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Aliens among usThe real fears behind

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WATERLOOPANICThe Napoleonicp

OLIVER CROMWELL’S FORGOTTEN QUEEN

oppies, blood and poetry

The changing face of First World War remembrance

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The Holy Land RevealedTaught by Professor Jodi MagnessTHE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL

LECTURE TITLES

1. The Land of Canaan

2. The Arrival of the Israelites

3. Jerusalem—An Introduction to the City

4. The Jerusalem of David and Solomon

5. Biblical Jerusalem’s Ancient Water Systems

6. Samaria and the Northern Kingdom of Israel

7. Fortifi cations and Cult Practices

8. Babylonian Exile and the Persian Restoration

9. Alexander the Great and His Successors

10. The Hellenisation of Palestine

11. The Maccabean Revolt

12. The Hasmonean Kingdom

13. Pharisees and Sadducees

14. Discovery and Site of the Dead Sea Scrolls

15. The Sectarian Settlement at Qumran

16. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Essenes

17. The Life of the Essenes

18. From Roman Annexation to Herod the Great

19. Herod as Builder—Jerusalem’s Temple Mount

20. Caesarea Maritima—Harbour and Showcase City

21. From Herod’s Last Years to Pontius Pilate

22. Galilee—Setting of Jesus’s Life and Ministry

23. Synagogues in the Time of Jesus

24. Sites of the Trial and Final Hours of Jesus

25. Early Jewish Tombs in Jerusalem

26. Monumental Tombs in the Time of Jesus

27. The Burials of Jesus and James

28. The First Jewish Revolt; Jerusalem Destroyed

29. Masada—Herod’s Desert Palace and the Siege

30. Flavius Josephus and the Mass Suicide

31. The Second Jewish Revolt against the Romans

32. Roman Jerusalem—Hadrian’s Aelia Capitolina

33. Christian Emperors and Pilgrimage Sites

34. Judaism and Synagogues under Christian Rule

35. Islam’s Transformation of Jerusalem

36. What and How Archaeology Reveals

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Comb through these remains for yourself with The Holy Land Revealed, an unforgettable experience that will add new dimensions to your understanding of the millennia-long story of this dynamic region. Delivered by archaeologist and professor Jodi Magness, these 36 lectures give you an insider’s look at ruins, artefacts, documents, and other long-buried objects that will take you deep beneath the pages of the Bible.

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WELCOME

CONTACT USPHONE Subscriptions & back issues0844 844 0250 – Those with impairedhearing can call Minicom 01795 414561Editorial 0117 314 7377EMAIL Subscriptions & back [email protected] [email protected] Subscriptions & back issuesBBC History Magazine, PO Box 279,Sittingbourne, Kent ME9 8DFBasic annual subscription rates:UK: £59.80, Eire/Europe: £62, ROW: £64Editorial BBC History Magazine, ImmediateMedia Company Bristol Limited, Tower House,Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN

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Dominic Sandbrook

When BBC Two asked me

to make a series about the

history of science fiction,

I jumped at the chance.

Sci fi is far more than

entertainment for anoraks,

and I think nothing better

captures mankind’s

ambitions and anxieties

over the last century.

� Dominic explores thehistory of sci-fi on page 43

Jenny Uglow

My research made me

realise that the wonderful

county archives and

university special collec

tions across the country are

overflowing with letters and

diaries – there are so many

more discoveries to make.

� Jenny writes about the warwith Napoleon on page 50

Miles Russell

The detailed re examina

tion of a 12th century book

has provided an entirely

new outlook on the

late British Iron Age,

a period that some

people still insist on

calling ‘prehistory’.

� Miles discusses Geoffreyof Monmouth on page 22

One of the frustrations of studying the lives of ancient

Britons is that we have so few written sources that reflect

their point of view. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s medieval

History of the Kings of Britain was one book that claimed to derive

from the Celts but, filled with legends about King Arthur and giants,

it has long been dismissed as a work of fiction. However, new

research by historian Miles Russell suggests that Geoffrey’s writings

may well contain seeds of truth and, as such, shine a new light on a

shadowy period of the past. Miles explores the startling potential of

his findings on page 22.

Miles Russell was one of almost 40 speakers who took part in our

History Weekend festival, which has just ended, as I write. It was

great to meet so many readers there and I hope that those of you

who attended enjoyed it as much as we did. Our events programme

moves on next to Bristol, with two days coming up in March themed

around Magna Carta and Waterloo. There are details of those on

page 60 of this issue.

Magna Carta and Waterloo will both be reachhing

significant anniversaries next year and alreaddy the

excitement is building around these milestonees. In

this month’s magazine Jenny Uglow takes us to 1814

to sample the mood as the Napoleonic Wars

approached a dramatic climax. Head to page 550 for

that and look out for more stories about Waterlloo

200 and Magna Carta 800 as we head into 2015.

Rob Attar

Editor

MAGAZINE

4

Features Every month

BBC History Magazine

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Save 27%when yousubscribe*

to the digitaedition

RIBE

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l

THE LOSTVOICE OFANCIENTBRITAIN

For centuries, Geoffrey of Monmouth

medieval history of the British Isles has been

cast as a work of pure make bel eve Yet says

Miles Russell, look beyond the tales of

wizards and giants and what you have is a

priceless insight into what life was rea ly like

for the inhabitants of Ce t c Britain

22 BC H o Ma a ne

COVER STORY

u i s Ca s r s ro ps ghtr t ns n a be ch n h se a l r m n 1 th c n u ye ef C es r s n as o ofr t i is ne f t e n me ousv nt in eo f e of M n

m u h s H s o ia eg mr t nn e t at an b ve fiedy o he h s o i a so r es

OM

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oB C H s M ega ne

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hs

been

23

*All offers, prices and discounts are correct at the time of being published and may be subject to change

DECEMBER 2014

CONTENTS

22 Lost voicesof ancient BritainMiles Russell reveals what Celtic

Britons really thought about the

world around them

28 Cromwell’s shadowy queenHow much influence did Elizabeth

Cromwell wield over her husband,

Oliver? Simon Guerrier investigates

34 Poppies, blood and poetryDavid Reynolds explores how the ways

we commemorate the First World War

have changed over the past century

43 The phantom menaceImplacable clones, murderous Martians

and Jedi knights dominate Dominic

Sandbrook’s history of science fiction

50 The Napoleon complexJenny Uglow takes the pulse of the

home front in the run-up to the battle of

Waterloo, when the prospect of defeat to

the French haunted Britons’ nightmares

56 The vote that saved AmericaIf Abraham Lincoln had been voted out

in 1864, the world today would be a very

different place, says Adam IP Smith

62 Black power amid dreaming spiresStephen Tuck recalls the evening

a coruscating Malcolm X speech

electrified Britain’s intellectual elite

6 ANNIVERSARIES

11 HISTORY NOW11 The latest history news

14 Backgrounder: devolution

17 Past notes

18 LETTERS

21 MICHAEL WOOD’S VIEW

32 OUR FIRST WORLD WAR

65 BOOKSExperts review new releases,

plus Boris Johnson discusses

his book on Winston Churchill

77 TV & RADIO The pick of this month’s history

programmes

80OUT & ABOUT80 History explorer:

the Restoration

84 Ten things to do in December

86 My favourite place: Luxor in Egypt

93 MISCELLANY 93 Q&A and quiz

95 Sam’s recipe corner

96 Prize crossword

98 MY HISTORY HERO

John Lloyd on Pliny the Elder

USPS Identification Statement BBC HISTORY (ISSN 1469-8552) (USPS 024-177)December 2014 is published 13 times a year under license from BBC Worldwide byImmediate Media Company Bristol Ltd, 9th Floor, Tower House, Fairfax Street, BristolBS1 3BN, UK. Distributed in the US by Circulation Specialists, Inc., 2 Corporate Drive,Suite 945, Shelton CT 06484-6238. Periodicals postage paid at Shelton, CT andadditional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to BBC HISTORY,PO Box 37495, Boone, IA 50037-0495.

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Discover how Britain has honoured its warveterans since 1914, on page 34

43

“No film better cap-

tured the nightmarestured the nightmares

of the early Cold War

than Invasion of the

Body Snatche

BBC History Magazine 55

22

62

The Oxford speech

that crystallised

Malcolm X’s world view

28

Meet the first

lady of Oliver

Cromwell’s England

56

The

story of

critical

electio

in US

historyhistory

f

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65

Boris Johnson

runs the rule over

the star of his

new biography,

Winston

Churchill

6 BBC History Magazine

Dominic Sandbrook highlights events that took place in December in history

ANNIVERSARIES31 December 1759

Ireland’s most famous drink

is born

Arthur Guinness launcheshis beer empire

in the city of Dublin

14 December AD 557

The earth moves in Constantinople

Terror strikes the Roman capital as “a deep, growling sound like thunder issues from the bowels of the earth”

On the last day of 1759, a young man signed a 9,000-year lease on

a dilapidated brewery on James Street, Dublin, for which he agreed to pay the sum of £45 a year.

His name was Arthur Guinness and he now enjoys near-legendary status in the Republic of Ireland. He was a member of the island’s Protestant Anglo-Irish elite. His father was a land steward for the archbishop of Cashel, but Arthur had decided to make his living as a brewer.

Since, at the time, there were already some 70 breweries in Dublin, it might have been thought that Guinness stood little chance of success. The country’s most popular drinks tended to be spirits and the quality of its beer was generally low. But Guinness’s business boomed, and by 1767 he had been elected master of the Dublin Corporation of Brewers.

By the time Guinness died, almost 40 years later, his brewery was turning out some 20,000 barrels of the black stuff every year. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, it was the biggest brewery in the British empire.

The key to Guinness’s success was his embrace of porter, a drink that for decades had been associated with London’s street and river porters. It was a dark, heavy beer, made from roasted barley and much more flavoursome than the thin ales then associated with Dublin’s brewers.

Contrary to popular belief, however, it has evolved considerably since then. Who knows whether Arthur would recognise the drink inside the bottles that, even today, still carry his signature?

I t was at around midnight on 14 December 557 that Constantinople

felt the first tremors. Its people were no strangers to earthquakes – there had been one just a matter of months earlier – but this seemed worse. As the Roman capital’s buildings began to shake, “shrieks and lamentations” rose from the imperial city. After each tremor, recorded the historian Agathias, there came a “deep, growling sound like thunder issuing from the bowels of the earth”, while the sky “grew dim with the vaporous exhalations of a smoky haze rising from an unknown source, and gleamed with a dull radiance”.

Seized by mass panic, the city’s population poured into the streets. They turned their eyes to heaven, wrote Agathias, as though to “propitiate the deity”. But it was no good. Everywhere was the sound of crashing and screaming, and in the chaos

“the ordered structure of society… was thrown into wild confusion and trampled underfoot”. But when the dawn came, and it was over, “people moved forward to meet one another, gazing joyfully into the faces of their nearest and dearest, kissing and embracing and weeping with delight and surprise”.

For the rest of that winter, Agathias wrote, the people of Constantinople were afflicted by “nagging doubts and persistent fears”. Many saw the calamity as a divine judgment on their sins – and on their emperor, Justinian. Afterwards, the emperor set about restoring the vast number of public buildings damaged during the earthquake. But barely six months later, the main dome of Hagia Sophia, the jewel of his capital, collapsed in ruins. The structure that replaced it, however, stands to this day.

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The Constantinople earthquake of AD 557 saw thousands running for their lives as their world came crashing down around them

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Dominic Sandbrook will be presenting

the forthcoming series Tomorrow’s Worlds:

The Unearthly History of Science

Fiction on BBC Two

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Workers build vast pyramids of wooden casks in this image of the Guinness brewery on James Street in Dublin. Arthur Guinness’s business began life as a dilapidated also-ran, but by the outbreak of the First World War it was the biggest brewery in the British empire


Anniversaries

15 December 1914

After an occupation lasting

barely two weeks, the Austro

Hungarian army is forced

to abandon the Serbian

capital Belgrade.

4 December 771

Frankish king Carloman (pictured right)

dies unexpectedly in Samoussy, now

northern France. His brother

Charlemagne becomes undisputed

master of the Frankish realms.

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News of the shocking assassination of former Beatle John Lennon made newspaper headlines across the world,while thousands of people gathered at his New York home to pay tribute

For musician John Lennon, the last dayof his life began much the same as any

other. The former Beatle had a photo shootwith the American photographer AnnieLeibovitz in his apartment at the DakotaBuilding, New York, then an interview witha San Francisco disc jockey. Shortly before6pm, Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, leftfor the recording studio. On their way out,Lennon stopped to sign autographs forfans, as was his custom. Among them was

26 December 1860

In Yorkshire, Sheffield FC and

Hallam FC contest history’s first

association football match at

Sandygate Road. The ‘Rules derby’

ends in a 2-0 win for Sheffield.

8 December 1980

Crazed fan murders John Lennon

The world mourns the death of the former Beatle

a 25-year-old security guard from Hawaii,Mark Chapman, who wordlessly handedover a copy of Lennon’s latest album. “Isthis all you want?” Lennon asked, as hescribbled his name.

It was almost 11pm when Lennon’slimousine reappeared outside the DakotaBuilding. Almost as soon as the musiciangot out, he glanced towards the shadows,perhaps recognising the man he had seenearlier. And at that moment, Chapman

opened fire. The first bullet missed; the nextfour all hit their target.

As Lennon lay bleeding, Chapmandropped his gun. By the time the policearrived, he was clutching a copy ofJD Salinger’s book The Catcher in the Rye.

That day was a Monday and, bizarrely,it was the ABC commentators on theevening’s American football game whobroke the news of Lennon’s death. Withinmoments the news had spread aroundthe globe: thousands of fans gatheredoutside the Dakota Building while millionsmourned across the world. Six days afterthe murder, some 30,000 people paidtribute in Liverpool, while a further 225,000 gathered in New York.

Chapman, a college dropout who hadbeen a big Beatles fan before being bornagain, was sentenced to life imprisonment.He has had eight parole hearings since 2000,none of which have been successful.


While an airplane first took to thesky in 1903, it is important to

recognise that invention is a process, not simply a moment in time.

The Wright brothers began their serious work in aeronautics in 1899, with anexperimental kite. Over the next fiveyears they moved forward through anevolutionary series of three gliders andthree powered aircraft.

By autumn 1905, operating from apasture near their home in Dayton, Ohio, the pair had produced a machine that was capable of remaining in the air as long as the fuel held out, performing all reason-able manoeuvres under the complete

control of the pilot. The practical plane was now a reality.

The Wright brothers owed a great debt to talented experimenters before them, but it is important to recognise that they were the inventors of the plane in a much truer sense than Samuel Morse can be said to have invented the telegraph, Alexander Graham Bell the telephone, or Thomas Edison the electric light bulb.

Intuitive engineering geniuses, the Wrights solved a series of incredibly difficult problems to create a revolutionary new technology that would change the world in ways that even they scarcely imagined. Perhaps their most important

impact, however, was to demonstrate that human minds and hands were capable of achieving things that had been impossible only a few years before.

COMMENT / Tom D Crouch

“Invention is a process, not simply a moment in time”

Tom D Crouch is senior curator of aeronautics at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC. He has written extensively on the history of early flight

17 December 1903

The Wright brothers fly into history

The ‘impossible’ is achieved

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On the North Carolina coast, Thursday 17 December 1903 was a cold and

very windy day. When Orville and Wilbur Wright awoke that morning, they thought it was almost perfect. Three days earlier, after years of trials, they had tried to get their primitive powered ‘airplane’, with its 40ft wingspan, into the air. But no sooner had Wilbur got it off the ground, than the aircraft stalled and plunged back down into the sand. Now it was Orville’s turn.

By conventional standards the two men made implausible historical icons. Born in 1867 and 1871 respectively – the sons of an evangelical Christian clergyman – the story goes that they were first smitten by the principle of flight when their father bought them a helicopter toy. After working as commercial printers, the pair opened a bicycle shop, capitalising on the craze for cycles but all the time tinkering with schemes to get an aircraft into the sky.

Just after 10.30am, Orville climbed into the Flyer. Disappointingly, his diary

fails to capture the excitement he must have felt. “The wind, according to our anemometers at this time, was blowing a little over 20 miles, 27 miles according to the government anemometer at Kitty Hawk,” he wrote. “On slipping the rope the machine started off increasing in speed to probably seven or eight miles. The machine lifted from the truck just as it was entering on the fourth rail. Mr Daniels took a picture just as it left the tracks… A sudden dart

when out about 100 feet from the end of the tracks ended the flight. Time about 12 seconds (not known exactly as watch was not promptly stopped).”

It was the first of four flights made that day, each longer than the one before. On the fourth trial, Wilbur guided the world’s first plane through the air for a distance of 852 feet in 59 seconds. For the first time, mankind had the power of flight. It was a genuinely extraordinary moment.

History is made as Orville Wright takes to the skies in the powered plane he had

built with his brother, Wilbur. The fourth attempt achieved

a flight distance of 852 feet and lasted for 59 seconds

Any questions? Get in touch or visit our website call 01722 713800 | [email protected] | www.andantetravels.com

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pompeii, herculaneum and classical campania


The latest news, plus Backgrounder 14 Past notes 17

HISTORY NOW

Extreme weather battersEngland’s coastal heritage

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

A new study has revealed that hundreds of historic

sites are suffering increasing damage from storms and

coastal erosion. David Keys reports

Bigbury-on-Sea, Devon Previously unknown Iron Age and Romano-British site

Hengistbury Head, Dorset Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Romano-British sites

Reculver, Kent Roman fort

Spurn Point, East Yorkshire First and Second World War gun batteries

Westward Ho!, Devon Prehistoric forest

and midden

Aldbrough Second World War

coastal defencesFormby 5,000 to 7,500-year-old

ancient human footprints

Fawley Second World War coastal defences

Trevelgue Head, Cornwall

Iron Age fortress

Mullion, CornwallRare pre-Norman manorial site

Damaged during winter 2013/14

This map shows some of the sites that English Heritage regard as either already damaged or at risk from extreme weather

At risk of being damaged within the next decade


England’s coastal heritage is at riskdue to extreme winter weather,new research has revealed.

A detailed aerial survey of the country’scoastline, recently completed byEnglish Heritage, suggests that at leasta thousand historic monuments and sitesare under increasing threat from stormsand coastal erosion.

The organisation has also carried out aseparate study to record the destructionwrought by the extreme weatherconditions experienced around the UKin the winter of 2013/2014. It reveals that,in those months, roughly 70 significantancient sites and historic buildings weredamaged or partially destroyed.

The locations already affected by badweather include an important andpreviously unknown Iron Age andRomano-British site near Bigbury-on-Sea in Devon, Second World War coastaldefences near both Aldbrough andSpurn Point in Yorkshire and nearthe Hampshire village of Fawley, anda prehistoric forest and midden inWestward Ho! near Bideford in Devon.

English Heritage’s research suggeststhat England’s coastline boasts at least30,000 ancient sites and historicbuildings. Work on the survey wasprioritised in order to identify which ofthese are most at risk, so that archaeolo-gists can concentrate resources onprotecting or recording them.

Those historic treasures thought likelyto be damaged by winter weather over

the next decade – or, worse still, lostentirely – include an Iron Age fortressat Trevelgue Head near Newquay,Cornwall, a pre-Norman manorial sitenear the Cornish village of Mullion,and features spanning the Palaeolithic,Mesolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age andRomano-British eras on the archaeologi-cally important site of HengistburyHead in Dorset.

The sheer range of locations deemed tobe vulnerable to extreme weather revealsthat England’s coastline bristles withevidence of life across thousands ofyears. It features everything from theoften-spectacular remains of prehistoricforests, and evidence of ancient humanfootprints, to defences constructed torepel a German invasion during theSecond World War (thousands of whichwere discovered as a direct result of theEnglish Heritage survey).

Meanwhile, in a separate development,academics have been investigating thecauses of the dramatic winter stormsthat have battered the United Kingdomin recent years. New research, publishedin the International Journal of Climatol-ogy and led by academics from theUniversity of Sheffield, suggests that theprobability of English coasts experienc-ing extreme winter weather has signifi-cantly increased.

Marcus Jecock, English Heritage’ssenior official with responsibility forcoastal heritage, told BBC HistoryMagazine: “Increasing storminess aroundBritain’s coasts poses a real threat toarchaeological sites and historicalmonuments. We would urge the publicto report any erosion or storm damageto historic or archaeological sites to theirlocal county council or other historicenvironment services. Members of thepublic can perform a vital role in helpingto safeguard our coastal heritage.” C

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WHAT WE’VE LEARNED THIS MONTH…

Richard III’s bones will

visit Bosworth battle siteDetails of the ceremony that is to be held to mark the reburial of the remains of Richard III have been announced. The skeleton, which was found beneath a car park in Leicester in 2012, will be carried on 22 March from the University of Leicester to the city’s cathedral via sites including Fenn Lane Farm – thought to be the spot where the king fell at the battle of Bosworth – and Sutton Chaney, where he took his final mass. The bones will then be reburied four days later in a service led by the archbish-op of Canterbury, Justin Welby.

Haiti wreck isn’t

Columbus’s flagshipA shipwreck discovered off the coast of Haiti is not that of Christopher Columbus’s ship Santa Maria, according to the UN’s cultural body Unesco. Although underwater archaeological explorer Barry Clifford claimed in May that it belonged to Columbus’s flagship, experts say that the evidence points to the vessel dating from a much later period.

Human creativity

wasn’t only ‘western’Cave paintings found in Indonesia are some of the earliest yet discov-ered, according to experts. The art is thought to date from between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago, making it at least as old as prehistoric art found in Europe. The discovery is particularly important because it helps disprove the idea that human creativity was an exclusively ‘western’ phenomenon.Stay up to date with the latest stories

at historyextra.com/news

Ancient hand stencils and painting at Leang Pettakere, Indonesia

“The probability of English coasts experiencing extreme winter weather has significantly increased”

On the edge Trevelgue Head’s Iron Age fort on the Cornwall coast is one of the hundreds of

sites that could be damaged or lost entirely to extreme weather over the next decade

History now / News


Reading the medieval mindNew research is exploring scribes’ handwriting to reveal what it can

tell us about conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease in the Middle Ages

Historians regularly use the text ofmedieval documents to reveal details

of society at the time – but, as a pioneeringstudy is exploring, the way in which suchtext was written may offer clues into thewellbeing of the scribes that composed them.

The research, being carried out byDeborah Thorpe from the Centre forChronic Diseases and Disorders at theUniversity of York, is exploring how scribes’handwriting can point to the presence ofneurological conditions. Because they weretrained to produce exceptionally regularwork, even the slightest variation in scribes’handwriting is noticeable – and the fact thatmany had careers that spanned decadesmeans that their output may also reveal howsuch conditions worsened over time.

“There is lots of scope to find out moreabout medical conditions by looking athandwriting,” Thorpe told BBC HistoryMagazine. “Writing by hand is a demandingactivity for the human brain: it requiresplanning, the ability to remember spellingand grammatical structures, and controlover physical movement. This means thatany neurological, visual or movementproblems can be glaring in the words on thepage: we might see the tremors associatedwith Parkinson’s Disease or the memoryproblems of dementia, for instance, orevidence of repetitive strain injury orage-related visual impairment.”

A key component in the research is thework of a 13th-century scribe known as‘The Tremulous Hand of Worcester’, dueto a distinctive tremor in his handwrittenannotations on an earlier document (seeimage below). Thorpe has studied how this

shaking increased as the scribe aged and he became more affected by his condition. “I’mdeveloping new computer techniques toanalyse individual strokes, and discover howhistorians might be able to pick out thesmallest effects of neurological disorderson handwriting,” she says.

Despite their elegant work, the lives ofmedieval scribes were not always easy.“Their work was arduous, with long hours taking their toll on the body: symptomsincluded back pain, stomach cramps andtension in the hands,” Thorpe says. “Inwinter, with nights drawing in, scribeswould be doing intricate work in poorlighting, resulting in eye damage. All of this led medieval writers to compare such work with the toils of battle, or the labours of afarmer in the fields.”

Contemporary authors reported scribes experiencing psychological difficulties.A poem that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote to his scribe, Adam, highlights the pressure placedupon him. Chaucer complained that he had to correct Adam’s work, criticising him for hislack of attention to detail and “negligence”.

The 14th-century poet Thomas H lmeanwhile, wrote about a period o

SOCIAL HISTORY

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“One 14th-century scribe could not sleep, felt an unshak-able sense of heavinesand feared that he waclose to death”

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illness that he experienced while working as a scribe: he could not sleep, felt an unshakable sense of heaviness and feared he was close to death.

Thorpe is eager to avoid comparisons between medieval attitudes towards neurological conditions and the treatment sufferers receive today. “‘Medieval’ is widely used as a byword for barbarity and a lack of compassion for the vulnerable, when, in fact, medieval society protected those unable to work, such as the sick or elderly,” she says.

“In general, older people were respected as figures of authority whereas, in contrast, I would argue that there is a tendency today to view the elderly as a burden to society. I hope that this research contributes towards a shift in perceptions of older people by uncovering more evidence for their value in medieval communities.” Matt Elton

The writer’s tale A scribe depicted in a 14th-century illustration. Variations in medieval

handwriting can alert us to the onset of neurological conditions

– as can be seen in the work of ‘The Tremulous Hand of

Worcester’ (shown bottom)


History now / Backgrounder

Now that David Cameron has made his post-referendum

promise to devolve more powers to Scotland – and declared

that the “millions of voices of England” must also be heard –

are we about to witness the end of the UK as we know it?

Two historians offer their take on the current crisis

Interviews by Chris Bowlby, a BBC journalist specialising in history

Scotland has voted No toindependence, but there’s talkof more power for a devolvedScotland, and devolution for

England too. But how well have the UK, andearlier unions centred on London, dealt withand understood the diversity within theirconstituent parts? Has the approach toconstitutional power in these unions everbeen coherent?

A new British state was created in 1707.But we ignore that fact. It’s assumed thatthe British state is the English statecontinuing, with the addition of Scottishmembers of parliament. It’s as if thebeginning of a new state is just notacknowledged, either by the majority ofhistorians or politicians or jurists.

The union is often described as anincorporating union, as if Scotland wasincorporated into England. That may havebeen true of the Scots parliament – in reality,if not in theory – but in other respects essential markers of nationhood were preserved, such as the distinctiveness of Scotland’s legal system and the established Scots Presbyterian church. The articles of union even preserved a separate set of Scottish crown jewels.

Wales is a different case – it has never been a kingdom in quite the same way. Wales certainly didn’t have a clearly defined

political tradition or set of institutions.So the relationship of the core of the state

to each of its satellites – Scotland, Wales andNorthern Ireland – is distinctive.

One suggestion now is that the UKshould look at a more federal arrangement.Federalism has often been seen as somethingalien to British political traditions. But thereis one period when it attracted moreattention. From around the late 1880s to theFirst World War, there was not only a flapabout the Irish question but also concernsthat somehow Britain had acquired anincoherent jumble of an empire. Federalismin the empire and home rule within theseislands offered a way of making sense of thismotley collection of territories.

There was considerable discussion – mostoften among Liberals, but also amongConservatives – about how the British homenations might be treated. Might the empire,one commentator asked, be reformed tocreate a ‘United States of Greater Britain’?

So this idea that federalism is a dirtyword is not true of the late 19th century.Nevertheless, the British patriotism inspiredby the Great War inhibited the discussion ofdecentralisation, except of course in the case

Colin Kidd on whether federalism has a future in the United Kingdom

of Ireland. In her recent book, Acts of Union and Disunion, Linda Colley has suggested persuasively that there’s a greater sense of unity when Britain’s fighting a war, but that talk of devolution tends to come after sustained periods of peace.

And there’s the problem that England has something like 85 per cent of the UK population. A UK federation would be very unbalanced. The only way that would make sense would be if there was some way of federalising England. But it seems there’s no desire for that, even in the parts of England with the most distinctive regional identities.

The solution might be to focus on House of Lords reform, which has proceeded in fits and starts since the early 20th century. The second chamber might become a senate of the regions and devolved nations.

Professor Colin Kidd lectures in history at St Andrews University. His books include Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland 1500-2000 (Cambridge, 2008)

The historians’ take on…

Devolution in the UK

“There’s the problem that England has 85 per cent of the UK population. A UK federation would be very unbalanced”


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Conor Mulvagh comparesIreland in 1922 withScotland in 2014

Dr Conor Mulvagh is alecturer in Irish history atUniversity College Dublin

The Scottish referendumcampaign was watched closelyin Ireland. Ahead of the vote,talk of what would happen in

the event of Scottish independence led manypeople to re-examine what happened whenthe new Irish state emerged in 1922. Andnow, following the No campaign’s narrowvictory, mention of phrases like ‘home rule’in discussing what comes next for Scotlandand the UK has prompted a great deal ofinterest in the history of the earlier home ruledebate about Ireland.

