History Today 2015-09

September 2015 Vol 65 Issue 9

New World Outcasts

From poverty in Britain to life on the American frontier

Profits of Slavery

The cultural impact of slave-owners’ wealth

UNHOLY WAR The failed Nazi plan to mobilise the Muslim world

Publisher Andy Patterson Editor Paul Lay Digital Manager Dean Nicholas Picture Research Mel Haselden Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph Contributing Editor Kate Wiles Editorial Assistant Rhys Griffiths Art Director Gary Cook Subscriptions Manager Cheryl Deflorimonte Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell Accounts Sharon Harris Board of Directors Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston CONTACTS History Today is published monthly by History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn London WC1V 7QH. Tel: 020 3219 7810 [email protected]

From the city to the world: the Galata Museo del Mare, Genoa.

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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 Tom Holland 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 Ulinka Rublack St John’s College, Cambridge 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 GENOA, ‘LA SUPERBA’, the former city-state that once rivalled Venice for control of the Mediterranean, commands a magnificent, if precarious, position overlooking the harbour which brought the Black Death to medieval Europe and honed the seafaring skills of Christopher Columbus. Nowadays it is a grizzled working port with a wonderfully claustrophobic, if graffiti-ridden, baroque heart. Like all Italian cities, it has more churches and pallazi crammed with paintings – Caravaggios, Veroneses, Strozzis – than it knows what to do with; but, more than any other place in la bella Italia, it is and has long been a global city, as I found out on a visit in July. The role of Columbus in shrinking our world, for better or worse, is well known, but the story of the 19th-century Italians who followed him to the New World – primarily from Genoa – is not. Their story is told with élan and humanity in the city’s wonderful Museo del Mare, constructed in the old docks, which have been given new life by the architect Renzo Piano, a son of Genoa. In it, one enters the booths where Italians, who remained impoverished despite reunification, were lured by the call of the shipping companies that offered them the chance of a new life, for a price, in the US, Brazil and Argentina, then a booming young country, full of promise. We follow them to the ship’s barrack-style dormitories, separated by gender, the women cramped together with their children, where disease spread rapidly among the primitive sanitation facilities. We see the tables where they ate in shifts, without knives for fear of violence. We embark with them to the coffee estates of Brazil and the slums of Buenos Aires, as well as Ellis Island, New York, from where names such as Sinatra, Scorsese, Ciccone and Coppola would resonate worldwide. Genoa’s tale is not just one of export and emigration, but of imports and immigrants, too. Among them were the Britons attracted to the city in the 19th century, when it became an important coal station on the way to Suez. In 1893 a group of them founded the Genoa Cricket Club, which in 1896 added the word ‘Foot-ball’ to its name, becoming the first football club in Italy, a nation which has won the World Cup three times more than England. Its story is told in the portside Museo della storia del Genoa (retaining the English spelling, ‘Genova’ in Italian). To this day, Italian football managers are addressed as ‘Mister’.

Paul Lay

HistoryMatters

Forgotten Figures • Literate Slaves • Names • Charles Rennie Mackintosh

David Nash THE NOBLE BUT DEFEATED figure treated unjustly by posterity is a recurring feature of Britain and its history, often appropriated as a tool to accomplish political or cultural goals in the contemporary world. Those who entertain a developed sense of justice want to see this side of history prevail, actively representing it as a means of preserving the cultures and principles these figures fought tirelessly to defend. This fight to establish a new historical truth inevitably pits the romantic, enthusiastic, amateur historian against the apparently dispassionate and rational historian. The most famous example of this is perhaps Richard III, whose supporters and their quest to rehabilitate his image are well known. However, another story about a forgotten hero blends issues of historical truth with identity: the story of Prince Madoc. This Welsh prince apparently fled his war-stricken home during the 12th century and sailed west from modern Colwyn Bay to discover America, landing at Mobile, Alabama. According to legend, Prince Madoc explored the American interior and members of his party intermarried into a Native American tribe, the Mandans, bequeathing them both pale skins and the Welsh language. In the years since, his story has been in the possession of a bewildering number of people with different agendas and uses for it. Professional historians have often felt unwillingly dragged into the legend, tending to dismiss it as fanciful and lacking proof, and were poor value among those who gazed wistfully at the Atlantic. The most famous account of the story comes from the great leftwing historian Gwyn Williams, who used it to elaborate a wider history of Welshness that encompassed both the British Empire and exploration on the eastern seaboard of America. But

to the Madoc legend was also almost a touchstone of national identity among Welsh descendants in the New World. While professional historians hoped they had banished Madoc, or discredited his legend as a skilled Tudor fabrication with its own purposes, they were scarcely to have things all their own way. Enthusiastic amateurs persisted, claiming they had uncovered literary evidence that predated the Tudors,

Subscription to the Madoc legend was a touchstone of national identity among Welsh descendants in the New World

The Propaganda of the Defeated The quest for justice for maligned figures in our past forces us to question the notion of historical truth and objectivity. Gone but not forgotten: James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose, by William Dobson, c.1636.

Williams also saw the story as doubleedged with its blind assertion liable to make the Welsh a laughing stock. He felt the Madoc legend had eclipsed the history of the Welsh common people, potentially turning them into a romantic Celtic sideshow. This element also surfaced in Madoc’s adoption by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who erected a plaque in his honour at Mobile as a way of asserting a further connection with an intriguingly Celtic origin. Subscription

while others said they could point to suggestive archaeological evidence uncovered on both sides of the Atlantic. New ways of investigating arrived with DNA testing, championed by the Madoc International Research Association, which hoped to provide a clear and obvious link between the Welsh prince and Native Americans. Perhaps the latest attempt to take possession of Prince Madoc and his story was the campaign in his ‘home town’ of Colwyn Bay, which hosted an exhibition in his honour. This offered the twin lures of heritage tourists from both sides of the Atlantic, while bolstering Welsh independent identities during the quest for political devolution from Westminster. Elsewhere the Montrose Society of Scotland is a comparatively recent phenomenon that celebrates and seeks to publicise the career of another noble figure who inspired sympathy for the manner in which he was defeated and accepted his fate. James Graham, the 1st Marquis of Montrose, was an early signatory of the Solemn League and Covenant, a pledge to gain SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 3

HISTORYMATTERS

increasing separation from the king, Charles I, that escalated into outright war. According to the account given by the Montrose Society, the marquis was sent north with a commission to raise an army, which eventually won a series of important military victories against Covenanter armies in a period that became known as ‘the year of miracles’. However success melted away and after defeat and surrender Montrose went into exile to

Being a supposed victor in history’s great battles is no guarantee of the survival of your version of history be courted by the new king, Charles II, who was also negotiating with the Covenanters behind Montrose’s back. The Society states that the king knew he was sending Montrose back to Scotland to a certain death and, perhaps inevitably, he was duly arrested and executed in Edinburgh in April 1650. This story stresses the courage of a man of gentility and learning, loyal to a cause and individuals who manifestly appear not to deserve such loyalty. Likewise it displays a morality tale of loyal Scottish service betrayed by the fickle and devious behaviour of successive English kings who forgot they were kings of Scotland as well. The Montrose Society has also ensured a last intriguing tinge, suggesting that he should be regarded as a champion of constitutional monarchy and a prototype for modern Scottish politicians who might echo the sentiments of his last words to the Scottish people from the scaffold: ‘God have mercy on this afflicted land.’ Several of these sentiments are echoed in organisations devoted to remembering the importance of the Jacobite cause. Re-enactors like the Charles Edward Stuart Society bring bekilted troops to Derby every year to commemorate the furthest point in England reached by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s troops. Alternatively the Royal Stuart Society keeps alive knowledge of the Stuart monarchy and offers itself as the defender of monarchy in opposition to republicanism. Perhaps most interesting of 4 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

all is an organisation called the ‘Circle of Gentlemen’, claiming to have been in existence since the ‘Good Old Cause’ was driven underground after Culloden in 1745 and secretly working for the defence of Scotland ever since. As such, they also offer a counterpoint to the hybrid identities created by the modern world, suggesting that the advent of multicultural society has produced a need ‘to hold onto old values and traditions’. Perhaps such organisations provide historical focus for less articulate and conscious nationalist feelings that can otherwise appear in every context in every place from popular song, to the football terrace and, most recently, the ballot box. Being a victor in history’s great battles is no guarantee of total success or of the survival of your version of history. History always has hidden stories to tell and it is also a hitherto hidden story just how far enthusiasts and professional historians have been prepared to go in resurrecting some of these. Defeated, marginal and forgotten figures hold a fascination for those who believe history is about truth. But such figures are also pressed into service in the contemporary world to shore up identities under threat or to promote them in a time of potentially advantageous change. David Nash’s book, Christian Ideals in British Culture: Stories of Belief in the Twentieth Century, is out now, published by Palgrave MacMillan.

Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

Runaway Reading How did literacy encourage slave rebelliousness after the American War of Independence? Shaun Wallace AS THE DUST settled and libertarian rhetoric became increasingly muted, the newly created United States of America emerged as a republic whose lifeblood was her educated and selfless citizenry. Amid the promise and potential of the young nation, the survival of slavery stood in stark contrast to the rhetoric promoting liberty and equality to all men. Following the ratification of the American Constitution in 1789, a plethora of legislation was enacted across the United States promoting slave illiteracy and curtailing slave mobility. With an increasing awareness of slave discontentment, slaveholders targeted what they perceived as contributing to that restlessness: instruction of reading and writing. Suspicious of slave gatherings and paranoid that literacy could ‘spoil’ a slave, they recognised that learned slaves who freed themselves from the shackles of slaveholderimposed ignorance would be unsuited to a life of perpetual servitude. What if a slave understood the moral arguments against their enslavement – would they seek vengeance against their enslavers? Would a literate slave transmit knowledge or inspire discontentment among the wider slave community for whom they held special status? And was it a coincidence that the leaders of well-known slave rebellions, such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner, were literate slaves? These were men, women and children who defied the threat of whipping, branding and even death to learn to read and write. With the odds stacked against them and slaveholder rights to reclaim their property protected by legislation such as the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, most escapes ended in failure.

HISTORYMATTERS

When faced with punishment, division of family, a new owner or poor working conditions, hundreds of slaves chose to run from their masters every year. Slave runaway advertisements in local newspapers were used by slaveholders to try to retrieve a runaway and, although rare, advertisements for slaves who could read and/or write reveal the liberating effects of literacy for slaves and the fears of many slaveholders being realised. The case of Prophet illustrates this point. On first impression, Prophet was a typical Georgia runaway. He was a male slave aged between 25 and 30 and the property of John Ruppert, who had purchased him from Leonard Cecil. A discontented and rebellious character, he escaped. His owner valued him worthy of a $10 reward, which was advertised in the Savannah-based Georgia Gazette on October 18th, 1792. ‘Well known in and about’ Savannah’s bustling multiracial urban environment, his daily interaction with the city’s white and black population and access to newspapers and discourse was far from the popular image of the isolated slave toiling in the field as the sun set on a rural plantation. On the contrary, he was literate and learned. He was empowered. Ruppert concluded that it was now ‘very probable that he [Prophet] will pass for a free man, as he can both read and write’. This was an explicit acknowledgment that being able to read and write provided Prophet with the skills to learn more and to transform his identity. Adopting a new ‘free’ identity, Prophet could cast aside his slave status and manipulate his surroundings for the accomplishment of freedom, like other literate slaves who ‘endeavour[ed] to pass as free men’. Assimilated into society, he was free in his own mind. Bodily freedom was the final stage of transition from slave to free man. In an attempt to preserve his reputation, Ruppert could only attempt to discredit Prophet’s likely account of his enslavement, portraying him as a ‘very smooth tongued’ runaway who could

Freedom in thought: the poet Phyllis Wheatley with her autograph. Woodcut, 18th century.

‘tell a very plausible story’. In a similar fashion, Isaiah Wright and Thomas Hamilton advertised for their slave Hercules in June 1793. Regarded as a ‘notorious offender’, the proof of which ‘he carried [by] the mark of a whip on his back’, Hercules was a 24-year-old African-American, or ‘country born’,

A successful escape required that a slave have a combination of astuteness, adaptability and practicality runaway. Denied instruction, the young slave had concealed his learning. He was able to read ‘remarkably well’, which his advertisers linked to him becoming ‘very artful and impertinent’, and they believed he would attempt to ‘change his name’. Name-changing was a common sign of slave empowerment and a challenge

to slaveholder authority. Conforming to the ‘artful’ slave type, a term used by slaveholders pejoratively, Hercules had developed skills that made him difficult to control and was no longer the obedient servant his owners desired. They placed a bounty of $10 upon his head, wanted ‘dead or alive’. ‘Artfulness’ in a slave’s character was most often attested to a literate and learned slave and was linked to excessive knowledge and transforming their identities. In most cases, it was used to characterise slaves who could read; those who had knowledge and imagination and could interpret and subsequently adapt to the world around them. They were slaves who had developed a sense of self and forged their own identity. Rarely was ‘artfulness’ used to describe runaways who could only write, which was linked to more practical qualities, such as the forging of passes. A successful escape required a combination of astuteness, adaptability and practicality. It was imperative that the slave be inconspicuous, often reinventing themselves during escape attempts. Their slaves having escaped, slaveholders used the advertisements to downplay the consequences of their slaves’ literacy and learning, portraying themselves as still in control. Advertisers resorted to pejorative phrases and deliberate vagueness in their description of the act of the fugitives. Terms such as ‘artful’, ‘pretends or endeavours to be free’ or ‘acquired a pass’ deliberately masked the reality that the slave had demonstrated empowerment, skill and agency. Having acquired basic reading and writing skills, literate scribes embarked on learning while simultaneously moving ever further away from the state of ignorance their slaveholders desperately tried to protect. Reading and learning allowed slaves to understand the immorality of their condition and many resolved to become free. These slaves had become free in their own minds and began articulating a free identity for themselves through reading and writing which could only be realised by escaping the slave system.

Shaun Wallace is an ESRC-funded PhD student studying slavery in the American South at the University of Stirling. SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 5

HISTORYMATTERS

A Noble Stone Gathers No Moss What names tell us about Anglo-Saxon England. James Chetwood ALFRED THE GREAT’s illegitimate grandson, King Athelstan, became known to posterity by the epithet ‘the Glorious’, which must only be a couple of rungs below his grandfather on the ladder of kingly sobriquets. While Athelstan’s glorious nickname was only applied posthumously, his name, like most Old English names, was a compound, combining two elements – words taken from the vocabulary of everyday language. The first element Æðel- meant ‘noble’, while the second element -stan meant ‘stone’. Athelstan was, in name at least, a ‘noble rock’. Such names were not the reserve of royalty. In fact, this sort of name was common among people of all ranks of society across Anglo-Saxon England. While the grandson of a king might rightly have expected an illustrious life, living up to the promise of his noble names, the same could surely have not been said for the multitude of future cowherds and milkmaids across the land who were given names marking them out as noble beauties (Æðelflæd), wise protectors (Eadmund) or powerful wolves (Wulfweald). Perhaps being a dear friend (Leofwine) was a more realistic aim for most parents. While it is hard to tell exactly how important the meaning of name elements were, it seems likely that people were aware, to some extent, that names carried some kind of meaning. Indeed, one of the most famous, or infamous, Anglo-Saxons is most often known to us today as Ethelred the Unready, the king who lost his kingdom to Cnut. However, the name Ethelred signified ‘noble counsel’. So, when his contemporaries labelled him Æðelræd Unræd they were not calling him ‘unready’, but using the meaning of his name to mock his lack of good counsel. Similarly, when Archbishop Wulfstan entitled his homily to the English people ‘Sermon of the Wolf to the English’, he was clearly doing so in the knowledge that the first part 6 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

of his name did not just sound like, but signified, ‘wolf’. Surely it cannot be coincidence that ‘rich’, ‘strong’ and ‘beautiful’ were used in names, where ‘poor’, ‘weak’ and ‘ugly’ were not. A feature of this naming system was flexibility. There was a finite number of elements, but they could be combined in a multitude of ways. This meant that, in essence, a name was created for, rather than given to, each person. So, while elements could be repeated to emphasise parentage and family links, there was very little repetition of full names and it would be unlikely that any two people

It cannot be coincidence that ‘rich’, ‘strong’ and ‘beautiful’ were used in names, where ‘poor’, ‘weak’ and ‘ugly’ were not within a community or family would have the same name. However, this compound naming system was not universal and unchanging throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. There was always significant minority of simple names such as Tutta, Babba and Ælle. And Old English names rubbed shoulders with names of British and Scandinavian origin. Indeed, one of the most celebrated early Anglo-Saxon ‘Eðelred rex’: silver pennies bearing Ethelred the Unready’s name and portrait, 10th century.

kings, Cerdic, bore a name that is thought to be a form of the British Caradoc. In the century before the Conquest, Scandinavian names had become so common in some areas that, not only had names such as Toki and Gyða been incorporated into the naming stock, but hybrid names had developed, creating truly Anglo-Scandinavian names, like Ælfcytel (combining Old English Ælf-, ‘elf’, and Old Norse -kettill, ‘cauldron’). Scandinavian patronymic suffixes were even added to perfectly Old English names to mark parenthood – at least in the case of Ælfric Wihtgarsson, and his son Wihgtar Ælfricsson. And we do not think it in the least bit strange that the last ‘Anglo-Saxon’ king of England, Harold, bore a Scandinavian name, Haraldr. It was not only outside influence that had an impact on the English naming system. Later Anglo-Saxon society evolved and the naming system evolved with it. New name elements were introduced, such as God-, meaning ‘good’ or ‘god’, -cild, meaning ‘child’ and -sunu, meaning ‘son’, perhaps indicating a greater emphasis on religion and parentage than on glory in battle. Name elements were shortened and compound names contracted: Ælfsige became Alsi, Æðelgar became Algar and Leofwine became Lefwin. We also increasingly see names being copied and passed down in their entirety, losing some of their compound nature. This went hand in hand with an increase in popularity of a small number of names, as people appear to have become less interested in the individuality of a name and perhaps more concerned in highlighting similarities with their friends, neighbours and notable people. With the Norman Conquest looming large on the horizon, even more changes were to come in the English naming system. What we can say is that ‘AngloSaxon’ personal naming was never one static system, disconnected from the world around it. It was an an everevolving reflection of society, responding to changes in language and culture caused as much by developments in the way English people lived their everyday lives as by foreign invasion.

James Chetwood is a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholar at the University of Sheffield, studying medieval English naming.

HISTORYMATTERS

A Legacy and a Love Story

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, c.1893. Below: the interior of the Glasgow School of Art before the fire.

Behind the beautiful work of the ‘Father of Glasgow’ lay a deep and lasting love. Barbara Butcher THE FIRE AT The Glasgow School of Art in May 2014 destroyed the magnificent library, devastating devotees of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, particularly Glaswegians, who look on him as the ‘Father of Glasgow’. It did, however, introduce his work to a wider community, many of whom thought it was limited to jewellery and designs destined to appear on carrier bags and tea towels. In fact he did not make jewellery, except one piece, which he designed for his wife, Margaret. What is perhaps less well known is the enduring love match of Charles and his wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. They met as students at the old Glasgow School of Art in 1883. Little did they know that Charles would one day be the architect of the new Glasgow School of Art. He was employed by the architectural practice of Honeyman and Keppie which, in 1897, won a competition with his design for the new Glasgow School of Art. Because he was not a partner in the firm, Honeyman and Keppie took the glory. But by then Mackintosh was already making a name for himself elsewhere. The couple were married in 1900. Their home, which is now replicated at the Hunterian Gallery in Glasgow, was both beautiful and functional. Their collaboration in the design of the famous Willow Tea Rooms, commissioned by a Miss Cranston, was a work of art in itself. Meticulous attention to detail was apparent, right down to the teaspoons, china and the attire of the staff. During those heady days commissions kept them occupied and in addition to the tea rooms Mackintosh designed Hill House for publisher Walter Blackie. Margaret was well known for her fabric designs and paintings. By then Mackintosh had

and there was no doubt of their enduring love for each other. One of his letters to her states: ‘You must remember that in all of my architectural efforts you have been the half if not three quarters of them.’ In 1927 Margaret had to return to London for six weeks for medical treatment, leaving Mackintosh alone and lonely in France. Mackintosh, who was mildly dyslexic, wrote almost daily to her, calling the letters his Chronycle, or Chronacle. The letters were never intended for publication but, after their privacy was breached and in order to preserve their authenticity, they were published in their entirety in 2001. Margaret’s replies were never discovered. From these letters we have a moving insight into the enduring love between Margaret and Charles. He tells her he misses his ‘chum’ and his ‘lover’ and his concern about her health shows that he is worried as well as lonely without her. This Chronycle seems to be full of fleeting impressions and disconnected sentences but anyone who can read their meaning would find only three words – I love you.

won prizes in Italy and Vienna, where he met Gustav Klimt and other artists. This talented couple seemed to have the world at their feet but unfortunately their work was better known on the Continent than in Britain and by 1914 commissions had dried up and they moved from Glasgow to Walberswick in Suffolk. It was there that Mackintosh executed exquisite botanical watercolours. This was during the First World War and the local folk mistrusted the man with the strange accent who received mail from Vienna. Mackintosh enjoyed walking along the sea front at night carrying a lantern. The locals thought he was signalling to the German fleet and reported him. He was arrested and imprisoned while his wife was away and it was only on her return that she was able to convince the authorities of their mistake. By 1923 they were seriously impoverished and decided to leave England to settle in France. Mackintosh’s watercolours during this time show both his love of nature and his architectural perspective. During all their trials and tribulations Margaret was by his side

Money was still a problem and he writes on the thinnest paper he can find so that the postage will not be so great, injecting humour into the messages: Writing lightly so that the weight of the lead in the pencil will not cause extra postage. Tongue cancer forced him to return to London and he died in 1928, a disappointed and impoverished man whose early promise had not been fulfilled, partly due to the Great War and the lack of commissions during that period. Margaret died five years later and their estate was valued at £88.16s 2d. It is ironic that in 2002 the kimono-style writing desk that he designed was sold at Christie’s for £900,000 and in 2008 Margaret’s painting, The Red Rose and the White Rose, sold at auction for a sum in excess of £1,700,000. In December 2009 a plaque was erected in Chelsea to celebrate the London years of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. His work can be seen at venues across Glasgow and beyond.

Barbara Butcher is the author of The Other Canal (Troubadour, 2011). SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 7

MonthsPast

SEPTEMBER

By Richard Cavendish

SEPTEMBER 12th 1940

The Lascaux cave paintings discovered ONE OF archaeology’s most exciting discoveries was made by four French teenagers and possibly a dog. Versions of the story differ in detail, but Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel and Simon Coencas came across a hole in the ground in woods near the village of Montignac in the Dordogne region of south-west France. Whether they had a dog called Robot with them and it chased a rabbit into the hole is uncertain. Another version has Ravidat finding the hole on September 8th and taking the other three back with him on the 12th. There was a local story about a secret tunnel that led to buried treasure and the boys thought this might be it. After dropping stones into the hole to get an idea of how deep it was, one by one they went cautiously down into what proved to be a narrow shaft. It led down 15 metres (nearly 50ft) to a cave whose walls were covered with astonishing paintings. Marsal said later that going down the shaft was terrifying, but the paintings were ‘a cavalcade of animals larger than life’ that ‘seemed to be moving’. The boys were worried about getting back up again, but they managed it using their elbows and knees. Tremendously excited, they promised each other to keep their discovery a secret and explored it again the next day. After that they decided to show it to friends for a tiny admission fee. The news quickly spread and so many people came to see the cave that the boys consulted their schoolmaster, Leon Laval, who was a member of the local prehistory society. He suspected it was a ruse to trap him in the hole, but when he went cautiously down and saw the paintings he immediately felt sure they were prehistoric and insisted that no 8 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

Brief opening: a tourist poster for the caves, 1955.

one must be allowed to touch them and they must be guarded against vandalism. The youngest of the boys, 14-year-old Marsal, persuaded his parents to let him pitch a tent near the entrance to keep guard and show visitors round. It was the start of a commitment to the paintings which lasted to his death in 1989. Word of the discovery reached the Abbé Breuil, an eminent prehistorian, who vouched for the paintings’ authenticity. The sensational news spread through Europe and the rest of the world and in 1948 the family that owned the land organised daily tours that eventually brought thousands of visitors every year to see for themselves. There were more paintings in galleries that led off the main cave and they confirmed previous discoveries,

which had showed that, unlike other animals, the first human beings believed in religion, magic and art. They buried their dead formally with equipment for another life and they may have believed in a great mother goddess, the source of all life. They seem to have had a deep sense of the numinous, of something outside human beings that is powerful, mysterious and uncanny. The paintings convey this. Dated to about 15,000 bc, though they may have been created over a longer period than formerly realised, they show bulls of the now extinct aurochs species, oxen, horses and stags as well as arrows and traps. Early humans were hunters and one of the purposes of the paintings may have been to bring about successful hunting in real life. There is a figure of a man with a bird’s head, perhaps a shaman, who carried out rituals in the cave. Recent theories link some of the paintings with constellations in the sky, including the Pleiades and Taurus, or connect them with ritual dancing, which can induce trances and cause visions. The thousands of visitors to Lascaux did not mean to harm the paintings, but they did, simply by breathing on them. The occasional visitor fainted because the atmosphere was so thick. Condensation formed on the walls and ceilings, moisture ran down the paintings and lichens and mould developed. High-powered lighting added to the damage and the paintings began to fade. Lascaux was closed to the public in 1963 by the French minister of culture, André Malraux, and only experts were allowed in. A replica of the site was built close by for the public in 1983 and draws 300,000 visitors a year. Efforts to halt the damage to the original paintings are continuing. In 2009 the French ministry of culture brought close to 300 experts from many different countries together in Paris to consider ways to halt the deterioration. Their recommendations were published in 2011, but misgivings about the site have not been allayed.

