History Today 2015-04

April 2015 Vol 65 Issue 4

In Ruins

Medieval Europe and the First World War

Imperial Endgame

Anglo-French rivalries in southern Africa

Girl Gods The last survivors of a 1,000-year-old tradition

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

Where art meets science: the School of Athens by Raphael, 1510-11.

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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FROM THE EDITOR MANY CLAIMS ARE MADE for the study of history. For example, that a knowledge of the past will help us improve our decision making in the future, though the best reason I know for studying history was given in these pages by Chris Wickham, Chichele Professor of Medieval History at Oxford: that it was ‘simply very interesting’. However, it may have a more important role to play. It has been noted by numerous commentators that many Islamist terrorists have studied science, engineering in particular. The US magazine Foreign Policy suggests that this might be because engineering is ‘attractive to individuals seeking cognitive “closure” and clear cut answers’. Mohammed Atta, ringleader of the 9/11 terrorists, was an architectural engineer. The founders of the Pakistani terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, were both professors of engineering. Jihad al-Binaa, a wing of Hezbollah, could marshal more than 2,000 engineers in its reconstruction efforts following the 2006 conflict with Israel. More recently, Mohammed Emzawi, the ISIS executioner raised in Britain and known as ‘Jihadi John’, was revealed to be a graduate in ‘information systems and business management’ at the University of Westminster. None of these individuals appear to be or to have been wracked by self-doubt. History, by contrast, is all doubt and scepticism and questioning and so, arguably, appealing to a different cast of mind. But it is surely wrong to claim that the world is divided by a Manichean struggle between those with a bent for humanities and those preferring the supposed certainities of science. Medicine, mathematics, the sciences in general are at the core of our modern world. Which is why one of the most interesting and contentious commentators on this divide is Dominic Cummings, a former adviser to Michael Gove when he was education secretary, whose erudite, often blistering assaults on conventional thought can be found at dominiccummings. wordpress.com; do read him in full, for summaries tend to do him a disservice. An Oxford history graduate, Cummings champions an ‘Odyssean education’, in which ‘a more demanding and interesting science curricula’ combines with greater focus on essay writing and an emphasis on the learning of languages ancient and modern. His Britain would become a ‘school to the world’ in the manner of Periclean Athens, fit to tackle an increasingly complex and uncertain future. Absurdly ambitious? Maybe. But how wonderful would it be to tackle the kind of course suggested by Cummings to replace the vagaries of PPE? ‘Ancient and Modern History, Maths for Presidents, and Coding’.

Paul Lay

HistoryMatters

Henry Oldenburg • Women’s Congress • Breast Cancer • Ireland’s War

Innovative Oldenburg

A German scholar living in 17th-century London revolutionised the way scientists shared news of their latest advances. Noah Moxham SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY has shaped the world for four centuries. To make it happen, scientists needed an effective way to circulate knowledge, share ideas and establish new paradigms. One of the most important innovations of early science (natural philosophy to its 17th-century practitioners), therefore, was the scientific journal. It owes its existence to an industrious German, Heinrich (Henry) Oldenburg. Educated in his native city of Bremen and in Utrecht, he was intended for a career in the Church or the academy but, in the early 1640s, he abandoned his studies in favour of experiencing the religious, political and intellectual life of Europe at first hand, seeking employment as tutor and travelling companion to the son of a nobleman or ‘some honest merchant’. Oldenburg travelled extensively, mastered Dutch, French, Italian and English and made a wide acquaintance among the leading theologians and philosophers of Europe. His English contacts included many future members of the Royal Society, a like-minded knot of devotees of the new experimental science, which began meeting formally in London in November 1660. This well-travelled networker with eerily perfect English – the poet John Milton remarked that he had never heard a foreigner speak it better – was ideally equipped to address the learned of Europe in their own languages and made a natural

of scientific communication, promote the Society’s activity, save him the labour of copying the same news to dozens of correspondents in half a dozen languages and enable him to earn a decent living. It was to be a monthly periodical dedicated to natural philosophy, published by Oldenburg and printed with the Society’s authority. The first issue was dated March 6th and it inaugurated a publication that continues down to the present: Philosophical Transactions, the oldest scientific journal in the world and the oldest English periodical of any kind still in production. Oldenburg’s innovation has been much imitated; estimates suggest that the number of scientific journal titles in publication today exceeds 30,000. The success of the scientific journal may not have seemed quite so certain at the time. The first years of the Transactions were subject to a Biblical catalogue of disruptions: pestilence, fire and war. Plague was the first to strike, in the summer of 1665. While much of the senior fellowship retreated to Oxford or the countryside to escape the disease, Oldenburg stayed behind and braved the epidemic. He continued to receive scientific news from the Continent, almost single-handedly kept up the impression through his correspondence that the Society was still active and arranged for the Transactions to be printed at Oxford. Fire came next. The disruption caused to the print trade by the Great Fire of September 1666 was little short of catastrophic. Many printers lost their stock and workshops and Oldenburg despaired of getting anyone to undertake to print the journal in

Publishing pioneer: Henry Oldenburg by Jan van Cleve, 1668.

He proposed a new venture ... which he hoped would further the cause of scientific communication choice for the Society’s first secretary. Oldenburg filled the role with extraordinary dedication and energy, writing regularly to his contacts to inform them of the progress of science in England and to solicit news of their research in return. The Royal Society failed to match this commitment with a salary, however, and Oldenburg found himself overworked, unpaid and scratching out a living as a translator and publishing agent for the aristocratic pioneer of chemistry, Robert Boyle. In 1665 he proposed a new venture to the Royal Society, which he hoped would further the cause

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its aftermath. To keep it going he was forced to surrender his stake in the journal’s profits for several months, which, as he wrote anxiously to Boyle, he was really in no financial position to do and to sweeten the deal for the booksellers with gifts of ‘some saleable books’ from the Continent. War was last. The second AngloDutch war had broken out within a few days of the Transactions’ first publication but had done little to disrupt Oldenburg’s communication with France and the Low Countries until the summer of 1667. The Dutch fleet’s attack on the Medway in June caused panic and indignation through all echelons of society. In the search for a scapegoat, the authorities ordered Oldenburg’s arrest and imprisonment in the Tower, apparently for being a foreigner who had used some unguarded expressions in his letters overseas. Initially denied writing materials and allowed few visitors, Oldenburg was in a miserable situation. Samuel Pepys, a fellow-member of the Society, reflected that Oldenburg’s imprisonment ‘for writing news’ to a colleague ‘in France with whom he constantly corresponds in philosophical [scientific] matters’ indicated the danger of the times. It also, Oldenburg observed bitterly to Boyle, taught him who his real friends were. Few tried to visit him; many of those who did left without seeing him upon learning what he was imprisoned for. It is not known how he eventually secured his release. It is likely that some highly-placed friends did in fact intercede for him, Boyle perhaps among them. He had work to catch up on when he got out at the end of August. Someone – perhaps an unscrupulous publisher, more likely a well-meaning friend – published a stop-gap issue of the Transactions reporting blood transfusion experiments from France. Oldenburg repudiated it and disqualified it from the journal’s sequence, not because it had not appeared under his stewardship but because it advanced French claims to priority in transfusion over English ones. Oldenburg had learned the value of asserting plainly whose side he was on and he vowed to stick to scientific matters in his future correspondence. (The accused poacher 4 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

Philosophical Transactions never

made Oldenburg a living; he observed that it barely covered his Piccadilly rent

would later turn gamekeeper, working in the 1670s to translate intercepted letters and dispatches for the Secretary of State.) Philosophical Transactions survived these disruptions and Oldenburg himself, who died suddenly in September 1677. It never made him an independent living; he observed in 1668 that it barely covered his Piccadilly rent and the Society voted him a salary in recognition of his services. But it had become a part of the scientific landscape and remains so to this day. The Society refused to let the journal die, badgering Oldenburg’s successors to keep it going. Others began to appear, in Britain and on the Continent, and by the time the Society took over the Transactions in 1753 over 150 titles had been started. The revolution in science communication was well under way. Noah Moxham is a Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews. For details of the Royal Society’s celebrations of the 350th anniversary of the Philosophical Transactions go to: royalsociety. org/publishing350 Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

Pacifism and Feminism in the Great War

A century ago, the Women’s Congress met with the aim of revolutionising a ravaged political landscape. Helen McCarthy MORE THAN 1,100 women from warring and neutral states gathered at The Hague in April 1915 for a special set of peace negotiations. They were not diplomats representing states and they were not present to press national demands. Most were unable even to vote in parliamentary elections in their own countries. They were feminists and pacifists and it was their commitment to these twin ideals that drew them together as conflict raged across Europe. Their vision of a peace founded on gender equality, social justice and human rights did not bring the war to a close. Nor was it embraced by the male powerbrokers meeting in Paris in 1919 to conclude peace terms. Yet the Women’s Congress of 1915 is important because it reminds us that the First World War not only mobilised armies but nurtured alternative forms of politics, not least the politics of international cooperation and peace. Who were the women at The Hague? They were mainly middle-class, well-travelled and experienced feminist activists, many with professional backgrounds and all advocates of women’s suffrage. They included the British lawyer Chrystal Macmillan, Aletta Jacobs, the pioneering Dutch physician, the Hungarian feminist Rosika Schwimmer and the trade unionist Lida Gustava Heymann of Germany. The US peace campaigner Jane Addams agreed to preside as chair of the Congress. Many travelled to the Netherlands at personal cost, encountering hostility from the patriotic publics of the belligerent nations. In Britain, anti-war campaigners were placed under official surveillance. As a result, only 20 of the 180-strong British delegation were issued with passports and even they

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found it impossible to cross the North Sea due to military operations. The three British women who reached The Hague had either travelled some weeks earlier or went by a different route. Taking a stand against the war was, furthermore, a difficult experience emotionally for many of the delegates. They found themselves in conflict with suffragist comrades who chose a different course, seeing the war as an opportunity

All delegates wishing to attend were required from the outset to pledge their support for women’s suffrage to prove themselves loyal citizens and hence convince their respective governments to grant women the vote. After four days of discussions and debates, the Congress agreed a set of 20 resolutions encompassing practical proposals for immediate negotiations to end the war, as well as fundamental principles for a permanent peace. Among the latter were the right of self-determination for all peoples; the creation of an international authority to arbitrate disputes and advance con-

structive cooperation between nations; and an end to ‘secret diplomacy’ conducted behind closed doors and without democratic accountability. Women’s rights were central to this blueprint. All delegates wishing to attend were required from the outset to pledge their support for women’s suffrage, which the Congress organisers saw as inseparable from the objective of peace. A just world free of conflict, they argued, was impossible to achieve unless women were allowed to take their place alongside men as equal citizens. Enfranchisement, they claimed, would make peace more likely because of the role that women played as mothers in creating the life which war extinguished. Women, in the words of Jane Addams, ‘who have brought men into the world and nurtured them until they reach the age for fighting, must experience a peculiar revulsion when they see them destroyed, irrespective of the country in which these men may have been born’. Despite the efforts of Addams and others to win support for their proposals after the Congress had closed, both women and their concerns were marginal to the negotiations in Paris in 1919, led by the victorious powers. Not one woman was appointed as a formal representative of her nation at the Peace Conference and while a small contingent of feminists travelled to Paris

Protesting for peace: US delegates, including Jane Addams (second from left, front), travel to the Congress.

Women, Peace and Transnationalism: A Century On is a half-day conference taking place at Queen Mary University of London on March 31st, 2015 and is free and open to all. For more details see http://www. qmul.ac.uk/ events

to lobby the official delegates, their demands fell on deaf ears. The US President, Woodrow Wilson, briefly raised the question of women’s political representation with his fellow plenipotentiaries, but few wished to see women’s rights recognised as a legitimate matter for international agreement. Where the Hague women saw peace and gender equality as fundamentally interlinked, the great powers in Paris were anxious to keep them separate, with women’s citizenship firmly under the control of national governments. Given this failure, why is it worth remembering the 1915 Women’s Congress at The Hague? The history of seemingly lost causes can tell us a great deal about how power works and, in this case, why women remained peripheral to international politics and diplomacy for so much of the 20th century. Today, the United Nations Security Council passes resolutions about women’s inclusion in conflict resolution; governments host summits on rape as a weapon of war; and powerful non-governmental organisations ensure women are given a voice in debates about human rights, development and security. But history shows us that these achievements have been hard fought and won. They stand as testament to the efforts of generations of feminists who worked to make women’s rights an international, and not just a national, concern. It would be too simplistic to draw a line of continuity between the Women’s Congress of 1915 and today’s policy debates. Much took place in the interim to reconfigure the global women’s rights agenda, from interwar Fascism and the Cold War to the fall of European empires and the rise of new superpowers at the century’s end. Nonetheless, at this moment when the legacy of the First World War is uppermost in the public mind, it is worth reflecting on how that conflict produced, through the voices of the women who gathered at The Hague, an analysis of the modern world in which gender equality, social justice and peace were intertwined. It is an analysis which endures a hundred years on.

Helen McCarthy is Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary University of London. APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 5

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Culture, Continuity and Breast Cancer

Breastfeeding, corsets and ageing: the mysterious dangers of womanhood. Agnes Arnold-Forster ‘I CONGRATULATE … [my fair countrywomen] on their present easy and elegant mode of dress’, wrote the surgeon James Nooth, in 1804, ‘free from the unnatural and dangerous pressure of stays.’ Nooth’s concern was not aesthetic. The danger he saw in restrictive bodices was cancer: ‘I have extirpated [removed] a great number of … tumours which originated from that absurdity.’ Breast cancer in the 19th century was a consistent, if mysterious, killer. It preoccupied many doctors, unable to state with any confidence the disease’s causes, characteristics or cures. While the orthodox medical profession in Britain were broadly agreed on cancer’s ultimate incurability, they were less uniform in their understanding of its origin. The disease was thought to develop from a range of harmful tendencies and events acting together. Both the essential biology of being female, as well as typically ‘feminine’ behaviours, were understood as causes of breast cancer. Breastfeeding was a contentious topic at the end of the 18th century. An image of idealised motherhood emerged that infiltrated concepts of femininity: women were by nature loving, maternal and self-sacrificing. This ideology was expressed through changing social and political attitudes to breastfeeding and an outcry against wet-nursing across western Europe. In 1789 only 10 per cent of babies born in Paris were nursed by their own mothers; by 1801, this number had increased to half of all Parisian infants and two thirds of English babies. Late 18th-century medical men were explicit about the associations between breastfeeding and breast cancer. In 1772, man-midwife William Rowley wrote: ‘When the vessels of the breasts are over-filled and the natural discharge 6 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

Suffering for fashion: Minna at her Toilet by Sir William Quiller Orchardson, 19th century.

through the nipple not encouraged … it lays the foundation of the cancer.’ Frances Burney – an aristocratic novelist who underwent a mastectomy in 1811 – attributed her disease to her inability to breastfeed properly: ‘They have made me wean my Child! ... What that has cost me!’ Menstruation was seen as particularly hazardous. The surgeon Thomas Denman wrote: ‘Women who menstruate irregularly or with pain … are suspected to be more liable to Cancer than those who are regular, or who do not suffer at these times.’ However, their risk only increased after menopause.

Denman considered ‘women about the time of the cessation of the menses’ most liable to cancer. Elderly women were blighted by a dual threat: their gender and their age. While surgeons insisted their theories were based on clinical observation, designating these various female-specific processes as causes of cancer supported their broader thoughts about female biology. Eighteenth-century theory dictated that all diseases were explained by an imbalance in ‘humours’: black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm. Into the 19th century the insufficient drainage of various substances continued to be invoked as a cause of cancer; women’s ‘coldness and humidity’ made them particularly prone to disease. Menstruation was the primary mechanism by which the female body cleansed the system of black bile and its regularity was seen as

central to a woman’s wellbeing. Certain situations in which the menses were disrupted or had been terminated were, therefore, especially dangerous: pregnancy, breastfeeding and menopause. Similarly, when the female body and its breasts were not used for their ‘correct’ purpose – childbearing and rearing – the risk of breast cancer increased. The historian Marjo Kaartinen has noted that 18th-century theorists considered just ‘being female and having breasts’ a threat to a woman’s health. This way of thinking about female biology suggested that women were more likely to suffer from all cancers, not just cancer of the breast. Denman wrote: ‘It can hardly be doubted … that women are more liable to Cancer than men.’ This association between womanhood and disease and between breastfeeding, pregnancy, menopause and cancer is still part of our 21st-century understanding of breast cancer; that certain female-specific processes make you more or less likely to succumb to it. On its website, the breast cancer charity Breakthrough lists various ways you can reduce and increase your chances of disease. According to contemporary research, having children early and breastfeeding them reduces your risk. The later a woman begins her family the higher her risk is. The contraceptive pill, growing older and the menopause also increases your risk of breast cancer. Drawing attention to such historical continuities questions the social and cultural environments that make certain medical assumptions possible. The causes of cancer suggested by Denman, Nooth and friends were informed by their understandings of female biology and female inferiority more generally. They were working within a school of thought that suggested any deviation from ‘appropriate’ womanhood could have hazardous consequences for a woman’s health. While the role of the historian might not be to deny the validity of 21st-century medical research, it is part of our remit to question cultural assumptions that continue to have some effect on both the conclusions of scientists and the way those conclusions are accepted by the broader public.

Agnes Arnold-Forster is a PhD candidate at King’s College London.

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In memoriam: graves of soldiers from Irish units killed in the 1916 Easter Rising, Grangegorman Military Cemetery, Dublin, 2015.

Ireland: Easter Rising or Great War? The events that led to the creation of the Irish Free State and reshaped the United Kingdom were part of two inextricably linked histories. John Gibney IN MAY 1916 the young Dubliner Seán Heuston was sentenced to death for his participation in the Irish Easter Rising of that year. The night before his execution he wrote to his sister and touched upon how he and his colleagues might be judged: Let there be no talk of foolish enterprise. I have no vain regrets. Think of the thousands of Irishmen who fell fighting under another flag at the Dardanelles. Thousands of Heuston’s contemporaries were killed or wounded when the 10th (Irish) Division landed at Gallipoli in 1915; it is a little reminder that Heuston and the others who fought in the Easter Rising lived in a world shaped by the Great War, which conditioned their own actions. The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War generated great public interest in Ireland. The Irish involvement in the Gallipoli campaign is being marked in a variety of ways. Last November the Irish government announced its plans for the impending centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916. The emphasis on 1916 arises from the fact that it was the catalyst for the independence movement – Sinn Féin and the IRA – that led to the creation

of the Irish Free State in 1922. With the foundation of the Free State a substantial portion of the United Kingdom broke away from the whole in an unprecedented manner; it is of obvious relevance in the light of last year’s Scottish referendum. There is still a tendency to view the Easter Rising and the First World War as distinct events, even if someone like Heuston did not. This is understandable on one level: the Irish involvement in the First World War (210,000 volunteers and 35,000 deaths) overwhelmingly took place in the British armed forces: an unlikely bedfellow for a tradition of resistance to British rule. But the First World War was fundamental to the growth and development of the Irish independence movement, especially in relation to the Easter Rising. The separatist republicans who planned and executed the rising did so within the context of a war that gave them both an opportunity and a prospective ally: Germany. The British suppressed it in the manner in which they did precisely because they were at war and feared the potential for German involvement in such an insurrection. Some Irish responses to 1916 were surprisingly hostile, especially on the part of the families of serving troops. Many Irish soldiers were involved in suppressing the rebellion and the Easter Rising cannot be

understood outside the context of the British war effort. Among the British and Irish fatalities of the Great War are those troops who were killed when the Great War came to Dublin for a week in April 1916. Many of them are still buried there. The approach to a number of centenaries up to 2022 has seen a greater recognition on the part of the Irish government of the experiences of Irishmen who fought in the First World War, along with a increased, albeit cautious, British official engagement with the reality of the Irish independence movement. The spech by Britain’s Minister for International Security Strategy, Andrew Murrison, in Cork on January 24th, 2014, was a natural follow-on from the symbolism of the state visit to Ireland of the Queen in 2011. Yet while one can be respectful of differing viewpoints, it is also right to caution against the creation of a contrived historical consensus about events that might not be compatible in ideological terms. This was pointed out by the Irish government’s Expert Advisory group on commemorations: the Irish state can hardly be neutral about its origins in 1916. Yet there are lives that straddled a range of experiences to make one think how the Irish independence movement and the First World War are intertwined. Take, for instance, Michael McCabe, who fought in the Easter Rising as a member of the Irish Volunteers; served in the British army from 1917 to 1922; fought against the Irish Free State as a member of the IRA in the Irish Civil War; yet, when applying for his IRA pension in 1938, did so as a member of the 2nd Battalion, Gold Coast Regiment, Royal West African Frontier Force. Does his life point to a ‘shared’ history, or to distinct histories, inextricably linked? Ireland was not the only small European country to gain independence from a larger one in the era of the First World War; the difference is that it was a rare instance of a country gaining independence from a victorious power. The creation of the Irish Free State is the single most fundamental change to the UK since it was created. That alone makes the events that led to it worth looking at anew from a British perspective.

John Gibney is the editor of www.decadeof centenaries.com. APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 7

MonthsPast

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By Richard Cavendish

Destructive legacy: a NASA photograph of the huge caldera formed when Mount Tambora erupted in 1815.

APRIL 10TH 1815

The eruption of Mount Tambora The volcano looms over the Java Sea from the northern shore of the island of Sumbawa, which lies towards the eastern end of the former Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. Every now and again Mount Tambora erupts. Its 1815 explosion was possibly the most destructive ever recorded. Tambora stood over 14,000 feet high in 1815, but when it blew its stack it hurled more than 4,000 feet off the top of it, leaving a crater more than four miles across and 2,000 feet deep. On April 5th a modest eruption occurred, as if the volcano was practising, followed by thunderous rumbling noises. Ash began to fall and on April 10th there were more rumblings that sounded like cannon. That evening the eruption moved into full force with an explosion that was heard more than 1,200 miles away in Sumatra. The ground shook as massive boulders were tossed about like pebbles and caused havoc in all directions. Columns of flame shot up from the mountain and melded together to carry a plume of gas, dust and smoke miles up into the sky. Rivers of incandescent ash poured down the slopes at more than 100 miles an hour, destroying all in their way before they hissed and boiled into 8 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

the sea. Ships in harbours were trapped in rafts of pumice stone, while tsunamis were driven across the Java Sea. Volcanic ash fell as far away as Borneo. Ash and debris rained down for weeks and houses for miles around collapsed. Fresh water sources were contaminated and crops failed, while sulphurous gas caused lung infections. It is thought that 10,000 people had been killed instantly, but thousands more died of starvation and disease and the death toll in Sumbawa and neighbouring islands has been estimated at anything from 60,000 to 90,000. Stamford Raffles, then governor of Java, which had been taken over by the British during the Napoleonic Wars, sent an officer to Sumbawa to report on what had happened. He found there were still dead bodies lying around, the villages were almost entirely deserted and most of the houses had fallen down. The few survivors were desperately trying to find food. An epidemic of violent diarrhoea had broken out, thought to have been caused by volcanic ash contaminating the drinking water, and had caused many deaths. Tambora is classified by specialists as Ultraplinian, the most violent of all

categories of volcanic eruption, named in honour of the Younger Pliny’s description of the destruction of Pompeii by Vesuvius in ad 79. Such eruptions propel quantities of sulphurous gases into the stratosphere, where they combine with water vapour to create ‘aerosol’ clouds of drops of sulphuric acid. The Tambora eruption caused unusual phenomena around the globe. In the north-eastern United States in the spring and summer of 1815 the sunlight was dimmed and reddened by periods of fog, which wind and rain did not disperse. It was described as a kind of aerosol veil. London experienced spectacular sunsets at the turn of June and July, which are thought to have influenced paintings by Turner. The following year brought far more damaging effects, with serious consequences for climate and the fertility of the land over much of the world, as global temperatures dropped. In mid-June 1816 Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and two other friends were staying at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland when the weather was so repellently rainy and foggy that they were trapped indoors. Byron suggested that they pass the time by each writing a horror story and that was when Mary Shelley began to create Frankenstein. In June 1816 snow fell in New York State and in Maine, while frost was reported from Connecticut. In Canada the Quebec area had deep snow. Cold persisted through the summer months in North America and elsewhere and quantities of crops failed. The monsoon seasons in India and China were disrupted, with damaging agricultural effects, famine and cholera, and 1816 was called the year without a summer. Such conditions persisted until 1819 and are believed to have helped create severe epidemics of typhus in south-eastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Harvests failed in Britain and famine struck Ireland, Germany and other areas of Europe, sparking outbreaks of rioting and causing starvation. Mount Tambora is still active. Its most recent eruption was in 1967.

APRIL 26TH 1865

John Wilkes Booth meets his end Born in 1838 in the state of Maryland, President Lincoln’s assassin was christened in honour of the English radical John Wilkes. A handsome young actor, he was a fanatical supporter of the South in the Civil War and of the institution of slavery. Booth had often performed at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC and was well known there. On April 14th, 1865 he heard that Lincoln would attend a play there that evening. He promptly decided to murder the president, assigning a fellow-conspirator called George Azerodt to kill the vice-president, Andrew Johnson, and another, Lewis Powell, to kill William Seward, the secretary of state. Booth rode to the theatre armed with a pistol, went into the president’s box and fired a single shot into the back of Lincoln’s head. He leapt down from the box onto the stage

Lincoln’s nemesis: John Wilkes Booth, c.1864.