Could we describe home rule as the devomax of the 19th and early 20th centuries –ie, similar to what is now being promised toScotland? In some senses it is. Home rule –used to describe the idea of establishinglegislatures with devolved powers to regionsof the British Isles and elsewhere – was a veryadvanced form of devolution.

However, viewed from another angle,parallels between Ireland a century ago and Scotland today are not as neat. Scotland achieved devolution in 1999, and so already has many of the powers that Ireland was

arguing for in 1912–14. The closer parallelmight be with Ireland in 1921 when a morecomplete separation was negotiated betweenBritish and Irish delegations.

One question politicians were confrontedwith at the turn of the 20th century was:could residual Irish representatives atWestminster speak on Scottish, English andWelsh business if they had an Irishparliament? It’s like a 19th-century version ofthe ‘West Lothian’ question discussed in theUK today – why should Scottish MPs havethe right to vote on purely English matters?

In the early 20th century the debatechanged, with nationalists and unioniststhreatening violence. Both sides movedtowards setting up provisional governmentsand paramilitary forces – evidently verydifferent from the Scottish situation today.

After the First World War, only one part ofIreland got proper home rule and that wasNorthern Ireland. It’s one of the ironies of

history that those who opposed home rulemost fervently up to 1914 were granted itafter the war. Although the Government ofIreland Act of 1920 legislated for twoparliaments being set up – north and south– the demand in the south had alreadyevolved far beyond home rule.

In the early history of the independentIrish Free State after 1922, there are someinteresting parallels with the debate thatemerged around Scottish independence.Take currency. The government hadcommissioned an investigation of Irishfinance in 1911 which discovered a massivedeficit in Irish finances because of pensionsand the roll-out of a proto-welfare state. Thatled to financial caution. After 1922, it tookmore than five years for Ireland to establishits own currency and it continued to base itscurrency values on the British pound, onlyleaving the sterling area in the 1970s.

Just as the basing of the British nucleardeterrent in Scotland raised sensitive issuesrecently, defence was a key issue in thediscussions that preceded the Anglo-Irishsettlement of 1921. Britons negotiating theAnglo-Irish treaty were fresh from the Parispeace treaties that followed the First WorldWar, and strategic considerations wereprominent in their minds. They insisted thatBritain keep the use of four naval bases inIreland, the so-called ‘treaty ports’. And, hadthe Scots voted for independence, the future

of the nuclear base at Faslanewould have been a key partof negotiationswith London.

Refugees from Belfast pictured in Dublinshortly after the partition of 1922

“The question was, could Irish MPs speak on Scottish, English and Welsh business if they had an Irish parliament?”

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History now / Past notes

Leaf through a Victorian newspaperand you will often find reports

translated from the foreign press.Politics, fashion and daring escapadesall find their place on British pages.

In 1859, The Stirling Observer carrieda report from a French newspaper,Courrier de l’Europe, of a terrifying“Duel in a Balloon” that had recentlyoccurred. For the sum of a thousandfrancs, the renowned balloonist and“Aeronaut to the Emperor of Austria”,Eugene Godard, had agreed to take awealthy private gentleman on an ascent.

As the balloon shot into the sky,Godard eyed his companion expec-tantly, waiting for the horror and shockmany often experienced at this newform of travel. But, surprisingly, thegentleman remained coolly detached.

Reaching 5,000ft, Godard decided tobegin his descent, when the man leaptinto the ropes and demanded they gohigher. Then, laughing wildly, he beganto cut the ropes tying the basket to theballoon! Luckily, he was renderedinsensible by the balloon’s gas, leavingGodard to return safely to earth anddeliver him into police custody.Fern Riddell regularly appears onRadio 3’s Night WavesNews storysourced frombritishnewspaperarchive.co.uk

OLD NEWS

High-flying thrill seeker lands in prison

with a bump

The Stirling Observer / 10 February 1859

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How did people do their bakingin the Middle Ages?Ovens weren’t a standard feature inmedieval households. Lords of themanor often supplied large commu-nal ovens and made people pay touse them. This was a source ofincome but it also reduced the riskof fire. A good example survives onthe churchyard wall in Corbridge,Northumberland. It was firstmentioned in 1310, and remained inuse for 500 years.

When did stoves come into use?In 1735 Belgian architect Francoisde Cuvilliés introduced his Castrolstove – a wood-burning masonryunit with iron grilles on the top thatwas primarily used for stewing.

Then, around 1800, BenjaminThompson, Count Rumford inventeda large iron kitchen stove. It had asingle fire source but the tempera-ture of individual wells could be regulated independently. It was idealfor large-scale cooking but was too big for the average kitchen, so the ensuing century saw new designs for smaller cookers.

When did we start cooking with gas?In 1826 Northampton inventor

James Sharp patented a gas cooker.Gas cooking soon gained thesupport of renowned Reform Clubchef Alexis Soyer – who argued thatgas was more manageable than coaland wood – but only really caughton in the 1880s when a reliable gassupply network was establishedacross much of Britain. Electricovens were available from the 1890sbut only began to rival gas in the1920s when the supply of electricityhad been improved.

How about the AGA?The Aktiebolaget Gas Accumulator,or AGA, originated in Sweden. It wasinvented in 1922 by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Gustaf Dalén.Dalén had been blinded by an explo-sion in 1912. Forced to stay at home,he designed the heat-retainingall-in-one cooker, water heater,laundry dryer (and status symbol) to help his wife.

How was the microwave invented?Completely by accident. In 1945 an American engineer called Percy LeBaron Spencer was working on microwave-producing magnetrons for use in military radar when he discovered the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted.

As the UK toasts its new Great British Bake Off champion,

Julian Humphrys looks at the history of the appliance

that made all those ‘showstoppers’ possible

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An engraving of a baker in the Middle Ages, when most people had to pay the lord of the manor a fee for using his oven


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

Your views on the magazine and the world of history

LETTERS

as delighted to read the article on tattoositten by Julian Humphrys in the Octoberition (Past Notes). My grandfather Robertmers was a First World War veteran, whoved on the Somme and saw action at the

ttle of Cambrai. After the war he rejoinede army in 1919, serving with the King’s

n Scottish Borderers in Egypt, Turkeyd India. While in India he got a series oftoos, eventually covering his upper body.ave included a photograph from theum that I inherited from him tostrate the results.

bert Ward, Dorset

ttooed warrior

e reward the writer ofe letter of the month with

‘History Choice’ bookhe month. This issue it isHistory of England,

ume III: Civil War byer Ackroyd. Read theew on page 69

Bad press for Richard IIII approached Dan Jones’s essay on theWars of the Roses (October) – and thewhite versus red Tudor-inspired myth– with interest. But I stopped dead in mytracks, horrified, when I hit upon hisbold, unequivocal references toRichard III: his “almost uniformlyspecious arguments for seizing thethrone”, his “brutal power-grab” and“the dreadful fate met by the princes inthe Tower”. I’m disappointed that Danis not prepared even to entertain thepossibility that the portrayal ofRichard III as a child-murderingmonster may equally have its roots in Tudor propaganda.

The guilt or innocence of Richard III,in the absence of evidence, is a matter forspeculation and personal opinion. Butopinion and speculation have no place inforensic historical analysis, as Dan Jonessurely must recognise.

Despite that, I did very much enjoyreading this thought-provoking essay,and re-familiarising myself with the

people and events of this colourful and violent period of history.Barbara Gordon, Cornwall

What, no Martin Luther?As a reader of Ian Mortimer’s books,I was fascinated by his article Centuriesof Change (November). However I wasdismayed that he discussed Bibletranslation in the 16th century without mentioning Martin Luther. As NeilMacGregor says in his interview onpage 29 of the same magazine (The Story

of Germany), Luther’s Bible was not only more widely disseminated than anyother text up to that time, but alsocreated the modern German language.Luther also influenced William Tyndale,whose own translation was the basisfor other English translations up to the King James Bible of 1611.John Dakin, Dunstable

Are humans innocent?Yuval Harari’s statement that humanscaused the extinction of half the planet’slarge land animals even before thetransition from hunting to agriculture(The Rise of the Humans, October) is byno means universally accepted. Themegafauna extinction that occurred atthe end of the Pleistocene glaciations also coincided with a period of climatechange, and some scientists believethat this was responsible. There is alsoa less widely held theory that there wasa comet impact around the same time, which may have resulted in the megafauna extinction.

It is possible that both climate changeand human activity were responsible,dand possibly interrelated – with climatechange affecting human activity and thelarge-scale clearance of trees for agricul-ture having an impact on the climate.Andrew Hudson, Cumbria

A cast-iron geniusI much enjoyed Michael Wood’s columnon Thomas Paine (November). I regretthat Paine gets even less recognition asan engineer than as a radical. In 1779 thefamous Coalbrookdale cast-iron bridgewas built in Shropshire, with a span of100ft, which was about the maximumthat could have been built in stone. Not

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SOCIAL MEDIAWhat you’ve been saying

on Twitter and Facebook

WRITE TO USWe welcome your letters, whilereserving the right to edit them.We may publish your letters on ourwebsite. Please include a daytimephone number and, if emailing, a postaladdress (not for publication). Lettersshould be no longer than 250 words.

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long after, a cast-iron bridge with a 300ftspan was built at Sunderland to a patentof Thomas Paine (definitely the ThomasPaine). This bridge continued to carrythe A19 trunk road until some timebetween the wars.Alan Simpson, Glasgow

The great disappearing actAndrew Roberts’s impressive re-assess-ment of Napoleon (Why Napoleon Meritsthe Title ‘The Great’, November) omitsan important aspect. While the militarygenius deliberately cultivated a strongpersonal loyalty bond with the soldierswho died for him in their thousands, hehad no compunction in abandoning hisarmies altogether while still in the field(eg Egypt, Russia and after Waterloo) topursue a political agenda.D Hague-Holmes, Dorset

Napoleon was no HitlerAndrew Roberts is correct to assert thatcomparing Napoleon with Hitler isspecious, indeed ridiculous. Hitler wasa totalitarian destroyer. True, Napoleonloved war: his meteoric rise to general bythe age of 24 was remarkable, but hisachievements off the field of battle wereequally, if not more, astonishing.

Comparing leaders is a subjectivebusiness. Opinions are bound to differ.Nevertheless, few would contest theclaim of Napoleon to a pre-eminentplace in the soldier’s pantheon.

He was an enigma. He was ruthless,egotistic and single-minded, with anextraordinary capacity for sustained

hard work. Yet very few generals havecared more for their troops. He was afine orator, his morale-boosting speechesbear a close analogy to those of Mont-gomery in the desert. He was a devotedand loving father.

In brief, he had a personality that wasclose to charismatic. Nemesis followedhubris but this was no ordinary man.Dr Barry Clayton, Cleveleys

Fire on the DanubeI greatly enjoyed David Olusoga’stelevision series The World’s War andthe review of his book based on it in yourNovember edition. However, Nigel Jonesis wrong to claim that the first shots ofthe war were fired in Togoland. RSM(as he later became) Grunshi was indeedthe first British serviceman to open fireduring the war on 7 August, but thefirst shots were fired on 29 July whenAustro-Hungarian gunboats on theDanube, then the border betweenAustria-Hungary and Serbia, openedfire on Belgrade.NJ Ridout, Lincolnshire

@HistoryExtra: Why do you think Anne Boleyn had to die? Was she a victim of conspiracy or her own loose tongue, or was she guilty?

@Neilovichi She had made too

many enemies at court, especially

Cromwell. That would have been

ok had she delivered a son for

Henry VIII

@ GibsonRoo Her inability to

produce a male heir for an obsessive

Henry signed her death warrant. It

was just a matter of time

@jgzahoul I think that she became

a victim of her own intrigue game.

Obviously Henry VIII was very

angry about her behavior at

the court

@Lucy_Worsley She had to die to

keep historians in business. Thank

you, Henry, for the gift that keeps

on giving

@GenealogyTrackr She exceeded

boundaries of class, obedience and

popularity. This made her a threat

and dangerous

@sheffernanMnaS A victim of the

fact that she was getting old,

especially following the miscarriage

at the beginning of 1536

@HistoryExtra: BBC ’s Wolf Hall adaptation must avoid errors of other historical dramas, Hilary Mantel has warned. How important is factual accuracy in historical dramas?

@tonesekl 100% essential. We

shouldn’t allow politics or the need

for a good story to influence the

facts surrounding any actual

historical event

@dmabelwest Really important.

Too many people rely on them for

their history lessons and will be

terribly misinformed if the history

isn’t accurate

@charlotte_szep Important but it ’s

too hard to achieve, especially

when it comes to portraying what

was said but not written down

@catecawley Very important. No

need to change the history, it ’s

dramatic enough as it is

@stuartroxy If the drama is

‘historical’ rather than ‘periodic’,

surely it should be at least based

on the facts

Mammoths and wolves in the Upper Pleistocene Epoch. Should humans shoulder all the blame for the megafauna extinction that occurred during this period?

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Comment

Michael Wood on… Alexander the Great

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On our summer holidays in Greece at theend of August, I started getting excitedmessages from Greek friends about anamazing discovery at Amphipolis in the

north of the country. A Macedonian tomb, the largest yetfound: a mound 160m across surrounded by a circularwall, with a series of underground chambers, of whichthree so far have been entered. Inside are stone sphinxesand caryatids (sculpted female figures).

Stone fragments in the entrance may be part of thefamous Lion of Amphipolis which today greets thevisitor as you enter the town; very likely the lion oncesurmounted the burial mound. The date of this extraor-dinary monument is still uncertain, but the excavatorsthink it is from the late fourth century BC – just afterAlexander the Great’s death in Babylon.

The find is front-page news in Greece. The villagers(sensing its potential to draw tourists!) want the tomb tobe that of Alexander himself. However, he was certainlyburied in Alexandria. But could it still have beenoriginally planned for him? All will be revealed, we hope,when the excavators open the tomb chamber; but thefind has focused attention again on one of the greatfigures in history, and one who has long fascinated me.

Back in the early eighties I was lucky enough toexperience the incredible thrill of climbing down byladder through a hole in the roof of the tomb of Alexan-der’s father, Philip, in the northern Greek town ofVergina with the excavator, Manolis Andronikos; themarble doors to the underworld still closed. In the latenineties I followed Alexander’s route from Greece toIndia on the ground, and will never forget the excitementof tracking him across the Hindu Kush to Alexandria theFarthermost (Khujand in Tajikistan), and through theforbidding Makran desert in southern Pakistan.

The Greek adventure in Asia is an astounding tale:people from a small land on the edge of civilisation whoconquered half the known world. After Alexander, theywent even further. The ‘King and Saviour’ Menandersubdued the Ganges valley and became a Buddhist; his

name is given on ancient maps to the Arakan mountains,which divide Bengal and Burma. It’s an incredible storyof conquest, daring and cruelty, only matched in historyperhaps by the conquistadors.

As for Alexander himself, the debate goes on. Britishimperialists idealised him as a unifier, yet he standsaccused of war crimes. But as so often in history, wardrove change. The expedition accelerated the dissemina-tion of Greek culture across west Asia in a great cross-fertilisation. For a thousand years Greek was a linguafranca in a Hellenised near east. Even the Qur’an tells thetale of the ‘Two Horned One’ – thought to be Alexander– to whom Allah gave dominion over the Earth.

Going east, the theorem of Pythagoras reached Chinawithin decades of Alexander’s death, and the terracottaarmy and the first monumental bronzes of the Chinemperor are now thought to have been inspired byHellenistic models, perhaps seen in central Asia.

So amazing vistas open up. The tale has been trans-formed out of all recognition these last few decades,through archaeology, cuneiform texts, the Verginatombs and the Derveni papyrus with its insights intoGreek mystical cults. And now, unexpectedly, is aspectacular new find from Macedonia itself.

So who lies in the tomb? One of Alexander’s succes-sors? Or one of his family? Could it be a war memorial?(Is it a coincidence that it was at Amphipolis thatAlexander’s army assembled before embarking on thewar in Asia?) Or could it perhaps commemorateAlexander’s general Laomedon, who went to India butmay have ended his days in Amphipolis?

So many questions! In the meantime we all wait withgreat excitement. When I heard the news on holiday inGreece, my mind went back to the old folktale still toldby fishermen on the little Cycladic island where we goeach summer. In the midst of the storm a mermaidappears in the raging waters and calls out: ‘Where isGreat Alexander?’ To save your life you must give theright answer, or she will drag you into the depths. Theanswer is this: ‘Great Alexander still lives and rules!’

Michael Wood

is professor of

public history at

the University of

Manchester. His

most recent TV

series was King

Alfred and the

Anglo-Saxons

“The Greeks’ astounding tale still makes front-page news”

ILLUSTRATION BY FEMKE DE JONG

THE LOST VOICE OF ANCIENTBRITAIN

For centuries, Geoffrey of Monmouth

medieval history of the British Isles has been

cast as a work of pure make-believe. Yet, says

Miles Russell, look beyond the tales of

wizards and giants and what you have is a

priceless insight into what life was really like

for the inhabitants of Celtic Britain


COVER STORY

Julius Caesar’s troops fightBritons on a beach in thisdetail from an 18th-centuryrelief. Caesar’s invasion ofBritain is one of the numerous events in Geoffrey of Mon-mouth’s Historia RegumBritanniae that can be verifiedby other historical sources

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“Favourable winds

brought the Trojan

Brutus to the promised

isle, which at that time was

called Albion. It had no

inhabitants save for a few

giants. This pleasant land led

Brutus and his companions to

settle there and, after driving

off to mountain caves any

giants they encountered, they

divided it up and portioned it

out. Brutus named the island

Britain after himself and called

his followers Britons”

So the 12th-century writer Geoffrey ofMonmouth described how Britain firstcame to be discovered, named and settled.Compiled in around 1136, Geoffrey’s HistoriaRegum Britanniae (History of the Kings ofBritain) is an epic, which chronicles the rulersof Britain from earliest times until theseventh century AD. Containing characterssuch as Cole (the merry old soul), Lear andCymbeline (both later immortalised byShakespeare), as well as Arthur, Merlin andMordred, the Historia was a medievalbestseller, and its influence upon Europeanculture cannot be overstated.

Geoffrey’s work clearly contains numerousfictional stories – and so it’s hardly surprisingthat, within a few years of the Historiabeing published, serious doubt was being caston the authenticity of his research. In 1190William of Newburgh declared that “it isquite clear that everything this man wrote…was made up”, while 800 years later, GeoffreyAshe insisted that “Monmouth is an enter-taining and memorable companion, so long

as one never believes anything he says”.Geoffrey himself claimed that the inspira-

tion for his work was an ancient book “in theBritish tongue”. Yet the fact that this sourceremains utterly elusive to us today has addedweight to the conviction that it was nothingmore than a figment of his imagination.

However, I think this view does Geoffreya disservice. In fact, having examined theHistoria in great detail over recent months,I’m convinced that there is sufficient evidencewithin its pages to suggest that it was no workof make-believe. On the contrary, I believethat it was compiled from a variety of genuinesources – most of them hailing from what isnow the south-east of England – dating backat least to the first century BC.

For me, the key to unlocking Geoffrey’s textlies in the story of Julius Caesar’s invasion of

“Geoffrey’s Historia

matters in the

21st century

because it was

set down by the

ancient Britons

themselves”

Britain, the first ‘event’ in the book that can be independently verified from other historical sources.

Caesar stepped ashore on these islands on two separate occasions – in 55 and 54 BC – and recorded his exploits in a series of campaign diaries, known collectively as the Gallic Wars. In Caesar’s own account of his second invasion, there are three main protagonists: the hero (himself); the villain, a British king called Cassivellaunus whom Caesar defeats; and the ally, a young British aristocrat called Mandubracius.

In the Historia, however, Geoffrey dupli-cates the events of 54 BC, and sets them down as if they are two discrete military operations. In the first, the aggressor, Ilkassar (Caesar), is defeated by the heroic Briton Cassibellaun (Cassivellaunus) at the “Battle of Dorobellum” and driven back into the sea. In the second version, a few pages later, Cassibellaun, now the bad guy, is waging an unprovoked war upon his rival, Androgeus (Mandubracius), when he hears that Ilkassar has landed upon the south coast. At the battle of Durobernia, Ilkassar prevails, thanks to the timely intervention of Androgeus on the Roman side. Fearing the power of Androgeus, Ilkassar makes peace and departs.

It is clear that in describing this particular invasion, Geoffrey was using two versions of the same event, written from two very different perspectives. The first, with Cassivellaunus as the hero, appears to have been generated by supporters of the British B

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Sailing into legend Brutus the Trojan heads for Britain in this 15th-century edition of the Historia. Within a few years of its publication, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s hugely ambitious ‘history’ of Britain was widely dismissed as a work of fiction

Cover story


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WHO WAS

GEOFFREY OF

MONMOUTH?We know next to nothing about Geoffrey but it wouldappear that he was either born or spent a significantamount of time in Monmouthshire, at the

borderlands between what is nowEngland and Wales, in the early years ofthe 12th century. He was certainlyfamiliar with the geography of the area –the Roman fortress town of Caerleon,near Monmouth, appears many times inthe Historia Regum Britanniae.

Geoffrey spent most of his working lifein Oxford, his name appearing on anumber of charters there between 1129and 1151, where he is referred to asmagister or teacher. Geoffrey apparentlyconceived the Historia at the request ofWalter, archdeacon of Oxford, in order toprovide the British with their own heroicmythology: a national epic to rival anyproduced by the Saxons or Normans.

It is thanks to his Historia that Geoffreyis widely remembered as the man who,more than any other, created andpopularised the myth of King Arthur. TheHistoria features, for the first time, thewhole life of Arthur, from his conceptionat Tintagel in Cornwall, his battles acrossBritain and Europe with his swordCaliburn (Excalibur), his love forGanhumara (Guinevere), his colleaguesGawain and Merlin, the treachery ofMordred and the final battle after which,mortally wounded, Arthur is carried tothe Isle of Avalon.

king; the second is written from the perspec-tive of Cassivellaunus’s rival, Mandubracius.

It may therefore be wrong to search for asingle primary source for Geoffrey’s account– after all, as he says in his foreword, in hisday the lives of these early kings were“celebrated by many people by heart, as if theyhad been written”. As one might expect for apre-Roman heroic society, these tales hadsurvived to Geoffrey’s time not because theyhad been transcribed but because they had been transmitted from generation to generation by word of mouth.

Grand narrativeOnce you accept that the Historia does notrepresent a single epic but a mass of unrelatedstories woven together to form a grandnarrative, it’s easier to tease out individualtales. And these tales can radically reconfig-ure our understanding of the British past,producing new ways of seeing how the Britons dealt with the arrival of Rome, and whathappened following the collapse of Romanauthority in the fifth century AD.

The Historia matters because it is some-thing that was set down by the ancient Britonsthemselves: it is their ‘lost voice’. This is,perhaps, best summed up by the descriptionof the celebrations following the expulsion of Julius Caesar from Britain.The Britons, we are told,“summoned all the nobility” to Colchester “inorder to perform solemnsacrifices to the gods”,slaughtering “40,000 cowsand 100,000 sheep and alsofowls of every single kindwithout number, besides30,000 wild beasts of several kinds” before “theyfeasted themselves… andspent the rest of the dayand night in various playsand sports”.

This is no work of purefiction but the remem-brance of a real event froma period of the past we stillmistakenly call prehistory.For more on the truth

behind the Historia,

turn the page

Flourishing proseA page from the original

Historia Regum Britanniae,,featuring pen-flourishedinitials and annotationss

from later historianssin the marginss

Geoffrey of Monmouth is shown at work in a 15th-century French translation of the Historia – a book that aimed to furnish the British with their own national epic

25


Cover story

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A HOTLINE TO THE CELTSEight insights that the Historia can give us into ancient Britain

1 Ancient Britons gloried in their Trojan ‘past’

Perhaps the most incredible claim contained within the pages of the Historia is that the British monarchy was descended from Trojan nobility. As far-fetched as this may seem, a chance comment by John Creighton in his book Coins and Power in Late Iron Age Britain (published in 2000) suggests that Geoffrey didn’t merely pluck this ‘fact’ from the ether.

Creighton noted that it “exemplifies precisely the genre of foundation myth that would have been created within the political context of Britain” in the early first century AD. In other words, British dynasts of late Iron Age Britain may have wanted to fabricate a semi-mythical lineage that closely linked them to the Romans, who themselves claimed descent from the Trojan refugee Aeneas. (The Britons were also, remember, keen to adopt Roman symbols and titles on their coins.)

This is something that Geoffrey has Julius Caesar himself articulate when, just prior to the invasion of Britain, he observes that “we Romans and the Britons share a common ancestry”.

2 Young British aristocrats were educated in Rome

Geoffrey says that many British kings travelled to, and grew up in, Rome. On the face of it, this seems prepos-terous, but the system of bringing up the children of allied kings in the imperial capital was an old and established one. Such children may have gone to Rome partly in order to ensure the loyalty of their parents, but also to be educated the Roman way and benefit from imperial patron-age – a system of networking that proved vital to those determined to make it big.

Having the offspring of barbarian aristocrats growing up under close supervision in Rome is something that emperors such as Augustus (shown below) positively encouraged, and it is difficult to see why the Britons would have been treated differently. A number of British kings are known to have been at court during the reigns of both Augustus and Claudius, while images reproduced on early British coins slavishly imitated Roman designs, confirming a strong Mediterranean influence.

3 Tenvantius fathered the ‘Great King of the Britons’

One of the many British kings that Geoffrey describes in the Historia is Tenvantius, Duke of Cornwall, a warlike man who, we’re told, “governed his realm diligently”, insisting on “the full rigour of the law”. Unfortunately, Tenvantius is conspicuous by his absence from the Roman sources – yet that doesn’t mean he’s a figment of Geoffrey’s imagination.

As Geoffrey tells us, after Tenvantius’s death the crown passed to his son Cymbeline (or Cunobelinos), who is recorded on coins and in contemporary historical accounts, as ‘Great King of the Britons’.

Interestingly, on Cymbeline’s coin series – minted from native power centres at both Colches-ter and St Albans – the monarch declares that his father had been ‘Tasciovanus’. It is clear from these coins, and those minted by Tasciovanus himself, that Tenvantius/Tasciovanus was very real – his name, like that of Cymbeline/Cunobelinos, being irrevocably garbled over time.

That the Historia was compiled from sources produced within the pro-Roman tribal kingdoms of south-eastern Britain is confirmed by the fact that those who fought against Rome, such as Caratacus or Boudica, barely merit a mention. And when they do, it’s hardly in glowing terms – Geoffrey casts the Boudican revolt of AD 60–61 as a wholly negative event.

Boudica herself appears as ‘Soderick’, while her tribe, the Iceni, are called ‘Scythians’. Geoffrey also gets his geography mixed up, moving the revolt from Norfolk to southern Scotland. Crucially, when the Iceni/Scythians start razing the region, it is not the Romans who march to attack them but the British king ‘Marius’, who “won several engagements and killed Soderick”.

In the Roman account there is no room for native allies. Yet the fact that the southern British kingdoms thrived in the revolt’s aftermath suggests that the Romans received significant support from indigenous groups.

4 Britons helped quell Boudica’s rebellion

The demi-god Hercules as depicted in a coin minted by the

Celtic Trinovantes tribe

This coin, minted by Tasciova-nus, is evidence that Geoffrey’s king ‘Tenvantius’ really did exist

Boudica rides into battle, but not into Geoffrey’s affections


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BOOKS

� History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Mon-mouth, translated by Lewis Thorpe (Penguin Classics, 1973)� Britannia: The Creation of a Roman Province by John Creighton (Routledge, 2008)

DISCOVER MORE

Earlier this year, Miles Russell explored Fishbourne Palace on our podcast. To listen, go to: � www.historyextra.com/podcasts

ON THE PODCAST

Miles Russell is a senior lecturer in

archaeology at Bournemouth

University. He is co-author of

UnRoman Britain: Exposing the Myth

of Britannia (The History Press, 2011)

According to Geoffrey, mid-first-century AD Britain was ruled by King Coilus, who “had been brought up from his infancy in Rome”. By paying what was required to the Roman government, Coilus “enjoyed his kingdom in peace and no king ever showed greater respect to his nobility… binding them to him through his continual bounty and munificence”.

There can be little doubt that of all the areas of early Roman

Britain, the most bountiful and munificent was along the coast of central southern England. Here, the remains of at least eight palaces, of which Fishbourne is the most famous, have been found.

That extravagant new residences were being erected by native aristocrats such as Togidubnus, Catuarus and Lucullus is beyond doubt – the last of these could plausibly have been Geoffrey’s peace-loving ‘Coilus’.

8 A native elite ran south-east Roman Britain

The Historia presents an alternative late Iron Age Britain in which there is no military occupation by a foreign power. Rather than being part of a Roman province, Geoffrey describes Britain as a friendly, tribute-paying dependency whose monarchs retained a degree of autonomy beyond Rome’s invasion of AD 43.

