The History Girls

We are accustomed to thinking of the Meon Valley as a peaceful, very rural place, where cows graze in the meadows, sheep crop the short turf on the hills, and grain and rape and watercress are harvested from the fields and paddies that border the river.

I have said before that, from early times, there were many mills along the banks of the meandering Meon. They were mostly used for grinding grain for flour but also for a number of manufacturing processes, including iron working, cloth processing, paper making and tanning – quite heavy industries.

Today I’m going to look at iron working, and next time I will consider brick making. Both industries were centred around the lower reaches of the Meon, at Titchfield and a little further upstream at Funtley, and both have been very important to the economy of the area and the country.

Greenwood’s map from 1826 showing the Titchfield Hundred.
The white arrows and circles show, from the south, “Brick Kilns” next to the River Meon,
and to the east, the “Fareham Kilns”; “Iron Mill”; “Funtley Mill”.

Iron making

Iron smelting had been going on in the Meon Valley since Roman times. Evidence of a Roman “bloomery”, a type of furnace, was found during excavations for one of the Forest of Bere’s car parks in Soberton Heath. This method was used from the Iron Age to mediaeval times, and used charcoal and iron ore. The charcoal would have been made from local timber, in this case trees from the Bere Forest, and the iron ore would presumably have come from the Wealden sandstones, found to the east in Sussex and Kent. Once extracted from the ground, the ore was “roasted” before being smelted with the charcoal in the bloomery furnace, which initially was just a hole in the ground, but later was built above ground out of clay, or stone with a clay lining. The bellows used to increase the heat inside the furnace were operated by hand or foot. The result of the smelting was a spongy mass of iron and slag, which needed to be heated again and hammered, as many times as necessary, to remove the slag and produce iron suitable for making plough-shares, cart fittings, weapons and so on.

A "bloomery" furnace

Later on, iron smelting became increasingly located where water power could be exploited to speed the process.

From the 15^th century, “finery” forges used pig iron to produce bar iron. Charcoal was again used to burn the carbon off the pig iron, and the resulting “bloom” was beaten with a hammer to remove the impurities and then draw the iron out into a bar for working.

A finery forge

A slitting mill, invented in the 16^th century, was basically a watermill for slitting bars of iron into rods. It consisted of two pairs of rollers turned by water wheels.

A slitting mill

The first blast furnace in Britain was recorded in 1496, and they spread across the country during the 1550s. The blast furnaces made pig iron from iron ore, and the basic principle was similar to that of the bloomery, using charcoal, but the smelting temperature was higher. Water was used to drive the bellows to create the draught. Later, in 1709, Abraham Darby used coal/coke as a fuel at his Coalbrookdale (the Midlands) furnaces and, within 100 years, the use of coke was almost universal in iron working.

So what do we know about the Funtley iron mill?

As I have mentioned in a previous post (History Girls, August 2017), until the seventeenth century, the Meon was navigable as far as Titchfield, which at that time was a significant port. Eventually, silting restricted the passage of ships and the busy life of Titchfield as a port began its decline in 1611, when the 3rd Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, took the decision to block off the estuary of the River Meon from the sea. He built a canal adjacent to the river, one of the very first canals to be built in England, and a sea lock was built across the estuary. However, several years before he blocked off the estuary, the Earl had established an iron mill a little upstream at Funtley, powered by the River Meon, which might suggest that he expected (or hoped) his actions over the port to support, even boost, Titchfield’s prosperity (though in many ways it did decline). Over time, the Funtley iron mill produced a huge quantity of iron.

The iron mill seems to have been built on a virgin site by the Earl in 1603-5. As already suggested, its establishment seemed to be part of the Earl’s attempt to restore Titchfield’s economic health but also his own fortunes after his release from the Tower of London. Wriothesley had been deeply involved in the Earl of Essex’s 1601 rebellion against Elizabeth I. He was sentenced to death, but it was commuted to life imprisonment through the intervention of Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s Secretary of State. However, on the accession of James I in 1603, Wriothesley was released and resumed his place at court. And he built his iron mill.

A tin mill was apparently also established in the vicinity in 1623, producing utensils for London and perhaps also Portsmouth, although the origin of the tin itself is not clear but was probably Cornwall. However, in the ensuing decades, the iron mill produced an annual total of c.200 tonnes of iron, so clearly the Earl’s strategy worked, and industry in Titchfield did not slump entirely following the closing of the port. The productivity of the mills was already great enough before 1611 to have seriously depleted the local region’s wood resources, used to make charcoal to fuel the furnaces.

From the 1770s until 1789, the Iron Mill at Funtley was owned by Henry Cort, the inventor of the rolling mill and the puddling furnace, important for the production of iron during the Napoleonic Wars.

As a young man, Cort was a supplier of naval provisions and by the 1770s he had built himself a small fortune. In 1768, he married Elizabeth Heysham, whose uncle William had inherited the family ironmongery business in Gosport, which supplied the navy with mooring chains, anchors and hundreds of different items of ironmongery. Henry took over the business and, after years of experimenting with improved methods for wrought-iron production, in 1775 he bought a forge and slitting mill at Funtley. He wanted continue his experiments, hoping to find an easier way to turn cast iron into wrought iron without the need for hammering.

In 1780, the Royal Navy hired him to re-roll the iron hoops for their barrels. Henry wanted to install new equipment at Funtley, and he turned to Adam Jellicoe, chief clerk in the navy’s pay office, to help finance the venture to the tune of nearly £30,000. (It was apparently normal for pay office clerks to use surplus funds temporarily for their own benefit, though this would later prove Henry’s undoing.) As part of the deal, Samuel, Jellicoe’s son, became a partner in the Funtley works. Jellicoe lived at Fontley House, situated close by the mill, a house that still survives.

In 1783 and 1784 Henry took out patents for new processes, which represented major technological advances in the production of wrought iron. First came the process called “rolling”. In this, the red hot iron was passed through grooved rollers (the design of which he patented) rather than using a hammer to draw the iron out into a bar. The bars of iron were reprocessed several times to produce wrought iron of the desired quality. Rolling replaced hammering for consolidating wrought iron and was 15 times faster.

A rolling mill

He also invented a new process for fining iron, removing the impurities to enable it to be forged. The earlier method of fining used a hearth fuelled with charcoal, but the wood needed for making charcoal had become too scarce to enable the iron industry to expand. Newer blast furnaces were using with coal/coke instead of charcoal. Henry devised a method of “puddling” iron in a coal-burning “reverbatory” furnace, in which the molten iron was stirred with a long rod before being consolidated, and then rolled into bars with the grooved rollers. The new method produced rolled iron of such quality that the navy soon insisted that all iron produced for their use had to meet the same standard.

Because the puddling method used coal/coke instead of expensive charcoal, and because the system could be mechanised, eventually iron production became much cheaper and faster. It also became essential once blast furnaces were used. Before Henry developed his processes, England imported large quantities of wrought iron from abroad, but within a decade of his patents, the country became a major iron exporter.

However, everything was about to go wrong for Henry Cort. For, in 1789, Adam Jellicoe died, and it was discovered that he had indeed used navy money – public funds – to finance Henry’s business, but he hadn’t paid it back and he died with large public debts. His liabilities passed to Henry, who also didn’t have the money to repay the debts. A court requisitioned the works at Funtley and another one at Gosport. Henry was financially ruined. His partnership with Samuel Jellicoe was dissolved, although Samuel was later able to clear the debt. The Crown later gave Samuel possession of the works at Funtley where he remained for the next thirty years.

As an acknowledgment of the value of the patents, the government did grant Henry a small pension in 1794. But despite his inventiveness and the contribution he had made to British industry, Henry Cort died a poor man in 1800.

There is very little left of the iron works at Funtley, apart from some sections of brickwork surrounding the millstream and a plaque.

However, in modern day Fareham, Henry Cort’s work is celebrated in the Henry Cort Millennium Project, a permanent exhibition of the work of twelve blacksmith artists from throughout Europe.

I wrote this:

OK - I know that statement needs a bit of unpacking. You see, what this photograph of Base Court at Hampton Courtdoesn’t show is a series of speakers cunningly hidden under the cobbles alongside the central path and in the wine fountain (out of the picture). It also doesn’t show what they are playing: a rich soundscape of passing carts and horses, the yapping of a lap-dog and the conversations of courtiers, ladies and servants going about their business one morning in 1536.

Eustace Chapuys is extracting gossip from Elizabeth Somerset by the fountain, and later locking horns with the Duke of Norfolk over the refusal of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the Fifth to recognise Anne Boleyn as Queen. Thomas Cromwell is interrogating the kitchen boys about the fancies to be served later that day, and the Lord Chamberlain is assigning rooms and chivvying the servants to get on with the unloading of their master’s goods.

When the team at Hampton Court decided they wanted to recreate in sound the bustle and business of Base Court they turned to design agency Chomko & Rosier, who have already come up with some technologically advanced and sympathetically imagined ways of engaging the public with the context of a particular place, including work for Historic Royal Palaces. They've won awards. So Matt Rosier found a brilliant sound artist called James Bulley, and me.

Readers of this blog will know that I am not a sixteenth century specialist, at all, but before I was a full-time writer I was a TV, film and radio director working on such classics as The Shiny Show and The Numberjacks. Hang on ‘Numberjacks Seaside Adventure’ which I directed between getting the deal for Instruments of Darkness and publication has had 15 MILLION views. Please stand by while I hyperventilate for a bit.

Just imagine if one in ten of those viewers grew up and bought one of my novels. I’d be J.K. Rowling.

....and I’m back in the room.

Anyway, I’m still on a number of mailing lists from my TV days, so I saw Matt’s search for potential writers and sold him on my experience working in production to get myself the gig writing for the Base Court project.

It’s been fascinating. This is a continuous loop of action where visitors might pause for a few seconds, just absorb the atmosphere as they wander by in search of an audio guide, or spend time seeking out bits of gossip and conversation. That means that any conventional ideas of storytelling are out of the window. On the other hand, it all needs to make sense as a coherent whole as invisible characters (Norfolk, Cromwell, the lap-dog) move around the space over the twenty minutes or so the piece runs.

One of the speaker trenches. Glad I'm not involved in that bit.
Or the specifications for the speakers which I hear were very complicated.

In the end I thought of it like the staging of a ball scene in an opera on a grand stage. Lots of characters and individual members of the chorus have their own sequence of actions around the space, all happening at once, and the viewer decides which bits to focus on, or they let the whole thing wash over them. In this case what they get to focus on will depend on where they are.

Because the scene is set at a particularly gossipy time (everyone is waiting to see if Anne will produce a son and wondering about Henry’s wandering eye), coming up with the conversations was relatively straight forward. I plunged into the notes from Hampton Court and, of course into the works of some great historians, such as the lovely Alison Weir. I also freely admit that my ideas of the personalities are deeply influenced by Hilary Mantel. Interestingly, I would find that a problem were I writing a novel about the Court, but not on this project. This project is nothing to do with what I think of the period, so it’s wonderfully ego-less compared with the business of writing novels. Also I know Mantel really, really does her research.

I had, of course, the usual fears about accuracy, but not too badly, because everything I wrote was checked by Tracey Borman. (God, I wish I could get Amanda Vickery to go through my Crowther and Westerman novels. Or maybe not.).

The real joy of the process comes after the writing though. Working with actors again is such a pleasure, they bring so much to the text and convey with an inflection, a breath what would take you forever to get across on the page.

Then there's the edit. The sound I’ve been involved with in the past is designed to come out as a stereo mix from your TV while you sit and watch the pictures. This is a world you can walk around in, and which will sound completely different depending on where you are in the space and when.