Beauty queen: Helena Rubinstein emphasises facial contours, 1935.

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Helena Rubinstein dies in New York City

and escaped in the uproar to an alley outside where his horse was being held for him. Booth and a co-conspirator called David Herold rode away together and fled south into Maryland, hiding in the woods and presently crossing into Virginia. Meanwhile, George Azerodt had made no attempt to kill the vice-president, but Lewis Powell had attacked and injured William Seward. By April 24th Booth and Herold had reached Port Royal in Virginia, almost 90 miles south of Washington. The war department had offered a reward of $100,000 (worth more than $1.5 million today) for information leading to the arrest of Booth and his accomplices and federal troops were searching for them. The fugitives took refuge at the farm of a man called

Richard H. Garrett, who apparently knew nothing of what had happened and let them sleep in one of his barns. A band of soldiers arrived at the farm in the early hours of April 26th and surrounded the barn. Herold surrendered to them, but Booth defied them and they set the barn on fire. One of them saw Booth raise his gun to shoot – or said he did –and fired at him. Mortally wounded, he was dragged to the farmhouse where he died, after saying ‘Tell Mother I died for my country’. The body was taken to Washington and buried. Herold, Azerodt and Powell were hanged along with Mary Surratt, a boarding house owner, while others involved were sentenced to life imprisonment. Booth’s corpse was later returned to his family and buried in 1869 in an unmarked grave in a cemetery in Baltimore. For years there were those who fantasised that the whole story was a lie and that Booth had escaped and was still alive somewhere, but there seems no doubt whatever that it was Booth’s body that was buried in Baltimore. He was just 26 when he died.

The queen of the modern cosmetics industry built a commercial empire on her maxim that ‘There are no ugly women, only lazy ones’. Born in 1872 to a poor Jewish family in Poland, she rejected her father’s choice of a husband for her and went to Australia, where in 1903 she opened a shop in Melbourne, selling face cream. It was so successful that she moved to London and opened a beauty salon in Mayfair – Margot Asquith, the prime minister’s wife, was a regular patron – and then another in Paris. In 1908 she married an American journalist and they had two sons. They opened up in New York City in 1915 and Helena started branches all across the United States. Hollywood movie stars including Theda Bara and Pola Negri regularly consulted her and bought her products. The publicity’s effect on sales was electric. Pint-sized, dominating and intensely competitive, Helena knew that women did not want beauty on the cheap. The

higher the prices, the more they bought. She and her business rivals – she spent years in a ferocious feud with Elizabeth Arden – sold to women at all social levels who would never previously have bought beauty products. In 1928 Helena sold her American business to Lehman Brothers for $7.3 million, but then the stock market crashed and she bought it back for only $1.5 million. Business success was not matched in her private life and she felt deeply guilty for concentrating so much on her work. She knew she had neglected her children and she and her persistently unfaithful husband divorced in 1937. She then married an impoverished Russian prince, who died in 1956. She spent her last years in her palatial apartment in New York City. In 1964 robbers broke in and threatened ‘your money or your life’. She told them that at her age they could take her life and welcome. She saw the robbers off, but died the following year at the age of 92. APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 9

FIRST WORLD WAR

War Among the Ruins James G. Clark investigates the destruction of western Europe’s medieval heritage during the First World War, as churches and cathedrals became targets, and how it made people think anew about their nations’ pasts.

T A British soldier silhouetted against the ruins of Ypres Cathedral, c.1918.

HROUGH TO 2018 WE WILL SEE a succession of sombre centenaries marking the many major and minor tragedies of the First World War. Among the most poignant datelines are those recalling a litany of medieval landmarks that fell along the frontline almost from the opening hours of the war: at first, simply shattered by the German army’s rapid advance and then steadily eroded by mutually destructive attrition. Treasured symbols of its commercial and cultural power in the later Middle Ages, Belgium’s heritage churches bore the full ferocity of the first salvoes. Liège’s late Gothic cathedral of St Paul came under enemy bombardment on the second,

sweltering day of the war and, following the fall of the medieval walled city of Namur on August 23rd, 1914, the German Third Army took Dinant on the same day. There they toppled the distinctive Reformation-era pyriform dome of its collegiate church, an act of destruction that was eclipsed by the massacre of 600 townspeople. No doubt in the next four years most of the major milestones in the conflict will be marked, but, perhaps increasingly, we will also remember and reflect on those experiences – mechanisation, civilian bombardment – which, after the passage of a century, we can see more clearly represent moments of great cultural transformation. The first engagements by the German army with French and British forces – Mulhouse (August 7-19th), Charleroi (August 21st), Mons (August 23rd) and Le Cateau (August 26th) – for the most part skirted or spared such landmark sites, including the baroque cathedral at Belfort. However, as the Germans reached further into France, other – and, in the scale of medieval artistry, arguably greater – townAPRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 11

FIRST WORLD WAR The ruins of Arras Cathedral following the German offensive of 1917.

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at the edge of the Place du Parvis as fire seized the roof timbers and the scaffold, which, by a fateful irony, still surrounded the northern tower of the west front after a stint of restoration work. The fire reached such intensity in the hours that followed that it softened the mortared joints of the statues covering the facade. Suddenly, the sculpted head of the Smiling Angel – le sourire de Reims – broke from its shoulders and fell.

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Top: Reims Cathedral hit during a German shell barrage, September 19th, 1914. Above: The Smiling Angel of Reims Cathedral.

scapes came under threat. The desperate retreats of late August drew the line of the emerging Western Front back as far as Arras, a medieval city rich in classical refinements, and then to the uncompromisingly gothic St Quentin. While the ‘miracle of the Marne’ assured lasting protection for the Île de France and Paris, the cost was to be a nearconstant barrage along a chain of northern cities, each one celebrated for its medieval architecture and art. A presage of what was to follow in the four years of war was offered at Reims, scarcely six weeks after the conflict began. On Saturday September 19th a shower of German incendiaries set the 13th-century cathedral ablaze. In the stillness of a misty autumn twilight, bystanders paused aghast

FTER REIMS, a further six medieval cathedrals were laid waste: Meuchlen (Malines; 1914), Ypres (1914, 1915), Cambrai (1917), St Quentin (1917), Arras (1918) and Noyon (1918). The national cathedral of Nôtre Dame also suffered surface damage following an isolated Zeppelin raid on Paris in January 1916. In addition, the soaring abbey church of St Jean de Vignes near Soissons, a treasure house of later medieval decorative art including, as archaeological fragments have shown, a scheme of stained glass to rival Chartres, which had withstood the iconoclasm of the Huguenots and Napoleonic requisition, lost all but the shell of its west front. After the allies adopted its twin towers as a reconnaissance post, the abbey church of Mont St Eloi, near Arras, was projected into the heart of battle. By 1917 the site of the seventh-century abbey had been razed, with only the shards of its classical towers reaching above the rubble. The basilica of St Remi at Reims, crucible of French Christianity, founded to commemorate the conversion of Clovis, who in 496 became the first king to unite the Franks, was badly scarred, although its richly carved Romanesque nave endured. APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 13

FIRST WORLD WAR The sheer scale of these churches, including some of the longest naves and tallest steeples and towers to survive from the Middle Ages, made them the most conspicuous of cultural casualties, yet much secular medieval architecture was also lost. Consumed by fire in the first days of the war, the University Library at Leuven (Louvain) was itself a fine, classical building, but it contained a collection of medieval manuscripts and incunabula (books printed before 1500) of great value: all were lost. Ypres’ Lakenhalle (Cloth Hall) may have been the grandest, but many other civic, commercial and domestic buildings were obliterated in the densely developed streets not only of Ypres but also Liège, Mechlen, Reims, Arras and St Quentin. Given the powerful regional identities – the Duchy of Burgundy on the one hand, the wealth of the Flemish wool towns on the other – which had defined the design of these buildings and shaped their distinctive, decorative schemes, it might be said that an entire cultural milieu had been effaced.

Clockwise from right: Fifth-century Buddha of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, damaged in battle, May 1999; an aerial shot of Ypres in 1915; postwar souvenir bookmark of Gloucester Cathedral issued by Great Western Railway.

S Not since the 16thcentury Wars of Religion had churches in a whole chain of regional capitals suffered in such a way

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UCH WIDESPREAD DESTRUCTION of medieval heritage was unprecedented in the modern era. As the French press ruefully observed, even their Revolution – powered by a radical secularism – had not seen the razing of so many ancient sites. Not since the 16th-century Wars of Religion had churches in a whole chain of regional capitals suffered in such a way. It also represented a new departure in modern warfare because, as the conflict intensified, these medieval landmarks were made the deliberate target of offensive action. In this respect, the attack on Reims represented a turning point. The early damage wrought by the invasion force had been largely collateral. At Reims, however, the Germans fired on the cathedral. Earlier, on first entering the city, they had established a temporary encampment in the Place du Parvis but, as the allied counterattack began, they had withdrawn to a strategic position to the north to concentrate their fire on the centre of the city. Thereafter, the great cathedrals and other medieval landmarks were targeted right along the Front. Shells did not stray towards Ypres, Meuchlen, Cambrai,

St Quentin and Sailly: they were aimed. St Quentin was set alight in 1917. Noyon’s interior was stripped and the pipes of its organ cut down for use as bands for shell cases. Although it had endured during some of the most intense barrages, in the autumn of 1918 the retreating Germans filled the piers and vaults of Arras cathedral with explosive charges. It would be wrong to regard the defacement and destruction of landmarks as wholly one-sided. The Allied forces were not slow to exploit the strategic benefits of these sites and were equally dispassionate in seizing the offensive advantage in their destruction: at Mont St Eloi, it was their own shelling that finally put paid to the remains of the church, so that what remained of its ridge-top position could not be turned against them by the enemy.

A postcard issued postwar of the ruins of the Abbey of Mont St Eloi, near Arras.

The targeting of cultural heritage represented a conscious assault on national identity, marking a growing recognition that this, just as much as casualties, defeats and retreats of the men in arms, could directly diminish morale. The medieval landmarks of Flanders and the industrial north of France were charged with a particular symbolic power, as they pointed to the prosperity and determined independence of the region in earlier generations. One of the key legacies of the conflict was its template for Total War, carrying the fight from the battlefield into the heart of the civil community. That such weapons as the aerial bombardment of civilian populations secured a permanent place in post-1918 armoury is all too familiar. Perhaps less so is the fact that the targeting of cultural assets became – and continues to be – a tool favoured by any force on the offensive. Although in the wake of the war the use of aerial bombardment was debated by the recent and future protagonists at the diplomatic table, notably at the Washington Conference of November 1921 to February 1922, no watertight convention has ever emerged. THE TIT-FOR-TAT ATTACKS on the medieval cities of central and southern England – Bristol and Coventry in 1941, the Baedeker raids on Bath and Exeter in 1942 and southern Germany (Hamburg, Mainz and Dresden) – are well known. Less prominent are the medieval losses of our own times: the ruin, in 1993-4, of the ancient Bosnian city of Mostar and its Old Bridge, for so long the symbol of its prosperous past; the Taliban’s blasting of the sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001; the irreparable damage to many early medieval sites in Iraq, most notoriously, the Minaret al-Malwiya at Samarra in 2005, an attack that recalls the fate of Mont St Eloi, since it was made the target of insurgents after US forces allegedly used it as a sniper post; and the losses of the last 12 months in Syria, which include a tower of the 12th-century crusader castle, Crac de Chevaliers, and the minaret of the Great Mosque of Aleppo. The ruin of ancient landmarks on the Western Front captured public attention as much as the lengthening casualty lists. The jagged remains of towers and frontages conveyed the apocalyptic power of constant bombardment and still photographs in the printed press and, in time, newsreel footage, carried them across Europe. Images of the heaped rubble that lined the nave at Reims were widely syndicated. In England a public exhibition was hurried into London’s Leicester Galleries showing ‘the glory that was Reims’. Even in the heat of its commitments on the Marne, the Third Republic issued an official response to the assault on Reims, inviting the wider world to share in its outrage, a ‘revolting act of vandalism, which … robs the whole of humanity of an irreplaceable piece of its artistic heritage’. Robust justification and counter allegations of hypocrisy from the German authorities ensured that another pan-European dispute sparked APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 15

FIRST WORLD WAR and stuttered through the wires of the international press. The ruin of buildings made ideal visual copy for the rapidly expanding news media. Pathé presented British picture houses with a reel showing the shattered remnants of Arras in 1917, which many billeted Tommies had come to know well. Before the Armistice, postcard views of devastated churches were already in circulation. Their effect was not only awe and shock, but to make these great medieval sites, always a source of antiquarian fascination and regional pride, a focal point for the national interest. It is not that they stirred a more immediate or deeper emotional response than the spectacle of devastated cities and their dead or displaced citizens on the Franco-Belgian border, but they fostered a different one, a sharpening sense of the historic identity that was under attack, which also held the key to their defence. People – civilians and soldiers, whether resting or returning up the line – were drawn to these sites more than any others where the shells had rained and they did so while the threat of bombardment continued and when dislodged statues, pillars and vaulting must have made their visits perilous. One such was George Brooker, serving with the Royal Army Service Corps, who picked his way through the shattered nave at Arras one day in 1917. He gathered up the shards of Gothic glass beneath his boots and enclosed them in an improvised frame of wooden scraps. Fortunately, George survived to the Armistice and his stained-glass entered the collection of the Imperial War Museum.

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HE ATTENTION GIVEN to the great cathedrals and abbey churches also engendered a level of spirituality, which some had considered lacking in the early stages of the war. Public worship and private devotion in these spaces surged, even among the rubble. Church leaders, roused into guiding the public response, used the fragility of their most ancient places of worship to reinvigorate intercession. Cardinal Louis-Henri-Joseph Luçon, Archbishop of Reims, performed the Stations of the Cross daily, picking his way around the fallen vault of the nave. In England parallel efforts were carried forward by Canterbury, York and the senior bishops, in which the historic resonance of their great churches was self-consciously harnessed to the imperatives of the Home Front. National Days of Intercession, first tried during the Boer War, called the public into these ancient places of worship; at Salisbury and Exeter Cathedrals and Westminster Abbey local people were reminded of the bishops’ wish that everyone pause and enter their churches for prayer at noon each day. At a time when troops from across the Empire were passing through many cities and towns, it would appear the antiquity of these places spoke to those with little first-hand knowledge of the Old Country they served. After a visit to Exeter Cathedral, Brigadier General Herbert Hart, commander of New Zealand’s Second Infantry Brigade, reflected in a diary entry of May 15th, 1918: ‘All these places are most closely connected with the historical development of the country during the last nine centuries and are intensely interesting.’ BY THE WAR’S END, it does seem possible to trace a distinct turn in public attitudes towards these medieval landmarks. In Belgium and France there was an almost instinctive impulse to make the shells of their medieval churches 16 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

Syrian government troops walk though a corridor of the Crusader fortress of Crac des Chevaliers, March 2014.

The ruin of medieval buildings made ideal visual copy for the rapidly expanding news media

public memorials. As such, they became the priority for reconstruction. In April 1919 the Bloc National determined that all ancient landmarks were to be returned to their prewar condition. Work began within months, funded, at least for the medium term, by German reparation payments; in the immediate term it was carried forward by German labour; it was prisoners of war that began the early work at Arras. At least in France, in the first months of the peace, the work to recover the lost cathedrals was used explicitly to advance the case for German war guilt: the historian Maurice Andrieux published a study of Reims in 1919, which he subtitled un crime allemand. The priority attached to the work of reconstruction was reinforced by an early (and common) vision among the republic’s leaders that the landmarks at the centre of these cities bearing battle honours should serve as the nation’s memorial. In the first postwar months there was no movement to raise a secular memorial and the dominant impulse was to (re)invest in the notion of a national church.

The ruins of the 16th-century bridge at Mostar destroyed in November 1993 during the break up of the former Yugoslavia.

Reims Cathedral was designated the first among equals, for its unrivalled links to the nation’s past. Also, as the first to fall, for both government and people its fate had focused the threat to the cultural and historical identity of France. Restored, the cathedral not only acquired the sacral status of a shrine to the Republic’s sacrifice but was also raised as a symbol of their secular, political agenda for continental peace. It was the summation of its role since September 1914 that President de Gaulle and Chancellor Adenauer conducted their act of Franco-German reconciliation in the restored, 13th-century crossing on July 8th, 1962. In England, in the wake of the Armistice, the great cathedrals, minsters and abbeys, as a continuation of their recent role in public intercession, were upheld as the natural focus for national commemoration. It was Wren’s

A guide book from the UK series Cathedrals, Abbeys and Famous Churches, issued postwar.

masterpiece, St Paul’s, that witnessed the royal service of thanksgiving, but, like their French and Belgian counterparts, the prelates and clergy of the senior sees also harnessed the palpable historical identity of their medieval churches to the widespread impulse for mourning. Away from the spirit of thanksgiving that swept the capital – causing damage to the plinth of Nelson’s Column on the night of the Armistice – requiems were conducted in the provincial cathedrals. Notable figures were honoured, in special services, with Westminster Abbey electing to celebrate the US wartime ambassador, Walter Hines Page. There was also a response to the public’s reaching out for meaningful commemoration. In a conscious recall of medieval practice, and for the first time since the Reformation, libri vitae were inscribed. Regimental colours were accepted into ancient chantry chapels and a number of makeshift wooden crosses recovered from the battlefields and chapels, such as that of St Michael, Salisbury, were re-dedicated to the memory of the fallen.

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S THEY channelled public mourning and public memory, offering an historical framework in which the experience of the war might, in the fullness of time, be more comfortably held, it would seem that the status of these medieval landmarks ineluctably changed. In England, as much as France, they were transposed from the focus of provincial pride to treasures of national significance. One expression of this change, which did much to secure their new-won status, was the postwar explosion in heritage tourism. Directed towards their best-known medieval landmarks to assuage their collective shock and private grief and to articulate an impulse to memorialise, the French and English publics renewed their relationship with their national past. Those whose business was travel were swift to recognise a shift in social behaviour. The Chemin de Fer du Nord did not wait for the new Reims to be finished before it invested in a romantic poster image of the cathedral to call citizens to see their national war memorial. England’s largest railway company, Great Western (GWR), embarked on its own promotion in 1924: recruiting academic medievalists – Montague Rhodes (MR) James, provost of Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, and Sir Charles Oman, Oxford’s Chichele Professor, and launching a trio of guidebooks to the cathedrals, abbeys and castles of the region served by GWR. Announced by a poster campaign to rival the Art Deco imagery of the French railway companies, the guides called on their customers to APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 17

FIRST WORLD WAR practice a new kind of touring, sober and reflective, ‘not to be unloaded for ten minutes from a charabanc’, as the guide admonished, but to pause amid ‘these precious monuments of English piety’.

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HE CONNECTION WITH THE WAR and the common memory of it was made explicit. Archbishop Randall Davidson of Canterbury, architect of the wartime national days of intercession, was invited by GWR chairman, Viscount Churchill, to introduce the guides: ‘You will render a wonderful service to the English people’, he wrote in a letter reproduced as a frontispiece, ‘if you will help them to realise the sacred heritage which is ours.’ The shadow of the war reached into the account of almost every site, none more so than in Salisbury, whose ‘surpassing beauty’ was a monument to the absence of ‘foreign influence’. Cathedrals, the first guide, was an immediate best-seller: 30,000 copies were sold in just eight weeks. The company’s conviction that it was the memory of England’s past and, in particular, its medieval past, which was most likely to stir the public mood became the guiding principle of its marketing. Even as the Cathedrals guide was in press, ten ‘star’ class locomotives were given the names of England’s medieval abbeys; in 1923 a new ‘cathedrals’ class was contemplated: the plan changed but what became the ‘kings’ class still commemorated the succession of monarchy from the Conquest. Medievalism was especially strong in their merchandise for children: a series of jigsaws produced by the toy company Chad Valley not only celebrated cathedrals and castles of the GWR region but also scenes from the company’s growing sense of a ‘grand narrative’ of English history: ‘the Romans at Caerleon’, ‘King Arthur on Dartmoor’ and ‘the Vikings landing at St Ives’. THE GWR OUTLOOK spread quickly and widely. Copycat guides appeared almost overnight: J.M. Dent’s popular Cathedrals, Abbeys and Famous Churches series was on the same station bookstalls scarcely six months later. Batsford began its colourful series of guides to architectural and topographical heritage in 1930. In what was perhaps the ultimate expression of popular interest, Wills printed their first collector’s series of cigarette cards featuring England’s cathedrals in 1933. Even academics responded: George Coulton, a controversial medievalist, embarked on his epic Five Centuries of Religion in 1923, a five-volume undertaking, which he completed, by curious symmetry, in the midst of the London Blitz. At the same time the Office of Works accelerated the programme of conservation which had been promulgated at the passing of the Ancient Monuments Act in 1913 but had been arrested for almost a decade. 18 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

In an act of reconciliation between Germany and France, Chancellor Adenauer (left) and President De Gaulle attend mass at Reims Cathedral, July 8th, 1962.

The cultural consequences of the Great War will generate much comment in the coming years of commemoration. As we debate the many modernising trends that may be traced to the cataclysms of 1914-18, we should also acknowledge that from that deluge there also flowed a new outlook on humanity’s ancient achievements. James G. Clark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, who wrote the introductions to the GWR guides.

FURTHER READING Nicola Lambourne, War Damage in Western Europe: The Destruction of Historic Monuments During the Second World War (Edinburgh University Press, 2001). Stephen Parker, Tom Lawson (eds), God and War: The Church of England and Armed Conflict in the Twentieth Century (Ashgate, 2012). Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (Yale, 1996). David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (Longman, 1992). Meredith Parsons Lillich, The Gothic Stained Glass of Reims Cathedral (Penn State University Press, 2011).

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LAUDE MONET, a 20-year-old art student, appeared in the sub-prefect’s office in his home town, Le Havre, on March 2nd, 1861 along with 227 eligible young men. They arrived to draw a lottery number for the compulsory army draft; Monet drew a low number, below 74, and was called into service. His father, a prosperous ship’s chandler, could have bought his son’s discharge for 2,500 francs, but he refused to do so when Claude refused to give up painting. Monet’s father had an interest in removing him from the local scene: he did not want his son to find out about his mistress and the existence of an illegitimate half-sister. His father also disliked spending money. Most important, he thought military discipline would improve his son’s volatile yet stubborn character and make him more amenable to his father’s wishes. Yet Monet refused to abandon his career as an artist. He thought the picturesque oriental locales painted by his hero Eugène Delacroix were infinitely more appealing than a grocery store in Le Havre or an austere barracks in a boring provincial town. He later recalled: The seven years of service that appalled so many were full of attraction for me. A friend, who was in the regiment of the Chasseurs d’Afrique and who adored military life, had communicated to me his enthusiasm and inspired me with his love of adventure. Nothing attracted me so much as the endless cavalcades under the burning sun, the razzias [raids], the crackling of gunpowder, the sabre thrusts, the nights in the desert under a tent, and I replied to my father’s ultimatum [to give up art] with a superb gesture of indifference. I drew an unlucky number. I succeeded, by personal insistence, in being drafted into an African regiment and started out. Monet’s experience in North Africa certainly toughened him up and prepared him for his future arduous painting expeditions in intense cold, high wind and severe storms. In defying his overbearing father, he finally broke away from emotional and financial domination. Monet was inducted into the army on April 29th and swore to serve with honour and fidelity for seven years, a period that would be dramatically cut short. His military record reveals that his hair and eyes were brown, his nose

Claude Monet in uniform, by Charles Lhuillier, 1861.

The painter Claude Monet spent his early twenties as a soldier in French North Africa, yet none of his works or writings from this period survive. Jeffrey Meyers pieces together a portrait of the artist as a young man.

The lower city of Algiers, including the Marine quarter, late 19th century.

Monet in Algeria

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MONET

Clockwise from top: Odalisque, a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir of an Algerian concubine, 1870; a water carrier and his family in the Algiers casbah, late 19th century; Claude Monet, 1860s; a wool spinner, Algiers, c.1860.

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‘well made’, his chin clean-shaven and round, his face oval and his height 1.65 metres (5 ft 5 ins). A bachelor without children, he was physically fit and had never been convicted of theft, swindling, fraud or immoral behaviour. Monet joined the first regiment of the Chasseurs d’Afrique, an elite light cavalry corps that had fought victoriously in Morocco in 1844, in the Crimean War of 1853-6 and in Solferino in northern Italy, where the French had defeated the Austrians in 1859. The Chasseurs, the mounted equivalent of the French Zouave infantry, were first raised in 1832 from cavalry posted to Algeria and from French volunteers in North Africa.