SEPTEMBER 6th 1715

The Jacobite standard raised at Braemar JAMES FRANCIS EDWARD STUART, later known as the Old Pretender, was born in St James’s Palace, London in 1688. His father, James II of England and VII of Scots, was privately Roman Catholic and his mother, Mary of Modena, openly so. The next British king would clearly be raised a Catholic and a story spread among Protestants that the real baby was stillborn and another infant had been smuggled into the queen’s bed in a warmingpan. It was not a promising start. A Protestant rebellion drove James into exile in France by the end of the year. Mary of Modena had already taken the baby there. Courtesy of Louis XIV, they lived at the Chateau de St-Germain-en-Laye while Britain was ruled by William of Orange and then by James II’s Protestant daughter Anne from 1701. James II died that

year and young James, now 13, was claimed to be his rightful successor as James III and VIII. In 1708, with a French fleet, he tried to invade Scotland, but was driven away by English warships. When Anne died in 1714 Catholic claimants were barred. James knew he might succeed her if he turned Protestant, but he spurned the idea and a German Protestant, the first of the Hanoverian dynasty, was crowned as George I. John Erskine, Earl of Mar, now took a hand. A Scottish peer, he lived in London and was secretary of state

SEPTEMBER 28th 1865

licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries, which though less prestigious than an MD, or doctorate of medicine, would entitle her to be a practising physician. The Society shrank back in alarm, but her father threatened to sue it and she passed the exams in 1865. It then revised

Britain’s first female doctor ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON was described in her time as a woman of indomitable will who did not suffer fools gladly. Her father was a prosperous businessman in Aldeburgh in Suffolk, who believed that girls should have as good an education as boys and she was educated at home with some teenage years at a boarding school for girls. When Elizabeth decided she wanted to be a doctor, her father was supportive but her mother was horrified. Most doctors and surgeons did not want a woman joining their ranks. Nor did medical colleges and her applications to teaching hospitals and universities were turned down. Sneaking in as a nurse at the Middlesex Hospital in London failed to work and she hit on becoming a

Highland fling: the Earl of Mar with the Stuart standard, 20th-century illustration.

Medical pioneer: Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, c.1888.

for Scotland. Although he assured George of his loyalty he was deprived of his post. In August 1715 he got away to Scotland, allegedly disguised as a workman. Lowland Scotland was staunchly Protestant, but the situation was different in the Highlands and Mar convinced a number of clan chiefs that Scotland faced enslavement by the English, if it did not act. At a gathering at Braemar, west of Aberdeen, he proclaimed James VIII king of Scotland, England, Ireland and France and raised the Stuart banner. Mar led a large army, but he was a useless general. He failed to defeat government forces in battle and a Jacobite invasion of England also failed. James Stuart arrived in Scotland in December, but he was timid, indecisive and no leader. Mar and James scuttled off to France in February 1716, leaving their followers in the lurch. Mar accepted a bribe from George I’s government (reportedly £3,500 a year, over £1 million today) and stayed quiet until his death in 1732. Rescued by successive popes, James Stuart lived on in palatial ineffectuality in Rome until he died aged 77 in 1766.

its rules to keep women out. In 1866 Elizabeth opened the St Mary’s Dispensary for Women and Children in the Marylebone area of London, a hospital solely for women, staffed solely by women, which drew crowds of poor patients. In 1870 she obtained the University of Paris’s first ever MD degree for a woman and in 1872 her Marylebone dispensary became the New Hospital for Women. In 1871, aged 34, Elizabeth married James George Skelton Anderson, head of a large shipping firm, who supported her belief in independence for married women. The barriers were giving way and in 1874 she helped to found the London School of Medicine for Women, where she taught for years. Elizabeth also supported the suffragettes. In 1902 she and her husband retired to Aldeburgh, where she became mayor in 1908, the first woman mayor in Britain. When she died there in 1917 aged 81 her London hospital was renamed after her in her honour. SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 9

SLAVERY

The Slave Trade, an engraving by J.R. Smith, late 18th century.

A society built on SLAVERY

The extent to which Britons were involved in slave-ownership has been laid bare by a project based at University College London. One of its researchers, Katie Donington, shows how one family profited.

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HE LEGACIES OF British Slave-ownership project has been based at University College London since 2009. The project has digitised the records of the Slave Compensation Commission. The work highlighted the little-known economic process of compensation that accompanied the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean, the Cape of Good Hope (both 1834) and Mauritius (1835). As part of the measures to end slavery the government paid slave-owners £20 million in compensation. This act created a bureaucratic record of everyone who claimed property in people at the moment of abolition. Working with these records, the project has built up a biographical database of the recipients in order to try to measure their impact on the formation of Victorian

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Britain. Multiple research strands were identified – cultural, political, commercial, imperial, physical and historical – so that the project could examine the different spheres of influence that slave-based wealth infiltrated. The database offers a unique snapshot of who the slaveowners were at the ending of slavery. There were approximately 46,000 claimants, although not all of them were successful in gaining compensation. Of the £20 million paid out, nearly half of the money stayed in Britain. Unsurprisingly, some of the funds went to wealthy absentees, but the flow of money also highlights the importance of another class of compensation recipient: the British merchant. This merchant class was a vitally important cog in the machinery of transatlantic slavery and yet little is known about

it. When it comes to the public memory of slavery, these money men have attracted hardly any scrutiny. Barry Unsworth detailed the operations of the West India counting house in his 1992 novel Sacred Hunger. Describing the maps and ledgers and the markings in tidy columns, he remarked on the ways in which these careful dashes and figures represented the ‘violence of abstraction’. Far away from the horror of plantation life, slavery’s human face was subject to a process of geographical and psychological distancing. The suffering of enslaved men, women and children was converted into hogsheads of sugar, puncheons of rum and barrels of sticky molasses. Mercantile wealth derived from the profits of the plantation was one important way that slavery returned home to Britain. AMONG THE thousands of entries in the database it is possible to lose sight of the human stories that underpin the records. In attempting to understand a history of the magnitude of transatlantic slavery it is sometimes useful to approach it through the individual. George Hibbert was born in 1757 to a Manchester family that had made its money as cotton manufacturers. The family supplied finished cotton goods that were then shipped from Liverpool and used to trade for enslaved people in West Africa. George’s father’s generation had become increasingly involved with the slavery business and in 1734 his uncle Thomas had left for Jamaica where he settled, making a living as a slave factor. Buying enslaved people directly from the ship and selling them on to his plantocratic clients, Thomas made a reputation for himself as ‘the most eminent Guinea factor in Kingston’. During the 1760s the family’s concerns in Jamaica expanded; they became involved in credit finance and bought sugar plantations and pens. The business was run by a close-knit network of kith and kin, a feature that was common to the most successful of the transatlantic merchant houses. In the late 1760s George’s eldest brother Thomas returned from Jamaica, where he had learned his business from his uncle. Thomas set up a commercial house in London from which he and his partners acted as sugar merchants and plantation suppliers, as well as providing credit to their associates in the colony. The Hibberts counted some of the wealthiest men in Jamaica as their business correspondents, including the planters Simon Taylor, John Tharp and Nathaniel Phillips. George joined his brother’s

George Hibbert by Thomas Lawrence, 1811.

In attempting to understand a history of the magnitude of transatlantic slavery it is useful to approach it through the individual SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 11

SLAVERY

A West India Sportsman, published by William Holland, 1807.

The extent of the Hibbert family’s involvement in slavery is evident from the sum they received in compensation firm in 1780 and quickly rose to become its senior partner. While four of his brothers served their time in Jamaica, attending to their uncle Thomas’ slave trading empire, George himself never visited the island. Instead he became a leading member of the London West India interest. He was a regular attendee and sometimes chairman of the Society of West India Planters and Merchants. He purchased the seat for the rotten borough of Seaford, in Sussex, and served as an MP between 1806 and 1812. He spoke at length in defence of the slave trade during the parliamentary debates in 1807. Eventually he achieved his lifelong ambition and was appointed Agent for Jamaica in 1812, a position he kept for nearly 20 years, only relinquishing the post when old age and infirmity forced him to retire from public life. The extent of the Hibbert family’s involvement in slavery is evident from the sum they received in compensation. Twelve family members received jointly the total of approximately £103,000. As the head of the family counting house, George received the largest single sum: £63,000. The Hibberts made claims as trustees, owners-in-fee, mortgagees, judgement creditors, devisees in trust and executors. 12 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

Their ownership of enslaved people was based both on plantation ownership and on the complex system of credit relationships that characterised the West India trade. It shows how long the campaign for compensation took and demonstrates Hibbert’s vital role in the negotiations. George himself had supported the principle of compensation from as early as 1790 when he gave evidence to the select committee tasked with examining the slave trade. He consistently argued throughout his career that investment in the slave economy was legitimate and that respectable people would be ruined without payment for their loss of ‘property’. As late as 1833, just four years before his death, he wrote to The Times newspaper to make his case. Although Hibbert was an active member of the proslavery lobby in London, in order to consider the ways in which the wealth generated through the slavery business infiltrated the British economy, the following account focuses on the private world he inhabited. George Hibbert’s domestic life provides an opportunity to examine the relationship between the profits of slavery and the culture of conspicuous consumption in Britain.

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HE ASSOCIATION between Clapham, in the south-west of London, and abolitionism – particularly the Clapham Sect, or Clapham Saints, a group of social reformers who included William Wilberforce – has created a particular historical narrative and identity for the area. Many of the buildings in which the abolitionists lived, worshipped and worked proclaim their inheritance proudly with plaques which draw the casual passer-by’s attention to this history. English Heritage Blue

Plaques and their forerunners, the London County Council plaques, can be found adorning the walls of Holy Trinity Church, where the Saints worshipped, at the Pavement, which was the home of Zachary Macaulay, and at Broomwood Road, where William Wilberforce was based. In 2007 Britain marked the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. Abolition was deemed a public history priority and numerous activities were arranged around the Clapham area. While critics of the commemorations dubbed it ‘Wilberfest’, 2007 arguably gave historians, museums, libraries, archives, galleries and community groups the time, space and, importantly, the funding to investigate their links with the history of the slave trade and its abolition. This allowed people to recover so-called ‘hidden’ histories of their local area. The links that were turned up as a result were striking in their diversity: a reminder that the local and the global were deeply enmeshed in a period when commercial and imperial endeavours were creating a far more interconnected world than had existed previously. Situated in the abolitionist heartland for over 20 years following their arrival in 1793, George Hibbert’s family lived at Clapham Common Northside. George was joined in Clapham in 1800 by his brother Samuel’s widow, Mary, and

her son, Samuel Junior, who was also a member of the Hibberts’ London West India merchant house. By 1812 George’s brother William, a partner in the family firm, who had spent time working for their uncle in Jamaica, had also moved into the area, on the South Side of the Common. The Hibberts were not the only residents on the Common who had links to the slavery business, as a map of 1800 shows. Instantly recognisable on the map is the Wilberforce residence and living next door to it was the Wedderburn family. The Wedderburns, like the Hibberts, were a slave-owning family with interests in Jamaica, who had also set up a London West India mercantile partnership. A tutor of the young James Webster Wedderburn – John Campbell the future Lord Chancellor – described how he was bored to the point of resigning his post by the incessant talk of the West Indies within the household.

‘Perambulation of Clapham Common’, 1800, showing family residences.

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N EXPLAINING THE PRESENCE of slave-owning families on the Common it is important to recognise the character of the area as it stood during the period; not solely as an enclave for abolitionists but as a popular destination for London’s successful merchants and bankers, who sought to establish themselves in suburban villas on the outskirts of the capital. Away from the threatening and uncontrollable boisterousness of the capital, but close enough to make it accessible, Clapham provided a happy medium, combining the conspicuous trappings of gentility with the everyday demands of a working merchant. Its draw for respectable families was summed up by the novelist E.M. Forster, whose great-aunt was Marianne Thornton, daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton. Forster wrote that: The Clapham area had become civilised, there was no danger from highwaymen, the merchants and politicians who were beginning to settle there could leave their families in safety when they drove the four or five miles to Westminster or to the City. That sense of security came not only in the form of physical safety but also from the moral and spiritual character of its middle-class residents. Before their move to Clapham, George and his wife Elizabeth, the daughter of Phillip Fonnereau, an MP and director of the Bank of England, had lived on Broad Street in the City. The residence was a short walk away from the Hibbert family counting house on Mincing Lane; the noise, smells and poverty of the fellow residents of the nearby courts meant the area was hardly the place for an aspiring gentleman to keep a wife or raise children. George had grown up in Manchester, where his parents lived in a dwelling house with warehouse SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 13

SLAVERY Below: Wiliam Wilberforce, by Thomas Lawrence, 1828. Right: Holy Trinity Church, Clapham.

space adjacent to the property. His mother and the children would have been exposed to his father’s thriving business but things would be very different for his wife and young family: a reflection of the rise during the period of the notion of separate spheres. After nearly ten years of marriage, with six children and their seventh expected, George and Elizabeth left the City. By this time George had attained a level of seniority within both the counting house and the West India interest and a suburban villa reflected his increased status within London’s commercial society. A detailed inventory of the house and land can be found in the 1820 advertisement for its sale. The profits from George’s lucrative engagement with the slave economy had clearly paid off; the advert described the house as a ‘capacious’ and ‘commodious’ family abode. It boasted a 170ft approach to the front as well as ‘another elevated Frontage in a most beautiful situation’ to the rear of the property, double coach houses and stabling for four horses, a gardener’s cottage, six servants’ rooms and a servants’ hall, nine family bedrooms, 12 further rooms for the family’s use and an extensive 500ft garden that 14 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

stretched down to Wandsworth Road. The family rooms give a glimpse into the comfortable existence of the young Hibbert family. The three bedchambers on the second storey were accessed via a grand double staircase on the first floor. As the family rose in the morning to prepare for the day they had the use of three dressing rooms. Their early hours might have been passed in ‘a cheerful Morning Room’.

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EORGE WAS AN avid collector of books and he reached a degree of fame for his prized possessions. His collection included works printed by Aldus, a collection of books printed on vellum, a copy of the Gutenberg Bible and contemporary authors, as well as a large number of texts on the West Indies and slavery. An indication of the size and value of George’s collection can be taken from an auction of his books which took place in 1829: he sold 20,000 volumes over 27 days raising £21,753, which he then invested in remodelling his country estate. George was by no means an uninformed fashionable consumer; his library was both a home for his books and place in which he could work. His reputation

specially commissioned frieze by Henry Howard, The Fable of Cupid and Psyche. Classical civilisation with its vast empire and practice of slave-holding appealed to George; he used examples from it to bolster his arguments during the slave trade debates. Guests of the Hibberts would have been encouraged to take advantage of his extensive gardens. George was a serious amateur botanist and he spared no expense in pursuing his passion. The building of a hothouse was testament to his horticultural ambitions. The effect was captured vividly by a friend, Dibdin: Must I tell how the Alpine or Chinese roses, how the exotics from America or Japan have given place to the delicious performances – to flowers whose bloom is perennial – from the garden plots of Spira, Jenson and Zarotus? Shall I lead you in imagination to the Morocco (not azalea) bowers, and Russia (not orange tree) vistos, of Honorio? George’s activities as a merchant and his involvement with shipping enabled him to collect specimens from all corners of the globe. He employed professional horticulturists, one of whom, James McFayden, went on to become Jamaica’s island botanist. George’s botanical knowledge and connections gave him the authority needed to be taken seriously in new scientific ventures affecting colonisation and trade; the Colonial Secretary Robert Wilmot Horton sought his advice on introducing the silk worm to Jamaica.

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Top: a plaque on Holy Trinity in honour of Wilberforce, who worshipped there. Above: the Hibbert almshouse, Clapham, opened in 1859.

for erudition created an alternative identity to that of slave-owner and merchant, authorising his claims, or so he might have imagined, to the cultural superiority which legitimised his ownership of ‘lesser’ human beings. The house then operated as familial, social and business space. In his diary George’s brother Robert made multiple references to business conversations which took place at the family home. For instance in 1801, he wrote ‘Thursday we go to Clapham and dine with George, the new co-partnership canvassed’. The Hibberts held large dinner parties, dancing and theatrical performances. George’s brother Robert wrote in his diary about balls he attended at the home in Clapham and George’s commonplace book was filled with plays he had written for the family to perform in the house. The ‘elegantly fitted up drawing room’, adorned with ‘costly marble chimney-pieces’, was without doubt the centrepiece of the Hibberts’ abode. The Reverend Thomas Dibdin described the room and house in his Bibliographical Decameron, as a ‘Palace of Pleasure’, gushing ‘Oh the luxury of that abode! The felicities which his taste and his well-replenished purse impart!’ George was also an enthusiastic patron of art. His cosmopolitan taste included examples of the Old Masters, Italian, Dutch and Flemish prints and contemporary British artists. The drawing room at Clapham was dominated by a

HE GARDEN reflected the needs and ambitions of its owner; it was paid for and stocked by commercial endeavour but, while it might have aspirations towards the rural idyll, it was shaped by the demands of urban fashion. George never visited the further reaches of Empire, preferring instead to remain in Europe, but he did stock his garden full of the flora and fauna of the imperial world, creating his own botanical microcosm of the Empire in his hothouse in Clapham. George’s villa was situated in a prime location close to Holy Trinity Church, where both the Hibberts and the Saints worshipped. It was under the ministry of Henry Venn, an ardent Evangelical and founding member of the Clapham Sect, whose son John went on to become rector in 1797; he was also involved in the abolition movement. Holy Trinity constituted a sacred space for the Saints; it was their spiritual home, a place in which their beliefs were formed and enacted. While there was no bar to the Hibberts using the church as a place of worship, one must wonder how the abolitionists felt about the presence of someone who was so publicly opposed to one of their most treasured principles. The social importance of church life can be read in a series of disputes which broke out between George and a Mr Dobree over who was the rightful claimant of a highly desirable pew; while the trustees wished to allocate the seats to George’s rival, he was able to prove his claim and the pew was duly awarded to him along with a further five seats at the back for his servants. The almost comical round of musical chairs played by the great and good of SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 15

SLAVERY

Clockwise from right: the plant Hibbertia, named after George Hibbert; Murillo’s The Marriage Feast at Cana, c.1665-75, which belonged to him; a catalogue of the sale of Hibbert’s book collection, 1829.

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Clapham Common’s Holy Trinity Church is indicative of the importance of the family’s visibility in the religious life of the community. Living a lifestyle which shadowed the Saints enabled George to demonstrate to the abolitionists the ways in which respectable middle-class families were supported and maintained by an engagement with the slave economy. Cultivating a genteel identity for himself was politically useful. George noted in his diary in 1816 that: ‘Mr. Wilberforce came to me in the House of Commons the other day purposely as he said to thank me for being the only one of his opponents who had treated him like a Gentleman.’

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ANGIBLE TRACES OF THE HIBBERTS can still be found in Clapham: George’s first son, also George, and his brother, William are buried in the churchyard at St Paul’s in Rectory Grove. They share the graveyard with a number of African children. In 1799 Zachary Macaulay had brought the children with him when he returned home after serving as the governor of Sierra Leone. In the years following their arrival most of the children died. They were interred in the same churchyard as George’s son and brother. While the Hibberts’ grave has lasted intact for over 200 years, nothing has survived to name, mark or commemorate the African children. Further down from St Paul’s, on Wandsworth Road, is the still operational Hibbert Almshouse. Erected by the daughters of William Hibbert, George’s brother, the building carries an inscription to the memory of their father, creating a lasting reputation for William as a benevolent philanthropist divorced from his involvement with slavery. The presence of the Hibberts in Clapham acts as a reminder that slave-based wealth was not simply generated and spent in the local areas we now associate most closely with the slavery business. As the work of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project has demonstrated, the

Monument of the late Thos. Hibbert Esq, in Jamaica, by James Hakewill, 1825.

profits of slavery infiltrated diverse geographic locations and a range of sectors of the British economy including, but by no means limited to, the cultural sphere. The house in Clapham was filled with all the trappings of mercantile gentility: luxurious furnishings, paintings and exquisite objects, a library and a garden renowned for its rare blooms. Abstracted in the elegance of the polite mercantile home, the profits from slavery were domesticated and remade as the signifiers of cultural connoisseurship, taste and status. The traces of the history of slave-ownership can be found throughout Britain. The weight of abolitionist memory might have served to obscure that presence but it is only one facet of the story of Britain’s involvement with slavery. Clapham’s ‘hidden history’ mirrors a wider national urge to remember the celebrated role Britain played in emancipation, while simultaneously forgetting an uncomfortable history of domestic participation. In order to move beyond telling stories that suppress the memory of slave-ownership, as well as remembering the Clapham Saints we must also recognise the sinners. It is only through an articulation of both sides of the history that Britain can come to terms with its role as both enslaver and abolitionist. Katie Donington is a Research Associate with the Antislavery Usable Past project at the University of Nottingham.

FURTHER READING Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slaveownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (Cambridge, 2010). Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington, Rachel Lang, Legacies of British Slave-ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2015).

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ISLAM

German officers and local leaders in Cyrenaica, Libya, September, 1942.

Muslims in Hitler’s War The Nazis believed that Islamic forces would prove crucial wartime allies. But, as David Motadel shows, the Muslim world was unwilling to be swayed by the Third Reich’s advances.

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UNIS, DECEMBER 19TH, 1942. It was the day of Eid al-Adha, the Islamic feast of sacrifice. The retreat of Rommel’s army had turned the city into a massive military camp. In the late afternoon, a German motorcade of four large cars drove at a slow, solemn pace along Tunis’ main road, the Avenue de Paris, leaving the capital in the direction of the coastal town of Hamman Lif. The convoy contained Colonel General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, commander of the Wehrmacht in Tunisia, Rudolf Rahn, Hitler’s consul in Tunis and the Reich’s highest civil representative in North Africa, and some other high-ranking Germans. They were to visit the Bey of Tunis, Muhammad VII al-Munsif, who had remained the nominal ruler of Tunisia, to offer him their good wishes for the sacred holiday and to show their respect for Islam. In front of the Winter Palace of Hamman Lif, hundreds of cheering people saluted the convoy; the Tunisian guard extended them an honorary welcome. In the conversations with the monarch, the Germans promised that the next Eid al-Adha, or Eid al-Kabir as it is known in Tunisia, would take place in a time of peace and that the Wehrmacht was doing everything it could to keep the war away from the Muslim population. More important than the consultations, though, was the Germans’ public show of respect for Islam. Back in his Tunis headquarters, Rahn enthusiastically cabled Berlin, urging it to make full propagandistic use of the ‘solemn reception’ at the ‘Eid al-Kabir celebration’. In the following days, Nazi propaganda spread the news across North Africa, portraying the Third Reich as the protector of Islam. SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 19

ISLAM

The cover of Der Islam, 1941.

At the height of the Second World War, in 1941-42, as Hitler’s troops marched into Muslim-populated territories in North Africa, the Balkans, Crimea and the Caucasus and approached the Middle East and Central Asia, officials in Berlin began to see Islam as politically significant. In the following years, they made significant attempts to promote an alliance with the ‘Muslim world’ against their alleged common enemies: the British Empire, the Soviet Union, America and Jews. Yet the reason for the Third Reich’s engagement with Islam was not only that Muslim-populated regions had become part of the warzones but also, more importantly, because at the same time, Germany’s military situation had deteriorated. In the Soviet Union, Hitler’s Blitzkrieg strategy had failed. As the Wehrmacht came under pressure, Berlin began to seek broader war coalitions, thereby demonstrating remarkable pragmatism. The courtship of Muslims was to pacify the occupied Muslim-populated territories and to mobilise the faithful to fight on the side of Hitler’s armies. German officials had increasingly engaged with Islam since the late 19th century, when the kaiser ruled over substantial Muslim populations in his colonies of Togo, Cameroon and German East Africa. Here, the Germans sought to employ religion as a tool of control. Sharia courts were recognised, Islamic endowments left untouched, madrasas kept open and religious holidays acknowledged. Colonial officials ruled through Islamic intermediaries who, in return, gave the colonial state legitimacy. In Berlin, Islam was moreover considered to offer an opportunity for exploitation in the context of Wilhelmine Weltpolitik. This became most obvious during the Middle Eastern tour of Wilhelm II in 1898 and in his dramatic speech, given after visiting the tomb of Saladin in Damascus, in which he declared himself a ‘friend’ of the world’s ‘300 million Mohammedans’ and, ultimately, in Berlin’s efforts to mobilise Muslims living in the British, French and Russian 20 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

Top: Muslim policemen in the German colony of Cameroon, 1891. Left: a parade at the end of Ramadan, Uraza Bairam, in Kislovodsk, October 11th, 1942.

empires during the First World War. Although all attempts to spread jihad in 1914 had failed, German strategists maintained a strong interest in the geopolitics of Islam. With the outbreak of the Second World War and the involvement of German troops in Muslim-populated regions, officials in Berlin began again to consider the strategic role of the Islamic world. A systematic instrumentalisation of Islam was first proposed in late 1941 in a memorandum by the diplomat Eberhard von Stohrer, Hitler’s former ambassador in Cairo. Stohrer suggested that there should be ‘an extensive Islam program’, which would include a statement about ‘the general attitude of the Third

discrimination in the 1930s, following diplomatic interventions from the governments in Tehran, Ankara and Cairo. During the war the Germans showed similar pragmatism when encountering Muslims from the Balkans and the Turkic minorities of the Soviet Union. Muslims, it was clear to every German officer from the Sahara to the Caucasus, were to be treated as allies.