Mixing on the move

James did most of the work of putting the piece together, and creating the underlying atmosphere, then we gathered to listen, discuss, move things about, add space, swap lines, find lute music and decide what a goblet being chucked on the cobbles sounds like. The back and forth is great. With novels, after months working in isolation, the whole process of waiting for comments, responding to them, working out the ramifications of changes through a text of 120K words is slow and painstaking. Here decisions are quick, the effects immediate, and the ownership shared. It’s…enlivening.

As with novel editing though, a lot depends on the relationships you have with the people you are working with and at the moment I’ve lucked into working with people I thoroughly like and admire. Which is nice.

I'm sure I just said something really useful to James about the mix here.
By the way, this is a corner of Hampton Court, not James's studio which is much more comfortable.

I don’t seem to have put them off with my helpful comments yet either. Since recording Base Court, we’ve also been working on both sound and vision elements for the Tudor Kitchens.

The research and writing has been more of a challenge this time, as it involves delving deep into the specifics and practicalities of this huge operation rather than the skim of gossip, but the same pleasures pertain - having the experts on hand to consult throughout including Richard Fitch and his team, the collaboration with Matt, James and now Kyle Waters on images, and the practical, hands on elements of filming.

Oi!! You scum.#BoilingHouse pic.twitter.com/RPWJLPCGsE
— Richard Fitch (@tudorcook) February 15, 2018

I still love the megalomaniac’s paradise of world-building in novels, but it is a great and particular pleasure to get out into the world and be part of a team.

Oh and as I have a longstanding and almost Trumpain tendency to try and rope family members into things wherever possible, I just thought I’d point out that the cute little voice of ‘0’ and ‘1’ in that Numberjacks video is now one of the teenaged servant boys being quizzed by Cromwell in Hampton Court. Thank you, Dylan.

If you want to see what we’ve been up to, the Base Court soundscape is now live, and the Tudor Kitchens should be ready for inspection by early May.

www.imogenrobertson.com

I've been having a lot of conversations recently about research, not just how much writers need to do but what type. Whatever the downsides of the web with its never-ending news feeds and all-too distracting social media, we are incredibly lucky to live in a time of such easy access to information. Like most of us I spent a lot of time buried in books but I can also be regularly found lost in articles and images on the internet and I'm beginning to think I couldn't survive without Pinterest. When you can, however, there's no substitute for getting out into the places you write about and letting your senses do the thinking. To this end I've spent a fair bit of time lately wandering the corridors of power, past and present, and one of my biggest takeaways? I really am rather small or, to put it another way, the architects of power did their job very well.

Westminster Hall's Hammer Beam Roof Commissioned 1393

Architecture is used by political leaders to seduce, to impress and to intimidate.(The Edifice Complex, Deyan Sudjic).

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Westminster Hall, the starting point for my recent let's-get-away-from-the-desk meanderings. As most people are aware, very little of the medieval palace survives, most of the complex having been destroyed in the 1834 fire. Remarkably, however, given the fires, floods, bombs and death-watch beetles which had other ideas, the hammer beam roof commissioned by Richard II in 1393 remains intact. The hall itself was begun in 1097 but it was Richard who had the Norman pillars removed and the wooden arch (the largest medieval timber roof in Northern Europe) installed. It spans 60 feet and was incredibly dangerous to construct as the great beams, which together weigh over 600 tons, had to be hoisted to a height of over 90 feet. Crane up and you can see the carved angels and tracery work that was started but not finished and crane up again and there is Richard's white hart badge still edging the walls. It is a vast space, still filled with scuttling people clutching papers and quite a contrast to the labyrinth of corridors and tiny chambers that make up the back stage of the Palace - I was lucky enough to get that tour too - although that also retains a medieval feel, all shadowy corners and plots.

Medieval shield painted onto the nave wall

I did even more craning up when I crossed the road to Westminster Abbey where you need an eagle eye to spot the fragments of medieval paintings and shields hidden among the main church's monuments. As you come in, and along the nave, there are a series of carved sheilds of arms, dating from 1245 and 1272 and commemorating the church's aristocratic benefactors, including Fulk Fitzwarren, William Ferrars, Earl of Derby, Roger de Mowbray and Hugo de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The shields are easy to miss among the huge marble sculptures now filling the walls and there is nothing on the audio tour about them but the guides are a happy fount of knowledge. As you continue round the Abbey, the medieval touches become easier to spot, culminating in the series of paintings of the Apocalypse in the Chapter House which date from 1375-1404 with a wonderful set of lower friezes from about a century later filled with amazing birds and animals. And you go past England's oldest door, from 1050, to get to it - it's like being given a never-ending box of chocolates.

Richard 11

The Abbey is, of course, best known as the burial place of England's monarchs and the number, and beauty, of the tombs is quite overwhelming. For me, however, the most fascinating of the Abbey's monuments comes at the end - presented almost as an after-thought The huge portrait of Richard II is contemporary, commissioned by the King, and was painted in the 1390s by Andre Beauneveu. Restored and reframed in the nineteenth century, its vivid greens, crimsons and golds look freshly done and even the loss of some of the gilt work does not detract from the power it is meant to evoke. And power is what this painting is all about. Richard was devoted to Westminster Abbey and to St Edward the Confessor and he rebuilt the northern entrance and some bays of the nave but this painting was not simply an addition to the Abbey's riches - it was a reminder to an unruly London where power really lay. Like the Palace of Westminster, it is impossible not to feel tiny when you enter the Abbey and overawed. Add to that the hidden nature of much of the church's ceremonies during this period, performed behind the rood screen, and your insignificance grows. Standing next to the painting under the soaring ceiling and imagining it on display at the far end of the nave with Richard seated below it on an elevated throne, demanding his new title of Majesty, says everything you need to know about power and tyranny. It is impossible not to shiver.

Citta Sul Mare, Sassetta

So Scotland to London and back home again and another group of buildings pointing to the heavens and shouting look up and fear me. Fourteenth century Tuscany was riven with politically charged violence and raids as city states, and their competing families, fought to control each other. One of the impacts of this can be seen in the ruined towers which still dot the landscape. These were used as homes and warehouses and were a very visible stamp of authority - the higher the tower, the more powerful the family. Built either from white albarese stone or reddish brick, they had crenellated tops, small Romanesque windows, narrow porticoes and - when a family built a number close together as they often did - holes to support movable connecting bridges. Stretching up to 180 feet, each floor had one room and floors were reached by winding stairs set into the walls or ladders. At the height of the building craze (pun intended), there were over 200 in Florence and Lucca and perhaps as many as 100 in Siena (the inspiration behind the contemporary Sassetta painting) and San Gimignano where the most preserved examples remain. And the sizes changed - as towers were seized they could be reduced or heightened depending on the message the new owner wished to transmit, a moving picture which puts me rather in mind of the opening of Game of Thrones.

Tower of Hallbar & Me

The WIP will get me to Tuscany but, in the meantime, we have our own version of the Tuscan towers in Scotland, one of which, the Tower of Hallbar, is on my doorstep. Built between the fourteenth and sixteenth century, these tower house castles have some differences (including more elaboration) but largely follow the Tuscan pattern. Hallbar (which is privately owned and can now be rented) is 5 storeys high, has walls up to 1.6m thick and is very narrow. Each level originally had a single room, with a winding stair, built into the walls, wrapping around and linking the floors. At the basement level was a low-vaulted cellar. If you've any doubts about the scale of these things, that's me feeling very dwarfed by the door.

Nowadays we often associated high rises with the damage caused to working class communities or the horror of Grenfell. The new builds dominating our skylines, however, are increasingly once more becoming the preserve of the wealthy - we are again looking up at temples to power and greed but perhaps our shivering needs a different aspect. London's 95 storey Shard, owned by the Qatari royal family and the city's tallest building at 390.7m, currently has 10 of its multiple million pound apartments lying empty and is the target of protesters infuriated by such wasted space in a country in the grip of a housing crisis. The spectre of ghost towers - high rise homes built for the wealthy but standing empty - is becoming a real issue in the capital. The Observer newspaper recently revealed that builders are currently constructing towers in London containing 7,749 homes priced between £1m and £10m, and have planning rights to build another 18,712 high-end apartments and townhouses, despite concern over the number already standing half-empty and the lack of affordable housing. In 2016-2017 only 6,432 affordable homes were built.

When we look up now at the works of the mighty, it really is hard not to despair.

Last year I and my husband went on holiday to the Bavarian Alps, in the region around Salzburg; the name may conjure up an opera festival nowadays, but it means: Salt city. Other names in the area also conjure up salt; the river Salzach, for example, but it's not so obvious, even perhaps if you're a Welsh speaker, that Bad Reichenhall refers to salt. It is so, though. The Celtic name for salt is Hall, and there were once more Celts (I'm not going to get into the argument here about who the Celts actually were) in South Germany and northern Austria, than there ever were in the British Isles. The name element Hall pops up over and over again in this area. Three examples spring to my mind; Hallein, Hallgarten (salt garden), and Bad Reichenhall, the second element of which means 'Reich in Hall', or 'rich in salt.' Reichenhall became a spa (Bad) because people thought the salt had healing qualities and you can buy a huge variety of bath salts (literally) of different kinds in the area and notably in the museum shop.

Simon Scharfenberger (Own work) Wikimedia Commons

Bad Reichenhall has been an area of salt extraction probably since the Bronze Age, but the first documents referring to the salines there occur in the 7th century. By the seventeenth century, they were producing about seven and a half thousand kg of salt per annum.
Salt was, of course, a hugely valuable resource; it was essential for the preservation of food through the long winters, particularly meat. Otherwise, you'd have to live on sauerkraut, which is a good thing, but doesn't contain much protein. It was, essentially, white gold.

However, if your idea of a salt mine is based on the mines in Cheshire, where rock salt is hacked out of caves for refinement, you have to change your ideas. The salt which was, and still is, extracted in Bad Reichenhall, is a saline suspension, which is pumped up from below. There are two salt works in Reichenhall, but we chose to visit the old one, the Alte Saline. Here you can see the early nineteenth century machinery, still functioning throughout the day, powered by water coming down from the nearby mountain, which ran over enormous wheels and fuelled the pumps.

You can go down into the bowels of the earth beneath the Alte Saline, walk along passages slimed green (and probably salty) and see them working. Below is a picture of the salt spring, welling up from below. It was a hazardous business to dig out these tunnels, among the reservoirs of saline. We entered one room which was once such a reservoir. When the workmen broke through into it, twenty-two of them were drowned.

Either the guide didn't tell us, or we didn't hear (the Saline is a noisy place), but I assume that the saline is actually the result of groundwater washing through rock salt, the remnant, as in Cheshire, of ancient seas. The picture below, from the museum at the Alte Saline, shows the salt workers getting precipitated salt from the drying pans; it was packed damp into barrels, and formed into cakes for transportation by road and river. It was a hot and undoubtedly uncomfortable job. The next photograph shows the same process in the early twentieth century, and then you can see the salt being packed up, also in the early twentieth century, but in the new salt works. The Alte Saline went out of production in 1834, after a fire destroyed the works. Nowadays it is a museum only, but one of the most beautiful industrial buildings I have ever seen.

Originally, the saline was processed at the extraction site, but drying it outrequired an enormous amount of fuel, and with time, the area immediately round Bad Reichenhall was deforested. In 1816, the Royal Salt Councillor of Bavaria, Georg von Reichenbach, was commissioned to lead an ambitious project, the 'saline pipeline' (Soleleitungsweg), which channelled liquid saline to forested areas, where new salt works were set up, such as Berchtesgaden. There was a series of pumping stations to deal with the inevitable differences in level of the pipeline. A remnant of this pipeline can be seen above the lovely village of Ramsau, where Joseph Mohr, of Silent Night fame, was once curate, and where we stayed in a house alongside the old salt road last summer.