No works of art have survived from this turning point in Monet’s life (Algerian Scene, a landscape, was later destroyed) BEFORE THE TWO-DAY VOYAGE from Marseilles to exotic, mysterious, dangerous Algiers, Monet’s friend from Le Havre, Charles Lhuillier, painted his full-length portrait. Monet’s new uniform combines European dress and oriental costume. He wears a red and blue képi with a black brim shading his forehead and eyes; a long blue tunic with epaulettes, gold buttons and a hanging yellow lanyard fastened at the collar and opening into a wide pyramid along his legs; billowing red Turkish trousers; and high black boots with spurs. Facing forward with one foot placed in front of the other, Monet assumes a swaggering stance with his rakishly tilted cap, right fist on his hip, left arm holding a long white burnous and hand tucked inside his wide red sash. His dark, thin, idealised figure looks very different from the bearded, stocky, stolid Monet in a photograph of 1860. No letters or works of art have survived from this major turning point in Monet’s life. (Algerian Scene, a landscape with camels painted in the style of Eugène Fromentin, was later destroyed by the artist.) The books about him give only a brief account of his year in Algeria, but by describing the recent events, the contemporary state of Algeria, the North African ambience and his military duties, it is possible to evoke some of Monet’s experience during this little known yet influential period.

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ONET ARRIVED in Algiers on June 10th, 1861, during the Second Empire (1852-70) of Napoleon III. Algeria had until recently been part of the Ottoman Empire, but the weak and corrupt Bey had control only of the cities on the coastal plain. Marauding Barbary pirates dominated the southern Mediterranean, preyed on ships and carried away booty. After a minor diplomatic insult and using the flimsiest excuse for invasion, the French had moved into this power vacuum, capturing Algiers in 1830 and Constantine in 1837. Four years later France had established the Foreign Legion, in which French officers commanded foreigners who volunteered to serve overseas. France had fought a long guerrilla war in the desert with Emir Abd el-Kader, who led the Arab struggle against the colonial invaders until he finally surrendered in

1847. The following year the French officially abolished, but did not extinguish, the widespread practice of slavery. From 1859 to 1861 the French explorer Henri Duveyrier, braving the hostility of the nomadic Tuaregs, penetrated deep into the desert and published his influential L’Exploration du Sahara in 1864. By 1870 French soldiers would reach the edge of the Sahara, which stretched south to Lake Chad and almost to the River Niger.

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BLOODY EPISODE, which took place only two months before Monet arrived, revealed how vulnerable the French still were. On the night of April 14th, 1861, about 50 Arabs (without guns) attacked Djelfa, 260 miles south of Algiers, one of the last military outposts in the south and the site of a small settlement of European colonists. In A Desert Named Peace (2009), Benjamin Brower wrote: Armed with staffs, stones and knives, the group slipped past the garrison and descended upon the village, where they raided five houses and a café maure, a local Arabic-style coffeehouse. They attacked with deadly intent, killing three Europeans (two men and a five-year-old girl) and critically wounded three settlers, two labourers and three soldiers. The settlers, belatedly joined by French soldiers, killed four of their attackers, while the leader himself escaped. This attack was followed by harsh military retribution. In Monet’s time Algiers was populated by Berbers (the original inhabitants), Arabs (who had converted them to Islam) and a remnant of Turks. In The Conquest of the Sahara (1984) Douglas Porch described the physical setting of the city, which rose from the sea to the mountains and the contrast between the modern town and the ancient Casbah: The Boulevard du Front de Mer, supported by vaulted arches, connected the harbour with the Place du Gouvernement on the bluff above. From there, one could look out over the almost perfect semicircle of the Bay of Algiers filled with small wooden boats and larger steamers … Behind the seafront a multitude of terraces, minarets and houses of startling whiteness climbed the hill until they disappeared into the sombre greenery of the summit. In the narrow, twisting streets of the Arab quarter, merchants sat before pyramids of oranges, sacks of herbs and spices, pieces of raw, dripping meat … The air was permeated with the soft, indefinable odour of an Arab souk, or marketplace. The outline of the Kabylia Mountains, some snowcapped, stood like sentinels above the town. The air seemed to vibrate with sunlight. In 1860 the traveller Ernest Feydeau emphasised how easily the stranger got lost in the labyrinthine and disorienting Arab section of Algiers, whose houses were crammed together to keep out the harsh sunlight: Located on the hillside above the French city, or Marine quarter, the Casbah was in reality a multi-ethnic quarter, housing both Jews and West Africans as well as Muslim city dwellers known as Moors. It could be reached from the Marine quarter by climbing a steep hill. Inside the Casbah, narrow streets followed curving paths, guiding the traveller through whitewashed buildings with few openings to the exterior. Algiers had a high crime rate and loose morals and both civilians and soldiers spent a lot of time in the town’s bars APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 21

MONET to a half-mad, fever-inspired breakdown and a wild attempt to escape. He later recalled: The hours of training seemed so tiresome. It seemed so wearisome to be confined to barracks or camp. [So he mounted a mule and galloped away, but] eventually ran out of breath and fell fainting to the ground. Unburdened of my weight, the mule stopped of its own accord and wandered lazily back to the barracks. A search party found me that evening, unconscious and in a most pitiful state. My uniform was in shreds and my entire body was covered with cuts and bruises. I awoke confined to a cell by orders of the military police and accused of desertion and destruction of military property. The next day, I was taken to prison and I again lost consciousness. I was spared the military tribunal and taken to the hospital, where I was diagnosed as having typhoid fever.

Right: The Zouave by Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Bottom right: A scene from the Rue Boulabah, Algiers casbah, c.1912.

and cafés and in the Arab brothels of the Casbah. The louche allure of the Casbah lasted well into the 20th century and was portrayed in many popular films: Morocco (1930); Pépé le Moko (1937); Algiers (1938), with its memorable line: ‘Come with me to the casbah’; and Beau Geste (1939).

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ARELY HALF THE RECRUITS to the colonial administration before 1914 had even a secondary education’, wrote Porch, ‘and 22 per cent were judged incompetent by their immediate superiors’. Nevertheless, they managed with a well-trained and well-armed military force to conquer and control the vast land. Monet, at the very bottom of the military pyramid, was posted to the barracks in the Mustapha quarter at the eastern gate of Algiers and was housed in a one-storey, mud-brick building. He had never mounted a horse and needed extensive training in the riding school, but he finally learned to control a horse and perhaps, with considerably more difficulty, a restive camel. The soldiers led a strict life during campaigns, but were not subject to severe discipline when they were not fighting. Monet remained on the comparatively safe and temperate coast and there is no evidence that he ever engaged in combat or suffered sandstorms and thirst by penetrating the vast and hostile desert. Monet’s friend, Count Théophile Beguin-Billecocq, quoting letters now lost, later recorded that: He wrote to us often and detailed the harshness of the soldier’s life, listing the endless guard duties and fierce instructors he endured, and the veritable nags he was required to ride. Before the sudden and dramatic conclusion of his military service, Monet had the opportunity to do some drawings and watercolours (also lost) of the old Spanish gate in the casbah of Oran. His officers, bored by garrison duty and eager for immortality, asked Monet to draw their portraits, and his burgeoning and obvious talent gained a few favours and earned some leave. The monotonous, arduous routine finally drove Monet

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The symptoms of typhoid, a bacterial disease that originates in contaminated food or water, are a pink rash, high temperature, head and muscle aches, stomach pains and constipation. Sick for three weeks, Monet was granted two months rest in Algiers and six months convalescence in Paris. Rescued from an additional five-and-a-half years in the army, he was bought out by his wealthy aunt for 3,000 francs, 500 more than his father could have originally paid. Many prominent French authors travelled to and wrote about North Africa: Théophile Gautier, Eugène Fromentin, Gustave Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Alphonse Daudet and Guy de Maupassant. Writing in his journal from Tangier in 1832, Delacroix, like many 19th- and 20th-century writers, emphasised the palette of colour and light (even in the dark shadows) that would also influence Monet: As we were coming home, superb landscapes on the right, the Spanish mountains in the softest possible tones; the sea, a dark blue-green, the colour of a fig. The hedges, yellow on top because

The Steps, Algiers by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, c.1882.

of the bamboos, green at the bottom because of the aloes … Shadows full of reflections; white in the shadows. In his novel The Immoralist (1902) André Gide (who met Oscar Wilde in Algiers in 1895) echoed Delacroix and seemed to be describing an Impressionist painting: The quality of the light here is not strength but abundance. The shade is still full of it. The air itself is like a luminous fluid in which everything is steeped; one bathes, one swims in it. Forty years later, Albert Camus’ Meursault, about to murder an Arab in The Outsider, describes the effect of the trembling Algerian sun, heat and light that had driven Monet half-mad

when he had tried to escape: There was the same red glare as far as the eye could reach, and small waves were lapping the hot sand in little, flurried gasps … I could feel my temples swelling under the impact of the light … I keyed up every nerve to fend off the sun … A blade of vivid light shot upward from a bit of shell or broken glass lying on the sand. Monet’s accounts of his crucial year in Algeria were recorded in two interviews with him, published nearly 40 and 65 years after the events had taken place. Filtered through time and depending on his mood of the moment, the memories of the now old and successful artist revealed the contrast between his expectations and reality, and gave both APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 23

MONET

‘Africa … taught Monet to see into shadow and follow the brilliant decomposition of light’ Right: Claude Monet, c.1915. Far right: his San Giorgio Maggiore by Twilight, 1908.

exaggerated and contradictory recollections of the adventurous and finally disastrous military experiences of his youth.

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IDE, LIKE MONET himself, also explained how his imagination, stimulated in North Africa, had awakened dormant powers that would later enhance his work: ‘At the touch of new sensations, certain portions of me awoke – certain sleeping faculties, which, from not having as yet been used, had kept all their mysterious freshness.’ Monet, in a nostalgic 1900 Le Temps interview with François Thiébault-Sisson, recalled the delayed but significant benefits of his experience: In Algeria, I spent two [sic] really charming years. I incessantly saw something new; in my moments of leisure I attempted to render what I saw. You cannot imagine to what extent I increased my knowledge, and how much my vision gained thereby. I did not quite realise it at first. The impressions of light and colour that I received were not to classify themselves until later; but they contained the germ of my future researches. Twenty-six years later, the same interviewer in the same journal recorded the youthful idealistic enthusiasm that had propelled Monet into the Chasseurs d’Afrique, which was clearly superior to the infantry: [Algeria] appealed to my sense of adventure. In any case, the uniform was elegant, which appealed to me even more, and the thought of trotting along on a lively little horse beneath the African sun, with foot soldiers kicking the pebbles along the road as they laboured to carry their packs, did not seem at all disagreeable to me. Beguin-Billecocq recalled that Monet described Algeria as: a splendid country with constant sunshine, with hot, seductive colours, an eternally blue sky accentuated by the greens of palms and exotic plants, Arabs and their veiled wives, the Arab language, guttural but beautiful, camels, donkeys and horses. But in the same 1926 interview Monet also described his

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fever-driven attempt to escape from these beautiful horses. Unlike his friend Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who was inspired by his two visits to Algeria in the early 1880s, Monet never returned to North Africa. He ended his ambivalent interview of 1926 by unequivocally stating that he was glad ‘at never again having to see a country that had left me with so many awful memories’. He contradicted himself yet again by adding: ‘I had not even thought of painting for an instant.’ Hugues Le Roux, a French critic writing in Gil Blas in 1889, concluded that for Monet, as for Delacroix: Africa put the finishing touches to his mastery of colour. It taught him to see into shadow, and follow the brilliant decomposition of light to be found there, to set afloat an atmosphere around objects that trembles and encircles them like a halo. Though Monet escaped his full term of military service, his year in Algeria was sufficient to absorb the spirit of the place. His experience helped him to mature and confirmed his artistic ambitions; it focused his mind and vision, and inspired the light and colour of his Impressionist work. Jeffrey Meyers is the author of Painting and the Novel (1975), a biography of Wyndham Lewis (1980), Impressionist Quartet (2005) and Modigliani (2006).

FURTHER READING Benjamin Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902 (Columbia University Press, 2009). Douglas Porch, The Conquest of the Sahara (Fromm, 1986). Patricia Lorcin (ed), Algeria and France: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia (Syracuse University Press, 2006). Charles Stuckey (ed), Monet: A Retrospective (Beaux Arts Editions, 1985). Daniel Wildenstein, Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism (Taschen, 1999).

KUMARIS

The Living Goddess Isabella Tree explores the Kumaris, young girls chosen to be worshipped in Nepal by both Hindus and Buddhists as symbols of purity and makers of kings.

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N A MEDIEVAL BUILDING in the heart of old Kathmandu lives a young girl known to Nepalis as ‘Kumari’. To foreigners she is the ‘Living Goddess’. Her face features on the cover of guide books, postcards and souvenirs. Beneath a bejewelled crown and bedecked with gold snake necklaces and sacred amulets, she gazes at the world enigmatically, never smiling. If she smiles at you – so her worshippers believe – it is an invitation to heaven and you die. From the centre of her forehead, painted red and edged in gold, stares a third, ‘all-seeing’ eye, a black pupil set in bronze. Her 18th-century residence – a traditional red-brick building with carved windows and dragon-scale roof tiles known as the ‘Kumari Chen’ or ‘Kumari Ghar’, just yards from the old royal palace and surrounded by exquisite pagoda-temples, is one of the ‘must-sees’ on the Himalayan tourist trail. Though foreigners are not allowed inside, anyone can enter her courtyard, an intimate space frequented by pigeons and surrounded by carvings of multi-armed goddesses. A glimpse of the child goddess at her window here, if she deigns to appear, is a highlight of a visit to this ancient capital. The Kumari provokes fascination and admiration, as well as controversy. Myths abound about her origins and the reason for her existence. The Living Goddess is the survivor of a tradition, dating back ten centuries or more, that once prevailed throughout South-East Asia. She is evidence of a cult that focuses on the divine feminine as the source of infinite power. This is, perhaps, the last place on earth where the omnipotent deity is regarded as female, where god is a young girl. Before delving back in time to the origins of the tradition, it is worth explaining who this child is in the present day and where she comes from. Uniquely, the Kumari is worshipped by both Buddhists – as the embodiment of the goddess Vajradevi – and by Hindus – as the goddess Taleju, or Durga. The child herself is Buddhist, from the high religious caste of Shakyas, goldsmiths of the Newar community, who live in traditional Buddhist temple courtyards, or bahals, in the old centres of the Kathmandu Valley and who trace their descent from Shakyamuni 26 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

The Kumari Samita Bajracharya with offerings from worshippers, Patan, Nepal, 2011.

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KUMARIS

Left: the royal Kumari of Kathmandu, Preeti Shakya, crosses Durbar Square in her palanquin, 2005. Below: Preeti Shakya looks back at her Kumari house while crossing Basantpur Square, Kathmandu, c.2005. Opposite: Hanuman Dhoka temple complex in Durbar Square at the start of the Indra Jatra Festival, Kathmandu, 2012.

Buddha. The Newars are the indigenous inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley, whose culture has dominated this remote Himalayan fastness for millennia. Originally in the majority and predominantly Buddhist, Newars are now almost evenly Buddhist and Hindu and number less than 30 per cent of the total valley population. They still speak their own Tibeto-Burman language, alongside Nepali. It is one of the strict criteria of the Kumari’s selection that she comes from a family of pure lineage attached to one of the 18 Shakya bahals in Kathmandu.

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SUALLY SEVERAL girls are put forward for selection by their parents when a new Living Goddess is called for. The role is considered a deep honour among the Shakyas. The sacrifice involved in parting with a beloved child for what is likely to be seven or eight years is conceived of as a matter of dharma, or religious duty, done for the good of all sentient beings. Once the horoscope of each candidate is checked for inauspicious or contrary signs, the girls are examined by the wife of the royal Hindu tantric priest. The Kumari should have no physical blemishes, such as scars or birthmarks, and should be glowing with health. The final selection is carried out by tantric priests behind closed doors at the Kumari Chen. According to tradition the Kumari should exhibit the 32 lakshina, the physical perfections of a bodhisattva, or enlightened being. She should have the chest of a lion; a neck like a conch shell; eyelashes like a cow; a body like a banyan tree; the thighs of a deer; a voice clear and soft as a duck’s; magical attributes that are intuited by the priests in deep meditation. From the moment the Living Goddess is installed at around the age of two or three, until she is dismissed at puberty, she is confined to the Kumari Chen on Kathmandu’s Durbar Square. She leaves the building only to attend important religious functions a dozen times or so a year, during which she is either carried or transported in a palanquin, a vast golden chariot. Her feet must never touch the ground. She is looked after by a family of hereditary caretakers, ritual specialists who act as her surrogate family until she returns to her own. Since the caretakers are also Shakya, which is not a large community, they are often closely related to the elected child. They tend to her every 28 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

need, treating her with all the deference of a goddess, providing her with her favourite dishes (which she eats before everyone else in the household), entertaining her with games and toys (often provided by devotees), indulging her whims. There is no chastisement, only gentle appeals to the child’s divine nature to behave as befits a goddess. Until recently it was assumed a Living Goddess, being omniscient, was in no need of education but now, more pragmatically, the Kumari receives private tuition for several hours a day so she can enter school at her age level when she leaves. Great care is taken that the Kumari does not bleed. If she cuts or grazes herself it is believed the spirit of the Goddess will leave her. Blood is the Mother Goddess’s medium, the essence of life and death, and for this reason the Kumari dresses exclusively in red, the rajas colour of creative energy, from her fingernails to her vermilion-stained feet. Devotees come to her, especially if suffering from a blood disorder. When she shows the first signs of reaching puberty, before she can experience the blood loss of her first menstruation, the Kumari is dismissed, whereupon she returns home and another takes her place. If the Kumari has an accident or illness, if she cries or wakes up in a temper, this is believed to predict disaster for the country: a flood, perhaps, an earthquake, or civil unrest. Reparations to restore her equanimity must be made as quickly as possible for the sake of national harmony and security.

Her influence extends onto the political stage. Every year the president of Nepal’s fledgling republic kneels at her feet, like generations of Nepali kings before him, in order to receive her authority to rule. Her blessing – a vermilion tika, a religious mark, placed with her forefinger on the politician’s forehead – gives him legitimacy. This is believed to instil in him the energy and rightmindedness required for good governance. For his part, kneeling before the feet of a girl, touching the most sacred part of his body – his forehead – to her feet, is a submission of ego, a counterbalance to the potential abuse of power. Even today, this simple act is regarded by Newars and other devotees as being vital to the country’s stability. In the past, when the goddess has failed to bestow her blessing, kings have died or some accident has befallen them. The killing of Nepal’s king and queen by the crown prince in June 2001 took place when the Kumari was suffering from a disqualifying skin disease; there was no Living Goddess on the throne to protect the king. It was a tragedy that heralded the end of the Shah dynasty, the world’s last Hindu monarchy. In the republican era, post-2008, the understanding still applies. If the goddess fails to bless the president, this not only spells disaster for him; his government could be regarded as illegitimate and doomed to fail. The prominence of Kathmandu’s Kumari, however, and particularly the political focus on her, masks the older, deeper, broader tradition of Living Goddess worship; one that, incredibly, survives elsewhere

The Kumari dresses exclusively in red, the rajas colour of creative energy, from her fingernails to her vermillion-stained feet

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KUMARIS

Many Hindu cities – including Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan – were founded on the principles of sacred space

The palace of Kumari Ghar, home of the Living Goddess. Kathmandu, 2003.

in the Kathmandu Valley to this day. There are still ‘royal’ Kumaris in Bhaktapur and Patan, cities that were once, like Kathmandu, ruled by competitive dynasties of Malla kings, Hindu rajas originally from India. Then there are local Kumaris still worshipped in the towns of Nuwakot, Sankhu, Tokha and Bungamati. There are even Kumaris in different neighbourhoods of Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan. These lesser-known Kumaris stem from a belief system that once thrived in the rest of the subcontinent but was, over time, squeezed out by orthodox Hinduism and Islam. In the remote mountain fastness of the Valley of Nepal, far from the influence of competing empires and the rising tide of patriarchal religions, belief in Shakti – the doctrine of the supreme Goddess, and, in particular, Living Goddess worship – found a place of refuge. The roots of virgin worship in the subcontinent can be traced back to pre-Vedic times, tapping into ancient primeval fertility rites and mother goddess cults of the kind that predominated in places like Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in the third millennium bc. Unlike male gods, who tend to be conceived of as single deities with separate identities, the concept of the goddess – Devi – has evolved in the Indian tradition, as in many other parts of the world, as an all-pervasive figure: the universal mother. Her different aspects, from nurturing child-bearer to warrior-saviour to aged crone, are all manifestations of the same creative and regenerative force. The moment the aspect of the goddess known as ‘Kumari’ – the word for 30 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

a pre-menstrual, unmarried girl – came into being seems to have been towards the late Vedic period (c.1000-500 bc). The word ‘Kumari’ is listed in the Mahabharata and other early texts as an epithet of Durga, the great warrior goddess who vanquished the demon Mahisasura.

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HE VIRGIN ASPECT of Devi is also included in the class of eight mother goddesses – the Astamatrika – arising around this time as the sexual partners of leading male deities, who together took on a protective role as the guardians of the eight directions. Many Hindu cities – including Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan – were founded on the principles of sacred space, with the king at the centre, the castes radiating out from him in hierarchical priority and the Astamatrika ranged outside the city walls, protecting civilisation from the forces of chaos and destruction. The earliest reference to Kumari worship through a living human, however, appears in an eighth-century Indian Buddhist text known as the Manjushrimulakalpa, or ‘Garland of Manjushri’, the ritual of using a Kumari to spin thread for making a ‘patah’, or cloth, on which images of the Buddha could be painted. The text is emphatic about the girl’s purity in terms of being both free from sin and free from polluting substances like menstrual blood: attributes that, in a sense, rendered her semi-divine. The Kumari’s role in this kind of ritual was only temporary, however, and brief. Once the canvas was finished and

consecrated, the girl would return home and resume normal life. By the end of the 10th century, according to the literature of the Kalachakra, both Kumaris and Kumaras – young boys – were performing in Hindu and Buddhist rituals as agents for divination. In ritual context, these texts imply, a child of either sex was believed capable of providing an open channel to the divine and could be invested with the powers of prophecy. There are references to a Kumari seeing, for example, the image of ‘pratisena’ – an ‘Opposing Army’ – reflected in a mirror, an indication that Kumaris were being used by kings for military intelligence, as psychic spies. The texts generally indicate a preference for young girls, especially in the longer rituals. This is presumably because girls tend to be more placid, better behaved and interested in ritual performance at a younger age.

Above: the tantric goddess Taleju. Below: Seven-year-old Unika Bajracharya, the new Kumari, with friends, Nepal, 2014.

BY THE 10TH AND 11TH centuries, the preference for Kumaris over Kumaras in rituals of divination was boosted by a growing interest in goddess worship and tantric possession, key aspects of the subversive religions that had become popular in places on the periphery of the subcontinent, such as Kashmir, Assam, Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Nepal. The first known text recording actual tantric Buddhist worship of a Kumari is the 11th-century Samvarodaya Tantra, which seems to have been composed in Nepal. It refers to Kumaris, dressed as goddesses, being invited to sit in the centre of a mandala, a Buddhist geometric diagram symbolising the universe, where they were worshipped as Vajradevis’ goddesses in the flesh. A couple of centuries later, but probably no later than the 13th century, a Buddhist master based in Nepal called Jagaddarpana wrote a vast digest of tantric ritual called the Kriyasamuccaya, or ‘Compendium of Ritual’. Here the account of a Kumari ritual is more detailed and recognisable as the forerunner of the practice that has endured in the

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Kathmandu Valley to the present day. The text describes in detail how Kumaris should be dressed in red, their foreheads painted with vermilion and colyrium applied to their eyes; that sacred jewellery should be placed around their necks; and how the officiating Buddhist priest should, through meditation and the utterance of mantras (utterances with special power), transform the Kumaris into divine beings. It urges worship of the Kumaris with offerings of the taboo substances of alcohol and meat, stating that the sponsor of such a ritual – who must, crucially, have deep and genuine faith in tantric Buddhism – will thereby receive material blessings from the girls in their possessed state. This tantric form of Kumari worship found a natural home in the Kathmandu Valley, where it was bolstered by shamanic traditions of spirit possession and the inherently matrifocal society of the Newars; but in India, as Buddhism began to wane and, finally, under Muslim occupation, to wither away completely, Kumari worship survived only in those peripheral areas where Hindu Tantra continued to exist.

