but their purposes are very different. Colls and Dodd preside over ‘a negative act – an act of dispossession’ – in which a series of academic authors interrogate the meanings of Englishness in what they consider its formative years in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They contemplate the complexities of national identity in the English-dominated United Kingdom, reflecting on culture

and countryside, language and literature, music and the margins (of Ireland and women). Englishness is shown to have presented political problems to British socialists (the Labour Party was formed in 1900) and the Conservatives alike, who could not guarantee electoral success simply by flying the flag. While the Tories won patriotic elections in 1900 and 1918, they lost in 1906, 1910 and 1923 when their opponents trumpeted an alternative England. Originally, the Colls and Dodd volume was written in response to the Falk-

Building nations and national identities demands history, so the publication of these books is timely lands War and Margaret Thatcher’s patriotism. Englishness was designed to unpick patriotism, to understand it as constructed and imposed. It was a radical project aimed at rethinking Englishness by presenting it as complex and difficult. Robert Tombs can not do other than outline the complexities of English history. His hefty tome provides a narrative of the English since their ‘dreamtime’, when they can be considered to have become ‘English’ 1,300 years ago. The birth of the nation, he argues, was in the Dark Ages before the Norman Conquest, the English were ‘unleashed’ in the middle ages, to be divided in the 16th

REVIEWS and 17th centuries, making a new world from the 1660s to the start of the 19th century, or ‘The English century’ as he calls it. The two world wars were a new dark age, but he questions England’s place in the postwar world, probing whether it was really ‘an age of decline’. To ask is to doubt. Tombs considers the end of Empire and other losses of power but concludes that ‘Declinism has been our national narrative for several generations, a chorus of lamentation in a lucky country where life is safer, longer and more comfortable than ever in history’. Tombs argues that English history is devolving rather than dissolving, able to live with its past and develop its future, so that Rita Ora, Dizzie Rascal, Jessica Ennis and Rio Ferdinand are as English as anyone else today. It is a nation that can live with its past, because, he argues, it is not a dark history. There is an element of comparison throughout the book and, for Tombs, England compares favourably with any against whom he measures it. It has not seen prolonged state collapse, nor ‘as vicious a civil war as that in Syria’, nor revolutionary terror as in France, Russia, China and Cambodia. That is not to say that Tombs ignores England’s atrocities and catastrophes – 12th-century anarchy, 17th-century civil wars, Peterloo, Amritsar, Kenya, Cyprus, Bloody Sunday are all here – but he considers that ‘We who have lived in England since 1945 have been among the luckiest people in the existence of Homo sapiens, rich, peaceful and healthy.’ He accepts that ‘the lot of the whole Western world has been comparable ... But, for that too, the people of England over the last 400 years can take a share of the credit’. Tombs has written a history book to buttress English patriotism, to renovate the oldest nation in the world for post-imperial and post-devolution times but its ‘My country, right or wrong’ patriotism itself seems rather outdated. Paul Ward

Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England Mo Moulton

Cambridge University Press 388pp £60

MO MOULTON’s survey of the political and social aftermath of the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-21 asks challenging questions about how this conflict continued to resonate in subsequent decades. The ‘Irish Question’ represented a powerful accumulation of political grievance, and social adjustment to the mass migrations of the 19th century that brought tens of thousands of Irish workers to England, Scotland and Wales. Yet Moulton argues that the apparent resolution of 1921 was a chimera. The settlement caused the bloody divides of the Irish Civil War and failed to resolve Northern Irish concerns, creating a violent, tragic legacy that persisted down to the 20th century. It also failed to provide ways to manage the ongoing political and social interweaving of Ireland and the United Kingdom, through the back and forth of migration, political controversy over the standing of the Irish Free State as a Commonwealth member and continuing debates about Catholicism in public life. Ireland was a problem, Moulton convincingly argues, that required a continual effort of repression. Irishness was a strong presence within interwar English cities, where the Irish-born represented one per cent of the population by the mid 1930s. In Scotland three per cent of the population were Irish-born and many more could trace an Irish ancestry. An Irish subculture developed: Migrants built schools and marched in St Patrick’s day parades and Gaelic

sports and dances, Irish bookshops and separate Catholic schools, ensured the persistence of what Moulton terms a privatised ethnic identification. Key institutions reflected Irish concerns, yet tended to do so in a muted fashion. Moulton notes the unusual gender profile of Irish migration – as many Irish women came as men, seeking jobs as domestic servants, in industry and in agriculture. Their experiences were mediated by the Catholic Church, which feared for their morals and tried to regulate their lives through Catholic women’s and girls’ associations. Politically, the Church preferred to repress Irish nationalism, removing Irish history from the curriculum in its schools and stressing a personal rather than political version of Irishness. The Labour Party captured many Irish votes, but preferred to see them as working class, not as an ethnic or religious minority. Major trade unions feared that Irish workers were undercutting their more skilled English counterparts; the Transport and General Union in 1929 called for quotas of Irish workers to be imposed. Interwar Britain prided itself on its extremely low immigration. The extension of wartime controls on the movement and entry of aliens into subsequent decades helped support a vision of national identity centred on quiet domesticity. The Irish were understood as racially or politically at odds with this, with their perceived tendency to emotionality and attraction to ‘mystical’ religion. Moulton concludes, however, that this was a ‘gentle racial discourse’, occupying a blurred space where religious difference met ethnic otherness. Despite occasional extreme voices from Fascists or hardline Protestants, the Irish in England were quietly, pragmatically different. Other groups – Jews, ‘coloured’ seamen – received harsher treatment, while the politically disruptive ‘Irish question’ was repressed. Moulton traces the ‘bittersweet’ story of a kind of multiculturalism, which provided Britain with stability, but at the price of stigma and uneasy assimilation. Lucy Delap

A Free-Spirited Woman

The London Diaries of Gladys Langford 1938-1940 Patricia and Robert Malcolmson London Record Society and The Boydell Press 197pp £25