At first glance, this may appear to be a hopelessly rose-tinted interpretation of the facts. But is it? After all, having invaded south-east England – the area from which most of Geoffrey’s sources hailed – the Roman army swiftly moved on to fight the recalcitrant tribes to the north and west. And, instead of leaving garrisons, they delegated day-to-day governance of the area to the native elite.

So, as far as the south-eastern corner of the island was concerned, Geoffrey was right: the transition from Britain to Roman Britain would have appeared relatively seamless.

5 There was method to the geographical madness

Geoffrey’s detractors have long used his appreciation of geography – or lack of it – as a stick with which to beat him. Not only, they point out, did he mistakenly claim that Boudica went on the ram-page across southern Scotland, he also moved various towns, cities and battlefields from their rightful historical settings of Kent, Hertfordshire and Essex a hundred miles or so west to Wales and Cornwall.

Yet I believe that, far from simply sticking a pin in a map, Geoffrey genuinely based the settings of his history on Roman sources – it’s just that, on a number of notable occasions, he misinterpreted these sources.

Take the titles the ‘Duke of Cornwall’ and the ‘Duke of London’, both of which repeatedly crop up in the Historia. It seems that Geoffrey mistook ‘Catuvel-launi’ for ‘Kerniw’ – or Cornwall – when in fact Catuvellauni was the name of a British tribe based around St Albans. Likewise, he took Trinovantes to mean ‘New Troy’ or ‘London’, when it referred to another British tribe, this one established around Colchester.

By AD 1136, both tribal names had lost any meaning and so Geoffrey equated them with geographical terms that made sense to his audience.

One of the most curious incidents in the Historia relates to Stonehenge which, we are told, was set up by the post-Roman King ‘Aurelius Ambro-sius’ to commemorate those treacherously slaughtered by the Saxons. The stones in question were, on advice from the wizard Merlin, taken from a mountain in Ireland and transported to Salisbury Plain.

This story may read like it’s straight out of a fairy tale, yet it could be doing Geoffrey a disservice to dismiss it as a mere flight of fancy. For a start,

we know that the bluestones at Stonehenge did indeed originate from a source in the west – albeit Pembrokeshire in Wales rather than Ireland.

What’s more, recent excava-tions at the monument hint at significant late or post Roman activity. Many of the bluestones that we see at Stonehenge today may actually have been re-shaped, reset or otherwise significantly modified in the fourth or early fifth century AD, during the time that the historical Ambrosius Aurelianus is thought to have ruled.

6 British grandees built big in southern England

7 The Romans may have added their own touches to Stonehenge

The dolphin mosaic at the ultimate Romano-British status

symbol: Fishbourne Palace

A rocky dolerite outcrop in Pembrokeshire, west

Wales – the source of the bluestones at Stonehenge


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Simon Guerrier investigates the mysterious life

of Elizabeth Cromwell – the ordinary woman who

became England’s first lady in the 17th century

Accompanies the BBC Radio 3 documentary The Fundamentalist Queen

CROMWELL’S SHADOWY QUEEN

On 14 April 1654, the new lordprotector, Oliver Cromwell, moved into apartments in Whitehall Palace. But his wife, Elizabeth, could never endure whispering or to be

left alone in her new home. She was haunted by the ghosts of dead princes.

At least, that’s the story in The Court and Kitchen of Elizabeth Cromwell, a satirical cookbook – yes, really – first published in 1664. The pamphlet is, obviously, Restorationpropaganda, accusing the former lady protectress of meanness and greed, and written from “contemptuous indignation thatsuch a person durst presume to take upon herself such a sovereign estate when she was a hundred times fitter for a barn than a palace”.It recoils at the very idea that, in the 1650s, themost powerful woman in England was not anaristocrat but an ordinary housewife.

Elizabeth’s life and the times she lived through were extraordinary. Yet, unlike almost anyone else who ever married a Britishhead of state, there is no major biography of her. Just a handful of academic papers mention her. That’s largely because so little evidence of her life survives.

We know she was born some time in 1598, perhaps the oldest of 12 children of the merchant James Bourchier. James was knighted in 1603 and he owned property in Essex and London. Yet the next we know of Elizabeth is her wedding day: 22 August 1620.

Elizabeth Cromwell

who is very much in my heart.”A letter from Elizabeth to Oliver dated

27 December 1650 is a rare surviving record of her voice. She complains that she has written three letters for every one received from him. “Truly, my life is but half a life in your absence,” she says, “did not the Lord make it up in himself.”

The letter reveals more than her love for Oliver (and God, reminding us of the Cromwells’ puritanical faith). She also tells Oliver to write to the lord chief justice, the president of the Council of State and the speaker of the House of Commons. “You cannot think the wrong you do yourself,” she concludes, “in the want of a letter, though it were but seldom.” It’s tempting to read a lot into this one surviving letter. Is it evidence that Elizabeth guided, even masterminded, her husband’s political career? How much did she help him reach the highest office in the land? Again, we just don’t know.

But what we do know about Elizabeth can shed light on how the Puritan regime might have differed to that of the late king – or not. We tend to think of the Puritans as dour and earnest, opposing all comfort and pleasure. However, a portrait of Elizabeth (opposite) from about 1653, painted by Robert Walker and now on display in the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon, shows something very different. Elizabeth gazes confidently down at us, resplendent in a dress of black velvet and bright orange lining. She wears pearl earrings

The 14th-century church where she was married, St Giles Cripplegate, is still standing, dwarfed by the brutalist architecture of the Barbican Centre around it.

Between 1621 and 1638, Elizabeth and Oliver had nine children and lived in Huntingdon, St Ives and then Ely. Their home in Ely is now a museum, the satirical cook-book a key source in the re-creation of Elizabeth’s kitchen. We can follow Oliver’s path from relative obscurity as MP for Huntingdon to general of the New Model Army during the Civil War, but all we really know of Elizabeth’s life at the time is that he sent her some of his pay.

Dead princes What did she think of the war with King Charles and her husband’s part in defeating him? A 19th-century painting by William Fisk (see page 30) shows Elizabeth and her children pleading with Oliver to spare Charles’s life – but there’s no contemporary evidence of such an intercession. Did she really believe that ghosts of dead princes haunted her? We simply don’t know.

We do have a sense of Elizabeth’s relation-ship with Oliver. Three letters from him to her survive from the year after the king’s execution. While at war in Scotland in 1650–51, Oliver wrote to Elizabeth: “Thou art dearer to me than any creature.” In another, he says: “Although I have not much to write, yet indeed I love to write to my dear,


Robert Walker’s c1653 portrait of Elizabeth

Cromwell shows a self-assured, lavishly

dressed woman, far removed from the dour puritanism associated

with her husband

“The part Elizabeth played at state

occasions seems to have been strictly limited. That could have been a conscious choice: to be different from

the Stuart monarchy and not use Oliver’s

family as a symbol of state power”

and necklace, her hair is in glossy ringlets and she seems to be wearing make-up.

In short, Elizabeth – this first housewifeamong equals – looks rather like a queen.In style and composition, the painting couldalmost be one of a pair with the portrait ofHenrietta Maria, widow of King Charles,on display in the National Portrait Gallery.

But many portraits of Henrietta Mariaexist, while there are very few of Elizabeth – which might be evidence of a majordifference between the two women. We knowthe Cromwells adopted the royal palaces ofWhitehall and Hampton Court as theirhomes. Elizabeth helped to entertain thewives of foreign dignitaries there. But, unlikeher husband, her role was not defined in thewritten constitution. The part she played atstate occasions seems to have been strictlylimited. That could have been a consciouschoice: to be different from the Stuartmonarchy and not use Oliver’s family as asymbol of state power. If so, our lack ofknowledge about Elizabeth is not down tosources having been lost – or erased. Instead,her life was not recorded, as a kind of politicalstatement by her husband’s regime.

We don’t know how the death ofOliver in 1658 affected Elizabeth.We know the Protectorate offered her £20,000 and the use ofSt James’s House. We don’t know if she attended Oliver’s state


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Elizabeth Cromwell

RADIO

� The documentary, The Fundamentalist Queen, is scheduled for BBCRadio 3 on Sunday 7 December

DISCOVER MORE

Simon Guerrier is a freelance writer andr

producer, who has been working on a new

BBC documentary on Elizabeth Cromwell

funeral on 23 November, or how involved shewas in her son Richard’s reign as lordprotector. The army would not followRichard, but it proposed to parliament thatElizabeth receive a generous pension.

We can only imagine Elizabeth’s feelingswhen, soon after this, parliament restored themonarchy. Her late husband’s corpse wasexhumed from Westminster Abbey to be ‘executed’ for treason. By the time Oliver’shead was displayed on a pole at WestminsterHall, Elizabeth had been evicted.

Her son Richard fled the country in fear ofhis life but was Elizabeth ever in danger? Thesatirical cookbook shows how cruelly she wasmocked by those keen to show loyalty to thenew regime. A telling source is her petition toCharles II in 1660, denying the rumours thatshe’d stolen jewels and other items belongingto the royal family. She speaks of “manyviolences and losses under pretence ofsearching for such goods”, insists that sheplayed no part in her late husband’s regimeand assures the new king of her obedience.

Charles must have believed her – perhapsher low profile in the Protectorate even savedher life. She was allowed to retire to live with

her son-in-law John Claypole inNorthborough Manor, a few miles fromPeterborough. But Elizabeth’s health wasfailing; her daughter Mary described hermother’s sickness as “so affecting a spectacleas I scarce know how to write”. She died in1665 and is buried in the nearby St Andrew’s Church. Today, a plaque put up by theCromwell Association marks the site but thestone is bare. We don’t know if the inscription was defaced or merely faded over time.

A commoner becoming queen is a fairytale, yet Elizabeth’s life was anything but. It’sfrustrating that we don’t know more aboutsuch a key figure in this extraordinary period.But perhaps that’s why the rare glimpses we do have of her remain so haunting.

Scented soaps and

collops of veal

Elizabeth Cromwell left us just a

few glimpses of her life, as Simon

Guerrier found out when working

on a new Radio 3 documentary

In producing a documentary about Elizabeth [for more details, see below right], the challenge has been to use what glimpses we do have of her to bring her to life. We know how many children she had and that she attended particular court events in the 1650s but we needed something more vivid.

As well as retracing Elizabeth’s steps – the church where she was married, the house where she died – we looked for anything that would give us a feel for Elizabeth the person. That’s why the satirical cookbook produced by her post-Restoration tormenters is so important: for all it mocks Elizabeth, it also lists what she ate, including her “almost constant dish” of Scotch collops of veal. Suddenly, there’s a tantalising sense of a real person.

At the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon, curator John Goldsmith showed us a lavish box of soaps owned by the Cromwells but never used – suggesting, we believed, that the puritan Elizabeth had never dared to indulge herself (our experts thought that this assumption was too fanciful).

Most powerful was historian Patrick Little pointing us to sources describing the music that might have played in Cromwell’s court. He helped us track down modern recordings of works by John Hingeston and GiacomoCarissimi, which we’ve included in thedocumentary That’s the benefit ofdocumentary. That s the benefit of

res

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s ofritebeth

30

radio: what you hear conjures pictuin your head. And when that musicplays, Elizabeth and her world feel suddenly within reach.

An illustratioshowing thedifferent cutsveal, a favourdish of ElizabCromwell’s

The Cromwell family, including Elizabeth (seated far right), implores Oliver to spare King Charles I’s life in this 19th-century painting by William Fisk

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WWI eyewitness accounts

“Our First World War”In part seven of his personal testimony series, Peter Hart takes us to December 1914,

when the grim drudgery of war was briefly punctuated by a Christmas ceasefire. Peter

will be tracing the experiences of 20 people who lived through the First World War –

via interviews, letters and diary entries – as the conflict’s centenary progresses

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAMES ALBON

PART 7

Thomas Louch

Thomas was born the son of an archdeacon in Geraldton, Australia in 1894. He worked as a law clerk in Albany, WesternAustralia until war broke out. Assoon as he could he joined theAustralian Imperial Force (AIF).

In December 1914, ThomasLouch was serving with the11th (Western Australia)Battalion where he hadattained the rank of corporal.After some basic training inthe Blackboy Hill Camp, theAIF were shipped off to Egyptto complete their training.Here they encounteredthe men of the 42nd (EastLancashire) Division who hadbeen sent out to replace theBritish regular army units.

There are a lot ofLancashire Territorials

here, and they do look adiminutive lot beside ourfellows, but we get on very well

During a visit to the western front by the king, Douglas Haig tried to get George V to understand the awful nature of the fighting – to show that not everyone could stand up to the terrors of war.

The king seemed very cheery, but inclined to

think that all our troops are by nature brave, and is ignorant of all the efforts which commanders must make to keep up the morale of their men in war, and of all the training which is necessary in peace in order to enable a company to go forward as an organised unit in the face of almost certain death.

I told him of the crowds of fugitives who came back down the Menin Road from time to time during the Ypres battle, having thrown everything they could, including their rifles and packs, in order to escape, with a look of absolute terror on their faces, such as I have never before seen on any human being’s face.

“What really staggered us was

the Tommies’ vocabulary.

One four-letter word… was the

staple of their conversation”

Sir Douglas Haig

In December 1914, Douglas Haig was promoted to command the 1st Army of the expanding BEF.

with them – much better thanwe do among ourselves, for thereis a lot of inter-state jealousy.

What really staggered usabout the Tommies was theirvocabulary – or lack of it! Onefour-letter word with variantsprovided verbs, nouns andadjectives – the staple of theirconversation. The men in mysection were not particularlystrait-laced, but only swore in amild way when exasperated.

The Australians were placedin Mena Camp right alongsidethe pyramids – providing atempting opportunity thatLouch did not fail to takeadvantage of.

On Wednesday last, another chap and I had a

guide and did the pyramids andSphinx thoroughly. We visited the tomb in the third pyramid, which is some 80 feet under-ground and you have to crawl down a narrow passage on your hands and knees.

You get down inside and then you have to pay a piastre for a candle to enable you to see your way; then when you get into the tomb of King Mycron (or some such name as that) you pay another 5 piastres for the guide

to light some magnesium wire, so that you can see the beautiful roof. Then you pay a boy 1 piastre to mind your boots, which you have been obliged to discard, and finally another boy 5 piastres to pour water over your hands to wash them! We then went to the temple of the Sphinx.

The Australians developed a reputation for irreverence towards those in authority, as the officers of the 11th Battalion soon discovered.

Our 11th Battalion officers were mostly from

the militia or the senior cadets; some had been area officers and others school teachers. Two had been at the Boer War, but few, if any, had ever served in the ranks. Not all were popular at that time, and anyone who had given particular cause for dislike might find himself ‘mentioned’ in the early morning despatches.

Newsboys arrived with the daily paper at reveille, and for a piastre or two they could be induced and tutored to go up and down the lines calling “Egyptian Times, very good news. Major ‘X’ (or as the case might be) Dead!” Sometimes the personal announcement was in terms that could hardly be repeated in a drawing room. The newsboys were excellent mimics, though they had no idea of the meaning of what they were paid to say.


In December 1914 trench war-fare had its vile grip on thewestern front. Men died assnipers preyed on the unwaryor as shells crashed down.But there was a last flicker ofhumanity on Christmas Day.The results were witnessedby Private George Ashurst,a new arrival with the 3rd Lan-cashire Fusiliers.

It came 11 o’clock, we’dbeen standing up on the

firing parapet and nobody wasshooting. So one or two fellowsjumped out on top; another twostopped in the trench with theirrifles ready. But they didn’t needthem. As these two fellows gotup, two others followed andthere were scores of us on top atthe finish.

It was grand, you couldstretch your legs and run abouton the hard surface. We tied anempty sandbag up with its stringand kicked it about on top – justto keep warm of course. AndJerry – he was sliding on an ice

BOOK

� Fire and Movement: The British Expeditionary Force and the Campaign of 1914 by Peter Hart (OUP, October 2014)WEBSITE

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On enlisting, Joe Murrayjoined the Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division. Although part of the navy, the men of the RND would in fact be deployed ashore as soldiers alongside the army. After a period at Crystal Palace they underwent thorough training at BlandfordCamp among the chalky Downs of Dorset.

It had been raining quite a lot and after about a

week it was ankle deep in mud and slosh! We had a Leading Seaman Harris – ooh a proper swine, really a swine! We used to go out route marching and drilling: “Right turn! Left turn! Advance! Fix bayonets! Keep

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Peter Hart is an oral historian at the

Imperial War Museum, and the

author of several books about the

First World War

DECEMBER 1914

pond just behind the line – we could tell the way he started off, went so gently across to the other end and then another followed. We did not intermin-gle. Part way through we were all playing football, all on top.

Some Germans came to their wire with a newspaper, they were waving it. A corporal in our company went for it, went right to the wire and the Germans shook hands with him, wished him ‘Merry Christmas’ and gave him the paper. Of course we couldn’t read a word of it so it had to go to an officer.

There were fellows walking about on top of our trench at five o’clock of teatime. Not a shot had been fired and the armistice finished at one o’clock! It was so pleasant to get out of that trench from between them two walls of clay and walk and run about – it was heaven.

Sadly, the guns would not stop again for four long, painful years.

JANUARY ISSUE: “I can’t get up – can’t stand on my feet! We cut my shoes off with a knife”

Joe Murray

Joe was born on 8 October 1896 and grew up in a mining community at Burnopfield in County Durham. After working as a pony driver and putter down the mine, in October 1914 he had enlisted into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

“The Germans shook hands with the

corporal and wished him ‘Merry

Christmas’” George Ashurst

your rifle at the port!” And every time we came to some mud: “Lie Down!”

Honestly and truly we got wet through. Some parts were clay, other parts were chalk. He seemed to make a point of making us lie down where it was muddy. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why he was such a so-and-so! We were so filthy, you couldn’t scrape it off, you sort of sponged it off with a rag.

In the huts there was a little stove – it gave off as much light as a miner’s lamp and as much heat as a glow worm! We used to sit around trying to dry our wet trousers. We spent most of our time wallowing in mud and attempting to get dry.

George Ashurst

George was born in Tontine in 1895, the son of a quarryman. While working as an engine cleaner, he had trained as a special reservist and arrived in France in late 1914.

British and German troops mingle in no man’s land at Ploegsteert, Belgium on Christmas Day 1914

As we arrive at the first

Remembrance Day since the

First World War centenary,

David Reynolds explores how

commemoration has changed

over the past 100 years


Remembering the First World War

Honouring the deadFormer and serving soldiers march

past the Cenotaph in Whitehall on the first Armistice Day, 11 Novem-

ber 1919. Grief-stricken old men such as the Cenotaph’s designer, Edwin Lutyens, did most to shape

remembrance in the immediate aftermath of the First World War,

says David Reynolds

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At first sight, Britishremembrance of war haschanged little over the lastcentury. The Cenotaphand the Two-MinuteSilence date from 1919,the Poppy Appeal from

1921. Yet the continuity of ritual masksprofound changes in British attitudes toremembrance. To explore these changes takesus into broader issues of national identity andeven foreign policy.

The Great War was the deadliest in Britain’shistory, with nearly three quarters of a millionkilled. It was impossible to bring such a largenumber of bodies home. Indeed manysoldiers had been literally blown to bits byshellfire and their remains were never found.So the dead were interred and commemo-rated along the battlefronts in nearly athousand cemeteries and monumentsconstructed by the Imperial War GravesCommission in one of the biggest publicworks projects of the 1920s.

Among the missing was Jack Kipling – onlyson of the celebrated author Rudyard Kipling– who was last seen stumbling in agony acrossthe battlefield of Loos in September 1915 withhalf his face blown off. Jack could have got amedical exemption because of short-sight buthe and his father were gung-ho patriots. After1918 Kipling threw his energies into the wargraves project, like the architect EdwinLutyens and the administrator Fabian Ware.Too old to fight, these were men consumedwith grief and probably guilt about the youngmen who had been sent to their deaths.

During the war itself the public knew littleof the gruesome reality of modern industri-alised killing. Press reporters were strictlycontrolled and there was virtually no filmfootage of combat or bodies. But during thetwenties, the veil was partially lifted inveterans’ novels and memoirs. Particularlypowerful was the play Journey’s End byRC Sherriff. Set in a gloomy dugout on thewestern front, it depicted British soldiersbickering and drinking as they psychedthemselves up for the next German onslaught.The 1928 play had little action but it proveda runaway West End success, praised for its‘realism’ in bringing alive the horrors of thetrenches. The author JB Priestley called it “thestrongest plea for peace I know”.

A second war

As the thirties progressed, this link betweenpeace and remembrance tightened. Manypeople felt that the dead would not have diedin vain if 1914–18 proved, in the cliché of thetime, ‘the war to end war’. In other words,peace would be the truest form of remem-brance. By the mid-1930s Britain had thelargest peace movement in the world. Over athird of the population – 11.5 million people– signed the so-called ‘Peace Ballot’ of 1935,with an overwhelming majority registeringsupport for the League of Nations and for anend to the arms trade. And, as war cloudsgathered in 1938, Prime Minister NevilleChamberlain made his own bid for peace ina desperate deal with Hitler at Munich.

Chamberlain was another of the generationwho was too old to fight. He had never

recovered from the death in action of hisyounger cousin and closest friend, Norman.

But on 3 September 1939 Britain was at war once again with Germany: all the peace-talk and peace-making had come to nothing.

This new war was profoundly differentfrom the last. All through the Great War there had been a western front, but in 1940 the fallof France in four weeks left Britain fightingon alone. Unlike 1914–18, the country washeavily bombed and menaced by imminent invasion: 1940 became immortalised inChurchill’s celebrated phrase as Britain’s ‘finest hour’. And this war, unlike the last, ended with Germany’s unconditional surrender and complete occupation by the Allies, by which time the utter bestiality of Nazism had been revealed in camps such asBelsen and Buchenwald. This seemed clearly a ‘good war’ – and it had been won at half the human cost of the last for Britain.

In the 1920s and 1930s the British contin-ued to refer to 1914–18 as the Great War. Butafter 1945 they adopted American terminol-ogy, and spoke of ‘the First World War’ andthe ‘Second World War’. This accentuated the sense that 1914–18 had been an inconclusive M

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Flowers forthe fallenWomen’s ArmyAuxiliary Corpsgardeners tendgraves on thewestern front inSeptember 1917.The Imperial WarGraves Commissionwould constructnearly a thousandcemeteries andmonuments over thefollowing decade

The grim reality1929 production of Journey’s End at the d

Savoy Theatre. The play gave many their first glimpse of the horror of the trenches



“Oh What a Lovely

War said more about

the sixties’ attitudesto class and countrythan about what

actually happened

in 1914–18”MIR

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opening round, which needed another roundto finish the job.

After 1945, both Armistice Day on the 11thof November and the Two-Minute silence fellout of fashion. Instead, the dead of both worldwars were honoured on the nearest weekend,known as Remembrance Sunday. In the 1950sand 1960s the British seemed obsessed withHitler’s war – commemorating, evencelebrating it, in more than a hundred colourmovies showing squared-jawed, stiff-upper-lipped heroes such as Jack Hawkins andRichard Todd fighting evil Nazis in filmssuch as The Cruel Sea and The Dam Busters.

Preoccupied with the era of Churchilland Hitler, the British paid little attention to1914–18, but the 50th anniversary broughtthe conflict alive for a new generation. Theblockbuster BBC TV series The Great Warscreened hitherto unseen footage of thetrenches in surreal black and white. And themeaning of the war was questioned in bookssuch as Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, whichpopularised the phrase that British Tommieshad been ‘lions led by donkeys’.

This theme of innocent soldiers sent totheir deaths by bone-headed upper-classgenerals was dramatised in Oh! What a LovelyWar – an experimental play that mush-roomed into a West End hit and a global movie. The tragedy of the soldiers is played out in front of a news panel displaying headline points about the fighting, such as “November… Somme Battle Ends… Total Loss 1,332,000 Men…Gain Nil”. At one point,Field-Marshal Haig (played by John Mills) asserts with aristocratic insouciance: “The

loss of, say, another 300,000 men may leadto really great results.”

In fact Oh! What a Lovely War revealedmore about sixties’ attitudes to class andcountry than about what actually happenedin 1914–18, but its impact has been enduring.

This was also the decade when the Britishdiscovered the ‘War Poets’. Some 2,200writers published poetry about the Great Warbetween 1914 and 1918, 25 per cent of themwomen and fewer than 20 per cent men inuniform. Yet since the 1960s, thanks largely to50th-anniversary anthologies, a handful of‘soldier poets’ have become the true interpret-ers of the war for generations of schoolchil-dren through the English literature curricu-lum. Supreme among them was WilfredOwen, whose poems evoked the ‘pity of war’and whose death in action a week before theArmistice seemed to sum up its futility.

Recently some revisionist military histori-ans have contested these sixties stereotypes of

the generals, insisting that the British Army learned from the disastrous first day of the Somme, developing into an efficient war machine that combined infantry, tanks, artillery and aircraft to deadly effect in the autumn of 1918. But this ‘learning curve’ wasgreased with an appalling amount of blood: whether such a costly education can be justified remains a matter of debate.

Noble sacrifice?It was in the sixties that British remembrance of the Great War set firm, heightening the contrast with the positive remembrance of 1939–45. All the belligerent countries, I wouldargue, see 1914–18 through the lens of1939–45, but the refractions vary from placeto place. Consider two examples. In France,‘La Grande Guerre’ remains a noble sacrifice to rid the country of German occupation, whereas 1940–44 is remembered as ‘the dark years’ – humiliating defeat in 1940, and thenshameful collaboration with Nazi genocide.

In West Germany after 1945, there was nodenying the crimes of Nazism, even if thesewere initially blamed on Hitler and a criminal few rather than acknowledging the complicity of the population as a whole. But until the 1960s, Germans still thought of 1914–18 as a necessary war of defence against Russian and French encirclement. But then the writings of leftist historian Fritz Fischerpersuaded many Germans to see 1914–18 asthe forerunner of 1939–45, with both wars asepisodes in a long story of militaristic expansion since the days of Bismarck.

And so in France and West Germany, like

Fight the good fight Square-jawed Jack Hawkins stares out of poster art for the 1953 film The Cruel Sea, which epitomised Britain’s obsession with its ‘finest hour’

Anti-war movement A peace demonstration converges on Trafalgar Square in June 1935. Earlier that year, 11 million Britons had signed a ‘Peace Ballot’


Britain, the two world wars were interlocked in cultural memory. But, unlike Britain, both these countries found a way of escaping from the prison of memory. In 1957, together with Italy and the Benelux states, they signed the Treaty of Rome, creating the European Economic Community. In effect, the EEC represented a peace treaty for western Europe, drawing a line under not only the Second World War but also the grim cycle of Franco-German wars that stretched back before 1939 and 1914 to the days of Bismarck, Napoleon and Louis XIV.

For France, Germany and their neighbours, European integration has offered a way out of their darkly entangled history, transmuting pained remembrance of the past into bright hope for the future.

Awkward partnerIn Britain this exit strategy has never had much appeal. Not until the British empire had largely been liquidated did Britain, in 1973, join the European Community but the country remains an ‘awkward partner’, frequently at odds with majority policy. Our distinctive patterns of war remembrance are, I think, an important part of the explanation. The First World War, costly yet inconclusive, left troubling questions about whether Britain should have intervened on the continent. The Second World War – in which Britain triumphed with the help of the ‘English-

speaking peoples’ of the Commonwealth and the United States – accentuated that sense of distance, so that the Atlantic often seems narrower than the Channel.

For Britain the last third of the 20th century stood in marked contrast with what had come before. With the retreat from empire, compulsory military service was abandoned. Apart from the Falklands, foreign wars seemed a relic of the past. But over the last quarter-century, war has returned to our national agenda, in the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan. The deaths of young soldiers today give new life and meaning to stories and poems from Britain’s greatest war. The two-minute silence has gained new reso-nance, likewise the Poppy Appeal.

Yet what is being remembered is largely the sixties version of the Great War – a story of mud, blood and class conflict, a cultural memory that is stuck in the trenches and trapped in Poets’ Corner. The 50th anniver-sary was profoundly important for shaping images of 1914–18. Will the centenary changethose rooted assumptions?

Maybe this time we shall develop a broader sense of the conflict, one in which the home front matters as much as the western front. Perhaps we shall appreciate the impact of the war on women as well as men, not least in breaking the bitter deadlock over female suffrage. We might also grasp the conflict’s global nature – its impact on countries such

as India, China and Japan, its effects on the Middle East, which endure to the present day in Syria, Iraq and Israel/Palestine.

Above all, after the catharsis of the centenary, maybe we shall start to move on from remembrance to understanding. After all, no veterans are alive today who served in the conflict: quite literally, no one can ‘remember’ the Great War. In fact, we are now as far from the men who marched away in 1914 than they were from the Redcoats who fought Napoleon at Waterloo. Of course we should honour the dead but I believe we must also try to understand the Great War as history – history that still casts a long shadow across the world today.