Y THE TIME the Malla kings arrived in the Kathmandu Valley around the 12th century from the neighbouring Hindu kingdom of Tirhut (in the present-day Terai in southern Nepal), Kumari worship was clearly a central part of the Newar belief system. The powerful, complex and allegedly dangerous process of installing a goddess inside a human child had become the preserve of the Newar, Buddhist ‘professionals’, categorised eventually under the caste system imposed on them by the Hindu kings as the priestly caste of Shakyas and Vajracharyas. Kumari worship in its tantric form – the form that was thought to confer the invincible powers of a siddha (a tantric master) on a worshipper – was confined, in all but exceptional circumstances, to Newars born into tantric Buddhist bahals. QUITE WHEN Hindu kings began to worship Buddhist Kumaris in the Kathmandu Valley is impossible to tell, though late Nepali chronicles assert that Shivadeva I, a king who ruled in the valley from ad 590 to 604, placed four Kumaris at the crossroads of Navatol – present-day Deopatan, on the outskirts of Kathmandu – when he established the city. Wright’s chronicle also tells of a king, Gunakamadeva, in the 10th century, attaining enormous wealth and conquering vast tracts of land – ‘four quarters of the world’ – through worshipping a Kumari living in the city of Patan. Whichever king was responsible for creating the precedent, it seems likely to have happened at a time of crisis. Hard-pressed and with his own gods failing to deliver, the Hindu king would have found himself compelled to approach the Buddhist priests and ask them to allow him to consult a Kumari. Such were the king’s rewards for this imaginative departure that subsequent monarchs, finding themselves in a similar tight spot, followed suit and a tradition was born. From the Newar side, tantric initiation was not normally given to non-Newars, let alone non-Buddhists, but Newar religious experts would have been prepared, if circumstances were favourable, to make an exception in the case of a king in return for his protection and patronage, something Buddhist monastic institutions APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 31

KUMARIS Samita Bajracharya, Kumari of Patan, plays the sarod in a performance at her home in Lalitpur, Nepal, 2014.

everywhere, not just in Nepal, were always eager to secure. As Kumari worship became not only customary but essential for the Hindu kings, the Mallas began to look for a way to establish permanent Kumaris, exclusively for their own use, whose services for divination and empowerment they could call upon at short notice as the need arose. According to a copy of a ritual text known as the Pancharaksha, on October 12th, 1491 a renowned tantric Buddhist priest from Kathmandu was invited by the three joint Malla kings of Bhaktapur to establish a Living Goddess for their own personal use, one that, for the first time, would be invested with its own Hindu lineage goddess, Taleju, as well as the conventional Buddhist goddess. A special residence was provided for this new ‘royal’ Kumari in a bahal on the eastern side of Bhaktapur’s royal palace. Here she could continue to receive the administrations of the Buddhist tantric priest, while at the same time being available for Hindu tantric worship by the king and his Brahmin priest, for which she would be carried the short distance to the palace in a palanquin.

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HE MALLA DYNASTIES in the cities of Kathmandu and Patan were swift to copy this innovation. By 1528 Surya Malla, King of Kathmandu, was worshipping Taleju in the form of his own royal Kumari in order to empower himself against an attack by King Mukunda Sen of Palpa. Although these royal Kumaris were established to meet the specific requirements of the king and the Hindu court, the tradition remained for over two and a half centuries of Malla patronage in the domain of Newar Buddhism. Like the Kumaris elsewhere in the Kathmandu Valley, the royal Kumaris continued to live with their own families in their own Shakya lineage bahals under the umbrella of Buddhist worship. In 1757 all that changed, at least for the royal Kumari of Kathmandu. The valley was facing an unprecedented crisis. For over a decade it had been blockaded by an ambitious king called Prithivi Narayan Shah from the hill-town of Gorkha, 80 miles to the west. All-out conquest was imminent. Of the three Malla kings only Jaya Prakasha Mall, King of Kathmandu, seemed capable of action. Try as he might, though, and whatever offerings he made to the Kumari and his lineage goddess, his efforts to push back the Gorkha warlord continued to fail. In desperation, he conceived of an offering that, he hoped, would harness the goddess’s powers like no other had before. He constructed a Kumari residence on 32 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

the south side of Kathmandu’s Durbar Square, grander and more elaborate than any had been before, with a golden window framed by dancing goddesses and an audience chamber, where she could receive him on her golden throne surrounded by paintings of himself, Taleju and the protective Astamatrika. The building itself was designed as a mandala, symbolising the Kathmandu Valley, into which the beleaguered king could invoke all the most powerful aspects of the goddess. By summoning their collective energy at the centre of Kathmandu through the medium of the living Kumari he hoped to throw a protective force-field around the valley and repel the invader. HOWEVER, IN ORDER TO create this mandalic valley microcosm Jaya Prakasha Malla set a controversial precedent. The Kumari Chen, as we see it today, occupies a large area of ground, with entrances in the four directions, a central courtyard and three storeys on all four sides. It could never have fitted within an existing Shakya bahal. A public worship room was incorporated, too. It seems Jaya Prakasha Malla’s intention was to make her more accessible to the citizens at large and, by setting her up as the city’s central goddess, involve his subjects in his fervent attempts to secure the protection of Kathmandu. But Jaya Prakasha’s focus, too, was primarily on Hindu worship and this alone required him to break with tradition. For the first time a Buddhist child goddess was called upon to live outside her own lineage bahal. It is at this juncture, it seems, that a Kumari is first separated from her parents and placed entirely in the hands of the royally appointed female Kumari caretaker and her family. We do not know if there was previously a royal Kumari caretaker in the Kathmandu system, as there was in Bhaktapur (there seems never to have been one in Patan), but from now on the role of a specialist Kumari caretaker (and, indeed, the caretaker’s entire family) would be vital in sustaining the highly complex, highly public and super-charged practice of Kumari worship at Kathmandu’s new Kumari Chen, something for which normal Shakya parents would be completely unprepared. Ironically, Jaya Prakasha Malla’s new ‘omnipotent’ Kumari sealed his own fate. The story of how, in September 1768, the Gorkha conqueror stormed Kathmandu on the very day of the royal Kumari’s chariot festival – when she was due to give her blessing to the king – is one of the most famous in Nepal. The inhabitants were propitiously drunk and Prithivi Narayan Shah’s army took the city with barely a struggle. Jaya Prakasha Malla was forced to flee and, as the Kumari waited on her throne, Prithivi Narayan Shah stepped up and, to the amazement of the crowds, neatly received the vermilion blessing on his forehead in the Malla king’s place. The reign of the Shah dynasty had begun. Isabella Tree‘s latest book is The Living Goddess: A Journey into the Heart of Kathmandu (Eland, 2015).

FURTHER READING Rashmila Shakya, From Goddess to Mortal: The True Life Story of a Former Royal Kumari (Vajra, 2007). Jonathan Gregson, Blood Against the Snows (Fourth Estate, 2002). Thomas Bell, Kathmandu (Random House India, 2014). Michael Hutt, Nepal: A Guide to the Art and Architecture of the Kathmandu Valley (Kiscadale Publications, 1994).

InFocus

Anzac Cove, Gallipoli 1915

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T WOULD BE hard to imagine a less suitable place to land troops than the strip of beach soon to be christened Anzac Cove. The Australians and New Zealanders were meant to have been put ashore further down the Gallipoli peninsula, but the strength of the current had been underestimated, while those in charge of the pinnaces towing the boats got disoriented. The Turks were ready, under the command of Mustafa Kemal, one of the outstanding figures to emerge from the First World War. Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) attempts to move inland and seize the higher ground were repulsed. General Birdwood, the Anzac commander, was only stopped from ordering an immediate re-embarkation by the prospect of it degenerating into a complete rout. By the following evening the hospital ships were full; after five days 136 officers and 3,313 men had been killed or wounded and the rest were confined to a beachhead perimeter only a few hundred yards inland and three or four miles long. The beach itself, a mile-and-a-half long, was hidden from the Turks but vulnerable to shrapnel, its flimsy piers were regularly broken up by high seas and it was 1,400 miles away from the nearest railhead at Marseilles. There was soon a network of trenches – sometimes only ten yards from the

Gallipoli was meant to break the stalemate of the Western Front, but only succeeded in replicating it Turkish line – dugouts, dumps and mule tracks. Gallipoli was meant to break the stalemate of the Western Front, but only succeeded in replicating it, here and at Cape Helles a little to the south, where the British landings had taken place on the same day, April 25th. The Turkish record in recent years and in the first months of the war had not been good. They had lost Libya to Italy in 1911-12 and most of their European territory in the first Balkan War of 1912-13. An attack on the Suez Canal had been repulsed by the British and the Russians had defeated them in the Caucasus, triggering the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. All this helped Churchill to persuade Asquith’s Cabinet that it should answer the Grand Duke Nicholas’s call for the Allies to remove the distraction of Turkey so Russia could concentrate on attacking the Central Powers. But what seemed a simple matter of 34 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

a squadron of the Royal Navy’s obsolete pre-Dreadnought battleships steaming through the Dardanelles and pounding the Turks into a swift surrender by a bombardment of Constantinople was soon shown to be far from that. Battleships were sunk and shore batteries were not subdued, while the Turks and their German advisers were prompted to strengthen the defences of the Gallipoli peninsula ready for the landings which they rightly anticipated. As the weeks went by, the temptation to break off the offensive was resisted for fear of its effect on the millions of Muslims within the British Empire and on still-neutral Balkan countries, such as Bulgaria and Romania, whom the

Allies hoped to bring in on their side. As the temperature rose and the number of unburied grew, so the Gallipoli flies bred, the stench increased and dysentery spread. In an attempt to get rid of dead mules, they were towed out to sea but the tide brought them back. A suicidal frontal attack by the Turks on May 18-19th produced 10,000 casualties and 3,000 dead lying unburied. The Turkish-speaking Aubrey Herbert, inspiration for John Buchan’s character, Greenmantle, managed to negotiate a truce – as remarkable as that of Christmas 1914 – so that the dead could be buried. He persuaded each side that the other had requested it. In August failure was reinforced one more time with the

grossly incompetent aftermath of the landing at Suvla Bay, while the Australian attack on Lone Pine produced seven VCs and 1,700 casualties. Herbert recorded in his diary that: ‘The lines of wounded are creeping up to the cemetery like a tide, and the cemetery is coming to meet the wounded.’ In October the overall commander, Sir Ian Hamilton, was recalled and his replacement set about planning for withdrawal. By the end, half the 410,000 British Empire troops engaged at Gallipoli were casualties. Turkish losses were put at 251,000 but were probably higher. Australia’s tally was 8,700 dead, New Zealand’s, 2,700; a brutal coming of age. ROGER HUDSON

APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 35

RHODESIA Ian Smith, prime minister of Rhodesia, signs his country’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence, November 11th, 1965.

Rhodesia’s white minority government declared unilateral independence from the UK in 1965, gaining covert support from France, Britain’s colonial rival in Africa, as Joanna Warson explains.

A secret history of African decolonisation

I

F RECENT REVELATIONS surrounding the ‘secret archive’ of Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) documents have done anything, it is to underline how much is still unknown about the history of the British Empire. With over a million documents alleged to be hidden from the public and historians alike by the British government, it is apparent that the history of Britain’s colonial exploits may require substantial revision. When one moves beyond a UK-centred approach to examine connections between colonial empires, the number of gaps in the existing picture of Britain’s imperial past increases still further. Little is known, for example, about the part played by France in the decolonisation of Anglophone Africa and its aftermath. Yet, as a re-examination of the history of Southern Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) reveals, France played a significant – and frequently overlooked – role in the end of British rule on the African continent. At 11am GMT on November 11th, 1965 Ian Smith, prime minister of Rhodesia and leader of its white minority government, announced the colony’s UDI from Britain. This move, deliberately timed to coincide with the precise moment that Armistice Day was commemorated in the UK, was conceived by Rhodesian-born Smith and his supporters as a way of preserving Christian ‘civilisation’ in Africa in the face of a perceived moral decline of the West, the encroachment of communism and the spread of corruption across the continent. The desire to maintain the privileged ‘Rhodesian way of

France played a significant – and frequently overlooked – role in the end of British rule on the African continent

36 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

Ian Smith at home in the Rhodesian capital, Salisbury, November 1964.

MARCH APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 37

RHODESIA

A supporter of the Smith government delivers election campaign posters, 1964.

life’ also underpinned this act of rebellion by a small, but influential, settler minority, many of whom had only migrated to southern Africa in the 20 years following the Second World War and maintained close ties with family and friends in the UK.

U

DI SET RHODESIA on a collision course, not only with its colonial rulers, but also with an international community increasingly committed to the eradication of colonial rule across the globe. It also significantly delayed the introduction of majority rule to this landlocked territory, with Zimbabwe not gaining official independence from Britain until April 18th, 1980, more than 23 years after Britain formally began decolonising its African empire by granting independence to the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1957. On the surface, the official French response to UDI appears far from extraordinary. The French government immediately condemned the actions of Smith and his supporters and refused to acknowledge the validity of a white-ruled Rhodesia, independent from Britain. The French consul and commercial attaché stationed in the Rhodesian capital, Salisbury (now Harare), were promptly recalled and the French ministry of foreign affairs openly affirmed its support for the programme of economic sanctions introduced by the UK government in an attempt to bring the rebellious Rhodesians to heel. Yet behind this public position of opposition to UDI and the state38 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

ments of cooperation with the UK authorities, there is a more complex picture of French reaction to this monumental crisis as Britain attempted to draw a line under its colonial ventures on the African continent. In contrast to Britain’s difficulties in Rhodesia, France had, by 1965, decolonised all of its sub-Saharan colonies with the exception of Djibouti. Moreover, in spite of the violence that had characterised France’s eight-year long, ultimately unsuccessful struggle to retain hold of the North African territory of Algeria, France fostered a much better reputation in Africa than Britain, frequently presenting itself as the ‘champion’ of black Africans and the Third World more widely. The divergence of Britain and France’s African fates only grew as the UK government came increasingly under fire, at home and on the world stage, for its failure to introduce majority rule to Rhodesia, as well as its perceived intransigence over the persistence of apartheid in another of its former colonies, South Africa. These contrasting experiences, combined with the long-standing Anglo-French rivalry in Africa, which can be traced back to the French humiliation at the hands of the British at Fashoda in 1898, mean that it is unsurprising that, behind official indignation at UDI, a hint of glee characterised the French response to Britain’s troubles in southern Africa. Reports housed in the archives of Jacques Foccart, the chief adviser to French governments on African policy after 1960, described the UK government’s policy in Rhodesia as ‘incoherent’ and

The Rhodesians identified France as an important partner in their efforts to break free of British dominance Above: a 1968 demonstration in London against minority-rule Rhodesia. Right: a marriage between a white farmer and a black woman is poorly attended, May 1963.

characterised by ‘multiple errors’. Furthermore, from a French perspective, Britain’s mistakes in Rhodesia were not an isolated malfunction in the British decolonisation process, but part of an ever-lengthening list of British failures on the African continent, which also included South Africa, Tanzania, Nigeria and Ghana.

E

VEN MORE satisfying for the French was the way in which the ‘cruel failings’ of Britain’s decolonisation created new opportunities for France in regions of the African continent formerly dominated by the British. This included South Africa, where disagreements between London and Pretoria over apartheid, epitomised by South Africa’s departure from the Commonwealth in 1961, created new openings for France, particularly in the economic sphere. French smugness about this shift in their favour is apparent in one French source that describes British ‘worry’ and ‘bitterness’ about its declining stature in South Africa, in contrast to France’s growing position of strength. The decline of British fortunes in southern Africa and the parallel rise for France was equally apparent in the Rhodesian setting. Even before UDI was declared, Rhodesians identified France as an important partner in their efforts to break free of British dominance, particularly

as it offered potential new markets for their exports and alternative sources of investment. After 1965 many white Rhodesians continued to view France as an important ally in their struggle to ‘go it alone’. Ian Smith wrote to French presidents Charles de Gaulle (1958-1969) and Georges Pompidou (1969-1974) on at least six occasions after UDI, openly expressing white Rhodesia’s fraternal feelings towards France, as well as its hopes for further French support. Moreover, in a letter to de Gaulle from July 1968, Smith explicitly stated his belief that France was poised to fill the vacuum left by Britain in Rhodesia. Across Rhodesian settler society there was a perception that France was sympathetic to their plight and might, in the future, offer more formal support. P.K. van der Byl, the South African-born politician and one of Ian Smith’s closest supporters, believed that France would ‘be prepared to do whatever she can to further trade and harmonious relations’ and sustained hopes throughout the UDI period that France might accord Rhodesia formal diplomatic recognition. The Rhodesian press contained optimistic accounts of France’s position towards UDI, such as reports alleging French opposition to the UK government’s foreign policy and equating this opposition with sympathy for the white cause. Rhodesian confidence was also recorded in British newspapers: a APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 39

RHODESIA

French President Georges Pompidou meets Felix Houphouet-Boigny, president of Ivory Coast, Abidjan, 1971. Below: Prince Charles, visits a military camp during Zimbabwe’s independence ceremonies, April 1980.

feature on ‘Rhodesia at war’, published in the Guardian in 1966, included a discussion of how many white Rhodesians believed France would offer support to Smith’s regime.

I

T IS TEMPTING to dismiss the Rhodesian representation of France as an ally as the delusions of an isolated and inward-looking population, influenced by a highly censored press. Certainly the UK government did not take these reports particularly seriously, with Downing Street dismissing them as ‘Rhodesians whistling to keep their spirits up’ and Whitehall claiming that the idea that France might offer diplomatic support to Rhodesia was ‘wishful thinking on the part of the Rhodesians’. Yet French backing of Rhodesia was not entirely imagined, with both individuals and groups, some of whom had ties to the French state, providing Rhodesia with real assistance. The principal means by which the UK government sought to bring the Rhodesian rebels to heel was through economic sanctions. However, the trade embargo largely failed to achieve its objective due to the numerous external actors who were willing to defy legislation by continuing to trade with Rhodesia. Apartheid South Africa and, until its independence from Portugal in 1975, Mozambique, were at the forefront of this illegal trade. Yet, businesses based in other western countries, including the UK, the US, Japan, West Germany and France, also breached the international trade embargo. After UDI, French businessmen remained a common sight in Salisbury and French companies continued to buy Rhodesian goods, including tobacco, sugar and metals. French purchases from Rhodesia actually increased in the years immediately following UDI, with France 40 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

importing 200 per cent more Rhodesian merchandise in the first three months of 1967 than it had done in the same period in 1966, including a 106 per cent rise in purchases of unembargoed commodities such as diamonds and precious stones. French companies also remained important suppliers of goods to Smith’s illegal regime. A visible French presence in Rhodesia after 1965 was to be found on the roads, with French estimates suggesting that 50 per cent of all cars driven in Rhodesia during the UDI period were made by one of two French manufacturers: Renault and Peugeot. Moreover, at least some of the petrol needed to fuel these automobiles came from French suppliers, with the Compagnie Française de Petrole (CFP) and

A party at Government House, Salisbury, with Clifford Dupont, president of the illegal republic, second from right.

its subsidiary, Total, providing oil that was transported overland to Rhodesia from Mozambique and South Africa. As well as helping to maintain the high standard of living for ordinary white Rhodesians, French companies also aided the physical defence of white rule. A guerrilla insurgency was launched in 1972 by the military wings of the two competing factions of the Zimbabwean nationalist movement: the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), led by Ndabaningi Sithole and Robert Mugabe; and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), led by Joshua Nkomo. From the outset, French arms were vital to counterinsurgency efforts led by the Rhodesian Security Forces, with at least 50 French-manufactured Alouettes in the service of the Rhodesian Air Force (RhAF) between 1965 and 1980. The Rhodesians also had access to Mirage FI planes and Maxtra rocket launchers, leading one Zambian press report from 1977 to conclude that 22 per cent of all military material used by the RhAF was of French origin. Numerous French companies evaded the international trade embargo, therefore and, in doing so, contributed directly to efforts to maintain white rule in Rhodesia. WHAT IS distinctive about French sanctions busting in Rhodesia is not its extent –British and US companies were probably more prolific – but the degree and nature of French government involvement. Although powerful business lobbies did influence the UK and US governments to turn a blind eye to illegal Rhodesian commerce carried out by British and American companies, French state complicity went deeper than this, to the heart of French involvement in Africa in the post-independence era. After the formal handover of power to the majority in Francophone

Africa in 1960, French relations with the continent were pursued not by the foreign ministry, but through complex networks (known in French as réseaux) of state and non-state actors. At the heart of these réseaux was the French Presidential Palace, where a dedicated African cell (cellule africaine), led by Foccart, advised the president on African affairs and conducted covert operations in Africa. Private French companies as well as private and public interests in Francophone Africa also played an important role in this opaque network, which is often described as la Françafrique. This system, in turn, enabled France to continue to extract profit and exert considerable influence over its former African colonies. THERE WAS EXTENSIVE overlap between the Franco-African réseaux and the illegal French support given to white Rhodesia after UDI. Many of the private French companies who participated in these networks were also engaged in illegal Rhodesian commerce. Sucres et Denrées (SUCDEN), a Paris-registered company with strong ties to the cellule africaine, operated not only in Francophone Africa, but also in Rhodesia, purchasing considerable quantities of Rhodesian sugar throughout the UDI period. Another striking example of a company close to the heart of French African policy is the airline Union des Transports Aériens (UTA), which participated in Rhodesian affairs. Although UTA suspended its commercial flights to Rhodesia in 1966, the airline maintained offices in Salisbury and Bulawayo (Rhodesia’s second city) and was at the forefront of various initiatives to promote Rhodesian trade and tourism after UDI. There were, therefore, various private French companies, that not only had links to the apparatus through which French African policy was conducted, but also participated in illegal Rhodesian trade. This, alongside the notoriously blurred lines between French state and non-state action in Africa, makes it possible to suggest state complicity in French sanctions busting in Rhodesia. Damning evidence concerning the existence of relations between some key members of the cellule africaine and high-ranking white Rhodesians strengthens this argument. These contacts can be traced back to the early 1960s, when Jean Mauricheau-Beaupré, Foccart’s principal deputy in Brazzaville, along with Daniel Richon, UTA’s director of external affairs, who frequently acted on behalf of the African cell, attempted to form an organisation comprised of African leaders friendly to France and white rulers of southern Africa, to oppose Anglophone dominance of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), ahead of its first summit in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, in May 1963.

A

LTHOUGH THIS GROUP never fully materialised, it was important in establishing a pattern for covert relations between key players in the Franco-African réseaux and the settler government in Salisbury, permitting Franco-Rhodesian contacts to continue, in secret, after UDI. Mauricheau-Beaupré, for example, met with van der Byl in Paris on at least two occasions that are documented, in 1969 and 1971, and may also have corresponded directly with Smith. Another of Foccart’s agents, Philip Létteron, maintained direct personal contact with van der Byl, as well as Geoffrey Follows, a long-serving adviser to the Rhodesian government. In addition, Pierre de la Houssaye, an informant from the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE) – France’s external intelligence agency APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 41

RHODESIA – met members of Rhodesia’s white settler government, including on a trip to Salisbury in 1970. These covert channels served an important purpose in facilitating illegal Franco-Rhodesian trade after UDI. French purchases of Rhodesian tobacco, for example, were made possible largely through the existence of a Rhodesian Information Office in Paris. The origins of this office can be traced back to contacts between members of the cellule africaine and certain Rhodesian representatives. Rhodesian sources claim that authorisation to establish a commercial representation in the French capital was given during a meeting between Létteron and van der Byl in Paris in 1966. A similar series of events appears in a SDECE report from 1970. Although this has not so far been verified by archival evidence, the French investigative journalist, Pierre Péan, also asserted in his 1983 study of Affaires Africaines that, until its closure in 1977, the bureau had the support of the Renseignements Généraux (the intelligence service of the French police) and the SDECE. Rhodesian sanctions busting by French individuals and groups appears to have been contingent, therefore, upon the relations that existed between key protagonists of France’s African policy and high-ranking Rhodesian settlers. Furthermore, the extension of Franco-African networks to south-

Ian Smith conducts a press conference, 1975, with PK van der Byl, the principal contact between France and Rhodesia, behind him (in white).