Ramsau church,

We walked the Soleleitungsweg on a day of threatening thunderstorm. It's an idyllic track now, leading through fields of wonderful wildflowers, the haunt of butterflies, bees, and of course Alpine cows with clonking bells.

You need a sharp eye to see the old wooden boards on the track, and we missed several on the outward walk, but picked them up later on our return. You can see below, from the information boards on the path, what it once looked like, boarded over all the way. One thing that puzzled us was how they dealt with leaks, which must have occurred from the joints in the wooden pipes, which were simply hollowed-out tree trunks. I suppose they swelled with the liquid, and were preserved by the saline, but nevertheless, leaks there must have been. Perhaps they were just accepted as inevitable.

This is what it looks like nowadays.

.

and here is a stand of the old wooden pipes, preserved under a roof, the last remnant of what was an impressive and groundbreaking piece of engineering.

All photographs are mine, except for the one of the Alte Saline. Here is a link to their website

Temple Church exterior. Wikipedia

A building that has featured in several of my novels is the Temple Church in London, where the great William Marshal whose life story. I have told in The Greatest Knight and The Scarlet Lion, and the forthcoming Templar Silks is buried with two of his sons, William II and Gilbert. William Marshal and his family were associated with the Templar order throughout their lives and their burial in the Temple Church reflects their commitment to the order Knights.

The rectangular nave of the Temple Church, originally part of the 1240 improvements.

The Temple Church in London is a beautiful building of mellow golden stone set within the tranquil labyrinth of The Inns of Court, and it has its own very special almost ethereal atmosphere even though it could not in itself be called an ethereal buildings.

What you see now and experience now iis the result of almost a thousand years of development and restoration. The church may retain the ground plan of the original, but there is not a great deal left of that first building. Most of what a visitor sees has either being restored or interpreted at some point or another in history.

Thought to be the tomb effigy of William Marshal.

It is believed that the Templar order of warrior monks came to England in 1128 and around that time establish themselves in Holborn, on the site of what is now Southampton House. They build a church of Caen stone with a round at one end, emulating the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. However, within a few decades. They had outgrown their original premises and moved to the current location the 'New Temple' closer to the River Thames. The new church was consecrated in 1185 by Heraclius, the visiting patriarch of Jerusalem who was in England to offer the throne of Jerusalem to Henry II (who declined). During the same visit he was to consecrate the Hospitaller's establishment in Clerkenwell.

Google Map View. Click to enlarge. The Temple Church is centre picture just about the greenery.

The Templars' growing influence, logistical expertise, their power and the security of their establishments made them perfect for the role of 'bankers' to people who wished to deposit their treasure or make large-scale financial transactions and who wanted to know that their money would be safe. The Bishop of Ely ( a post that went with the office of royal treasurer), had a right of lodging at the Temple during the Angevin period.

in 1312, the Templar order was dissolved and their property was given into the keeping of the Hospitallers, although there were various legal disputes and the Hospitallers did not gain possession until 1338. Within 50 years of this date, the apprentices of the Law acquired the tenancy and have occupied the Temple grounds ever since.

The Round in 1792

The West door of the Round is the only part of the Temple Church to show its original surface to the world. Even prior to bomb damage in World War II, (after which major repair work had to be undertaken), the church had been restored in the 19th century to as near to the original as possible according to the vision and understanding of 19th-century historians, architects and antiquarians which in essence meant that a sledgehammer was taken to crack a nut.

The 13th century church had a rectangular choir of five bays and was completed in 1240 during the reign of Henry III, who, at one time, had intended to be buried here, but then embarked on his great Westminster project instead. But before Henry III's remodelling which at least gives us the current shape of the church, there had been a much smaller predecessor i.e. the church consecrated by patriarch Heraclius in 1185. There had also been an early 13th century chapel tacked onto the side of the Round with a crypt beneath it. The crypt is still there and also another underground chamber under the south side of the chancel, this time belonging to the late 12th century. This was excavated in the mid-20th century. It was built before the 1240 chancel, and was low and long with a stone bench running along the north and south walls and evidence suggesting that there was an altar in the East. One speculation is that this may have been the Templar strongroom because it was protected by thick walls and that the holiness of an altar incorporated an extra safety feature

The Round in the 18th century showing one of the shops attached to the church

With the lawyers ensconced in the Temple area, the Round was used as a sort of general waiting-room for people who had business with the lawyers. The West porch became a shop with Chambers above it and there were shops all along the south wall. The churchyard had a tailor's shop and there were other sundry shacks and hovels built in this area. Laundresses did their washing in the churchyard and hung up their clothes. Sometimes the House of Commons would use the church as a committee room.

In 1666 the Round was slightly damaged in The Great Fire of London and in 1682 Sir Christopher Wren suggested that $1,400 should be spent repairing it. The suggested repairs included raising the level of the floor, adding wainscotting up to window level in the Round and in the chancel, and whitewashing everything else. Also painting the effigies of the Templars. An organ was also to be made. The Middle Temple lawyers wished the organ to be made by Father Smith, but the Inner Temple had their own candidate in mind in Renatus Harris. Smith and Harris both made organs and they were set up in the Temple church and then tried out at services. But no one could reach an agreement. Finally in 1685 they decided to ask the Keeper of the Great Seal, Lord Guildford who was a great music lover to listen and decide. Unfortunately he died before he had made his decision known so the task was passed on to his successor Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys (the dreaded 'hanging' Judge Jeffreys) who decided that the Smith organ was the best and that Harris should be given a consolation sum of £200.

A 19th century restoration of one of the head corbels in the Round of the Temple Church

Wren's decor of wainscots and whitewash remained in situ until the 19th century, although at some point during the 18th century, buttresses and battlements were added to the church exterior. It had been decided in 1811 that no more burials were to take place within the church because the slabs kept getting broken. Restorations were carried out in 1828 by one Robert Smirke. The remains of St Anne's chapel were removed and portions of the West Door were recut.

The chapel of St Ann, the crypt and the belfrey in 1826

A crypt adjoining the south side of the Round Tower was in such a ruinous state that it was destroyed and the the legal records it had contained were removed elsewhere for safe keeping. The head corbels and arcading around the edge of the round were recut by masons and the original heads were thrown away. The pillars of the round and nave were replaced with 42 new pillars of Purbeck marble. The work continued over several decades and it was the quaintly named Sidney Smirke and Decimus Barton who made a full and thorough job of the restoration of the church when 'every ancient surface was repaired away or renewed' except for the vaulted ceiling of the choir.

Victorian Gentleman plaster cast of William Marshal

The effigies of the knights Templar within the church were re-restored as part of the of the mid 19th century 'upgrade.' In 1840, Mr Edward Richardson cleaned the effigies, removing the earlier coats of paint and recutting and restoring the figures to the best of his ability by joining the broken fragments and using artisitc license on the features where they were beyond recall. He then coated them with bronze paint and in so doing destroyed all traces of earlier colour. It is his inventive restoration from which the V&A plaster casts of the Temple Church knights have been taken, so if William Marshal the plaster cast effigy resembles a Victorian gentleman, then Richardson's imaginitive restoration is the reason why.

In 1941 the ceiling again survived, this time incendiary bomb damage during the Blitz but the Purbeck marble columns (themselves part of the 19th century restoration) split in the heat and had to be replaced. The effigies were in a poor condition 'smashed to smithereens' according to Elizabeth and Wayland Young in their book Old London Churches, but since then they have been yet again restored.

This is just a short blog post on some of the alterations and restorations that have altered the structure and appearance of the Temple Church throughout its long and eventful life and my brush strokes are broad with moments of detail here and there. It would take a whole book to write its story and indeed it was the authors of those books I consulted to write this article.

The Temple Church has weathered is alterations well, and while individual elements of its facelifts might horrify historians and interested parties (myself being one of them where the Templar effigies are concerned), nevertheless, there is no denying the beauty of this wonderful old building and the wonderful ambience of the sum of its parts.

Books consulted in the writing of this article:

The Temple Church: A short history and Description with plan and illustrations by George Worley. Bell's Cathedral Series 1907

Old London Churches by Elizabeth and Wayland Young published by Faber and Faber 1956

Temple Church Monument being a report to the Two Honourable Societies of the Temple by Mrs. Arundell Esdaile, published by Geo. Barber & Son ltd. 1933

Elizabeth Chadwick's new novel Templar Silks which is about William Marshal's pilgrimage to Jerusalem and involves the Temple Church in London in a few scenes is published on the first of March 2018.

I passionately wish this was ‘History.’ This is a photo of Marcos Amaral Gourgel, the 35-year-old Portuguese man who froze to death on the night of February 13th in a subway just by Westmister tube station, on Parliament’s doorstep.This morning, within ten minutes of leaving my flat in north London, I passed three homeless men sitting or lying on the pavement, just round the corner from a whole block of houses that has been empty and boarded up for years. How is it possible that a country that prides itself on giving everyone free health care allows people to die of hypothermia on the streets of its richest city?

In 1990 I published a book of interviews with homeless women and politicians called Bed and Breakfast: Women and Homelessness Today. I talked to a lot of women, most of whom had children, who were living in temporary accommodation in squalid hotels in Bayswater. At that time, Westminster Council was selling off 50% of its council housing. Theresa Gorman, who had been a Westminster Councillor and was then the Conservative MP for Billericay, said, ”The Government (Thatcher’s) sees putting money into council development as a way of just rebuilding or bolstering the Labour vote.’ At the bottom of her letters was a quotation from Frederick Bastiat:” The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”

Now, of course, you would be lucky to be given somewhere to stay anywhere as central as Bayswater and many London councils are giving homeless people 24 hours to accept private rented homes in the West Midlands or Essex, far away from friends and family and schools where their kids are known. These Londoners are warned that if they refuse the council will consider them to have become “intentionally homeless” and withdraw support.

In 2018 homelessness is far more visible all over the country and shames us all. No government has made any serious attempt to improve the situation. According to the Joseph Rowntree Trust, homelessness has risen by at least 32% since 2009/10. Jon Sparkes, the chief executive of the homelessness charity Crisis believes that the new Housing Act will help. Recently, Windsor Council proposed to fine beggars and rough sleepers £100, but backed down after a public uproar.

The attitude that poor people are to blame for their poverty and should be punished for it is not new. The Poor Law Act of 1388 restricted the movement of labourers, when they became scarce after the Black Death, and led to the state, or parish, becoming responsible for the support of the poor. A distinction was made between "the genuinely unemployed and the idler" - the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor - and this attitude still dominates housing policy.

Monasteries provided a great deal of charitable relief and employment. After the Reformation the Elizabethan Poor Laws provided support for ” the aged, sick, and infant poor,” and the workhouse was invented. Its function was to keep the ‘destitute’ off the streets and conditions in the workhouses ensured that people forced to accept their charity were worse off than the lowest paid worker: “If paupers are miserable, paupers will decline in multitude. It is a secret known by all ratcatchers.”

In 1834 more workhouses were built and continued to exist until the NHS turned many of them into hospitals in the late 1940s. I can remember old people who had grown up in poverty telling me that, as children, they were threatened with ‘being sent to the workhouse.’ As a seven-year-old, Charlie Chaplin was sent to the Lambeth New Workhouse on Renfrew Road in Kennington, (now a cinema museum threatened with closure).

In the early 20th century Sydney and Beatrice Webb advocated replacing the Poor Law with public services administered by local authorities. The first old age pension was introduced by the Government in 1908, paying five shillings a week to men (presumably, old women were considered dispensable). At a time when the average life expectancy was 47, the pension kicked in at 70. Ten years later, housing subsidies were introduced to make council rents more affordable.