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BOOK

� The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century by David Reynolds (Simon & Schuster, 2014)TV & RADIO

� The BBC’s First World War coverage continues on TV & Radio. For more details see page 78 as well as our weekly TV newsletter at historyextra.com

DISCOVER MORE

David Reynolds is professor of international

history at the University of Cambridge. He is the

author of several books and regularly presents

series on BBC television, most recently Long

Shadow on BBC Two this autumn

“What is being

remembered is

largely the sixties

version, a story of

mud, blood and class conflict

trapped in the

trenches and

Poets’ Corner”Pen and

sword The “su-preme” war

poet, Wilfred Owen, in 1916.

The pathos of his verses and the

timing of his death encapsulated the ‘pity of war’ and – from the 1960s – framed Britain’s attitude to the First World War for half a century

A peace treaty for western Europe

Foreign ministers ratify the birth of the European Economic Community (EEC) in

Rome, March 1957

Remembrance renewed Prince Philip presents medals to soldiers who had served in Afghanistan, November 2012


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As we arrive at the first

Remembrance Day since the

First World War centenary,

David Reynolds explores how

commemoration has changed

over the past 100 years

Honouring the deadFormer and serving soldiers march

past the Cenotaph in Whitehall on the first Armistice Day, 11 Novem-

ber 1919. Grief-stricken old men such as the Cenotaph’s designer, Edwin Lutyens, did most to shape

remembrance in the immediate aftermath of the First World War,

says David ReynoldsM

IRR

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Listen to Dominic

SandbrookON TH E

PODCAST

The phantom menace

Dominic Sandbrook picks out 10 milestones in science fiction

history that show how tales of alien imposters, urban dystopias

and implacable clones were born out of more earthly concerns

Accompanies the BBC Two series Tomorrow’s Worlds: The Unearthly History of Science Fiction


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A Martian fighting-machinerampages across Surrey in anillustration of The War of theWorlds. HG Wells wrote hisdark interpretation of theinvasion novel at a time ofrising tensions betweenEurope’s great powers


Science fiction

IMAGES LEFT TO RIGHT:From the Earth to theMoon cover artwork;A still from the 2005

film adaptation of TheWar of the Worlds;

Robots take control ina 1938 BBC adaptation

of R.U.R; A posteradvertises the 1927

silent film Metropolis;Kevin McCarthy and

Dana Wynter on the runin a poster for the 1956

film Invasion of theBody Snatchers; A

scene from the 1966film Daleks – InvasionEarth: 2150 AD; Cover

artwork for thegender-bending Left

Hand of Darkness

French author Jules Verne (1828–1905) is often regarded as the father of modern science fiction, and his book From the Earth to the Moon is the first vaguely realistic story of travel in space. Writing towards the end of the American Civil War, Verne told the story of an imagined postwar society called the Baltimore Gun Club, obsessed with weapons of all kinds.

In the novel, the club devises a plan to fire a manned ship into space from a giant gun, and raises funds from countries across the world – although not Britain, which is jealous of the Americans’ scientific exploits.

The story ends with the ship shooting off into space; only in the sequel, Around the Moon, do we find out what happened to the astronauts. But Verne’s story proved hugely influential, and in 1902 it inspired the first science fiction film, Le Voyage dans la Lune, by the French director George Méliès.

By now, however, science fiction had acquired a taste for melodrama, and Méliès included an audience-friendly battle with sinister alien insects. As a result, the film was hugely successful – especially in the United States, a country that was increasingly seen as the crucible of scientific modernity.

The late Victorian age was the heyday of ‘invasion fiction’, as writers reacted to the news of the Franco-Prussian War with increasingly lurid scenarios of German, Russian and French invasions of southern England. Many were set in the suburban Home Counties, and one writer, William le Queux, whose stories were serialised in the new Daily Mail, deliberately featured towns with a high proportion of Mail readers.

In many ways, then, HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds was a satire of the invasion genre, from the shock of the alien landings to the suburban ordinariness of the Surrey setting.

Wells’s theme has fascinated readers and audiences ever since, from the 1950s Holly-wood adaptation to Steven Spielberg’s version in 2005, which was clearly influenced by the trauma of 9/11.

Yet unlike so many science-fiction thrillers, his book ends on a distinctly grim note. The Martians may have fallen victim to Earth’s bacterial infections, but the crowds in London now look like “phantasms in a dead city”. And though he survived the invasion, the narrator feels an abiding sense of “doubt and insecurity”, like some ghostly premonition of the horrors of the First World War.

The word ‘robot’ was coined bythe Czech writer Karel Capek inhis play R.U.R., first performedin Prague in January 1921.Capek derived it from the wordrobota, which means ‘forcedlabour’, and his play capturedboth the excitement and theanxiety with which manypeople viewed the coming ofthe machine age.

This was the heyday ofFordism, with machinestransforming industry andthrowing thousands out ofwork. And Capek was the firstwriter to capture an abidingtheme of modern sciencefiction: our fear of the machine.

His play tells the story of afirm called Rossum’s UniversalRobots, which manufacturesartificial people – clones,effectively – to work formankind. But the robots learnto think for themselves andlaunch a revolution – a threatthat seemed very real in theage of Bolshevism. In a chillingecho of events in Russia, therobots storm the citadels ofmankind and wipe out allremaining humans, except one.

But in a final twist, the robotsthemselves develop humanfeelings. Two robots fall in love:they are the new Adam andEve, the father and mother ofa new human race.

From the Earth to the Moon (1865)

by Jules Verne

The War of the Worlds (1897–98)

by HG Wells

R.U.R. (1921)

by Karel Čapek

“In a chilling

echo of events

in Russia, the

robots storm the

citadels of man-

kind and wipe

out all remain-

ing humans,

except one”

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

dir. Don SiegelNow that Doctor Who has become a British cultural institution, it is easy to forget that it was originally devised as a Saturday evening filler to keep BBC audiences watching between Grandstand and Juke Box Jury. Yet no other cultural product of the last half-century has addressed so many serious historical issues – from the British empire and the Second World War to genocide, slavery and religious intolerance – even if many of them have been disguised in an alien setting. And perhaps no other television series better captures the ambiguities of Britishness itself, from the central character’s Victorian curiosity to his semi-detached relationship with the armed forces.

For a historian, meanwhile, the fascinating thing about Doctor Who is how faithfully it has echoed the political and cultural trends of the day, from the technological fears of the 1960s and the feminism and environmentalism of the 1970s to the anti-Thatcher passions of the 1980s and the Iraq War debate in the 2000s.

Generations of children may have thrilled to the adventures of the Doctor and his compan-ions. But like all the best science fiction, it has often been at its most compelling when tackling issues that

haunted the imaginations of their parents.

No film better captured the nightmares of the early Cold War, when Senator Joseph McCarthy was warning of Reds under the bed, than Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Adapted from Jack Finney’s novel, the story is set in Santa Mira, California, where people become convinced that their friends and neighbours have been replaced with imposters, hatched from alien seed pods.

The beauty of the Body Snatchers story is that it resists easy interpretations. Some saw it as a criticism of the soulless uniformity of the Soviet Union – or as a metaphor for fears that communists were infiltrat-ing the American suburbs. But the film’s director, Don Siegel, denied that there was a simple meaning. “The political reference to Senator McCarthy and totalitarianism was inescapable,” he said, “but I tried not to emphasise it because I feel that motion pictures are primarily to entertain and I did not want to preach.”

Born and brought up in Berkeley, California, Ursula K Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness as a “thought experiment”. One line above all has gone down in science fiction legend: “The king was pregnant.” For what her book explores is an alien world called Winter, on which the people are ambisexual. Once a month, for mating purposes, they can choose to be male or female, but their genders are not fixed.

At the time, Le Guin’s book seemed revolutionary. Femi-nism’s second wave was yet to get fully under way, while the gay rights movement was still in its infancy.

But what The Left Hand of Darkness reflected was not just the emerging social move-ments of the late 1960s and 1970s, but science fiction’s latent potential to question the way things are. For much of the 20th century, writers used science fiction, more than any other genre, as a tool of social criticism, satirising the conventions of the day and speculating about a better future. And in imagining an alien world in which there were no fixed gender roles, there was no war and nature coexisted harmoniously with

technology, Le Guin was challenging the values

her American compatriots took

for granted.

Often regarded as the greatestfilm of the silent era, FritzLang’s Metropolis was hugelyinfluential on science fiction inthe cinema. An Austrianveteran of the First World War,Lang had since moved toBerlin and, as perhaps thesupreme exponent of Germanexpressionism, became amaster of nightmares.

Metropolis was a product ofthe Weimar Republic’s briefartistic golden age. It is set ina terrifying future city, ruled byan oligarchy while the toilingmasses live underground.A fear of machines pervades,and the implacable robotMaria became a lastingsymbol of German cinema.

The film is animated by alurking dread of revolution:not for nothing is the robot’smission to stir up unrestamong the city’s workers.

HG Wells wrote thatMetropolis was “quite thesilliest film” he had ever seen.But its vision of the city of thefuture, with its toweringskyscrapers and huddledmasses, was to proveremarkably prescient.

Doctor Who (1963— )

The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

by Ursula K Le Guin

Metropolis (1927)

dir. Fritz Lang

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Science fiction

Dominic Sandbrook discusses the history ofscience fiction on our weekly podcast� historyextra.com/podcasts

THE PODCAST

When William Gibson wrote Neuromancer, he was an obscure American-born writer who had emigrated to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War draft. Today, he is often described as the man who foresaw the inven-tion of the internet and coined the term ‘cyberspace’, which he defines in the book as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation… lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.”

The story of a computer hacker, hired to carry out the ultimate crime, Neuromancer was remarkably prophetic. Gibson was writing before most people even had home computers, yet he imagined a world in which computer networks would constitute theirown ‘virtual’ reality.

Later, he explained that he had been inspired by watching people in video arcades, their eyes glazed as they played games like Space Invaders. Today, of course, Space Invaders feels like an ancient relic. But Gibson’s book endures, not merely as a cultural artefact of the 1980s, but as a chilling guide to the emerging world of the 21st-century internet.

More than any other picture since the early days of cinema, Star Wars changed the film industry itself, ushering in an era of big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. Yet George Lucas only made his space epic after failing to secure the rights to remake Flash Gordon.

Flash Gordon had first appeared in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. In a society haunted by the spectre of unemployment, it was pure escapism: a thrilling adventure utterly removed from its social context. This was what George Lucas wanted to give American audiences in the 1970s: the era of Vietnam, Watergate, economic stagflation and morbid introspection. “It had become depressing,” he once said, “to go to the movies.”

Lucas’s aim may have been to make a film that would banish the miserable headlines of the day. But there were obvious geopolitical parallels, too. In an age of détente with the Soviet Union, Star Wars restored a clear dividing line between good and evil. It was little wonder, then, that when Ronald Reagan devised the Strategic Defense Initiative, a ring of satellites to protect the United States from nuclear attack, it was quickly nick-named ‘Star Wars’.

If anyone doubts that sciencefiction can explore serioushistorical themes, they ought towatch Neill Blomkamp’s District9, which could hardly be aharder-hitting examination ofthe racism that blighted SouthAfrica for so long. On thesurface, the film tells howextraterrestrials, having landedoutside Johannesburg, areconfined in a poverty-riddencamp, supervised by govern-ment bureaucrats and military contractors.

Behind the story, however, lurks the shadow of the real-lifeDistrict Six, a largely black areaof Cape Town during the apartheid era. In 1966, claimingthat District Six had become a crime zone, the government declared it a whites-only area and began evicting residents toa bleak township known as ‘apartheid’s dumping ground’.

In the film it is the aliens, not black South Africans, who face

Neuro-mancer (1984)

by William Gibson

Star Wars (1977)

dir. George Lucas

District 9 (2009)

dir. Neill Blomkamp “In the film it is

the aliens, not

black South

Africans, who

face eviction,

but the parallel

is clear to see”

eviction, but the parallel is clear to see. What made the film even more unsettling, though, was its frankness about race relations in South Africa today, notably the tension between indigenous South Africans and immigrants from other African countries, such as Nigeria. That such themes could be explored in a film about aliens living on Earth, complete with expensive special effects and a compelling narrative, is testament to science fiction’s extraordinary power.

IMAGES LEFT TO

RIGHT: The cast of Star

Wars prepare to usher in the age of

the blockbuster; William Gibson’s Neuromancer coined the phrase ‘cyber-space’; “You are not welcome here” is the message conveyed by a poster promoting District 9

Dominic Sandbrook is a historian, columnist and

TV presenter. His most recent book is Seasons in

the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979 (Allen

Lane, 2012)

TELEVISION

� Tomorrow’s Worlds: The UnearthlyHistory of Science Fiction, presentedby Dominic Sandbrook, is dueto air this month on BBC Two

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History courses

at Chichester

www.chi.ac.uk/history

Contact: Dr Hugo Frey, [email protected]

BA (Hons)

History

Modern History

Politics and Contemporary History

Medieval and Early Modern History

Literature, Culture and History

MA Cultural History

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As Britain’s military fortunes

ebbed and flowed in the run-up

to Waterloo, the public mood routinely

swung from joy to horror and back again.

Jenny Uglow tells the story of the year

when fear of Napoleon stalked the land


The Napoleo

At war with Napoleon

Explosions of joyCharles Calvert’s painting shows a

‘sham fight’ on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, celebrating Napoleon’s fall from power in 1814. The French

emperor’s defeat sparked a nation-wide outpouring of relief, yet he

would soon be back to spoil the party

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on complex



Acentury ago, in August 1914, Britain was plunging into war. But in the same month a hundred years before, the country was rejoicing at the end – as they thought

– of the long conflict with France, and the toppling of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The prince regent announced a grand jubilee in London’s royal parks, to be held on 1 August – a date that also marked a cente-nary of Hanoverian rule. It was rather more spectacular than he hoped: the Chinese pagoda in St James’s Park caught fire and tumbled into the lake, killing two men and some swans, and drawing huge crowds who thought it was all part of the show. In Hyde Park, the fairground shows of Bartholomew Fair, due at the end of the month, took over the ground: swings, roundabouts, wild-beast shows, donkey racing and sack-racing, and even printing presses to run off souvenirs. The writer Charles Lamb groaned that the grass was turned to sand, and “booths & drinking places go all round it for a mile & half. . . the stench of liquors, bad tobacco, dirty people & provisions, conquers the air”.

At the outset of the wars with France in 1793, politicians had assured the public that the conflict would be finished in months – as with the First World War, ‘over by Christmas’.Yet by now, broken only by the brief Peace of Amiens in 1802, the fighting had continued for over 20 years: 300,000 men had died and many more were wounded and maimed.

Briefly, the country was wild with relief. But the following spring, elation would turn to despair at Napoleon’s return, then to anxiety and finally to mingled joy and horror at the news of Waterloo. Dizzying changes of mood swept the people of Britain as they cheered, waited, watched and trembled.

Rise and thawIt was always hard to keep up with news from the battlefronts, and in the biting winter of1813–14 snow drifts had blocked the roads,the rivers were frozen and the mails were stopped. But with the thaw came a rise in hopes. In the north Napoleon’s army was fighting a brilliant rear-guard action to stopthe combined armies of Austria, Prussia and Russia marching across his borders, but in the south, the Duke of Wellington had defeated French forces in Spain and had crossed the Pyrenees. In this time of suspense, ordinary life went on. “Do not be angry with me for beginning another letter to you,” Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra in March, “I have read The Corsair, mended my petticoat, & have nothing else to do.”

Then came a wave of alarm: hearingrumours of French victories, people rushed tosell stocks before prices fell. On 4 April 1814,The Times was still carrying accounts ofFrench triumphs from the Paris papers. Yet infact, in the last two days of March – a weekbefore the news reached the London press –the Russians and Prussians had entered Paris.On 2 April, the new French Senate declaredthat Napoleon was officially deposed.

“The week before Easter was certainly avery agitating one,” wrote the elderly aristocratAmabel Hume-Campbell, “& to be sure I sleptbut little the night after that Tuesday whenthree different gradations of incredible goodnews came on us from hour to hour.”

The papers were peppered with contradic-tory reports, but finally, on the evening ofSaturday 9 April, the day before Easter, aGazette Extraordinary from the Foreign Officeappeared, saying that despatches had arrived“announcing the abdication of the crowns ofFrance and Italy by Napoleon Bonaparte”.

Queues formed outside booksellers and thestock of newspapers ran out. The countryrang with bells and shone with illuminations.“What overpowering events!” exclaimed theclergyman John Stonard. “Surely there willnever be any more news as long as we live. Thepapers will be as dull as a ledger and politicsinsipid as the white of an egg.”

“Elation would turn to

despair at Napoleon’s

return, then to anxiety and finally to mingled joy and horror at the news

of Waterloo”

On Easter Monday the allies signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, exiling Napoleon to Elba and restoring Louis XVIII. “Nap the Mighty is gone to pot,” wrote the teenage Thomas Carlyle in amazement. The novelist Maria Edgeworth exclaimed: “All that has passed in France in the last few weeks, a revolution without bloodshed! Paris taken without being pillaged.”

At Hartwell, the new French king, Louis XVIII, a portly widower, and his niece the Duchesse d’Angoulême, the only surviving child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, packed their bags for their return. Later that month Louis paid a state visit to London. “At this present writing, Louis the Gouty is wheeling in triumph into Piccadilly, in all the pomp and rabblement of royalty,” wrote Lord Byron to Tom Moore. “I had an offer of seats to see them pass; but as I have seen a sultan going to mosque, and been at his reception of an ambassador, the most Christian king ‘hath no attractions for me’.” On 24 April Louis left Dover for Calais on the yacht Royal Sovereign, entering Paris on 3 May.

Hobbling soldiersSlowly the soldiers returned home. The rifleman Benjamin Harris, suffering from fever contracted during the ill-fated Walcheren expedition to the Netherlands in 1809, marched to Chelsea with his veterans’ battalion, to be disbanded. Harris saw thousands of soldiers – English, Scots and Irish – lining the streets, “and lounging about before the different public-houses, with every description of wound and casualty incident to modern warfare. There hobbled the maimed Light Infantryman, the heavy dragoon, the hussar, the artillery-man, the fusilier, and specimens from every regiment in the service.” A week later he was discharged, receiving his pension of sixpence a day.

The relief of British families seeing fathers, sons and brothers out of uniform at last was matched by that of countless French prisoners of war. As the Peterborough newspapers reported: “The joy produced among the prisoners of war at Norman Cross by the change of affairs in France is quite indescrib-ably extravagant. A large white flag is set up in each of the quadrangles of the depot, under

which the thousands of poor fellows, for years in confinement, dance, sing, laugh and cry for joy, with rapturous delight.”

It was different for the French officers. Several had been on parole around Melrose, where the novelist Walter Scott had been hospitable to them: “Many of them,” Scott wrote, “companions of Buonaparte’s victories, and who hitherto have marched with him from conquest to B

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Napoleon’s return from exile on Elba came as a nasty shock to

many Britons


Back from the dead Joseph Beaume’s painting shows Napoleon leaving the island of Elba, on which he had been exiled, to return to France. This turn of events propelled many Britons, who had been glorying in the Corsican’s ‘defeat’, into a state of blind panicL’A

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conquest, disbelieve the change entirely.”But the change was true. On 30 May the

Peace of Paris restored France to the borders of 1792 (when the French Revolutionary Warserupted), with slight adjustments. In June the allied sovereigns, Frederick William III of Prussia, Tsar Alexander of Russia and Metternich, the Austrian chancellor, with theheads of German states and several generals, paid a state visit to London. The whole route from Dover was illuminated, and the artist Thomas Sidney Cooper, then 10, rememberedflags hung across the streets in Canterbury and how the wounded soldiers following the procession “were treated and cheered by the populace, who smoked and drank with them; and the city was kept in a state of conviviality and uproar until midnight”.

Green pantaloonsIn London, windows along the route were let for huge sums, bakers ran out of bread and the cows in Hyde Park were spooked by the cheers, and produced no milk. When a grand ball was held at Burlington House, Betsey Fremantle, the young wife of a naval com-mander, gasped at the splendour: “The rooms were brilliant, and looked like a fairy palace… 2,000 people set down without any inconve-nience or confusion. I stayed till seven o’clock in the morning and met almost everybody I know in London.”

This was rivalled by a masquerade at Watier’s, to which Byron went dressed as a monk, while politician Cam Hobhouse put on Byron’s Albanian robes and Lady Caroline Lamb appeared in mask and domino, flashing her green pantaloons.

All spring and summer, across the country there were tables in the streets, sports and dancing on the green. In Oldham, wrote the

weaver William Rowbottom, “the different manufacturers gave dinners and ale to their respective work people who paraded the streets with musick and flags with different devices. A pair of looms were drawn in a cart where a person was weaving callico and a person representing Bonaparte was wind-ing… ale &c flowed in the greatest profusion.”

Every town had such stories. Bury St Edmunds held a feast for 4,000 poor people from 20 miles around: “The whole of the meat was prepared a day or two before & of course was designed to be cold,” explained James Oakes, “the plum puddings hot. The tables were set all thro the butter market, on the beest market & round the theatre.”

In Gainsborough there was “a grand emblematical procession” including an effigy of the fallen emperor labelled ‘Going to Elba’. In the small Devon town of Ashburton, parole prisoners joined local guilds in a parade with “Fifty flower girls, haymakers and agricultur-alists, woollen manufacturers”, ending with “Britannia in triumphal car drawn by four horses abreast”.

Not everyone enjoyed the celebrations. The journalist William Cobbett saw them as

a form of hysteria and thundered against the balls and processions, “from the solemn and gawdy buffoonery of the freemasons down to the little ragged children at the Lancashire schools… Upwards of 2,000 oxen were roasted whole and upwards of 2,000 sheep. One boundless scene of extravagance and waste, and idleness and dissipation pervaded the whole kingdome, and the people appeared to be all raving drunk, all raving mad.”

All too soon, however, they were sober again. As winter closed in, hunger stalked the poor. In the new year, while delegates to the Congress of Vienna waited to formalise the terms of the peace, unemployed soldiers haunted British roads. The farmers, who had made big profits during the war, worried as the price of corn fell. In March 1815, during the final stages of a bill to ban imports when the home price of wheat fell below 80 shillings a quarter, mobs gathered outside ministers’ houses, tearing down railings and scrawling ‘Bread or Blood’ on the walls.

At the same time, on Friday 10 March, James Oakes of Bury St Edmunds wrote a worried entry in his diary. “This morning by mail the acct came of Bonaparte’s making good his landing in France with 10 or 12,000 men.” After slipping away from Elba, Napoleon had landed 10 days earlier near Antibes, with 600 men. Suddenly the national mood swung back towards panic. Every day there were new and contradictory reports: that Napoleon had reached Lyons and most of the army and navy had defected to him; that his troops were deserting, “& great hopes were entertaind there Bonaparte would be surrounded & brot a prisoner, dead or alive, to Paris”, scribbled Oakes. But on Good Friday, the 24th, he wrote solemnly: “The London B

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A c1819 painting shows Chelsea Pensioners

receiving tidings of the victory at Waterloo. The

news would be music to a war-weary nation’s ears

“In Gainsborough

there was ‘a grand

emblematical

procession’ including

an effigy of the

fallen emperor labelled ‘Going to Elba’”


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� Britain Against Napoleonby Roger Knight (Allen Lane, 2013)EVENT

� Jenny Uglow is giving a talk at BBCHistory Magazine’s Waterloo Day atMShed, Bristol on 22 March 2015. Formore details on the event, turn to page 60

DISCOVER MORE

“When the

ship carrying

Bonaparte

anchored in

Torbay and

Plymouth,

crowds

packed the

shore or

rowed out

to see him”

This caricature shows Napoleon – now in exile on the Atlantic island of St Helena – before and after his fall from power. By the time of his final defeat at Waterloo, the Corsican had haunted Britons’ nightmares for over a decade

papers this morning announced the arrival of Bonaparte at Paris on Monday last, 20th Inst, without opposition. Not a gun fired.” Napoleon was back in power.

Mary Hutchinson, from her family’s farm in Radnorshire, wrote to her relative Tom, that they had sent to town to find a newspaper “to satisfy us on the report we have had of B. having entered Paris. It was terrible not to have a paper, at such a time as this when we are all anxiety – we have not had one since the 13th and therefore are in utter darkness probably made more gloomy by reports which are afloat in the neighbourhood… What can these wise emperors & kings think of themselves now, for giving such a tyranny an opportunity of once more bringing misery upon the world when they had it in them to destroy him.”

More than half the farmers, she thought, who “think of themselves alone and look no further than the present would be most happy to have war again”. But most people were full of dismay, foreseeing more taxes, more hardship, more deaths.

Soldiers like Benjamin Harris were hauled back to their regiments: 30,000 troops converged on Canterbury and marched to Deal, to board ships waiting in the Downs.

For the next two months, the British public tried to keep track of the fighting in Flanders and around the Rhine. Spring passed and June was fine and hot. The haymaking began and the London elite got ready to leave for the

country. Then, around 19 June, rumours began to spread in the city from Channel couriers of three days of fighting around Waterloo, south of Brussels.

Late on 21 June, Wellington’s exhausted aide, Henry Percy, arrived in London. Next morning the Morning Chronicle declared “TOTAL DEFEAT OF BONAPARTE: We stop the press to announce the most brilliant and complete victory ever obtained by the Duke of Wellington and which will forever exalt the glory of the British name.”

Scene of carnage

But while the public illuminations were grander than ever, letters home from soldiers were sad and grim – “how anyone escaped alive out that scene of carnage is strange,” wrote James Stanhope of the Foot Guards. Over the coming months hundreds of British visitors toured the battlefield, bringing back trophies – a button, a bullet, a letter, a skull.

The papers reported that Bonaparte had dashed back to Paris to raise a new army. But at Rochefort on 15 July, he surrendered to Captain Maitland of HMS Bellerophon. When the ship anchored in Torbay and then in Plymouth, crowds packed the shore or rowed out to see him. Sailors hung out placards saying that Bonaparte was at breakfast, or in his cabin.

On one of these was General George Dyer of the marines, who noted every detail, from Napoleon’s white pantaloons to his thinning

hair and “fix’d steady look. “When I reflected on the wonderful events

that had taken place,” he wrote, “I could scarcely believe [while looking at Bonaparte] that I actually saw this man who had caused so much blood to be spilt and so much misery to all Europe and that he was at the moment a prisoner in a British man of war, in an English port – But alas! How inscrutable are the ways of Providence.”

Ten days later, on Friday 11 August 1815, Napoleon sailed on the Northumberland to his final banishment on St Helena. In Britain there were hard years ahead, but for the moment – after the exhilaration of 1814, the panic at Napoleon’s return, and the emotions aroused by Waterloo – the whole nation shared Dyer’s dazed astonishment that, finally, the long war was over.

Jenny Uglow is an award-winning historian and

biographer. Her book In These Times: Living in

Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815 has

just been published by Faber & Faber


Lincoln’s fight for power

56

equally appalled by what they saw as the revolutionary fanaticism of the Lincoln administration. The writ of habeas corpus had been suspended and hundreds of Democrat politicians – some prominent, many just local leaders who got on the wrong side of a military commander – were arrested and imprisoned in what critics hyperbolically described as ‘Bastilles’.

In 1863 there were riots – hundreds were killed in an especially serious outbreak in New York in July – as white working-class men objected to being conscripted into the army. Above all, as Raymond told the president in August 1864, public disillusion-ment with the administration was fuelled by the widespread fear that there would be no peace so long as emancipation was a precon-dition. To those opposed to freeing the slaves (at least a third of the northern population; at times probably more than half), Lincoln was a Jacobinical fanatic, ‘King Africanus I’, who was set on ‘mongrelising’ the white race while destroying civil liberties.

Lincoln’s supporters responded that, far from being an obstacle to victory and peace, emancipation was not only right in itself but also an essential weapon to destroy the rebellion. After all, 200,000 African-Americans now fought in Union blue. Would

On 22 August 1864, with just two and a half months to go before election day, President Lincoln received a stark warning from the chairman of his

campaign committee: “The tide is strongly against us,” reported Henry J Raymond. The country was facing the prospect of falling “into hostile hands”.

For the president’s supporters, winning re-election was every bit as vital as securing success on the battlefield. Elections were the manifestation of the ‘government by the people’ for which the war was being fought. But at the same time, the ‘right’ side had to triumph. “For four summers the loyal North has been firing bullets at the rebellion,” ran a typical editorial. “The time has now come to fire ballots.” Support for Lincoln was made inseparable from national loyalty; to oppose him was tantamount to treason. Never in American history has there been a presidential election with such high stakes.