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Reich towards Islam’. Between late 1941 and late 1942 the Foreign Office set up an Islam program, which included the employment of religious figures, most prominently the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, who arrived in Berlin in late 1941. On December 18th, 1942 the Nazis inaugurated the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin, which became a hub of Germany’s propaganda efforts in the Islamic world; the party organ, the Völkischer Beobachter, ran a headline promising, ‘This War Could Bring Freedom to Islam!’ As the war progressed and German troops moved into Muslim areas in the Balkans and in the Soviet Union, other branches of the Nazi state followed up on these policies.

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ERMAN OFFICIALS tended to view Muslim populations under the rubric of ‘Islam’. An advantage of using Islam rather than ethno-national categories was that Berlin could avoid the thorny issue of national independence. Moreover, religion seemed to be a useful policy and propaganda tool to address ethnically, linguistically and socially heterogeneous populations. The Germans saw Islam as a source of authority that could legitimise involvement in a conflict and even justify violence. In terms of racial barriers, the regime showed remarkable pragmatism: (Non-Jewish) Turks, Iranians and Arabs had already been explicitly exempted from any official racial

German armoured personnel carriers in a Bosnian Muslim village, 1944.

N THE GROUND in North Africa, in contact with the coastal populations, army officials tried to avoid frictions. As early as 1941, the Wehrmacht distributed the handbook Der Islam to train the troops in correct behaviour towards Muslims. In the Libyan and Egyptian desert, German authorities courted religious dignitaries, most importantly the shaykhs of the influential Sufi orders. The problem was that the most powerful religious force in the Cyrenaican warzone, the Islamic Sanusi order, was the spearhead of the anti-colonial resistance against Italian rule and fought alongside Montgomery’s army against the Axis. In any case, Berlin’s promises to liberate the Muslims and protect Islam stood in sharp contrast to the violence and destruction that the war had brought to North Africa and the Germans ultimately failed to incite a major Muslim pro-Axis movement in the region. On the Eastern Front the situation was very different. The Muslims of Crimea and the North Caucasus had confronted the central state ever since the tsarist annexation in the 18th and 19th centuries and the Bolshevist takeover had worsened the situation. Under Stalin, the Muslim areas suffered unprecedented political and religious persecution. Islamic literature was censored, sharia law banned and the property of the Islamic communities expropriated. Party cadres took over mosques, painted Soviet slogans on their walls, hoisted red flags on their minarets and chased pigs through their sacred halls. Still, Islam continued to play a crucial role in shaping social and political life. After the invasion of the Caucasus and Crimea, German military authorities, eager to find local collaborators to stabilise the volatile rear areas, did not miss the opportunity to present themselves as the liberators of Islam. General Ewald von Kleist, commander of Army Group A, which occupied the Caucasus, urged his officers to respect the Muslims and to be aware of the pan-Islamic implications of the Wehrmacht’s actions: ‘Among all of the German Army Groups, Army Group A has advanced the furthest. We stand at the gates to the Islamic world. What we do, and how we behave here will radiate deep into Iraq, to India, as far as to the borders of China. We must constantly be aware of the longrange effect of our actions and inactions.’ Similar orders were issued by General Erich von Manstein in Crimea. In his infamous order of November 20th, 1941, which demanded that ‘the Jewish-Bolshevist system be exterminated once and for all’ and which became one of the key documents used by his prosecution at Nuremberg after the war, Manstein urged his troops to treat the Muslim population well: ‘Respect for religious customs of the Mohammedan Tartars must be demanded.’ In their attempt to control the strategically sensitive rear areas, the Germans made extensive use of religious policies. They ordered the rebuilding of mosques, prayer halls and madrasas and the re-establishment of religious holidays. In the Caucasus, they staged massive celebrations at the end of Ramadan in 1942, of which the most SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 21

ISLAM notable was in the Karachai city of Kislovodsk. Under Soviet rule, the Muslims of Kislovodsk had not openly observed Eid al-Fitr and the celebration became a key marker of difference between Soviet and German rule. Attended by a large delegation of high-ranking Wehrmacht generals, it included prayers, speeches and exchanges of gifts; the Germans had brought captured weapons and Qurans. In the centre of Kislovodsk, a parade of Karachai horsemen was organised. Behind the honorary tribune for Muslim leaders and Wehrmacht officers, an oversized, open papier-mâché Quran was arranged, displaying two pious quotations

The attitudes of Nazi officials towards the Muslim population cooled the longer the occupation period lasted in Arabic script. On the right-hand page there was the shahada, the statement of faith: ‘There is no god but Allah/ Muhammad is his Prophet’ (La ilaha illa Allah/Muhammadan rasul Allah). On the left was the popular Quranic verse (61:13): ‘Help [comes] from Allah/and a nigh victory’ (Nasr min Allah/Wa fath qarib). Nailed above the Quran was an enormous wooden Reich eagle with a swastika. In Crimea the Germans even established an Islamic administration, the so-called ‘Muslim Committees’. In the end, the hopes for freedom among the Muslims of the Soviet borderlands were shattered. The attitudes of Nazi officials towards the Muslim population cooled the longer the occupation period lasted. Ordinary German soldiers, influenced by propaganda defaming the Asiatic peoples of the Soviet Union as subhumans, were not prepared for dealing with Muslims. Even worse, after the German retreat, Stalin accused the Muslim minorities of collective collaboration with the enemy and ordered their deportation.

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THE SITUATION IN THE BALKANS was different again. When the Germans invaded and dissolved Yugoslavia in 1941, they initially did not get involved in the Muslimpopulated regions, most importantly Bosnia and Herzegovina, which came under the control of the newly founded Croatian Ustaša state. The Ustaša regime, led by Hitler’s puppet dictator Ante Pavelić, officially tried to court its Muslim subjects, while murdering Jews and Roma and persecuting Orthodox Serbs. From early 1942, however, the region became increasingly engulfed in a severe conflict between the Croatian regime, Tito’s Communist partisans and Dragoljub ‘Draža’ Mihailović’s Orthodox Serbian Četniks, who were fighting for a greater Serbia. The Muslim population was repeatedly attacked by all three parties. Ustaša authorities employed Muslim army units to fight both Tito’s partisans and Četnik militias. Soon, Muslim villages became the object of retaliatory attacks. The number of Muslim victims grew to the tens of thousands. Ustaša authorities did little to prevent these massacres. Leading Muslim representatives turned to the Germans for help, asking for Muslim autonomy under Hitler’s protection. In a memorandum of November 1st, 1942 they professed their ‘love and loyalty’ for the Führer and offered to fight with the Axis against ‘Judaism, Freemasonry, Bolshevism, and the English exploiters’. Officials in Berlin were thrilled. As the civil war in the Balkans spun out of control, the Germans became more and more involved in the Muslimpopulated areas. In their attempts to pacify the region, the Wehrmacht and, more importantly, the SS saw the Muslims as welcome allies and promoted Nazi Germany as a protector of Islam in South-eastern Europe. The campaign began in Spring 1943, when the SS sent the Mufti of Jerusalem on a tour to Zagreb, Banja Luka and Sarajevo, where he met religious leaders and gave pro-Axis speeches. When visiting the grand Gazi Husrev Beg Mosque in Sarajevo, he gave such an emotional speech about Muslim suffering

Below: a damaged mosque in North Africa, 1942. Bottom: German soldiers talk to a Muslim woman in Mostar, Herzegovina, 1944.

that parts of the audience burst into tears. In the following months the Germans launched a massive campaign of religiously charged propaganda. At the same time, they began to engage more closely with Islamic dignitaries and institutions, as they believed that religious leaders wielded most influence on the people. Muslims were formally under the authority of the highest religious council, the Ulema-Medžlis, and Nazi officials repeatedly consulted with its members and tried to co-opt them. Many Islamic leaders hoped that the Germans would help them found a Muslim state. Soon, however, it became clear that the Wehrmacht and the SS were not able to pacify the region; at the same time, the

German support for the Muslim population fuelled partisan and Četnik hatred against them. Violence escalated. In the end, a quarter of a million Muslims died in the conflict. AS THE TIDE of war turned against the Axis from 1941 onwards, the Wehrmacht and the SS recruited tens of thousands of Muslims, among them Bosnians, Crimean Tatars and Muslims from the Caucasus and Central Asia – mainly to save German blood. Muslim soldiers fought on all fronts, they were deployed in Stalingrad, Warsaw and in the defence of Berlin. German army officers granted these recruits a wide range of religious concessions, taking into account the Islamic calendar and religious laws, such as dietary requirements. They even lifted the ban on ritual slaughter, a practice that had been prohibited for antisemitic reasons by Hitler’s ‘Law for the Protection of Animals’ of 1933. A prominent role in the units was played by military imams, who were responsible not only for spiritual care but also for political indoctrination. When speaking to Nazi functionaries about the recruitment of Muslims into the SS in 1944, Himmler explained that the support of Islam had simple pragmatic reasons: ‘I don’t have anything against Islam, because it educates men in this division for me and promises them paradise when they have fought and been killed in combat. A practical and attractive religion for soldiers!’ After the war, many Muslims who had fought in German units, especially those from the Soviet Union and Balkans, faced gruesome retaliation.

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HE GERMANS’ engagement with Muslims was by no means straightforward. Nazi policies towards Islam, as worked out by bureaucrats in Berlin, regularly clashed with the realities on the ground. In the first months after the invasion of the Soviet Union, SS squads executed thousands of Muslims, specifically prisoners of war, on the assumption that their circumcision proved that they were Jewish. A high-level meeting of the Wehrmacht, the SS and the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories was held in the summer of 1941, in which Colonel Erwin von Lahousen, who represented Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Wehrmacht intelligence, became embroiled in a fierce argument with Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, the infamous ‘Gestapo-Müller’, about these executions. In particular the selection of hundreds of Muslim Tatars who had been sent for ‘special treatment’ because they were taken for Jews, was brought up. Müller calmly acknowledged that the SS had made some mistakes in this respect. It was the first time, he claimed, that he had heard that Muslims, too, were circumcised. A few weeks later, Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s chief of the SS Reich Security Head Office, sent out a directive cautioning the SS Task Forces to be more careful: ‘The circumcision and Jewish appearance do not constitute sufficient proof of Jewish descent.’ Muslims were not to be confused with Jews. In Muslim-populated areas, other characteristics, like names, were to be taken into account. SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 23

ISLAM

I

N THE SOUTHERN BORDERLANDS of the Soviet Union, however, Nazi killing squads still had difficulties distinguishing Muslims from Jews. When the Einsatzgruppe D began murdering the Jewish population of the Caucasus and Crimea, it encountered a special situation with regard to three Jewish communities which had long lived closely alongside the Muslim population and were influenced by Islamic culture: the Karaites and Krymchaks in the Crimea and the Judeo-Tats, also known as ‘Mountain Jews’, in the northern Caucasus. In Crimea, SS officials were puzzled when encountering the Turkic-speaking Karaites and Krymchaks. Visiting Simferopol in December 1941, two Wehrmacht officers, Oberkriegsverwaltungsrat Fritz Donner and Major Ernst Seifert, reported that it was interesting to note that: ‘A large part of these Jews on the Crimea is of Mohammedan faith, while there were also Near Eastern racial groups of a non-Semitic character, who, strangely, have adopted the Jewish faith.’ The confusion among the Germans about the classification of Karaites and Krymchaks, which were, in fact, both Jewish communities, was striking. In the end, the Karaites were classified as ethnically Turkic and spared, while the Krymchaks were considered ethnically Jewish and killed. According to Walter Groß, head of the NSDAP Race Office, the Karaites were excluded from persecution because of their close relations with allied Muslim Tatars. In the Caucasus, representatives of the Judeo-Tats, a minority of Iranian ancestry, took their case to the German authorities. The SS started investigations, visiting houses, attending celebrations and enquiring into the customs of the community. SS-Oberfüher Walther Bierkamp, then head of Einsatzgruppe D, personally visited a village of the ‘mountain Jews’ in the Nalchik area. During this visit, the Judeo-Tats were extremely hospitable and Bierkamp found that, aside from their religion, they had nothing in common with Jews. At the same time, he recognised Islamic influence, as the Tats also practiced polygamous relationships. Bierkamp swiftly gave the order that these peoples were not to be harmed and that, in place of ‘Mountain Jews’, the term ‘Tats’ had to be used. In other war zones, too, Nazi authorities and their local helpers faced difficulties in distinguishing between Jews and Muslims, particularly in the Balkans. The privileged position of Muslims (and indeed Catholics) in the Ustaša state seemed, to many Jews, to offer an opportunity to avoid persecution. Soon, many tried to escape repression and deportation through official conversion to Islam. In Sarajevo alone, around 20 per cent of the Jewish population is estimated to have converted to Islam or Catholicism between April and October 1941; given their circumcision, many found Islam to be the easier option. In the autumn of 1941, Ustaša authorities finally intervened, prohibiting these conversions, and even those who had converted were still not safe from persecution as it was race, not religion, which defined Jewishness in the eyes of German and Ustaša bureaucrats. Still, a number of converted and non-converted Jews managed to flee the country disguised as Muslims; some of them – women and men – wearing the Islamic veil. Finally, the murder of Europe’s Gypsies involved Muslims directly. As the Germans began screening the occupied territories of the Soviet Union they soon encountered many Muslim Roma. In fact, the majority of the Roma in Crimea were Islamic. They had, for centuries, 24 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

In the southern borderlands of the Soviet Union, Nazi killing squads still had difficulties distinguishing Muslims from Jews

Muslim women return to their ruined village in the Bosnian mountains, 1943.

assimilated with the Tatars, who now showed remarkable solidarity with them. Muslim representatives sent numerous petitions to the Germans to ask for the protection of their Roma co-religionists. Backed by the Tatars, many Muslim Roma pretended to be Tatars to escape deportation. Some used Islam. One example was the round up of Roma in Simferopol in December 1941, when those captured tried to use religious symbols to convince the Germans that their arrest was a mistake. An eyewitness noted in his diary: The gypsies arrived en masse on carriages at the Talmud-Thora Building. For some reason, they raised a green flag, the symbol of Islam, and put a mullah at the head of their procession. The gypsies tried to convince the Germans that they were not gypsies; some claimed to be Tatars, others to be Turkmens. But their protests were disregarded and they were all put into the great building. In the end, many Muslim Roma were murdered, but as the Germans had trouble distinguishing Muslim Roma from Muslim Tatars, some – an estimated 30 per cent – survived. During his interrogation at the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Trial, when asked about the persecution of Gypsies in Crimea, Ohlendorf explained that the screening had been complicated by the fact that many Roma had shared the same religion with the Crimean Tatars: ‘That was the difficulty, because some of the gypsies – if not all of them – were Muslims, and for that reason we attached a great

amount of importance to the issue to not getting into difficulties with the Tartars and, therefore, people were employed in this task who knew the places and the people.’ Muslims in the Balkans, too, were affected by the persecution of the Roma, as there were many Roma of the Islamic faith. When the Germans and their Ustaša allies began persecuting the Roma population, they initially also targeted the largely settled Muslim Roma of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the so-called ‘white gypsies’. In the summer of 1941 Muslim Roma complained to the Islamic religious authorities about their discrimination. A delegation of leading Muslim representatives petitioned the authorities that Muslim Roma should be considered part of the Muslim community and that any attack on them would be considered an attack on the Islamic community itself. Eager to court Muslims, Ustaša and German officials eventually excluded Muslim Roma from persecution and deportation. When launching their pro-Muslim policies, German bureaucrats had not considered that the (religiously defined) population group (‘Muslims’) they tried to win as allies could overlap with (racially defined) population groups (‘Jews’ and ‘Roma’) that were to be persecuted. In the last months of the war, holed up in the Berlin bunker, Hitler lamented that the attempts of the Third Reich to mobilise the Muslim world had failed because they had not been strong enough. ‘All Islam vibrated at the news of our victories and the Muslims were ready to rise in revolt’, he told his secretary, Martin Bormann. A movement could have been incited in North Africa that would have spilled over to the rest of the Muslim world. ‘Just think what we could have done to help them, even to incite them, as would have been both our duty and our interest!’ In the end, German attempts to find Muslim allies were less successful than the strategists in Berlin had hoped. They had been launched too late and had clashed too often with the violent realities of the war. More importantly, the Third Reich’s claims that it protected the faithful lacked credibility, as most Muslims in the war zones were aware that they served profane political interests. The Germans also failed to incite a major Muslim uprising against the Allies. Although tens of thousands of Muslims were recruited into the German armies, in the end the British, French, and Soviets were more successful in mobilising their Muslim populations: hundreds of thousands fought in their armies against Hitler’s Germany. From French North Africa alone, almost a quarter of a million Muslims enlisted in de Gaulle’s forces, taking part in the liberation of Europe. David Motadel is Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and Research Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge and the author of Islam and Nazi Germany's War (Harvard, 2014).

FURTHER READING

Top: SS recruits from Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1943. Above: German soldiers and Muslims in Sarajevo after the fall of Yugoslavia, 1941.

David Motadel, ‘The Muslim World in the Second World War’, in Richard Bosworth and Joe Maiolo (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Second World War, Vol. 2: Politics and Ideology (Cambridge, 2015). Marko Attila Hoare, The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War: A History (Hurst, 2013). Klaus Gensicke, The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis: The Berlin Years, 1941-1945 (Vallentine Mitchell, 2011). SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 25

InFocus

The Crystal Palace Resurrected

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HE CRYSTAL PALACE RISES AGAIN on Sydenham Hill, south of London, in 1853-4, one of a series of photographs taken by Philip Henry Delamotte. After housing the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park the structure has been sold for £70,000 to the new Crystal Palace Company, which is employing 7,000 men to re-erect its identical, standardised cast-iron sections and create the surrounding gardens. They will then cover the sections once more in glass, using, as before, ‘glazing wagons’ whose wheels run along the gutters, carrying the glaziers, their tools and materials. The area in which the two stovepipe-hatted men stand is called the open colonnade, since it has a roof but no glass in the iron side-frames. The Palace cost £150,000 in 1851 but by the time work at Sydenham was complete, £1.3 million had been spent, some £800,000 over budget. It now had five rather than three floors and curved-roof transepts north and south to accompany the original central one, which itself had been added to avoid having to cut down three large Hyde Park elms, in response to a public outcry. Much of the extra expense was down to the elaborate gardens with their terracing and fountains (12,000 jets of water in all), statuary, maze and (inaccurate) life-size models of dinosaurs. There were also two 284-ft-high brick water towers designed by Brunel. Inside there was a concert hall, complete with vast organ, and Pugin’s original 1851 fine art Medieval Court was now joined by Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Pompeian, Moorish, Byzantine, Renaissance, Indian and Chinese ones, full of plaster casts of sculpture collected round the world by Owen Jones. The expensive grounds were the brainchild of the great gardener Sir Joseph Paxton, who had first come up with the idea for the Palace, based on the ‘Giant Stove’, the huge greenhouse that he had built for his employer, the 6th Duke of Devonshire, at Chatsworth in the 1840s. The ridgeand-furrow roofing system, which can be seen clearly at the top of the photograph and in the background forming the curved transept roof, was a particular invention of his but it never really caught on; it was not until the 20th century that the Palace came to be seen as a model of what could be done in the way of a functional, modular glass-and-metal structure. Predictably the architectural establishment at the time was jealous of him for his originality and his success. Once the thousands of workmen were finished at Sydenham, Paxton arranged for them to go out to the Crimea and build roads for the army besieging Sevastopol. Later he was very much the driving force behind the

26 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

The extra expense was down to the elaborate gardens, statuary, maze and (inaccurate) life-size models of dinosaurs

building of the Thames Embankment and the West-East sewer alongside it, when not designing country houses for the Rothschilds in England and France. The Company never really recovered from the overspending at Sydenham, although Londoners flocked for entertainment and relaxation via a specially built railway line to this, the first theme park. On Sundays, the one day when

the working man might have come with his family, it was closed. It still had two million visitors a year, with concerts, rallies, mass meetings, and Brocks’ firework displays every Thursday. The Company finally went bankrupt in 1909 and the Palace was then bought for the nation, only to burn down in 1936.

ROGER HUDSON

SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 27

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Aleksander Stamboliski and the Bulgarian Contract Bulgaria suffered a swift and devastating defeat in the First World War, due, G.D. Sheppard argues, to its peasant leader-in-waiting’s shrewd use of propaganda. BULGARIA WAS THE last country to enter the First World War on the side of the Central Powers, in 1915. In 1918 it became the first to capitulate. Bulgaria’s sudden military collapse was significant in that it both presaged and probably hastened the defeat of its more powerful allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary. After three years of trench stalemate in Macedonia, a multinational Entente force launched the Vardar offensive on September 14th, 1918. It swept through the Bulgarian lines, putting its army to flight, leading to the country’s capitulation within two weeks. The war was over within two more months. With the opposing forces on the front at roughly equal numbers, the Bulgarian army’s collapse of 1918 has until now been attributed largely to war-weariness, poor morale and a shortage of food and clothing. It turns out that there may be more to its poor performance than that. Two British officers, prisoners of the Bulgarians, were witnesses to an act of shrewd political propaganda by a man waiting for his chance to seize power, Aleksander Stamboliski, the charismatic leader of the peasants’ party, the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU). Fearless, barrel-chested and black-haired, Stamboliski was born in a Bulgarian village in 1879 to a peasant farmer of ten hectares. Running away from home to gain an education, he joined the newly formed Agrarian Union and began to develop its political ideology, neither socialist nor communist but dedicated to furthering the lives of his fellow Balkan peasants. It placed Stamboliski and his party at odds with the country’s ruling faction, headed by Ferdinand I, a Viennese-born aristocrat elected tsar in 1887. In the Balkan war of 1912, in alliance with its neighbouring states, Bulgaria had revolted against the long rule of the Ottoman Empire. The Balkan allies expelled the Turks from 28 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

much of the peninsula. This success, however, was short lived, as the fledgling states began warring among each other over disputed territories, Macedonia being chief among them. In 1913 Bulgaria was out-manoeuvred and defeated by Serbia and Greece. In a short space of time Bulgaria had won and then lost the coveted Macedonia. The fighting of 1912 and 1913 had cost Bulgaria dearly in both lives and money and the government of Ferdinand was not keen to become embroiled in the resulting war between the great powers. For a year Bulgaria remained neutral, courted by both sides. In October 1915, however, Ferdinand was eventually persuaded to join the Central Powers with the promise of regaining Macedonia. Stamboliski, an opponent of the war with Entente sympathies, had the temerity to quarrel violently with Ferdinand over the issue and was imprisoned as a result. Prison gossip Initially the war went extremely well for Bulgaria. Attacked on two fronts, Serbia was rapidly overrun and Macedonia regained. Too late to be effective, Entente forces were shipped in via Salonika and sent north towards the Macedonian front in an effort to meet up with their Serbian allies. Outnumbered, British troops were badly mauled in the snow and rugged terrain and forced to retreat to the Greek border. Among those wounded and taken prisoner by the Bulgarians in December 1915 were two young British lieutenants, D.J. Cowan and R.G. Howe. Somehow escaping death by frostbite or disease, they spent the next three years making increasingly audacious attempts to escape. Incurring the fury of their captors for doing so, they were punished by transfer from one Bulgarian prison camp to another. The regimes varied greatly: one camp was little more than a typhus-ridden killing ground. But throughout 1918 the two

Barrel-chested: Aleksander Stamboliski, 1900.