In 1948 the Poor Law of 1834 was finally repealed and replaced with the National Assistance Act. This stated that local authorities ( at that time, specifically social services), had to help homeless people who were ordinarily resident in their area. To quote from the Fabian Society website:” Beveridge was unable to resolve ‘the problem of rent’ and come up with a fair way of supporting people with housing costs under a contributory, universal system. The costs of housing were and are so variable that any flat-rate subsidy would either cause real hardship or give some money they had no need for.”

History can explain why homeless people freeze to death on our pavements but cannot justify it. Over the last few decades a combination of local authorities starved of funding, outrageous property prices and greedy private landlords has destroyed the fragile safety net that once existed. I’m sure that in the future our callousness towards homeless people will seem as cruel as the indifference of our ancestors to slavery.

In less that two weeks time, 8th March, it will be the publication date for the paperback of THE LOST GIRL. I have already written here on our lovely HG site about the inspiration for the modern half of the story, which is partially set over the weekend of Friday 13th November 2015 when a series of coordinated terrorist attacks hit Paris, killing over one hundred and injuring more than four hundred.

In THE LOST GIRL, an Englishwoman, Kurtiz, is still looking for, praying to find, her teenage daughter, Lizzie, who has been missing for four years. For reasons revealed within the novel, Kurtiz believes that Lizzie is attending a rock concert, an Eagles of Death Metal concert, which is performing that Friday evening at the Bataclan concert hall, 50 Boulevard Voltaire, not far from Bastille in Paris.

I thought this month I would pull up a few facts about the famous old theatre, the Bataclan, that witnessed such horrors on that fateful night. It is a very curious looking building, Chinese-style, and rather stops you in your tracks if you happen to walk by it without knowing of its existence.

Here is a photograph with its original pagoda:

And in 2008, without the pagoda:

As you can see from the photos, at some point during the twentieth-century the pagoda was removed. With or without its crown, it is an odd piece of architecture for central Paris. It was designed by the architect Charles Duval in 1864 and opened its doors for the first time in February 1865.
Duval, who was trained by his architect father, was also known for his design of another theatre in Coulommiers, east of Paris. He loved theatres and had originally dreamed of becoming an actor.

Why such a piece of chinoiserie? I have no precise answer except that France was taking an avaricious interest in China at this time, gaining in Indo-China. It originally entered Vietnam to give itself a southern foothold into China. France was determined to upstage the British and its holds within the Asian continent.
Between 1857 and 1860, France joined forces with their rivals, the British, to fight the Second Opium War. So, stories from the Far East would have been regularly reported in the newspapers.

The Bataclan theatre's original name was Le Grand Café Chinois. Opulent, capacious cafés were very à la mode in Paris during this period when the theatre and revue scenes were really flourishing. Some of the largest in the world such, as Le Grand Café Capucines, are still going strong. Capucines draws in a huge tourist trade as well as the audiences from the opera at the celebrated Palais Garnier, which is just across the street and was a new attraction to the city back then. An architectural masterpiece finally completed and opened in 1875.

The audience at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, the birthplace of Jacques Offenbach's operettas (1860)

When it first opened its doors, Le Grand Café Chinois was a lively dance and music theatre with its stage and bistro/bar on the ground floor and an immense dance floor up on the higher level.
During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, it was used as an ambulance base. Around this time, after the brief war, France's defeat and the fall of its Second Empire, although I cannot pinpoint the precise date, this appears to be when Le Grand Café Chinois was rechristened. It became Ba-ta-clan and then Bataclan. The nomenclature Ba-ta-clan is interesting because it refers to the title of an operetta, a"chinoiserie musicale" by Offenbach first performed in 1855, but performed at the Bataclan only in 1885.

Ba-ta-clan is also French slang for 'all that jazz'.

The music hall changed management yet again in the 1890s when it was bought by a famous café-concert singer, Paulus, who towards the end of his career made a series of five short films with George Méliès entitled Paulus Chantant (1897). When showing the films, Méliès had Paulus sit behind the cinema screen and sing the song of the title, thus giving the illusion of cinema sound. Alas, these films appear to be lost now. I have searched all over to find them.

Amongst Bataclan performers at the turn of the century was Buffalo Bill Cody. By 1910, just after the death of Paulus, it offered almost exclusively revue-style shows. For its time, it was 'trendy', offering opportunities to young, up and coming artists such as Mistinguet, Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf. Rolling Stone magazine much later described it as, 'one of the funkiest music venues in the city.' Even back at the beginning of the twentieth century that description appears to have been appropriate.

Mistinguet, actress-dancer, 1900

In 1926, due to financial difficulties, the place changed ownership once more, but this time it was transformed into a cinema and remained a cinema until 1969 when after refurbishment, it was re-opened as a concert hall.

I cannot describe how thrilled I was when I discovered the period of the building's life as a cinema.

My second leading character in THE LOST GIRL is Marguerite, an eighty-something retired actress. She walks into the bar where Kurtiz, anxious and uncertain, has settled for the evening, to await the news of her daughter. The two women, seated alongside one another, begin to talk, sharing confidences; intimacies you might only divulge to a stranger.
All the while, although unbeknownst to both women at this stage, the terrorist attacks are beginning to unfold. The Bataclan was the last location of the evening to be targeted.

I was able to use the Bataclan in both the women's stories. When Marguerite was a teenager dreaming of the silver screen, she needed a humble part-time job to feed and keep herself in Paris while she was looking for, auditioning for her "big break". The idea of her selling tickets at a cinema was perfect, she would be quite naturally drawn to cinemas. The Bataclan then, a cinema in post-war Paris. There, quite by chance, she meets a young Englishman who falls in love with her and their stories become intertwined.

No spoilers.

One of the great joys of the research work for a novel or film is discovering threads that can be knitted together. I never know where my stitches, threads, will all lead when I begin to write, so when something pops up at you that you feel instinctively is a gift, the work becomes very exciting.
Film, photography, the stage, all of these are subjects that both women in the book are passionate about. These interests bond them. However, as their stories unfold, as the horrors of the coordinated attacks are revealed, we discover that there is another element, far less expected, that brings these two female strangers together. One that neither could have envisaged at the beginning of the evening when they were both strangers sitting alongside one another, ordering their drinks.

The Bataclan has an audience capacity of 1,500. It was packed to the gills on that fateful night in 2015. I discovered the horrors of what was taking place on that Friday 13th on television when I switched it on to watch the news.
I have written a short piece for the Penguin website,
https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/features/2018/feb/carol-drinkwater-thelostgirl/

about my inspirations for THE LOST GIRL.
The Bataclan and its history is certainly a rich part of my story.

On 11th March 1991, the Bataclan was listed amongst the Monuments Historiques of France.

Sting's concert 12th November 2016

After the attacks, the venue was closed for refurbishment and as a mark of respect for the lives lost. The city was in shock, grieving. The ghosts haunted the music hall, haunted the neighbourhood. It re-opened its doors one year later on Saturday 12th November 2016, the eve of the anniversary. Sting was the performer booked to bring the venue back to life, to make the first step towards exorcising the demons. The concert sold out in minutes even though the nation's reaction to staging a performance there, so soon if ever, was received with a mixed range of emotions.

A formidable security operation was put in place for the reopening. Streets were cordoned off and were patrolled by heavily armed police and CRS, riot squads. Extraordinarily, courageously, some of the audience who had been present at the Eagles of Death Metal concert, 364 days earlier, returned. Several explained to the media that it was really important for them to be there. To celebrate the music, to begin to live again. To help the healing process. That Saturday's edition of the daily newspaper, Libération, praised those who were going to be present; christening them, Génération Bataclan, for their opposition to intolerance and for their faith in France's future.

An organisation has been founded, Génération Bataclan. Its members are fighting to have a memorial, a statue or monument, erected across the street from the Bataclan, to commemorate those who lost their lives during those tragic attacks.

Here are two from the short list of ten proposed:

Regeneration, beginning again, is at the very heart, the core, of THE LOST GIRL.

13th November 2016

President Hollande, on the first anniversary of the attacks, laying a wreath outside the concert hall. He and Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, visited each of the six sites where the massacres had taken place one year earlier, and read out the names of everyone who had been injured or murdered. France remembers.

'Rock on, Noble House,' as I have heard say in France of this revered establishment, the Bataclan.

One last link, if you have time and enjoy popular music. The late Jeff Buckley played the Bataclan to tremendous acclaim on 11th February 1995. His concert has become legendary in the world of rock greats. Here is his rendition of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah It is available on his short album, Jeff Buckley Live From the Bataclan.

It seems a fitting tribute.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8AWFf7EAc4

I sincerely hope you will enjoy THE LOST GIRL. The reviews have, so far, been amazing.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

Only this month I realised that although I was not born until 1952, I am among the first generation of women born in Britain to have the right to vote: my mother was born before 1918. A few months after my 18th birthday, in 1970, I was also among the first Britons under 21 years to vote. I knew it was a big deal, but until I read Diane Atkinson’s excellent new book Rise Up women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes, I didn’t realise what extraordinary sacrifices so many women had made for British women. Apparently, my paternal grandmother chained herself to the railings of Buckingham Palace. Sadly, she died before I was born, so I can’t ask her about it. But this energetic and detailed history brings the fight to life, from the Chartists of the 1830s, to the start of women’s suffrage in 1918.

Suffragette chained to a railing, later copied by activists chaining
themselves to trees to demonstrate against road-building.

A question often asked is ‘What is the difference between a suffragist and a suffragette?’ Suffragists hoped to achieve votes for women by gentle persuasion. Although there were fewer suffragettes, they were noisier, more militant, often violent, and so got noticed. They showed, as many activists have done since, that being polite and asking nicely may not get you as far as attacking property and blowing up post boxes.

`Deeds Not Words!' was the suffragette's slogan on bombed post-boxes, acts of arson and works of art.

From the start of Edward VII’s reign in 1901, the suffragettes’ actions were public and militant and as a result, they endured public derision, assault and imprisonment. In the Great Pilgrimage of 1913, courageous suffragettes marched from Newcastle, Cromer, Bangor and Land’s End, meeting in a rally of 50,000 people in Hyde Park. Women of all classes walked together, camped together and stayed in each other’s homes. They also endured being stoned, beaten up, having dead rats thrown at them and their speeches interrupted. But it gave them even more strength, solidarity and purpose; and they refused to be crushed.

Suffragette rally in Trafalgar Square.

Atkinson relates the tales of women from all classes who fought with flair, energy and imagination: mill workers and actors; teachers and doctors; seamstresses and scientists; clerks and boot-makers. The stars of the suffragette movement are well known: the Pankhurst family, Emmeline and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia; and Emily Wilding Davidson who became a martyr after running under the King’s race horse at Epson. There were also female students at Oxford University (a rare breed) who opened a hat- repair shop to raise funds; the Honorable Evelina Haverfield whose talent was to stand beside police horses during demonstrations and get them to lie down; and Mary Richardson who after slashing Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery was sentenced to six months imprisonment with hard labour.

Suffragette Dora Thewlis is arrested in 1907.

Phyllis Keller broke the windows of anti-suffragist Lord Curzon and in her Holloway prison cell longed for Camp coffee and potted meat. The government refused to treat suffragettes as political prisoners, so they stopped eating and went on hunger strike. And the stronger the women, the crueler became their punishments. Kitty Marion, a comedian by profession, was force-fed lumpy soup through a tube 232 times during her three months sentence in Holloway Prison in 1914. It made little difference to her nutrition: she vomited for hours after each ‘meal’ and lost 36 lb. “I found blessed relief to my feelings in screaming, exercising my lungs and throat after the frightful sensation of being held in a vice, choking and suffocating,” she wrote later.