The American Civil War is usually told as a story that pitted northerners against southerners, but it did more than that: the North was divided against itself. Millions of ordinary white northerners who were appalled by the break up of their country were

“Millions of

ordinary white

northerners

were appalled by what they saw as Lincoln’s revolu-tionary fanaticism”

When Abraham Lincoln stood for

re-election in November 1864 he

knew that defeat could bring the civil

war to a premature end and shatter

his dreams of abolishing slavery.

And, as Adam IP Smith reveals, his

victory was far from certain

The vote that America


The American

Civil War in 1864

LIB

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OF

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In August 1864, three and a half yearsafter the conflict’s first shots had beenfired, there seemed no end in sight.The war had begun – as most wars do– in the hope that it would be over inthree months with grand heroics but little bloodshed. In reality it had become aremorseless struggle. Southern slavestates were fighting for their indepen-dencedence while the United States was, whilcommitted not just to i g therestoring theUnion but also, since the EmancipationProclamation of 1 January 1863, todestroying slavery in the process.y

Although by August 1864 key parts ofthe South were back in Union hands,and although desertion from the army,

rampant inflation and food shortagesrevealed a war-torn society under

severe strain, the Confederacynevertheless seemed resilient,,inspired by the uncanny battle-field successes of GeneralRobert E Lee. A new Unioncommander, SGeneral UlyssesGrant, gnhad launched a campaig

psin April amid high hopes: US troopoutnumbered their opponents, and

ed.they were far better supplied and armeThis would be the final push.

Through May and June the Unionarmy lost more than 50,000 men ain aseries of bloody assaults, but without

redestroying Lee’s army. By August thewas stalemate once again. And whatmade the distress and anger on thenorthern home front worse was thesuspicion that President Lincoln’s

der,policies were making the war hardnot easier, to win. These were the

ncolncircumstances in which Abraham Lis ago.ran for re-election exactly 150 years

saved

An 1864 cartoon shows Democrat presidentialcandidate George B McClellan acting as an intermedi-ary between his Repuen his Republican rival, Abraham Lincoln(left), and Confederacy president, Jefferson DaJefferson Davis.McClellan declares, “The Union must be preserved atall costs”, Lincoln utters, “No peace without aboli-tion”, and Davis says, “No peace without separation”

Union commander General Ulysses S Grant’s big push in May and June 1864 failed to break Confederate resistance

I N CONTEXT


Lincoln’s fight for power

OF

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Some 200,000 African-American soldiers – one of whom is pictured here with his wife and daughters – fought for Lincoln and the Union during the American Civil War

As commander of US forces in the earlypart of the war, McClellan had earned theloyalty of his men. And though historianshave been rightly critical of his caution as amilitary leader – as was Lincoln at the time– his reluctance to fight a hard and destruc-tive war was as much a political choice as itwas a product of military miscalculation. In arevealing letter to the president penned in thesummer of 1862, McClellan advocated ahearts and minds strategy – winning theSouth back by fighting a war according to the“highest principles of Christian civilisation”.He wanted to protect civilians and respecttheir property, which to him includedenslaved people. This perspectiveabout the realities of conflict

strong popular appeal two years later.What most undermined McClellan’s

campaign was that just two days after theDemocratic convention declared the war afailure, there was a dramatic breakthrough.The city of Atlanta, in the heart of theConfederacy, fell to General Sherman, whosearmy then commenced their ‘March to theSea’ to the Georgia coast and up into SouthCarolina, wreaking destruction in their wake.

On such events, electoral fortunes can betransformed, and so it was in 1864. Lincoln’ssupporters were now armed with the case thattheir strategy of ‘hard war’ – destroying theSouth’s capacity to fight, including by

LIB

RA

RY

Oe, naïve

ter urges voters to choose peace over ruin andt McClellan”. Yet Democrats were vilified by opponents for aiding the rebellion

they continue to do so if the promise of freedom was reneged upon?

And where, argued Lincoln, was theevidence that the Confederacy wouldabandon the project of independence inreturn for being allowed to keep theirslaves? The president of theConfederacy, Jefferson Davis, had saidagain and again that his goal wasindependence: nothing more, nothingless. It was futile to imagine that theUnion could be patched up, half slaveand half free. The only route to peace,Lincoln said, was to give the nation a “newbirth of freedom”, cleansed of slavery, the‘tap-root’ of the rebellion.

But so long as there was, as Raymonddelicately put it, a “want of military success”,such arguments fell on deaf ears. Even somewho had always been anti-slavery quailed inthe face of the slaughter in the summer of1864. “Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dyingcountry… shudders at the prospect of freshconscriptions… and of new rivers of humanblood!” wrote the New York Tribune editoreHorace Greeley as he urged the president toexplore options for a negotiated settlement.

No wonder that, after reading Raymond’sletter, Lincoln sombrely concluded that hewould have to try to win the war before hewas forced from office.

Rivals dividedTwo factors transformed Lincoln’s fortunes.The first was the divisions and politicalmiscalculations of his opponents. TheDemocratic Party was riven between thosewho supported an immediate abandonmentof the war and those who wanted to fight onto restore the Union while abandoningemancipation. The advocates of peacedeclared that “after four years of failureto restore the Union by the experiment ofwar, during which… the constitution… hasbeen disregarded in every part, and puliberty and private right alike troddendown… the public welfare demand thaimmediate efforts be made for a cessathostilities.” But the Democrat conventmeeting at the end of August, nominattheir candidate General George B McCwho favoured war.

The contradiction between the partyofficial policy and the position of its cadate exposed them to predictable ridicMcClellan was nevertheless a formidabopponent. He had the support of someinfluential New York financiers and hehad high name-recognition. He was veyoung – only 37 – and self-consciouslydashing, with a silky moustache and aNapoleonic habit of tucking one arm intunic when being photographed.

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“Some soldiers, it is

clear, were effectively

compelled to vote

for Lincoln, aspartisan officerssuperintended theballot boxes”

Adam IP Smith is a senior lecturer at University

College London, specialisinng in American history.

He is the author of several bbooks on the American

Civil War period

BOOK

� Abraham Lincoln: Pocket Giants byAdam IP Smith (The Hisstory Press, 2014)

DISCOVER MORE

freeing its slave ption – was succeeThe anti-war procltions of the Democmeanwhile, now loless like statesmansand more like surre

Combined with tDemocrats’ divisions,the turn in the fortuof war tipped the electiLincoln’s way. Thousanof hesitating conservatwho were suspicious ofemancipation saw Lincolworst option.

But coercion also playedplaces the Union army mastations. In border states (s tucky,which stayed in the Union even thoughslavery remained a legal institution) loyaltyoaths were imposed as a condition of votingthat conflated loyalty to the Union withsupport for the government. And everywhere,since there was no secret voting in those days(ballots were brightly coloured and allegiancepublicly declared), there were Democrats whokept their heads down and abstained ratherthan being publicly vilified for aiding andabetting the rebellion.

Traitors or shirkersDemocrats appealed to northerners’ sense ofanger and despair at the cost of the war;Lincoln appealed to their determination tofinish the job.

Enlisted soldiers voted heavily for Lincoln.Some because they were genuinely convincedthat victory was in their grasp and thatemancipation had helped to break thebackbone of the rebellion. Others did soonly reluctantly, their admiration for theirold commander McClellan soured by the‘peace’ men in his party who they regardedas traitors or shirkers. And some soldiers, it isclear, were effectively compelled to vote forLincoln, as partisan officers superintendedthe ballot boxes.

In the end, Lincoln won with a healthy, if– given his advantages – less than overwhelm-ing 55 per cent of the popular vote. Hisvictory was pivotal to the outcome of the warand thus to the whole course of American –and world – history. The North had all themanpower, economic and strategic advan-tages; the only question was whether they hadthe political will to pay the price of victory.Lincoln’s defeat would have, rightly, beeninterpreted by southerners, by watchingEuropean powers, as well as by slaves, as asign that the northern public was no longerprepared to do so.

Had McClellan triumphed he may still

tes voted?lace in all 25 states thatbellion (voters also went too Union-occupied secedediana and Tennessee – butsed to count the electorale). Three new statesNevada and Kansas –t time. Slavery was stillticipating statesare and Missouri) and

abolished in another:a candidate needed

l College votes from amongthese states.

Who was allowed to vote?Each state determined its own franchisebut everywhere all white men could vote,regardless of property ownership,literacy or anything else. In a few statesin the north-east, African-American mencould vote too. Special laws passed byseveral states allowed enlisted soldierswho were stationed away from home to vote in camp.

How was the campaignconducted?Hundreds of speakers took the stump,great public meetings were held withbarbecues, bonfires and brass bands.And in this highly literate society, millionsof dollars were raised to print campaignbroadsides and pamphlets and to helpdistribute sympathetic newspapers.

What was the popularvote result?Lincoln won 2.2 million votes andMcClellan 1.8 million, giving Lincoln 55 per cent.

What happened in theElectoral College?Here Lincoln’s victory was lopsided. Hewon all but three states (failing only in theslave states of Kentucky and Delawareand in McClellan’s home state of NewJersey), ggiving him 233 ElectoralCollege votesto McClell-lan’s 21.

have tried to pursue a military strategy. But by abandoning emancipation, as he certainlywould have done, he would have prompted abacklash in the army – eespecially, but not only, among black troopps. Many ofMcClellan’s supporters wwould have pushed immediately for a ceasefifire, and theConfederacy had in placce plans to use such anopportunity to pause hoostilities, regroup andreach a negotiated settlement that recognised their independence.

It is likely that, had McClellan won, slaverywould have remained a llegal institution inNorth America for manyy years longer than itdid. Had the Confederaccy survived as a slaverepublic, there would haave been no strongUnited States with the ecconomic and military clout to dominate world affairs in the20th century. Rarely, if eever, has so muchturned on the outcome oof a single election.

e

ora

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ITIS

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LA

MY

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“England in the Ageof Magna Carta”Dan Jones is a journalist

and a bestselling historian. He

is the author of several books

about medieval England,

including The Plantagenets ands

The Hollow Crownw . His

forthcoming book, Magna

Carta: The Making and Legacy

of The Great Charter,t will be

published in December.

“Women in the Ageof Magna Carta”Louise Wilkinson is

professor of medieval history

at Canterbury Christ Church

University and a co-director of

the Magna Carta Project. Her

books include a recent

biography of King John’s

youngest daughter, Eleanor de

Montfort.

“Magna Carta:The Document”David Carpenter is a

professor emeritus of medieval

history at King’s College

London and an honorary

professor at University College

London.

“The Legacy ofMagna Carta”Nicholas Vincent is

professor of medieval history

at the University of East Anglia

and leads the Arts and

Humanities Research Council

team that is investigating the

context and meaning of Magna

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> Visit historyextra.com/events for full details

“InscrutableProvidence: TheHome Front at theEnd of the Wars”Jenny Uglow has written

widely about 18th and

19th-century art, science and

society. Her most recent book

is In These Times: Living in

Britain Through Napoleon’s

Wars, 1793–1815.

“Why was the BattleFought at Waterloo?British GrandStrategy between1793 and 1815”Andrew Lambert is

Laughton professor of naval

history at King’s College London.

His latest book is The Challenge:

Britain Against America in the

Naval War of 1812.

“Napoleon and hisPlace in History”Alan Forrest is emeritus

professor of modern history at

the University of York. He has

published widely on modern

French history, including, most

recently, a biography of

Napoleon in 2011.

“Wellington fromIndia to Waterloo:The Making of aMilitary Commander”Gary Sheffield is

professor of war studies at the

University of Wolverhampton.

His biography Wellington is

being published in the Pocket

Giants series by the History

Press in 2015.

“Waterloo: TheBattle for Europe”Gordon Corrigan was

a regular officer of the Royal

Gurkha Rifles before becoming

a full-time military historian.

His latest book is Waterloo: A

New History of the Battle and

its Armies.

> Visit historyextra.com/events for full details

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Magna Carta DaySaturday 21 March 2015, 10am–5.30pm

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Rebel with a causeMalcolm X during a visit to

Smethwick in the Midlandsin February 1965. A few

months earlier, the formerconvict had “captivated his

audience with a masterclassin oratory” in the hallowedhalls of Oxford University

Malcolm X visits Oxford

BLACK POWER AMID

DREAMING SPIRES


MIR

RO

RP

IX

On the evening of3 December, 50 years ago,a most unlikely figure wascalled to speak at theOxford Union:Mr Malcolm X. It seemedquite a mismatch. The

Oxford Union, the most prestigious debatingsociety in the world, was the self-styledtraining ground for the politically ambitiousof Britain’s young intellectual elite.Malcolm X, by contrast, was the global icon ofrevolutionary black nationalism. A one-timeHarlem hustler and prison inmate, by 1964Malcolm X was (in)famous for his call tooppose racism by “any means necessary”.When he arrived in Oxford, he was under adeath threat (from former colleagues in theNation of Islam, a religious movement), andthe FBI was on his tail.

The peculiarity of his presence among thescions of the British establishment was notlost on Malcolm X. “I remember clearly thatthe minute I stepped off the train, I felt I’dsuddenly backpedalled into Mayflower-time,”he told a friend. “The students were wearingcaps and gowns as if they graduated the firstday they arrived… and they were ridingbicycles that should’ve been dumped longago.” One of the first students he met, beset bynerves, could hardly speak in Malcolm X’spresence. Malcolm X wondered whether hehad made a mistake accepting the invitation.

It didn’t help when the hotel receptionist,who had never heard of him, insisted that hewrite his surname in full in the guest book –rather than just an X. Nor did the motionhe was due to support: ‘Extremism in thedefence of liberty is no vice, moderation inthe pursuit of justice is no virtue’ was aquotation from the arch-conservativeAmerican presidential candidate of that year,Barry Goldwater, who had campaignedagainst civil rights legislation.

The start of the debate made matters worse.Malcolm X’s main opponent, HumphryBerkeley, a conservative MP, accused him ofbeing a racist on a par with the architects of South African apartheid, and mocked Malcolm’s use of X as a surname. Malcolm X

admitted later that he came as close as hecould remember to losing his temper.

For all the awkwardness, though,Malcolm X and the Union turned out to bea fitting, and powerful, combination. In hisprison days, he had developed a love of debate(one of the few recreational activities onoffer), and during his time giving talks as aleading figure in the Nation of Islam, he foundthat “he liked the college audiences best”.Student minds were still “alive and search-ing”, he wrote later, and as a result, “collegesessions never failed to be exhilarating”.

Razor-sharpFor their part, members of the Unionadmired fine rhetoric and relished contro-versy. Malcolm X gave them plenty of both.A brilliant orator with a razor-sharp intellect,the human rights activist was able to citeliterature, dissect international politics, ortrade insults, as needed. The BBC sent itscameras to broadcast the speech. Malcolm X’sfriend, the black arts poet and filmmakerLebert Bethune, travelled to the debate just“to see the sacrosanct image of Oxfordshattered by the fist of revolutionary logic”.

The blow landed most heavily againstHumphry Berkeley. “He is right. X is not myreal name.” That had been taken by Berkeley’sforefathers, Malcolm X explained, coolly, whohad raped and pillaged their way throughAfrica. “I just put X up there to keep fromwearing his [Berkeley’s] name.”

St h T kStephen Tuck i it M l l X’ hi t irevisits Malcolm X’s historic

11964 speech at the Oxford Union and explains

wwhy his words so electrified the audience

AAccompanies the Radio 4 documentary Malcolm X in Oxford

63

The Oxford Union president, EricAbrahams, admitted later: “I have never beenas sorry for a man as I was for HumphryBerkeley that night, because… I mean, he justtore him up.”

Malcolm X then captivated his audiencewith a masterclass in oratory. The studentslaughed when he feigned ignorance ofShakespeare and then quoted from Hamlet.They listened attentively to his critique of theAmerican Congress’s committee structure.And some booed when he blamed PresidentLyndon Johnson for the recent murder ofwhite missionaries in the Congo. Malcolm Xlost the vote, but he won plenty of admirers.Lebert Bethune judged it “one of the moststirring speeches I have ever heard deliveredby Malcolm X”.

Historians of Malcolm X agree. The speechis widely recognised as one of the greatest ofthe 20th century. Little recognised, but moreimportant, though, is why the Union invitedhim, and why Malcolm X felt he needed to come – and what the combination ofAmerican black power and the dreamingspires of Oxford reveals about the transatlan-tic struggle for equality in the 1960s.

In global terms, this was a decade of anAmerican civil rights movement and protestagainst apartheid in South Africa, of the fallof European empires and the rise of a BritishCommonwealth of newly independentnations. In Britain, this was a period ofrapid immigration from Africa, the Caribbean and south Asia, and of wideningaccess to higher education (from withinBritain, in terms of class, and from aroundthe Commonwealth, in terms of colour).

Unexpectedly, Oxford had becomesomething of a focal point for the questionof race equality in Britain. The invitation wassent by Eric Abrahams, a charismaticJamaican and outspoken opponent of whitesupremacy and empire. When Abrahamsarrived at Oxford, the year that Jamaicagained independence, he told his sister,who was visiting: “Before I leave here I willbe president of the Oxford Union. And I’ll fill the room with blacks.”

In the summer of 1964, following protests

“A black filmmaker travelled to the debate just ‘to see the sacrosanct image of Oxford shattered by the fist of revolu-tionary logic’”


GE

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human rights. Frustrated by his stereotype as a somewhat pathologically violent and racist extremist, he was eager to get his message out. What better way, than by triumphing at the world-renowned Oxford Union?

Malcolm X’s speech, refined in the cauldron of an Oxford Union debate, and captured on film, stands as the clearest, most powerful articulation of his thought before he died. He argued, with appeals to reason and emotion in equal measure, that the en-trenched, globally interconnected nature of white privilege demanded a united, forthright – extreme – response by all those who were committed to liberty and justice.

The speech did not mark the end of Malcolm X’s intellectual development. Coming to England, and meeting with black British immigrants as well as students, caused him to reflect, for the first time, on the ability of the western media to frame dissenters as rebellious extremists, and the establishment as reasoned moderates – a critique that resonates with contemporary concerns.

Malcolm X returned to Britain in February, and predicted racial unrest. “There’s trouble for Old John Bull,” he noted in his diary, and he planned to see it in person – but he was shot dead, later that month, at a rally in Harlem.

In turn, Malcolm X’s visit was certainly not the end of Oxford’s engagement with race. In 2014, Oxford’s ‘I, Too, campaign’, where students from ethnic minorities held up slogans in front of iconic buildings to highlight the way in which they believe they are ‘Othered’ by the Oxford community, gained worldwide press coverage.

Remembering Malcolm X’s visit to Oxford 50 years later, then, is more than a celebration of rhetoric. The combination of an American black radical in the midst of his travels at ahistoric white British university in turmoilreminds us of the global scope of the strugglefor racial equality, and the internationalvision of so many of its activists.

Professor Stephen Tuck is director of TORCH |

The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

arrival allowed them no such thing.For Malcolm X, coming to Europe provided

the logical next step after months of travel inthe Middle East and Africa. During the spring of 1964 he visited Mecca, on the Hajj, andthen in the summer and autumn he sought topersuade various heads of African states topetition the United Nations on behalf ofAfrican-Americans. Visiting Oxford allowedhim to connect with the next generation ofpost-colonial leaders – Oxford had the secondlargest cohort of non-white visiting studentsin the country. From Oxford he travelled toSheffield, Manchester and London, to meetwith Muslim and black students.

Coming to the Union also provided himwith an iconic platform from which to outlinehis views. He had long since left behind hisracial dogmatism (in which he argued that allwhite people were doing the Devil’s work),and had developed a compelling (though stillstaunchly anti-American) global vision for

“The Oxfordspeech stands asthe clearest, mostpowerful articula-tion of Malcolm X’sthought beforehe died”

DISCOVER MORE

BOOK

� The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union: A Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest by Stephen Tuck (University of California, 2014)RADIO

� Archive on 4: Malcolm X in Oxford is scheduled to be broadcast on Radio 4 on 6 DecemberTALK

� Stephen Tuck will be discussing Malcolm X’s Oxford speech at the Union, Oxford on 1 December. torch.ox.ac.uk/mxoxtalk

Malcolm X visits Oxford

United they stand Malcolm X chats with Eric Abrahams – the Oxford Union president who vowed to “fill the room with blacks” – before giving his famous address on 3 December 1964

64

against the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, the university authorities had put Abrahams and some Union friends under curfew. The story hit the newspapers. Malcolm X, not the more moderate Martin Luther King, was Abrahams’ hero. A Zambian student Louis Nthenda, who had bumped into Malcolm X in Kenya, brokered the invitation, and Abrahams followed up. He did indeed “fill the room with blacks” – many white students remember being startled by just how many black faces were in the audience at the historic Union chamber.

Oxford on fireMalcolm X knew something of Oxford’s news. He accepted the invitation “without hesitation”, he told Abrahams, because Oxford was “on fire” about the race issue.

When Malcolm X arrived, Oxford was, in fact, hotter than he could have expected. Three days before the debate, students released a widely publicised report exposing the fact that almost two thirds of Oxford’s university landladies refused to accept black students as lodgers. The presence of racially segregated student housing in the intellectual heart of the English establishment shattered the presumption, in the British mainstream press, at least, that the race problem was ‘over there’ (in the American south or South Africa). More than 1,000 students, including Abrahams, became paid-up members of an anti-racism campaign. An embarrassed university sought a negotiated, quiet, resolution to the housing issue. Malcolm X’s

http://torch.ox.ac.uk/mxoxtalk


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Ten pages of interviews and reviews with leading historians

BOOKS Boris Johnson at the Churchill Hotel in Portman Square, London. “Churchill saw how war paints events with glamour and increases people’s stature – but it’s absolutely wrong to say he tried to incite war,” he argues

Photography by Helen Atkinson

INTERVIEW / BORIS JOHNSON

“Churchill was a tremendous bully in some ways – but we needed a bully”Boris Johnson talks to Matt Elton about his new account of the life of Winston Churchill, from the childhood experiences that motivated him to the legacy of his Second World War leadership




Books / Interview

BORIS JOHNSONBorn in New York, Johnson studied classics at the University of Oxford and

went on to work as a journalist for publications including The Daily Telegraph

and The Spectator. He was elected as Conservative MP for Henley in Oxford-

shire in 2001, a position that he held until he was elected Mayor of London in

2008. His previous books include The Dream of Rome (HarperCollins, 2008)

Who were the formative figures in

Churchill’s early life?

The biggest contribution Churchill’s parentsmade to history is that they neglected himas a child. There’s no doubt that Churchill’sfather, Randolph, had an absolutely mesmericeffect on Winston. He wanted to be like him,and suffered terribly from a sense that hewas a disappointment, that his fatheractively thought he was a failure and awastrel. I think he longed to prove himself,possibly because some of the things thatRandolph said were so wounding, and toshow he had the stuff of greatness in him.

His mother slightly starved him ofaffection: she was a beautiful, glamorousfigure, but never quite gave him the kind ofaffection that I think modern mothers wouldinstinctively give to their children. She wasvery remote: she would stride in to the roomin her skin-tight jodhpurs, looking fantastic,but was not really involved in his upbringingthe way most modern mothers are.

It was Churchill’s nanny, Mrs Everest, whogave him absolute solidity and dependability.They wrote these charming letters to eachother, and he was absolutely devoted to her. Both of his parents refused to come to sportsday one of the years that he was at Harrow, but she turned up and he proudly walked around arm in arm with her, braving the ridicule of his peers.

What do you think it was that

Churchill felt he had to prove?

First of all, he felt that he had something to prove intellectually. Don’t forget he was sent

to Harrow (rather than Eton), which in thosedays was thought to be a dumber school.There was no question of him even trying togo to Oxbridge, even though his father haddone well as a classicist at Merton College.

Churchill felt the effect of this, eventhough, when you look at his school reports,they’re actually not bad. One of the mythsabout Churchill is that he was a dunce –he wasn’t remotely!

He also felt that he needed to prove hisbravery. At school he was conscious of beingsmall and runty: other kids threw cricketballs at him and he ran away. He later saidthat, having been in many ways a coward,there was nothing that he wanted more thanto acquire a reputation for physical bravery.He wanted to prove that there was no act toodaring or too noble.

The amazing thing is that his appetite neverreally diminished. It drove him all the waythrough, even after the Second World War.I mean, what an engine! He just kept going.

What was the fuel driving this engine?

I think that Churchill was just naturallyendowed with absolutely superhuman energy,coupled with the era in which he grew up.He was one of the last great Victorians.Although he came to prominence in theEdwardian age, when he entered parliamentVictoria was still on the throne, and so he waslike this vast promontory of the Victorianworld jutting out into the 20th century.

He was constructed on a Victorian scale, with a belief in Britain and its huge empire. I think he felt he had to measure up to all of that: to be big and strong enough to sustain the great vault of the empire.

Money was not unimportant, either. He spent huge amounts, and was always broke. He often said to his wife, Clementine: “I’m sorry, but we can’t buy the joint for Sunday

until I’ve sold this article to the Daily Mail.” They really did live like that sometimes, so money was a big spur to his creativity.

How did he view his own politics,

and his tendency to switch sides?

I think that he viewed it with an absolute, brilliant ruthlessness. He once made a crack that you should approach your political party as a jockey approaches a series of horses in the stables: just find the one that will carry you the furthest, and the fastest. That was his approach, and nobody before or since has been so nimble in leaping from saddle to saddle in mid-career.

How did people respond to Churchill

during the Second World War?

People such as Richard Toye, in The Roarof the Lion [his 2013 book that explored the impact of Churchill’s speeches, and suggested that they produced a wider range of reactions than is often imagined], have delved deeply into how people actually responded to his wartime speeches. I enjoyed Toye’s booktremendously, but at the end of it I couldn’thelp wondering whether Churchill had won the argument in spite of it all. His audience was colossal, and yes, of course you can find huge numbers of people who reactedagainst his speeches, that’s just the way it is –particularly with something as strong and urgent as Churchill’s message and style.

You can imagine wounded soldiers lying in hospital wards shouting swearwordsat radio broadcasts of Churchill’s speeches,as Toye documents, and yet huge numbers of people felt absolutely lifted by what he said, felt the napes of their neck prickle, and knew that it was the right thing to say.

The final vindication of Churchill onthat point is that, in a way, he was fightingfor people’s right to tell him to bog off. That was what the whole war was about:there were some creeps on the other sidewho didn’t believe in democracy, and we did.

Things were going so badly for us in the war. We were losing virtually every sodding battle; you could see that the empire was going; we were being bled white by the Americans. It really was a nightmare. The Blitz was absolutely terrible – and we were fighting for what? We were fighting to stop this ghastly guy from dominating Europe, but it was a most terrible sacrifice and struggle for the British people. There was

“I think that Churchill

felt that he had

to be big enough,

and strong enough,

to sustain the great

vault of the empire”

LI STE N TO MORE

FROM TH I S I NTE RVI EW

historyextra.com

/podcasts

PROFI LE

Winston Churchill was born in 1874 to an aristocratic family. He served in the British Army in Sudan and fought in the Second Boer War, before successfully standing as MP for Oldham in the 1900 general election. His career in politics was lengthy, and he held poststhat included home secretary (1910-11),minister of munitions (1917-19) and chancellor of the exchequer (1924-29). Yet it is his term as Second World War prime minister – and his rousing wartime speeches – for which he is most famous. Churchill lost the 1945 general election, but returned to the role of prime minister between 1951 and 1955. He died in 1965, leaving his wife, Clementine, with whom he had five children.

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so little to console ourselves with – exceptfor this guy, Winston Churchill, who seemedto stand for everything that was good aboutthe country, and be able to sum it up. All of the evidence that I’ve seen seems to show that his reputation now is not a million miles from what it was during the war.

You write about some of the charges

that can be laid against Churchill: that

he was spoilt, bullying, a warmonger…

Well, let’s start with the bit about him being spoilt. Certainly, if you read his childhood letters to his mother asking to go to seeBuffalo Bill, there’s an amazing wheedlingsense of entitlement: he had a thousand toy soldiers, and was attended by every kind of comfort. His grandson, Nick Soames, toldme that his grandfather never went any-where without someone to look after him,and I suppose in a sense that is spoiled – buthe was also able to think about others, which is not often thought of as a feature of spoiled people. To get to your second point, was he a bully? He was a kind of bouncy-castle personality: he filled the room, and, ofcourse, was a tremendous bully in someways, but we needed a bully. We neededdsomeone who was going to drive the whole flywheel of the war effort to get stuff done.And thank God he was as he was.

Whether he was gleeful for war is interest-ing. There is no doubt that as somebody whohad been to Sandhurst, who had activelysought out military conflict as young man,he loved warfare and military glory. He saw how it paints events with glamour andincreases people’s stature – but it’s absolutelywrong to say that he tried to incite war. Hesaw its horror when he was in the trenches of the First World War; he came back and madepassionate speeches about the horror of see-ing men turned into bundles of bloody rags.

He fought to prevent the Second WorldWar. He had absolutely no appetite for embroiling Britain unnecessarily. He wantedto minimise casualties, which was why he supported the use of gas, and the tank: because he knew that the slaughter would be all the greater if things went on as they were.