DIARIES CAN BE A holy grail for the historian: written with the immediacy of the moment, capturing the authentic atmosphere of an event, idiosyncratic almost by definition, a singular viewpoint that wriggles through official versions of the past, colourful, often irreverent and joyfully quotable. But

Diaries can be a holy grail for the historian ... a singular viewpoint that wriggles through official versions of the past, colourful, often irreverent and joyfully quotable of course this is not always, indeed is not usually, the case. Lay aside the great published (edited and often expurgated) diaries of Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf, Harold Nicolson, Chips Channon, Richard Crossman and Tony Benn and often what is left in local record offices is collections of leather-bound pocket diaries which, if the handwriting is legible, reveal that, ‘It rained again, vicar called’. MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 61

REVIEWS But that is not always the case: there are deposits of compelling diaries in many archives, some local – I have found treasures in Oxford, Glasgow, Wandsworth, Birmingham, Lambeth Palace. Others, such as the Imperial War Museum, the London Metropolitan Archives, Mass-Observation Archive housed at the University of Sussex, are national. The growth of interest in so-called ordinary lives, in the experiences of people without power or position, has meant that a number of such diaries are being edited and packaged to reach a wider audience. The most notable relatively recent success was the republication of Nella Last’s wartime diaries,

The value of Gladys Langford’s diaries is the melange that they provide of a life-as-lived picture of Britain with concerns about world events, about which she has a sharp intelligence and an acerbic wit kept for Mass-Observation, which were subsequently adapted as a television play written by and starring Victoria Wood as ‘Housewife 49’ (the identification used by Mass-Observation, since the anonymity of all diarists was guaranteed unless they gave their express permission). Now Patricia and Robert Malcolmson, who have already published extracts from two other Mass-Observation diaries, have turned their attention to the writings of Gladys Langford, who had kept a diary for several years before she came across Mass-Observation, an organisation, which, since its inception in 1937, had been fulfilling its objective of compiling a ‘science 62 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

of ourselves’, the British people, to match the work done by the increasingly popular anthropology of peoples of more far flung areas of the world, by listening, questioning and, since the outbreak of war in 1939, encouraging people to keep daily diaries of how the momentous events were affecting them and their communities. Mass-Observation’s project was a perfect match for Langford, who considered herself something of a sociologist, though in fact she worked as a primary school teacher, a job she disliked, sometimes intensely, in Hoxton in East London, then a slum area. The value of Langford’s diaries is that they provide a life-as-it-is lived picture of Britain, in this volume on the eve of the Second World War, a mélange of concerns about world events, about which she had a sharp intelligence and an acerbic and critical pen, juxtaposed with a general discontent with her own life, fuelled by her frustrated ‘sex drive’ and her social and cultural snobbishness. The idea of being evacuated with her generally disliked snotty pupils horrified Langford so much that ‘I carry a razor blade about with me’; jostled in a crowd to hear the proclamation of George VI as king, her overpowering impression was the smell of brilliantine and bloaters. Since, apart from comments about politicians, Bay and Edith and darling Charles and others who people Gladys Langford’s world will be unknown to readers, the editors have decided that lengthy footnotes are required. While helpful, it is rather daunting to the general reader, who may decide the scholarly apparatus overwhelms the freshness of Langford’s prose. It is a conundrum with the publication of all diaries of the unknown and the uncelebrated, but it will be a shame if such diarists fail to reach the wider audience who would enjoy their often quirky writing. Juliet Gardiner

Family Politics

Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival 1900-1950 Paul Ginsborg Yale University Press 520pp £25

PAUL GINSBORG is well known as a political activist in, and historian of, modern Italy. Now he has essayed a massive comparative exploration of the fate of families under five interventionist and non-liberal democratic regimes. He begins with the Soviet Union, before returning to that regime’s bloody fate in a short final chapter on Stalinism. In between, Ginsborg’s attention is drawn to Kemalist Turkey, Fascist Italy, Republican and Francoist Spain and Nazi Germany. The general commentary is initiated by a close analysis of an individual and his or her family, ideas and practice. These lead figures are the Bolshevik feminist, Aleksandra Kollantai, the female journalist and nationalist, Halide Edib, the Futurist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the independent socialist and feminist, Margarita Nelken and, finally, Josef Goebbels. They constitute an idiosyncratic band. Each writes about the family, is of elite origin or rises to high position. None is ‘ordinary’. Perhaps jolted by the deployment of these unrepresentative figures, the book proceeds in shortish segments. These sub-sections range widely in chronology and in social, gender (and ethnic) focus. When illuminating the empires of the Russias and the Turkeys or when scrutinising the Italy and Spain that were still characterised by massive regional difference, Ginsborg is alert to the twists that place gave to the family story. His commentary therefore extends to

the effect of revolution in Moscow on the Turkic peoples of Soviet Central Asia or in Istanbul on the Armenians and Kurds. Nearer the mainstream, those who lived in the various metropolises or constituted more straightforward national peasantries have their ‘everyday’ experiences brought to light. The terrain is so vast and the need for background so compelling that ‘domestic life’ on occasion seems lost in the political and social narrative or through Ginsborg’s fondness for psychologising about his lead characters and their dictatorial masters, Lenin, Atatürk, Mussolini, Franco, Hitler and Stalin. Often the book drifts into being a total history of its focus states and societies, but this is valuable. Ginsborg also amplifies his description with telling comparison when, for example, he maintains that Stalin and Atatürk ‘bowed to history’ as they uneasily sought to locate a ‘normalisation of family life’. In the short conclusion, Ginsborg underlines his key points. He argues that the embattled word ‘totalitarian’ will merely obscure these dictatorships’ engagement with the everyday. What was ‘planned’ from above was by no means necessarily what happened below. Moreover, none of these tyrannies stood ‘against families per se’. Confronted with their power,

A massive comparative exploration of the fate of families under five interventionist, non-liberal regimes ordinary men and women retained strategies in surviving the horror that infringed their lives. Ginsborg concludes with a glimmer of hope; evidence can always be found of ‘fragile and innovative associationism, individual testimonies, [and] micro-histories of resistance to the dominant powers’. Like the Earl of Gloucester in Lear, families knew that, in bleak times, ‘men [and women] must endure’. Richard Bosworth