France provided white Rhodesians with an economic lifeline at a time of British and international sanctions ern Africa enabled the establishment of commercial relations between Gabon, a former French colony in Equatorial Africa, and Rhodesia. In the late 1960s Robert Mugabe, future Mauricheau-Beaupré, Letteron and de la president of Zimbabwe, Houssaye introduced the rulers of white pushes his claims for the Rhodesia to their best Francophone African leadership of ZANU on his arrival at Geneva airport, ‘friends’, namely Félix Houphouet-Boigny, October 1976, for talks on President of the Ivory Coast (1960-94) and the future of Rhodesia. Omar Bongo, President of Gabon (19672009), and promoted Gabon as a potential market for Rhodesian beef. In turn, this endorsement led to the development of an enduring trade enterprise, 1960, actively participated in Rhodesian affairs throughout the 14-year involving the French state and private individuals and groups, Francoperiod of UDI. The impact of this French involvement was considphone Africans and white settlers, whereby Rhodesian beef was flown erable, providing the white Rhodesians and their government with into the Gabonese capital of Libreville, before being re-exported to an important economic lifeline at a time of British and international sanctions. Although not the sole external power willing to breach the various European capitals, including Amsterdam and Athens. This trade trade embargo, French support for white Rhodesia was unique due to was maintained throughout the UDI period, providing the Rhodesian regime with access to much needed foreign currency reserves and thus its intricate entwinement with the networks that formed the basis contributing considerably to its survival until 1979. Its significance is for France’s wider efforts to retain a privileged position on the African continent in the post-independence era. attested to in the autobiography of Ken Flower, head of Rhodesia’s Central Intelligence Agency, published in 1989, in which he claimed that this venture ‘contributed more than any other single factor to the RENCH INVOLVEMENT in Rhodesia stands apart in another defeat of economic sanctions’ in Rhodesia. way, due to the particular psychological consequences that it had on Rhodesia’s white population. As has been noted, at all IT IS APPARENT, therefore, that certain actors linked to the French levels of Rhodesian society, France was seen as an ally and a state, and more specifically those involved in the parallel official mechpotential formal backer of white rule in southern Africa. Although ofanisms through which French policy in Africa was conducted after ficial French diplomatic support for Smith’s government was never

F

42 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

An armed guard provides security for white Rhodesian golfers at the Leopard Rock Hotel, Manicaland, 1978.

accorded – and it is highly unlikely that this possibility was ever seriously contemplated by France – the fact that such perceptions could exist in the minds of many white Rhodesians underlines the importance that should be accorded to the moral backing Rhodesia received from France, even if this support was sometimes little more than a figment of the Rhodesian imagination. Moreover, the memory of French support outlasted Rhodesia itself, as can be seen by references to it in various memoirs written by former Rhodesian settlers. In Alexandra Fuller’s account of her childhood in Rhodesia, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2002), for example, there is a description of being driven around the country in an ‘avocado-green Peugeot’. Similarly, Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa (1997) makes reference to the RhAF’s use of ‘an Allouette helicopter, made in France’. French assistance, both real and imagined, made a lasting imprint on the Rhodesian psyche. FRENCH SUPPORT for white Rhodesia – physical and psychological, direct and indirect – contributed to Rhodesia’s commitment to maintaining white rule in southern Africa. This, in turn, prolonged the settler rebellion against Britain and delayed Zimbabwean independence until 1980. Thus, this episode brings to light a previously unknown dimension of the history of the end of the British Empire, whereby French and Francophone actors crossed national and imperial boundaries to influence the decolonisation process in Anglophone Africa. Beyond the ‘secret archives’, there exists a much wider history of the British Empire, still in the process of being uncovered by historians. Moreover, French involvement in Rhodesia was closely bound up with the particular way in which France decolonised its own African empire and the subsequent form of post-colonial Franco-African relations, which enabled the maintenance of ties between certain

actors from France, Francophone Africa and Rhodesia. By examining French involvement in Rhodesia historians can not only learn about the end of British colonial rule in Africa. We can also gain fresh insight into France’s efforts to maintain its position on the African continent in the post-independence period. This tale of French involvement in Rhodesia after UDI is not merely a hitherto unknown dimension in the story of the end of the British Empire. Rather, it is part of a much wider, interconnected web of previously neglected transnational histories, which provide new perspectives on the end of European colonial rule in Africa. It is only by looking beyond individual Empires and crossing national and colonial boundaries that this secret history of decolonisation will fully come to light. Joanna Warson is a fellow of the Centre for European and International Studies Research at the University of Portsmouth.

FURTHER READING Tony Chafer and Alexander Keese (eds), Francophone Africa at Fifty (Manchester University Press, 2013). Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France and their Roads from Empire (Oxford University Press, 2014). Joanna Warson, ‘Entangled Ends of Empire: The Role of France and Francophone Africa in the Decolonisation of Rhodesia’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History (Johns Hopkins, 2015). Carl P. Watts, Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence: An International History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 43

| FATHER OF PSYCHIATRY Johann Weyer, History of Magic, woodcut 1577.

Johann Weyer used his compassion and a pioneering approach to mental illness to oppose the witch-craze of early modern Europe. Ray Cavanaugh profiles the founder of modern psychiatry.

THE MISUNDERSTANDING and persecution of disturbed people was a fact of life in 16th-century Europe and many who suffered were hunted down as witches. Against this injustice there stood one man: Johann Weyer (151588), the first physician to specialise in mental illness, or ‘melancholy’ as it was then termed. Weyer (also known as Wier) fought the practice of punishing or killing suspected witches, contending that these ‘melancholics’ were not demonic but mentally ill. For his insight into the mental turmoil of disturbed persons, Weyer has been credited as the ‘founder of modern psychiatry’ and the year 2015 marks the 500th anniversary of his birth. Though his exact birthdate is unknown, historians say that Weyer was born in 1515 in the town of Grave, in the Dutch province of North Brabant. Scant information is available on his family, but we do know that Weyer had two brothers and that his father was a merchant. We also know something of young Weyer’s educational background. Among his teachers was the controversial philosopher, magician and occultist, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, who undoubtedly exposed him to radical ideas. At age 19 Weyer enrolled at the University of Paris to study medicine. Upon obtaining his medical degree, he returned to his hometown of Grave but eventually relocated to the Dutch city of Arnhem. Here he served as a city physician, in charge of preventing and counteracting infections such as plague and syphilis. He also married and started a family, becoming a father to five children. Injustice of the Inquisition Weyer became the personal physician to Duke William V of Julich-Berg-Cleves in 1550, serving in this capacity for three decades. Maintaining the duke’s health was not his only pursuit. He had become fixated on the subjects of witch-hunting and a nascent psychopathology. At this point it is not clear what sparked his interest, though it is true that everyone in that era was aware of the witchhunts running rampant in both Catholic and Protestant communities. Maybe Weyer could not stand the injustice he saw, which had flourished for hundreds of years and brought misery to those of unsound mind. Organised religion, instead of being a solace for the mentally ill, had become largely their enemy. The Vatican’s miscomprehension of mental illness had surfaced on December 5th, 1484, when Innocent VIII issued a papal bull on the matter of eccentric people who, ‘unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic faith, have abandoned themselves to devils’.

From Demons to Doctors 44 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

The pontiff added that, when encountering such people, ‘inquisitors [should] be empowered to proceed to the just correction, imprisonment, and punishment of any persons, without let or hindrance’. A year after this proactive papal bull there appeared a now infamous book, Malleus Maleficarum (Witch’s Hammer), which became a ‘bible’ for some of Europe’s most dogged and ruthless witch-hunters. Robert E. Adler, author of the 2014 study Medical Firsts, writes how Malleus provided moral support to its readers, as well as serving as an instruction manual on how to best execute the stages of arousing suspicion, making an arrest, conducting an interrogation and performing a successful torture and execution. Responses Many of the people arrested confessed to practicing witchcraft. However, most of these confessions were given while the suspect was prostrated on the rack or under the duress of thumbscrews or some other coercion. Weyer argued in his writings that these confessions could be distorted. Not everyone agreed. The political philosopher Jean Bodin wrote that Weyer ‘should stick to examining urine rather than intruding into the lofty territories of theology and jurisprudence’. Of course, negative publicity was not the only consequence the doctor risked. He was well aware of the perils involved in standing against the practice of witch-hunting. Others could potentially reason that Weyer himself was a demon, looking to secure the survival of his fellow demoniacs. Indeed Bodin felt that the doctor ‘must be a wizard in league with the devil to have shown such sympathy with witches’. Weyer’s published works had some initial impact; they saw multiple editions in Latin, as well as translations in French and German. The author won the support of some scholars, ecclesiastics and even a group of enlightened judges, who dismissed charges against suspected witches. On the whole, however, the culture of witch-hunting was undeterred. Either Weyer’s medical arguments were insufficient to convince the inquisitors, or the inquisitors didn’t want to be convinced. No one has any clear idea as to how many lives the witch-craze claimed. Estimates range from 50,000 into the millions. The panic spread to the New World, peaking most notably in the early 1600s in Salem, Massachusetts. It would take time for the persecution to end; for example, the last ‘witch’ in Germany was decapitated only one year before the American Revolution. The memory of witch hunts long remained and its frenzied hysteria could serve as a premonition of the fanatical ideologies that would take hold of Europe in the 20th century. Weyer, the anti-fanatic, wrote in his magnum opus, De Praestigiis Daemonum (1563), that many of the excoriated witches were in reality ‘melancholics’, whose ‘senses are often distorted’ when the ‘melancholic humour seizes control of the brain and alters the mind’. He added that

A woman, accused of witchcraft, bound and thrown into a river, 16th-century woodcut.

‘some of these melancholics think they are dumb animals, and imitate the cries and bodily movements of these animals’. Other melancholics ‘fear death, and yet sometimes they choose death by committing suicide’. Others yet ‘imagine that they are guilty of a crime, and they tremble and shudder when they see anyone approaching them’. Weyer also contended that such psychological states as ‘fascination and enchantment’ could ‘contribute to the belief in witchcraft’. Additionally, social isolation could ‘predispose one to abstruse beliefs’. Weyer also provided case studies. Among them was one man who ‘was certain he had become a wolf’. Another case involved a man who ‘believed that he was monarch and emperor of the whole world’. A third involved a woman who would ‘linger by night about the tombs in the cemeteries’ for weeks at a time. Sometimes, she would run through the streets vandalising people’s property. Without Weyer’s insight and support such a person would have stood a slim chance against witch-hunters. What else, other than demonic influence, could cause someone to smash her neighbour’s window for no reason? Legacy For such a pioneering figure, there is surprisingly little known about Weyer. He left behind no autobiography, nor did any of his contemporaries write anything sizeable on his life or work. In the 1991 edition of Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance, George Mora relates that the latter part of Weyer’s life is particularly obscure. One might assume it was less than blissful. Though Weyer had made some initial impact, the grim truth was that the overall persecution of eccentric and disturbed persons was only to intensify. Weyer spent his final years in exile and died following a brief illness, at 73, on February 24th, 1588. Ten years before his death, he had retired from his medical career; the retirement might well have been involuntary. For centuries, Weyer and his work went largely neglected. Then, in the 1940s, a psychoanalyst and medical historian named Gregory Zilboorg revivified Weyer as a forerunner of modern psychiatry. Today his case studies serve as the progenitor of the current-day psych evaluation, and the Johannes Wier Foundation – a Dutch human rights organisation for health workers – honours a man who breached prejudices that had smouldered for centuries. Where some people saw witchcraft and evil, Weyer saw suffering. And he devoted his talents, compassion and bravery so that others might see it as well.

Where some people saw witchcraft and evil, Weyer saw suffering

Ray Cavanaugh is a historian of medieval Ireland and early modern Europe. APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 45

MakingHistory The increasing commercialisation of sites known for their gruesome and violent history raises troubling questions. But to ignore such events would be worse, argues Suzannah Lipscomb.

Shedding light on dark history I HAVE SPENT a week on the trail of witches in Scotland and Lancashire. In Edinburgh, I stood on Castle Hill, where, on January 28th, 1591, a midwife called Agnes Sampson and a number of other witches accused in the North Berwick trials – with which James VI was directly involved – were garrotted and burnt for witchcraft. There is a tiny, easily missable memorial and I found the oblivious hordes of tourists (with their selfie sticks) or the bizarre jocularity of some tour guides deeply disturbing on the site of so much horror. By contrast, Lancashire commemorates its gruesome history. The council offers driving and walking routes through Pendle and the surrounding countryside, following in the footsteps of those accused of witchcraft. There is even a nice poem by Carol Ann Duffy about the victims, engraved on a stone on Gallows Hill in Lancaster, where ten convicted witches were hanged in August 1612 and an eerie metal sculpture of one of them, Alice Nutter, in the village of Roughlee. In both, of course, commercialism reigns: from an upmarket restaurant in Edinburgh called The Witchery to Pendle Witches’ Brew ale – everyone is getting in on the act. As a phenomenon, it is nothing new: from the remains of Pompeii and Madame Tussaud’s post-French Revolution Chamber of Horrors, to the battlefields of the Somme and tours of concentration camps, people have long been drawn to the sites and scenes of disaster, murder, execution and war. And the question of how we respectfully and appropriately mark and remember the darker episodes of our history has, in the last decades, become the subject of scholarly study. Perhaps not coincidentally, there is an Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire and the commodification of atrocity 46 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

for the public even has its own academic term: thanatourism (from the Greek for ‘death’, thanatos). Visiting these kinds of macabre heritage sites is an important way in which the public consumes history and therefore, for the historian just as for the heritage industry, there are ethical questions to consider. On the one hand, these places do a crucial job of memorialising the past,

What is worse? Not remembering or remembering in a way that seems distasteful? of healing wounds and of allowing for empathy. They remember the suffering of others and help alert us to the complex tangle of historical circumstances that created such barbarity and could do so again. They remind us that far too often homo homini lupus est – man is a wolf to man. On the other hand, though, such places are open to moralistic charges of capitalising on the unpleasant human impulse to voyeurism and prurience, Eerie: the metal sculpture of Alice Nutter in Roughlee, Lancashire.

a titillated fascination with horror and the frisson of fear it provokes, or entertainment at the pain of others. But what is worse? Not remembering or remembering in a way that seems distasteful? One of the most moving places I have ever been was a charnel house in the vaults of a church in the City of London. It was filled with the skeletons of those who had died from the plague. The sight of the bones carefully laid out filled me with awe at the reality of lives lived, the hideousness of their deaths and the transience of mortality. But recent building works meant that many other bones had been packed into cardboard boxes, which were piled up in a corridor that also served as the general storage space and dumping ground. Perhaps these bones were carefully preserved and it was only the debris that gave the impression of neglect, but I found this latter disregard troubling. I felt dimly aware that all sorts of best practice policies for the treatment of human remains may have been contravened, yet it was the sense of forgetfulness that most perturbed me. I have, therefore, realised with some discomfort that, grim as it may be to see human suffering exploited by the market (another example of our tendency to wolfishness), it is, on balance, far worse for people not to remember the past than for them to remember in a way that I find unappealing. It is not good enough: the reason forgetfulness is so terrible is because it betrays a lack of empathy, just as jaunty tour guides or tasteless paraphernalia do; our duty towards past horror is a sombre honouring and anything else falls short. But it is still better to remember than forget. Suzannah Lipscomb is Head of the Faculty of History and Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at New College of the Humanities.

BISHOP KEN Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells, portrait by F. Scheffer, c.1700.

In the precarious years that followed the Restoration of Charles II, the senior clergy of the Church of England navigated the country’s shifting politics at their peril. But high principles still had their place, as John Jolliffe explains.

Bishop Ken and the Non-Jurors

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NGLISH LIFE in the second half of the 17th century divides into two sharply contrasting periods. The first, the Puritan regime of Oliver Cromwell, sought to destroy the liturgy of the Church of England, the backbone of most people’s devotional life. It made the theatre illegal and abolished the feast of Christmas. It also destroyed a great deal of the treasure of glass and stone at the heart of the nation’s churches and cathedrals.  The reaction to such iconoclasm was confirmed by the Restoration of Charles II on his 30th birthday in 1660 and

with the laxity and license of his behaviour. Between these two extremes there were cases of devotion to high principles. One example was the stand taken on two separate occasions by the Non-Juror clergy, led by the bishops, who refused first to order James II’s Declaration of Faith to be read out in their dioceses, as instructed by the king; and then declined, shortly afterwards, to swear allegiance to William III as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, on the grounds that they had previously taken that oath in favour of James, however much they disliked his attempt APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 47

BISHOP KEN to impose Roman Catholicism on the country. Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells, had stood at James’ right hand at his coronation in April 1685. Like Pontius Pilate in rather different circumstances, the bishops’ line was Quod scripsi, scripsi (What I have written, I have written); or, in this case, Quod juravi, juravi (What I have sworn, I have sworn). Their first crisis had arisen in April 1687, when James issued his Declaration of Indulgence. In theory this was a liberal – and liberating – pronouncement, reversing the penal laws against religions other than the Church of England. Its real purpose, however, was to facilitate the pre-eminence of the Roman Catholic Church. At first, addresses of thanks poured into Whitehall from Quakers, Anabaptists and other non-conforming bodies. Far stronger was the realisation that James was setting aside, arbitrarily, the anti-Catholic Test Act, passed by Parliament as the cornerstone of religious policy. Many could see that this was likely to lead to other measures of an autocratic nature of the kind that had cost the head of James’ father, Charles I. It even seemed to be a step towards rule without Parliament.

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AMES ISSUED AN ORDER in Council on May 4th, 1687, requiring the bishops to have the Declaration of Indulgence read out in all the churches and chapels in their dioceses. The bishops reacted quickly. Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, led six of them to wait on the king: besides Ken there was Compton (Bishop of London), White (PeterborJames II, anonymous ough), Turner (Ely) and Cartwright portrait, c.1690 (Chester). Their petition stated their conscientious scruples against reading the declaration and begged the king to withdraw it. Ken explained that ‘we have two duties to perform, our duty to God and our duty to Your Majesty. We honour you, but we fear God’. James was furious and dismissed them as ‘trumpeters of Sedition’. The next day a letter was sent to every parish priest in the country urging that the declaration should not be read. The result was overwhelming. In a radius of ten miles of London it was read in only four churches, including Westminster Abbey, where the entire congregation walked out, leaving only the choristers and the scholars of Westminster school behind. The bishops were then told they would be prosecuted in the Court of King’s Bench and ‘must enter recognizances to appear’. This they declined to do, on the grounds that, as members of the House of Lords, they were under no obligation to do so. Nevertheless, the Lord Chancellor, George Jeffreys, later to gain notoriety as the ‘hanging judge’ at the Bloody Assizes following the Monmouth ReThe Bishop’s bellion of 1685, ordered the serjeantPalace, Wells, Somerset. at-arms to conduct them as prisoners to the Tower of London. A week later, 48 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

The Trial of the Seven Bishops in the House of Commons During the Reign of James II by John Herbert, 1844.

Unlike the Vicars of Bray and most of their bishops, Ken remained loyal to the man who had sent him to the Tower of London after visits from Lord Clarendon and John Evelyn among others, they were brought to trial in Westminster Hall, with sympathetic crowds cheering them on their way. After the summing up they were allowed to go off to their residences. The jury was locked in for the night and ‘were heard at midnight in heated disagreement, and again about 3 am’. At 10am the foreman gave the verdict of ‘Not Guilty’ and crowds outside broke out in wild cheering. Church bells rang, guns fired salvoes, bonfires blazed and soon the bishops went home. Events moved rapidly. By November 6th, 1688 William of Orange was landing an army of 17,000 (of whom, ironically, a quarter were Roman Catholics). By the 24th Ken left his diocese to avoid possible contact with the Dutch, some of whom were known to him personally from his unhappy time as chaplain to the child bride Princess Mary in the gloomy court of The Hague back in 1680. Unlike the Vicars of Bray and most of their bishops, Ken remained loyal to the man who had sent him to the Tower of London. But on December 11th, 1688 James fled from Whitehall by night, casting the Great Seal into the Thames. It is worth looking at the sequence of events that had brought Ken to Wells. After The Hague he was appointed

chaplain to the king and when the latter ordered the building of a new palace at Winchester, he was in the habit of lodging at the deanery on his visits. Ken had been installed as a prebendary there in 1669 and the harbinger responsible for the accommodation of the court had wanted Nell Gwyn to be lodged at the prebendary’s residence, conveniently close to the deanery. Ken refused and, instead, more conveniently still, a small apartment was built on to the deanery to house her. In 1684 the Bishop of Winchester had died and the then Bishop of Bath and Wells was appointed in his place. Charles had to find another bishop and he decided to appoint ‘the little fellow who refused poor Nelly a lodging’. In 1685, only a week after his consecration as bishop (having already taken the Oath of Allegiance on his election), he ministered to Charles on his deathbed.

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HE CUSTOM at the time was for a newly appointed bishop to provide, at his own expense, a banquet for ‘the cream of the clergy and nobility’. Ken decided instead to present what the banquet would have cost him to the fund for rebuilding St Paul’s Cathedral ‘in lieu of his consecration dinner’. Another considerable act of generosity by Ken was his decision to forego the sum of £4,000, which had come to the episcopal treasury from legal dues on the renewal of various leases. This he made over to a collection intended to support Protestant refugees from France, who had fled their country after the Revocation of the Treaty of Nantes. In his few short years at Wells he regularly entertained 12 poor men and women at dinner in the palace. Hardly were these pious acts completed APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 49

BISHOP KEN than arose the first crisis of his time at Wells. The Protestant Duke of Monmouth, who had been exiled by his acknowledged father, Charles II, returned with two ships and landed at Lyme Bay in Dorset. Secretary Pepys at the Admiralty seized the vessels and cut off any means of escape for Monmouth by sea. His only option was to fight on land. At first Monmouth was welcomed rapturously by large numbers of Taunton’s and Bridgwater’s citizens. James’ disciplined troops under Louis de Duras, 2nd Earl of Feversham had little trouble in routing Monmouth’s rabble of supporters,

Monmouth was captured, cowering in a ditch, and wrote an abject letter begging James, who he had unwisely described as a usurper, to receive him who were mostly armed with pitchforks, scythes and other agricultural implements. More than 1,300 of them were killed and perhaps as many again captured and found guilty of treason. They were executed on and around the battlefield at Sedgemoor and left to rot. Some of the prisoners were incarcerated in a church in Wells and Ken did what he could to save them from death or transportation and to relieve their families, even forgiving the amateur soldiers for having used the cathedral as stables and terrorising the city. Monmouth was captured, cowering in a ditch, and wrote an abject letter begging James, who he had unwisely described earlier as a usurper, murderer and enemy of religion, to receive him. It did him no good. Ken attended him in his final hours and urged him to repent. At first Monmouth refused, but on being reminded of all the carnage that he had caused among the Somerset ‘hobbledehoys’ he repented.   N JANUARY 28TH, 1689 the Commons passed a resolution based on no legal principle: that James ‘having withdrawn himself from the Kingdom had abdicated the government, and that the throne had become vacant’. For all they knew James might have changed his mind, rallied his supporters and come back. William declined stubbornly to be in the position of his wife’s ‘gentleman usher’, which as far as England was concerned was what he was, or of being regent or even king consort. Since no alternative could be suggested and his supporters being understandably determined to remain on the best possible terms with him (as well as to feather their nests), he succeeded in bulldozing his way into sharing the throne. When considering William’s character, Samuel Johnson’s description of it is worth recalling:

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Arbitrary, insolent, gloomy, rapacious and brutal … neither in great things nor in small the manners of a gentleman, and only regarded his promise when it was in his interest to keep it. Ken’s biographer, H.A.L. Rice, while detesting William’s character, nevertheless concedes as follows: In defence of the liberties and independence of small nations, in opposition to over-towering ambition and lust for power, he remained constant, fearless and inflexible. It remains an impressive tribute. 50 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

Right: The Battle of Sedgemoor, 1685, woodcut, 17th century. Below: James, Duke of Monmouth, Studio of Sir Peter Lely, c.1680.

of James and were harassed accordingly by the new regime, but no evidence of treasonable intent could be found against them. In 1702 Queen Anne offered to restore Ken, an offer he declined (though he accepted a pension). It was not until 1715 that any serious attempt was made to oust what by then was the Hanoverian regime and it soon failed.

A DUBIOUS RESOLUTION declaring the throne vacant by the two Houses of Parliament, in joint session, was passed by just 62 votes to 47, Ken being among the minority. Thirty-seven peers then protested against William and Mary being declared king and queen, 12 of them, including Ken, being bishops. Nevertheless, other measures were passed transferring authority and allegiance from James and, on February 12th, Ken quit the House of Lords, never to enter it again. He refused to abandon his sacred principles long before being asked to swear allegiance to William. Even in their deprived state, the more extreme bishops still regarded themselves as legitimate holders of their sees, while their successors were viewed as intruders and schismatics. Bishop Sancroft died two years later, in 1693, and the extremists, with the approval of James in exile at St Germain, secretly consecrated two more bishops. The Non-Jurors were now suspected of being active supporters

The Seven Bishops, tried for Sedition, a contemporary engraving, with Bishop Ken, top row, second from left.

MEANWHILE, Ken had been given shelter (still in his old diocese) by his Oxford contemporary, Lord Weymouth, at Longleat in Wiltshire. A few letters of Ken’s survive from this period, always beginning with the rather formal opening, ‘My very good lord’. Sadly they throw little light on Ken’s character, which is anyway illustrated by his impeccable behaviour while still in office. He sold his personal possessions when leaving Wells for over £700, which he handed over to Weymouth in return for an annuity of £80. He kept only his library, which is still at Longleat, the catalogue of which is interesting both for its contents and for its gaps. It contains no Shakespeare, nor any of the Elizabethan dramatists. No English Reformers are represented; Cranmer and Latimer are absent, as is Luther. Yet there are many works of the Church fathers: Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, Eusebius, Gregory Nazianzen, Ambrose, Augustine, Bernard, to mention only some of the better known. More surprisingly there are a number of Roman Catholic notables: a life of St Ignatius, the works of Thomas à Kempis and St Francis de Sales, Mabillon and the Doctrines of Bossuet, as well as the Roman Missal and Breviary. For some reason Ken left a substantial collection of Spanish authors to Bath Abbey, which were recently transferred to the Cathedral Library at Wells. There are also the works of major contemporary thinkers, including Sancroft, Jeremy Taylor, Hobbes and others, and, very surprisingly in view of his underhand and dishonest treatment of Ken, three works by Bishop Gilbert Burnet.