What hopes did Churchill have for

a European union after the war?

This is a subject that enrages Churchill enthusiasts, because he said so many different things at different times. He wanted a unitedEurope, with France and Germany at itscore, but I don’t think he would have wanted the UK to have been solely committed to that. I think he would have seen us assisting and participating, but also having an eye to our primary relationships with America and

former imperial countries. He would havewanted to have his cake and eat it.

I think it was a great shame that Churchill wasn’t PM when the Schuman plan to create a European community got going in 1948.I’m absolutely certain that he would not have allowed Britain to have been on the sidelines. If he had been there, I think that there’s agood chance that we would have had a muchmore intra-governmental structure moresuitable to Britain’s traditions of parliamen-tary democracy. Churchill was a child ofparliament: he would not have wanted to seethe rights of the electorate, through the House of the Commons, being eroded by Brussels.

Are there any modern politicians

who compare to Churchill?

I don’t think there are. I think he was a one-off, I really do. I mean, Margaret Thatcherwas nothing like Churchill, frankly. TonyBlair was nothing like him; John Major wasnothing like him. Harold Wilson used to g

compare himself to Churchill, but it didn’t pay off for him, did it, really?

The Churchill Factor:

How One Man Made History

by Boris Johnson (Hodder

and Stoughton, 416 pages, £25)

“Churchill was like

a vast promontory

of the Victorian

world jutting into

the 20th century”

Boris Johnson discusses a prime minister “endowed with absolutely superhuman

energy” with our books editor, Matt Elton

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The History of England,

Volume III: Civil War

by Peter AckroydMacmillan, 512 pages, £20

Although technicallythe third volume ina six-part Historyof England, PeterAckroyd’s new bookis not really a historyof England at all –or, at least, not in theconventional sense.

Instead, it would be more accurateto describe it as a history of five men:

James VI and I, Charles I, OliverCromwell, Charles II and James II andVII, and a city – London – accompaniedby a series of absorbing disquisitions ondiscrete, often literary, themes.

Spanning the period from 1603to 1688, Ackroyd’s book is divided upinto 45 more or less chronologicalchapters, each commencing with aportrait, taken from the obverse of acontemporary coin, of the individualruler to which the discussion in thatparticular chapter relates. A list of thetopics that these chapters cover revealthe spread of their themes: we have,therefore, 10 chapters on the reign of

ames I (including three devoted to theJaJtatesman and scholar Francis Bacon, tostsondon in the early Stuart period andLL

o Jacobean drama); 20 chapters on thattotf Charles I (including one devoted tooohe poet John Milton); four on the rulethtf Oliver Cromwell (including oneooiven over to the philosopher Thomasgig

Hobbes); nine chapters on Charles IIHHwhich take in, among other things, the(wonconformist writer John Bunyan, the nncientist Isaac Newton, Restorationscsrama and late Stuart London). Finallyddhere is one, slightly breathless chapterthtn James II.ooAckroyd possesses a fine eye for the

pposite quote and vivid anecdote, andapaas one would expect from a writer of––is calibre – the book fizzes along inhhne style, particularly in its first half.fifi

ames I is well depicted in his manyJaJarying moods, at one point wrylyvavbserving that “the highest bench is theoboliddriest [slitheriest] to sit upon,” forslsxample; at another angrily declaringexehat “no house save the house of hell”thtould match the House of Commons;cocnd at yet another urgently enquiringanaf an aspirant courtier “Do you trulyoonderstand why the Devil works moreuu

with ancient women than with others?”.wwAckroyd’s treatment of Charles I,

too, is both sensitive and carefully-judged, and he shows himself to be

far more willing than many previoushistorians to consider thingsfrom the king’s point of view,as well as from that of his

domestic opponents.The discussion of the Civil War itself

is rather more perfunctory, and onesenses that, despite the book’s sub-title,the mid-17th century conflict is not thecentral focus of Ackroyd’s own interest.

With the chapters on Bunyan andNewton, however, the pace picks uponce more, while, with the restorationto the throne of Charles II – and the

Studying the StuartsMARK STOYLE explores a history of 17th-century Englandthat combines diverse looks at people, places and themes

“Ackroyd possesses

a fine eye for the

apposite quote and

the vivid anecdote”SU

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MAGAZINE

CHOICEMAGAZINE

A gold spur ryal showing James VI and I, one of the main protagonistsA ld l h i J VI d I f th i t i tof a book that, says Mark Stoyle, “fizzes along in fine style”

New history titles, reviewed by experts in their field

REVIEWS


Books / Reviews

MA

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Queen Victoria as seen in a lantern slide, c1897. The monarch is “not

merely fascinating but loveable,” according

to biographer AN Wilson

Queen and countryKATE WILLIAMS commends a masterly biography of Queen Victoria, from childhood to her relationship with Albert

Victoria: A Life by AN Wilson Atlantic, 656 pages, £25

Queen Victoria was a meticulous planner. Before her death, she listed at length what she wished to be buried with: her treasured coloured photograph of Albert, plus those of “all my

dear children & their husbands & wives & of my grandchildren in frames”. Then she required sheer cratefuls of things: one of Albert’s cloaks, locks of courtiers’ hair, Balmoral heather and John Brown’s ring. Like the age that she came to stand for, Victoria was always surrounded by personal and material clutter, and – as AN Wilson shows in his marvellous new biography – constantly accompanied by a “cloud of witnesses” in her head.

Victoria is a huge subject. She holds on by her fingertips to the accolade of longest reigning monarch – Elizabeth II is set to overtake her in September 2015. Sixty four years of reign, 10 prime ministers and dozens of colonial premiers, conflicts from the Crimean to the Opium Wars – and boxes and boxes of things. Through it all was the ever-constant queen, demanding, stubborn, passionate, requiring perpetual companionship.

Wilson brings Victoria’s complex character to life with sympathy, never overlooking her faults – most of all her inflexibility. As he deftly puts it, some humans derive strength from their ability to change and develop, while, for others, “strength consists in their incapacity

for change”. Victoria’s miserable adolescence at the hands of the household manager John Conroy and her complaisant mother left her allying obstinacy with resolve. “I don’t think they have an ounce of sense between them,” said Lord Melbourne on the subject of the grasping Conroy family. As ever, he understated the matter: their desire for power had spoiled Victoria’s character.

Wilson’s book is splendidly re-searched, with especially fascinating finds in the Coburg archives, but he pays particular and brilliant attention to the queen after the death of Albert. He deftly counters the prevailing scholarly argu-ment that he was some kind of saviour. As Wilson shows, Albert relentlessly crit-icised his wife, his comments sometimes little more than priggish nitpicking. Britain, as also he reminds us, was not enthusiastic about the prince consort. He was mocked as a gold-digger when he arrived to marry his cousin, and a pamphlet published as late as 1856 titled ‘Prince Albert: Why Is He Unpopular?’ declared that dislike for him was “shared by almost everyone” in the country.

Wilson is spot on about Victoria’s early widowhood – although she “refused to be paraded in person on the public stage” she still kept a close eye on business.

This is a scrupulous biography that refuses to choose either way on Brown. Most of all, it is wonderfully engaging and full of superb insights: a dazzling investigation into a woman Wilson calls “not merely fascinating but loveable”.

Kate Williams is an author and

broadcaster

appearance on the scene of the famous diarist Samuel Pepys – Ackroyd enters a world in which he plainly feels entirely at home. Certainly, he delineates it here with great relish.

The portraits of the individual rulers, and of the men and women with whom they interacted, are always finely drawn. Yet, in the end, it is the vision that Ackroyd conjures up of early modern London – of the urban backdrop against which his leading players typically performed – that lingers most powerfully in the mind’s eye. Ackroyd’s Stuart London is a dark, violent and amoral place; a “city of dice and whores”, as he terms it at one point, a “city of disease, of cruelty and of false reports”.

“Ackroyd’s Stuart

London is a dark,

violent and amoral

place – a ‘city of dice

and whores’”

COMING SOON…

“Next issue will see the return of our Books of the Year list,

featuring leading historians such as Andrew Roberts, David

Reynolds and Bettany Hughes exploring the books that they

most enjoyed in 2014. Plus we’ll have a look at the best fiction

and DVDs of the past 12 months.” Matt Elton, books editor

Nor, Ackroyd seems to suggest elsewhere, is that dark city quite as far removed from our own modern metropolis as we might like to think. In a characteristically vivid passage he writes that, although watching James I’s London from the perspective of a 21st-century Briton “is in a sense like watching a foreign world… there are still flashes of recognition and understanding. And then once more we are part of the Jacobean city.”

It is a sentiment with which many of Ackroyd’s readers will surely agree, and although we may very well feel uncomfortable as we accompany Charles I and his wife, Henrietta Maria, on their visit to the Bethlehem Hospital in 1636 “to see the mad-folks” – where, a contemporary observes, “they were madly entertained” – it is hard to resist the observation that, in its depiction of 17th-century London at least, The History of England, Volume III is a madly entertaining book.

Mark Stoyle is professor of early modern

history at the University of Southampton


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Sauce and scandalFRANCIS BECKETT has mixed feelings about the second volume of a sweeping history of Britain’s political system

Parliament: The Biography,

Volume Two: Reform

by Chris BryantDoubleday, 480 pages, £25

“It might indeed bebetter called ‘Thingsin history which haveinterested me,’” wroteClement Attlee ofChurchill’s 1950sA History of the EnglishSpeaking Peoples. So itis with the second part

of Chris Bryant’s lengthy and entertainingbook Parliament: The Biography.yy

I initially thought that I was readinga chronological history of the institution of parliament, starting with the assassination of prime minister Spencer Perceval in 1812. But, 80 or so pages in,Bryant abandons the chronology for anenjoyable ramble through heterosexual

scandals, from Charles Dilke to RobinCook, and then homosexual ones,starting with Oliver Cromwell’s protégéWalter Hungerford in 1540.

Later comes an equally enjoyable diversion through parliament’s relationship with alcohol, in which the liberal prime minister HH Asquith naturally enjoys a starring role. Inthe more forgiving days of the early20th century, the leader of the opposition declined to take advantage of Asquith’sdrunkenness, even when he fell noisily asleep on the Treasury bench during adebate. There is also a lot in this sectionabout 1960s Labour deputy leader George Brown, though, surprisingly,

nothing at all about Arthur Greenwood,Attlee’s famously bibulous deputy.

Chronology is similarly abandoned whenever Bryant notices an interesting byway to explore. This produces a lot of insights and thoughtful writing froma practising politician who has also been an ordained Church of England curate. He is not your standard special advisor-becomes-career-politician, and it shows.

The book provides one of the mostthoughtful accounts I have read of the contribution to reform made by the 1905 Liberal government, and of its first, now almost forgotten, prime minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The year was to mark the first of four 20th-century general elections that produced a huge majority for the opposition – the first“sea change” as James Callaghan putit. The next such ‘sea change’, 1945,produced the Attlee settlement, and thethird, in 1979, the Thatcher revolution.The fourth was in 1997, when perhapsless use was made of it.

Bryant is good on the way parliamenthas tamely yielded its power to theexecutive. Most of its powers were given away in wartime, first to Lloyd George and then to Churchill, and Bryant sees clearly how “in our ‘finest hour’ we surrendered parliament into the hands of the executive – and that, thus far, nobodyhas thought to ask for it back”.

He also likes to right wrongs, pinningblame in the right places. Mardy Jones,a miner’s son and briefly MP for Pontypridd, was forced out in disgrace in1930 for letting his wife travel to London on his parliamentary rail pass. But, saysBryant, Lloyd George, Bonar Law andAusten Chamberlain all sold peerages and were never punished.

There are many good things here, then, but it doesn’t quite add up to a book. Just as the fondness of management gurus for demanding solutions has led to solutions in search of problems, I never quite identified the question to which the answer was: ‘You need Chris Bryant’s Parliament.’

Francis Beckett is the author of What Did

the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us? (Biteback,

2010). For more on Churchill and parliament,

see our books interview on page 65

“Bryant’s book abandons

chronology for an enjoyable

ramble through scandal”

HH Asquith, as depicted in an illustration of parliament in 1908. This PM “enjoys a starringrole” when Chris Bryant’s study of parliament focuses on alcohol, says Francis Beckett


Books / Reviews

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On the ancestral trailALISON KAY rates a family history that has plenty tosay about the wider social story of 19th-century Britain

Islamic voicesHELEN NICHOLSON on a study of the crusades that putsthe voices of Islamic writers firmly at the centre of the story

Common People: The History

of an English Family

by Alison LightFig Tree, 352 pages, £20

In sharing herexcavation of herfascinating familyhistory, Alison Lightweaves a narrative ofthe lives of migratingworkers in 19th-centuryBritain. From fieldto workshop and

workhouse to asylum, Light brings to lifea host of real characters: men, womenand children living the ‘common’ life.Through them she tells the story of abroader cast – those who collectivelypowered, and were often ravaged by, theturbulent industrial and urban changessweeping Britain in this period.

It is easy to get bogged down in finedetail when researching a family history.Light has produced an excellent exampleof how a researcher can step back andsee the broader relevance of these

The Race for Paradise: An Islamic

History of the Crusades

by Paul M CobbOxford University Press, 360 pages, £20

Paul Cobb, an expertin Islamic history,is already well knownto historians of the cru-sades for his work onthe autobiography of12th-century Syriannobleman Usama ibn

Munqidh. In this new book, he presents

small details, without losing a sense ofcloseness to the material. Indeed, thebook is as much about her journey asthat of the people she follows. As shetells us quite early on: “I have been on arollercoaster, lurching from excitementto disappointment and back again.” In aselection of opening sections, Light alsoallows herself to fill gaps with empathyand imagination, forming a warmingexcursion into history-as-storytelling.

Light is astonished by the sheermobility of her relatives: “I am travel-sick: so many journeys, too much strangecountry – did these people never staystill?” she writes. She also discovers thatfamily myths of wealth or tragedy turnedout to be embellished half-truths. Forexample, her maternal grandfather’s tallstories of a lost patrimony turned outinstead to mask the loss of his mother.

Light’s detective work brings to light notonly the grim realities of the workhouseand asylum, but also agricultural lifeand a range of trades such as needle-making and staymaking, as well as Poolefisheries, Portsmouth docks and the

a wide-ranging history of the crusades,told through the writings of Islamiccontemporaries such as Usama,rather than those of western Christiancontemporaries that are already sofamiliar to scholars of the subject.

The result is refreshing and illuminat-ing. Cobb introduces readers to a host of unfamiliar yet engaging Islamic writersof the 11th century onwards, giving us a clear view of the Islamic leaders and politics of various crusading arenas around the Mediterranean: the Iberianpeninsula, Sicily and north Africa, and

the Middle East. While western writers have often approached these as separateareas of conflict, to the Islamic writers on whose work this book is based, Cobb explains, they were all part of one“global Frankish assault on Islam”.

Through looking at the crusades from the Islamic sources we see the crusaders’faults and failings, but we also see their effectiveness: “An agile Frankish enemy,”writes Cobb, who “within a decade uponarriving in the area… had insertedthemselves into the political landscape.”

These crusaders did not always live up to modern expectations: they took slaves,and allied with Muslim leaders againstother Muslim leaders allied with other rFranks. Cobb insists that “this was not a clash of Islam versus Christianity”. Most Muslims of the Middle Ages never

Royal Navy. Grandmother Evelyn’s stintin the Forage Corps was particularlyinteresting: formed in 1915, its successled to the establishment of the larger,better known Women’s Land Army.

The stories of success, great sorrowand the ordinary in Common People arepresented to the reader with empathybut not excessive pathos, and are care-fully considered against a backdrop ofoccupational, local and national social history. Although Light’s references are not listed completely, there is a useful notes section for those wanting to pick up her trail. There are also numerous

Men pack hops, c1900. Alison Light’s new book combines family and social history in order to “bring to light agricultural life and

a range of trades” throughout Britain’s history


A reproduction Iron Age fort atCastell Henylls, Wales. Francis

Pryor’s book is “part autobiogra-phy and part conventional history”

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encountered Franks (their generic termfor western European Christians), and, ifthey did, it was probably as townspeopleor through trade. Although contempo-rary writers concentrated on military andpolitical affairs, trade was all-important:it continued during war, and peacetreaties included provisions to facilitate it.

Cobb tells us that the crusades cannot explain modern struggles. Yet they canaid our understanding of them – and, indeed, it is those struggles that makethis book particularly relevant to 21st-century readers. They will find here afascinating account of relations betweenwesterners and ‘Islamdom’ (as Cobb calls it) in the past.

Helen Nicholson is a professor of medieval

history at the University of Cardiff

family trees, maps and photographs to aid the reader.

Common People is a good read not onlyefor family historians but also for readerslooking for an anchored and very realtelling of the history of ordinary peoplein 19th-century Britain. Along with theauthor, I hope that this book encouragesothers “to write their family history as a public history”.

Dr Alison C Kay is a researcher on they

Professions in 19th-Century Britain project,

run by the University of Oxford and

Northumbria University

Campfire talesMILE S RUSSELL enjoys a lively, idiosyncratic explorationof the domestic and family lives of our earliest ancestors

“Pryor is a perfect companion:

polite, madly curious and

cheeky as a schoolboy”

For reviews of hundreds of recent

history books, go to our online archive

historyextra.com/books

WANT MORE ?

and “nothing”, he notes with evidentsatisfaction, “is better than that”.

Whether he is discovering Mesolithicfootprints preserved in the silt of theBristol Channel or sharing a train withfootball fans from Newcastle who “hadenjoyed that great city’s brown ale buthad a very limited repertoire of songs”,Pryor is nothing less than the perfectcompanion: polite, informative, madly curious and at times as wide-eyed andcheeky as a schoolboy.

The lack of detailed illustrations, plansand maps is at times mildly irritating.The colour photos in particular provesomething of a disappointment, neverbringing the past to life in the same wayas the evocative prose. But then this isnot really the point: Home is a thought-eprovoking discourse on the changingnature of prehistoric family life, not atextbook to help pass exams.

With his easy-going, engaging style,Pryor is never patronising, conveyingimportant information in a relaxed andhumorous way – so much so that Homecan be read from cover to cover like anovel. So if you have ever consideredbuilding (or decorating) a prehistoricroundhouse, or have wondered whatlinks Wiltshire’s Bronze Age ‘AmesburyArcher’ to Colonel Gaddafi or SaddamHussein (but not Adolf Hitler), then thiscertainly is the book for you.

Miles Russell is the author of The Piltdown

Man Hoax: Case Closed (History Press, 2012).d

Read his feature on Celtic Britain on page 22

Home: A Time Traveller’s

Tales from Britain’s Prehistory

by Francis PryorAllen Lane, 352 pages, £20

The study of homeand family has been amainstay of historicaldiscourse for decadeswhereas prehistoricstudies, it is fair to say,have tended to focusmore on the dramaticnature of the rituals,

monuments, burials and tombs of ourdistant ancestors, often strenuouslyavoiding the ‘domestic’ sphere.

Francis Pryor, surely one of the moreprolific authors of archaeohistoric-relatedliterature in the last decade, sets out toredress this in his rather curiously titlednew publication. This, he explains fromthe very beginning, sets out to define theconcept of ‘family’, examining howdiverse clans, tribes and communities evolved through British prehistory fromthe first hunter gatherers to the arrival of Rome in the first century AD.

Pryor is a master storyteller, and hisbook, which is part autobiography andpart conventional history, eschews whathe calls the more usual “textbook style ofdescription followed by discussion”,offering instead a journey of discoverybased upon his own life experiences asarchaeologist, academic, farmer, writer and presenter. His archaeologicalbackground provides the basic narrativeskeleton, generated from years patiently working in the field. It is fleshed out with observations made as a sheep-farmerand TV presenter – the latter a job thathas frequently put him in touch withthose making important discoverries –

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75

Books / Paperbacks

PAPERBACKS

The Fateful Year:

England 1914

by Mark BostridgeViking, 432 pages, £9.99

“Never such innocenceagain,” wrotePhilip Larkin ofthe England of1914 in his poemMCMXIV Well,Vwas he correct?

Not according to MarkBostridge’s masterly portrayalof the nation on the brink of,and after taking the plungeinto, the most destructive war(until then) in human history.

Bostridge shows a nation inwhich children are strangled bytheir fathers; respectable ladiestake meat cleavers to master-pieces in public galleries inpursuit of the vote; rival armiesdrill with smuggled Germanrifles in an Ireland on the vergeof civil war; and an infatuated prime minister drools loveletters during cabinet meetingsto a woman young enough to behis daughter. Innocence, then, is hardly the word.

What Bostridge almostmiraculously captures is acomplex society already rivenby conflict – liti l i lindustrial –guns of Au

Thomas Aquinas:

A Portrait

by Denys TurnerYale, 312 pages, £14.99

Providing adigestible account of ThomasAquinas’sthought fora generalreadership is an

unenviable task. Denys Turnertakes it in his stride, explainingthe most abstruse theologicaltopics with clarity but with nodamage to their complexity.

There is also a sterling effortto sketch a biography ofAquinas. A paucity of reliableevidence makes this difficult,but the book offers an authen-tic sense of what drove andobsessed the greatest Christianthinker of the Middle Ages.You will meet Aquinas theteacher, the hugely prolificwriter, and the man whotransformed the study of theology.

Turner clearly admiresAquinas, but this does notprevent him from exposing themoments when the great man’smeandering logic landed himi ti ht He also has the

ke Aquinas atthan bendingt a modern-agenda. Morefollow thise who has ever copy of theiae will agreeefused to bee had a more to systematise

h Christians r God.een arguingut whether he

or almost 800an impressivef you require

an introduction to the ‘AngelicDoctor’, Turner’s magnificent book will serve you well.

Jonathan Wright is editor oft

The Jesuit Suppression: Causes,

Events and Consequences, set to

be published by Cambridge

University Press in 2015

Robert the Bruce

by Fiona WatsonThe History Press, 128 pages, £6.99

This year marksthe 700thanniversary ofthe battle ofBannockburn,in which theScottish kingRobert the

Bruce defeated Edward II’smuch larger English army justoutside Stirling. Bruce is aniconic figure in Scottish history,the battle a landmark in itsstruggle for independence.But Fiona Watson believesBruce also has British andeven European significance.

Studying history as she does,through the lives of ‘great men’,is less fashionable today. Yetthe approach still has validitybecause it engages general readers with personalities asa way into the past. Indeed,Watson’s boiled-down Brucemanages to be informative,balanced, and accessible.

The National Trust forScotland has recently opened awonderful new heritage centreat Bannockburn. Armed withthis admirable pocket guide,visitors will be better able toappreciate the importance ofthe battle, the man and thenation at one of Britain’s greatturning points.

Rab Houston is author of Scotland:

A Very Short Introduction (Oxford

University Press, 2008)

method is to choose a broadtheme – the struggle of theSuffragettes, say – and thenpresent a myriad of individualvignettes to give us a detailedmosaic of stories within thebigger picture. The result is asmesmerising as a greathistorical novel.

Nor does the author neglectsubjects in an apparently minorkey that, with hindsight, haveacquired historical importance.Thus the composition ofEdward Thomas’s iconic poemAdlestrop, with its picture of adisappearing pastoral England,is lovingly reconstructed. So,too, are the comic luvvie-typeantics of the actors rehearsingShaw’s Pygmalion, the play inwhich the breakthrough word‘bloody’ was first uttered on an English stage.

As an author who has writtena book on a similar subject toBostridge, I should be enviousof his enormous achievement. And, of course, I am. But,nonetheless, I take my hat off to him.

Nigel Jones is author of War and

Peace: Britain in 1914 (Head of

Zeus, 2014). An updated version

of his Rupert Brooke: Life, Death &

Myth has just been issued by the

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THREE MORE LATIN AMERICAN REVOLUTION TALES

Nick Rennison is the author of Carver’s

Quest (Corvus, 2013)t

Jose Doroteo Arango Arambula, also known as Pancho Villa, 1914. Robert OlenButler’s novel features “credible characters encountering genuine dilemmas”

The Hot Country

by Robert Olen ButlerNo Exit Press, 326 pages, £8.99

Christopher MarloweCobb is an Americanwar correspondentwho arrives in theMexican town ofVera Cruz in 1914. Ithas just been invadedby soldiers from hisown nation, sent in

by President Woodrow Wilson toprotect US interests. Beyond Vera Cruzthe Mexican Revolution is in full swing,as various factions fight for power.

Cobb is looking for a story and thinkshe has found one when he notices a newarrival at the German consulate intown. The man is named Friedrich vonMensinger, and Cobb learns that he isthe kaiser’s personal representative ona mission to meet with the alreadylegendary guerrilla leader Pancho Villa.Von Mensinger will offer Villa Germanarms in return for a pledge to invadethe USA. A patriot in his own way,Cobb wants to serve his country as well as scoop his rivals, and so adopts anassumed identity to follow the German

agent north into the wild countrycontrolled by Villa’s army.

Before he can do his bit to thwartvon Mensinger’s plans, Cobb is destinedto ride into battle with a troop of Villa’srevolutionaries, come face to face withthe great man himself and lose a little of his heart to a fiery woman who hasfound, to her cost, that the revolutionwon’t necessarily bring her the freedom for which she longs.

Twenty years ago, Robert Olen Butlerwon the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction forhis novel A Good Scent from a StrangeMountain. He is a fine writer: his proseis distinctive, with long, full-stop-freeparagraphs used to convey the breath-less energy of Cobb’s encounters withthe violence of the revolution. This canoccasionally be distracting, but mostlyThe Hot Country is a historical thrillerof admirable depth and intelligence.

This is a story in which complex,credible characters encounter genuine dilemmas and grapple with realemotions. Further adventures for Cobbare promised which, on the basis of this first instalment, is excellent news.

Love and revolutionNICK RENNISON on a novel exploring the volatile situationin Mexico while the First World War raged on elsewhere

FICTION

Books / Fiction

The War of the

End of the World

Mario Vargas Llosa (1981)

Llosa’s epic storyLs set in 1890s Brazil,iwhere a charismaticwpreacher namedpAntonio Conselheiro,Aclaiming that thecend of the world iseat hand, establishesa

a religious community in the north-li ieast of the country. Conselheirobelieves that apocalypse is close;when it finally comes, it arrives inthe form of government soldierswhose aim is to crush his rebellion.Taking real events in Brazilianhistory, Llosa creates a sweepingand powerful narrative.

The Old Gringo

Carlos Fuentes (1985)

Carlos Fuentes wasCarguably Mexico’safinest 20th-centuryfinovelist, and this isnone of his best works.oBased on the trueBstory of the US writersAmbrose Bierce whoA

went to report on the MexicanRevolution and disappeared withouttrace, it follows the fortunes of the‘old gringo’ as he enters a complex,triangular relationship with one ofPancho Villa’s generals and a youngAmerican governess stranded in thecountry by the fighting.

The Friends of Pancho Villa

James Carlos Blake (1996)

Told through the eyesTof Rodolfo Fierro,oone of PanchooVilla’s most ruthlessVcommanders, this iscan unblinkered lookaat the bloodshed andachaos engenderedc

by the Mexican Revolution. Blakeb th M ihas a compelling tale to tell anddoes so with great panache. BothFierro and Villa emerge as vividcharacters in a tale reminiscentof the savagely unsentimental workof Cormac McCarthy.


TV&RADIOJonathan Wright previews the pick of upcoming programmes

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Secrets of the Castle:

With Ruth, Peter and Tom

TV BBC Two, scheduled for November

ince 1997, a magnificently anachro-nistic structure has been taking

shape at Guédelon in central France.Here, using only tools and techniquesfrom the 13th century, a team is buildinga medieval-style castle – a project that’sexpected to be completed in the 2020s.This year, the team had extra help fromPeter Ginn, Ruth Goodman and TomPinfold of Tudor Monastery Farm fame.

“It was absolutely fascinating,”Goodman tells BBC History Magazine asshe discusses filming a five-part livinghistory series. “I’ve always been a bigproponent of the idea that you learnthrough doing. You think you under-stand something till you do it, then youthink: ‘I might have understood parts A,B and D, but I’ve missed out part C.’”

Before the team could get involved inthe construction work, though, it wasnecessary for them to set up home –in a 2.5m by 3m ‘hovel’ with no beds.“If you try to live even a semi-modernlife, it’s just chaos,” says Goodman.

Fundamental questionsA History of Ideas

RADIO Radio 4,scheduled for Monday 10 November

In a 60-part weekday series, expertsfrom various fields consider questionsthat have long preoccupied humankind.The first week’s theme is: what does itmean to be free? After an initialdiscussion, neuropsychologist PaulBroks reflects upon whether we havefree will or if events are predetermined,and, inspired by Franciscan monkWilliam of Ockham (c1287–c1347),theologian Giles Fraser considers whytrue liberation sometimes lies inaccepting constraints.