This poster of a suffragette being force-fed in prison haunted me as a child.
I could not understand how women and doctors could do this.

The infamous ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ (officially the “Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-health) Act, 1913”) allowed suffragettes early release if they had been on hunger strike, but once their health was restored, they were re-arrested, and the starvation and force-feeding began again. Atkinson relates the stories of many who endured horrific prison sentences, when they could easily have led comfortable lives as dutiful wives or daughters. While recovering from a hunger strike at home, Annie Kenney donned black clothes and escaped from the police by climbing down a rope ladder at night. After secretary Hilda Burkitt and bookkeeper Florence Tunks were arrested for a campaign of arson in Suffolk, Burkitt told the judge to put on his black cap “and pass sentence of death or not waste his breath”. You have to admire these gutsy women, and what they did for us, the next generations.

'How women will answer Mr Asquith'
the new British Prime Minister in 1908.

At the outbreak of the war in August 1914, an amnesty was announced and all suffragette prisoners were released. They threw themselves into the war effort and in February 1918 were rewarded with the Representation of the People Act, which gave the vote to women over the age of 30 years, albeit only if they were married or owned property. It wasn’t everything but it was a start.

History is about remembering the people who got us where we are, and Rise up Women! certainly does that. At over 600 pages,this is a definitive history of the suffragettes’ determination during the decade-long militant campaign they fought on our behalf. This book would make an apt present for anyone, female or male, on their 18th birthday. Then they will appreciate what was done to win half our population the right to a vote.
Rise Up Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes by Diane Atkinson is published by Bloomsbury.

The so-called “Full English Breakfast”, ie bacon, eggs, sausages, baked beans, toast etc. etc., is a relatively modern term.

What did our distant ancestors eat when their fresh meat ran out, before they worked out a way of curing meat to make it last longer? When did they discover that curing it made it taste different? When did they realise that the eggs of chickens, ducks, turtles etc. could be cooked and eaten by humans?

Inspired by the current television series called “Back in Time for Tea”, as well as by a fascinating book called “A Million Years in a Day” by Greg Jenner, I

decided to investigate breakfasts through the ages – which has proved remarkably interesting.

Bacon: Pigs were first reared as domestic animals in the Middle East some 9,000 years ago, and became a staple food, even for poorer people, throughout Europe. Their popularity was principally because pigs would eat anything, gain weight easily and produce large litters.

Furthermore, as has long been established, every bit of the creature (except the squeak!) could be used. The ancient Egyptians had worked out how to cure pig meat so it could be eaten all year round (possibly because they were used to preserving bodies for the afterlife!), and we know that bacon and sausages featured on Roman menus, though it sounds as though the sausages the Romans ate bore little relation to those we eat today. Some cultures and religions banned the eating of pig meat altogether, possibly since pigs were dirty (unclean) and eating it could cause diseases. Christians didn’t go quite that far: they banned the eating of it on Fridays, holy days and the whole of Lent. (In mediaeval times this led to a grand fry-up the day before Lent began, when people would use up all their leftover bacon and eggs - Greg Jenner suggests this was a forerunner of the Full English Breakfast!)

Eggs: It seems the ancient Egyptians were keen on eggs, and on keeping hens specifically for the purpose of using their eggs, though the Chinese and Indians had already discovered the benefits of domesticating fowl.

They learned to cook the eggs in several different ways, most of which are the same as we use today: boiled, fried, poached or turned into soufflés or custards. Omelettes were also a popular food for the Romans.

Baked beans: As with so much food, the problem for people through the ages was how to keep it fresh, or at least edible. During the Napoleonic wars armies on both sides became used to having to eat food riddled with maggots by the end of their campaign. In 1810 a Frenchman partly solved this problem by sealing food inside a glass jar and then boiling it. Unfortunately glass is fragile, so it wasn’t ideal, and four years later in 1814 another Frenchman invented the tin can. This proved to be a great success, except for one thing: getting into the tins to get at the contents. Hammer and chisels must have been vital kitchen utensils at the time, because, astonishingly, the tin-opener wasn’t invented until 48 years later!

However, once it was possible to store food in tin cans and open them later, people felt they could preserve anything. Soon an old recipe dating back to the Aztecs for haricot beans baked in tomato sauce and flavoured with sugar, pepper and other spices, became popular as the now very familiar baked beans.

Cereal: In the late 19^th century in the USA, a doctor called John Kellogg had some strange ideas, but was fixated on the idea that a good diet (ideally, as far as he was concerned, a vegetarian one) would cure man of his baser instincts. In the kitchen of his sanatorium he set his brother, Will, to boil wheat to use as an alternative to bread. However, one day in 1894 Will became distracted and let the wheat boil over, until it formed a gloopy mess. Unwilling to waste it, he put it through large rollers, which flattened it and squeezed out some of the liquid. Much to his surprise, the resulting wheat flakes were not only edible but fairly pleasant. The brothers fed these to their patients, who reported that they liked them, and after a little experimentation with different grains they invented cornflakes. The Kellogg brothers then began marketing them to the health-conscious general public, suggesting these were Health Foods, and they became extremely popular.

Bread: According to Greg Jenner, “bread is one of the most significant inventions in human history.” Our ancestors were eating grains and cereal crops 30,000 years ago, but during the Neolithic period they began grinding wheat and barley together, using a stone quern, until they produced flour. Then they mixed the flour with water and cooked the resulting “loaf” over a fire until it turned into a satisfying food which could sustain life when animals were in short supply. In the Bronze Age farming became more intensive, so that fewer people were required to produce more food, and by the time of the Roman invasion bread was a staple part of the diet. Originally all bread was brown, and it was only when “white” bread was invented, which involved throwing away half the ingredients (the husks of the bran etc.) that this became more expensive and thus more desirable among the rich. This discrepancy in price sometimes led to the unscrupulous practice of adding white ingredients, such as chalk, or even plaster of Paris, to the mixture to make it white so the baker could charge more for his bread. In this instance the poor were luckier, since they continued to eat the rough, brown bread and thus escaped the nastier side-effects of eating the adulterated white.

But marmalade? Where did that come from?

I read once (and this may be entirely fictitious) that it was invented in France when Mary, Queen of Scots was a little girl. When she was feeling ill, the cook would boil up some oranges with sugar as a sort of jam to make her feel better, and called it “Marie est malade”, which in time became shortened to marmalade. It may not be true, but it’s a nice story.

Have you ever thought about who designed the things you see every day around you in the UK? Take the request bus stop sign above, for example. Things like this are so much a part of our lives that we take them for granted but this, like so much else in the 30s and beyond, was designed by a Jewish immigrant, Hans Schleger, in 1935.

You can see it at the fascinating exhibition, Designs on Britain, at the Jewish Museum in Camden Town in London. It's on till 15th April so you have time. It shows the enormous influence that Jewish emigrés had on the look of the world that Brits live in. But it wasn't just street furniture or the look of books. There were public information posters, the Festival of Britain in 1951 and designs like the Chopper bike and marble run by Tom Karen.

One of the first exhibits you see is especially striking:

University of Brighton Design Archives, the Henrion Estate

This is a poster called Four Hands by FHK Henrion (1944), showing the way in which the four nation allies broke the Nazis. Henrion, born in Nurenberg in 1914, came to England in 1936 and was interned as an alien intern in the war, like many other Jewish designers. He was released later and designed two pavilions for the Festival of Britain. Henrion became one of the first designers to create corporate brands and logos, working for KLM, Tate and Lyle, the National Theatre and the Post Office.

Not this one, though. This was by his assistant, Manfred Reiss in 1950. Reiss was born in Leipzig and also relocated to England in 1936 and worked for the Post Office and the Society for the Prevention of Accidents.

One of the things that particularly fascinated me was the contribution of Berthold Wolpe. This is one of his famous book jackets for Faber & Faber, for whom he worked from 1941 to 1975 and designed around 1,500 covers for them. But before he went to Faber, Wolpe had already designed the iconic Albertus font, which characterised so much of their look in the 50s and onwards.

When I started The Greystones Press with my husband in 2016, we knew that we wanted our books to have that Wolpe look and that we wanted the Albertus typeface on our book jackets. Here's one we published in 2017:

And here's the font itself, whose blocks are on display at the exhibition:

Wikimedia Commons

The elegance and simplicity of Albertus is enduring: one authority that still uses it is the City of London:

There is a fascinating video here about Wolpe's typefaces being made available digitally. Albertus was one of many and you'll recognise several of them straightaway.

Other designers in the exhibition include Elizabeth Friedlander (one of only three women represented), whose work is currently on display in the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft in East Sussex. Friedlander also designed a typeface early on in her career, known as Elizabeth, since a Jewish surname would have been unpopular with Adolf Hitler.

Then there is Misha Black, Hans Unger and George Him. Most of the seventeen designers featured in the exhibition moved to Britain in the 30s and 40s but Black came here as a toddler in 1912 and in WW2 became principal Exhibitions designer for the Ministry of Information.

All the designers here are Jewish immigrants to the UK but some more strictly refugees, fleeing Nazi persecution. They were widely commissioned by London Transport, The Post Office, the Society for the Preventions of Accidents, various Government ministries and big corporations like Shell. It is impossible to imagine what public life would have looked like in the 20th century and even into the 21st without them.

Oxford Circus

Green Park

Two of the mosaic station motifs by Hans Unger for the London Victoria Line. (Wikimedia Commons)

It’s Women’s History Month in Australia (and in the US) and I meant to write a delightful piece about something entirely different, but on Wednesday I took my regular students to see an exhibition on British women’s suffrage. It struck me that, although most women were given the vote in Australia at Federation, women’s lives generation that saw all the Suffrage debates – from the moment Australian women got the vote to 1920s when US women could vote and learned how to use it, show that it was only a partial victory.

I could focus on politics for this, or talk about income levels and glass ceilings, but today I’m thinking of grandmothers. Not all grandmothers. Women who took care of spouse, children and households born from the 1890s to the 1910s. Those who were part of these big changes the way I as part of another way of big changes in the 1960 – they were the first generation expected to blossom. We often think of this period as changing women’s lives. And it did, in many countries in some very important ways. The truth of the everyday wasn’t as glamorous for many, many women.

I often talk about two of my great-aunts, who ran their own business. They were the ultimate glamorous working women in Melbourne, in some ways, for they ran an exclusive shop on an exclusive street and were regularly consulted by the papers about incoming fashion. They were fashionable … and they were hit by the Great Depression. A wonderful roller-coaster set of lives that doesn’t make most books. I put this picture of the arcade their shop was in up on Redbubble the other day, to celebrate them. They can't get books, but they can have t-shirts and journals.

Also, an influential pair of sisters, during their lives. They were forgotten by the press immediately after, however, for women are not expected to leave lasting legacies. A generation later their niece ran a successful business when life proved less than supportive. That was what she did during the day. Her spare time was devoted to arts and crafts, at which she had a real talent. She had to (she told me) work all this out for herself: the family career tradition was not quite that. It was more that women didn’t get much support when things went wrong. My great-aunts’ problem was that they had never married and my aunt’s that she was a widow. All three of them were born during this critical moment in women’s history. All three of them voted.

Popular literature during this period often contains the message that women’s lives were not complicated, that women’s main purpose was to support the men in their lives. The reality is that the vast majority of women’s lives in Britain, Australia, the US and other similar countries were reported to look the way popular literature described them, but they were not. My grandmother divorced and was not given any money to support herself. She took her cooking talent and made sweets for a living.