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LASSICAL AUTHORS are also well represented and although Homer, Herodotus and Aeschylus are absent (perhaps given away to friends?) most of the Greek canon is there, as are the main Latin authors: Horace, Livy, Ovid, Tacitus, Juvenal, Catullus, Cicero, Lucan, Martial and Pliny, probably survivors from Ken’s studies at Winchester and Oxford. English authors include Holinshed and Froissart, Bede and Ussher and, among contemporary literature, the works of Milton, Crashaw, Herbert and Donne. Although Ken was lucky to fall on his feet at Longleat, he was just 54 and a loss to his diocese. His remaining years were spent largely in private study and devotions, mainly APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 51

BISHOP KEN

Right: A View of Longleat by Jan Siberechts, 1678. Below: William and Mary depicted on England’s Happiness, a pamphlet, London 1689.

in the chapel that was set up for him at Longleat. He also composed a number of undistinguished verses and a few hymns, among them the wellknown ‘Awake my Soul, and with the Sun’. He is certain to have been troubled by the fate of so many of his fellow clergy on being deprived and to have lamented the loss suffered by the Church of England on their departure. Some of the clergy found employment as private tutors, schoolmasters or domestic chaplains, but this would hardly have been appropriate for Ken, who had held exalted positions both at court and, however briefly, at Wells and who could not bring himself to play any active part in the new ecclesiastical regime. But he certainly gave encouragement and advice over the foundation of Lord Weymouth’s Grammar School in Warminster, which still survives as Warminster School. He kept old friendships alive, not least with former colleagues who had taken the Oath of Supremacy and whose consciences Ken respected. HE WAS NOT TIED DOWN at Longleat. To avoid the house’s crowded Christmas celebrations he was in the habit of going to stay with various friends and faithful supporters, including Lord Weymouth’s widowed daughter-in-law at Lewesdon near Sherborne and with Dr Cheyney, the

Principles still at stake To bring the story of expulsion up to date, another more bitter irony, much resented in the Diocese of Bath and Wells, was the recent high-handed move by the Church Commissioners to prevent the recently installed bishop, the Rt Rev Peter Hancock, from occupying the flat in the Bishop’s Palace. This plan was made without consulting the new bishop himself and the commissioners failed to consult the 52 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

headmaster of Winchester, who had once been his chaplain. He also acted as a kind of spiritual director to two maiden ladies, the Misses Kemeys at Portishead. In 1704 he was staying with his nephew, Izaak Walton the younger, in the Rectory at Poulshot, not far from Longleat, when it was badly damaged in a storm described by Defoe. Twelve ships of the line were wrecked and the Eddystone Lighthouse destroyed. At Wells, part of the Bishop’s Palace collapsed on Bishop Kidder and his wife, killing them. It is a supreme irony that this fate befell Ken’s successor and not himself. Ken died in 1711 at the age of 74 and was buried in accordance with his instructions in a simple grave outside the church of St John in Frome, at that time the nearest parish church to Longleat. John Jolliffe is a historian and publisher. His Raymond Asquith: Life and Letters is published by Michael Russell; www.lennoxandfreda.com/publisher

FURTHER READING Robert Southey, Bishop Kenn (Longman, 1812). JWC Wand, The High Church Schism (Faith Press, 1951). Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed, Britain 16301714 (Penguin History of Britain, 1997).

dean. So the new bishop was likely to be deprived of his lodging before even setting foot in it. A former rectory three and a half miles away was bought back at huge cost for him to occupy, thus removing him from the historic centre of the diocese. This appeared to be a purely materialistic move in order to increase the theoretical tourist value of the Bishop’s Palace. There was even a strong suspicion, although they may deny it, that the Commissioners would next try to sell

off the Bishop’s Palace itself. Following a forceful and eloquent letter to the press by a former dean and other robust protests, the Church Commissioners referred the matter to the Archbishop’s Council, which sent an envoy to Wells, who investigated the situation and reversed the Commissioners’ decision. No doubt they will be more careful in future before trying to betray their solemn obligation to protect the Church’s architectural legacy and a fascinating chapter in its history. JJ

| THE POST OFFICE Hugh Gault charts the long-running debate over the privatisation of the Post Office amid rising competition and shifting political agendas. ‘HISTORY NEVER repeats itself exactly. But patterns recur because the contexts in which human beings have to act repeat themselves, more or less’, as Robert, now Lord, Skidelsky put it in his 1967 book Politicians and the Slump. The question of whether the Post Office should be a business has been around for almost as long as the service itself and certainly since the 1920s. But when the question was carefully explored in the 1930s the answer was ‘no’, as it was in the early years of this century – though only just. However, in 2013 Britain’s coalition government sold off Royal Mail. The government retained the pension liabilities and a minority stake, as well as having the ultimate responsibility for the Universal Service Obligation (USO). A National Audit Office report in April 2014 decided that Royal Mail had been sold too cheaply, not achieving sufficient value for the taxpayer, and in July 2014 the Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Committee endorsed these conclusions. The market value had been underestimated by Vince Cable’s BIS Department. The business secretary’s arguments that ‘froth’ accounted for vastly increased share prices in the months after flotation were not seen as credible and, while the government might have delivered a privatised Royal Mail with an employee share scheme, it was the taxpayer who lost out. Competition Not for the first time since privatisation, Royal Mail has complained recently about the USO making them uncompetitive. It requires Royal Mail to deliver six days a week to every address in the UK at the same price. Its competitors, however, can pick and choose where they deliver, cherry-picking the easily accessible and more lucrative parts of the country and leaving alone those, usually rural, that are less so. Royal Mail argues that the private sector should be required to deliver to every address, too, preventing it from targeting urban areas and business mail only. This would also mean that less accessible areas would gain increased access to Internet shopping. Almost exactly the same questions were raised in a letter to The Times in 1932, when Post Office privatisation was under consideration: Who is to prescribe the policy of the new body? Will it be allowed, like any other concern run on business lines, to select its own business? Much of the present business is

Helpful hints: a public information poster issued by the Post Office, 1950.

probably unremunerative. Will the emancipated [i.e., privatised] Post Office be allowed to jettison this?’ These questions anticipate those that are with us now: around parcels/letters distinction, the organisation of private delivery and the viability of non-commercial rural services. Just as the USO’s viability was questioned in the 1930s, so it is today, although Cable has described Royal Mail’s comments as scaremongering and Ofcom has dismissed them. Nevertheless, Royal Mail’s management must be hoping that it will be forgotten that their over-arching purpose is as public service, rather than as a profitable business prioritising shareholder return. In March 1930 the Conservative MP Roundell Palmer, later Lord Wolmer, made his intentions clear in Parliament: I want to … remove the Post Office altogether out of the

The Stamp of Success? APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 53

| THE POST OFFICE or, still Leader of the Labour Party in 1954, perhaps he thought this would improve his chances of becoming prime minister again. Possibly he was simply repeating what he had told Roy Jenkins six years earlier. In 1948 Jenkins had published an interim biography of Attlee, based in part on the former prime minister’s ‘powers of recollection’ and ‘hitherto unpublished writings’. Wood set up the enquiry committee Wolmer had sought, with the politician William Bridgeman in the chair, accompanied by the industrialist John Cadman and the accountant William Plender. In less than six months they produced a short but pithy and extremely sophisticated report to the terms of reference Wood had given them:

hands of politicians and the Civil Service, and to put it in the hands of a statutory authority … controlled by the ablest business brains we can find, in a position to raise its own capital … and to run this great concern as a business. Wolmer’s campaign was conducted initially through proposals to fellow MPs, then in articles in The Times and other newspapers and finally by a petition to the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, signed by 320 MPs in November 1931. The Postmaster General (PMG) Sir Kingsley Wood had political responsibility for the Post Office and was directly in the path of the Wolmer reform bandwagon; but would he also be in its way? Kingsley Wood was the 19th person to hold the office of PMG in the 20th century and the fourth in 1931, with Clement Attlee having been PMG for five months earlier in the year. Attlee was beginning to make some changes, but was furious when the Labour government came to an end and the National Government took over, putting him out of a job. Though Wood would not have been MacDonald’s choice, leading Conservatives such as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain knew him well and must have won this argument. The upshot was that two months later Wood was left holding the parcel at the head of a quarter of a million people. In those days the Post Office included a savings bank, telegrams and telephones, as well as its deliveries and counter services. The savings bank, created in 1861 when Palmerston was prime minister, was hived off as a separate department in 1969 and BT (British Telecom) was sold in the 1980s. Whose reforms? In November 1931 Attlee had described the Post Office as ‘the outstanding example of collective capitalism’, a view then widely held, with the BBC and electricity supplying other examples. He argued that its contribution to the Treasury should be restricted, judged the civil service-type structure too inflexible for the active campaigning required and wanted to reduce parliamentary control. These proposals would have been anathema to Evelyn Murray, the hide-bound Secretary of the Post Office, who had day-to-day control and a particular distaste for public relations. Nevertheless, they were not as radical as the claims Attlee made in his 1954 autobiography, asserting that it was he who introduced public relations, adopted advertising and improved the telephone service. These are very striking, especially for someone who was only in the post for five months and generally so modest, even deprecatory, about his own achievements. He had set up an advisory committee on public relations and invited Stephen Tallents to join it, but it had progressed no further than that. With regard to the telephone service, he only received the report setting out proposals the day he left office. Perhaps Attlee’s memory was faulty, or he confused his intentions with the changes that his successor Wood did introduce; 54 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

To enquire and report as to whether any changes in the constitution, status or system of organisation of the Post Office would be in the public interest.

Postmaster General Kingsley Wood listens in to a shortwave transmitter, 1932.

The report distinguished the Post Office communications services from its other state functions, such as the savings bank and pension payments. It was very positive about the efficiency and effectiveness of the latter and, indeed, about the postal service itself. It was more critical of the telegram and telephone systems (as Wolmer had been), but it was most concerned about the dead hand of the current administration and Murray’s excessive authority as Secretary, judging, and in reality condemning, it as a stifling initiative. The PMG’s proper role was to separate policy from operation and to maintain parliamentary oversight and the public interest. But modern management demanded a board chaired by the PMG, led by a director general and comprising other executives charged with regional and/or specialist functions. The Secretary’s post would no longer be required. These and other recommendations were endorsed by the government and brought into effect for, as the committee had concluded: The criticisms, so far as we find them to be justified, in our opinion point to defects in the present organization which can be remedied without … a complete change of status. … we wish to place on record our opinion that on the whole the Post Office performs the services for which it is responsible with remarkable efficiency. The committee had rejected the transfer of some services to a public utility company or Wolmer’s private sector option, concluding that this would result in the development of the ‘more remunerative business of the denser areas to the detriment of more remote and sparsely populated districts’. They were also critical of ill-informed public criticism for ‘the public will come to learn that it cannot demand luxuries at the same price which it pays for necessities’. Both judgements remain pertinent today. It is to be hoped that they are not joined by a third: only realising what one had when it has gone. Hugh Gault’s most recent book is Making the Heavens Hum: Kingsley Wood, Volume 1 – The Art of the Possible 1881-1924 (Gretton, 2014). Volume two, Scenes from a Political Life 1925-1943, is scheduled to be published in 2016.

REVIEWS

Claire Holleran on the day that Commodus killed a rhino Stephanie Eichberg admires a story of pain • John E Law explores Italian Venice

Frank Hudspeth carries the FA Cup after Newcastle United’s win against Aston Villa in 1924.

SIGNPOSTS

British Sports History Robert Colls rises to the challenge of arguing the case for sports history as a serious academic subject, digging deep into its beginnings in the 1960s and winning with a wealth of scholarly works and skilled rhetoric. UNLIKE ITS European and American counterparts, the rise of British sports history as an academic subject in the 1960s came out of social history and theory, not physical education and sports science. That said, the most ambitious works were decidedly left field – Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) came out of cultural linguistics, Elias’ The Civilizing Process (1939) out of so56 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

ciology, economics, and psychotherapy and Guttmann’s From Ritual to Record (1978) out of literature, history and American studies. With no clear theoretical lead, British social scientists could be found strapping sports history into hard-boned theories (Marxist, Functionalist or Figurationist) that did not always fit – though Dunning’s and Sheard’s Barbarians, Gentlemen

and Players (1979) was influential and deserves a prize for trying. Wray Vamplew’s Pay Up and Play the Game (1988) introduced the Utility Maximisation Hypothesis, which was interesting, while Neil Tranter’s Sport, Economy and Society (1998) sought to answer some of the big sociological-historical questions and did well by both disciplines. On the other hand, there was Desmond

Morris’ The Soccer Tribe (1981) that zoolo-anthropologised sport. The social historians preferred specific events and established chronologies. James Walvin was first with The People’s Game: The Social History of British Football (1975). I can remember the cries of ‘folly’ that followed the young Walvin as he tried to win the interest of York University’s history department. After all, here was a man who had done his doctorate in a proper subject (popular radicalism) wasting his time (and his youth) on Manchester United. Forty years on, the book is still in print. Tony Mason’s Association Football and English Society followed in 1981, while Tony Mangan brought the middle classes into sports history in the same year with his study of public school athleticism. But the ground for academic British sports history was really cleared with Dai Smith and Gareth Williams’ Fields of Praise (1980), a ‘deep’ history of the Welsh, and with Richard Holt’s Sport and the British (1989), a sweeping work which showed historians how to think about sport and how to cast it into the mainstream. In this context, we cannot signpost sports history without pointing to Keith Thomas’ ‘Work and Leisure in Pre-Industrial Society’ (Past & Present, 1964), R.W. Malcolmson’s Popular Recreations in English Society (1973), Gareth Stedman Jones’ ‘Working Class Culture and Working Class Politics 1870-1900’ (Journal of

Social History, 1974) and Ross McKibbin’s Classes and Cultures (1998). Since Holt, the subject has grown into a small but distinctive corner of British university teaching, with its journals (Sport in History and International Journal of the History of Sport), its teaching manuals (such as Booth’s The Field, Polley’s Sport History and Cronin’s Oxford VSI) and its societies (the British Society for Sports History). See R W Cox’s immense bibliographical labours to track this growth, Pascal Delheye’s attempts to make sense of it and Jeff Hill’s reinterpretation of it as a form of people’s representation. The subject is so confident these days it can even ask ‘What’s the point of Sports History?’ (Martin Johnes, IJHS, 2013). Britain’s only dedicated Sports History department was founded in 1996 at De Montfort University in Leicester,

British sports history came out of social history and theory, not physical education and sports science where it continues to flourish. Last year it launched the first BA in Sports History and Culture. Meanwhile, Ramachandra Guha reversed the batting order in 2002 with his Indian history of an English sport, Corner of a Foreign Field. Emma Griffin pushed back the boundary in 2005 with her fine early modern study, England’s Revels and Mike Cronin’s indefatigable work on Irish identity found a rich sporting vein in his work on the GAA. But all in all it has proved difficult for sports historians to spot the ‘mainstream’ let alone figure a way in. Tony Collins’ rugby histories (League in 1998, Union in 2009) found a way in, somewhat, as did Simon Inglis’ Engineering Archie (2005) and Mason’s and Riedi’s Sport and the Military (2010). Ina Zweiniger Bargielowska’s Managing the

Body (2010) and Neil Carter’s Medicine, Sport and the Body (2012) showed how far the sporting body could stretch into other subjects. By and large sports historians have remained true to their social history instincts by concentrating on mass activities. Football has predominated. No sooner had Matt Taylor and Adrian Harvey brought the British story to a fine scholarly pause by 2007, than David Goldblatt reminded everybody that the journalists were still a force with his global history The Ball is Round, a work not likely to be bettered in my lifetime. His The Game of Our Lives followed in 2014, a bold run into the crowded area of English national identity that started with a long pass from Dave Russell’s Football and the English in 1997. Sports history is on the up at a time when sport itself is on the down. The British, it seems, are world-beating Olympians who suffer from record-beating levels of obesity, while the Premier League and Sky Sports has achieved the impossible by turning football into shopping. Tony Collins’ Sport in a Capitalist Society (2013) gets it exactly right in this respect and sports historians are going to have to widen their remit to deal with it. If modern celebrity is a kind of fool’s paradise, sporting celebrity is a living media death played over and over again. For sports history’s one perhaps irredeemable fault is that it is taught and written by fans. There are exceptions (some mentioned here) but, unlike the political historians who do not feel obliged to love politicians, or the religious historians whose belief is not presumed, sports historians are believers. While the old challenges are being dealt with – such as Jean Williams on football and Kasia Boddy on boxing – the next challenge comes from within: the fan, the supporter, the partisan, the white guy in the chair who secretly wants to be the man on the ball. Robert Colls

The Day Commodus Killed a Rhino Understanding the Roman Games Jerry Toner

Johns Hopkins University Press 136pp £13

THE EMPEROR COMMODUS was immortalised in the film Gladiator as an unstable and insecure ruler who fought in the arena to win the adulation of the crowd. While the film is fictional, Jerry Toner’s excellent new book provides the historical context for Ridley Scott’s emperorgladiator, drawing on the senator Dio Cassius’ eyewitness account of the lavish games held by Commodus in Rome in ad 192. It was not enough for Commodus merely to host, he wanted to perform. He hunted animals, albeit from the safe vantage point of a catwalk suspended above the arena, and fought as a gladiator, although he was never in any real danger since he and his opponent were armed only with wooden weapons and he was flanked by his most trusted aides. This book is not solely about Commodus, but explores the Roman games more broadly, focusing in particular on the violent pursuits of the arena, including beast hunts, executions and gladiatorial games. It is often difficult for a modern audience to get beyond their revulsion at these aspects of Roman entertainment, but Toner manages to achieve an appropriate balance between compassion for the level of human suffering involved and a non-judgemental analysis of an audience whose world was

very different from ours, even wondering at one point how he himself would have responded to the sights and sounds of the arena. Toner demonstrates that the games should not simply be dismissed as a reflection of the peculiar cruelty of the Romans. Rather they were central to Roman identity, since paradoxically, while a gladiator was on the margins of society, he embodied the core Roman values of masculinity, bravery, self-control, discipline and military virtue. The gruesome executions that were held in the arena were a means of asserting law and order in a society that had very minimal policing. Beast hunts were a display not only of skill, but also of the power and extent of the Roman Empire, as more and more exotic animals were sought, pushing some species to extinction. Furthermore, the crowd was not a mindless bloodthirsty rabble. Since the loss of voting rights in the early Empire, the games were the principal location for political dialogue between the emperor and the people. It was an opportunity for the crowd not only to display its loyalty, but also its displeasure, including demonstrating over issues such as food shortages. For his part, an emperor was supposed to respond magnanimously to the people’s demands and to join with them in their enjoyment of the games. Toner has published extensively on Roman social and cultural history and here he vividly captures the atmosphere and spectacle of the games, while providing a thoughtful analysis of their importance in Roman culture. His account is full of colourful anecdotes and fascinating details, such as the memorable image of Dio Cassius chewing laurel leaves to stop himself from laughing in Commodus’ face, surely a suicidal move for any senator. Toner’s voice throughout is warm and engaging and his wry comments and personal observations make this book a pleasure to read. Claire Holleran APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 57

REVIEWS

The Temple of Perfection

A History of the Gym Eric Chaline Reaktion 272pp £20

KNEES UP, knees up…head the ball Nervous energy makes him tick. He’s a health fanatic ... he makes you sick

Despite his cutting stanzas, John Cooper Clarke’s 1978 poem, Health Fanatic, gave a cultural legitimacy to the 20th-century fitness craze. ‘Going to the gym’ is now a wellworn phrase with the 16 per cent of Americans who are gym members; in Britain the figure is 12 per cent. Gyms have become a familiar part of the global urban landscape. Their brightly lit and open facades expose their occupants pounding away on the rows of treadmills and stationary bikes, while listening to their iPods or watching big screens. In Britain the history of sport has largely been a product of its social and labour history roots. In more recent years there has been a shift to the cultural turn in order to explore some of the wider meanings associated with sport and physical activities. Eric Chaline¹s engaging and thought provoking history of the gymnasium is part of this growing trend. Using a chronological structure, Chaline outlines the origins and meanings of the gymnasium from ancient Greece to the 21st century. He identifies the changing philosophical shifts in the idealisation of the body through exercise and argues that the Greek ideal of masculine beauty remains the basis of western male fitness and attractiveness. This ideal has manifested in a number of ways. Since the 20th 58 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

century, for example, bodybuilding – ‘pumping iron’ – has represented the most extreme form of body culture, while the ‘fitness body’ of today has been a product of a cross-fertilisation between gay and straight men. Throughout, Chaline pays particular attention to the history of same-sex relations through the lens of the gymnasium and its changing body cultures. The gymnasium and its accompanying meanings of fitness has served a number of functions, including the shaping of personal identities, entertainment and, occasionally, the needs of the state. Arete, or reaching one’s full potential in life, was the prime objective for those male freeborn citizens of Ancient Greece who had exclusive access to gymnasiums, which were also important cultural institutions. During the Renaissance the relationship between exercise and body culture underwent a revival based around the ‘rebirth of Vitruvian Man’. However, the gym’s modern roots were firmly established in the early 19th century through Friedrich Jahn’s Turnplatz and the state’s increasing need to improve the health of the population for military and industrial

and women, although different parts of the gym continue to reflect gender stereotypes, with males mainly occupying the free weights section while women are predominant in group exercises. The Temple of Perfection is an illuminating study that provides insights into historical practices of physical culture and further evidence of the ideological impact of sport and leisure. Neil Carter

Chaline ... provides insights into historical practices of physical culture [and] further evidence of the ideological impact of sport and leisure

IN THIS engrossing book, Mark Hailwood opens the doors on one of the least understood institutions in the history of British drinking. Charting the period 1550-1700, Hailwood describes how the alehouse became one of the most important social spaces of the time and reveals a world of rich social relations, laughter, mishaps and occasional violence that thrived despite repeated bouts of government repression. Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England updates a history that, according to Hailwood, has been through two distinct phases. In the early 1980s, social historians such as Peter Clark and Keith Wrightson documented the control and regulation of alehouses, using legal records, while a more recent ‘cultural history’ phase explores alehouse life through literary sources. Hailwood judiciously combines these

production purposes. Entrepreneurs, such as Hippolyte Triat, Eugen Sandow and Jack LaLanne, also began to exploit a growing consumer demand for healthy lifestyles. However, the most successful fitness entrepreneur has been a woman. Jane Fonda’s aerobics classes and videos not only opened up a new form of exercise but also acted as a form of emancipation for women’s bodies. The gymnasium has increasingly become a shared, equal space between men

Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England Mark Hailwood

Boydell and Brewer 266pp £60

approaches, triangulating a fine study of contemporary ballads with diaries, depositions and other documents to build up a compelling picture of regulatory ambivalence, cultural significance and complex social mores. At the heart of all this is what Hailwood refers to as ‘good fellowship’: ‘a practice centred on recreational drinking in alehouses [which] was a widespread, meaningful and potent form of social bonding in early modern England’. ‘Good fellowship’ involved hard drinking but pursued merriment rather than oblivion. Indeed, there are striking parallels with the ‘controlled loss of control’ that social researchers see in today’s drinking cultures. Social drinking, then as now, was less about escapism than rituals of friendship, the loosening of social restrictions and, of course, the occasional kind of drunkenness that would be as readily regretted the next day as gleefully recounted by those who witnessed it. Hailwood shows convincingly that alehouses blurred social relations. They were not, for instance, places where women were excluded, but rather where conventional gender hierarchies were dissolved: for all the undoubted sexual harassment and violence (and marital tension), there was also much all-female sociality, mutual flirting and

Alehouses blurred social relations ... they were places where gender hierachies were dissolved mixed-gender drinking. Furthermore, for all that the state sought to repress the alehouse through bouts of restrictive legislation, those efforts were continually undermined – not least by the tendency of many officers of the law to embrace the behaviours they were meant to control. One John Lufkin, an Essex constable, appears

REVIEWS throughout this book, shirking his official duties for a series of ever more outrageous drinking escapades: from swiping the codpiece of a companion he has bested in an all-night drinking game to dropping his wife’s sex toy into a jug and proposing a toast to ‘she knew where’, much to the amusement of his wife and the whole company. The meticulous research and lively writing make this a mustread for anyone interested in the early history of drinking cultures in England. Like the good fellowship it celebrates, it is both complex and fun. It also serves an important purpose in reminding us that the lowly alehouse was ‘an ersatz public sphere’, as filled with social meaning as any high-class tavern or coffee house; and that the sociability it fostered had a value that deserves preservation. James Nicholls

The Story of Pain

From Prayer to Painkillers Joanna Bourke Oxford University Press 416pp £20

HAVE YOU ever experienced a pain that felt like a ‘toothache about six inches long in the hip’? Or one that tortured you ‘like a demand from Her Majesty’s Inspector of Taxes’? From these two descriptions of pain, expressed in 1909 and 1910 respectively, we could deduce that toothache must have been the most common and excruciating visitation of pain against which all other kinds of pain were likely compared at the time – and that tax collections anno