An awfullybig adventureThe Real Tom Thumb –

History’s Smallest Superstar

TV BBC Four,scheduled for November

Michael Grade charts the life and timesof Charles Stratton (1838–83), betterknown as General Tom Thumb, a ‘littleperson’ who became a star undershowman PT Barnum. How should weview Stratton’s life, Grade asks? Was heexploited? Or should we consider such aman – who became rich and famousthrough showbiz – a success?

We see his extraordinary possessions,including exquisite bespoke suits andtiny horse-drawn carriages, and join thefirst film crew to be allowed into theMassachusetts villa Stratton shared withhis wife, Lavinia Warren (1841–1919).

“If you try to live even

a semi-modern life in a

3m-long hovel, it’s chaos”

“If you do what they did [in medi-eval days] and have only the bareminimum of things, you can do it.”

Keeping the floor of the hovel in goodorder was also important, and it wascarefully spread with cut, dried andbundled rushes arranged in a herring-bone fashion. Not only did this providea ‘squashy’ environment for sleeping,but it was also hygienic.

“When I cleared the rushes away, I wasexpecting the earth underneath to showsigns of stuff that had dropped through,”says Goodman. “I knew it would roughlycompost down but I was expecting tosee the odd mouse dropping, or a littleinsect activity. But I saw nothing – it wasas clean as clean could be.”

Some of those working on bigprojects would have migrated to thearea for work, illustrating a feature ofmedieval life that Goodman says weoften overlook. “The 13th century wasmuch more connected than you mightexpect,” she says. “For a start, therewere all these people wandering abouton crusade. If you were an ordinarybloke in… I don’t know, Wolverhamp-ton, the chances that you’d have visitedthe Holy Land were considerably higherthen they are now.”Look out for the article How to Build

a Castle in our Christmas issue

The rise of the castleRuth Goodman reveals the realities of everydaylife on a 13th-century French building site

Charles Stratton and his wife withan orphaned baby, added to

paint a picture of domestic bliss

Monk and philosopher William of Ockham inspires questions of freedom and reasoning

77

Medieval workforce:

Ruth Goodman, Tom Pinfold and

Peter Ginn


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Redefining faithSunday Feature – God and

the Great War

RADIO Radio 3,scheduled for Sunday 9 November

ne common narrative linked withthe Great War contends that it

killed God – or at least deeply woundedthe supreme being. In a documentaryproduced to mark RemembranceSunday, screenwriter and novelist FrankCottrell Boyce challenges this idea,arguing that God survived but thatreligion changed profoundly.

“In the Anglican church there werenever prayers for the dead; they werekind of outlawed because of theReformation,” he tells BBC History Magazine. “But from the First World

War onwards they become a kind of centrepiece. Remembrance Sunday is the day when everybody’s eyes are on the church, so it’s gone from something that was completely outlawed tosomething that’s a bit of a flagship.”

The documentary also considers why we remember certain people and not others. Take the women – more than 11,000 of them – who worked in Gretna’scordite factory, handling a substancenicknamed ‘the devil’s porridge’.

“It was incredibly dangerous,” says Cottrell Boyce. “Physically immediately dangerous in that it could blow up, butalso immensely damaging to health.They lost their teeth, and their complex-ions went really weird [they turned yellow]. They threw themselves into this work, for the war effort, for our boys – and they’re kind of unremembered.”

78

A British soldier pays his respects at a grave at the Gallipoli landing site

DVD REVIEW

Class and conflictCastles in the Sky

BBC/Spirit Entertainment Limited, £15.99

In 1935, Robert Watson-Watt(1892–1973) sent a secret memo tothe air ministry entitled The Detectionof Aircraft by Radio Methods. Thememo presaged the research thatwould lead to the creation of Britain’seast and south coast radar network,so crucial to the Royal Air Forcevictory over the Luftwaffe in theBattle of Britain.

Scriptwriter Ian Kershaw’s dramatells the story of Scotsman Watson-Watt’s team of plucky outsiders, largely provincial scientists, battling against a stuffy

Oxbridge establishment. The class war, it’s safe to say, looms almost as large as the Second World Warin proceedings.

Yet, though it’s certainly a close-runthing on occasion, Castles in the Skynever overplays the intrinsic comedy in this scenario. Instead, Eddie Izzard brings a believable and quiet dignity to Watson-Watt, while there are strong supporting turns from Julian Rhind-Tutt, as a desert-dry mandarin,and Tim McInnerny, expansive asSir Winston Churchill.

Criticisms? There’s the odd forced moment when, for example, thebounce of a ball leads to a crucial insight, but mostly it’s a testament to all concerned that this 90-minute drama about boffins undertaking

scientific research – a piece made on a modest budget

– seems to be, ifanything, too short.

The latest drama in the BBC’songoing season of First WorldWar-themed programming,The Passing-Bells (BBC One, November), tells the story of two ordinary young men who join up to fight. On BBC One Scotland but available across the UK via iPlayer,Jane Haining: The Scot Who

Died in Auschwitz (Sunday 30November) has Sally Magnusson telling the story of a Dumfriesshire-born matron at a Budapest school who refused to leave Hungary afterthe Nazi invasion in 1944 – with terrible consequences for herself.

On Channel 5, Dan Jonesexplores Britain’s Bloodiest

Dynasty: The Plantagenets

(November) over four episodes. He begins with Henry II, a man who had, to say the least, a dangerously fractious and ambitious family.

Back on Radio 4 is MichaelScott’s Spin the Globe (Tuesday 11 November), in which the historian looks at events beyond those we usually associate with specific years. Scott starts in 1485 – the year in which Richard III lost his throne and his life, and when theSpanish inquisition was in theascendency. A Cultural History of

the Plague (Radio 3, Sunday 30 November) considers, among other subjects, zombie moviesand the disease.

Secrets from the Sky (ITV, Friday7 November) offers an aerial view ofBritish history. WWII Air Crash

Detectives (Yesterday, Monday 24 November) showcases researcher Garth Barnard’s investigations intoplane accidents and crashes.

The Passing-Bells depicts the experiences of two young soldiers

TV & Radio

Eddie Izzard plays plucky

outsider Watson-

Watt

http://www.buysubscriptions.com/stuarts


The road from Blackheathto London was lined withpeople. Tapestries hungfrom windows, trumpetsparped and church bellspeeled, and wine flowedfreely. It was 29 May 1660.

Charles II, turning 30 that day, rode at thefront of a great procession heading for thepolitical heart of the capital. He had cometo reclaim the thrones of three kingdomsafter more than a decade of republicangovernment, and he was welcomed as aredeemer by a restless public that had seenthe Commonwealth collapse from within.

“The public was tired of years of politicalinsecurity, crushing over-taxation andmilitary rule,” says Ronald Hutton,professor of early modern history at theUniversity of Bristol. “They imagined that,whatever the king stood for, he was bound tobe better than that.”

The press of the crowd was such that thecavalcade took seven hours to get throughLondon. Finally, at 7pm, Charles reached thePalace of Whitehall, where English royaltyhad resided for more than a century beforethe monarchy was swept away following theCivil War. In the opulent surroundings ofBanqueting House, both houses ofparliament declared their loyalty to the king.In response, Charles made a p i“I find my heart set really toendeavour by all means for threstoring of this nation tofreedom and happiness; andhope by the advice of myparliament to effect it.”

Commissioned by JamesVI and I and completed in

1622, Banqueting House was the first majorclassical building in England – and, with itsPalladian facade, it certainly stood out fromthe Tudor-style brick buildings that madeup the rest of the palace. It was designedby Inigo Jones to provide the setting forbanquets and court masques, extravagantmélanges of poetry, dance, music and songperformed for (and often involving) kings,queens and their courtiers.

By the time Charles II was resident atWhitehall, Banqueting House no longerplayed host to masques. It had been decidedthat the flaming torches used to light suchproductions would damage the magnificentceiling canvases painted by the Flemish artistPeter Paul Rubens for Charles I. Instead, itwas now the setting for state occasions suchas royal proclamations and receptions forforeign ambassadors. “It was the stage –the public arena of royalty,” says Hutton.

Today, Banqueting House is the onlysurviving part of the old Palace of Whitehall,which was destroyed by fire in 1698. Climbingthe stairs and entering the cavernous mainhall, with its two tiers of enormous windowsset between towering white columns, it’s easyto imagine the royal occasions held here.

In December 1662, for example, the diaristSamuel Pepys was present at BanquetingHouse to witness the visit of the Russian

b d s. “I saw all the presents,furs, hawks, carpets, clothsand sea-horse teeth,” wroteThe king took two or threeupon his fist, having a glove

wrought with gold, givenm for the purpose. The son ofne of the Embassadors was inthe richest suit for pearl and

HISTORY EXPLORER

The RestorationDr Ronald Hutton and Daniel Cossins visit

Banqueting House in London to explore the

overthrow of the British Commonwealth and

Charles II’s perilous path to the throne in 1660

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A bust of Charles I at BanquetingHouse marks the spot from wherehe stepped onto the fateful scaffold


“The point of the paintings is to illustrate

the classic doctrine of the divine right of kings”

DR RONALD HUTTON

Charles I commissioned Peter Paul Rubens to paint the epic

array of nine canvases that adorns the ceiling of Banqueting House


Out & about / History Explorer

tissue that ever I did see, or shall, I believe.”At the far end of the main hall stands the

modest throne, upholstered in red velvet, where Charles II ennobled worthy subjectsand performed ‘healing ceremonies’ for theless fortunate. The throne is out of boundsbut visitors can lounge in beanbags on thefloor and gaze up at the nine ceiling paintings by Rubens, each contained in anornate golden frame. It was this masterpieceunder which Charles I passed in January1649 as he walked out to face his execution.

“The point of the paintings is to illustratethe classic doctrine of the divine right ofkings,” says Hutton. “So to have to walkacross the hall, right underneath this portrait of the invincibility andtriumph of monarchy, must have been pretty bitter.Still, I would guess thatif you’ve lost threekingdoms and you’reabout to have your headcut off, the presence of paintings doesn’t makean enormous amount of difference.”

Today, a bust ofCharles I above the

entrance marks the approximate location of the window (now gone) from which hestepped onto the scaffold and to his death.“It was freezing cold, with occasionalsnowflakes,” says Hutton. “Charles wore two shirts underneath his clothes to avoidshivering with cold and giving an impressionof being afraid. When the king’s head fell– and it fell at one blow – an enormous groanrang out. People rushed forward to dip theirhandkerchiefs in his blood as souvenirs.”

Charles II was in exile in the Netherlandswhen he heard of his father’s death. He wascrowned king of Scotland in January 1651, and later that year marched into England,only to be crushed by Cromwell’s forces atWorcester. Forced to flee, Charles made adramatic escape, hiding out in royalisthouseholds and even an oak tree beforegetting away to France and exile once more.

Hope for royalists returned in the late1650s when the republican regime began to unravel. “The Commonwealth was alwayssitting on a time bomb, which was financial and ideological,” says Hutton. “Financial inthat, in order to hold down the conqueredBritish Isles, the government needed a hugearmy.” The regime downsized the army andreduced taxes to keep the people happy, butthe income wouldn’t suffice. “The result wasa slow slide into arrears, with too manysoldiers now chasing too small a treasury,”says Hutton.

Then there was the ideological problem.The Civil War had shattered the Church ofEngland into competing Protestant creeds.

Cromwell’s government opted fortoleration but it didn’t work,

says Hutton: “The tensionbetween those who wanted

a Church of Englandand the new radicalminority who wantedto let it go altogetherwas growing, and weseemed to be headingfor a new civil war.”

When Cromwelldied in 1658, his son,Richard, succeeded

“CHARLES II MADE A DRAMATIC ESCAPE, HIDING

OUT IN ROYALIST HOUSEHOLDS AND EVEN AN

OAK TREE BEFORE GETTING AWAY TO FRANCE”

him as lord protector. Richard’s plan wasto throw out the radical reforms demanded by the army – reformed parliaments,toleration of unorthodox religious beliefs, abroader Church of England – in return forparliament’s acceptance of his governmentand funds for the army. But his attempt to rally his supporters in the army failed, andin May 1659 Richard was forced to resign.

“Richard was overthrown, his parliamentthrown out and the Protectorate abolished,”says Hutton. “In its place the army, after anawful lot of argument, called back the oneparliament from the previous 10 years thathad seemed most receptive to its reformprogramme.” That was the purgedparliament, or the Rump Parliament – the

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Beanbags are provided for lolling while admiring

Rubens’ ceiling paintings

VISIT

Banqueting House

Banqueting House,Whitehall, London, SW1A 2ER� hrp.org.uk/BanquetingHouse

This portrait of Charles II by John Wright was probably painted shortly after the king’s coronation on 23 April 1661

Isaac Fuller’s painting of Charles II’striumphal progress to Whitehall on29 May 1660 gives a sense of thepomp and popularity of this pageant that marked the Restoration

http://hrp.org.uk/BanquetingHouse


1 Moseley Old Hall,StaffordshireWhere the escaping Charles IIhid from Cromwell’s troopsHaving marched from Scotland in 1651,Charles II’s forces were crushed atWorcester. He narrowly evaded capture,hiding at Boscobel House in Shropshire,then at Moseley Old Hall, before fleeing toFrance. At Moseley Old Hall, the bestpreserved of Charles’s hideouts, visitorscan see the priest hole in which he hid.nationaltrust.org.uk/moseley-old-hall

2 York Castle Museum, YorkWhere visitors can see one ofCromwell’s death masksWhen Oliver Cromwell died, in 1658, theProtectorate began to fall apart. In the daysafter Cromwell’s demise, several deathmasks were sent around the country asevidence. One of the masks can be seen,warts and all, at York Castle Museum. yorkcastlemuseum.org.uk

3 Edgehill, WarwickshireWhere General Lambert tried toprevent the RestorationIn April 1660, die-hard republican Major-General John Lambert rallied supportersto the hamlet of Edgehill, site of the firstpitched battle of the Civil War in 1642.Monck’s forces easily saw off the fewhundred mounted parliamentary troops, and Lambert was sent to the Tower. battlefieldstrust.com

4 White cliffs of Dover, KentWhere the returning Charles IIstepped ashoreOn the morning of 25 May 1660 a 20-strongfleet carrying Charles II approached thewhite cliffs of Dover, where crowds cheered the return of the king. As cannon fired incelebration from Dover Castle, GeneralMonck greeted Charles on the beach. whitecliffscountry.org.uk

5 Westminster AbbeyWhere Charles II was crowned kingOn 23 April 1661, Charles II was crowned inthe magnificent surroundings of Westmin-ster Abbey, the setting for coronationssince 1066. The abbey was packed withspectators, including diarist Samuel Pepys,all desperate to catch a glimpse of theirreturning king. A stone tablet in the abbey’sRAF Chapel, normally covered by a carpet,marks the spot where Cromwell was buriedbefore he was exhumed in January 1661. westminster-abbey.org

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THE RESTORATION: FIVE MORE PLACES TO EXPLORE

Convention Parliament pardoned almosteveryone except those involved in the trialand execution of Charles I who did notimmediately surrender themselves. It alsoconfirmed that all legal actions of the past20 years were binding, and granted the kingmoney to disband all the armies.

“This was pretty healing,” say Hutton.“But then, in 1661, a very differentparliament arrived: the Cavalier Parliament,far more embittered and vengeful andold royalist.” It proceeded to pass a seriesof measures designed to ensure that thenobility held all the power, preventinganyone – including the Crown – from everagain overturning law and order. It alsoordered the exhumation of Oliver Cromwelland two of his comrades, to be hanged anddecapitated at Tyburn.

Ultimately, Charles II learned that oldanimosities die hard. “England struggled torecover from the mauling of the Civil War,”says Hutton. Three great problemsremained: whether ultimate power shouldlie with the king alone or with the king andparliament; what to do with religious sectsthat refused to worship within the Church ofEngland; and how to address the balance of power between England, Scotland andIreland. “It took another reign and anotherrevolution, that of 1688, to settle those questions,” says Hutton.

Words: Daniel Cossins. Historical advisor:

Ronald Hutton, author of The Restoration:

A Political and Religious History of England and

Wales, 1658-1667 (OUP, 1997)7

rump of the Long Parliament that in 1648 had been purged of MPs unlikely to supportthe army’s goal of punishing Charles I.

It took just four months for old enmitiesto flare. In October, the army dismissedthe Rump and seized power. As a result,the winter of 1659–60 was one of agitation, with the people demanding a return toconstitutional propriety. “There was a clamour for a freely elected parliament that wasn’t told what to do by an army,and whatever that parliament decided, themajority of people in England and Waleswere happy to accept,” says Hutton.

Into the confusion strode General GeorgeMonck, commander of the army inScotland. On hearing the news that theRump had been thrown out, Monck ordered it restored, and marched into England inJanuary 1660. Starved of pay, the Englisharmy gave up and submitted to Monck as he marched on the capital.

Having seen the discontent in London,Monck went with the will of the people,ordering the dissolution of the Rump andthe free election of a new parliament. Allthe while, he was in secret contact withthe exiled king. And on 1 May, the newConvention Parliament received a letterfrom the king in which he promised to granta general pardon for traitors. A week later,parliament proclaimed England a monarchyonce more, and invited Charles to return.

Though no legislation could be passedwithout the king’s consent, Charles hadto accept the central role of parliament.Two months after his glorious return, the

http://nationaltrust.org.uk/moseley-old-hall

http://yorkcastlemuseum.org.uk

http://battlefieldstrust.com

http://whitecliffscountry.org.uk

http://westminster-abbey.org


TEN THINGS TO DO IN DECEMBER

Out & about

EXHIBITION / FREE ENTRY

The CuriousContraptions ofHeath Robinson

Museum & Art Gallery,Derby29 November–1 March 2015� 01332 641901� derbymuseums.org

Take a closer look ateccentric machinerydesigned by cartoonist andillustrator William HeathRobinson (1872–1944).

TALK / FREE ENTRY

The Clifton SuspensionBridge and the Avon Gorge

Tyndall Lecture Theatre, University of Bristol4 December� bristolmuseums.org.uk/bristol-museum-and-art-gallery

A history of the CliftonSuspension Bridge and itsenvirons, using architectural drawings, paintings andarchive photographs.


Working for Victory:Welsh Industry andthe First World War

National WaterfrontMuseum, Swansea11 October–15 March 2015� 029 2057 3600� museumwales.ac.uk/swansea

An exhibition examiningthe contribution of Welshindustry to the war effortand the impact of war on the workers involved.

EXHIBITION / FREE ENTR

A Bear CalledPaddington

Museum of London 14 November–4 January 2015� 020 7001 9844� museumoflondon.org.u

Explore the history ofthe much-loved bearthrough a selection ofobjects, including asigned first edition copyof the 1958 debut story

MAGAZINE

CHOICEMAGAZINE


Small Stories: At Homein a Dolls’ House

V&A Museum of Childhood, London13 December–6 September 2015� 020 8983 5200� museumofchildhood.org.uk

Twelve unique dolls’ houses will bethrowing open their doors and

drawing back their curtains at the V&AMuseum of Childhood this month, toreveal the tiny delights contained withintheir four walls.

The houses, which were createdbetween the 18th and 21st centuries, offera miniature snapshot of the history of thehome and changing family relationshipsover the past 300 years, as well asdevelopments in architecture and design.

Alice Sage, co-curator of the exhibition,says: “The 12 dolls’ houses on show havebeen selected from the V&A’s collectionof around 100 houses, and range from aQueen Anne country house dating from1712, to a colourful, plastic modularhouse from the 1960s.

“Showcasing such a wide range ofhouses, and with 1,800 or so miniature

“Victorian girls used dolls’

houses to learn how to be

good wives and mothers”

objects within, the exhibitionreveals how dolls’ houses havechanged over time. They developed fromthe expensively furnished examples of the1600s, to the educational houses of theVictorian era, when girls used them tolearn how to be good wives and mothers.”

Visitors to the exhibition will be able to peer inside the houses, which aredisplayed chronologically, light upindividual rooms and listen to the dollstalk about their daily lives, with tales ofmarriages and parties, politics and crime.

Highlights of the exhibition includethe Tate Baby House of 1760, whichfeatures original wallpapers and paintedpanelling, as well as a lying-in room fora pregnant doll. Meanwhile, the Whitela-dies House, designed by artist MorayThomas in the 1930s, features chromefurniture, a cocktail bar and even aswimming pool. It was based onModernist country villas that were beingbuilt in Hampstead at the time.

Says Sage: “We’ve also created afull-size version of the kitchen in the1830s Killer Cabinet (pictured right),so visitors can experience the house for themselves. The house isa wonderful snapshot of a Victorian residence, and includes itemscreated by the women of the Killerfamily, such as needlepointcarpets and exquisite, hand-embroidered upholstery.”

Life in miniature

Paddingmis

ONLI NESLI DE SHOW

historyextra.com

/small-stories

RY

uk

yy.

ton Bear: makingschief since 1958

http://historyextra.com/small-stories

http://www.museumofchildhood.org.uk

http://derbymuseums.org

http://bristolmuseums.org.uk/ bristol-museum-and-art-gallery

http://bristolmuseums.org.uk/ bristol-museum-and-art-gallery

http://museumoflondon.org.uk

http://museumwales.ac.uk/swansea

http://historyextra.com/small-stories

tory MagazineBBC Hist

Charlotte Hodgman previews some of the

latest events and exhibitions

EXHIBITION

William Blake:Apprentice and Master

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford4 December–1 March 2015� 01865 278000� ashmolean.org

The Ashmolean will befocusing on the life and worksof English printmaker, painterand prophetic poet WilliamBlake (1757–1827), whoseradical political views wereoften reflected in his work.More than 90 pieces will be ondisplay, including a completeset of the plates fromEurope: A Prophecy,a book from 1794 ofwhich only nine knowncopies exist.


Beauty by Design:Fashioning the Renaissance

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh 15 November−3 May 2015� 0131 624 6200 � nationalgalleries.org/portraitgallery

This exhibition uses a series of Renaissance paintings – from both the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and ScottishNational Gallery’s collections – to explore fashion designin the 21st century and to challenge modern perceptions of physical beauty.


Traces of Empire: Decorationand Design in Roman Britain

Weston Park, SheffieldUntil 31 October 2015� 0114 278 2600 � museums-sheffield.org.uk

Examine the changes in decoration and style that followedthe Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43 through a selectionof artefacts that have been unearthed by chance over the years.Among the items on display is a collection of 35 silver denariicoins, with dates ranging from AD 69 to AD 155, which wasfound in Pitsmoor, Sheffield by workmen in 1906.

TALK / FREE ENTRY

The 1914Christmas truce

Newarke Houses Museum, Leicester14 December� 0116 225 4980 (booking line)� leicester.gov.uk

Find out how the unofficialtruce, when many British andGerman soldiers temporarily laid down their weapons,affected soldiers in theLeicestershire Regiment.

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rt & Soul: Victoriansnd the Gothic

AMM, ExeterNovember–12 April 201501392 265 858rammuseum.org.uk

e works by 19th-centuryists such as William Morris,s well as designscommissioned in theSouth West, from paintingsand tapestries to furniture and metalwork. A Roman silver bracelet of

the 2nd or 3rd century AD,found in Derbyshire in 1866

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The Killer Cabinet was a gift from Manchester surgeon John Egerton Killer to his wife and daughters in the 1830s, and was decked out with gilded wallpapers, a four-poster bed and liveried servants

ONLI NESLI DE SHOW

historyextra.com

/william-blake

http://rammuseum.org.uk

http://leicester.gov.uk

http://www.ashmolean.org

http://historyextra.com/william-blake

http://nationalgalleries.org/portraitgallery

http://museums-sheffield.org.uk

http://historyextra.com/william-blake


MY FAVOURITE PLACE

Out & about

LuxorEgypt

of Luxor and their much largercounterpart at Karnak just a short drive away. With its prime riverside location enabling youto follow in the footsteps ofcountless dynasties of pharaohs,who came south to pay tribute to the gods of Egypt’s religiousheartland, Luxor Temple inparticular is a wonderful place to spend a few hours.

I’d particularly recommend avisit in the evening, when thelights begin to twinkle across theriver on the west bank. Yet at anytime this is a spectacular view,with a fabulous backdrop oflimestone cliffs fronting theworld’s most famous cemetery,the Valley of the Kings.

To cross the Nile at Luxor isnot only to move from the eastbank to the west bank, but totravel back in time. The firstmonuments you’ll encounter arethe Memnon Colossi that so impressed Hadrian in AD 130.These welcoming figures – for solong alone – have now beenjoined by increasing amounts ofthe temple they once fronted, thanks to ongoing excavations.

Beyond lies a series of othersuch temples – each different insize and style. They include the Ramesseum of Ramesses II(c1279–1213 BC), whose fallencolossus inspired Percy Bysshe

Shelley to write Ozymandias, and the temple of femalepharaoh Hatshepsut (c1473–1458 BC), its clean linesbrilliantly offset by the backdropof the cliffs at Deir el-Bahari.

And right behind this, ofcourse, is the Valley of the Kings,its massive rock-cut tombsbearing repeated images ofmighty monarchs in thecompany of endless deities.

If you find the size and sheernumber of these royal tombsoverwhelming, then my adviceis to visit some of the smaller‘tombs of the nobles’ – littlegems whose painted scenes of A

LA

MY

/GE

TT

Y

by Joann Fletcher

In the latest instalment of our historical holidays

series, Joann reveals why tourists have been

dazzled by Luxor’s unique charms for millennia

ne of the statues of Ramesses II at Luxor temple,hich is “a wonderful place to spend a few hours”

Few countries haveattracted tourists for longer than Egypt.Visitors wereadmiring its already

ancient monuments as early asthe second millennium BC.And when the great Greek poetHomer immortalised Thebes –modern-day Luxor – in theninth century BC, he was merelyarticulating the awe that the cityhad been inspiring among hiscountrymen for centuries.

Countless visitors since havefallen for Luxor’s charms. Oneof them was the Roman emperorHadrian who, in AD 130, tookhis party to the spectacularColossi of Memnon, two hugestatues that still front thefunerary temple of Egypt’sgreatest pharaoh, Amenhotep III(c1390–1352 BC).

Almost 17 centuries later, thearrival in Egypt of anotherleader – Napoleon, at the head ofa French invasion force in 1799– led to Egypt’s ‘rediscovery’ and h fi dwave‘Egy

Sonentwerewinttherclim

– either aboard their privateboats or at the iconic WinterPalace hotel, where a drink on the terrace is still heartily recommended.

One such visitor was LordCarnarvon, whose winterseasons by the Nile – initially recovering from a car accident– led to an interest in Egyptol-ogy, an introduction to unem-ployed archaeologist HowardCarter and one of the greatestarchaeological discoveries of alltime. For when Carter discov-ered the tomb of Amenho-tep III’s grandson Tutankhamunin November 1922, Luxor wastransformed overnight from a rarefied retreat to a place packedwith tourists, for whom the localeconomy adapted accordingly.

Indeed, for me, much of Luxor’s charm is its buzz,nowhere more apparent thanwhile running the gamut of salesmen in its tourist bazaar,passing the belly-dancing outfitsand King Tut paperweights.

f h f ontmpres-ncient the

fication

rse,

temples

Onwh

the first moderne of European

yptomania’.oon, the conti-t’s aristocratse spending theirters in Luxor’s apeutic

mate

Not far away is the riverfrcorniche with its im

sive museum of anEgyptian art andnearby MummifiMuseum.

Then of couthere are the

legendary t

87

life range from harvesting cropsto throwing parties.

And if you’d like to see thehouses in which ancientEgyptians lived – rather thansimply the tombs in which theyare buried – you can visit theruins of the village of Deirel-Medina, home to the workerswho constructed the tombsin the Valley of the Kings.

A perfect visit for me endswith the temple of MedinetHabu, whose atmospherelate in the day is truly magical,especially if combined witha reviving Turkish coffee atShahat’s ‘Ramses Cafe’ nextdoor. There are many suchplaces across the west bank,whose small hotels offera less luxurious yet moreimmediate experience thantheir counterparts on Luxor’s east bank.

Although I’ve only been toLuxor as a tourist once – on myfirst visit to Egypt in 1981 – I’vemade countless return trips as

part of my life as an Egyptolo-gist. And when I’m here inLuxor, which has been dazzlingvisitors for millennia, I trulybelieve that life can never get much better.

Professor Joann Fletcher of ther

University of York is an author who

regularly presents documentaries on

ancient Egypt for the BBC

Read more about Joann’s

experiences in Luxor at

historyextra.com/luxor

Next month: Miranda

Kaufmann visits Cartagena

de Indias in Colombia

ADVICE FOR TRAVELLERS

AL

AM

Y

BEST TIME TO GOTemperatures can reach inexcess of 40˚C in June, butthings begin to cool downfrom August. Avoid theextreme temperatures bytravelling between October and March.

GETTING THEREAt the moment most directflights to Luxor are fromLondon, with those from UKregional airports dependenton demand.