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‘It was common talk that the men definitely did not intend to carry on after the three year limit had been reached’ friends’ final place of captivity, in the north-central town of Sevlievo, was far from being a prison. Entering into a gentlemen’s agreement with the local commander, they were given virtual freedom, provided they agreed to not escape. Both men had a gift for languages and, with Cowan’s previous experience as a medical student, they set up their own dental practice, mainly pulling rotten teeth. This peculiar captivity afforded them a perhaps unique position to hear intelligence from all stratas of society. After the war’s end and their release both men joined the British diplomatic service. However, they rarely again met and it was quite separately that they wrote of what they

had heard among Bulgarians during the year of 1918. In 1931 Cowan wrote via the Foreign Office to the British official war historian Cyril Falls, then compiling his second volume of the Macedonian campaign. Cowan summed up what Bulgarians everywhere had told him: Our contract with the Germans is for three years and for three years only. And at the end of that time we will be replaced on the front by German troops and the Bulgarian army will be demobilised to its peace-time strength. Cowan added: It was common talk … not advanced as a rumour but as a statement of fact ... In early September 1918 I was told ... that the men definitely did not intend to carry on after the three year limit had been reached. Cowan could not recall the precise date that was fixed in the minds of the soldiers, but thought it may have been somehow linked to Bulgarian mobilisation (variously recorded as September 22nd or 24th, 1915) and more or less SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 29

| STAMBOLISKI

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coincided with the Vardar offensive (September 15th-29th, 1918). He had no doubt that the bulk of the Bulgarian army ‘simply left the front with the intention of returning home’.

Overthrown: the crowd at Sofia following the coup that deposed Stamboliski, 1923.

Rise and fall Despite Cowan’s keen offer to discuss the matter, he and Falls appear not to have met. In his 1935 volume Falls makes only the briefest of references to rumours of a contract and attributes them to ‘gossip of the rest-camp and dugout’: this despite the fact that Falls also records an incident where retreating Bulgarian officers had explained to the mayor of a town near Strumica that the troops had anticipated the contract’s end by three days. Nor did Falls mention Cowan also explaining that he had initially presumed the contract to be a piece of Entente propaganda. Staying on in Bulgaria for a further six months after his release and serving with military intelligence, he had learned that it was not so. Nor did Falls refer to Cowan returning as a diplomat to Sofia in 1929, where he was told by Bulgarians that the contract story had stemmed from the by then dead Stamboliski. Falls may not have dealt with the contract so lightly had

he consulted Cowan’s fellow prisoner, R.G. Howe. In retirement in the 1970s, Sir Robert Howe wrote an unpublished autobiography describing his rise from the son of a Derby rail-worker to becoming governor-general of Sudan. He also described hearing in 1918 of the contract. The soldiers had the same answer, he explained: ‘Always the same, “do we know when the war will end, it will end next September”. Always the same word – contract.’ But Howe had yet more evidence to supply. Remarkably, he also described meeting Stamboliski himself at the royal palace in Belgrade in early 1923, only months before the Bulgarian leader’s assassination. After defeat in the First World War, Ferdinand had abdicated in favour of his son. The Agrarian party had swept to power on a tide of popular support and Stamboliski had become prime minister. In Belgrade Howe queued with other foreign diplomats waiting for an audience with the visiting Bulgarian leader: 30 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

On being introduced I spoke to him in my best Bulgarian and he expressed surprise. We had a long talk and I told him something of my experience as a prisoner of war and I told him about ‘the contract’. He smiled hugely and said ‘You are quite right – I did that’, and he told me how he did it. In prison he concocted the story of the contract and through his agents in the party spread it throughout the army. Howe noted: ‘As an example of psychological warfare this has seemed to me without parallel.’ He made a good point. Stamboliski knew the wants and desires of his own people absolutely; the overwhelming majority of Bulgarians were peasant farmers who cared little for war or politics. Appealing to their desire to return home, the contract was a simple and yet masterful piece of propaganda. Beset with economic problems, crippling war reparations and surrounded by internal enemies, Stamboliski’s peasant government proved short-lived. In June 1923 he was overthrown, tortured and killed by, among others, IMRO, a Macedonian terrorist group who considered him a traitor who had signed away Bulgarian territory as the price for peace. Today, however, Stamboliski is something of a Bulgarian national hero. The tiny house in which he was born is preserved as a museum. Nevertheless, perhaps due to the decades of Bulgarian conflict and political turbulence that followed his assassination, knowledge of the contract and its hidden origins almost died with him. Propaganda for peace Just how important was Stamboliski’s contract in Bulgaria’s capitulation? By the summer of 1918 the Bulgarian army was in a parlous state and in no position effectively to resist a concerted attack. But it is often said that morale is all important in war and the evidence produced here indicates that a widely held belief in the contract had indeed undermined the Bulgarian army’s willingness to continue and was a significant factor in the country’s defeat. As to the human cost, though many Bulgarian soldiers were killed in retreat, there can be little doubt that more lives would have been lost on both sides had they held their ground and fought. Another result was Bulgarian territory escaping much of the ravages of invasion. An ignominious defeat also ensured the end of Ferdinand’s reign, another Stamboliski aim. But what of the contract’s impact on the wider conflict in Europe? At the time of Bulgaria’s capitulation its allies were already in full retreat on all fronts; so the Macedonian front cannot be said to be a deciding factor in the First World War. Although it was the catalyst of the Great War, the Balkan conflict had rapidly become a sideshow. Nonetheless, Bulgaria’s sudden fall left its neighbouring ally Turkey isolated from Germany and Austria-Hungary and placed an even greater pressure on the governments of the Central Powers to seek an armistice; having your allies capitulate at a time of crisis cannot fail to have an effect. During this late period the war was still inflicting huge numbers of casualties (as many as 10,000 on the final day). If the contract and Bulgaria’s sudden exit hastened the end by a only few days or weeks, an evidenced assertion, then it probably prevented many thousands of further deaths. G.D. Sheppard is a civil servant based in London.

SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 31

MakingHistory Poorly paid and treated with contempt, the plight of early career researchers in the humanities is the result of a systemic betrayal of a generation of academics, argues Mathew Lyons.

The great betrayal SUPPORTERS OF THE status quo in higher education are about as common as authentic autographs from Abu Qatada. Yet I am not sure many of those who have attacked successive governments for the short-sightedness of their policies are aware of how systemic the problems are. Let us look, for example, at those at the very beginning of their careers. One of the great pleasures of my role as a public historian is getting to meet PhD students and early career researchers in both History and the broader humanities. Their intelligence, creativity, ambition, energy and dedication is extraordinary and leaves me, for one, deeply humbled. It also leaves me acutely aware of my good fortune in having been born a couple of decades earlier, because today it takes a brave person to undertake postgraduate study in the humanities – and then to seek a career in academia – without the security of a private income, or rich parents, or, more commonly, both. Increasingly, early-career researchers are offered only poorly paid ninemonth teaching contracts. They receive little or no support from their faculties. Indeed, in many cases they are essentially non-people within the faculty, denied access to office space, telephones, email addresses and all the other facilities one might take for granted in any other organisation. They are offered no career development or pastoral support either. Naturally, because many if not most academics disdain teaching themselves, these young historians receive little or no pedagogical training. Which is doubly a shame, because most are far more committed to providing a high-quality education to their students than many of their supposed superiors. 32 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

These people represent the future of the academy, if there is such a thing, but not only are they invisible within their faculties, they are invisible within academia. They appear to be – and often are – invisible tout court to administrators and academics alike, who prefer to pretend they do not exist, because to admit there is a problem might require them to do something about it. Frozen out: bikes parked in Cambridge.

To what end has such a system developed? No end. That is what is most contemptible about it As with the introduction of student fees, there is something deeply nauseating about a generation which benefited from free education to degree level and generous support into postgraduate study denying precisely those same opportunities to their children. This is not a new phenomenon. There are none who guard their position in society so jealously as the nouveau riche.

By the time the second term of the early-career researcher’s contract begins their minds will be focused on gaining the next nine-month job. It is an intellectual environment in which publication, that perverse desiderata of today’s academic world, becomes almost impossible. Never mind the fact that publication in a ‘good’ journal can take up to 18 months. Again and again, talking to earlycareer researchers, I hear the same stories. Four moves in five years. Five moves in seven. Young academics are expected to uproot repeatedly, often internationally, too, in order to maintain the hope of a career. For most, this is destructive of their personal lives and their ability to develop research that will help them progress. For some, who have families or other dependents to care for, it is impossible. Then there is the money. As a Univerity and College Union survey recently revealed, over 40 per cent of higher education and further education staff on short-term or zero-hour contracts have struggled to pay bills. Some 30 per cent earn less than £1,000 a month. This is in a sector where the average senior academic salary in the UK for 2013-14 was £82,545 for men (women averaged £10k less). It is a sector in which the amount spent on administration – £4.7bn – dwarfs that spent on the humanities at £0.9bn. To what end has such a system developed? No end. That is what is most contemptible about it. To save a little money, perhaps. More generally, to satisfy some well-paid administrators and civil servants that all is well, when all the evidence that cannot be fed into Excel spreadsheets suggests that the opposite is true. Mathew Lyons is author of The Favourite: Ralegh and His Queen (Constable & Robinson, 2011).

SCOTLAND

Why were there no Levellers in Scotland?

The Humble Petition of Jock of Braid, English engraving on a Scottish theme, 1648.

Laura Stewart asks why popular politics has been largely absent from studies of the Scottish revolution of the 17th century, yet is thought crucial to our understanding of the Civil Wars in England and Wales.

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HEN A SCOTTISH HISTORIAN gives a lecture on what was formerly known as ‘the English Civil War’, one of the questions students ask is: why were there no Levellers in 17th-century Scotland? For some Scottish historians, this can be irksome. It looks on the surface to be une question mal posée: it tells us little about early modern Scottish society – and not much about Levellers – to ask why a phenomenon that was seemingly unique to England did not make an appearance somewhere else. The question speaks to that now outdated determinist historical narrative, still commonplace in popular histories and on television, in which the putatively democratic and secularising ideals espoused by the Levellers foreshadowed England’s emergence as ‘the first modern society’. By failing to produce any Levellers, 17th-century Scotland demonstrated that it was an essentially backward society, whose people had to await

the liberating effects of full union with England before acquiring the wherewithal to stand up to their over-mighty magnates and tyrannising clerics. The question also touches one of the assertions of the ‘new British history’ that flourished at the end of the 20th century. If the Civil Wars were a single integrated crisis, as John Morrill has averred, it would be reasonable to assume that the unprecedented ‘intermingling of peoples’ that occurred in this decade also included some cross-fertilisation of ideas. London’s printing presses were churning out material that could have been accessed almost as readily by the inhabitants of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, as those of York, Norwich and Bristol. Could the radical ideas expressed in English publications have taken hold north of the border? After all, Scotland’s history, culture, politics, religion, social structures and institutions, although distinctive, shared broad similarities with England’s. SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 33

SCOTLAND More importantly, Scots could read English publications and vice-versa. Yet important recent work by, among others, Philip Baker and Eliot Vernon, Michael Braddick and Rachel Foxley, suggests that the distinctively English historical narratives that underpinned the radical ideas of this decade – the Norman Yoke, Magna Carta, the Common Law tradition represented by Edward Coke’s Institutes, the Petition of Right – would have made them difficult for Scots to appropriate. The unilateral decision made by Englishmen in January 1649 to execute the man who also happened to be Scotland’s king and the subsequent conquest of the country by Cromwell’s New Model Army further tarnished English radicalism north of the border. This is evidenced by responses to the introduction of religious toleration. Many Scots probably went to gawp at English preachers who, like Conservative Cabinet ministers today, were an intriguing novelty in their midst, but most ultimately opted to remain with their own congregations.

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E MIGHT nonetheless ponder why 17thcentury Scots do not appear to have developed their own radical agendas for law reform, expansion of the franchise and religious change. Nearly 40 years ago David Stevenson wrestled with this matter in what remains the definitive political study of Civil War Scotland. His conclusion was that the deferential, hierarchical nature of Scottish society obstructed the emergence of popular radical movements. The power that Scotland’s feudal landowners wielded over their tenants, in combination with the control exerted by presbyterian clerics over their parishioners, not only prevented the Scottish people expressing new ideas, but also inhibited them from thinking them. Although Stevenson demonstrated that a ‘revolution’ had taken place in Scotland by 1641, he suggested that it was limited by two facts: it was fundamentally religious in origin and constitutional rather than socio-political in nature. There was simply no space in Scotland for the emergence of the kind of secularising, democratising movements that were regarded in the 1970s as essential aspects of the revolution in England. It is unlikely that hitherto unknown cells of Scottish radicals are waiting to be discovered. This does not mean that there is either nothing to find or to be gained by investigating popular political engagement. On the contrary, one of the exciting things about studying the Civil War period is that, as in England, we can see how a political crisis opened up opportunities for ordinary people to shape public events. Both men and women took part in the Prayer Book riots of 1637 and thousands of people signed the National Covenant of 1638. What was the significance of their participation? Were they simply instruments wielded by the nobles and clerics who would come to dominate Scottish politics? THE SCOTS STARTED the Civil Wars. Charles I, trying too hard to complete James VI’s unfinished work of bringing the Scottish church into line with the English model, sought to impose a Prayer Book on a Protestant people who were convinced it was but one step removed from the Roman Catholic Mass. Riots ensued. When the combination of popular disturbances and a public petitioning campaign failed to have the desired effect of persuading Charles to drop his plan, the organisers of these events were forced to raise the stakes. The 1638 Covenant, by banding the Scottish 34 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

An illuminated copy of the Scottish Covenant, signed around September 1639 to mark the defection to the cause of Lord George Gordon, son of the Royalist peer, the Marquis of Huntly.

people together with one another and with God, aimed to mobilise popular support and make good the claim that defence of ‘true religion’ was not a cloak worn by a seditious faction, but the profession of a nation united. Charles preferred the first interpretation. Emboldened by the fact that he could call upon the resources of his other kingdoms, he began preparing a military solution to the Scottish problem. Waging war on his own people turned out to be a fatal miscalculation: it not only galvanised the Scots behind the fight for national self-preservation, but also divided the English. Many were persuaded that, at a time when Catholic armies were on the march in Europe, the king of Britain had better things to be doing than attacking godly Protestants who also happened to be his subjects. One of the most (in)famous images of the Prayer Book riots is that of the legendary ‘Jenny Geddes’ hurling her three-legged ‘cutty’ stool at the clerics who led the ill-fated service in Edinburgh’s main church of St Giles. Although ‘Jenny’ was almost certainly the mythical creation of a later period, the prominence of women in these events is well-attested to in contemporary sources. It has been suggested that the inspiration for the legend was a real woman called Barbara Hamilton, wife of John Mean, an Edinburgh merchant and opponent of royal religious policy. (Scottish women usually kept their own names after marriage; taking the husband’s name follows English custom.) The disturbances of July 23rd were not the only example of crowds taking to the streets and low-born women continued to be eager to express their opinions. In the summer of 1639, James Gordon, Lord Aboyne, second son of the royalist Marquis of Huntly, failed to make himself sufficiently inconspicuous on a trip to Edinburgh and was attacked by a group of female assailants. Women were taking advantage of what Natalie Zemon Davies describes as the ‘licence’ that patriarchal societies grant to ‘the unruly woman’: by

windows were stoned by a crowd that despised him for supporting the Prayer Book, there was no significant damage done to property. Scots were not noted for being especially law-abiding, so this is surprising and suggests significant differences in popular behaviour on either side of the border. In the 16th century, Scotland’s towns often became battlegrounds for feuding noblemen and their retinues. Periodic violent uprisings, as well as localised disorders, were a hallmark of the later 17th century. Why the Prayer Book crisis seems to have been peculiarly free from serious violence is a complicated matter, but several important features can be noted. The authorities in Scotland had no soldiers to command and Royalist nobles proved unwilling to challenge Covenanter crowds by summoning their retinues, thereby reducing the likelihood of escalation; the beautification of churches that English puritans found offensive and reacted against with iconoclastic fury, had not advanced far in Scotland by the time the Prayer Book was rolling off the presses; the deployment of women at the forefront of crowds may have been a tactic designed to inhibit men from resorting to force.

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flagging up the failure of men to maintain order and do their duty, such women reinforced expectations regarding gender roles. This kind of behaviour convinced men of otherwise different political persuasions – Covenanters and Royalists – that matters might be getting out of hand. One defender of royal authority, Sir James Balfour of Denmilne, counselled one Covenanter lady to desist from ‘unwomenlyke attempts’ to influence politics and endeavour to learn some ‘humility’. It seems unlikely, given what we know of female activism at this time, that she heeded his advice. The odd thing about the crowd violence of the Prayer Book crisis is that it was not, in fact, very violent. Some crowds, such as the throngs that greeted the arrival of the king’s commissioner, James, Marquis of Hamilton, at Leith in June 1638, demonstrated strength and resolve through their peaceable, albeit implicitly threatening, behaviour. There were neither fatalities, at least until soldiers confronted one another on the field of battle in 1639, nor judicial executions of low-born scapegoats. This contrasts with crowd activity in London, where deaths, accidental and intentional, occurred. With the possible exception of the house belonging to the provost of Edinburgh, whose

Top: a silver medal with an image of Charles I struck at the Edinburgh Mint, 1633. Above: The Arch-Prelate of St Andrews is attacked while reading the new Prayer Book, 1637.

O WHAT WERE THE crowds doing? It seems that certain politicians and public figures were being targeted by people whose aim was to humiliate rather than harm. How did the crowds know when to take to the streets and whom to attack? Word of mouth must have been important, but it is difficult for historians to trace. Sermons galvanised people with rousing rhetoric about the imminent triumph of the forces of the Antichrist: ‘All the Pulpits of Edinburgh ... did ring with bitter invectives’, one royalist publication complained. Satirical verses and polemics also circulated unhindered around the country. Crowds often went after individuals who were already in possession of unenviable reputations. Degrading episodes at the hands of the common sort, recounted through gossip and tavern tales, then provided valuable material for the satirists. The people most likely to suffer in this way in the late 1630s were the bishops. An account of the events of July 23rd, 1637 included a vivid description of the Bishop of Edinburgh, David Lindsay, soiling himself so abundantly when confronted by an angry crowd that he warded off his attackers with his ‘stinking smell’. One of Scotland’s most important politicians was also subjected to unwelcome attention. The Lord Treasurer, John Stewart, Earl of Traquair, had chosen to absent himself from what became the disastrous first reading of the Prayer Book in Edinburgh. One wit composed a handful of gleeful little anagrams about Traquair that seem to have circulated in 1640. Variations on his name were rearranged to emphasise his untrustworthiness: ‘Johne Earle of Traquaire / Ho a varrie effronted lyer’. It was the involvement of ordinary men and women that made the politics of the late 1630s so dangerous. The politics of the 1640s did not continue in this vein and there is one particular factor that explains why: the Scottish Covenanters, unlike the English parliamentarians, were able to create a stable and legitimate government. In other words, there was no Scottish civil war: the insurrection led by James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, in the mid-1640s was destructive, but he never established an opposing regime by setting up a Scottish equivalent of the royalist capital at Oxford. Of crucial importance in making the transition from oppositional faction to governing regime was the SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 35

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suppression of popular political activity. This is the context into which the 1638 National Covenant needs to be placed: it was both a product of the creative political strategies of the late 1630s and a vital component in their containment.

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OVENANTING was not unique to Scotland. The practice of people bonding with one another and with God had parallels in England and on the other side of the Atlantic. The 1638 Covenant was printed on Dutch and, later, English presses and translated into French, Dutch and Latin. It became the underpinning for the 1643 treaty with the English Parliament that brought Scotland into the war against Charles. Known as the Solemn League and Covenant, it was disseminated throughout the kingdoms to people who professed to be ‘of one reformed religion’ and committed to the pursuit of religious ‘uniformity’. Historians have, therefore, been right not only to follow Morrill’s example, by placing the Covenant into its ‘British’ context, but also to investigate the role of the Covenants within an English culture of subscription and oath-taking. It is surely a curiosity, then, that we know so little about the act of taking the Covenant in its country of origin. How was it received by the people in the pews and what can this tell us about popular political engagement?

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Wenceslaus Hollar's A Map and Views of the State of England, 1642-49 compares Britain's situation to that of the civil war in Bohemia.

I do not mean to suggest that the Covenant has been neglected. As a text, it is so well known as to justify the appellation ‘iconic’, although it is debatable whether most of the members of what is now an avowedly secularist society know what is in it. The 1638 Covenant is not, in fact, a single document, but a compilation. It is based on the 1581 Negative Confession, to which the new Covenant’s authors added two further sections: a contract between God, king and people, bolstered by a tedious but important list of acts of the Scottish parliament and general assembly of the church (its highest governing body); and an oath for the preservation of the ‘true reformed religion’ and Scotland’s ‘liberties, laws and estates’. It is fair to say that the long-running debate on whether the Covenant should be regarded as ‘radical’, or ‘conservative’, or a ‘radical’ document written in ‘conservative’ language, has long since been exhausted. That such an interpretative burden has been placed on such a short document is testament to the studied ambiguity imposed on the authors by the volatile political situation then prevailing in Scotland. Significantly, the words ‘presbytery’ and ‘episcopacy’ are nowhere explicitly mentioned in the Covenant. Scotland’s church in the early 17th century was governed by bishops and their status in law – something distinct, it must be noted, from

The High and Mighty Monarch Charles, an engraving by Cornelius van Dalen, with Edinburgh in the background, 1633.

perceptions of their legitimacy – was almost unimpeachable. Debate raged in Scotland during 1638 over whether the Covenant was compatible with episcopacy. The argument was settled decisively in favour of the presbyterian interpretation at the end of the year, when the Glasgow General Assembly, having first kicked the bishops out of the church, appended a coda to the Covenant known as the Glasgow Declaration. Whatever the intentions and beliefs of those who took the Covenant prior to the Assembly’s ruling, the Covenant thereafter was a definitive statement that God thought the best reformed churches should be presbyterian.

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LTHOUGH HISTORIANS have primarily been interested in the Covenant as a printed text, it is important to remember that, for most people, their first and primary interaction with the Covenant was oral – they would have heard it being read to them. There was a visual aspect, too. Some Covenants, by their size and quality, seem to have been intended for public

Many records mention the ‘tears of great joy’ shed by people in the congregation as they swore the Covenant display in parish churches. Beautifully and painstakingly copied out by hand, sometimes with illuminated lettering, these Covenants were often produced on expensive and durable vellum rather than paper. Many people would have been unable to read the document in its entirety, but the signatures of the country’s leading nobles, sometimes set apart or placed in roundels to give them emphasis, would have been recognisable when pointed out to them. They would have seen the signatures of the people who led their

own community appended underneath. At the other end of the scale, many more Covenants were printed cheaply and plainly in the smaller quarto format for domestic use and private contemplation. It seems plausible that some people were passing covenants around their friends and family to create their own covenanted community in miniature. The circumstances under which the Covenant came into being are vital for understanding how such a legalistic document came to underpin the disruptive, schismatic and periodically violent covenanting movements that emerged in Scotland during the later 17th and 18th centuries. Two factors are of particular importance. Few scholars have commented on the fact that the Covenant was disseminated around the country before it had been sanctioned by either parliament or the general assembly. From whence, therefore, did its authority emanate? This was a contested issue. Presbyterians were aware, furthermore, that their attempts to legitimate the Covenant risked enhancing its potential for generating instability. It was distributed around the country and signed by many thousands of people who, it seems, represented a broad cross-section of society. There was a danger that individuals and congregations would come to believe that the Covenant was legitimate precisely because it had been approved by ‘the people’ and some Covenanter propaganda was ambivalent on this point. Surviving copies seem to overwhelmingly display the names of male householders. In many places, it seems, servants, apprentices, youths, the poor and women were not invited to put their names to the Covenant. Scottish subscribers to the Covenant appear not to have been as socially diverse as English subscribers to the 1641 Protestation Oath. However, the absence of signatures does not mean that all these people were excluded from taking the Covenant. Signings were preceded by what was arguably a more important event: swearing the oath. This was a communal performance in parish churches, framed by an explanatory sermon by the minister. It is clear, at least in some places, that the entire parish community, including men, women, and children, was explicitly and intentionally involved, perhaps in direct emulation of a biblical passage about covenant-swearing: the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, referenced by the co-author of the Covenant, Archibald Johnstone of Wariston, speaks of wives, sons and daughters taking an oath to ‘walk in God’s law’ with ‘knowledge’ and ‘understanding’. The emotional intensity of these occasions, as parishioners stood alongside their family, friends and neighbours with their hands upheld, must have been inspiring to some but daunting to others. Many records mention the ‘tears of great joy’ shed by people in the congregation as they swore the Covenant. Tears were significant, for they were taken by the godly as a sign of what Johnstone of Wariston termed the ‘extraordinarie influence of Gods Spirit’ upon ‘frozen hearts’. It would have been difficult for individuals who were opposed to, or doubtful about, the Covenant to express negative sentiments in such an atmosphere. These performances were intended to give greater meaning, significance and context to what was otherwise a dry and unexciting document. On the one hand, the experience of swearing the Covenant was empowering. For the first and perhaps the only time in their lives people who were not considered fit to serve in the most menial of public offices were being asked to give their consent to a constitution in both church and SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 37

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The Murder of Archbishop Sharp, John Opie's depiction of the killing of the Archbishop of St Andrews by militant Covenanters in 1679.

state. More significantly it conferred spiritual authority on the congregation. Since they had initially taken the Covenant, without the sanction of either parliament or general assembly, the people convened as a congregation could be regarded as the source of its authority. This idea would be important for the Covenanters of the Restoration era. Those who considered themselves bound to the Covenant concluded that they were not obligated to obey either the newly re-established episcopal church, which had denounced it, or the secular powers when they attempted to compel in matters of religion. These people staged acts of resistance when their presbyterian 38 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

parish ministers were replaced by episcopalians and took to the fields in the thousands to hear sermons preached in favour of the Covenant. Some individuals, notably Richard Cameron, author of the 1680 Sanquhar Declaration, took these arguments further. Cameron asserted that, because Charles II had reneged on the Covenants he had taken in 1650, with conspicuous bad grace, he had broken with God and was therefore a tyrant. Although unable to get at Charles, for whom one spell in Scotland had been more than enough, radical Covenanters did succeed in assassinating the erstwhile Covenanter, James Sharp, Archbishop of St Andrews, in 1679.