REVIEWS

FILM

Massacre

Shoah and four films after Shoah A Visitor of the Living (1997), Sobibór, October 14, 1943 4pm (2001), The Karski Report (2010), The Last of the Unjust (2013)

Yale University Press 336pp £20

Eureka! Entertainment 1,006 minutes £69.99

IN 1871 Paris revolted against the French state. Many Parisians did not accept France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Nor did they trust the head of the recently proclaimed Republic, Adolphe Thiers, to defend democracy. When Thiers tried to disarm the National Guard (a citizens’ militia but also the main source of income for many families) on March 18th, 1871, working-class Parisians refused to obey. For two months a revolutionary council, or Commune, made up of all shades of leftwing opinion, took charge of the self-declared autonomous city. The Commune’s flag was red and it was seen at the time and since as a harbinger of socialist revolution. In fact the Commune’s leadership was more middle class than working class and its rule was not that radical. There was no serious appropriation of property, no mass reallocation of wealth. The moments of Communard violence were usually directed against symbols of monarchy and the Church. Most Parisians could go about their business. The city continued to function thanks to a loan from the Bank of France. The one thing that the Commune proved unable to manage was its own defence. John Merriman’s sympathies are with the working-class Communards, who, having been physically and politically excluded under the Empire, were able

TO COINCIDE with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a Blue-Ray version of Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary Shoah has been released. Shoah is a Hebrew word now used by the French as an alternative to the English word Holocaust. Lanzmann spent 12 years making the film, locating not only Jewish survivors of the Holocaust but also German perpetrators and Polish eyewitnesses. He recorded over 350 hours of interviews, which eventually became a film of over nine hours. When premiered in 1985, it was hailed as an instant classic and garlanded with awards. Lanzmann himself calls Shoah ‘an allegory’, presumably of man’s inhumanity to man, and one critic has described it as ‘a meditation on the genocide of European Jews’. It is not a comprehensive nor a chronological account of the Holocaust and contains no archive film and little historical documentation. It is a mosaic of memories elicited from a succession of witnesses, usually shot in close-up, the better to observe the play of emotions upon their features. The context is provided by Lanzmann and his team visiting the sites of the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, all unremittingly bleak and eerily silent. Trains rattle ominously and ceaselessly through the film, a recurrent reminder of the one-way traffic of the death transports. The film is constructed thematically, covering in exhaustive detail the transportation of the Jews, the design and implementation of the extermination policy – ‘the production line of death’ as one ex-SS man describes it – the experiences at Auschwitz of the Czech Jews from the Nazis’ ‘model ghetto’ at Theresienstadt and conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto.

The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871 John Merriman

Sequence after sequence of Shoah becomes seared into the memory of the viewer. There are accounts of horrific conditions in the overcrowded cattle trucks conveying the Jews to the extermination camps, the manhunts for escaped prisoners from Sobibor and the tricks used by SS men to get the Jews to enter the gas chambers. There are descriptions of the design and operation of gas chambers and gas vans, of the sounds, smells and the cold in the camps, of the special arrangements to dispose of the sick, the elderly and the children, of the mass burning of bodies lighting up the sky with flames. One barber gives a matter-of-fact account of the cutting of the hair of naked women prisoners as they prepare to enter the gas chamber. There are apparently conscience-free and shiftily evasive accounts of their involvement in the Holocaust by elderly Nazi functionaries. There is evidence of the enduring antisemitism of the Poles as they describe the throat-slitting gestures they made as the death trains passed through their stations. Witnesses break down as particular memories become too hard to recall. One of the only two survivors of the 400,000 Jews exterminated at Chelmno weeps as he recalls recognising the bodies of his wife and children as he shovelled corpses onto lorries. Another, who had been part of a special Jewish detail responsible for cleaning up after the gassings, is overcome as he recalls the Theresienstadt Jews singing the Czech national anthem as they are driven into the gas chambers with whips and clubs (a few illustrations by victims at the camp have survived, as shown in the inset). One criticism of the film is that it is just too long. But the length is essential to the design. It is the sheer accumulation of detailed testimony that evokes the scale and the depth of the horror. It should be made compulsory viewing for all Holocaust-deniers. Shoah is accompanied by four more documentaries created from unused interviews shot for the original film. They cover Red Cross visits to the camps, the Sobibor uprising and the Warsaw Ghetto. The most remarkable is The Last of the Unjust, a 218-minute rehabilitation of Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish Elder of Theresienstadt, a man denounced as a collaborator postwar. Murmelstein, who organised the work programme, repaired the ghetto and cooperated with a Nazi documentary showing how well the Jews were treated, defends himself as a realist seeking to save the lives of inmates. Jeffrey Richards

Claude Lanzmann himself calls Shoah ‘an allegory’, presumably of man’s inhumanity to man

MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 63

REVIEWS to enjoy their city. Working-class women experienced a moment of emancipation; they would be among the most visible defenders of the Commune. However, Merriman’s focus is less on this experiment in democratic and social government than on its death. From early April Thiers bombarded the city; on May 21st Versaillais troops crossed an undefended part of the city’s western walls. During ‘Bloody