WHAT TO PACKA torch (for examininginteresting nooks andcrannies in Luxor’s manytombs and temples); mineralwater spray and tissues.

WHAT TO BRING BACKColoured scarves andsilver jewellery. And lots of photographs.

READERS’ VIEWSHot air balloon ride overthe Valley of the Kings andthe Nile at sunrise. Utterly magical!@Wightrose

Was very excited to sailpast the original boat thatinspired Death on the Nile!@chubchoc

Make sure you visit inthe winter months whenthe temperature is only25 degrees centigrade!@AmadeusinKent

The spectacular Colossi ofMemnon still front the funerary temple of Egypt’s greatest pharaoh: Amenhotep III

Been there…Have you been to Luxor?Do you have a top tip forreaders? Contact us viaTwitter or Facebook

twitter.com/historyextra

facebook.com/historyextra

Like so many of Luxor’s monuments, the Colossi

of Memnon have been filling tourists with awe for

thousands of years

http://twitter.com/historyextra

http://facebook.com/historyextra

http://historyextra.com/luxor

http://facebook.com/historyextra

Driver experience courses on theKirkless Light Railway

The Kirklees Light Railway nearHuddersfield offers the chance to takethe regulator on one of our 15 inch narrowgauge steam locomotives. With a choice ofa one hour, two hour or full day course tochoose from, attendee’s will receive expertone to one tuition from an experienceddriver with courses starting from only £60.

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THE KIRKLEES LIGHT RAILWAY 6

Unique Carpet Bags – Classicaccessories, handmade inEngland

Shop online at www.carpetbags.co.uk forbeautiful and practical bags individuallymade by crafts people in England. Theseunique Carpet Bags combine traditionwith modern designs to produce strong,lightweight bags in a variety of styles. Realcarpet is used, made from bio-degradableViscose (a natural vegetal material), inglorious colours and patterns.

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CARPET BAGS6

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We specialise in tours, books, lectures,and artefacts exploring history andarchaeology. We supply enriching travelitineraries, guided tours, up-to-datepublications, interesting talks, andbeautiful museum replicas. Newproducts are always being added.Gift vouchers are available. Getour free newsletter.

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HIDDEN HISTORY3The Big Fat Christmas Book willmake a gloriously gruesome gift

A Horrible Christmas is guaranteed withthe latest book in the world’s bestsellingchildren’s history series by Terry Dearyand Martin Brown. Packed to burstingwith foul festive food, cruel Yule disastersand spine-tingling seasonal stories. Newin hardback and available wherever booksare sold (published by Scholastic).

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Treat your feet to alpaca

Treat your feet to gorgeous alpaca socksfrom online alpaca specialist Perilla.Fabulous colours across seven ranges ofsocks from cosy bed socks of 90% babyalpaca to thick walking socks. Alpaca fibrenaturally repels bacteria and odour socan be worn for a week. All socks can bebeautifully gift-boxed and make a superband welcome present.

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An amazing gift that will inspirehours of creative play

Create your own sturdy model castlewith this easy-to-build kit. It includes twomodel armies, and a book about life in acastle with ideas for games and battles.Presented in an attractive box that canbe used to store pieceswhen not in use.Buy online directfrom Usborne, £25including free P&P.

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Here you will find a selection of Christmas gift options to show someone you care.

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It’s the time of year for giving and receiving. Please find below

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THE BRITISH

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Give the gift of armchair beekeeping,and help save the honey bee. Receivethis delightful welcome pack ofbee goodies and three award-winning newsletters with a year’ssubscription to Adopt a Beehive fromthe British Beekeepers Association,all for £30 plus p+p. You also receivea jar of British honey and packetof wildflower seeds.

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INTERNATIONALGLAUCOMAASSOCIATION IGAHelp continue the fight against glaucoma

01233 64 81 64www.glaucoma-association.com

Glaucoma is a leading cause ofpreventable blindness. The IGA is thecharity for people with glaucoma,with the mission to raise awareness,promote research and supportpatients and all who care for them.Our services are free and fundedentirely by donations.Registered Charity: 274681 & SCO41550

SPINAL RESEARCHHelping those with spinal cord injuries

A fall or road accident can result inlifelong paralysis. Spinal Research is the UK’s leading medicalresearch charity investigatingtreatments which could enablepeople with spinal cord injury torecover movement and regain fullindependence. Support our life-changing research this Christmasby making a donation by phone oron-line. Registered Charity: 1151015

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GREATER LONDON

FUND FOR THE

BLINDRaising money to change the lives of blind people

We are a fundraising charity,raising money to support peoplewith sight loss. We do this byproviding a range of vital servicesincluding helplines for familieswith visually impaired children,hot meals for older, sociallyisolated people and home visits.

Every day 100 people in the UKstart losing their sight. Sight loss affects people of all ages.

Please help us reacheven more people inneed of assistance.

Thank you.

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BROMLEY MENCAPDisability is life changing and we help change lives for the betterAt Bromley Mencap our awardwinning services provide muchneeded support to disabled childrenand adults, their families and carersand include; a telephone helpline,childminding, respite and shortbreaks, leisure and school holidayactivities, buddying, help for elderlycarers and an employment and training programme.Registered Charity: 800685

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The Anaesthesia Heritage Centre isproducing a series of four temporaryexhibitions honouring the work of thedoctors who gave anaesthesia and paindo

elief to wounded people during thererst World War.Fir

Visitor information:

The Anaesthesia Heritage Centre, AAGBI Foundation,

21 Portland Place, London W1B 1PY.

Registered as a charity in England & Wales no. 293575 and in Scotland no. SC040697

id you know that during the First World WarDid

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British soldiers bringing back the wounded

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Boyle’sapparatus

Henry Boyle

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Open Monday to Friday 10am until 4pm (last

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Q&A

Q Who was Bruno Hat?A On 23 July 1929, an exhibition ofpaintings by Bruno Hat opened in theLondon home of Bryan Guinness, thethen husband of Diana Mitford. Thepaintings were said to have beendiscovered in a village, hanging on thewalls of a shop owned by Hat’s mother.The artist made an appearance at theexhibition wearing dark glasses, sittingin a wheelchair and speaking in aGerman accent.

The newspapers hailed a new geniusof modern art. In fact, Bruno Hat did notexist and was the invention of Guinness’sfriend Brian Howard. The paintings werecreated as a prank by Howard and theartist John Banting, while the man inthe wheelchair was Guinness’s brother-in-law, Tom Mitford, in heavy disguise. The pranksters owned up to their trickery soon after the exhibition’s opening night. Nick Rennison

MISCELLANY

Q Did staff at the Tower of London stop work

during executions or did the steam and

clattering – particularly in the Armoury and

Royal Mint – continue unabated?Jim Hopkins, by email

Q What was Mrs Winslow’sSoothing Syrup?A A patent medicine first sold inAmerica in the 1840s, Mrs Winslow’sSoothing Syrup was advertised as reliev-ing babies and small children from thediscomforts of both teething at one endand diarrhoea at the other. Reportedlynamed after the manufacturer’smother-in-law, who had devised theremedy for her own children’s ailments,it sold in large quantities.

Since it contained both morphine andalcohol, it’s not surprising that the syrupsoothed those who took it – but it wasalso dangerous. As one early critic put it,parents who administered it ran the riskof being “relieved of all further care oftheir infants”. Although it was regularlydenounced by the medical profession,Mrs Winslow’s decoction continued tosell until the 1930s. Nick Rennison

AThere were certainly workers andother ancillary staff – including

soldiers, jailers, yeoman warders,record-keepers, minters of money,zookeepers and tradespeople – aroundthe Tower at almost all times. Workers,for example, would have been requiredto both construct and dismantle thescaffold itself.

Executions were witnessed byprivileged invited visitors. In 1536,for instance, Imperial AmbassadorEustace Chapuys was on hand to seethe demise of his enemy Anne Boleyn,while Sir Walter Ralegh was able togloat over the beheading of his hatedrival, the Earl of Essex, in 1601.

Executions of commoners on TowerHill were seen by crowds of thousands.However, the few executions carried outinside the Tower – mainly of royals and

high nobility – were restricted to VIPguests (a few friends of the condemnedand court officials), the guards and theheadsman himself. Common peoplewould have been kept at a distance.

We have to imagine prisonersentering or leaving the Tower – often forthe final time – making their exits andentrances accompanied by the bangingand clattering of coin-making in theRoyal Mint; the bawled commands oftroops; the raucous cries of traders andhawkers; and, not least, the roars andscreeches of the animals in the Towermenagerie. Add to that the cries andsighs of those close to the condemned,and it must have been quite a racket.

Nigel Jones, author of Tower: An Epic

History of the Tower of London

(Windmill Books, 2012)AL

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ILLUSTRATION BY GLEN MCBETH


Miscellany

QUIZBY JULIAN HUMPHRYS

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1 . Which royal wife lost her first

husband at the second battle of

St Albans in 1461?

2. What links the birthplaces of

Nelson’s wife and Napoleon’s

first wife?

3. What links Brilliana Harley, Mary

Bankes and Charlotte Stanley?

4 . Whose wife heckled during the

trial of Charles I?

5. “I am not well; pray get me a glass

of brandy.” What had the future

George IV just seen?

6. She was born Isabella Mayson but

to millions of households she’s known

by her married name. What is it?

7. What links Geddington, Harding-

stone and Waltham Cross?

8. Which incident in Hardy’s The

Mayor of Casterbridge may have been

inspired by a financial transaction

near Frome in 1827?

9. What was the maiden name of

Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of US

president Franklin D Roosevelt?

10. The wife of which polar explorer

created the bronze statue of him

pictured below?

Q Did British generals’ experiences in Africa

– during the Boer War in particular – help or

hinder fighting strategies at the start of the

First World War?Fraser McGarry, via email

Inspired by our feature on

Elizabeth Cromwell on page 28,

a quiz with a ‘wife’ theme

AThe Boer War (1899–1902) wasa watershed conflict for Britain.

Although the war ultimately ended ina British victory, it was prolonged, bitterand bloody. In 1901, Rudyard Kiplingreflected on the struggle in his poemThe Lesson, which noted: “We have had no end of a lesson / It will do us no end of good.” This was especially true of the British Army, which was determined to learn from the painful experience gleaned in South Africa. As a result, tactics, training and equipment were dramatically improved between 1902 and1914. On the eve of the First World War, the British Army had the highest standardof individual training in Europe.

Furthermore, the combat experience gained in the Boer War was valuable for British commanders. All of thesenior commanders of the 1914 BritishExpeditionary Force, and 138 out of 157 infantry battalion commanders, had seen action. Colonial warfare had taught

British officers much about leadership, morale, logistics and initiative. Though the pace and intensity of the Great War was very different from combat in Africa, the lessons learned on imperialservice had universal value.

Unfortunately, the ferocity of the first five months of the First World War took a dreadful toll on these highly trained men and experienced officers. By the end of 1914, the army had suffered 89,000 casualties from its prewar strength of 250,000 and 58 per cent of the original cadre of battalion commanders had fallen. The loss of these veterans meant that from 1915 onwards the army was forced to endure a costly learning curve as new, inexperienced officers and hastily trained volunteers were thrown into the maelstrom of trench warfare.

Dr Spencer Jones, senior lecturer in armed

forces and war studies at the University

of Wolverhampton

ONLI NEQUI Z EVE RY

FRI DAYhistoryextra.com

/quiz

QUIZANSWERS1.ElizabethWoodville,laterwifeofKingEdwardIV.Herfirsthusband,SirJohnGrey,waskilledatStAlbans2.TheywerebothbornintheCaribbean:FrancisWoolward(laterNelson)onNevis,Joséphine(laterBonaparte)onMartinique3.DuringtheCivilWartheydefendedtheirhousesintheabsenceoftheirhusbands:BrillianaHarleyatBramptonBryanCastle,MaryBankesatCorfeCastleandCharlotteStanleyatLathomHouse4.AnneFairfax,thewifeoftheparliamentarianarmy’scommander-in-chief,SirThomasFairfax5.Hiswifetobe,CarolineofBrunswick6.MrsBeeton7.TheyarethesitesofthethreesurvivingEleanorCrossesmarkingtherestingplacesofEdwardI’swife’sbodyonitsroutetoburialinLondon8.MichaelHenchard’ssaleofhiswife9.Roosevelt10.RobertFalconScott(Kathleenwasanotedsculptor)

British soldiers pictured in the Orange River Trenches, South Africa, during the Second Boer War, c1900

1

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Write to BBC History Magazine, Tower House, Fairfax Street,

Bristol BS1 3BN, email: [email protected]

or submit via our website: historyextra.com

GOT A QUESTION?IF YOUR QUESTION IS PRINTED, WE’LL SEND YOUA RECENTLY PUBLISHED HISTORY BOOK

Q What are the origins ofthe Stone of Scone?Mark Desjardins, Connecticut, US

AThe Stone of Scone – also known as the

Stone of Destiny, theCoronation Stone and theFatal Stone – was historicallyused in the coronations of the rulers of Scotland.

It was taken from SconeAbbey near Perth by Edward Iof England in 1296, as partof his systematic policy ofhumiliation and plunderof the defeated nation. Itremained in WestminsterAbbey, where it was used inthe coronations of monarchs(of England and, later, Britain)until its return to Scotland onSt Andrew’s Day 1996. Todayit rests in Edinburgh Castle.

The stone’s origins areclouded in legend. It’s evensaid to have been the stoneused by Jacob as a pillow,mentioned in Genesis 28:18.Scottish antiquarian andphilosopher Hector Boece(1465–1536) claimed that itcame from a lost Scottish citycalled Evonium. Other stories

SAM’S RECIPE CORNEREvery issue, picture editor Sam Nott

brings you a recipe from the past.

This month it’s wassail punch, a

deliciously warming drink that dates

back to the Middle Agesposit an origin in Ireland,where it was reputedly the coronation stone of the rulersof the Gaelic Dál Riatakingdom that controlledparts of Scotland and Irelandin the 6th and 7th centuries.

Geological examinationindicates that the stone wasquarried from somewherenear Scone. This rules outIrish origins – but only aslong as you believe that thepresent stone is the original.Some Scots, including formerSNP leader Alex Salmond,believe that the lump ofsandstone seized by Edward Iwas a fake, knocked up by themonks at Scone to dupe theEnglish while they hid thereal thing.

If so, the monks did apretty good job: a plausiblecontender for the ‘real’ Stoneof Scone is yet to be found.

Eugene Byrne, historian and

author of Brunel: Pocket Giants

(History Press, 2014)

Wassail punch

The coronation chair at Westminster Abbey incorporated the Stone of Scone until 1996

The smell of roasting apples

and cinnamon that fills the

house during preparation

is reason enough to make

this drink, but it’s also a

wonderfully warming tipple,

perfect for the festive period.

Wassail punch dates back

to the Middle Ages and, in

the south-west and south-

east of England at least, was

drunk as part of a ceremony

or ritual that took place to

ensure a good cider-apple

harvest the following year.

I’ll drink to that!

INGREDIENTS• 6 small apples, washedand cored• 1 litre cider (I used dry)• 2 cinnamon sticks,crushed• 2 pinches ground cloves• Freshly grated nutmeg,to taste• 1 lemon, sliced• Sugar, to taste

METHODPreheat oven to190˚C/gas mark 5.Score the applesand place in anovenproof trayand roast for45–50 minutes,or until skin issoft and startingto split.

Heat the cider ina saucepan over alow heat and addcloves, cinnamonand nutmeg.Stir well and heat

through until the liquid startsto foam.

Add the lemon slices androasted apples, and give theliquid a good stir – if there isany apple juice left in yourovenproof dish, add this, too.If you want to add sugar (Iadded about 4 tablespoons),now is a good time to do so –add it gradually and taste asyou go along. Serve hot. BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE TEAMVERDICT“A lovely punch that wasvery easy to make.”“Tastes a bit like applecrumble in a glass.”“I’d drink this to knock out a cold!”

Difficulty: 2/10 Time (including roastingapples): 1hrRecipe courtesy of bbc.co.uk/victorianchristmas/activity/wassail-punch.shtml

Add some history to your festivities with a glass of

wassail punch

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96

Miscellany

PRIZE CROSSWORD

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You may photocopy this crossword

CROSSWORDPR

History ofthe World in1,000 ObjectsA selection of 1,000 objects –dating from 20,000 BC to thepresent day – have been broughttogether to explore how peoplelived at different times across theworld. From weapons and art tojewellery and manuscripts, readerscan view cultures and civilisationsthrough the objects they created.

Published in hardback byDorling Kindersley, £25

HOW TO ENTER Open to residents of the UK,(inc. Channel Islands). Post entries to BBC HistoryMagazine, December 2014 Crossword, POBox 501, Leicester LE94 0AA or email them [email protected] by 5pmon 3 December 2014. Entrants must supply name,address and phone number. The winners will bethe first correct entries drawn at random after theclosing time. Winners’ names will appear in theJanuary 2015 issue. By entering, participantsagree to be bound by the terms and conditionsshown in full in the box below. Immediate MediaCompany Limited, publishers of BBC HistoryMagazine, would love to keep you informed by postor telephone of special offers and promotions fromthe Immediate Media Company Group. Pleasewrite ‘Do Not Contact Magazines’ or ‘Do NotContact IMC’ if you prefer not to receive suchinformation by post, email or phone. Write ‘NoEmail BBCW’ if you do not wish to receive similaroffers via email from BBC Worldwide. Please writeyour email address and mobile phone number onyour entry so that BBC History Magazine can keepeyou informed of newsletters, special offers andpromotions via email or free text messages. Youmay unsubscribe from receiving these messagesat any time. For more about the BBC Privacy Policysee the box below.

Across1 Rightwing politicalideology which in Europefirst achieved power inItaly in 1922 (7)5 The celebratedcomposer and pianist whose daughter, Cosima, married Richard Wagner after a failed firstmarriage (5)9 13th-century Mongolemperor who furtheredthe conquest of Chinabegun by his grandfather,Genghis (6,4)10 See 12 across.11 See 6 down.12/10 It recorded theresults of the survey,ordered by William theConqueror, of England’slanded wealth (8,4)13 A sudden seizure ofpower in a country, as inChile in 1973 (4)15/31 Revolutionaryleader and first president of the Republic of Chinain 1912 (3,3-3)17 First name of the missioncommander of Apollo 11 (4)19 A great Sumerian city dating back to around 5000 BC (4)21 Title for a knight or baronet:29 across gained this title in 1990 (3)23 The last of the Julio-ClaudianRoman emperors (4)25 The dinosaurs emerged towardsthe end of this period (8)27 Vessel used for forcible transport ofpeople (eg from west Africa to America)in the 16th–19th centuries (6)29 Kingsley, British novelist who madehis name in 1954 with his debut comicnovel about a young lecturer at ared-brick Midlands university (4)30 Untreated sewage in the Thamesproduced this phenomenon in centralLondon in 1858 (5,5)31 See 15 across.32 The British defeated the French atthis battle of the Peninsular War inMarch 1811 (7)

Down2 Paraguay’s capital city, once a majorcentre of Spanish colonial activitysouth-west of Brazil (8)3 Biblical character, a spy of Moseswho, with Joshua, advised immediateHebrew possession of Canaan (5)

4 Members of a major branch ofIslam, originally a political faction ofAli, cousin and son-in-law of theprophet Muhammad (7)5 He would carry a torch forpedestrians in unlit streets;usually a boy (4-3)6 down/11 across Son of John, the15th-century Italian navigator; he alsobecame a navigator and a cartographerto Henry VIII of England (9,5)7 Relating to an ancient Anatolian cityof archaeology and legend, calledIlium by the Romans (6)8 The London vicar __Varah foundedthe Samaritans in 1953 (4)14 Mountain of central Greece; inmythology, the home of the Muses (9)16 Established in Britain in 1948 withthe aim of providing state healthcare‘from the cradle to the grave’ (3)18 The Second World War battleof the Bulge was fought in thisregion (8)20 Alexei, member of the top Sovietleadership following Khrushchev’sousting, whose most radical policieswere kept in check by colleagues (7)22 The Egyptian town giving its nameto the stone, found in 1799, thatproved to be the key to deciphering hieroglyphics (7)

CROSSWORD COMPETITION TERMS & CONDITIONS� The crossword competition is open to all residents of the UK (inc. Channel Islands), aged 18 or over, exceptImmediate Media Company Bristol Limited employees or contractors, and anyone connected with thecompetition or their direct family members. By entering participants agree to be bound by these terms andconditions and that their name and county may be released if they win. Only one entry permitted per person.� The closing date and time is as shown under How to Enter, above. Entries received after that will not beconsidered. Entries cannot be returned. Entrants must supply full name, address and daytime phone number.Immediate Media Company (publishers of BBC History Magazine) will only ever use personal details for theepurposes of administering this competition, and will not publish them or provide them to anyone withoutpermission. Read more about the Immediate Privacy Policy at immediatemedia.co.uk/privacy-policy/� The winning entrants will be the first correct entries drawn at random after the closing time. The prize andnumber of winners will be as shown on the Crossword page. There is no cash alternative and the prize will notbe transferable. Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited’s decision is final and no correspondence relatingto the competition will be entered into. The winners will be notified by post within 20 days of the close of thecompetition. The name and county of residence of the winners will be published in the magazine within twomonths of the closing date. If the winner is unable to be contacted within one month of the closing date,Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited reserves the right to offer the prize to a runner-up.� Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited reserves the right to amend these terms and conditions or tocancel, alter or amend the promotion at any stage, if deemed necessary in its opinion, or if circumstancesarise outside of its control. The promotion is subject to the laws of England.

24 The peninsular location of themajor war brought to an end by theTreaty of Paris in 1856 (6)26 A populous First Nations people of Canada, with two main divisions: theWoodland and the Plains (4)28 Nancy, first woman to take a seatin the British parliament in 1919 (5)

Compiled by Eddie James

SOLUTION TO OUR OCTOBER CROSSWORDAcross: 6 Ebor 7 Jin Dynasty 9 Helsinki 10 Ludwig 11 Brahmi 13 Lysander 14 Assisi 15 Chester 18 Via Appia 20 Leakey 22 Napier 23 Assassin25 Philistine.Down: 1 Abwehr 2 Arms 3 Enfield 4 Byblos 5 Sandinista 7/26 Jenkins’ Ear8 Trireme 12 Hispaniola 14 Ali Pasha 16 Helmsley 17 Saladin 19 Parish 21 Émigré 24 Suez.FIVE WINNERS OF RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARTR Brentnall, Essex; I Collins, Cumbria; D Hughes, Clwyd; M Smith, London;S West, Northamptonshire

Who was Richard Wagner’s father-in-law?(see 5 across) IZE

f

Book worth

£25for 4 winners


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Female pharaohsJoann Fletcher explores

the lives of three of

ancient Egypt’s most

powerful women

In defence of Mary IAnna Whitelock argues that, despite her bloody reputation, Mary was a highly impressive queen cut off in her prime

Vol 15 No 12 – December 2014BBC History Magazine is published byeImmediate Media Company Bristol Limitedunder licence from BBC Worldwide who helpfund new BBC programmes.

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Dr Padma Anagol Cardiff University –Prof Joanna Bourke Birkbeck College,London – Prof Richard Carwardine OxfordUniversity – Dominic Crossley-HollandExecutive Producer, Factual, BBC* – MartinDavidson Commissioning Editor, History,BBC* – Prof Clive Emsley Open University –Prof Richard Evans Cambridge University– Prof Sarah Foot Oxford University –tProf Rab Houston St Andrews University –Prof John Hudson St Andrews University –Prof Lisa Jardine Queen Mary, London –Dr Peter Jones formerly NewcastleUniversity – Prof Denis Judd LondonMetropolitan University – Prof Sir IanKershaw formerly Sheffield University –Robert Ketteridge Head of Documentaries,Factual, BBC* – Christopher Lee formerlyCambridge University – Prof John MorrillCambridge University – Greg NealeFounding editor, BBC History Magazine –eProf Kenneth O Morgan Oxford University –Prof Cormac ó Gráda University College,Dublin – Prof Martin Pugh formerlyNewcastle University – Julian Richardsarchaeologist and broadcaster – Prof SimonSchama Columbia University – Prof MarkStoyle University of Southampton –Prof Miles Taylor Institute of HistoricalResearch* – Dr Simon Thurley chiefexecutive, English Heritage – Prof HelenWeinstein Director of IPUP, Institute for thePublic Understanding of the Past* –Michael Wood historian and broadcaster

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Editor Rob Attar [email protected]

Features editor Charlotte [email protected]

Section editor Matt Elton [email protected]

Production editor Spencer MizenPicture editor Samantha Nott [email protected]

Art editor Susanne FrankDeputy art editors Sarah Lambert and Rachel Dickens

Picture researcher Katherine HallettWebsite editor Emma McFarnonr [email protected]

KamikazeChristopher Harding

analyses the motivations

of the dreaded

Japanese pilots

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My history hero

Pliny was a Roman thinker and writer. After a career in the military, he held various official positions, such as procurator (government financial agent) of Spain. Most of his writings were lost in antiquity, but he is famous as the author of Natural History (Naturalis

Historia). His work drew upon original Greek texts and was the first scientific encyclopaedia. It was for centuries an authority on topics ranging from astronomy to zoology and technology to drugs – until finally being superseded by empirical methods of scientific observation in the 17th century. Commander of the naval fleet in the Bay of Naples, Pliny died when Vesuvius erupted.

When did you first hear about Pliny the Elder?Pliny, or Gaius Plinius Secundus, was born in Como, one of my favourite places on earth. I first came across him during Latin O-level. At the time, he was just another triple-barrelled ancient Roman, probably stalking a gerund or something. It wasn’t until my mid-40s, when I began assembling the first A-Z QI database of interesting stuff, that I realised how much he mattered to me. For those who begin to wonder at the world, all roads lead back to Pliny and his brilliant but slightly mad Natural History – the world’s first encyclopaedia.

What kind of person was he?Pliny was an enthusiast. He was interested in everything and driven by an incurable thirst to learn and to understand how the universe fitted together. He never stopped working. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, once spotted him sunbathing after a light lunch. But, even then, a servant was reading a book aloud to him so he could select extracts from it as he lay stretched out, apparently relaxing. No book was so bad, said Uncle Pliny, that it didn’t contain something worth recording. That’s very QI.

What made Pliny the Elder a hero?Heroic is the only word to describe the Natural History. Its 37 books cover everything Pliny had ever read, seen or heard, from astronomy and zoology to religion and medicine. Pliny claimed that it contained at least 20,000 facts and cites 2,000 sources. As

well as his masterpiece, he published 75 other books on history, grammar and military tactics and left 160 unpublished notebooks, all of which are, sadly, now lost.

What was Pliny’s finest hour?Pliny’s death shows him at his very best – spurred on to bravery by curiosity and kindness – as he sailed to rescue friends who lived close under the erupting Vesuvius in AD 79. He saved his friends but was overcome by the fumes and died at the scene.

Is there anything about him you don’t particularly admire?Although a wonderful writer, with an eye for the memorable detail, Pliny was far too credulous: he was a recorder, not a scientist. We used some of his marvellous medical prescriptions in a very early episode of QI. They are (unintentionally) hilarious – tying fox genitals to your forehead to cure a headache, or removing a piece of bread caught in your throat by putting another piece in your ear.

Can you see any parallels between Pliny’s life and your own?Pliny always had a proper day job. As a successful colonial administrator (he ran Spain and Africa) and a naval commander (like my father), he had to do all his creative work outside office hours. As a TV commercials director during the 1990s, I did the same: reading insatiably and researching for the infant BBC TVshow QI at night or at weekends.

If you could meet him what would you ask him?That’s the wonderful thing about Pliny – you could ask him aboutanything and he’d have a view and (true or not) a fascinating fact.He once wrote that it was a sign of weakness to bother about theform of God. I’d probably press him a bit more about that. But Idefinitely wouldn’t ask him for a hangover cure.

“For those who begin to

wonder at the world, all roads

lead back to Pliny and his

brilliant but slightly mad

Natural History – the world’s

first encyclopaedia”

TV producer John Lloyd chooses

Pliny the ElderAD 23–79

“Heroic is the only word to describe the Natural History. It covers everything Pliny had ever read, seen or heard,” says John Lloyd

John Lloyd, CBE is a writer and producer who created the BBC TV series

QI. The book 1,411 QI Facts to Knock You Sideways by John Lloyd, John

Mitchinson and James Harkin and the QI Elves is published by Faber AN

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Books for Christmas britishmuseum.org/shop

Germany Divided:

Baselitz and his

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John-Paul Stonard

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Ancient lives, new

discoveries: eight

mummies, eight stories

John H Taylor

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Paperback £19.99

Icons

Robin Cormack

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Parthenon:

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David Stuttard

Paperback £9.99

Ming: 50 years

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The Vikings in

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Jayne Carroll, Stephen

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Documents

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sacred land

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