THE COVENANT, HOWEVER, also imposed limitations on popular political agency. The manner in which the Covenant was taken reinforced its commitment to collective obligations over individual rights. There was no Magna Carta-style mention of the rule of law. Its emphasis on a national community, ordered according to a strict social hierarchy headed by propertied men, was complemented by the Calvinist insistence that sinful people must submit to the authority of the church. By endorsing monarchy, the Covenant made itself incompatible with republican rule – making compromise with the English regicidal regime all but impossible after 1649. Both the text and the manner of swearing it committed people to a constitution within which there was no scope for reform of the franchise. Men with titles and land continued to run the show in Covenanted Scotland. During the later 17th and early 18th centuries, the Covenant became identified with popular political and religious radicalism. Abandoned by the nobility, who were encouraged by the Restoration regime to blame the Covenant for Cromwell’s ‘usurpation’, and the church, which had disowned it at the Restoration and did not seek its renewal when Presbyterianism was reinstated in 1689, the Covenant was sustained by communities populated by agricultural workers and the rural poor. It is notable that one of the first serious enclosure riots in Scotland, occurring at the late date of 1724, was accompanied by the drawing up of a covenant. In the heyday of the imperial British state created by the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707, when Jacobitism had ceased to be either a threat or a useful vehicle for expressing political discontent, the Covenant found new significance. Harnessed by those seeking to advance civil and religious liberty in a specifically Scottish historical context, the Covenant was useful because it could represent national distinctiveness without conjuring up resistance to the English in the manner of William Wallace and Robert Bruce. This appeal to Scotland’s past sought to mobilise popular resistance, not against the union, but in favour of political and social reform within it.

that chimes with current social mores. The Declaration portrays the Scots as an emphatically Christian people, but one more interested in preserving the homeland from the predations of the English than waging holy war. Morrill has advocated placing the Covenant in its British rather than exclusively Scottish context, particulalry in relation to the 1643 Anglo-Scottish Solemn League and Covennant. Although some English presbyterians were committed to the Solemn League, it is evident that the Covenants never captured the English imagination in the same way as in Scotland. This is because the political nation described in the Covenant is Scottish, just as the reformed polity imagined in the Agreements of the People is clearly English. The religious reformation envisaged in the Covenant had explicitly been enacted through Scottish institutions and had delivered a type of church for which even English presbyterians showed limited enthusiasm. Similarly, the Covenant is neither a Scottish Agreement nor a Magna Carta and we should not expect it to be. Scotland did not somehow ‘lack’ England’s traditions of liberty, but developed its own interpretations of what that word meant. This should prompt us to think about why the political cultures of two countries joined, in various forms of union for over 400 years and with so much in common, should have remained politically distinct. This question has never been more pertinent. Although the Scottish electorate rejected independence in 2014, it has been widely acknowledged that the campaign in favour of maintaining the Union failed to articulate a positive vision for modern Britain. Many historians have observed that the success of the British state between the mid-18th and early 20th centuries was its ability to accommodate a wide degree of diversity among its constituent parts. This is a lesson we need to relearn. Paul Lay noted in History Today in May 2015 that ‘few people realise that what was once called the English Civil War ... was actually sparked by events in Scotland’. Even fewer know why the Scots rebelled first against Charles I or what it was they sought to achieve. Greater public understanding of the historical factors that created the UK’s diverse political cultures is a necessary first step to accommodating difference within a revitalised union. The Covenant is not now an inspiration for any modern democracy, but it is important to the story of why Scotland has never been fully assimilated into a unitary British state.

The Covenant was useful because it could represent national distinctiveness without conjuring up resistance to the English

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TTEMPTS TO make the Covenant speak for the modern democratic nation have been less successful. As recently as 2013, the Conservative MSP, Murdo Fraser, tabled a motion in the Scottish parliament stating that the Covenant had ‘aimed to affirm the right of the people to worship according to conscience and not [the] king’s regulation’. Fraser asserted that the Covenant was a defence of ‘Scotland’s religious freedom’ and underpinned modern values of ‘equality, compassion and justice’. This interpretation is difficult to square with the Covenant’s hostility to Catholicism, always the Covenant’s greatest weakness. A self-consciously secularist society, still emerging out of the long shadow cast by sectarianism, tends to prefer the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath. Composed in order to demonstrate Robert Bruce’s kingly credentials to the Pope in the wake of the Wars of Independence, this document was neither seen, nor intended to be seen, by the vast majority of the Scottish population. (It was not translated out of Latin until 1689.) Its attraction to modern Scots, apart from rousing words about freedom and holding rulers to account, is a woolliness about religion

Laura Stewart is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern British History at Birkbeck University of London. Her book Rethinking the Covenanting Revolution will be published by Oxford University Press in January 2016.

FURTHER READING Allan I. Macinnes, The British Revolution, 1629-1660 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637-49 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637-1644: The Triumph of the Covenanters (John Donald, new edn, 2003). SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 39

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OUTCASTS Convicts from Newgate Prison being taken for transportation, c.1760.

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IRGINIA, IN 1755, WAS ONE OF THE jewels in the British Crown. Prosperous, well-populated and claimant to huge territories beyond the Appalachian mountains, it was only natural that the colony should serve as a staging ground for the forces sent to oppose French troops in the American theatre of the Seven Years War. Just before marching west toward Fort Duquesne, in what is now Pittsburgh, the army of General Edward Braddock assembled in the Potomac port of Alexandria to gather supplies, determine strategy and join forces with colonial militia groups. Fort Duquesne survived the Braddock expedition, only to be destroyed in 1758 and Fort Pitt to be constructed in its place. Yet, regardless of their military record, Braddock’s troops seem to have left consternation in their wake, not among the French, but among their friends back in Virginia. Despite the fact that they were sent to defend their fellow British subjects,

the regulars did little to endear themselves to the locals. John Carlyle, whose home Braddock chose as his headquarters, recorded how the soldiers ‘used us like an enemy country … calling us the spawn of convicts [and] the sweepings of the gaols’. Carlyle, a Scottish-born merchant in his mid-thirties, was a prominent landowner of unquestioned loyalty, serving as a militia officer in wartime and a Fairfax County judge in more peaceful days. As a law-abiding subject of George II, Carlyle was deeply offended at the soldiers’ behaviour, adding that the comments from his countrymen ‘made their company very disagreeable’. If a leading citizen in this flourishing little riverside town had such an unpleasant experience, one wonders what might have happened further west in the rougher, hard-living frontier settlements. Similar perspectives could be found across the Atlantic in the upper levels of British society. Samuel Johnson reportedly told an acquaintance 14 years later, in a now-notorious quotation: ‘[Americans] are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging’. Johnson, one of the most widely respected English writers of his day, did little to conceal his negative views of the colonists, irrespective of their geographic or economic origins. On a different occasion,

Empire of Outcasts Britain’s American colonies were widely thought to be peopled by miscreants and ‘desperate villains’. Rachel Christian describes the reality for those who found a new, precarious life across the Atlantic.

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OUTCASTS he also remarked that ‘a man of any intellectual enjoyment’ would find emigration intolerable. Any person in his right mind, according to Johnson, would unhesitatingly decline to ‘go and immerse himself and his posterity for ages in barbarism’. Strictly speaking, the comments of both Braddock’s soldiers and Samuel Johnson are inaccurate, yet they reveal what might be termed the underside of migration to the nation’s colonies. For over two centuries, thanks to a mixture of philanthropic and judicially mandated resettlement plans, the Empire’s outlying possessions were viewed by many at home as a haven for all sorts of unwanted (often lower-class) citizens, a kind of dumping ground for outcasts of various backgrounds. Nowhere is the source of this perception more clearly revealed than among the territories of the Atlantic world. The miscreants-as-colonists notion originated generations before, when England, faced with a rapidly growing population, sought to counteract the resultant increase in unemployed vagrants through legislation. By the middle of Elizabeth I’s reign the number of homeless Englishmen had grown large enough to become a nuisance to society, at least in the eyes of the government. So in 1572 Parliament enacted the first of what are now termed the Elizabethan Poor Laws. Together with legislation passed in 1597, 1601 and additional post-Restoration

The Empire’s outlying possessions were viewed as a dumping ground for outcasts of various backgrounds revisions, the statutes codified the treatment of England’s less fortunate. Those needing charity were made charges of the jurisdiction in which they last had legal habitation and all able-bodied people were to be taken up and imprisoned until the next court term could determine their future employment. Separate provisions were made for the elderly and physically infirm. The workhouses, which Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge so heartily endorsed before his change of heart in A Christmas Carol, were a later addition to the parish charity system, but were still ultimately a product of this effort to see all those capable of it engaged in some sort of productive labour. Not until the 19th century did the Poor Laws undergo fundamental changes, thanks in part to social commentators such as Dickens. In the meantime, the semi-criminalisation of unemployment only contributed to prison overcrowding and placed added stress on existing institutional poverty assistance resources. The implementation of the Elizabethan Poor Laws, as well as later policies arising from them, would directly contribute to the perception of colonists as indigents and societal outsiders.

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N ADDITION TO punishing the ‘rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars’ with which England found itself troubled, the Poor Laws outlined methods for the training and bringing up of beggars’ children, under care of the parish they called home. As with the strictures placed on their adult counterparts, the laws were intended to ensure the young unfortunates eventually found a useful place in society. Taking into consideration the triple goals of alleviating strains on institutional charity, disposing of unwanted residents and helping populate the colonies, administrators quickly seized upon the idea of sending some of the children across the Atlantic. Christ’s Hospital in London, an establishment chartered in 1553 under Edward VI’s charitable auspices, implemented one such scheme. In accordance with its benevolent purpose, after receiving several years of standard grammar school education, former ‘bluecoats’ were expected to serve a normal apprenticeship term with a respectable tradesman. 42 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

Top: The Shooting of General Braddock at Fort Duquesne, Pittsburgh, 1755, by Edwin Willard Deming, 1903. Above: a beggar is tied and whipped through the streets, c.1567.

Right: Carlyle House, residence of John Carlyle in Alexandria, Virginia.

Surviving records prove emigration was a viable option for inhabitants ready to begin the next portion of their lives. While the majority of graduates seem to have remained in England, beginning in the early 17th century Christ’s sent a number of boys – and a tiny minority of girls as well – overseas to complete their apprenticeship. It is unclear what ultimately became of many who left Christ’s for the colonies. With no clear migratory trend, their destinations ranged from Hudson’s Bay to various islands in the West Indies. It is also unclear whether their purchasers were always as respectable as organisers might have hoped, although some were without doubt men of standing in their communities. The first experimental group – nine boys and one girl dispatched through an agreement between the school’s board of governors and representatives of the Virginia and Somers Isles companies – was sent to Virginia and Bermuda in piecemeal fashion in 1617, 1618 and 1619. Virginia’s transfer to Crown administration in 1624 meant the idea was effectively abandoned, except for a couple of boys whose sailing seems almost to have been an afterthought. With an increasingly precarious royal government at home, the practice slowed even further, entirely stopping during the upheaval of the Civil Wars. Those who were sent were kept far away from the uncertain political loyalties of the North Atlantic mainland, landing instead in Bermuda and Barbados. A return to peace saw society and its transport networks stabilised and the governors of Christ’s, taking a cue from their forebears, chose to resume indenturing their charges in the colonies. They did so with enthusiasm. After Charles II’s Restoration in 1660 the number of charity children leaving London accelerated dramatically and peaked during the 1720s, when more than 150 former students sailed from England. (These figures are large for emigrants from Christ’s, which then housed only a few hundred pupils of all ages, but always paled in comparison with overall emigration rates for each of the destinations.) After disembarking in their new homes, the children – around 14 years of age, as was typical for apprentices of the day – were placed in households of varying importance and economic means. A few were fortunate enough to have relatives already living in the colonies. Dozens arrived in the Chesapeake, joining thousands of other articled workers of all ages and occupations flooding into the region. Samuel Smith, who finished school in 1691, was taken by William Edwards, then serving as clerk of the Virginia Council. Several other prominent citizens of the era seem to have followed Edwards’ example, including the eldest William Byrd, a well-known political figure who served on the Virginia Governor’s Council. At least one of Byrd’s two apprentices may have sailed on the same ship as Smith, since they were released from Christ’s together. The boys’ schoolmates and their successors went north to Canada, as did John Lewis, sent to Nova Scotia and bound to Joseph Gerrish, a ‘naval storekeeper’, in 1759 and south to the Bahamas, where Maynard Kingsley was taken in 1725 and articled to Governor George Phenney. Even the tiny volcanic island of Montserrat became a destination. Generally speaking, boys such as Smith and Kingsley, who served well-known political figures, probably fared well. The masters – and ultimate fate – of numerous other Christ’s children are unknown.

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mong all of Britain’s former colonies, one in particular is forever linked with 18th-century poverty and social outcasts. Georgia, chartered in 1732, was originally administered by a committee of 20 philanthropically minded trustees. Unlike New South Wales, founded more than 50 years later as an outlet for known criminals, Georgia was supposed to serve as a home not for SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 43

OUTCASTS

Men and women moved from poverty in their homeland to a difficult life on the frontier

convicts, but for those ‘Poor Subjects [who] are through misfortunes and want of Employment reduced to great necessities’. Based in part on the views of founder James Oglethorpe, as expressed two years before the granting of the charter, early Georgia was supposedly a debtors’ colony begun specifically to relieve those incarcerated under the draconian financial laws of the day. But, by the time Oglethorpe and his group of 114 initial settlers landed at Yamacraw Bluff on February 12th, 1733, the notion of assisting debtors had largely been abandoned. ‘Probably not a dozen people who had been in jail for debt ever went to Georgia’, wrote E. Merton Coulter in his 1960 book, Georgia: A Short History. The debtor legend has proven to be firmly entrenched: Mark Jones and Peter Johnstone’s History of Criminal Justice (2012) includes in its chapter on the American colonies the statement that ‘many Georgia transplants had been released from debtors’ prisons’. A large number of today’s scholars of early Georgia, like Coulter, express doubts regarding the widespread implementation of the original relief plan. Perhaps the shift was due to prospective debtor-emigrants’ inability to obtain from their creditors permission to leave England. Whatever the cause, the first British Georgians were ‘necessitous families’ who had previously been a ‘burden’ to the public charge, even if they were never actually imprisoned. With their passage, livestock, farming implements and other supplies purchased through charitable contributions, these men and women moved from poverty in their homeland to a difficult life on the frontier. One wonders if many of their acquaintances in England thought of them as anything more than so many names removed from the list of parish poor. George II, for his part, thought of more practical functions in granting the new colony’s charter, such as providing a buffer between the Native Americans and Spanish in Florida and the British planters in South Carolina. The ‘whole Southern Frontier continueth unsettled and lieth open to’ Native Americans, he complained in Georgia’s 1732 founding document, referring to the ‘Savages’ who had ‘laid wast [sic] with Fire and Sword’ during the Yamassee War just a decade and a half earlier. It did not take long to find suitable candidates to inhabit these outlying buffer settlements. In January 1736, with the active support of the trustees, a group of Highland Scots founded Darien, in Georgia, then dangerously close to Spanish territory in Florida. ‘We will beat them out of their fort’ in the event of an attack, one colonist is said to have assured someone who expressed fears for his safety. An interesting attempt in 1757 to entice more settlers reflected continued interest in debtors, this time motivated more by empty lands than by charity. Hoping to make their still-underpopulated province attractive, Georgia politicians enacted a statute was enacted assuring debtors that their property would be free from seizure if they chose to settle the colony. Unsurprisingly, 44 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

Top: Christ's Hospital, London in the 18th century. Above: a bluecoat boy, a scholar of Christ's Hospital, by John Downman, 18th century.

the measure was revoked by the Crown. A steady stream of non-British immigrants provided a more reliable source of new residents; often these individuals were German-speaking members of various Protestant sects persecuted in their homelands. While many of the first settlers were members of the ‘deserving poor’ who found themselves in financial difficulties, the success of Georgia as an alternative to English prisons is questionable at best, given its dramatic and rapid shift in focus towards its new role as a buffer between South Carolina and the Spaniards and the comparatively high percentage of religious refugees from other European states.

B

ESIDES charity children and the ‘deserving poor’ the most unwanted element of British society was shipped overseas as well, usually to the chagrin of the colonies elected to receive them. Found guilty of what were then considered hanging offences, prisoners were effectively deported from locations throughout Britain throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Upon arrival overseas, they were

bought and sold, joining the labour force as indentured servants. Among the first records of transported criminals is a 1618 report that Ambrose Smith, sentenced for theft, ‘is of able body for employment in Virginia or the East Indies [sic]’. It is not clear to which destination Smith was taken, if indeed he was actually taken at all. Another 1618 thief, John Throckmorton, was permitted to leave England after a desperate plea from his grandmother convinced both the King’s Council and the council of the Virginia Company to give the teenager a second chance. A document obtained from the lord mayor, enumerating what the miscreant was innocent of (‘murder, burglary, highway robbery, rape, or witchcraft’), demonstrates the authorities’ interest in keeping hardened criminals away from the king’s far-flung dominions. Tellingly, in referring to Throckmorton’s ‘ Territorial divisions in North America, published by T. Stackhouse, 1783.

banishment’, it also makes clear that even at this early stage the punishment was literally viewed as a form of exile, even if Virginia was technically British property. Throckmorton was released from Newgate and left London almost immediately. He survived until 1625, though his further whereabouts are unknown. As the boundaries of the British Empire expanded so too did the options for disposing of prisoners. Scots captured by parliamentarians in battle in 1650 were dispatched to New England, although the crime for which these men were transported was more a question of opposing politics than moral transgressions. Other such captives were later packed off to the Caribbean. Barbados, in the process of developing an agricultural economy centered on sugar cane, rose to prominence as the recipient of unwilling immigrants at this time, eagerly seeking new workers for the cane fields, which were already acquiring a SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 45

OUTCASTS

The Island of Barbados, by Isaac Sailmaker, c.1694.

ghastly reputation. Barbadians quickly came to prefer African slaves over white servants, but other colonies with different labour needs were not so selective. Meanwhile, the trade in persons such as Smith and Throckmorton increased dramatically, to the alarm of many Britons who had emigrated of their own volition. Virginia, long since removed to the control of the Crown and rapidly growing tired of being forced to accept the mother country’s miscreants, wailed about the ‘great number of felons and other desperate villains sent hither’. In 1670, fearful of an increasing belief that ‘we are … a place only fit to receive such base and lewd persons’, the colony’s council prohibited further importation of convicts. King and Parliament promptly ignored both the new law and subsequent efforts to stop the prisoner trade. Pennsylvania attempted to levy a tax on incoming criminals in 1722 and 1729, but the governor received explicit instructions from London not to enact the statutes. New Jersey, Maryland and Jamaica also tried to follow suit, only to receive the same official censure from London. The idea of judicial transportation, like that of apprenticing charity children overseas, was rooted in efficiency: relieve pressure on domestic institutions, remove those who had no clear place in society and help populate the colonies. Sentencing someone to sail in irons was also seen as an act of clemency, at least for those people of influence to whom mercy was a valuable moral consideration. All these elements were firmly in place by 1700. But the most powerful impetus for convict emigration came in 1717, when the Piracy Act, also called the Transportation 46 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

Act, set the national standard of punishment for certain types of crime. Despite its name, the law only partly dealt with piracy, being also intended as an ‘Act for the further preventing [of ] robbery, burglary, and other felonies, and for the more effectual transportation of felons’. Under the stipulations of the Act, transportation was codified as an alternative to further penalising vagabonds domestically, as had been the standard for decades with the Poor Laws and made a regular option for those guilty of various degrees of theft, among other comparatively minor transgressions. Political prisoners were not dealt with in the Piracy Act, although some were transported according to separate proceedings; the popular Gentleman’s Magazine reported in 1747, for example, that more than 1,000 rebellious Jacobites had been shipped off. IN ADDITION TO providing a legal basis for their disposition, Parliament also provided economic incentives for removing miscreants from their native shores. Captains or other authorised individuals were typically offered £3 a head to take these unwanted subjects overseas, an arrangement that, when added to the purchase price, resulted in a tidy profit for the businessmen involved. From the year following the passing of the Transportation Act, convicts flooded into the colonies at an exponentially greater rate. Though they never constituted an overwhelming majority of all incoming travellers, modern estimates give the number of prisoners who left the British Isles between 1718 and 1775 at more than 50,000. To help put the total in perspective, this figure, although

Above: frontispiece of General James Edward Oglethorpeʹs Reasons for Establishing the Colony of Georgia, published in London in 1733. Below: portrait of Oglethorpe, by Samuel Ireland, 1785.

large, is negligible in comparison with the number of Africans imported during the same time period: more than 225,000 to North America alone. Meanwhile, during a slightly shorter time span, at least 65,000 Germans landed in the single port of Philadelphia. Clearly, prisoners were a minority of immigrants. Regardless of origin, somewhere between 60 and 80 per cent of the 50,000 were destined for Virginia and Maryland, with the latter possibly receiving the greater number. The men under Braddock’s command may well have been thinking of this recent dramatic upswing in convict arrivals when they made themselves such a nuisance in Alexandria.

A

FTER PURCHASE, the duties of many sentenced labourers typically resembled those of any other purchased servant, potentially encompassing a variety of occupations and situations. Indentured people with the relevant skills were popular as teachers and tutors, regardless of the circumstances under which they had left their home country. No less a person than Augustine Washington, according to a long-standing report, bought a convict to serve as instructor for his young son, George, though the name of this individual seems to have been lost to history. It was from this man, whoever he was, that the future soldier and statesman received much of his early schooling. Those who lacked educational skills could look forward to seven or more years as, essentially, slave labour. The prospects for released convicts did not necessarily improve at the end SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 47

OUTCASTS

After Culloden: Rebel Hunting, by John Seymour Lucas, 19th century.

Many labourers spent long days in Chesapeake tobacco fields. Around half did not live to see the end of their term of their term. Whereas individuals who had bound themselves into an indenture expected to receive some sort of compensation upon completing their time, such as a small amount of land, the masters of former prisoners were required to give nothing to their erstwhile labourers. Arriving in a society that was hostile to them and put on the market as one of the most inexpensive labour options available, many spent long days in Chesapeake tobacco fields. Around half did not live to see the end of their term. Whether under sentence or not, the conclusion of the American Revolution made several relocation options unavailable to the ‘baser sort’ in Britain. Instead of finding assistance in organisations seeking to fulfill a charitable and patriotic duty, as had been the case with Georgia’s initial settlement effort or the governors of the Christ’s bluecoat school, the impoverished free were more likely to seek other methods of bettering their situation. Meanwhile, the conclusion of the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which recognised the independence of 13 former colonies, also rendered the king’s criminal justice system legally unable to send convicts to most of the Atlantic seaboard. Judges and Crown officers looked elsewhere, turning to the South Pacific for the next large-scale recipient of prisoners. Their search for a new removal destination led directly to the idea of an entire penal colony, which was duly created and would later be incorporated into Australia. Transportation to the various remaining Atlantic territories would continue for some time to come. Without doubt, the undesirable elements of society constituted 48 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

a large number of emigrants to all British territories in the 17th and 18th centuries. They were no longer welcome in their old home for a variety of reasons: poverty, unemployment, homelessness, indebtedness. Tens of thousands more left under sentence of transportation. These were the barbarous race of convicts and sweepings of the jails. For many in Britain, it was easy to ignore the prosperous, law-abiding subjects, as well as the honest poor, and think of colonials as merely savage criminals. To inhabitants of the colonies, the steady flow of disreputable persons only contributed to the poor perception of those residing outside the home islands. No matter the scale of their crimes, in different ways the convicts’ presence particularly stained the reputation of the colonies in the eyes of those on both sides of the Atlantic, extending the taint not just to the charity emigrants, unwanted in their own way, but also to those who had freely come of their own means. A portion of the individuals pulled from the dregs of society managed to make a positive contribution to their new homes, acquiring property and enjoying productive lives after their release. The rest are largely lost to history, drifting back into the obscurity in which they once lived. Rachel Christian was a graduate researcher at Florida State University.

FURTHER READING Nick Bunker, An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America (The Bodley Head, 2015). Malcolm Gaskill, Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans (Basic Civitas, 2013). Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settlement of North America to 1800 (Penguin, 2003).