... an epic story ... told here with verve and sympathy ... written in the context of a contemporary climate of fear Week’ they fought through barricades towards the heartlands of Communard support. Thousands of Parisians died fighting, thousands more were killed by firing squads. Drawing on memoirs by surviving Communards, foreign correspondents and Parisian supporters of the Versaillais, Merriman details this savagery street-by-street. By the time the troops crushed resistance in the 19th and 20th arrondissements, readers will understand the title Massacre. However, just how bloody was ‘Bloody Week’? Robert Tombs, a leading historian of the Commune, has radically revised down the numbers of deaths from 30,000 to about 7,500. But Merriman’s is basically a narrative history and does not engage directly with Tombs. The sources are difficult: memoirists were often writing years after the event and they had their own reasons to inflate, or not, the numbers of dead. The voices of working-class Communards are the most difficult to recover, not least because this was unequivocally a class war: Versaillais singled out those who dressed or spoke like workers for execution. Many troops, and the residents in the posh western suburbs who egged them on, considered 64 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

prisoners as subhumans. Why? Merriman mentions several factors – pious rural recruits shocked by anticlericalism; the desire of the army to expiate their recent dishonour; the role of a politicised officer class; the influence of Versaillais propaganda – but none quite explains the brutality. The Commune is an epic story, told here with verve and sympathy. But why do we need a new history? Merriman’s study is written in the context of a contemporary ‘climate of fear’; its implication is that states are the main purveyors of terror in the modern period. The Communards, obsessed with legalism and traditions of the first French Revolution, seem oddly old-fashioned. It was the military and paramilitary death squads that were the true harbingers of the future. David Hopkin

The Americanization of France

Searching for Happiness After the Algerian War Barnett Singer Rowman and Littlefield 283pp £39.95

ONE OF THE mysteries of France’s postwar cultural history is the enduring popularity of the singer Johnny Hallyday. It is not that Johnny Hallyday is bad - though, arguably, he’s not that good! - but that, having started his career in the early 1960s, he continues to attract tens of thousands to his concerts, sells CDs by the bucketload and has become a cornerstone of the French cultural

establishment. All of this is based on an act in which the growly rocker grunts loudly in imitation of American rock and blues, all too often comically asserting himself as a ‘bluesman’ in the tradition of the Mississippi Delta. All a long way from the poverty and austerity of postwar Paris where Hallyday – real name Jean-Phillippe Smet – was raised. At last, in this engaging and sometimes brilliant book, Barnett Singer unlocks the mystery and provides some very important clues about who Johnny Hallyday is and why he is so important in the story of postwar France. The serious case that Singer argues is that the loss of Algeria was such a profound trauma in France and, indeed, on the other side of the Mediterranean, that ordinary French people, consciously and unconsciously, started to pull towards America as a new model for pleasure and happiness. This new generation turned their back on French traditions of the Chanson Française of Brassens, Brel and all that crowd and sought visceral thrills in the Frenchified pop and rock ’n’ roll called Yé-Yé (a transliteration of the Beatles’ ‘yeah, yeahs). Hence Hallyday, Eddy Barclay and a whole generation of French rockers who aped Elvis, but could not have been more French. Singer writes with a light and deft touch, but he is an impressively forensic researcher and his arguments are serious and sometimes groundbreaking. More to the point, he mourns the loss of ‘Frenchness’ as a category in global thinking, a pulling away from specifically French forms of creativity in cooking, music and philosophy. He is even brave enough to wonder whether the world is poorer without La Grande France, by which he refers to the French colonial Empire. Certainly he is clear that France suffered a loss of confidence in the wake of the catastrophe of Algeria. As Singer admits, this is not the definitive study of the subject, but he does take forward the insights of the likes of Kristin Ross, whose own work in this field was pioneering. A few years ago, while making a documentary on French punk for BBC Radio 4, I interviewed

Marc Zermati, who had brought the Sex Pistols and New York Dolls to Paris. The most interesting part of the interview was when Zermati, a Jew and a Pied-Noir in Algiers at the height of the Algerian War, recounted a long since disappeared underground culture in Algiers of jazz clubs, girls and drugs – all very French, as he put it. It is to the great credit of a historian like Singer that he has started the work of excavating what it meant to be young and French at one of the crucial turning-points in the 20th century. Andrew Hussey

Hi Hitler!

How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture Gavriel D. Rosenfeld Cambridge University Press 476pp £50

THE PAST is another country because we do things differently here. Even before the witnesses die out, the historians, novelists and filmmakers take over. A past as exceptional and traumatic as the Nazi era becomes banal and entertaining. Historians call this ‘normalisation’; or, in German, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, ‘coming to terms with the past’. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s Hi Hitler! is a report from the frontlines of popular memory. Normalisation is integral to memory: without it, the past becomes incomprehensible and loses all value. Yet normalisation can devalue the past, too. Today, Rosenfeld argues, normalisation threatens to annul our ‘ethical’ memory of the Nazi past and the Second World War.

REVIEWS Rosenfeld identifies three types of normalisation. The ‘relativisers’ want to diminish the ‘moralistic aura’ that endows ‘exceptionality’, the taint of particularly appalling actions. Nationalist politicians are crude relativisers; opportunist writers are sophisticated ones. In Air War and Literature (1999), W.G. Sebald described the Allied bombing of Germany with a Nazi term for the mass execution of Jews: a Vernichtungsaktion, an ‘act of extermination’. This relativises the Holocaust by moral inversion. Meanwhile, the ‘universalisers’, want to inflate that aura of exceptionality as a license for present ambitions, notably fighting the ‘good war’ of humanitarian intervention. In her 1999 essay To Suffer By Comparison, Samantha Power, now the American ambassador to the UN, suggested that Holocaust analogies had helped ‘stir the conscience’ of American politicians during the atrocities in the Balkans and Rwanda, but not enough to do much about it. Power argued that ‘Holocaustising’ might be counter-productive and encourage passivity: compared with the Holocaust, every humanitarian crisis looks ‘not so bad after all’. Rosenfeld’s third type, the ‘aestheticisers’, are more influential, because they are entertainers. In the western tradition, history has ‘clear moral underpinnings’. To preserve the historical record, events are narrated ‘from a realistic perspective’. When the past is shorn of reality, it sheds that tradition and its ethical demand on the living. The ‘aestheticisers’ do not always intend to neutralise the past. Often, as with Chaplin or Mel Brooks, their aesthetic strategies pursue ‘deeper moral agendas’. Mostly, though, they just want to laugh at cats that look like Hitler. The shallows of the Internet are unreal spaces, as, too, are the deeper pools of counterfactual history. Both foster an amoral urge to extract maximal value from the past, rather than the harder lessons of ‘historical responsibility’. Counterfactuals, Rosenfeld writes, replace facts

with speculations. Yet counterfactuals can also express the ethical import of history, by freeing us from determinism, which diminishes individual responsibility. Certainly, if ‘not all pasts are created equal’, then not all forms of memory should be equal. But it is no bad thing to remind ourselves that, while ‘inevitability’ is the name we give to what happened, what happens is not always inevitable. This, though, is less a criticism than a response of the kind demanded by Rosenfeld’s conscientious, scholarly and often alarming report. Dominic Green