Three sisters of that family earned their way through life. In my generation we were expected to go to university and then ear our way through life, but decades earlier, few women were given that privilege. They were literate (which has been typical of Australia for a fair while now) but left school when it was legal. Some of the males of that same generation went to university and some did not, but it wasn’t until my mother finished school that university was open to women. And it wasn’t until the 1970s that it became open to anyone bright enough and with a good enough high school result. Women who had the vote weren’t allowed to be equal in all things. Not in public image, not in decorum, not in education, and not in work.

When I talk about this to a live audience, there is always someone who says “Men missed out on stuff, too.” This is true. However, for them the public narratives gave them more choices. If a teenage boy as very bright and wanted to go to university, he could, for instance. For the women in the family, even though the local universities were accepting women into degrees by the time they were old enough to apply… they weren’t encouraged to apply. In fact, quite the opposite. My mother was the first woman (in an educated family) to get a university degree. That wasn’t until the 1950s.

Simple narratives are wonderful. That women got the vote was great. That – in Australia – Indigenous women were not equal to other women until much later is forgotten in the triumphal account. The everyday life is where we find out whether that simple, triumphant narrative is accurate.

Private lives tell us so much about what actually happened to women and help explain and refine our understanding of those magnificent narratives. For me it’s the difference between those who decided on the suffragette colours and marched with them, and the smaller realty of most of our lives. The big history is important, but it’s not the whole story.

‘Inspired by a true murder’, ‘Based on a real story’: we’ve long been fascinated by fiction and drama with their roots in real crimes. Maybe that’s partly because we’re drawn to what we believe to be genuine, and partly because we’re fascinated and horrified by the peculiarities of other people’s lives – in particular, by what would lead someone to commit a terrible crime.

The historical novels I list here reveal the human heart of stories that on the surface seem incomprehensible: works of fiction that make the strange truth graspable.

1. Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood (1996)

Alias Grace is the fictionalized account of Grace Marks, a sixteen-year-old Canadian girl convicted as an accessory in the murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his mistress, Nancy Montgomery. Kinnear’s manservant, James McDermott, was hanged for the crime, but nobody knew what to make of Grace, who claimed to have no memory of what occurred. In the novel, none of the doctors, lawyers, and clergymen who are drawn into the story can determine whether Grace is evil, insane, or simply a victim of circumstance. She remains an enigma.

Atwood came across Grace’s story in a contemporary account of the case, which was so inaccurate and so mired in nineteenth-century misogyny that she felt she had to tell her own version, one that stuck to the true facts save where there were ‘hints and outright gaps in the records.’ Her research was meticulous and the book’s construction is masterful, the different pieces stitched neatly together like the quilt Grace sews during the course of the book.

2. Fred & Edie, Jill Dawson (2000)

Another complex tale of a woman perceived as dangerous, Fred & Edie is a haunting novel based on the 1922 murder of Percy Thompson by his wife Edith Thompson and her lover, Frederick Bywaters. The plot progresses via a series of unsent letters that Edie writes to Fred while they are in prison awaiting trial.

To capture Edie’s voice, Dawson read Edith Thompson’s real letters, some of which are quoted in the novel. She has said in interview that finding the box-file at the National Archives was, ‘an eerie experience: opening it up, with faded ribbons around maps and documents, and the dust floating off.’ The letters themselves were, ‘skittish, tantalising, inconsistent. Troubling.’ And yet Dawson has made Edith Thompson into a powerful and memorable character, one who has stayed with me for many years.

Edith Thompson and Freddy Bywaters

3. Arthur and George, Julian Barnes (2005)

Barnes’ novel is based on the extraordinary case of lawyer George Edalji, the son of an Indian father and English mother, who in 1903 was convicted of mutilating farm animals and sentenced to seven years’ hard labour. His case was taken up by Arthur Conan Doyle, who petitioned the Home Office, spoke out publically about the conviction, and bombarded the Chief Constable of Staffordshire with letters providing new forensic evidence and offering alternative suspects. Doyle’s investigations confirmed that the Edalji family had long been a target of police persecution and ultimately resulted in the overturning of Edalji’s conviction, and his re-admission to the roll. It was also a key factor in the establishment of the Criminal Court of Appeal.

With a precise style that fits perfectly with the decorum of the era and that serves to accentuate Doyle’s warmth and generosity, Barnes narrates the parallel lives of these two very different men as they navigate their own personal crises. Barnes quotes verbatim from the anonymous threats that the family received (letters that Edalji was accused of having written himself) and from an anonymous letter sent to Doyle himself signed, ‘A Nark, London’. What Barnes did not know when he wrote the novel was that Staffordshire police fabricated evidence to try to discredit Doyle’s investigation. Newly discovered documents confirm that ‘A Nark’ was none other than the Chief Constable of Staffordshire himself.

4. Burial Rites, Hannah Kent (2013)

Burial Rites reimagines the life of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman to be executed in Iceland. Sentenced to death for her part in the murder of two men, she was beheaded by axe in 1830, aged 33. Although we know at the beginning of the novel how it will end, Kent successfully builds suspense and sympathy for Agnes, leading us to a gripping imagining of what might have happened on the night of 13 March 1828, when Natan Ketilsson and Pétur Jónsson were stabbed and bludgeoned to death. ‘I was more concerned with the story of Agnes’s life than in her execution or even the murders,’ Kent has said. ‘So I forgot about the execution when I was writing it and I hope the reader does too.’

Kent wrote the novel as part of her PhD and spent six weeks in Iceland sifting through historical records to try and glean an understanding of who Agnes was, returning home, ‘with the kind of hysterical happiness bestowed only on the severely jetlagged research student who has been allowed to touch very old paper without gloves.’ From the old paper and from Kent’s imaginings has emerged a beautiful and devastating portrait of nineteenth century Iceland and of Agnes herself.

Last resting place of Agnes Magnúsdóttir
by by Michael Smyth

5. An Officer and a Spy, Robert Harris (2013)

An Officer and a Spy is based on the Dreyfus Affair, another astonishing story of prejudice and injustice, but in late nineteenth-century Paris. Harris spent a year researching the book, aided by the French government’s decision to publish online the secret files relating to the case. At the heart of the conspiracy against Alfred Dreyfus was a secret intelligence unit called the Statistical Section. It is the newly-appointed head of the Statistical Section, Colonel Georges Picquart, who is chosen to investigate the crimes allegedly committed by Dreyfus. Picquart begins the novel convinced of Dreyfus’ guilt but, during the course of his investigation, begins to have his doubts, much to the displeasure of the military officials who appointed him.

As with the other novels in this list, Harris uses the historical materials to poignant effect, in particular the journals that Dreyfus wrote while imprisoned on the h where jealousies, slow-brewed rivalries orrific Devil’s Island.

A tale of scandal, anti-Semitism, cover-up and mass hysteria, Harris decided it, ‘could only be told as a thriller. That is what it is. You wouldn’t believe it in a novel of social realism.’

6. See What I Have Done, Sarah Schmidt (2017)

‘Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41’.

Sarah Schmidt’s debut novel is a disturbing, claustrophobic, and brilliantly original reimagining of that hot day in 1892, Fall River, Massachusetts when Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered with an axe. Their daughter, Lizzie Borden, was famously arrested, tried and acquitted, but over a century later, people are still wondering whether the verdict was correct. Schmidt’s novel, which explores the murky and complicated dynamics of the Borden family, gives us no easy answers.

Lizzie Borden

7. The Long Drop, Denise Mina (2017)

Consummate storyteller Denise Mina takes us on a journey to the sooty streets and smoke-filled pubs of 1950s Glasgow and into the life of William Wyatt, whose family has been murdered and who is wrongly accused of their killing. Desperate to find the true killer, he arrives at a bar to meet Peter Manuel, who claims he can get hold of the gun that was used.

The novel is based on real-life serial killer Peter Manuel, the last man to hang in Scotland. It paints a grim and fascinating picture of the criminal underworld in which he operated and deftly blends fact with fiction. Brutal and beautiful.

8. Little Deaths, Emma Flint (2017)

In the sweltering summer of 1965, cocktail waitress Ruth Malone wakes in her Manhattan apartment to find that her two young children have disappeared. Her daughter is found dead a few days later in a rubbish lot. Her son is found a week later. And she is accused of killing them.

The exquisitely-written Little Deaths retells the real story of Alice Crimmins, focussing on the themes of obsession and prejudice. It takes an unflinching look at how both society and the criminal justice system react to subversive women.

Alice Crimmins

A unique window

Flint is currently writing her second novel, also based on a real murder. When I asked her why she was drawn to write novels based on true crime, Flint said, ‘I’ve always been intrigued by how historical crimes give us a unique window into the past. I’m particularly interested in giving a voice to characters whose story has faded into the background over time, and in making them real and immediate and relatable.’

That, perhaps, is why fiction based on real crimes continues to appeal: the wish to see through that unique window, the desire to understand what would cause a certain person at a particular point in time to do a truly terrible thing.

Anna Mazzola‘s debut, The Unseeing, is based on the Edgware Road murder. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, was inspired by the West Ham Vanishings and will be published in July 2018.

https://annamazzola.com/about/

This article first appeared in modified form in Historia Magazine.

Featured image from The beautiful victim of the Elm City, a pamphlet from 1881
via U.S. National Library of Medicine Digital Collections

I’ve been reading a book called ‘The Day of Reckoning’, written by Mary Clive, best known for her marvellously entertaining semi-autobiographical romp ‘Christmas with the Savages’ based on childhood memories of her own family Christmasses in various English and Anglo-Irish stately homes in the early years of the last century. (She was a sister of Long Longford). She is so entertaining that I began to seek out others of her books. ‘The Day of Reckoning’ was published in 1964 and is a kind of personal history of the day-to-day surroundings, furniture, pictures and other fashionable items she grew up with as the child of a well-to-do family during the so-called ‘idyllic’ pre-War years. It is sharply-observed and often very funny. Here, for example, Mary’s mother shows her children two paintings (by G F Watts) on the drawing-room wall, both of them 'tall and thin, a shape much favoured by late Victorian academic artists, and they fitted in nicely between the french windows...'

We stared at them. One, she said, was called Love and Death. Well, we could all understand that. We were quite accustomed to stories in which silent veiled white strangers were confronted by another apparition who claimed that his or her name was Love. The only interesting point was which of them was going to get the best of it.

Then there was the other painting. ‘One man standing by himself and no clues at all.’

‘I see a venerable character,’ began my sister, ‘perhaps even the Venerable Bede.’

‘Nonsense,' said my mother, ‘it’s quite a young man. Now what is he wearing?’

‘Sort of a dressing gown.’

‘Oh come! It’s rather a fine robe with a fur collar. And what is he doing?’

‘Looking for something on the ground.’

‘No, no, he’s going away sorrowing. He’s the young man with great possessions – in the Bible – you must remember.’

Yes, I remembered, and I wondered how my mother could, how she could, bear to have him in her drawing room. The passage in which he occurs had always seemed to me to be the most uncomfortable in the New Testament...

‘You need pictures to keep down wallpaper,’ was one of Mary’s mother’s axioms, and one of the pictures which hung in her bedroom (over the bed) was a photographic reproduction of‘The Day of Reckoning’ (1883) by Samuel Edward Waller. Here it is:

Pictures that told stories were almost ubiquitous at the time, so:

‘What does it mean?’ we asked.

‘Can’t you guess?’ asked my mother. We looked again. Horses, dogs, grooms. A familiar sort of scene but nothing much happening.

‘What about the auctioneer?’ said my mother. We then perceived the auctioneer and wondered how he came to be allowed so close to the house. My mother wondered how she came to have such stupid children. To her, the whole story was crystal clear. The young man had ruined himself gambling, and was now being sold up.