PHOTOGRAPHY injustices of the time. Morgan’s methodological THE EARLY YEARS of photography saw approach to examining their work illustrates the pioneering practitioners explore every facet growing pains of the then new genre of text and of photography, pushing at the boundaries of photography. The reader sees how, in response communication and perceptions of reality. to their readers and critics, Smith and Thomson Street Life in London: Context and Commentary gradually adjusted the form and content of by Emily Kathryn Morgan is the first in-depth subsequent issues to improve their circulation. examination of the ground-breaking series of It was pioneering and a positive addition to the illustrated articles, entitled Street Life in London, growing lexicon of photography’s potential uses. by the socialist journalist Adolphe Smith and The foreword by Michael Pritchard, the the photographer John Thomson, published in present Director General of the Royal Photo1876-7 by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and graphic Society, contextualises the significance Rivington of Fleet Street, London. Smith and of the establishment of street photography and Thomson innovatively combined photograprovides a valuable additional appreciation of phy and essays, as they sought to publicise the Smith’s and Thomson’s work that this volume precarious conditions of a life of poverty in the presents. capital. They captured myriad street-peddlers, Morgan’s fascinating 556-page tome is such as those selling fish, flowers and ‘fancy well researched, referencing critical primary, wares’ (inset), as well as proffering their skills secondary and theoretical sources. The structure as chimney sweeps, shoe blacks and cane chair is presented so as to introrepairers. Although not the duce the range of complex first images of their kind, historical perspectives that Smith and Thomson felt influenced the work of that their work was ‘taken Smith and Thomson. There from life’, adding greater is a broad and generous selauthenticity to the accomection of pertinent plates panying texts. interspersed throughIn the present out the writing, but not volume, Emily Kathryn necessarily adjacent to Morgan sets out to the relevant text (an issue demonstrate the genesis of Street Life in London that Smith and Thomson designing a significant new Context and Commentary also experienced). They form of fascicle publicatEmily Kathryn Morgan range from examples of ion, addressing its successearly photographs by John es and failings, examining MuseumsEtc 556pp £59 Thomson during his years the photographs and texts from historical and theoretical perspectives. Her in Asia, examples of illustration engravings from the English press, original periodical covers sharp focus then turns to biographical analysis of Smith and Thomson, providing a better under- and photographs by Emily Kathryn Morgan. The publishers have been careful to match the standing of their credentials, motivations and tonalities and colours of the original images and oeuvres, whilst framing them within the social photographs in the book, although some of the and historical context in which they responded facsimiles of the deep rich brown Woodburytype photographs from Street Life in London have lost a little of their original detail. Should the reader wish to better appreciate the full beauty and fine detail of the original images, these can be found in the recent publication of a version of the original book Street Life in London, also published by MuseumsEtc, which complements Morgan’s tome. Alternatively, visit the excellent LSE digital archive and the History Pin resource: http://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/colto their subjects. Subsequent chapters address lections/streetlifeinlondon#historypin. content, reception and impact of Street Life in The LSE /HistoryPin site links each image to London when first published. These two Victorian collaborators significant- its original location, the date taken, Smith’s and Thomson’s original accompanying texts, and has ly shaped a genre of publications linking socially a growing collection of later photographs, some conscious images and texts. Their approach was of them taken in the same locations. consciously intended to stimulate debate, to Janine Freeston educate and to heighten awareness to the social

Pioneering practitioners of photography pushed at the boundaries of communication and perceptions of reality

APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 59

REVIEWS 1910 must have been equally excruciating affairs. In her new book, Joanna Bourke takes the analysis of such pain expressions one step further, arguing that the figurative language we use does not simply describe our pain, but also impacts on the way that pain is, and was, felt throughout history. Tracing the story of pain from the 18th century to the present day, Bourke introduces us to a variety of sufferers from all walks of life who have communicated their pain in colourful metaphors that enable the historian to identify the ‘language games that people residing in the foreign kingdom of the past have played’. The changing language of pain also reveals to us major shifts in the understanding of how the body works, the fortitude of sufferers and the way that the pain of others has been – and still is – evaluated, at times with harrowing results. In the 18th century, for example, infants were believed to be exquisitely sensitive

us mad, even with the most sophisticated pharmaceutical drugs at our disposal. According to Bourke, every year around 10,000 women in the US are diagnosed with pain-induced post-traumatic stress disorder after giving birth. Chronic pain, an evil of modern society, is steadily on the rise, posing a challenge to modern medicine. Horrifically, recent studies also indicate that the under-treatment of pain has worsened in the last decades, not least because pain relief is not distributed equally in society due to ongoing prejudices based on class, gender and ethnicity. Pain affects everyone, but, as Bourke convincingly shows, ‘there is still nothing democratic about pain’. Meanwhile, neuroscience is reducing the experience of pain to an ‘altered brain state’, based on the milliseconds of brain activity made visible by the latest neuro-imaging and magnetic resonance imaging technology. Bourke’s acknowled-

Historians and general readers alike will find much of interest in Joanna Bourke’s meticulously researched, entertaining and thoughtful book to pain. From the late 19th century onwards, however, physiologists and physicians came to think otherwise. Based on the belief that a baby’s nervous system was not yet fully developed, they concluded that ‘neither consciousness nor pain nor memory were possible yet’. As a consequnce, newborns were operated upon without anaesthesia up until the 1980s. In chapters investigating pain metaphors, the influence of religion, doctor-patient relationships and the sympathy that we feel as onlookers to someone in pain, Bourke shows us how much of a difference it makes ‘whether the person-in-pain conceives of the event as having been inflicted by an infuriated deity, being due to imbalance in the ebb and flow of humours, as punishment for a lifetime of “bad habits”, or as the result of an invasion by a germ’. Pain is still literally driving 60 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

gement that ‘the body is mindful and the mind is embodied’ is a healthy antidote to reductionism in science that can never capture the experience of pain as an integrated ‘type-of-event’ that affects the whole person. Historians and general readers alike will find much of interest in this entertaining and thoughtful book, with its meticulously researched wealth of patient accounts throughout history. It turns out that, when it comes to pain, history is not such a foreign country after all. Despite the different language games, the reader can easily relate to those sufferers in the past who Bourke introduces to us. After all, as the moral philosopher Adam Smith wrote in 1759, ‘for as to be in pain excites the most excessive sorrow’ – surely a statement with which we can still identify today. Stephanie Eichberg

REVIEWS

The Sick Rose

or: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration Richard Barnett Thames & Hudson 256pp £19.95

THE PUBLISHERS call this elegantly designed collection of medical illustrations before the advent of colour photography, ‘beautifully gruesome’. It is certainly that: many of the images – such as the head of a 13-year-old boy utterly disfigured by leprosy, or grotesquely pendent tumours painted by Lam Qua in 1830s Canton – will make most readers close their eyes before yielding to horrified fascination. In addition, The Sick Rose offers a brief yet thought-provoking commentary by Richard Barnett, a historian attached to the Wellcome Trust and author of Medical London: City of Diseases, City of Cures (2008). Barnett begins with an eye-opening quote from William Hazlitt, written in 1817, around the time that Edward Jenner’s controversial method of vaccination against smallpox, discovered in the late 1790s, was catching on in Britain. ‘We have known a Jennerian professor as much enraptured with a delineation of the different stages of vaccination, as a florist with a bed of tulips, or an auctioneer with a collection of Indian shells …’ By 1853, the Compulsory Vaccination Act made vaccination obligatory for all children born in England and Wales. It aroused strong opposition, especially from those unable to afford private vaccination. ‘Jenner was derided as a money-grabber and a quack’, observes Barnett; in 1862 his statue was removed from the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in central

London to a ‘more discreet’ site in leafy Kensington Gardens. The book’s ten sections are each devoted to a disease or group of related diseases. They begin with skin diseases – one reason for those modest Victorian high collars and long skirts – followed by leprosy, smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, cancer, heart disease, venereal diseases, parasites and finally gout, that ‘fashionable agony’ of the leisured classes. Cholera provides a compelling cover image, depicting a young and lovely Viennese woman with disturbingly bluish skin and lips in 1831, during the first European cholera epidemic. Inside, the image appears beside her portrait when healthy – a standard comparative device in medical illustration. Shockingly, the sick image shows her a mere hour after contracting the disease which killed her four hours later. More familiar is the epidemiologist John Snow’s historic 1854 map of cholera incidence in London’s Soho slums, which revealed cholera transmission as waterborne. However, Snow’s discovery had little influence on the course of 19th-century medicine and public health, in which the miasma theory of airborne cholera transmission predominated, notes Barnett. He could have added that even Florence Nightingale, whose 1858 Diagram of the Causes of Mortality of British troops in the Crimean War is included, remained a strong proponent of the miasma theory. The social history illustrations, for example, James Gillray’s 1799 etching of a small black demon sinking its claws and fangs into a foot swollen by gout, or some morbidly erotic paintings warning against syphilis, are of general appeal. The more numerous images of diseased internal organs are probably more engaging for connoisseurs with specialised medical knowledge. But anyone living in 21st-century Britain will feel very grateful that they are unlikely to become personally acquainted with these diseases – apart from cancer, heart disease and, once again, gout – outside the startling pages of The Sick Rose. Andrew Robinson

The Greatest Shows on Earth A History of the Circus Linda Simon Reaktion 296pp £29

The Golden Age of Pantomime

Slapstick, Spectacle and Subversion in Victorian England Jeffrey Richards I.B. Tauris 438pp £25

FEW DEVELOPMENTS signal the sunset on a ‘Golden Age’ like the creep of nostalgia: when the combined Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus opened in New York in 1943, performers wore turn-of-the-century costumes to music from the 1890s. The circus of that earlier decade had been forward-looking, even era-defining. Exotic menageries and international performers showcased limitless diversity and potential. By 1943, the ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ was referencing its former glories. If the story of circus’ Golden Age is one of rapid invention, beginning with 18th century hippodramas and reaching its zenith around and just after the turn of the 20th century, then pantomime’s equivalent was the result of continuous innovation seen by many Victorian critics as a process of vulgarisation. Circus was born spectacular; pantomime became it. Yet, while they occupy different stages – the latter requires faux magic, while the former’s spectacular feats are, as one performer noted, ‘really just physics’ – both enjoyed a 19th-century heyday. What each form offered – and

the shape into which they were moulded by their propagators – captured the late-Victorian zeitgeist. As a gauge of societal wonts and wants, popular entertainment, enjoyed without pretension, does not lie; a manifestation, in Freudian terms, of society’s id. Two new studies by Linda Simon and Jeffrey Richards cover the development of ‘entertainment’ at arguably the first time the term could be prefixed by the word ‘mass’. In The Greatest Shows on Earth, Simon describes how the circus satisfied the duality of the Victorian psyche: its hidden desires and ostentatious standards. Indeed, the teetotal Phineas Taylor Barnum considered his circus ‘a force for good’. The freak show’s popularity suggests the era’s interest in science (stoked by Darwinism) and its morbid corporeal obsessions. Impossible acrobatic feats held audiences rapt, both as showcases of human triumph and as a potential arena for satisfying latent bloodlust. Circus embraced the railway and was coming to – and shortly departing from – a ‘town near you’ soon (offering a literal form of escapism). But what Simon’s study makes clear is that its visit was as much an invasion of paper as of performers. The book is illustrated with colourful promotional material that wallpapered the destinations on a circus’ itinerary. Not everyone could attend the circus, but all felt its presence. Those who did see it, says Simon, often ‘saw what [promotional posters] told them to see’. Circus’ popularity was based on grand feats and a APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 61

REVIEWS ‘mighty, overwhelming, colossal’ image, as promoters increasingly ‘put their efforts into spectacle’. ‘It’s going to take a regular apocalypse to make us raise our eyebrows again’, noted a character in a circus-themed story by the poet George Garrett. Proffering era-defining slogans is a Victorian characteristic: the Age of ‘Societies’, ‘Cant’ and ‘Equipoise’ are suggested by various critics quoted in The Golden Age of Pantomime. Based on Simon’s and Richards’ books, we might propose another, coined decades later (with different intent) by the Marxist writer Guy Debord: ‘the Society of the Spectacle’. Richards identifies the Victorians as ‘literalists’, obsessed by ‘the act of seeing’, with a ‘thirst for the visual’, claims borne out in his masterful account of pantomime’s renaissance. The ascendancy could begin after the 1843 Theatres Act ended patent theatres’ monopoly on drama, prompting the decline of Harlequinade, which embodied cruel and outdated Regency values. The hero (or, indeed, villain) in the ensuing ‘battle for pantomime’s soul’ was, from the 1880s onwards, Drury Lane manager Augustus Harris Jr., under whose ambitious guidance panto became ‘a hotchpotch of muddled themes’, with lavish scenery, visual effects and topical allusions. One measure of Harris’ success is that today we would expect nothing less: panto has followed the beaten track ever since. The ‘battle’ was recorded in newspaper reviews (where ‘spectacle’ was often a pejorative) but won at the box office, presenting an awkward truth that rising education standards coincided with drama’s perceived decline. ‘Spectacle’, admitted the stage painter William Beverley, was ‘what people wanted’. One detractor of panto’s egalitarian shift distinguished between ‘competent’ and ‘incompetent’ audiences, the latter referring to those upon whom highbrow allusions were wasted. ‘No theatrical form can survive long if it attracts 62 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

a predominantly incompetent audience’, was the misguided forecast. Given pantomime’s endurance an accurate reappraisal would accept that no form can achieve the popularity required to flourish if it draws a distinction between the two, but the barbed condemnation does offer another self-defining name for the era in which mass entertainment embraced pure spectacle: ‘the Age of Incompetents’. Rhys Griffiths

The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

The Complete First Edition Translated and Edited by Jack Zipes. Illustrated by Andrea Dezsö. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Princeton University Press 568pp £24.95

THE BROTHERS GRIMM began collecting their tales at the start of the 19th century, taking them from existing books and manuscripts, transcribed them from living storytellers in Hesse and Westphalia and correspondents who sent tales from all over Germany. Since then, the tales have evolved in unexpected ways. The stories we know today, as Jack Zipes points out, are mostly retellings, as often musical, theatrical or filmic as literary. Zipes insists that it was the Grimms who began this process of repeated revision in successive editions of their work. Most tales were amended, some drastically, others deleted. Footnotes were removed, illustrations added. Their final edition of 1857 was very different from what they had ushered into the world nearly 50 years

earlier. Its target audience had also changed: not philologists and folklorists, but middle-class families and, increasingly, children. What Zipes has produced here is a new translation of the first edition’s 156 tales. His aim is ‘to grasp the original intentions of the Grimms’; to show tales that are ‘more fabulous and baffling than those refined versions in the final edition’; tales that ‘retain the pungent and naïve flavour of the oral tradition’. Pungent and baffling the tales certainly are and morally ambiguous, occasionally antisemitic, often very violent and almost always disturbing. Children murder each other in their games, or once dead, they refuse to lie quietly buried, but push up an arm through the earth until their mother smacks it down. What is surprising, given Zipes’ thesis about the gradual sanitisation of the stories, is how much of the unsettling and frankly unpleasant material was retained. They may have decided that it was not quite proper for the Prince to get Rapunzel pregnant, a detail that was quickly excised. But most of the gruesome, antisemitic and potentially upsetting tales remained. Zipes leaves us wondering why they chose to cut, alter and augment. Perhaps they were simply seeking to make their work more marketable, hoping for the success with young readers that the Taylor and Cruikshank English translation (1823-6) had achieved. What seems more likely is that their conviction of the importance of capturing ‘true’ folk culture gradually diminished. Whereas in 1812 and 1815 they had sought to collect ‘Germanic tales’ as ‘a gesture of protest against French occupation and a gesture of solidarity with those people who wanted to forge a unified German nation’, after Waterloo the need to assert the pure origins of the tales seemed less pressing. The Grimms gradually saw themselves more as authors than antiquaries, owners of the tales rather than mere collectors. In short, they made their tales their own, just as generations of writers and readers, illustrators and filmmakers, have continued to do happily ever after. Matthew Grenby

The Spy With 29 Names The Story of the Second World War’s Most Audacious Double Agent Jason Webster Chatto & Windus /Vintage 336pp £8.99

‘IN WARTIME’, Churchill remarked to Stalin during the Tehran conference of November 1943, ‘truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’ This is a story about stories – about lies and deceptions, the precious truths behind them and the most effective double agent of the Second World War. Juan Pujol Garcia, better known as agent Garbo, makes his first appearance through a fog of German traffic deciphered at Bletchley Park. ‘What’s going on?’ MI5 wondered as they intercepted messages from an apparent German spy informing his masters about the movement of non-existent British convoys. Skillfully unpicking Pujol’s story,

Agent Garbo makes his first appearance through a fog of German traffic deciphered at Bletchley Park Jason Webster follows MI5’s transition from incredulity to delight, as they first realise and then fully exploit the potential of this self-created double agent, who offered his services to the British when already embedded in the German system. Things progress from passing on cipher

REVIEWS tables and providing an insight into German strategic priorities, to preparations for the biggest deception of them all – fooling Hitler over the D-Day landings. This familiar story has never been spun in quite this way. Webster makes much of Pujol’s guile stemming from the Spanish literary tradition of the picaro, the lovable, imaginative rogue, ‘who deftly weaves his way through the world, smart, wily and slippery like mercury’. The real value of creative storytelling is deeply woven into the fabric of this book. Pujol’s first cover story was that he was a writer; he went on to create a network of fictitious spies, whose fabulous code-names, added to his own, comprise the 29 of the title. By the end of the war, the distinction between storytellers and characters has blurred. Several real people play the parts of invented agents, or even play themselves having been unwittingly co-opted into deceptions. Meanwhile Pujol and his British handler are forced to live their fictions so deeply that, at times, the fantasy spills over into life. This is the point: to change the world by telling tales. Appropriately for a book about the blurring of facts and fictions, this true story powers along like a novel. It has a compelling narrative and an almost filmic quality to its key scenes, as befits an author better known as a crime novelist. In his VE Day scene, Webster considers another fiction. ‘If we were to remove Pujol and his handler from the picture, from history altogether’, he muses, ‘the scene would collapse’. Rather than jarring, this stray into ‘what if’ seems fitting. Ultimately we don’t know whether Pujol completely fooled his German spymaster; having a Jewish grandmother, it was in his interests to maintain the value of his ‘espionage network’. However, we do know that he fooled Hitler with profound consequences for Europe. This telling of the story is well worth reading. Clare Mulley

EXHIBITION

Churchill’s Scientists

Science Museum, London SW7 The exhibition is free and is open until March 2016 ‘MORE THAN any other country in the world, Britain must depend for survival on skilled minds.’ So said Winston Churchill when he opened Churchill College, Cambridge in October 1959. It summed up his life-long belief that, if Britain could gain any advantage over an adversary by drawing upon the ideas of its scientists and inventors, then they should be encouraged. To mark the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s death, the Science Museum has put together a fascinating exhibition to illustrate the support he gave to a range of scientists during the Second World War. That war generated an immense number of scientific leaps and technological advances. New inventions ranged from jet engines to atom bombs, from flying wings to floating tanks and from miniature radios to ballistic missiles. Churchill immersed himself in the work of the nation’s engineers and physicists and a new word appeared, ‘boffin’, to describe the scientists who worked away on machines, the purpose of which most people did not even begin to understand. But Churchill knew that among them were probably the ideas that would help win the war and he wanted them realised as soon as possible. The exhibition begins with the development of radar and the giant receiver (4 feet high and 6 feet wide, pictured) used by Robert Watson-Watt in the famous Daventry experiment in which he invented British radar in February 1935. Even a valve used in the Chain Home radar system in 1940 is 15 inches tall and 3 inches in diameter. Yet only three years later there is an H2S radar receiver small enough to be carried in an aircraft and accurate enough to pick up a signal from the conning tower of a U-boat. These three exhibits

speak louder than words on the pace of scientific change in the Second World War. There is a spread on Operational Research, the process of mathematical analysis pioneered by Professor Patrick Blackett, that was applied to many military questions. Also a section on food and nutrition and on the new drugs of war, the antibiotics that helped to save, among millions of others, Churchill himself when he caught pneumonia in Tunis in December 1943. It was feared he might not survive but treatment with a new antibiotic called M&B brought recovery. There is a section on ‘Tube Alloys’ with a suitcase of fine mesh screens for uranium enrichment and a set of Churchill’s galley proofs from a chapter on science, which he called ‘The Wizard War’ in his six-volume history. Churchill dictated great chunks of these books and saw the galleys almost as a first draft. Screeds of handwritten re-writes cover the proofs (publishers beware of the Churchill method). The cast of characters featured is extensive and it is good they are not all backroom boys, but there are a few girls, too, like Elsie Widdowson, who demonstrated that the body could exist on a diet of far fewer calories than was supposed; and Dorothy Hodgkin, who unravelled the structure of penicillin. The last section explores how many of the wartime advances were taken forward in the postwar era. A few boxes of wartime surplus radar kit helped create radio astronomy and Bernard Lovell’s magnificent 250-foot radio telescope at Jodrell Bank. A Gee navigating device turned into a machine to measure the electrical currents in the brain. But the mushroom cloud dominates here, with William Penny building the British atom bomb without any help from the Americans. Of course, not everything can be included in a small exhibition. I would have liked something on the encouragement Churchill gave to scientists in the Great War at the Admiralty and, although Frederic Lindemann is there as Churchill’s scientific adviser, he gets off lightly with only a passing reference to his sinister misuse of statistics to prove that the bombing of Germany would disable the Nazi war machine by killing all the workers. Also, the captions are minimal and would benefit from far more background. But lead-curator Andrew Nahum’s exhibition opens up a little-known aspect of Churchill’s wartime achievement. It is a tremendous subject and a fine tribute to Britain’s leader. Taylor Downing

Opens up a littleknown aspect of Churchill’s wartime achievement. It is a tremendous subject and a fine tribute

APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 63

REVIEWS

The Italians John Hooper

Allen Lane   336pp £20

‘WHO KNOWS? Perhaps the true truth will never be known’, an Italian in a deckchair says to a girl on the beach who has asked him, ‘What is the time?’. This cartoon from an Italian newspaper is quoted by John Hooper as an example of the multiple realities, differing versions and competing narratives that afflict all those who seek to discover what is really going on among contemporary Italians. Likewise, an Italian football referee is cited as having been hounded and attacked – ‘because he gave a verdict’. If there are so many versions of the truth, how can one decision be correct and the others false? Mussolini, also, is given his say: ‘It is not difficult to rule Italians, merely pointless.’ The author’s way through this labyrinth of subjectivity and relativism is not to attempt a chronological or analytical history, but rather present a thematic, discursive personal view – John Hooper’s Italians, if you will. He does devote one chapter to geography, pointing to the Alps and the long sea coast as isolating elements and the mountainous terrain as a separator of people; the river valleys naturally places of close settlement. He also devotes a chapter to early Italian history, putting focus on the Sack of Rome in 1527, which he considers to be of great importance as the origin of many of the country’s woes, though how this affected, say, Sicily and Calabria, or 64 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

the Veneto and Savoy, was not clear. Hooper has been a Romebased journalist since 1994, largely in the Berlusconi era; his is a fluent, often persuasive account based largely on personal experience, buttressed with many statistics from government and NGO sources and the results of opinion polls. However, there are relatively few Italian voices. The author has conducted interviews – he mentions one with a police chief in Catania – but this book is his own authorial narrative and the few Italians quoted are usually anonymous barmen or unnamed fellow journalists. Italians are not easy to get information from, the author claims, let alone accompanied by names and places of residence. He gives an example: his London editor rings up asking for the price of a Big Mac hamburger. Neither Hooper nor his assistant know, nor does a phone call to McDonalds help: ‘If the information is for a British newspaper I can say nothing’, is the unhelpful reply. Hooper concludes that Italians are cagey, even with freely accessible information. It did strike me that perhaps the guy at McDonalds thought the question was a wind-up – I would have done, frankly. Familiar themes in Italian life are examined: crime, corruption and politics; the mafia, the Church, Freemasonry and conspiracy theories; the strong family, sexism, feminism and the role of women; dominant mothers and clinging sons, comfort food, traditionalism, technophobia, soccer madness and celebrity footballers, fashion conformism and more. The world of work is not much dwelt upon: industry, science, technology and agriculture are largely absent. The regions get thumbnail paragraphs only, written largely from a metropolitan viewpoint. Occasionally, the author moralises: on the phenomenon of stay-at-home adult children who do not move elsewhere to

find work, he comments: ‘this undermines Italy’s economic competitiveness and robs young Italians of a sense of responsibility for their own lives.’ Perhaps Italian families are just happier together, compared with their miserabilist northern equivalents? ‘Behave, or I’ll give you to an English family!’ was an effective threat that I often heard said to a squalling child when I lived in Provence. On the other hand, Hooper does admit that the cohesive family is probably the reason for the absence of criminal youth gangs and a grunge culture. In my view, this study has an under-edited feel. Such cliches as ‘mind-spinning legacy, momentous interaction, dazzlingly eclectic culture, dizzyingly complex diplomacy, foreign yokes, benighted village, and a slew of polls’ – all of which occur over just a few pages – could have been eliminated in an early draft to good effect. Robert Carver

Italian Venice A History R.J.B. Bosworth

Yale University Press 352pp £25

THE HISTORY of post-Risorgimento, post-Unification Italy has been much discussed, but relatively rarely has the history of the states that once made up a disunited country been explored. This Bosworth seeks to address in the case of a city state which regarded itself as sovereign and independent up to its surrender to Napoleon in 1797. After a long period of

Austro-Hungarian rule, Venice was ceded to the newly formed Kingdom of Italy in 1866. Bosworth takes up the challenge that Venice had no history after 1866, an impression encouraged by those who sought (seek) to keep the city as it was, or even to separate it from the Italian state. A negative impression is also encouraged by those who see Venice as a dying city due to disease (up until the 20th century), depopulation, environmental and climate change, tourist invasion, the loss and abuse of political power. It is clear that Bosworth has not been parachuted into his subject with a publisher’s advance and an archive of cliches. The history of Venice presented here operates on a wide range of levels. The city was obviously involved in the wider Italian experience: two world wars, the first placing Venice on the front line, then the rise, ambitions and failures of Fascism; industrialisation, largely on the mainland; the conflicts between Left and Right; terrorism; political atrophy. But there are other Venetian histories: coping with poverty, poor housing and hygiene; the issues of flooding and conservation; cultural initiatives in terms of the festivals of the arts and film and the growth of its universities. An innovative element introduced is the role of the Church, at least at the patriarchal level. The traditional ‘Myth of Venice’ suggests that the State held the institutional Church at arm’s length, but Bosworth argues that Venetian patriarchs and popes could aspire to be highly interventionist in political, social and cultural terms. Venice introduced the ‘ghetto’ and the plight under later Fascism of what had been one of the largest, settled Jewish communities in Europe is discussed. Bosworth has explored journals, newspapers and the records of some of Venice’s learned societies, but perhaps too few Venetian archival sources. He also has a good sense of place and makes effective use of buildings, monuments and districts to illustrate change. The Island of San Servolo, for example, was once the home of monastic communities, then hospital and asylum; now the island has