Infinitesimal

How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World Amir Alexander Scientific American/Oneworld 352pp £20

MATHEMATICS and numbers are not really part of what we think about when we think about the past, by and large. So it is nice to see Amir Alexander’s new book, in which he continues his mission to fill a significant gap by writing the history of mathematics as culture. Infinitesimal deals with the 17th-century debate about whether space can be infinitely subdivided or not – basically, the debates that preceded the calculus and provided the groundwork on which Newton would build new mathematical techniques for understanding the physical world in the 1680s. The Newtonian edifice remained one of the pillars of physical science for over 200 years.

For Alexander, the big idea of his book is that talk about the ‘infinitesimal’ or ‘indivisible’ small parts of mathematical space was dangerous, threatening the belief that ‘the world is a perfectly rational place, governed by strict mathematical rules’. Acceptance of the infinitesimal was a badge of those who ‘believed in a more pluralistic and flexible order, one that might accommodate a range of views and diverse centres of power’. On that basis, committee rulings about mathematics curricula and obscure writings by English geometricians can be read as part of a wide-ranging debate about the nature and existence of mathematical order. It is a well-spun yarn, a cracking read. We get brief histories of the Reformation, of the Jesuits, of the Gregorian reform of the calendar, all within the orbit of ‘mathematical order’. There is plenty of period detail and crowd-pleasing scenes (Jesuits in ‘flowing black robes’) almost worthy of Walter Scott. The prose rips along without losing any of its momentum: the trial of Galileo, the genesis of the Royal Society, Thomas Hobbes’ attempts to do geometry. A few serious tastes of mathematical and geometrical argument should not deter maths-phobes from reading the book. What really happened between maths and science in the 17th century is a complicated puzzle and readers will have to make up their own minds whether Alexander has put together his selection of – mainly English and Italian – pieces in a convincing order. His story stops in the late 17th century, but surely that was just the beginning: Newton was just starting to show that calculus could produce practical results, while the doubts about its logical foundations would generate heat for another century and more. And his story puts battle lines in some unexpected places, with Galileo, Wallis and Newton as opponents of, in some sense, ‘strict mathematical rules’ of nature. That paradox is part of his story’s excitement and Alexander’s engaging dexterity in handling it gives this book its unique flavour. Benjamin Wardhaugh

CONTRIBUTORS Richard Bosworth’s most recent book is Italian Venice: A History (Yale, 2014). Elizabeth Chadwick is an author of historical fiction. Her recent novels include The Winter Crown (Sphere, 2014). Taylor Downing is co-author of Cold War (Abacus, 2008) and a judge of the Longman-History Today Book Prize. Jerome de Groot’s books include The Historical Novel (Routledge, 2010). Lucy Delap is the author of Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2011). Clive Emsley’s books include Napoleon: Conquest, Reform, Reorganisation (Routledge, 2013). Anthony Fletcher is the author of Life, Death, and Growing Up on the Western Front (Yale University Press, 2013). Juliet Gardiner’s reflections on British women’s lives from 1945-1979 will be published by William Collins in 2016. Dominic Green is the author of The Double Life of Dr. Lopez (Century, 2003) and Armies of God (Random House, 2008). David Hopkin‘s most recent book is Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 2012). Andrew Hussey is Director of the Centre for Post-Colonial Studies, University of London in Paris. Claire Jowitt is author of The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630: English Literature and Seaborne Crime (Ashgate, 2010). Jeffrey Richards is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University. Paul Ward is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Huddersfield. Benjamin Wardhaugh is the author of Poor Robin’s Prophecies: A Curious Almanac and the Everyday Mathematics of Georgian Britain (OUP, 2012).

MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 65

HAVE YOUR SAY

Letters Modern History In ‘How Recent is History’ (February 2015) Suzannah Lipscomb touches upon an old debate: when do events change from being classified as ‘current affairs’ to become ‘history’, referring to those uncomfortable bedfellows, academia and the media. On the media side of things, Lipscomb makes a powerful case with regard to an apparent preference for the modern, with its greater access to footage and sources, a preference particularly pronounced among those sitting on awards panels. Moving to the print and academic side of things, Lipscomb notes that many Modern History degrees seem to end at the turn of the century, or even before. She goes on to raise the case of the well-received works of the journalist Jack Fairweather on recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She notes that his books have been rejected for review by leading history journals and she asks why this might be. It is a fair point, given, as she points out, that Fairweather uses the same scholarly methodology one would hope to find in a work of history. Lipscomb ends with a cri de Coeur from Fairweather, asking why historians are writing about Lawrence of Arabia when there is ‘urgent stitching to be done’ in the tapestry of history post-1945, or even 1997. However, I would like to offer an alternative perspective on the back of a personal confession. At roughly the same time as Lipscomb was embarking upon her Modern History degree, I was at a different university beginning a degree in International Politics and Strategic Studies. A large part of what I learned involved the same scholarly methodology one would hope to find in a work of history. One of the main courses was titled ‘International History from 1945’, the same year at which, Lipscomb notes, her 66 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