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XXXXXXXXX SPAIN

Manuel Cortes in Hiding Jeffrey Meyers on the neglected life of a political idealist, whose 30-year ordeal, hidden from the world, spans a period of momentous change in Spain. IN THE HILLS overlooking the Mediterranean, 20 miles west of Málaga, lies the village of Mijas, whose white cubist houses and narrow cobblestone lanes attract thousands of tourists. But, as Ronald Fraser observed in the superb but little-known oral history, In Hiding: The Life of Manuel Cortes (1972), ‘behind its tourist façade, Mijas today hides its past’.

A barber and deeply committed socialist, Manuel Cortes (1905-91) was mayor of Mijas during the last year of Republican government in Andalusia. His wife Juliana, whose bitter pragmatism contrasts with his generous idealism, described their separation just before Franco’s Fascists occupied the village in February 1937: I’ll never forget that moment, not if a hundred years pass over me. Never. I can feel the pain now as I felt it then ... having to say to him, ‘Go’. Not knowing whether I would ever see him again, and the people saying, ‘They’re coming, they’re killing as they come’. He rushed up the coast toward Almeria with thousands of other refugees. When Cortes secretly returned to Mijas after the Fascist victory in 1939, the terrified Juliana told him he would be shot, if he surrendered. A denuncia, signed by three witnesses and easy to obtain in those times of rabid hatred, was sufficient to secure an execution. Most of the notable survivors had either fled into exile or become bandits in the sierra, but Cortes decided to wait for a regime change or an amnesty that would make it safe to reappear. He waited for 30 years until 1969, from the age of 34 to 64. His story is a unique combination of personal and historical narrative, in which the dynamics of his secret family life merge with his vivid recollections of the most momentous years of modern Spain – from the fall of the monarchy to the end of the Civil War – as it was lived by the rural working class.

Contact at last: Manuel Cortes having come out of hiding, April 17th, 1969.

SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 49

| SPAIN sate for her poor tuition in the classroom. He had to watch her wedding while crouched at the keyhole and lamented: ‘For a father not to be present at his daughter’s wedding – that’s a sad thing to happen to a man.’ When grandchildren came, they too were schooled in silence and were never told the real name of their abuelo. Though he was able to share a bed with Juliana, and wanted to have another child, he could not have one. Juliana’s pregnancy would have been scandalous for her and perilous for him.

His first hiding place was a cramped hole in the wall near the entrance of his foster-father’s inn Cortes lived alone with daughter Maria and wife Juliana, who thought only of his welfare and safety and supported the family for three decades in times of great hardship. He feared betrayal, but remained hidden and undiscovered. His first hiding place, where he lived for two years, was a hole in the wall near the entrance of his foster-father’s inn, where many people came and went all day. His shoulders touched the walls, he was unable to move about and could only come out late at night when everyone had gone to sleep. Eventually, Juliana – who had begun by selling eggs and built a prosperous business of taxis and trucks – bought her own house. On a dark, rainy midnight, Cortes, disguised as an old woman, shuffled down the street to his new hideout where he had the upstairs floor. But he was still in constant danger of discovery and his old political enemies put pressure on the Guardia Civil to subject the ever-silent Juliana to frightening late-night interrogations in their barracks. Cortes fought boredom by keeping busy and by trying to recreate a semblance of normal life under extreme threats and pressure. He occupied himself by looking at the outside world through the narrow crack of his curtained windows, listening to radio broadcasts, reading newspapers and pulp fiction, preparing illegally gathered esparto grass for weaving into baskets and espadrilles, playing with his daughter and, later, with her children. Forced into passivity and completely dependent on Juliana, he sometimes felt like a child. Though he had once tutored younger boys after school, he lacked the patience to teach Maria and compen50 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2015

Village of goats: Mijas, October 1969.

Constant danger Cortes experienced many terrifying moments: he was seen by children who luckily did not know who he was; Juliana was almost trapped by a blackmailer. The Guardia searched the house, not for him but for illegal esparto grass that Juliana threw off her roof and into the neighbour’s patio; and the eight-year-old Maria threw vegetables into a pan of hot oil which suddenly flared up, setting the outdoor brushwood roof on fire and almost burning down the house. Just in time, a friend pulled down the post of the roof and ‘the whole thing collapsed and lay burning on the ground where they could put it out’. Cortes also had some serious medical problems. He had to tear out his own decayed teeth with pliers with only white wine as an anaesthetic. When he had a fever, Juliana treated him with penicillin and learned how to give him injections. When he developed an agonising pain in his left side Maria took to her bed, simulated his pain and got the necessary medicine from the doctor. Cortes’ oral narrative reveals the contrasting stages of his life. He recalled his childhood poverty and youthful years of oppression, when the landlords exploited the peasants and the mayors ‘ate’ all the taxes. He described his own short but effective term as mayor of Mijas, bringing electricity and telephones to the village, building a new road to the coast and beginning agrarian and educational reforms. He rescued religious objects from the burning churches and personally prevented the massacre of brutal right-wing landlords by marauding anarchist militias. Even in his moments of despair Cortes was too proud to give himself up. He hoped for the best, followed the progress of the Second World War and awaited his fate. If he had been caught in 1939 he would have been shot; later on, he would have been imprisoned and eventually released. Granted an amnesty in 1969, he emerged to find the world he knew had disappeared. Tourists had brought enormous prosperity to the region, the older men had left the land and the young ones lacked political awareness. But the village was jubilant at his return – his seeming resurrection – which seemed to symbolise the healing of old wounds. Manuel Cortes showed great fortitude when trapped and faced with the unremitting danger of discovery, but he never gave up hope. His personal narrative bears witness to his suffering and speaks for all victims who sought justice against oppression. Juliana exclaimed: ‘Politics brought us nothing but slavery and ruination.’ But he maintained, ‘my convictions will remain till I die’. His legacy is exemplary: nothing less than the patience, devotion, loyalty and courage of the ordinary man, which transcends the violence of contemporary politics. Jeffrey Meyers is the author of Impressionist Quartet (2005) and Modigliani (2006). His Robert Lowell in Love will appear in January 2016.

ISAIAH BERLIN

One of the most brilliant intellectuals of his age, Isaiah Berlin voiced impeccably liberal views. Yet, asks Antony Percy, were his political beliefs compromised by some unsavoury associations?

The UNDERCOVER Egghead

Isaiah Berlin, 2005.

SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 51

ISAIAH BERLIN

S

IR ISAIAH BERLIN is seen by many as the consummate British intellectual of the 20th century. A Russian Jew born in Riga, he witnessed the bookends that enclosed what was arguably that century’s most significant phenomenon: the Russian experiment with Communism. Fiercely critical of any totalitarian government, he popularised the notions of positive and negative liberty, revisiting and elaborating upon them in academic discourse, and arguing for the virtues of a society that accepts and endorses plurality of values. By revivifying a line from the Greek poet Archilochus, which contrasted the unitary vision of the hedgehog with the more nuanced perspective of the fox, Berlin shed new light on a whole host of historians and thinkers and brought new insights to a non-academic audience. More a historian of ideas than a philosopher, Berlin dazzled with his wide reading, his rich examples, his lively anecdotes and his dry humour. Yet a paradox remains about Berlin’s broader career beyond academia, where he undertook a number of roles in the sphere of propaganda and intelligence-gathering that can be described under the blanket term of ‘political warfare’. While undeniably a member of the intelligentsia, he constantly maintained that he never had anything to do with ‘intelligence’. For example, in a memoir about his uncle, L.B. Berlin, he writes:

'The enemy always assumes the colour of his surroundings', a satire from the Soviet magazine Crocodile, 1937.

Needless to add, I never worked for any intelligence organisation, British or any other, at any point in my life, and had no contact with such bodies, when I was a British Embassy official during the war or at Chaim Weizmann chairs a any other time. This is an astonishing claim: Berlin left behind much evidence to the contrary and occasionally would even boast of his secret contacts. Such denials do not therefore do justice to the actions that he pursued in a number of causes: some open, some clandestine, some official, some personal. Berlin’s desire to conceal such initiatives suggests that he may have felt discomfort when he recounted his memories to his biographer towards the end of his life.

discussion on plans for a Jewish university in Palestine, 1938.

BERLIN’S ACTIVITIES can be assigned to five major categories. First, he gathered information from sources in the Soviet Union between 1935 and 1956. Second, he acted as a spy and emissary for Chaim Weizmann, later first president of Israel, and the Zionist movement in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He expressed a desire to go to Moscow in 1940 (when the Soviet Union was an ally of Germany) and presented this plan as a ‘plot’ in letters to family and friends. He also conspired with Guy Burgess, a member of the Cambridge Five, and Harold Nicolson to secure a posting to Moscow on secret government business, ostensibly as a press attaché, but plausibly as a pretext to reach the US to take up private causes. Lastly, he worked as a propagandist for British Security Coordination in New York and later interpreted political events for the British Embassy in Washington. Berlin’s writings rely on a familiarity with the literary 52 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

climate of the Soviet Union that could be gained only by exchanges with members of the intelligentsia in that country. Yet he did not travel there frequently: after an abortive effort in 1940 he visited for a few months in 1945, ostensibly for government-sponsored research that did not turn out as planned, and again more briefly in 1956. On these occasions, he incurred the wrath of Stalin and, after the dictator’s death, the KGB, by making unauthorised visits to literary figures such as Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. In 1956 his distant relative Efraim Halevy, who was

works, which appears on the Berlin website maintained by Henry Hardy. Written by Berlin to his father, with a presumed date of autumn 1935, it appears to respond to a number of questions from Mendel about Britain’s probable response to European events, specifically about threats from Mussolini and Britain’s guarantees to France. The letter from Mendel that this item responds to has apparently not survived, but why Mendel should have developed a sudden interest in the broader political climate in Europe immediately after his return from Moscow and why such a request was made in writing as opposed to being offered in a friendly domestic chat is puzzling. In 1940 the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky informed his interrogators from MI5 that all visitors from trade delegations, especially those with relatives still in the Soviet Union whose safety could be threatened, were questioned when in the Soviet Union. Mendel Berlin would have been an excellent medium via his son to All Souls College, where the British intelligentsia mingled with the country’s leading politicians. It is possible that the NKVD applied pressure on Mendel to provide intelligence on British preparations and intentions concerning the impending conflict.

T

later to become head of the Israeli secret service, Mossad, accompanied him on a furtive visit to Berlin’s Aunt Zelma. In addition, his father, Mendel, had been accused of spying (Stalin treated all such foreign representatives as spies and unauthorised contact with members of the Soviet citizenry was illegal) during an enigmatic visit to Moscow in 1935. Mendel, whose British naturalisation documents describe him as a timber-exporter, was reported to be in Moscow but escaped his minders to visit his brother, Lev. The unfortunate Lev was later arrested and tortured, accused of being complicit in the so-called ‘Doctors’ Plot’ against Stalin in 1952. The brothers were suspected at this time of being links in a chain, passing information illegally to Berlin, although whether this was true is not clear. Ancillary to this aspect of Berlin’s intelligence-gathering is an extraordinary letter, not yet published in the printed

Guy Burgess, 1950.

HE PEAK OF Berlin’s enthusiasm for the Zionist cause was reached in the late 1930s following a meeting with Chaim Weizmann, about whom he frequently wrote in terms of idolatry in his letters. Arie M. Dubnov concludes that Berlin was used by Weizmann as an ‘inside informer, placed in a strategic position close to the British elite’s nerve system’. Berlin used his connections with Oxford to pass on information he gleaned about British plans for Palestine, such as the composition of the Peel Commission, announced in August 1936. During the eventful year of 1940 such concerns dominated Berlin’s thinking. His move to the US in that summer is frequently reported as an accidental by-product of his aborted trip to Moscow, but Berlin’s clear desire to return to Europe to see Weizmann and his pretence that the job offered to him in the office of British Information Services was not permanent or binding may reveal that his long-term interest was as much to help the Zionist cause as to contribute to the war effort. This conclusion has recently been confirmed by items in the diaries of David Ben-Gurion, later to become Israel’s first prime minister. Ben-Gurion records a meeting with Berlin in New York, just before Berlin set sail for Lisbon in October 1940, in which they discussed promises of material support from the Soviets and planned strategies for reporting back to the Labour Party politician and theorist Harold Laski in Britain. Berlin may have contacted Laski on his return to the UK, but a more significant event was a visit he paid on Weizmann on November 6th, when he expressed his eagerness to counteract the anti-Zionist propaganda that other government representatives had issued while in the US. The Weizmann papers show that Berlin had managed to persuade the British Embassy in Washington of the necessity of appointing a special representative for Jewish affairs. SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 53

ISAIAH BERLIN In a way, this was the position that had previously been offered to Berlin. He did eventually work for the British Embassy, but not until early 1942 when the US had entered the war and his propaganda role with British Security Coordination was no longer required. By this time, the need for his skills was one of a more general nature: broadly surveying the American political scene rather than providing a specifically Jewish perspective on it. Yet Berlin continued to pursue his private goals. His undercover work continued; he admitted to his biographer, Michael Ignatieff, that, during the summer of 1943, on hearing of a joint Anglo-American plan to issue a statement condemning ‘Zionist agitation’ he leaked the details of it to American Zionists who were thus able to forestall and cancel the announcement. Efraim Halevy would later pay tribute to Isaiah Berlin’s contribution to the state of Israel. In the Seventh Isaiah Berlin Annual Lecture, delivered in Hampstead on November 8th, 2009, he said: ‘Shaya, as we called him, was not a neutral bystander as history unfolded before our eyes. He was often a player, at times a clandestine one, as when he met me in the 1990s to hear reports of my many meetings with the late King Hussein of Jordan and his brother Crown Prince Hassan, who had been his pupil at Oxford.’ Berlin was a far more active negotiator on behalf of the Zionist cause than he ever admitted and his dealings with prominent Jews in Palestine, Great Britain, the US and the Soviet Walter Krivitsky Union placed him in a pivotal posibefore the Dies Committee, tion in the years before the Israeli Washington DC, state was founded.

The episode of this abortive journey to Moscow receives mainly routine treatment in the various histories and biographies of its key characters. As Michael Ignatieff tells the story, on the basis almost exclusively of Berlin’s conversations with him, the facts are briefly stated though a little bizarre. Early in the summer of 1940 Guy Burgess surprised Berlin by bursting into his rooms at New College asking him to accompany him on a trip to the Soviet Union. Burgess, who was at the time working for D Section of MI6 – responsible for sabotage and subversion – was probably anxious to make contact with his spymasters after Moscow had carried out a purge of the London station. He

1939.

BERLIN REVEALED in several letters written during his time of inactivity in the US that he wanted to get to Moscow. This longing apparently preceded Guy Burgess’ approach to him and even his professed desire to help with the war effort, perhaps over-unctuously articulated in a letter to his All Souls colleague, Lord Halifax. For example, in one of his most revealing letters, to the Communist Party member Maire Gaster, written in January 1941, Berlin refers directly to more sinister goings-on. He describes his role to her as ‘a courier with a bag’, suggesting that his function was to import secret material into the Soviet Union. He colours his account of the aborted trip to Moscow with the extraordinary phrase ‘a plot in which even Mrs Fisher [the wife of H.A.L. Fisher, Warden of New College] assisted’. He repeats to his parents his continuing desire to get to Moscow, despite the objections of British diplomats and, very curiously, reports that the Russians, mainly in the person of Constantine Oumansky, the Soviet Ambassador, are still eager to see him execute his mission.

‘Shaya, as we called him, was not a neutral bystander as history unfolded before our eyes. He was often a player, at times a clandestine one’

54 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

had persuaded the Ministry of Information that Berlin, a native Russian speaker, should be appointed as press officer to the newly appointed ambassador at the embassy in Moscow, Stafford Cripps. Berlin and Burgess left Liverpool for Moscow via the US but never completed the journey. In Washington, Burgess received the news that he was to be recalled to London and was fired by MI6 on his return. Meanwhile, Cripps refused to sanction Berlin’s presence in Moscow: the Foreign Office belatedly got wind of the whole scheme and scrapped it. Berlin, apparently not a government employee like Burgess, was left to pursue his own devices and eventually found an influential position assisting the British propaganda effort in the US.

F

URTHER RESEARCH has shown that this account is probably a travesty of what really happened. Berlin himself gives multiple, conflicting accounts of the events of that summer. To begin with, evidence provided by John Cairncross, one of the Cambridge Five, and Tom Driberg, a friend of Burgess’ (not normally the most reliable of chroniclers, but in this case there seems no reason for them to lie) suggests that, despite his protestations to the contrary, Berlin had been on intimate terms with Burgess and had mixed with him socially on frequent occasions. Second, Burgess’ claims that his mission to

Top: Soviet ambassador Constantine Oumansky, Washington DC, 1939. Above: Lord Halifax (left) with Maxim Litvinov, the Jewish Soviet ambassador, who was replaced as foreign commissar by Molotov, following the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939.

Moscow was driven by MI6’s need to exchange intelligence with that department’s Soviet counterparts must be seen as completely spurious, given Burgess’ role and reputation, and the timing of the event at the height of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Much more likely is that Burgess, as the ringleader and chief courier of the group of Oxbridge-educated Soviet agents, was anxious to inform his masters (who had withdrawn any contacts in London out of fear that their network had been compromised by recent defections) that the group was still willing, active and committed, and to advise them of the recent MI5 interviews with the Soviet defector, Walter Krivitsky. It is possible that Burgess wanted Berlin to accompany him as interpreter in Moscow to ensure that his messages to his Soviet handlers were not distorted. Krivitsky, who had been specially brought over under conditions of the highest secrecy from the US via Canada, had come close to identifying Cairncross, Maclean and Philby to his MI5 interviewers. Having conferred with his fellow moles, Burgess seems to have been the point-man who was determined to set the NKVD on Krivitsky’s trail. Other evidence suggests that Burgess and Berlin were engaged on a shared D Section mission. Bickham Sweet-Escott was then an officer in D Section and later in SOE (Special Operations Executive), the group into which D Section was folded after Churchill re-organised the security services. In his 1965 book, Baker Street Irregular, Sweet-Escott identifies Berlin’s mission to Moscow as one engineered by D Section, strongly suggesting that Berlin had been recruited by the same Colonel Grand for whom Burgess was the chief ideas man. Burgess may have come up with a scheme to deliver propaganda to the Soviet Union, one that was listened to with sympathy. Astonishingly, Harold Nicolson, in sections of his diaries that are unpublished, records that both Burgess and Berlin knew before they left that their mission to Moscow would not take place, presumably because of the disbanding of D Section just before they were due to leave. Yet they were nevertheless both able to embark on their ship to the United States. IT CANNOT BE PURELY COINCIDENTAL that, as soon as he had spoken in Washington DC to another member of the Oxbridge spy network, Michael Straight, Burgess was called back to the UK. His mission to Moscow was no longer required. Straight was then able to tail Krivitsky and alert his contacts at the Soviet Embassy in Washington to Krivitsky’s movements. In March 1940 Burgess made a trip to Paris with the writer Rosamond Lehmann on the spurious pretext of working with Paris radio. He absented himself for a while. Lehmann, who was the lover of Goronwy Rees, an Oxford don and another Soviet agent, guessed what he was up to: trying to visit his contact at the Soviet Embassy, on this occasion probably delivering the news of the interrogations of Krivitsky. Krivitsky’s fate was sealed. Once Trotsky had been assassinated in August 1940, he was next on Stalin’s list. In a classic set-up of falsified suicide, he was found murdered in a Washington hotel in January 1941. Berlin is silent on all aspects of Burgess’ enterprises during this period, claiming, for instance, that they never discussed his plans during their long sea journey across the Atlantic. Every other prominent figure who ever worked at all closely with Burgess during this time is similarly evasive or deceptive about their associations with him. Most extraordinarily, SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 55

ISAIAH BERLIN

despite this clumsy adventure with Burgess, Berlin was never called in to be interviewed by Special Branch after Burgess’ later defection. Berlin claimed that his work in New York was for an entity described as ‘British Information Services’, newly set up as part of the Ministry of Information. Yet this group shared offices at the Rockefeller Center with the multipurpose department known as ‘British Security Coordination’ (BSC), an amalgam of MI5, MI6 and SOE interests in the Americas. No personnel were wasted; their task was propaganda, to assist in gaining the support of the US for the war effort and the country’s eventual entry into the conflict on the side of the Allies. At first Berlin presented his employment there as a surprise, as something he undertook reluctantly. Yet research indicates that his appointment may have been hardwired. In particular, Berlin was probably a close acquaintance of, and collaborator with, Alexander Halpern, a dominant and central figure in BSC, but one who tried to keep his involvement in British intelligence secret until his dying day.

H

ALPERN’S KEY ROLE for BSC was to organise the acquisition and control of a radio station in Boston, WRUL, that was used to subtly disseminate British propaganda. Halpern had a history of allegiance to British interests: a member of Kerensky’s government before the 1917 revolution in Russia, he had been a legal adviser to the British Embassy in Moscow and had worked for British intelligence after he arrived in the United

56 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

Top: the Rockerfeller Center, 1939. Above: Isaiah Berlin's BIS identity card.

Kingdom. He, too, was employed by D Section and his interest in radio as a medium for influencing opinion dovetailed with Burgess’ expertise in broadcasting and propaganda. As a Russian Jew, he also had close cultural and ideological affinities with Berlin. Cairncross records him and his wife, a famed beauty of notorious pro-Soviet sympathies, holding salons in London late in 1939 at which other academics and future intelligence agents mingled with Berlin and Burgess. Yet Berlin claims he never knew Halpern until his name was mentioned to him by one Istorik in New York in 1941. Berlin wanted to hide his involvement with Halpern; he clearly felt that there was something dishonourable about any ties to British intelligence before the war.

At the end of 1941 Berlin transferred to Washington, in his words, ‘to take charge of political surveys’. While performing a well-appreciated job informing the British government of the realities of the American political scene throughout the remainder of the war, Berlin continued his private work as a Zionist emissary. Berlin was involved with a secret document called Casual Sources. The historian Verne Newton has reported that the British Embassy in Moscow wrote up a report of ‘casual sources’ (contacts considered treasonous by Stalin), a report that was kept under the tightest secrecy. Reference was made to it in an exchange between the Foreign Office and the embassy in Moscow. This was noticed by John W. Russell, a press attaché who had served in Moscow and was now supervised by the spy Donald Maclean in Washington. Russell sent London a cable, almost certainly cleared by Maclean, asking that he and Isaiah Berlin be provided with a copy of the Casual Sources report. ‘We make this request partly out of idle curiosity, partly out of a genuine need to keep abreast of developments in the U.S.S.R.’, the cable pleaded. The Moscow Embassy and the Foreign Office refused because of the danger. Maclean then intervened, promising that it would not get into the hands of the Americans and the Foreign Office finally relented. The report no doubt ended up in the hands of Stalin. When questioned by Verne Newton, Berlin gave an evasive and unsatisfactory response, claiming he never knew of the existence of such a document.

W

HY WAS BERLIN so coy about his intelligence activities? After all, supporting the war effort was a highly respectable pursuit for many Oxbridge dons, many of whom would have liked to have written about their various projects had it not been for the Official Secrets Act. Some evidence suggests that, before he became prime minister, Churchill attempted to forge a secret backchannel to Stalin, maybe prompted by his meeting with Burgess in 1938, that could have involved Cadogan, Nicolson, Cripps and Laski, even, and then Berlin, Oumansky and Ben-Gurion. This strategy may have been adopted to help the Jews in Palestine, as well as to build a relationship with Stalin, even though the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in force. In May 1940, at a time when Churchill was manipulating Hitler to make him believe that the country was divided, that Churchill’s, leadership role was at risk and that Britain was ready to sue for peace, Burgess and Berlin may have been used to convey orally a highly confidential message to Stalin – or his ambassador, Oumansky – that the process was a feint. As the Battle of Britain began and Churchill’s

Why was he so coy about his intelligence activities? After all, supporting the war effort was a highly respectable pursuit for many Oxbridge dons

Cartoon by Pont (Graham Laidler) in Punch, November 1940.

position as prime minister became more secure, the need for secret negotiations presumably waned. Any possible relationship may also have been jeopardised by the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States in the middle of June 1940. The episode in May 1941 when Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess landed in Scotland also alerted Stalin’s suspicions. Given the highly sensitive nature of such communications, those privy to them were no doubt especially tight-lipped about their involvement, especially after Burgess’ unmasking as a Soviet agent. Such a scenario could help explain Berlin’s constant denial of any intelligence dealings. It is also possible that propaganda and deception conflicted with his intellectual beliefs. He wished to maintain the façade that, as a leading intellectual, it was beneath his dignity to deal in such underhand exploits and he may have regretted some of his more dubious relationships. He also recognised a clash between the British government and the goals of Zionism, which had led to him being disloyal to his adopted country. Berlin was a man of the Left. He was a ‘New Dealer’ and enthusiastically welcomed the Labour Party’s win in 1945. Yet he was a hesitant converter of ideas into political philosophy. As Noel Annan wrote, in Our Age (1990): He did not pronounce on public issues. No one could say what his views were on trade union reform, the balance of payments, university entrance or the poverty trap. He remained marginal to the central issues of any region of national life. Despite the claim to the contrary made by the Soviet defector Anatoly Golitsyn, there is no evidence that Berlin was ever a Soviet agent: he was more like his friend Victor Rothschild, a man of influence who could be manipulated and who sometimes performed dubious activities under his own initiative. He was a consistent critic of totalitarianism, but it was not clear where his brand of social democracy drew the line. His life thus contained a central paradox. As an aesthete and intellectual, he enjoyed the comfortable liberal life of the Oxford common room and the London salon and felt accepted in this privileged circle. Yet his impulses towards egalitarianism and ‘social justice’ led him to favour some socialist causes, as well as the less liberal aspects of the Zionist movement and, maybe out of a sense of friendship, to maintain allegiance to questionable characters past their sell-by date. Ultimately, his lack of candour over his intelligence activities reflects an uneasy conscience over his contribution to the shaping of the century. Antony Percy is studying for a PhD in Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham.