REVIEWS become an international education and conference centre. An index would have been useful and there are sections when the reader feels that he has opened an Italian newspaper to be confronted with the usual incomprehensible plethora of political groupings, initiatives, compromises, ‘new dawns’, corruption scandals and a blizzard of acronyms. In general, though, Bosworth’s treatment of Venice and its history is evocative and revealing and what he says about the ‘glitterati’ and ‘literati’, such as, Cole Porter, Noel Coward, et al, deserves to be enjoyed out loud. More could have been made of films about Venice; where was Katherine Hepburn’s ill-advised leap into the canal at the Campo San Barnaba? John Easton Law

The Age of Asa

Lord Briggs, Public Life and History in Britain Since 1945 Edited by Miles Taylor Palgrave Macmillan 311pp £60

ASA BRIGGS says he likes to think in threes. In the three years following his 90th birthday, the author of Victorian People, Victorian Cities and Victorian Things published three books of memoirs: one on his time at Bletchley, another on people and places (which includes at one point some musings on his own three-letter first name) and a third which concludes with a chapter entitled Pasts, Present, Futures. Appropriately enough, The Age of Asa, a volume containing a dozen freshly commissioned essays about

Briggs and his work, is divided (like Gaul) into three parts. The first and longest focuses on Briggs the social historian and leading figure in the revival of interest in Victorian times. The middle section covers Briggs’ contribution to the history of broadcasting and the media, while the final essays chronicle what the editor Miles Taylor – himself a distinguished Victorianist – nicely encapsulates as Briggs’ ‘career as a university impresario’. This is no academic Festschrift; rather, a celebration of the sheer range and energy of Briggs’ work over a long and fruitful lifetime. The man who emerges from these pages is a genial, open-minded figure from provincial West Yorkshire blessed with a personality summed up by Rohan McWilliam as that of ‘a scholarship boy who never really failed at anything’.   Social history was not new with Briggs. But while learning from his predecessors, Briggs proved open to ideas from all sides, ‘a bridge between Marxists and non-Marxists’, says John McIlroy, who went on to write about the history of business and labour, health, education, transport and urban development, food and drink, the arts and sciences, broadcasting, publishing and the thousand and one trinkets of everyday life.  Inevitably, perhaps, his writings have occasionally been criticised for privileging information over argument or ‘interpretation’. As Martin Hewitt points out, there is no ‘Briggs school’ of historians. Briggs was always more concerned with bridging divisions and solving problems than in highlighting them. This became abundantly clear at the University of Sussex, where Briggs (leaving a chair at Leeds) was one of the founding fathers and later vice-chancellor. The aim at Sussex was to ‘re-draw the map of learning’, notably by the replacement of traditional academic departments with cross-disciplinary Schools of Study. As a young Sussex lecturer from 1963, I

remember finding this approach both challenging and exhilarating, with Briggs himself always easy to talk to – provided you could catch him as he dashed from his office to a lecture or meeting, a taxi, railway station or airport. Briggs left Sussex in 1976, the year of his peerage, to become Provost of his old Oxford college (Worcester), while continuing to undertake a bewildering variety of good works: the Commission on Nursing, the Workers’ Educational Association, Open University and University Grants Committee, the Labour and Social History Societies, the Commonwealth of Learning and Glyndebourne Trust, the Brontë, Ephemera and Victorian Soci-

The Age of Asa ... is no academic Festschrift; rather, a celebration of the sheer range and energy of Briggs’ work over a long and fruitful lifetime eties and the editorial board of journals and magazines (including History Today). Briggs was associated with them all and chaired many while managing to remain a prodigiously active historian. His five-volume history of broadcasting in Britain led to further innovative work on the history of communications more generally.    The Age of Asa does not pretend to give comprehensive coverage to all that Briggs has done. No single volume could do so. Rather, it is a carefully researched and affectionate (but not uncritical) portrait of Briggs’ principal public achievements by an assemblage of authors, all of whom have themselves benefited from his example.    Daniel Snowman

CONTRIBUTORS Neil Carter is the author of Medicine, Sport and the Body: A Historical Perspective (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). Robert Carver is the author of The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania (Flamingo, 2009). Robert Colls is Professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University, Leicester. Taylor Downing is author of Secret Warriors: Key Scientists in the Great War and Churchill’s War Lab: Code Breakers and Boffins in WW2 (both Little, Brown, 2014, 2011). Stephanie Eichberg is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. Janine Freeston is contributing writer to the Royal Photographic Society’s RPS Journal and PhotoHistorian. Matthew Grenby is the author of The Child Reader 1800-1840 (Cambridge, 2011). Rhys Griffiths is Editorial Assistant at History Today. Claire Holleran is the author of Shopping in Ancient Rome: the Retail Trade in the Late Republic and the Principate (Oxford, 2012). John Easton Law is Reader in History and Classics at Swansea University. Clare Mulley’s reflections on British women’s lives from 1945-1979 will be published by William Collins in 2016. James Nicholls is Research Manager at Alcohol Research UK and and Senior Lecturer at the Centre for History in Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Andrew Robinson is the author of The Last Man Who Knew Everything (Oneworld, 2006). Daniel Snowman is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research (London).

APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 65

HAVE YOUR SAY

Letters Percentage Points Daniel Tilles’ spirited account of Oswald Mosley’s fascist antisemitism (‘Mosley: antisemite’, February, 2015) raises a number of interesting questions and opens up issues that, in all probability, Tilles did not have space to address. Given that he referred to my work on violence and the British Union of Fascists (BUF), might I be permitted to add a little more detail on that question? Tilles rightly notes that I argued that only a minority of those arrested at BUF meetings were Jews, especially in 1934-5. He goes on to say that the BUF’s recognition of this fact was also evidence of the fascists’ ‘mendacity’, as the figures they gave of Jewish arrests as a percentage of anti-fascist arrests fell from a claimed 80 per cent to 50 per cent and then, by 1936, to ‘just 20 per cent’, which latter percentage Tilles thinks was correct. The Home Office figures show that over the period from January 1934 until September 1938, half of all those anti-fascists arrested at BUF meetings (those that were collated by the Home Office) were from clearly identifiable anti-fascist groups and a quarter of the entire non-fascist arrests were of Jews, half of whom were also communists. In fact, of the communists arrested, 43 per cent were also Jews. These figures are certainly an underestimate of the role of communists, Jews and Jewish communists and it is likely that more than 25 per cent of antifascist arrests were of Jews. The central role of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the violence that marked much of the BUF’s campaigns is something that Tilles does not mention. The antisemitism of the BUF was a gift to the CPGB and one that it accepted with open arms. In East London, 66 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

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in particular, the CPGB greatly exploited Jewish fears of the BUF to boost its own strength and standing. As a result, in some localised areas, such as Stepney and Bethnal Green, the fascistcommunist struggle took on a distinctly ethnic cast. Richard Thurlow, who receives rather poor treatment in Tilles’ article, characterised this as an ‘interactionist’ dynamic underlying political violence in these areas. What is interesting is that, where Jewish community leaders were successful in damping down the urge of some young Jews to attack the BUF (an example being in Cardiff in 1936), the BUF did not, as a result, thrive. In reality, there were, as the essays in Varieties of Anti-Fascism (2010) have shown, other ways to oppose fascism than those favoured by the communists. It is also important to note that Tilles’ arguments have previously been well-rehearsed by Stephen Dorril in his widely noticed biography of Mosley, Black Shirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (2006). It is not the case, as Tilles implies, that he is the first to trace Mosley’s antisemitism to the founding of the BUF. For myself, it would be interesting to know just how antisemitic Mosley was prior to October 1932. Matthew Worley’s Oswald Mosley and the New Party (2010) gives no clues and there is nothing currently available that throws light on Mosley’s time as a significant figure in the Independent Labour Party, or as a member of the Labour government. Stephen Cullen University of Warwick

Backyards and Biff Boys Daniel Tilles’ article retelling what we have already been told about Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists adds

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little that is new to the subject. I was disappointed that he felt unable to break new ground, perhaps enquiring as to why a surprising number of Mosley’s fascist officials were themselves Jewish. These included the ex-Labour MP John Beckett, the BUF’s Director of Publications, and Bill Leaper, the editor of The Blackshirt, to name just two well-known examples. This is paradoxical with regard to Professor Tilles’ article and requires some explaining. I also do not understand the author’s preoccupation with antisemitism relating to a comparatively small British political group when surely there are much bigger fish to fry, such as the history of antisemitism in Poland, for example. As Assistant Professor of History at the University of Cracow he will be aware that antisemitism was pandemic among all classes and political groupings in Poland before the Second World War: surely a study of what caused this unsatisfactory state of affairs would be far more enlightening? For example, is it true that when Germany invaded Poland in 1939 the Polish Government was in session discussing the expulsion of Polish Jews to Madagascar? Also, is it correct that most of the notorious Nazi death camps were located in Poland because the German authorities believed there would be less local opposition than in other Nazi-occupied countries? I have heard these things said but have seen no evidence of proof of such assertions: perhaps Professor Tilles could study the problem that existed in his own backyard next time rather than offer another rehash of Mosley and his ‘Biff Boys’.

Notes on Noted The primary meaning of the verb ‘to note’ is, according to the Shorter OED: ‘to mark carefully; to give heed or attention to; to notice, perceive’. The clear implication is that one ‘notes’ facts that are certainly true, rather than opinions. However, there seems an increasing tendency for historians to use the word as an ‘elegant variation’ (Fowler was being ironical) on ‘suggest’ or ‘assert’, i.e., as an expression of opinion. In December’s History Today Suzannah Lipscomb writes: ‘a crop of Tudor historians have noted that ...’, a usage that muddles her argument considerably (in the article appropriately entitled ‘The Error of Our Ways’) and Archie Brown does the same thing on the Letters page. I note that this usage is misleading and even sometimes deliberately so.

George Beckham via email

Daniel Bamford University of St Andrews

Owen Toller St Paul’s School, London

Further Reading Conor Meleady’s article about the Hashemite Sharif Husayn of Mecca’s bid to establish a new Caliphate made a refreshing change from the usual ‘Arab Nationalist’ or ‘Pan-Arabist’ interpretation of the 1916 revolt (‘New Caliphate, Old Caliphate’, January 2015). My only disappointment was to find no recommended further reading at the end of the article. As the centenary year fast approaches, I trust that History Today will subject Husayn’s revolt to genuine reappraisal. I also think the Saudi-Hashemite wars of 1919 and 1924-5 deserve to be more widely known and discussed. In the meantime, I would encourage other interested readers to study the iconoclastic works of Elie Kedourie and, more recently, Efraim Karsh.

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APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 67

Reassuringly intelligent. Comfortingly rational.

Coming Next Month The Dönitz Regime

For three weeks following Hitler’s suicide in April 1945 the Third Reich was led from the northern town of Flensburg by the German navy chief Karl Dönitz (centre) and a temporary government. Churchill saw the Dönitz regime as a useful handle with which to control the defeated country, but to Stalin the West’s recognition of the new government looked suspiciously like collusion. Richard Overy explains how a ‘bizarre footnote’ at the war’s end fostered a mutual hostility that developed into the Cold War.

A Woman’s College During the Great War

The First World War turned Oxford into a ‘city of ghosts’, with nearly 3,000 of the 15,000 men listed on the university’s Roll of Service dying during the conflict. Yet, as Frank Prochaska describes, the war presented an opening for Oxford’s female students. When the all-women Somerville College was requisitioned as a military hospital – hosting both Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves – its students were relocated to the prestigious Oriel College, ushering in ‘a wonderful period of progress’ for the status of women in higher education.

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Re-evaluating the Crusades

Since the 1980s the series of Crusades that took place during the Middle Ages have been subject to increased scholarly attention and revision, significantly developing our understanding of the campaigns’ scope and chronology. With reference to the History Today archive, Jonathan Phillips explains how Pope Urban II promoted the first Crusade in 1095 and traces the history of relations between Muslims and Christians in the Middle East into the 16th century.

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

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

PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The winner for February is M. Pitt, Hemel Hempstead.

EDITOR’S LETTER: 2 © Vatican Museums and Galleries/Bridgeman Images. HISTORY MATTERS: 3 © The Royal Society; 5 © Getty Images; 6 © Manya Igel Fine Arts/Bridgeman Images; 7 © John Gibney. MONTHS PAST: 8 © NASA; 9 top © Hulton Archive/Getty Images; bottom © Orlando/Getty Images. WAR AMONG THE RUINS: 11 © Popperfoto/Getty Images; 12 © Popperfoto/Getty Images; 13 top © Getty Images; bottom © Christian Cuny/Getty Images; 14 top © Kamal Khan/Press Association Images; middle HT Archive; bottom © Press Association Images; 15 HT Archive; 16 © Press Association Images; 17 top HT Archive; bottom © Zoran Bozicevic/Press Association Images; 18 top © AFP/Getty Images; bottom © National Portrait Gallery, London. MONET IN ALGERIA: 19 top © Musée Marmottan Monet/Bridgeman Images; bottom © Alamy; 20 and 21 top © National Gallery of Art, Washington DC/ Bridgeman Images; bottom left © Alamy; middle photograph by Étienne carjat; right © Bridgeman Images; 22 top Lefevre Fine Art/Bridgeman Images; bottom © Alamy; 23 © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images; 24 top left © Bridgeman Images; top right © National Museum Wales/Bridgeman Images. THE LIVING GODDESS: 26 and 27 © Narendra Shrestha/EPA/Corbis Images; 28 top and bottom © Isabella Tree; 29 © Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters/Corbis Images; 30 © Charles Sturge/Alamy; 31 top © Bridgeman Images; bottom © Narendra Shrestha/EPA/Alamy; 32 © Narendra Shrestha; INFOCUS: 34 and 35 © Getty Images. A SECRET HISTORY OF AFRICAN DECOLONISATION: 36 © Alamy; 37 © Reg Lancaster/Getty Images; 38 © Express/Getty Images; 39 top © Patrick Nairne/Alamy; bottom © Popperfoto/Getty Images; 40 top © Press Association Images; bottom © John Downing/Getty Images; 41 © Marion Kaplan/Alamy; 42 top © Jim Tampin/Alamy; bottom © Horst Faas/Press Association Images; 43 © Eddie Adams/Press Association Images. FROM DEMONS TO DOCTORS: 44 © Bridgeman Images; 45 © Alamy. SHEDDING LIGHT ON DARK HISTORY: 46 © Mar Photographics/Alamy. BISHOP KEN AND THE NON-JURORS: 47 © The Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford/Bridgeman Images; 48 top © National Portrait Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images; bottom © Manor Photography/Alamy; 49 © Thomas Agnew’s/Bridgeman Images; 50 top © Bridgeman Images; bottom © Philip Mould Ltd./Bridgeman Images; 51 © Peter Jackson Collection/Bridgeman Images; 52 top © Arthur Ackermann Ltd./Bridgeman Images; bottom © British Library Board/Bridgeman Images. THE STAMP OF SUCCESS: 53 © The British Postal Museum and Archive; 54 © Miller/Getty Images. REVIEWS: 56 © Topical Press Agency/Getty Images; 59 courtesy LSE Digital Library; 63 © Science Museum, London. COMING NEXT MONTH 69 © Sovfoto/Getty Images. PASTIMES: 70 top Caenarfon by William Turner, Wikimedia/Creative Commons; middle Charlotte Gilman, courtesy Library of Congress; bottom Budapest Nyugati Station, Wikimedia/Creative Commons. SIX DEGREES: 71 © Time Life Pictures/Getty Images. We have made every effort to contact all copyright holders but if in any case we have been unsuccessful, please get in touch with us directly.

APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 69

Pastimes Amusement & Enlightenment

The Quiz 1 Founded in the sixth century bc, the Black Sea settlement of Olbia was a colony of which archaic Greek city and member of the Ionian League?

22 In which year was Persepolis declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site? 23 In which year was London Zoo founded and in which was it first opened to the public?

2 What did Michael Ventris and John Chadwick finish deciphering in the early 1950s?

24 Which two monarchs agreed the Peace of Crespy in 1544?

5 Which much-reviled ancient Greek tyrant employed an infamous torture device known as the Brazen Bull?

8 Who was Charles Baudelaire’s ‘painter of modern life’? 9 Which fascist organisation did José Antonio Primo de Rivera found in 1933? 10 Who led the royalist cavalry at the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644? 11 The disease ‘Roman Fever’ was so-called due to its prevalence in Rome and the campagna during the classical period. By what name is it better known? 12 In which year and in which city did Sir William Ramsay and Morris W. Travers first discover neon? 13 Who did Albert I of Habsburg defeat at the Battle of Göllheim in 1298?

6 Which author and feminist activist imagined the all-female utopia Herland in 1915?

14 Which two powers signed the Pact of Steel on 28th May, 1939?

7 Who was Catherine Parr’s first husband?

15 Who was the ‘weeping philosopher’?

70 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

16 Who was the first Russian monarch to assume the title of ‘Tsar’? 17 The Leopold Museum in Vienna is known for having the world’s largest collection of works by which fin-de-siècle artist? 18 Where was the Communist Party of Finland founded in 1918? 19 Who was the last Aztec ruler? 20 Which US state did eccentric lobbyist George M. Willing reportedly name with a ‘made-up’ word in the early 1860s? 21 Which French architect designed the Budapest-Nyugati Railway Terminal in 1875?

ANSWERS

4 From where is Sir Lancelot said to have sailed after his banishment from King Arthur’s court?

25 For how much did Alexander II sell Tsarist Russian interests in Alaska to the US in 1867?

1. Miletus. 2. Linear B. 3. Edward I, begun in 1283. 4. Cardiff. 5. Phalaris, tyrant of Akragas. 6. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). 7. Edward Burgh (c.1463–c.1533). 8. Constantin Guys (1802-92). 9. Falange Española de las JONS. 10. Prince Rupert of the Rhine (1619–82). 11. Malaria. 12. 1898, London. 13. King Adolf of Nassau (c.1255–98). 14. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. 15. Heraclitus (c.535–c.475 bc). 16. Ivan IV, the Terrible (1530–84). 17. Egon Schiele (1890–1918). 18. Moscow. 19. Cuauhtémoc (c.1495–c.1525). 20. Idaho. 21. Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923). 22. 1979. 23. 1828, 1847. 24. Francis I of France and Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. 25. $7 million.

3 Which king built Caernarfon Castle?

Prize Crossword

Set by Richard Smyth DOWN 1 Abbot of Cieaux, known as ‘the Great’ (d.1167) (7) 2 10th-century king of England, called ‘Pacificus’ (5) 3 In Greek myth, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra (7) 5 A symbolic object, such as a heraldic device (6) 6 1743 battle, the last in which a British monarch took command (9) 7 ___ II, King of Belgium 18651909 (7) 8 François-Auguste-René, vicomte de ___ (1768-1848), French diplomat and author (13) 14 Baronetcy created in 1621, the subject of a famous legal dispute of the 1860s and 1870s (9) 16 Ruling dynasty of Iran from 1925 to 1979 (7) 18 City of southern Spain, under Muslim rule from 711 to 1236 (7) 19 ___ Hall, historically the executive committee of the Democratic Party in New York City (7) 20 Black Sea peninsula, annexed in 1783 by Catherine the Great (6) 23 John ___ (1874-1932), executioner; hangman of Dr Crippen and Roger Casement (5)

ACROSS 1/4 Austrian botanist and Augustinian prelate (1822-84) (6,6) 9 ‘Shoot, if you must, this old grey head, but spare your country’s ___’ – John Greenleaf Whittier, 1863 (4) 10 The Great ___, 1851 showcase of art and industry (10) 11 William Randolph ___ (18631951), US newspaper magnate (6) 12 ‘___ At Windsor’, 1892 Kipling poem on Queen Victoria (3,5) 13 The New ___, left-leaning political journal launched in 1913 (9) 15 Archaic oath, derived from ‘A God!’ (4) 16 Gregory ___ (1916-2003), imposing US film actor (4) 17 ‘___ is not a term capable of exact legal definition ... it means “anything that shocks the magistrate’’ ‘– Bertrand Russell, 1928 (9) 21 Lorenzo ___ (1378-1455), Pelago-born sculptor (8) 22 French city, notable for the 13th-century cathedral of Notre-Dame (6) 24 Californian city, western terminus of the Pony Express (10) 25 Sir David ___ (1908-91), Croydon-born film director (4) 26 The ___ Cometh, Eugene O’Neill play first performed in 1946 (6) 27 Karl ___ (1905-50), US radio engineer who discovered stellar radio emission (6)

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 April 30th or www.historytoday.com/crossword

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APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 71

THOMAS CROMWELL

FromtheArchive Michael Everett takes issue with one of Mary C. Erler’s assumptions in her otherwise perceptive article from 2014 on Thomas Cromwell’s friendship with Abbess Margaret Vernon.

Thomas Cromwell’s ‘unlikely’ friendship THOMAS CROMWELL, Henry VIII’s leading minister during the 1530s, is often described as a religious reformer. According to consensus, Cromwell was a deeply committed evangelical, who steered the king towards reform in religion more radical than Henry himself wanted. Yet the little evidence we have for Cromwell’s religious views is frustratingly inconclusive; some even points another way. In her fascinating article, Mary C. Erler discusses Cromwell’s long-standing acquaintance and apparent friendship with Margaret Vernon, a nun who was successively head of four nunneries, which Erler notes is surprising considering Cromwell’s ‘evangelical religious position’. Despite there being no indication of Vernon’s own religious views, Erler concludes that the abbess must have shared Cromwell’s desires for religious reform, without considering the possibility that his long-standing friendship with the head of a nunnery may qualify any simple understanding of him as a single-minded evangelical reformer. The increasingly held orthodoxy that Cromwell was a religious radical is a relatively recent interpretation. Although the Elizabethan martyrologist John Foxe described Cromwell as a ‘valiaunt Souldier and captayne of Christe’, who sought ‘all meanes and wayes to beate down false Religion and to aduaunce the true’, for much of the 20th century Cromwell was seen as a Machiavellian politician who cared ‘not a straw’ for any religious dispute of the time. However, since the late 1950s there has been a consensus that Cromwell was a deeply committed and driven religious reformer who manipulated Henry to accept radical religious 72 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015

reform. Erler, despite noting the unlikely friendship between Cromwell and Abbess Vernon, places Cromwell firmly in the evangelical camp. Yet there is little direct evidence for Cromwell’s religious beliefs. He did not pen any scholarly works which might offer hints of his affiliations, nor does his considerable correspondence contain much which touches on theology or doctrine at all. In fact, several pieces of evidence counter the view

The little evidence we have for Cromwell’s religious views is frustratingly inconclusive that Cromwell was a religious radical. Inventories of his possessions show that, throughout the 1530s, he continued to own many traditional religious images, including ‘ii ymages in lether gylted the one of our ladye the other of saynte christopher’. Cromwell’s will also invoked ‘our blessed ladie Saynct Mary the vyrgyn and Mother with all the holie companye of heuen to be Medyatours and Intercessours’ for his soul. He even specified a priest of ‘good lyuyng’ should be hired ‘to Syng’ for his soul, and money was left for friars in London to ‘pray for my Soule’. This suggests that Cromwell still believed in the intercessory power of prayer and in the importance of good works, as well as in the ability of saints to act as mediators for men’s souls. These were notably traditional beliefs for someone who – it is often claimed – was one of the driving forces behind the early Reformation in England. While there is little direct evidence for Cromwell’s own religious affiliations, there is none at all for Margaret

Vernon. In her article, Erler therefore follows other historians by pointing to Cromwell and Vernon knowing a similar circle of reform-minded people – including Thomas Somer, Stephen Vaughan, Ralph Sadler and Hugh Latimer – as evidence that Vernon (and therefore Cromwell) belonged to this religious group. Possibly; but we should be wary of assuming that acquaintance or friendship with a person implies agreement in all things. And it must be remembered that, although it is certainly true that Cromwell was friends with people who held evangelical views, he was also close friends with those who clung to traditional religious beliefs. Cromwell had a wide-ranging circle of friends and it is perhaps better to ask whether his friendship with Abbess Vernon might cast further doubt on his alleged evangelical credentials. At the very least, their long-standing friendship helps dispel the notion that Cromwell – ‘the hammer of the monks’ – was inherently hostile to those in religious orders. Michael Everett is the author of The Rise of Thomas Cromwell: Power and Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII (Yale University Press, 2015).

VOLUME 64 ISSUE 2 FEB 2014 Read the original piece at historytoday.com/fta