So Mary Clive takes the title of this painting as the title of her book: for a Day of Reckoning was indeed to come and sweep away the kind of worldher parents had inhabited.The First World War is something she mentions explicitly only in the last few pages of the book, though the knowledge of what is to come is implicit throughout. But this is a cheery, wry, funny book, and one of the chapters I’d like to share with you continues the theme of pictures that tell stories, pictures which – like ‘The Day of Reckoning’ – solicit or even tease the viewer to find a narrative interpretation. They were known as ‘Problem Pictures’.

‘Every summer at the Royal Academy’, said my governess, ‘there was a problem picture. Crowds stood in front of it, speculating on the meaning. It was very amusing.’ So my sister and I longed to go to the Royal Academy as we were sure we would guess the answer immediately.

'Mariage de Convenance' by John Collier (1910)

Some of the problems were not for the jeune fille, said my governess. There was often a man and a woman and a title like Disillusioned which might mean all sorts of things. The best problem paintings were painted by the Hon. John Collier, and his most famous one, The Cheat, showed four people sitting around a card table wearing expressions of indignation and dismay, and it is so wonderfully painted that you simply cannot tell which is the guilty person…

'The Cheat' by John Collier (1905)

I hadn’t heard of John Collier before this, so I looked him up, and happily many of his paintings can be found online. He was born in 1850 into a well-to-do Quaker family; his father and grandfather were both Members of Parliament, and in 1879 he married Marion Huxley, daughter of the famous Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. They were at art school together: here is his portrait of her...

And here is her portrait of him.

Marion died tragically in 1887 following severe post-natal depression, and two years later Collier married her sister Ethel. Marriage to a deceased wife’s sister was not then legal in Britain, so as Mary Clive puts it, ‘They went to Norway, where the laws were Scandinavian. Naturally, this was considered a rather quaint way to go on and even after 1907 when the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act was passed, people like his brother’s wife, Lady Monkwell, continued to cut him. Collier himself,crusader for various liberal causes, must have thought this ridiculous.’

Many of Collier's paintings present women in action, or in striking attitudes of rebellion. Take for example 'The Prodigal Daughter' (1903). Mary Clive comments that the young woman is portrayed as 'entirely unrepentant', and suggests that although 'her old mother is prepared to welcome her with open arms, her father is made of sterner stuff.' Hmmm... Maybe...

Or how about his two depictions of Clytemnestra? Not problem pictures as such, perhaps, but problematic in subject matter. In the earliest, painted in 1882, Clytemnestra dramatically thrusts back the curtains of the bath-house. She leans on a double axe, her face taut with deadly purpose, her robes stained with Agamemnon's blood.

Collier revisited the same subject a few years later, in 1914, by which time the Minoan civilization of Knossos had been excavated by Arthur Evans, and its pre-Homeric frescoes provided a very different picture of life and dress in the Mediterranean Bronze Age. Instead of wearing a modest classical Greek peplos, Collier's new Clytemnestra approaches Agamemnon's bath wearing a Minoan-style skirt and gold belt, her torso bare - the sword in her hand as yet unbloodied, the act of murder yet to be accomplished.

According to Mary Clive, this second painting 'became news in 1922 when Blackpool Town Council considered buying it, and the London press, ever ready to make merry at the expense of the Provinces, evolved the story that it was turned down not because of its size [238 x 147.8 cm] but because the City fathers considered it "wicked and nauseous".'

Well, in that case Blackpool's loss became Worcester's gain. Here are some more of Collier's 'problem pictures': and you can tease away at them and decide for yourselves what is going on. This one, from 1898, is called simply 'Trouble'.

And this, painted in 1895, is 'The Laboratory.' Just what is the rich young lady taking from the alchemist with such a regal air? A love-philtre? Poison? And what is that in her other hand? A mask? A mirror?

And in this, 'The Confession' (1902)- who is confessing to whom?

Collier must have been a real professional. His output was enormous, of high technical quality, and along with the 'problem pictures' (which he must have known would always bring the crowds) he painted many portraits. I will give Mary Clive the last words.

‘ “A thin bearded man (he) gave the impression of quiet tenacity and a sort of polite ruthlessness, and on occasion he indicated that he considered the public extremely crass. Regarding the celebrated problem pictures, “They are nothing of the kind,” he wrote impatiently. “The only ones that have been so termed merely depict little tragedies of modern life, and I have always endeavoured to make their meaning perfectly plain. If I ever again paint a picture of modern life, which is doubtful, I shall give it a title a yard long, setting forth the life history of the characters, and, if necessary, their names and addresses…”

All the same, who had cheated? And how?’

Picture Credits:

Love and Death by G F Watts 1885-7 (Tate)

For He Had Great Possessions by G F Watts 1894 (Tate)

The Day of Reckoning by Samuel Edward Waller 1883

Mariage de Convenance by John Collier 1910

The Cheat by John Collier 1905

Marion Huxley by John Collier 1883, National Portrait Gallery
John Collier, by Marion Collier (nee Huxley) 1882, National Portrait Gallery
The Prodigal Daughter by John Collier, 1903, The Usher Gallery, Lincoln
Clytemnestra by John Collier 1892, Guildhall Art Gallery
Clytemnestra by John Collier 1914, Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery
The Confession by John Collier, 1902, privately owned

I try to spread out showing you videos about historical clothes but, given the snowy weather UK has been host to this last while, I couldn't resist sharing this one. Here are some dress-up-warm suggestions from 1893, from Finland - a country that knows a thing or two about coping with the cold -

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Walking Mountain.

It wasn't all snowballing fun

So March came in like a Polar Bear. Like many other History Girls and readers, I’ve been snowed in for some days now. I can walk to the village shop, but it ran out of milk and bread on Thursday. I haven’t spoken to an actual human for a couple of days, and I’m pathetically excited about the fact that the thaw has started and I should be able to drive to town today.

on the way to the shop

Compared to people in other places, I’ve got off very lightly – the power stayed on, I had plenty of fuel, and there was food, of a somewhat dull but sustaining sort, in the freezer. The only thing I ran out of was seed for the wild birds, but the RSPB website was great at telling me what I could safely feed from my store cupboard. The birds are looking plump and happy on cooked rice and suet.

I’ve enjoyed – in a horrified sort of way – watching TV documentaries about the Big Freezes of 1947 and 1963, and being grateful that things aren’t so bad this time round. I’ve also been grateful for a home I can afford to heat, and for the fact that, unlike during the last local Big Snow (Easter 2013) I don’t have a horse to look after.

snow shapes

But mostly I’ve been thinking about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her pioneer girlhood, especially the harsh Dakota winter of 1880-1881, which she immortalised in her 1940 novel, The Long Winter.

What a wimp I am compared to Laura and her family. I felt very pioneer-spirited trudging through the snow in my thermal coat to the shed to fetch coal (a distance of some twenty feet, perhaps), and dragging a large bag of it back to the porch to save having to go back out. Not for me twisting hay in the lean-to, shrouded in blankets.

Pa and Laura, so much more intrepid than I

I’ve felt virtuous at managing not to give in and eat the box of Dairy Box in the cupboard (I’m supposed to be off sweets for Lent). Not for me having to worry that ‘surely a train must come before the last bread was gone.’

When I arrived at the village shop at the same time as another woman, both intent on buying the last of the milk, we were able to agree that she have the full-fat and I the semi-skimmed. Not for me having to find the hidden seed wheat in the wall as Pa does in The Long Winter.

I’ve been able to play my guitar in front of the blazing fire, and be glad to have some extra practice time. Unlike Pa, whose hands are too cracked and stiff from the weather to play his beloved fiddle.

As a child, The Long Winter was my least favourite of Wilder’s historical novels. It was so – well, so cold and bleak. As an adult I’m full of admiration not only for how the family and community survived, but also for how she was able to turn the experience into a satisfying novel.

Not great drying weather

As for my own historical novel, the Beast From the East gave me the perfect opportunity to stay at home and finish it. It’s about a different sort of long winter; hopefully I’ll be able to talk about it here soon.

This year marks the 125th anniversary of the founding of St. Hilda's College, Oxford. For many years, it was a single-sex college but nowadays, of course, it admits men also. St Hilda of Whitby, after whom the College was named by Miss Dorothea Beale, would not have minded at all. She was, as I learned on Sunday February 18th, a remarkable woman who was happy to encourage education, charity and good works in everyone who crossed her path. I will return to Hilda later but I'm going to begin with Wendy Cope. She is the reason I was in Oxford last Sunday. The cantata St Hilda of Whitby, from which she's allowing me to quote, was commissioned by the Association of Senior Members of St Hilda's College to mark this anniversary. The music was composed by Nicola Lefanu and Wendy provided the lyrics, or libretto, or whatever the words in cantatas are called. I wish I had a photo of Nicola to add to the one of Wendy below, but alas, the ones I took on my phone were dreadful, and I apologise for this gap in my account of this occasion.

Wendy and I were exact contemporaries. We went up in 1963 and graduated in 1966. Our paths have diverged a little over the decades but since 2011, she's been living in Ely and I've been living in Cambridge and she's become one of my closest friends.

An aside: I knew I'd have to stay overnight, so booked a room in the Mercure Eastgate Hotel, which is very near the College, on Merton Street. I wanted to stay here because this is where, when the place was still a pub called the Eastgate, I heard about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I've never forgotten that night and I wanted to see if there was any of the old pub left. The answer is: no, there's nothing here that remains of those days, though it is a very pleasant place to stay.

So on Sunday afternoon, Wendy and I set off for the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. We had tea in the delightful Vaults café (another addition since the 60s) and then went in for the pre-concert talk in which Nicola and Wendy spoke about the process of writing a cantata together. Below is a photo of some of the beautiful stained glass in the church

The concert began, as practically everything should begin, with Zadok the Priest by Handel. This piece of music has become almost a cliché but my goodness it's THRILLING! That set the tone for the whole evening. We heard Chopin, Suk, and Wagner too, and the musicians who played the piano and the cello were of the highest calibre. All three were associated with the College: a DPhil graduate student, and two undergraduates. The young man who played Wagner's Liebestod arranged by Liszt is a first year undergraduate. We were entranced by their musicianship and sophistication, and very eager to hear the cantata. We weren't disappointed. From the very first note, we were witnessing something historic. We knew we'd be able to tell people: Yes, I was there for the first performance ever...

I don't know enough about music to comment on it knowledgeably, but I know that the melodies and harmonies seemed to soar and swoop and surround us. The music was varied and appropriate to the written words in front of us, and it induced in the whole congregation a mood of celebration and joy and calm. I was transported and engaged and by the end, moved to tears. I do hope very much that a recording is made soon so that everyone can hear and judge for themselves.

And so to the words. Wendy is celebrated for well-crafted, stylish, often rhymed verse. She has a reputation for being witty and funny and she can be, but she's also serious when the occasion demands it. Her plain style in this cantata uses words in such a way as to emphasise the freight they carry from centuries of use in prayers and hymns and carols.

It begins:

"All who knew her called her Mother,

Abbess Hilda, full of grace.

Bishop, prince, monastic brother,

Loved the wisdom in her face."

Most of what we know about St Hilda is to be found in the writings of the Venerable Bede. The story of Caedmon, (which tells of how Abbess Hilda invites him to sing after he'd hidden away during a banquet because he felt unworthy to take part in the feast) is recounted in the words of the cantata.

Abbess Hilda is impressed and invites Caedmon to become a monk. In Wendy Cope's words, she says:

"You are indeed inspired by heavenly grace,

And therefore you will take your vows and be

A brother in our learned company

And live as we do in this holy place."

The singing was most beautiful, with most of those taking part having some connection, either as undergraduates or graduates or faculty, with St Hilda's College. The whole was under the direction of Jonathan Williams and he and Professor Martyn Harry ought to feel very proud of themselves, as well as of their hugely talented students.