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degree cut off. My dissertation was on the first Gulf War. Many of the books and articles I read looked like histories, though they were seldom published in what would be classified as history journals. Indeed, the separation between the disciplines was a matter for debate in seminars and was further brought home to me following my postgraduate ‘defection’ to history. So what to make of Fairweather’s rallying call? Is anyone analysing those 10,000 government memos from diplomats in Iraq and Afghanistan? Are people writing works that use methods recognisable to the historian, telling us something fascinating about the evolution of how we fight wars, government institutions adapting, military tactics evolving and anthropological interactions between cultures? The short answer is yes: quite a lot of people, in fact. Their output is considerable in both its volume and quality and many have been writing ‘speeded up history’ for a very long time. They just happen to work in academic departments with names like ‘War Studies’ or ‘International Relations’ (IR); for organisations such as the Royal United Services Institute or International Institute for Strategic Studies; and publish in journals called Foreign Affairs or the Journal of Strategic Studies. As a note of caution, this is not to suggest that these disciplines are entirely indistinguishable from history. They are not. Nevertheless, the crossover is significant. Distinguished scholars, such as Professor Michael Cox, publish works such as The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (2012), a historical analysis of the Bush era, including the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King’s College London is author of The Cold War: A

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Military History (2001) and the official history of the Falklands War (1988). From this perspective it does seem that a great deal of what is being called for in Lipscomb’s piece is already going on, albeit most frequently classified under headings other than ‘history’. Intellectual cross-fertilisation and interdisciplinarity should be encouraged. History has much to offer War Studies, International Relations and so on, and vice versa. Better co-ordination between those teaching Modern History and those teaching IR, etc, might help reduce the numbers of students for whom the world either stops or starts at 1945. History is one of the foundation stones of human culture and society. We need the likes of Lipscomb, who apply their great talents to matters of the more distant past, just as much as we need Freedman and his ilk on matters closer to the present. The health and vibrancy of both their disciplines is vital to us all. Philip Weir via email

Mosley’s Antisemitism Daniel Tilles’ argument that Sir Oswald Mosley was ‘antiJewish’ all along is simplistic. Far from obvious socially or ideologically from 1918 to 1931, this description arose only after his economic proposals developed into fully fledged imperial autarky, designed to supersede the existing import-export practices conducted by global finance, while also providing an alternative to Soviet revolution. Douglas Jerrold’s assertion in his Georgian Adventure (1938) that Mosley preached in the East End ‘not because he dislikes Jews, but because Jews dislike him’ is more than a superficial quip, but a shrewd insight into the pugnacity of a ‘Leader’, who combined an irresistible

response to opposition with an impatient adventurism. In 1961 Mosley published a clear condemnation of antisemitism and welcomed co-operation with Jews. What rarely emerges from the usual selective focus on prewar events, from ‘heckling’ at Olympia to the ‘battle ‘ in Cable Street, is the fact that Jewish issues occupied a very minor part of his writings and speeches, which were all largely devoted to economics. Now he is safely dead, some of his suggestions for recovery, updated and unattributed, might yet be worth consideration, given the present abject ‘state of the nation’. John Tanner London

Churchillian Oversight Why did Chris Wrigley not include the three-volume William Manchester/Paul Read biography of Winston Churchill in his Signposts (January 2015)? The Last Lion (1988-2012) is a readable and scholarly insight into Churchill’s actions during the Second World War and contains riveting pen portraits of those surrounding him, warts and all. It far surpasses Boris Johnson’s recent hagiography, which I am afraid I found unreadable. Pippa Bly Molesey, Surrey

More Brummie Banter I am sure Ken Clayton is right about the Brummie preference for jokey local nicknames (Letters, February). The old College of Food, in the city’s Jewellery Quarter, is now a part of UCB (University College Birmingham). Except, in the Jewellery Quarter at least, it has another name: the University of Cakes & Biscuits. Councillor Philip Davis Birmingham

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Coming Next Month The First World War’s Medieval History

Following the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, western Europe’s medieval architecture was destroyed at a rate unprecedented in the modern era. Initially exploited for strategic benefit, the ruination of a nation’s cultural assets soon became a standard feature of the newly established template for Total War. James G. Clark explains how the conflict’s legacy prompted a change in public attitudes towards historical landmarks and led to the rise of heritage tourism.

White Rhodesia’s French Backers

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When Rhodesia’s white Prime Minister Ian Smith announced the controversial Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1965, the official French response was condemnation. However, as Joanna Warson explains, covert support from a range of French actors – many of whom held links to the state – provided the Rhodesian government with the economic lifelines that enabled it to defy trade embargos and helped the French to retain a privileged position in Africa.

Norse Literature’s Prominent Women

Common perceptions of the Viking Age consider its myths, sagas and legends to be dominated by male protagonists, reflecting its warrior culture. Yet, assessing the literature that survives from Scandinavia and its outposts dating from the 10th and 11th centuries, Rosalind Kerven finds a wealth of richly wrought female characters adopting a variety of roles, from goddesses and giantesses to explorers and entrepreneurs.

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

The April issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the UK on March 19th. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.

PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS EDITOR’S LETTER: 2 Images © National Portrait Gallery, London; HISTORY MATTERS: 3 © Bridgeman Images/ Bibliothèque Nationale; 5 © British Museum Images; 6 © Alamy; 7 Photographs by Dean Nicholas. MONTHS PAST: 8 © Getty Images; 9 top © Alamy; 9 bottom © Mary Evans Picture Library. THE RISE OF THE SONS OF MARS: 11 © Jean-Pol Grandmont/Creative Commons; 12 © Tim Aspden; 13 top © Classical Numismatic Group, Inc./cngcoins. com; 13 bottom © Mary Evans Picture Library; 14 top and bottom © Bridgeman Images; 14-15 © Scala Archives; 16 top © Carthage National Museum, Tunisia/Bridgeman Images; 16 bottom © Bridgeman Images; 17 © Mary Evans Picture Library. THE WEAKER SEX? 18 © Press Association Images; 19 © National Portrait Gallery, London; 20 top © Museum of London; 20 bottom left © Press Association Images; 20 bottom right © Mirrorpix; 21 top © Press Association Images; 21 bottom and 22 top © Mary Evans Picture Library; 22 bottom © TopFoto; 23 top © National Portrait Gallery, London; 23 bottom by W.K Haselden, Daily Mirror 2nd July, 1909 courtesy the British Cartoon Archive © Mirrorpix; 24 top left © Mirropix; 24 top right © Bridgeman Images/Museum of London. INFOCUS: 26-27 © Getty Images. A DIARY IMAGINED: 28 © Ashmolean Museum, Oxford/Bridgeman Images. SHOPPING, SPECTACLE & THE SENSES: 30 top left and right © V&A images; 30 bottom courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University; 31 top and bottom right © V&A Images; 31 bottom left © Bridgeman Images; 32 top V&A Images; 32 bottom Mary Evans Picture Library; 33 and 34 top courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University; 34 bottom left © Mary Evans Picture Library; 34 bottom right Philadelphia Museum of Art/Bridgeman Images; 35 courtesy Serena Dyer; 36 © Bridgeman Images. THE FORGOTTEN WORLD OR CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM: 37 and 38 Courtesy Private Family Collection; 39 © Corbis Images. A MUTUAL FASCINATION: 41 © Imperial War Museum, London; 42 © TopFoto; 43 Photos © Alamy; 44 top and bottom © Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove; 45 © Imperial War Museum; 46 and 47 © Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove. CHARLIE HEBDO AND THE JUDGEMENT OF HISTORY: 48 © Alamy. ISLAMIC POET OF LOVE: 49 Portrait by José Luis Muño. Photograph by Leigh Cuen; 50 photographs by Leigh Cuen; 51 © Bridgeman Images; 52 © Bridgeman Images; 53 top © Factum Arte/Alicia Guirao; 53 bottom © Glasgow University Library/Bridgeman Images; 54 left and right © Bridgeman Images; 55 Photograph by Leigh Cuen. REVIEWS: 56 © Alamy; 63 top right contemporary illustration of Theresienstadt by unknown artist. Courtesy Eureka Entertainment Ltd. COMING NEXT MONTH 69 © Popperfoto/Getty Images. PASTIMES: Images © Wikimedia/ Creative Commons. SIX DEGREES: 71 © Lebrecht Photo Library/Alamy. 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.

The winner for January is Peter Taylor, Wrexham.

MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 69

Pastimes Amusement & Enlightenment

The Quiz 1 Referring to one of the most severe dust storms to strike the US Dust Bowl, on which date did ‘Black Sunday’ occur?

22 Where did Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler invent the high-speed petrol engine in 1885? 23 In which year was the GDR’s State Secretariat for Church Affairs established?

2 What did the German nationalist Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778-1852) first establish in 1811?

24 Which Mughal Emperor was responsible for building the Taj Mahal?

3 In which year and with which Act was badger-baiting outlawed in the United Kingdom?

9 ‘Lollards’ was a derisive term applied to the followers of which English theologian? 10 Which secret Calvinist organisation was founded in South Africa in 1918 to promote Afrikaner political ambitions? 11 At which battle of 1547 was the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League destroyed? 12 The Yosemite Grant was passed in the 19th century to protect the area now recognised as a national park from development. Which US president signed it?

6 The mythological Irish warrior and protagonist of the Fenian Cycle, Fionn mac Cumhaill appears in which Flann O’Brien novel of 1939? 7 In which year did Gdańsk (then Danzig) pass from German to Polish control following the Peace of Thorn? 70 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

13 Which Persian king founded the Achaemenid Empire (550-330 bc)? 14 Which French revolutionary founded the radical newspaper L’Ami du people in 1789? 15 The short-lived republic of Gran Colombia (1819-1831) was made

up of territory in which seven present-day countries?

25 How many days elapsed between Anne Boleyn’s execution and Henry VIII’s marriage to Jane Seymour?

16 Which pope excommunicated King John in 1209? 17 Which well-known author of ghost stories was director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge from 1893-1908? 18 Who was the last native Welshman to be Prince of Wales? 19 Who was Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State between 1573 and 1590? 20 Which Emperor unified modern Vietnam in 1802? 21 Founded in 1967, which US political party is represented by the flag below?

ANSWERS

5 The reign of which 11th-century Earl of Orkney oversaw the establishment of a bishopric on the island?

8 Which Native American nations comprised the so-called ‘Five Civilised Tribes’?

1. April 14th, 1935. 2. The Turnplatz, a proto-gymnasium. 3. 1835, the Cruelty to Animals Act. 4. Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556). 5. Thorfinn the Mighty (c.1020-65). 6. At Swim-Two-Birds. 7. 1466. 8. Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole. 9. John Wycliffe (c.1330-84). 10. Jong Zuid Afrika, later Afrikaner Broederbond. 11. The Battle of Mühlberg. 12. Abraham Lincoln in 1864. 13. Cyrus the Great (c. 576-520 bc). 14. Jean Paul Marat (1743-93). 15. Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, Guyana and Brazil. 16. Innocent III (1160-1216). 17. Montague Rhodes (MR) James (1862-1936). 18. Owain Glyndŵr (c. 1349-c.1416). 19. Sir Francis Walsingham (c.1530-90). 20. Gia Long (1762-1820). 21. The Youth International Party (Yippies). 22. Stuttgart, Germany. 23. 1957. 24. Shah Jahan (1594-1666). 25. 11.

4 Who was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533?

Prize Crossword

Set by Richard Smyth DOWN 1 1997 historical drama, winner of 11 Academy Awards (7) 2 British publisher (1902-70), founder of Penguin Books (5,4) 3 Adrian ___ (c.1520-98), French lutenist and composer (2,3) 4 In Greek legend, a herald in the Trojan War, noted for his powerful voice (7) 6 Michelangelo ___ (1912-2007), Italian director of films including Blow-up (1966) (9) 7 Archaic term for the lands of the far north (5) 8 Shackleton, Rutherford or Bevin, perhaps (6) 11 St ___, coastal village in Cumbria, site of a Norman priory (4) 15 Greek muse of tragedy (9) 17 Italian name for the Slovenian city of Kobarid, scene of a 1917 battle (9) 19 See 20 20/19 Name given to fortification near Temple Mount in Jerusalem (7,4) 21 Suburb of Stoke-on-Trent associated with the pottery works of Josiah Wedgwood (1730-95) (7) 22 Edna ___ (b.1930), Irish author of The Country Girls (1962) and other works (6) 24 Peter Mark ___ (1779-1869), physician, lexicographer and thesaurus compiler (5) 25 Carlo Francesco ___ (1670-1759), Bolognese Baroque architect (5)