FURTHER READING Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (Metropolitan Books, 1998). Gary Kern, A Death in Washington (Enigma Books, 2003). John Lukacs, The Duel (Ticknor & Fields, 1991). Verne Newton, The Cambridge Spies (Madison Books, 1991). SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 57

REVIEWS

Richard Weight is enthused by early 1960s Britain Joe Moran enjoys foodie time travel • Juliet Gardiner admires ‘perfect’ wives

Singer Tom Jones rides a crane at BBC Television Centre, 1971.

‘FROM SCARCITY to abundance’ is the phrase usually used to describe the explosion in the number of channels and broadcasting bandwidth over the last 60 years, from one television channel in Britain in 1950 to about 400 channels today. However the same could apply to the explosion in writing about broadcasting history. In 1957 the BBC decided it needed its history to be written. Partly this was because it wanted to remind itself (and others) of the values that underpinned the institution when, for the first time, its monopoly was broken and it was facing competition from ITV, which by the late 1950s was resoundingly defeating the BBC in the ratings game. Second, it had just been through a bruising encounter with government during the Suez Crisis. The director-general initially approached Alan Bullock but he was too busy. He recommended the young Asa Briggs, an Oxford historian who had been at Bletchley Park during the war and knew that institutions needed to keep their secrets. A wonderful deal was put in place whereby Briggs was paid by the BBC, received access to documents that no outsider had ever seen, had an office in the BBC, but would be totally independent and with the publisher, Oxford University Press, would 58 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

SIGNPOSTS

History of British Broadcasting With the BBC Charter renewal in the news, Taylor Downing recommends studies of the institution’s past, present and future.

retain editorial control. Two volumes were initially intended. What followed were five authoritative tomes: The Birth of Broadcasting (1961), The Golden Age of Wireless (1965), The War of Words (1970), Sound and Vision (1979) and Competition (1995). Briggs produced a history of an institution and of the bureaucrats who shaped the corporation. His volumes follow how ideas and policies emerged and were defined by events. This ranges across such issues as what radio and later television technologies to adopt, to what swear words were and were not suitable; from what was appropriate content for Children’s Hour, to how to support the wartime V for Victory campaign. The weakness of Briggs’ histories is that they are about people and policies rather than programmes. The vast bulk of the BBC’s output, its actual radio and television programmes, has not survived. So Briggs’ history is inevitably based on paper records. It is not a cultural history. In this sense it is very much of its time, for cultural history hardly existed when Briggs started writing and the ‘communications revolution’ had yet to happen. Since Briggs’ last volume was published, many histories have presented the BBC in terms of its cultural contribution to the life of the nation, such as David Hendy’s brilliant, all-embracing history of Radio 4, Life on Air (2007) and Joe Moran’s Armchair Nation (2013). Recently, Charlotte Higgins of the Guardian has produced an excellent work that roots the contemporary struggles of the BBC firmly in

the story of its early days, in This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC (2015). Many others have written on different aspects of broadcasting history. There is a six-volume history of ITV (1982-2002) by Bernard Sendall, Jeremy Potter, Paul Bonner and others. But this is more corporate and less compelling than Briggs. There are also lots of memoirs. Some are excellent like David Attenborough’s Life on Air (2002) and Jeremy Isaacs’ Look Me in the Eye (2006), which locate their own personal story in the context of a dramatically changing broadcasting landscape. Palgrave Macmillan publish for the BFI a series of TV Classics. This reviewer has written one, on The World at War (2012), and there are volumes on Civilisation (2009), Dr Who (2005) and The Singing Detective (2007) among many others. There is a growing mass of academic titles for the

Pinkoes and Traitors ... sums up the enormous range of the BBC’s output as the cultural cornerstone of the nation expanding media studies market, from analyses of TV news, to studies of television drama. So, after a gap of 20 years, it is exciting to read the follow-on to the Briggs mega history. The series has a new author, Jean Seaton, and a new publisher, Profile Books. The book was delayed for more than a year as lawyers pored over it, concerned about its treatment of Jimmy Savile among other issues. But it was finally published this year as Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC and the Nation 1974-1987. Seaton comes from a fine media history pedigree at the University of Westminster (which in its earlier existence, as the Polytechnic of Central London, encouraged much pioneering work on media

studies). She is also a known and outspoken supporter of public service broadcasting. Seaton has a totally different style to Briggs. He wrote as he would about a Victorian city, as a largely chronological, conventional history. Seaton’s approach is thematic and cultural, including topics such as the political coverage of Northern Ireland, David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, the Charles and Diana Royal Wedding, the role of women in the BBC and the corporation’s link with the security services, when 40 per cent of all staff were vetted by MI5. Seaton’s book has already become controversial and has been attacked for a host of factual errors that let it down. Melvyn Bragg has called it ‘distressingly inadequate’. The son of Alasdair Milne (the first programme maker to become top dog at the BBC) has denounced the account of the sacking of his father as DG. Much of Pinkoes and Traitors is highly opinionated and, most frustratingly, almost dateless. The final chapter on Milne’s demise never once reveals in what month and barely even what year, events were happening. Nevertheless, there is much fine writing in the book that sums up the enormous range of the BBC’s output as the cultural cornerstone of the nation ‘as it got up and when it went to bed, when it celebrated Christmas and on an ordinary weekday evening’. The book is timely and, as the debate about Charter renewal takes off, it leads one to ask what it is Britons want from the BBC. Seaton is loud and clear on this. The nation wants a broadcaster that is national while remaining independent from government; that caters for all tastes including the most popular while continuing to offer quality programming of the highest international standard; and an institution that enables creative talent to flourish. In Seaton’s history the BBC has a good champion. Let us hope that those who have the future of the BBC in their hands take note of its past. Taylor Downing

Modernity Britain

Book Two: A Shake of the Dice, 1959-62 David Kynaston Bloomsbury 454pp £25

AFTER APPEARING at the Stratford Royal in the hit 1960 musical Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be, the press asked Barbara Windsor if she would be returning to the East End. ‘Are you kidding?’ she shrieked. ‘I’m finished with all that tenquid-a-week lark. I’m not in this business for art’s sake, you know – I’m in it for the money.’ The Cockney Carry On star expressed the material aspirations that David Kynaston brilliantly captures in this latest volume of his history of postwar Britain. His trademark trawl of newspapers is analysed with an empathetic outlook and a readable style, so that A Shake of the Dice takes the reader into the daily fabric of British life. In some ways, the Britain of the early 1960s is unrecognisable today. Although expectations of marriage were growing, most women still faced a life of drudgery at home and at work. Bingo, enabled by the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act, became a female working-class craze, as dance halls and cinemas were converted for the fun of marking cards to win prizes. It was ‘a nice change from sitting around the house, washing, ironing, talking to the wall’, bingo fans in Tottenham told one journalist. However, the worst of today’s Britain was also apparent in attitudes to immigration

from the colonies. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act was passed in 1962 to limit the flow of black and Asian citizens. Daily Mail features on lazy, criminal and hypersexual blacks bombarded bingo women and debutantes alike, casting principled Labour opponents of the Act as out-of-touch elitists. Less toxic than this imperial hangover, but no less tricky for the Left, was the emergence of today’s consumer society. Kynaston traces the arrival of the supermarket – then to retailing what the Sputnik was to transport. Supermarkets were given a boost in 1964 by a Conservative minister, Edward Heath, who abolished resale price maintenance (the pricefixing of goods by manufacturing cartels). This enabled heavy discounting by giant retailers, an act of proto-Thatcherite free trade policy that, ironically, put many small grocers like Margaret Thatcher’s father out of business. Closing on a Sunday was ‘morally and socially right’, declared Robert Sainsbury in 1961, but his upright sabbatarianism was challenged by Jack Cohen, who opened his flagship Tesco store in Leicester that year, promising ‘keen prices and greater choice’. At the opening

Kynaston traces the arrival of the supermarket – then to retailing what Sputnik was to transport ceremony the Tesco tape was cut by another star of the Carry On films, Sid James. It was USstyle capitalism in full flow. Such was the appeal of America that when pollsters asked people about another Heath initiative – Britain’s first application to join the nascent European Union in 1961 – 55 per cent said they would rather be closer to the United States, compared with only 22 per SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 59

REVIEWS cent who said they would prefer Europe. Yet Kynaston shows that behind the bluster Britons were becoming more European. Supermarkets may have been an American invention but it was they who began selling Continental wine cheaply, making a once middle-class drink accessible to all. Supermarkets also piled high new products such as Heinz’ tinned Spaghetti Bolognese – the ‘Exciting New Dish’ – its strange taste evoking an exotic Continent as yet out of reach to most holidaymakers. You never feel that Kynaston is putting a cardigan around your shoulders like some chroniclers of postwar Britain, which could still be a mean and shabby place to live. He has the courage to show all sides of the dice being thrown, without ever

Kynaston has the courage to show all sides of the dice ... that is the strength of these marvellous books condescending to the workingclass people whose voices he allows to be heard. That is the strength of these marvellous books. The forthcoming volume on the mid-1960s may be the most crucial yet because, whatever revisionists may argue, that was the moment when the more secular, cosmopolitan Britain of today was forged. In January 1960, a Surrey teenager called Jacqueline Aitken recorded in her diary: ‘I did the shopping with Dad and you’ll never guess what we bought! A RECORD PLAYER! …We bought Travelling Light by Cliff Richard and Dad chose a Mantovani long player.’ What happened when teenage taste turned to the Who and James Brown should be at the core of Kynaston’s next foray into modernity. Richard Weight 60 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes

The Story of Women in the 1950s Virginia Nicholson Viking/Penguin 526pp £16.99

EXACTLY WHO were the ‘perfect wives’ of the 1950s? Were they the drably dressed women still queuing for food up to a decade after the Second World War had ended? Or were they sprightly looking females in frilly pinnies, manically waving a feather duster and serving up ‘delicious’ meals to their husbands? Following her probes into the lives of women after the First World War and their roles in the Second, Virginia Nicholson moves forward into a decade that has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves. Sandwiched between the privations and sacrifices of the 1940s and the affluent excesses of the ‘swinging sixties’, the fifties have long been regarded as a dull decade, when Britain was struggling to rebuild a devastated and shabby country and ‘face the future’, in the words of the Labour Party’s 1945 election slogan. For many women they were years of frustration at wartime gains lost, whereas others nursed a profound desire to return to the certainties of their pre-war lives. But for both the future was to prove circumscribed. Women might have had the vote on the same terms as men since 1929, but for most that was pretty well the limit of their equality: working women were paid much less than men and despite the responsibilities and sheer hard graft many had endured in wartime, were still regarded as submissive and inferior beings.

Educational opportunities were limited. The 1944 Education Act was supposed to give everyone ‘parity of esteem’, but that is not how it worked out. Many teachers and parents had narrow expectations for girls whose destiny was to be marriage, a home and a family, with work just an interim measure between leaving school and walking down the aisle, rather than a career. Just 1.2 per cent of women went to university in the 1950s. In many cases, a woman’s lot seems to have hardly improved by marriage. Imagining wives to be fulfilled by having an easy-to-clean Formica worktop and a twintub washing machine, husbands could be harsh taskmasters, most regarding running the home and parenting solely as a woman’s responsibility, expecting meals ready when they returned from work, making all the household decisions of consequence and largely continuing to inhabit a separate sphere of pubs and football. Nicholson stitches together some telling interviews to support this perception: the wife whose husband confiscated her pearl necklace until she ‘learned not to swear’, the mother who wept when her daughter called off her engagement since she had already purchased a set of wall-lights in anticipation. However, she also includes exceptions to the Stepford

Husbands imagined wives to be fulfilled with a Formica worktop and a twin-tub washing machine Wives stereotypes; Dora Russell who organised a ‘peace caravan’ of women against nuclear war, pioneers of birth control, the working-class girl who knew her looks would get her out of the factory and ruthlessly fought her way to be crowned Miss Great Britain. As ever, the perfect and the ideal were a chimera, but frequently proved oppressive ones for women in the 1950s. Juliet Gardiner

The Gardens of the British Working Class Margaret Willes

Yale University Press 414pp £12.99

RUNNING FROM the 16th century right up to the postwar period, The Gardens of the British Working Class traces the diverse ways in which gardens and gardening have enriched the lives of the ordinary people of Britain through the centuries. The book loosely follows a chronological structure, tracing the slow transition from gardening for subsistence purposes – primarily to obtain food but also to cultivate herbs for medicinal purposes – to the growing of flowers and the reinvention of gardening as a leisure, rather than useful, pursuit. Accessibly written, beautifully illustrated, and packed with fascinating evidence, this book will be sure to delight gardeners and social historians alike. While there is much here to interest and entertain, there is nevertheless a consistent difficulty in getting to material that really tells us about the gardens of the working class. In the introduction, Willes promises to turn to first-hand accounts which ‘express the thoughts and opinions of people who are rarely named, let alone heard’. But in reality the book makes rather little use of autobiographical testimony; a missed opportunity, particularly for the period after about 1850 when such sources become both more abundant and more informative. Indeed, it might be questioned how much of the earlier part of

REVIEWS the book is about the working class, or ordinary, gardener at all. Early chapters include fascinating discussions of medicinal herbs, the introduction of the potato and the development of flower-growing and floral societies. It is hugely engrossing, but only in part a story about the significance of gardening to ordinary Britons. As Willes moves into the 19th century, she moves into surer territory. From a raft of different sources, Willes pieces together the uses to which labouring people put their cottage gardens, usefully reminding us that gardens were not simply the preserve of the rural poor, but an important element of city life as well. Even in London, many working families enjoyed the use of a garden, at least outside the crowded central districts. Although vegetables formed the mainstay of many such gardeners, fruit and flowers were often present, too; sometimes for resale, sometimes for personal use and enjoyment. As the general population became ever more literate in Victorian Britain, so a new form of how-to literature aimed at the humble gardener began to emerge. Mass-produced, cheap newspapers such as Gardening Illustrated could be bought for a penny and contained tips and advice for those with limited space and limited means. It marked the emergence of gardening as a leisure pursuit, a trend that continued apace in the 20th century. Above all, this is a book of stories, pictures and vignettes. Serious historians might want to know more about the number, size, spread and use of allotments, but I imagine busy gardeners will simply revel in the detail Willes has amassed. The Gardens of the British Working Class leaves unanswered some large questions about the role of gardens in filling the plates and tummies of the labouring poor during the long period under review, but it is sure to delight anyone who likes to garden. Emma Griffin

TELEVISION

Back in Time for Dinner

BBC2 (To be repeated from August 2015) THE HISTORICAL makeover/reality television show has been around since at least the turn of the millennium, when The 1900 House gutted a late-Victorian terrace in south-east London and subjected a modern family to turn-of-the-century plumbing. That series spawned many sequels and imitators: The 1940s House, The Edwardian Country House, Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm and others. The format could be forgiven for feeling a little tired. It did feel past its bestbefore-date in the recent 24 Hours in the Past (BBC1), in which a group of celebrities became Victorian minimum-wage workers sweeping the streets and shovelling manure: a sort of time-travel version of I’m a Celebrity, which was an endurance test for both the participants and the viewers. If you want to see how to do this type of show right, though, catch up on Back in Time for Dinner, first aired on BBC2 this spring and co-presented by food historian Polly Russell and critic Giles Coren. It became one of the channel’s most popular recent programmes and I can see why, apart from its simple but brilliant title, nearly three million viewers tuned in. On the surface, it was not so different from the template first established by The 1900 House, which was made by the same TV company, Wall to Wall. The Robshaw family from North London spent a summer cooking and eating the food of every decade since the 1950s, from whole dinners cooked in lard to microwaved meals, with the producers remodelling their kitchen and living room for each era. The main thing the programme got right was its choice of family. Brandon and Rochelle Robshaw and their three children, Miranda, Ros and Fred, were engaging and thoughtful and up for the experiment without being too

Panglossian about it. They had twigged that the point of the show was not the historical dressing-up but to see how food acted as a lens through which to read our changing values: about the role of women, the invention of cookery as middle-class pastime or the trade-off between convenience and conviviality. They had a nice line in one-liners. ‘Salty weird jelly spread on weird bread’, was ten-year-old Fred’s verdict on the bread and pork dripping diet of the 1950s. Of the unloved National Loaf, English graduate Brandon had the perfect analogy: ‘In Henry V, there’s a bit where he talks about somebody going to bed “crammed with distressful bread”, and I kind of know what he meant.’ Back in Time for Dinner did not entirely escape a crucial methodological problem first highlighted by the Supersizers strand, which Coren also co-presented, namely that decades are a retrospective construction of cultural memory and people do not live by them. Not everyone rushed out to buy fish fingers as soon as they hit the shops and ate them in front of the telly. History is not the zeitgeist; it is messy and uneven and people within any era are living life at different speeds. And yet the programme implied that in the 1970s we were mostly reading John Seymour’s Self-Sufficiency and milking goats in our back gardens or using Delia Smith’s How To Cheat at Cooking to bluff our way through dinner parties. Yet the series largely succeeded in skirting round cliché because it got the minutiae right. From somewhere, enterprising researchers had managed to source 1950s Sutox beef suet, freeze-dried Vesta ready meals and a 1970s dining table covered in ceramic tiles. There were nice, illuminating details: we learned that frozen vegetables in 1970s freezer stores were sold loose, weighed and bagged (more eco-friendly than today) and that in the 1980s people who roasted chicken in the microwave were advised to baste it with Marmite to make it look appetisingly brown. In popular histories of the recent past, nostalgia often mixes with condescension. We gaze back at our immediate ancestors and, like colonialists wondering at the strange habits of a remote tribe, laugh at their fashion crimes and marvel at their naivety. Back in Time for Dinner avoided this trap. How refreshing to see that the Robshaws’ favourite decade was the one now most berated for its politics and its style mistakes: the 1970s. Joe Moran

In the 1980s, people who roasted chicken in the microwave were advised to baste it with Marmite ...

SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 61

REVIEWS

Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c.1050-1614 Brian A. Catlos

Cambridge University Press 650pp £65

‘ALTHOUGH [Muslims] do not acknowledge a good religion, so long as they live among Christians with their assurance of security, their property shall not be stolen from them or taken by force; and we order that whomever violates this law shall pay a sum equal to double the value of what he took.’ This statement, proceeding from the 13th-century Castilian law code Siete Partidas, encapsulates many of the complexities and ambiguities that characterised Muslim-Christian interactions, collaborations and conflicts in Latin Christendom during the Medieval and Early Modern periods. One of the achievements of this well-researched and exhaustive book is that it challenges some of the traditional historiographical views of interfaith relationships in ‘frontier’ territories. First, it overcomes the idea that Muslims were a subjugated minority in a predominantly Christian world and considers them, instead, as an integral and active part of it. Second, it challenges stereotypical views of ‘unity’ by focusing on the heterogeneity which characterised each ethno-religious group. Political, commercial and social networks involving Muslims and mudéjares (free Muslim subjects) created security and stability for most of them. However, within the same region and during the same period, Muslim soldiers, diplomats, peasants, jurists, intellectuals or 62 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

craftsmen, among other categories, did not always behave and interact as a coherent group. Catlos chose an intimidating title for an extremely ambitious book. The result is an intense and yet coherent reading, enriched by numerous source extracts, a comprehensive and up-to-date engagement with international historiography and a useful glossary. The first part takes the reader through a chronological narrative of the ‘static diaspora’ to which Muslim communities in Latin Christendom were exposed from the 11th to the 16th centuries. The second part is thematically structured and reconsiders many of the key stages discussed in part one, focusing instead on their representations and related historiographical debates, as well as on their legal, administrative, economic and social implications. Thanks to an impressive range of archival sources proceeding mainly from Iberia (with relevant distinctions between the crowns of

Muslim experiences under Latin rule proved extremely diverse in time and across multiple regional contexts Castile and Leon, Aragon, Navarre and Portugal), as well as from southern Italy, Hungary, Lithuania and the Crusader States, Catlos’ book examines the experiences of Muslims and mudéjares as individuals and communities, whose fortunes were not always interdependent. Catlos suggests that fiscal regimes and taxes paid by Muslims did not mirror the entire range of contributions that they provided to Christian powers and this range of unrecorded input might explain why in some cases royal and seigneurial authorities supported different ethno-religious groups, even against ecclesiastical impositions. Certainly, but only partially, religion defined identity and regulated contacts and exchanges, while acculturation, daily routines and practices, law and custom,

economic and commercial interests and, more generally, realpolitik also played influential roles. The laws issued in areas of intense contact are also valuable in understanding some of those dynamics, especially since Muslims were subjected to multiple jurisdictions, whose boundaries they crossed at their convenience. Even if the development of economically and administratively more stable Christian institutions favoured attempts at segregation and control of economically powerful minorities, it was only by the 16th century that the Iberian Peninsula – the last stronghold of Muslim communities in Europe – experienced an extreme intransigent turn under Habsburg domination. A dramatic policy of expulsion was implemented and, perhaps not surprisingly, new concepts of ‘race’ developed. But Catlos’ view on the failure of mudéjarism is more nuanced: ‘It was a crisis of conveniencia; a divergence of interests and agendas, that left Islamic society in the Iberian peninsula increasingly irrelevant, if not threatening, anomalous, if not provocative.’ Muslim experiences under Latin rule proved extremely diverse in time and in different regional contexts. Fear of Muslims as a potential ‘fifth column’ persisted and undermined interfaith relationships, especially when extremist external movements threatened the long-term pragmatic dynamics that were in place. While acknowledging the limitations of his project, especially the lack of sources for some areas and time periods, Catlos successfully describes complex historical and historiographical landscapes. He encourages the reader to revisit ideas of tolerance, conversion and convivencia with an awareness of the complexity of such multiple interactions to avoid ‘questions badly put’. The risk would otherwise be that inaccurate or partial views will continue to inform historically-led debates on interfaith relationships in an attempt to legitimise controversial political discourses relevant to 21st-century society. Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo

Empire of Tea

The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton and Matthew Mauger Reaktion Books 328pp £25

‘TEA’ has at least five meanings: the shrub, originally from China (camellia sinensis); the shrub’s leaf; the commodity produced by drying this leaf; the commodity’s infusion; and the occasion for partaking in this infusion. Trade in tea has been a big business, especially in Britain, for three centuries. Today, it is a very big business worldwide, worth just over $40 billion. That is about half the value of the worldwide coffee trade. Yet tea is imbibed in greater quantities than coffee: its ‘brewed volume’ in 2013 was estimated at 290 billion litres, compared with 162 billion litres of coffee. No wonder that the authors of Empire of Tea, a stimulating and attractively illustrated history, call their book ‘the story of an Asian cash crop, a necessary luxury, utterly free of nutritional value, shipped halfway around the world, saturating a mass market, inescapably foreign, indispensably British’. Outside China, the story really gets going in the 18th century, the period in which Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton and Matthew Mauger, who are literary academics, specialise. They quote James Boswell’s beguiling verdict on Chinese tea as a self-medication during a period of convalescence in 1763: ‘Green tea … indeed is a most kind remedy in cases of this kind.