ACROSS 1/5 The ___, name given to a Spartan victory over the Arcadians in 368 bc (8,6) 9 King of the Picts, d.657 (8) 10 Skye village close to the Iron Age broch Dun Beag (6) 12 French city, site of a serious mutiny in August 1790 (5) 13 ‘Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition: By that sin fell ___’ – Henry VIII, Act 3, Scene 2 (3,6) 14 Thomas ___ (1489-1556), Archbishop of Canterbury (7) 16 Followers of Zeno of Citium (6) 18 Saul ___ (1915-2005), Canadaborn novelist and Nobel laureate (6) 20 George Mathews ___ (1842-93), physicist and superintendent of the Kew observatory (7) 23 Daniel ___ (1700-82), Swiss mathematician (9) 25 Albrecht ___ (1471-1528), Nuremberg-born artist (5) 26 Jean-Auguste-Dominique ___ (1780-1867), portrait painter (6) 27 The Great ___, 1940 satire by Charlie Chaplin (8) 28 Name of a family central to the Pendle witch trials of 1612 (6) 29 Roman governor of Britain in the first century ad (8)

The winner of this month’s prize crossword will receive a selection of recent history books Entries to: Crossword, History Today, 2nd Floor, 9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH by March 31st or www.historytoday.com/crossword

Six degrees of Separation Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937)

Guglielmo Marconi

Italian radio pioneer and electrical engineer, was the great grandson of …

English socialite and Nazi sympathiser, who survived a suicide attempt by shooting, as did the wife of ….

John Jameson (1740-1823)

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

founder of Jameson Irish whiskey distillery, whose family motto is ‘sine Metu’, meaning without fear, which was also the nickname given to ...

French composer who in 1911 wrote the music for the mystery play Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien by…

Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938)

John the Fearless (1371-1419) Duke of Burgundy, victor at the battle of Nicopolis (1396), who died on May 28th, as did …

Unity Valkyrie Mitford (1914-48)

By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard

Italian writer and soldier, who was president of the Royal Academy of Italy, as was …

MARCH 2015 HISTORY TODAY 71

WOMEN IN THE 1950S

FromtheArchive Virginia Nicholson acknowledges the debt she owes as a popular historian to academics such as Roland Quinault, whose 2001 essay on Britain in the 1950s remains a rich source of information.

The Particular and the Personal ‘BRITAIN IN 1950 was different, in many ways, from Britain today.’ In his 2001 essay, Roland Quinault guides his readers rapidly through a catalogue of the essentials of postwar social history, taking in rationing, the housing shortage, immigration and education along the way. My new book, Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s, attempts to flesh out factual history through interviews, archival and published testimony, so it is important to have a strong skeleton. Had I been aware of this essay when I was doing the research I would have gratefully snapped up some of the nuggets it provides. For example, I wish I had known that in 1950 Leicester was the most prosperous city per capita in Europe, since it would have deepened my understanding of Valerie Gisborn’s life. Gisborn, a factory girl, wrote a short series of memoirs about her early life in Leicester, which I mined for her vivid reminiscences. Similarly, the article reminded me that in 1950 the largest immigrant group in Britain was the Irish. Like the pretty nurse from Kilkenny, Eileen Hawe, whose story I also tell, who spent five years in London between 1946 and 1951. Eileen’s plight as a young married woman with a small baby becomes all the more resonant when you realise that, as Dr Quinault tells us, ‘nearly half the population lived in private rented accommodation, often in dingy rooms or bedsits with little privacy, warmth or comfort’. I need historians like Roland Quinault more than they need me. The relationship between his fact-based history and my kind of social history, which prioritises the particular over the comprehensive, is 72 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2015

an amiable one. My research database bulges with Quinault-style statistics, tabulated survey results, weighty evidence from many such impeccable sources. This is the essential blackand-white bedrock of history. But it is largely uninviting and it lacks colour; after a few pages reading this kind of research material you may feel swamped. Luckily, I read it, so that others do not have to. I am not an academic. I love narra-

‘Nearly half the population lived in private rented accommodation, often in dingy rooms or bedsits’ tive, emotion and ‘true life stories’. My own work draws largely on matter-offact documentation, but this is the underwater part of the iceberg, largely invisible. I wanted my account of the 1950s to be rich with holiday camps, debs’ delights, Kensitas cigarettes, ‘Rock around the Clock’, home perms and perambulators. And I want my readers to get an inviting, engrossing insight not just into the everyday lives of our mothers and grandmothers, but also into their hopes and fears. Valerie Gisborn was just one of thousands of workers in the Leicester garment factories, but when we hear her voice it is that of a frustrated 20-year-old, whose ambitions and dreams felt shackled by her monotonous everyday life. Eileen Hawe’s isolation and her struggle to make ends meet as a young mum also speak to us across the intervening years. Eileen did not want to get married at 23; she wanted adventure and a career. But when you are a Catholic and pregnant outside

marriage in 1954, there is no way out. Listen, too, to the voice of Leila, the reluctant 1957 beauty queen; to Anthea, agonised by sexual doubt in 1956; to Vilma, from Jamaica, trying to find her feet in staid 1950s Eastbourne, experiencing freedom and homesickness in equal measure; or to Lorna, the single mother with a brilliant diplomatic career behind her, supporting her children by working in a biscuit factory in 1953. These voices are typical of countless women in the 1950s. Quinault refers specifically to the female population of Britain in a single paragraph, in which we learn that they ‘were not expected to have proper careers’. All too true, sadly, and yet it seems that, not having careers has, till now, also disqualified them from having their voices heard. Yet, for me, theirs is the kind of colourful, engrossing, moving history I want to read. Which is why I try to write it. And thanks to the likes of Roland Quinault, I can. Virginia Nicholson‘s Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s is published by Viking in March 2015.

VOLUME 51 ISSUE 4 APRIL 2001 Read the original piece at historytoday.com/fta