REVIEWS Often I have found relief from it. I am so fond of tea that I could write a whole dissertation on its virtues. It comforts and enlivens without the risks attendant on spirituous liquors. Gentle herb! Let the florid grape yield to thee. Thy soft influence is a more safe inspirer of social joy.’ In this period, beginning around 1720, much of the tea drunk in Britain was smuggled to avoid exorbitant government tax, which was also the cause in 1773 of the Boston Tea Party (though this name appeared in print only in 1834). Customs and Excise fought back. For example, in 1735 two officers, protected by five mounted soldiers, impounded 450lbs of contraband tea in the Suffolk countryside near Hadleigh. But on the way to their custom house, they were brutally attacked by 20 heavily armed smugglers on horseback, who ‘took away the aforesaid Tea’, they reported. Only after the tea tax was ‘commuted to’ an additional tax on windows in 1784 by the government of William Pitt did British tea-smuggling die away. By then, the smugglers’ distribution channels had spread the formerly city-based habit of tea drinking throughout Britain. The first Indian tea, from Assam, was traded in London only in 1839, two years after Queen Victoria, on accession to the throne, is said to have commanded: ‘Bring me a cup of [presumably Chinese] Tea and The Times!’ India quickly came to dominate both British teadrinking and the popular view of the tea trade with its colonial plantations and dramatic races between tea clippers. But as the authors observe, ‘these aspects of its story were the effect – rather than the cause – of the widespread demand for tea.’ Now excuse me if I stop, to boil up the kettle, warm the teapot, spoon in my late mother’s personal blend of loose-leaf Assam Tips and Darjeeling and indulge my lifelong love of this exotic, indispensable, infusion. Andrew Robinson

MUSEUM

Lion Salt Works

Marston, Cheshire CW9 6ES INVARIABLY, when one thinks of visiting restored industrial sites of importance it is early textile factories, coal mines and iron works that come to mind. Salt hardly ever pictures in Britain’s industrial heritage. However, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that salt was one of the most important industries in the north-west. Before refrigeration and canning, salt was vital for the preservation of food and as seasoning. By the end of the 18th century salt had become a fundamental ingredient in the production of soap (soda), glass (soda) and textile bleaching (chlorine). These developments eventually led to salt from Cheshire becoming a leading vector in the foundation and location of Britain’s chemical industries in Widnes, Runcorn and beyond. As such the re-opening of the Lion Salt Works Museum is a welcome reminder of this industry’s importance to the economic history of Britain. The museum is one of only four historic open-pan salt-making sites in the world. The Works provide a wonderful lens through which we see how salt has shaped the people, economy and landscape of Cheshire and the surrounding region. Indeed, it was salt that first fuelled the rise of the port of Liverpool during the late 17th century and was also, subsequently, the preferred ballast for ships involved in the slave and textiles trade. Salt refineries were built in Liverpool, Dungeon, Garston and Frodsham Bridge during the 1690s. One of the first wet docks in Liverpool, the Salt Dock, was built next to what is now the Albert Dock as a terminus for the trade in 1753.

There is nothing aesthetic about the Red Lion Works but then, of course, it was not built for attraction. In fact, the first thing that strikes you about the wonderfully restored complex is the temporary nature of the buildings. This can be seen by the supporting iron railway girders that are used to reinforce walls. It seems the owner of the works, Henry Thompson, scoured the local area for abandoned railways to obtain iron track to reinforce his crumbling buildings. This quirky but practical feature has been lovingly preserved in the buildings restoration. Indeed, one of the ironies is the now permanent nature of the salt works. Mr Thompson would not believe his eyes. As you walk towards the entrance you will be struck by the formidable glass sides that climb to the roof. Behind lies a shop and restaurant and above a modern conference centre. Through a combination of museum displays and stateof-the art interactions you are first introduced to the history of salt-making in Britain. You are taught about the geology of the Cheshire area and its large deposits of rock salt. It is through water running over this rock that brine is created, which was originally pumped to the surface by a steam engine (a ‘Nodding Donkey’) that is still exhibited. It was precisely the continual evacuation of brine from beneath the surface that led to the instability of the buildings and the surrounding area of Northwich. The various land collapses have now been filled with water and created a whole new environment for wildlife and vegetation. It is when you get to the first Pan House that the whole labour process of saltmaking emerges; a sense of the heat, salty air, sweat and sheer hard work comes to life. You first enter the Firing area of the furnace beneath the brine pan that constantly had to be maintained at the right temperature. You then climb some stairs to a dark and atmospheric iron pan being worked by lifelike models of salt workers; steam is depicted by dry ice and the customs of a bygone labour process are caught in the background through the eerie sound of a folk song. This was both gruelling and skilled labour, since parts of the pan had to be kept at different temperatures to produce different types of salt. All the various tasks of the manufacturing process are depicted. This museum will appeal to a wide audience and is both educational and entertaining. William J. Ashworth

The Works provide a wonderful lens through which we see how salt has shaped the people, economy and landscape of Cheshire and the surrounding region

SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 63

REVIEWS

The Raj at War

A People’s History of India’s Second World War Yasmin Khan The Bodley Head 414pp £25

MORE THAN two million Indian troops, the largest volunteer army in world history, fought on the Allied side from North Africa and the Middle East to Malaya and Singapore. But their role was quickly forgotten, because it did not fit easily with the postwar narratives of either British or Indian political elites. Even the idea of a South Bank memorial

64 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

to India’s war dead was buried in British bureaucracy. This book is written from a subaltern studies perspective, from the bottom up, rather than focusing on political leaders. However Khan makes no attempt to impose a politically correct, anti-colonial straitjacket on her remarkably diverse cast of characters, ranging from the sepoys themselves to their families, prostitutes, nurses and cooks and then radiating out to include the farmers, coolies, shopkeepers, businessmen and bureaucrats who made up the civilian fabric of the Raj at war. We hear about pervasive racism, but also about how the war broke down past barriers, producing remarkable camaraderie under fire between Indian sepoys and British tommies, between officers and other ranks. In India, as in Britain, Khan convincingly argues that the war was a great equaliser and moderniser, making independence inevitable and laying the foundations of the new Indian

state. It brought major opportunities for Indian manufacturing industry, churning out military and other hardware for the war effort and huge war profits for India’s business classes. Indian cities grew rapidly and so did jobs and prosperity for the urban middle and working classes. In the countryside, too, a job in the army meant a full belly after a decade of economic depression. In a surprising parallel with 1940s Britain, the war brought major expansion and modernisation of public health services. The sepoys, says Khan, received military healthcare ‘they would otherwise be unable to dream of back home’, including inoculations, malaria control and a healthy diet supplemented with multivitamins. But military service also brought soaring rates of venereal disease, with wartime Calcutta recording the highest rate anywhere in the world. Faced with endemic prostitution and illegal brothels, the Raj responded with increased supplies of condoms

and slogans like ‘Defeat the Axis, Use Prophylaxis’. On a more sombre note, Khan tackles the impact of wartime profiteering and bungling on the terrible Bengal famine of 1943, but she is careful not to apportion blame and points out that the famine happened on the watch of an elected provincial government. She is equally judicious about the failure of powersharing negotiations between the Raj and India’s rival Congress and Muslim League politicians. Khan’s research has been extensive and she combines it with a gift for storytelling. She is at her best and most original in bringing us the revealing perspectives of witnesses other historians might ignore: black American GIs denied entry to a racially segregated swimming pool in Calcutta, sick and orphaned Polish child refugees sheltered by a kindly Gujarati Maharaja, or starving Chinese troops sent to India to be fattened up and trained. Zareer Masani

REVIEWS

Another Darkness, Another Dawn

A History of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers Becky Taylor Reaktion Books 272pp £25

THERE ARE TOO FEW solidly written, accessible books on the situation of Gypsy, Traveller and Roma (GTR) populations in the UK and mainland Europe that contextualise their long, often tortuous and highly contested histories. Frequently, these diverse populations are identified simply as ‘Gypsies’. Thus, although the cover of Becky Taylor’s book, Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypies, Roma and Travellers, uses images (perhaps ironically) that play to popular ideas of the romantic, exotic and squalid/poverty stricken Romani, it is a relief to find that the text is far more sophisticated and challenging. Becky Taylor starts by exploring the divisions between the ethnic groups collectively known as GTR or Romani people, explaining that the popular categorisation of such communities relies on a mixture of recognition of ethno-linguistic and cultural variations, as well as an over-arching narrative of nomadism, spiced with presumptions of criminality, artistic endeavour and use of the ‘dark arts’. The trope of ‘travelling’ as a key characteristic of GTR people is so common as to lead to a frequent presumption that Gypsies or Travellers who no longer ‘travel’ have lost their ethnic and social identity. However nomadism as a way of life for GTR peoples is in sharp decline across Europe as a result of harsh policies

enacted over centuries, which have limited stopping places and criminalised nomadic lifestyles. At some points in history this was on pain of death, enforced through shooting horses used to draw wagons or imprisoning and deporting migrant or nomadic Romani populations (even when born in the country in which they travelled). Taylor and her team of research assistants, whose work she generously acknowledges, have drawn together a vast amount of literature, including the extensive annals of the Gypsy Lore Society journals and newsletters dating back over 140 years, as well as specialist books, administrative reports and scholarly articles. The result helps explain the wide variety of contexts and social milieus in which these populations have lived and the contradictions and challenges inherent in localised enforcement of centralised edicts and the influences of changing normative constructions of race, community and nationalism across Europe.

It is a relief to find that the text is far more sophisticated and challenging ... [than] the popular idea of the romantic, exotic and squalid/ poverty stricken Romani The densely-packed and extremely well-referenced text is a welcome addition to the burgeoning field of Romani studies, albeit the sheer volume of materials incorporated means that there is a frustrating tendency to jump from one well drafted, precise discussion to another. Indeed, the attempt to incorporate too much material is my main criticism of this substantial introductory volume on Romani historical studies. Thus, it is less a history of its subject than an engaging tour-de-force of

temporal political and policy practice across diverse localities; one in which mechanisms for representing and reframing poverty, migration/ethnicity and non-normative (that is, nomadic) behaviours are represented through a body of controlling, politically-driven practices addressed at diminishing the threat of dangerous ‘others’. However, Taylor presents a subtly nuanced picture of European Roma, showing the everyday lived reality of complex community relations, the impact of inter-marriage and personal contacts, which alleviate what could appear to be a relentlessly grim picture of centuries of bureaucratic and legislative oppression. Historical evidence, such as the genocidal round-ups in the Iberian peninsula in the 16th century and the horrifying brutality during the Nazi era, are contrasted with examples of how individual warmth, humanity and discretion could subvert policy decrees and the intent of rulers to create a monolithic nation state. The text perhaps relies too heavily on existing publications by key scholars, some of which are relatively dated and fails to engage fully with more recent historiographies of Romani peoples. Indeed Roma scholars in Eastern Europe are engaged in both deconstructing historical narratives of their own people and accessing first-hand ‘hidden narratives’ by dint of empathic shared histories. That said, this book is highly suitable for the general reader and students alike, who require a clear grasp of the post-Enlightenment spread of nationalism and the impacts of changing political regimes on populations who are outside normative constructions of the ‘good citizen’. The topical concluding chapter and afterword emphasise the recent resurgence of anti-Roma rhetoric and violent racism in the context of far Right political activities in Europe; resonating uneasily with concerns about the recycling of negative stereotypes, which have pursued Gypsies, Travellers and Roma for centuries and across many lands. Margaret Greenfields

CONTRIBUTORS William J. Ashworth is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Liverpool. Taylor Downing writes on film and television and is author of several books, including Secret Warriors (Little, Brown, 2014), about scientists in the First World War. Juliet Gardiner is a historian and broadcaster and a former editor of History Today. Margaret Greenfields is Professor of Social Policy and Community Engagement at Buckinghamshire New University and the author of numerous articles on Gypsies and Travellers in the UK. Emma Griffin is Professor of History at the University of East Anglia and is the author of A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution (Palgrave, 2010). Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Lincoln. Zareer Masani ‘s most recent book is Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist (The Bodley Head, 2013). His previous books include a widely acclaimed biography of Indira Gandhi. Joe Moran is a writer, lecturer, and Professor of Cultural History at John Moores University. His books include Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV (Profile, 2013). Andrew Robinson is the author of India: A Short History (Thames & Hudson, 2014) and nine other books on India. Richard Weight is a broadcaster and historian, whose books include, Mod: From Bebop to Britpop (The Bodley Head, 2013).

SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 65

HAVE YOUR SAY

Letters Becoming Trotsky I enjoyed reading the piece on the assassination of Trotsky in 1940 (Months Past, August), although I would have to disagree as to why ‘Trotsky’ became Trotsky in terms of the origins of his pseudonym. In a partly autobiographical essay, originally written and published in the 1920s, Trotsky stated that he himself chose this name when filling in a forged passport, fleeing from Irkutsk to Samara in August 1902, stating: ‘I myself filled in the [relevant] blank section of the passport, using the name of the senior prison warden from the jail in Odessa.’ Dr Steven J. Main via email

Fog on the Tyne Clive Emsley’s article ‘Cops & Dockers’ (August) was an excellent description of the unlawful practices carried out by dockers throughout UK ports during the Second World War. However, I would like to correct one error. Emsley refers in the text and photograph caption to Tyne Dock, Sunderland. In fact, Tyne Dock is situated between Jarrow (my birthplace) and South Shields on the River Tyne. Sunderland is situated approximately nine miles from Tyne Dock and stands on the banks of the River Wear. David Rowe Mold, Wales

A Special Relationship In ‘The Battle of Neuve Chapelle and the Indian Corps’ (August), Andrew Sharpe suggests that the lack of recognition of the Indian contribution to the Allied effort in the Great War deserves to be addressed. The views of one veteran of that war may go a very small way to do that. In August 1914 my father was junior subaltern in the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards and 66 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

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was with the regiment when it made the first BEF contact with the enemy on August 22nd at Casteau, near Mons. He was wounded on the Marne three weeks later and, until August 1918, he moved between hospital and regimental duty. He was with his regiment during the First Battle of the Somme and would certainly have encountered the Indian cavalry in June and July 1916 at Querrieu, where British and Indian cavalry waited for the word to drive through the gap in the German lines, which it was hoped would have been made by our infantry. He did not comment on this, but he told me of his admiration for the Indian troopers. They were, he said, issued with two blankets, one for the trooper and one for his horse. In the cold winter nights of northern France he recounted how many Indian troopers would give both blankets to their horses and would themselves share a single blanket with a comrade. One British officer at least was proud to serve with such men. Neil Munro Wimbledon

Fatal Fallacies In his piece on Lister’s introduction of antiseptic surgery (Months Past, August), Richard Cavendish repeats the widely held belief that death rates were, before its introduction, ‘appalling’. Most popular accounts of surgery in the 18th and 19th centuries repeat this mantra, with some suggesting that almost all patients died. In fact, case fatality rates were often considerably lower than this. For example, Robert Liston’s case fatality rate at University College Hospital in the 1840s was reported as 15 per cent, with the majority of deaths being due to secondary haemorrhage rather than sepsis. James Simpson conducted a

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countrywide survey of death rates in 1869 and received over 5,000 replies; the overall case fatality rate was about 10 per cent. Smaller hospitals generally had lower death rates than bigger establishments and experienced surgeons tended to do better than their less experienced colleagues, although not by very much. Some individual hospitals, on the other hand, did not do so well. Thus in the 1850s, surgeons at the London Hospital experienced a case fatality rate of 46 per cent, with most of the deaths being due to sepsis. At Reading Hospital, about the same time, the rate was 42 per cent. Obviously there were blackspots – or poorer surgeons – but it is wrong to suggest that the outlook for patients prior to the introduction of antisepsis and anaesthesia was uniformly bad. Professor Tony Waldron University College Hospital, London

Historians for Universality The debate in the pages of History Today between Professor David Abulafia of Historians for Britain and his critics has revealed an interesting insight into how historians interact with political change and contemporary disputes, particularly regarding Britain’s place in Europe, but also in a more globally interconnected world. On the one hand is an assertion of British exceptionalism, on the other a defence of Britain’s European identity. Both are supported by ample, if somewhat obvious, references to the country’s past. Both cases are positively argued, but are in fact reactions to political changes with which each side is uncomfortable and that strike at the intellectual context within which they have framed their understanding of British history. Historians for Britain is concerned about the putative dissolution of the

United Kingdom and the threat to British identity posed by European integration, while its critics are alarmed at the fragmentation of the European Union threatened by the Eurozone crisis and attacks upon the European idea from resurgent nationalism. Meanwhile, all historians of Britain, exceptionalists and ‘Europeans’ alike, are being challenged to relate their studies to a growing emphasis within increasingly international universities on global history. Simply, the contemporary certainties which have contextualised British historiography since the Second World War, namely a United Kingdom within a community of European nations, are being challenged at home at the same time that Britain (and Europe) has to adapt to a materially and intellectually advancing extra-European world. Perhaps both Historians for Britain and the ‘Europeans’ are too parochial. What is needed is neither exceptionalism nor Eurocentrism, but a history of Britain, national, regional and local, political, social, economic and cultural, that retains the particular experiences and practices of the inhabitants of Britain and relates them to similiar and dissimilar socities across the world, without losing the sense of identity felt by those who lived in our nation’s past: not a British or a European or a global history, but a universal history. This may require a revolution in academic practices and perhaps the next generation of historians will prove to be the revolutionaries who finally decouple British history from parochialism. In the meantime we can offer up some slogans to the cause: death to teleology, long live the comparative and vive la différence. David K. Warner Havant, Hampshire

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Coming Next Month England’s Hollow Victory

Did Henry V’s death in 1422 save him from confronting the painful truth that his plans for a cross-channel empire were unrealisable? ‘Great victories’, says Gwilym Dodd, ‘lead commanders into self-delusion, enticing them to pursue overambitious goals’, Henry’s unexpected victory over the French at Agincourt in 1415 being a case in point. Agincourt, argues Dodd, was lost by the French rather than won by the English and the victory encouraged Henry to pursue a foolish foreign policy that would forge catastrophic divisions within his kingdom.

The First Global Empire

Europe was astonished when, in August 1415, a Portuguese fleet crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and stormed the Muslim port of Ceuta in Morocco, one of the most important strategic strongholds in the Mediterranean. What followed, writes Roger Crowley, was a 30-year period when the nation – whose population numbered only one million and whose kings were too poor to mint their own coins – attempted to gain control of the Indian Ocean, world trade and destroy Islam.

The Bourbons Restored

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Visiting France in 1815, the German poet Heinrich Heine found it ‘a wretched, desolate land where mankind is stupid’. In the wake of the humiliation at Waterloo, France suffered manifold social and economic ills: there was widespread rural poverty and Paris was a seedbed of revolt. It was against this backdrop, writes Jonathan Fenby, that le Désiré, or ‘the desired one’, Louis XVIII, was restored to the throne and France entered a new phase in its history, the legacy of which is felt today.

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

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The winner for July is Edward Phillips, Lowestoft, Suffolk.

EDITOR’S LETTER: 2 © Alamy. HISTORY MATTERS: 3 © Scottish National Portrait Gallery; 5 © Alamy; 6 © Bridgeman Images; 7 top © Alamy; bottom © Corbis Images. MONTHS PAST: 8 Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris/Jean Tholance/akg-images; 9 top © Bridgeman Images; bottom © Alamy. A SOCIETY BUILT ON SLAVERY: 10 © Wilberforce House, Hull City Museums and Art Galleries/Bridgeman Images; 11 © PLA Collection/Museum of London; 12 © Bridgeman Images; 13 Reproduced by kind permission of Lambeth Archives Department; 14 left © National Portrait Gallery/Bridgeman Images; right © Alamy; 15 top © Alamy; bottom © David Curran/Wikimedia/Creative Commons; 16 top left courtesy Senate House Library; top right from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, vol.49:t.2338 (1822) [J.Curtis]; bottom © The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham/Bridgeman Images; 17 © Bridgeman Images. ISLAM’S UNLIKELY ALLIANCE: 19 © Ullstein Bild; 20 top left © German Federal Military Archives, Freiburg; top right © BPK, Berlin; bottom © Ullstein Bild; 21 © Ullstein Bild; 22 © Tim Aspden; 23 top © BPK, Berlin; bottom © Ullstein Bild; 24 © Ullstein Bild; 25 top © Ullstein Bild; bottom courtesy Archive of the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo. INFOCUS: 26-27 © Getty Images. ALEKSANDER STAMBOLISKI: 29 © Getty Images; 30 © Corbis Images. MAKING HISTORY © Alamy. WHY WERE THERE NO LEVELLERS IN SCOTLAND?: 33 © Bridgeman Images; 34 © National Library of Scotland; 35 top reproduced by kind permission of Arthur Bryant Coins; bottom © Bridgeman Images; 36 © The Trustees of the British Museum; 37 © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; 38 University of St Andrews/Museum Collections. EMPIRE OF OUTCASTS: 41 © London Metropolitan Archives/Bridgeman Images; 42-43 © Bridgeman Images; 42 bottom © Bridgeman Images; 43 bottom © Getty Images; 44 and 45 images © Bridgeman Images; 46-47 © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection/Bridgeman Images; 47 top Bridgeman Images; 47 bottom © Corpus Christi College, Oxford/Bridgeman Images; 48 © Bridgeman Images. MANUEL CORTES IN HIDING: 49 © Topfoto; 50 © Getty Images. THE UNDERCOVER EGGHEAD: 51 © Joe Partridge/Rex Features; 52 top © akg-images; bottom © Corbis Images; 53 © Getty Images; 54 © Press Association Images; 55 top and bottom © Library of Congress; 56 top © Mary Evans Picture Library; 57 © Punch Limited. REVIEWS: 58 © Alamy; 61 © Wall to Wall/BBC; 63 © Cheshire West and Chester Council. COMING NEXT MONTH: 69 Photo © Philip Mould/Bridgeman Images. PASTIMES: 70 top Woodstock Opening Ceremony courtesy Mark Goff/Wikimedia/Creative Commons; middle Catherine of Valois © National Portrait Gallery, London; bottom Maximilian Harden courtesy Library of Congress. SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION: © Alamy. We have made every effort to contact all copyright holders but if in any case we have been unsuccessful, please get in touch with us directly.

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PERSEPOLIS

FromtheArchive The monumental city of Persepolis was the pride of the Persian empire until its destruction by fire. Richard Stoneman revisits its builders, Darius and Xerxes, and their role in its construction.

Persepolis: the Monument of Xerxes IN HIS 1967 article on Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Persian empire, George Woodcock provided a vivid account of the building of this monumental complex of palaces, known to the Greeks as ‘the Persian city’. He sees the master plan as that of Darius I (r. 522-486 bc) but notably underplays the role of his son and successor, Xerxes (r. 486-465 bc), in the completion of the complex. Most notably, Woodcock credits Xerxes with the building of the Gateway of All Lands but does not point out that its erection completely changed the direction of approach to Persepolis. Xerxes made his mark on the plan of Persepolis as soon as he took over. How radical were the changes? One scholar supposed that the entire complex was a building site, unusable as a palace, until the reign of Xerxes’ successor Artaxerxes I, but this seems unlikely. Xerxes blocked Darius’ south entrance and created a new north-western stair, which Ernst Herzfeld, the excavator, called ‘perhaps the most perfect flight of stairs ever built’. Its shallow ascent enabled the Persian court dignitaries to ascend, without getting out of breath or having to hitch up their colourful robes, to a grand entrance, the Gateway of All Lands, through which one still enters the complex. The name is given by Xerxes’ inscriptions: ‘By the grace of Ahura Mazda, this Gateway of All Lands I made; much else that is beautiful was done throughout Parsa which I did and which my father did.’ In fact ‘Gate’ is something of a misnomer, since the building has the form of a roofed hall with a bench, in effect a waiting room. The visitor, then as now, was greeted by the massive guardian bulls that 72 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

flank the eastern doorway at the top of the stairs. Inside, the cedar beams of the roof were supported on columns 16.5m high; the walls were tiled with designs of rosettes and palm trees. The adjoining ‘harem’ – as it was designated by the excavators – bears one of the longest of Xerxes’ inscriptions, which describes how Darius chose Xerxes as his legitimate successor, as ‘the greatest after himself’. Its layout suggests that it was residential but there is no reason to suppose that

Darius chose Xerxes as his legitimate successor, as ‘the greatest after himself ’ it was really a harem as known from the Ottoman Empire, this is simply extrapolation from the Greek report that the Persian king had 360 concubines (one for almost every night of the year) and the assumption that Xerxes’ only interests after being humiliated by the Greeks were sex and architecture, here conveniently combined in a single structure. Next to the ‘harem’ is the Treasury. This was built by Darius but was extensively altered by Xerxes, who cut off the western parts to make room for the ‘harem’ and created a new entrance on the east side. In this building was housed a vast archive of clay tablets, written in Old Persian and Elamite, dating from 492-458 bc, and supplying a great deal of information about life in Achaemenid Iran. (Several thousand more were found in the northern fortifications.) Work on these had scarcely begun when Woodcock wrote: they give information on the rations and payments made to some 15,000 individuals in over 100

localities. Presumably it was here that Alexander discovered the treasure of 120,000 talents in gold and silver, all of which he took away with him, a task requiring quantities of mules as well as 3,000 camels. Why was Persepolis destroyed? Woodcock offered two alternatives: the traditional one, that it was burnt as the result of a drunken revel led by an Athenian courtesan, and the view of some historians that it was an act of policy, revenge for Xerxes’ destruction of the temples of Athens in 480 bc. It has become apparent that the fire set by Alexander the Great in 330 bc was particularly fierce in the buildings erected by Xerxes, which seem to have been singled out for destruction. So the romantic legend of the drunken revel should probably be laid to rest. But in the 470s that disaster lay far in the future. Xerxes could be proud of his achievement. ‘Me may Ahura Mazda together with the gods protect, and my kingdom, and what has been built by me’. Persepolis is Xerxes’ monument as much as Darius’. Richard Stoneman’s book, Xerxes: A Persian Life, will be published by Yale University Press in August 2015.

VOLUME XVII ISSUE 5 MAY 1967 Read the original piece at historytoday.com/fta