After the concert, we walked down the High to St Hilda's for a Celebration Dinner, which was a combination of good company and good things to eat and drink. Abbess Hilda would have approved of such a gathering and I'm sure she would have loved the music and words written in her honour.

New Mexico, 1920.

'Melita, the day after she was rescued

from hanging as a witch.'

Photo: James George Wharton

I was horrified, but sadly not surprised, to read of the terrible ordeal of a mother and daughter in Jharkhand State, India who, in February 2018, were dragged from their house by relatives, had their heads shaved and were paraded naked around the village, accused of having caused the death of a family member by witchcraft. Of the many cruelties perpetrated upon these two women, one that stuck out for me was the shaving of their heads. Why do some people fear women’s hair so much that they either demand to cover it up or cut it off?

From ancient times, in many cultures, cunning women and ‘witches’ were thought to be able to double the potency of any spell, curse or cure by unbinding their hair. Witches were believed to be able to whip up a storm that could sink ships simply by shaking their hair lose. To bind or cut a woman’s hair was thought to bind or sever her power, like weakening the mighty Samson by shearing his locks.

At the height of the witchcraft trails in England and Europe, Inquisitors were advised to shave the head and bodies of any women or man accused of witchcraft before integrating them. Jordanes de Bergamo in 1470 refers to this practise, and aside from helping to break their prisoners’ spirits, it was advocated for three reasons –

1) The ‘witch’ might conceal amulets or charms in his or her hair to render them immune to the pain of torture.

2) The devil himself might hide in their hair and instruct the accused how to answer in order to deceive the interrogators. This belief also extended to those deemed to be possessed. Their heads were not shaved, but they were made to wear wigs. When fits or ravings took hold of them, their wig would be snatched off and pushed into a flask in the hope that the demon had been pulled off with the wig and was now sealed in the bottle, rather like catching a wasp or spider in a pinch of paper.

'Examination of a Witch' by Thompkins H. Matteson, 1853
Collection of Peasbody Essex Museum

3) But in England the reason mostly commonly given to justify shaving the head and body was so that the cunningly concealed devil’s marks, such as moles or birthmarks, would be exposed.

Today is not only International Women’s Day, but also the 500-year anniversary of the birth of another woman who also found herself accused of witchcraft, Sidonie of Saxony, Princess of Calenberg-Göttingen, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg, who was born 8th March 1518.

In 1545, a marriage was arranged for her to Duke Erich II of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1528–1584), a man ten years younger. Although the couple seemed to get on well at first, perhaps Sidonie should have guessed he was unlikely to remain faithful for long, since he had broken off his engagement to Agnes of Hesse to marry her.

Sidonie, from a painting by Lucas Cranach, 1550

Erich’s mother, the Duchy’s regent, had converted the family to Lutheranism, but when Erich began to rule the Duchy, two years after his marriage, he reconverted to Catholicism. Much to his annoyance, Sidonie maintained her Lutheran faith. The marriage soon began to buckle under the weight of financial pressures and childlessness, and Sidonie started to believe her husband was trying murder her. In 1555, a merchant told her brother Augustus that Erich had ordered poison from him to do away with her.

Erich did not bother to conceal the fact that he had installed a very young mistress at Calenberg Castle where he was now living. Sidonie had previously refused to allow ‘the whore’ into their home and in turn Erich banned the duchess from the castle. But in 1563, the duke barely escaped with his life when a fire broke out under his bed, and he accused his wife of trying to kill him.

From 1564, Sidonie was more or less kept prisoner in her own home. Then in that same year, Erich became extremely ill. His hair and nails fell out and his body swelled. A physician, Dr Cornelius Mertens, swore before witnesses that the duke had been poisoned.

Erich, circa 1573. Artist unknown

As soon as he recovered sufficiently, Erich had four acquaintances of his wife arrested for witchcraft and attempted murder. Under torture, three confessed to planting some kind of explosive device under his bed, and then afterwards, with a fourth woman, Godela Kuckes, they swore they had brewed a harmful substance intended to kill the duke. Godela Kuckes confessed without being tortured, but a few days later, having been kept in solitary confinement, she was found dead by the prison guards with a broken neck. It was rumoured she’d been killed by the devil himself, though whether that devil was Erich or one of his henchmen we will probably never know.

The other three conspirators were burned at the stake as witches. But the deaths did not end there, for Erich had a further 37 people who he claimed to be involved executed, some by burning. On 30th March 1572, Duke Erich assembled nobles and authorities from Hannover and Hameln and publicly accused his wife of witchcraft and of attempting to murder him. Given what had already happened to the 41-other accused, Sidonie was justifiably terrified.

The duchess managed to get away and travelled to Vienna to beg Emperor Maximilian II for help. Maximilian ordered that an investigation should be carried out and the evidence heard at the imperial court. All witnesses recanted their testimony against Sidonie and she was eventually declared innocent of all charges. Elector Augustus gave her the monastery of the Poor Clare’s at Weissenfels and she lived there until she died on 4th January 1575, aged 56. At her request, she was buried in Freiberg Cathedral.

On this International Women’s Day, it is wonderful to celebrate the achievement of women, but perhaps reflect that for some, like those two women in India, attitudes have not changed much in 500 years. World wide we still have a long way to go.

by Caroline Lawrence

One day in 2014, according to urban mythology, director Sam Mendes took his young son to the set of Spectre. They happened to be filming a scene between James Bond and the weapons boffin known as ‘Q’. After the third take, Mendes felt a tug on his hand and looked down to see his son gazing up at him in wide-eyed wonder. ‘Daddy!’ whispered young Mendes, ‘Q is Paddington!’

Ben Wishaw, the actor who plays Q, had just done the voice of the bear from darkest Peru in the movie Paddington. So the confusion was understandable.

I was wondering if I would have a similar disconnect last Sunday afternoon at a London’s newest theatre when I went to see Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The actor Ben Wishaw was playing the part of Brutus in a new version of the play directed by Sir Nicholas Hytner.

I don’t usually go to the theatre because I’m always aware that I’m watching actors playing a role. As a result I rarely get caught up in the story, especially when people get killed (I can see him breathing!) or kiss each other (I wonder if she had garlic for lunch?) For some reason this doesn’t bother me in a movie, perhaps because I know nothing can go wrong. But it can on stage. Those are real people standing down there.

Also, sometimes I get sleepy and tend to doze off right where the actors can see me.

Also, sometimes I can’t always see or hear the actors properly. Last year I walked out of Robert Icke’s celebrated Hamlet in the interval because I could only see the middle third of the stage at the Harold Pinter Theatre and I couldn’t hear the actors at all.

So when my Shakespeare-loving friend Aidan Elliott told me about a new production of Julius Caesar where audience members who stand in the pit became part of the Roman mob with the actors moving among them, my interest was sparked.

‘Sometimes they even jostle you’, said Aidan. ‘In a gentle way.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘I like being gently jostled.’

And I booked my ticket online.

The Bridge Theatre by Tower Bridge is London’s newest theatre. It is state of the art. It can do anything. Everybody can see. Everybody can hear.

As soon as I went into the pit I was engaged. They had cleverly set it up like a political rally with a warm-up band to play music and stagehands dressed as merchandise-sellers flogging Julius Caesar baseball hats and T-shirts. The band started playing as people continued to file in and they soon got us clapping and shouting for Caesar. It wasn’t until Mark Antony in a tracksuit gently jostled me aside (yay!) that I knew the play had started.

The next two hours sped by, scene changes marked by Caesar’s bodyguards moving the crowd back and forth so that platforms in the floor could rise and fall. I felt a sense of camaraderie with the other audience members nearby. It was fun. I was happy to be part of the mob because I wasn’t just watching the play; I was part of it.

‘It’s a surprise both pleasant and alarming,’ said director Sir Nicholas Hytner in a recent interview on Front Row, ‘how easy it turns out to be to move, manipulate, corral four hundred people who’ve come to watch a play. We have been able to suck them in to a much greater degree than I thought we would be able to… It seems to me to be a great way to do Shakespeare.’

Because the actors are (literally) within spitting distance you can’t space out. You have to concentrate. And that means you really hear Shakespeare’s great lines, especially in this production where each word is pronounced clearly and with meaning.

Although I never forgot I was watching actors playing their parts, that was part of the appeal. That’s David Morrissey from The Walking Dead and Britannia playing Mark Anthony! There’s a kind of palimpsest where the actor’s celebrity overlays the part he’s playing. But you’re a palimpsest, too, playing at being a member of the mob. You are collaborating with them.

Casting Michelle (‘Catelyn Stark’) Fairley as lean and hungry Cassius was inspired. My friend Aidan says she was his MVP. Because the production was in modern dress she totally worked as a powerful, female Cassius.

Another standout for me was Adjoa Andoh as Casca. Exuding a menacing charm, she relished Shakespeare’s words and made them new to me.

And what words.

Every time I see a play by Shakespeare I am freshly astonished by his genius. Of course there are the famous and familiar lines like: It was Greek to me, Et tu, Brute, and The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars...

But there were lines and paragraphs I’d never noticed before.

They startled me with their originality and made me think. This by Brutus:

O Cassius, you are yoked with a lamb
That carries anger as the flint bears fire;
Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark,
And straight is cold again.

And I love Cassius blaming her choleric nature on her mother:
Have not you love enough to bear with me,
When that rash humour which my mother gave me
Makes me forgetful?

And of course it was a thrill to see Ben (‘Paddington’) Wishaw, superb as always. At no time did I think of the marmalade-loving bear from Peru, especially when he pulled out a handgun and gave Julius Caesar a bloody coup de grace.

If, like me, you aren’t a fan of theatre, this is the time to make an exception and try something new. I promise you will not doze off.

Three tips:

I. STAND. As you go into the pit imagine it as a clock face with you entering at 6 o’clock. Following advice of a friendly coat check girl, I stood at 10’oclock and had a brilliant view of almost everyone and everything. But don’t worry, you will get a good view wherever you are.

II. CHECK. Check your coat, scarf and bag; it gets very warm under the lights. The cloakroom at the back of the ground floor lobby is free and they have a good system of getting your stuff back to you quickly at the end.

III. PLUG. Bring earplugs for the loud rock music at the beginning and noisy gunfire at the end. I used the earbuds on my phone.

In my library, there’s a curious book called Giorno per giorno, tanti anni fa (Almanacco della Regione Veneta) which I’d translate as Day by Day, Many Years Past (Almanac of the Veneto). Its contents, originally curated for radio, were cherry-picked by Luciano Filippi for publication in this volume.

Today, March 10th, is marked by several entries, but the one that seems most significant is that, on this date in 1924, the nation of Italy ceded the Doges’ Palace to the Comune of Venice. A ceremonial handing-over of the keys took place in the presence of civil, military and religious officers of the city.

It crossed my mind that this transfer may not have been a cause for unadulterated joy among the Venetians; it may also have been canny on the part of the Italian state. As anyone who's custodian of a centuries-old house could tell you, such a gift was always going to prove brutally expensive to the city.

But what moved me was the reason recorded for the gift. Italy’s representative declared: ‘I hand over to Venice the keys to this palace which has seen the highest form of statecraft in Italy. This people – its navigators, artists, merchants – shall once more own this seat of power where the whole political life of Venice has been enacted.’

Salvatore Settis

I read those two sentences mindful of a book I’ve just finished reading and with the voice of its author still ringing in my head. Salvatore Settis presents the Venetians of 2018 as anything but masters of statecraft, navigators or artists. Instead, he shows a city gasping feebly for life amid the onslaught of mass tourism and crass globalization, a city from which her citizens are fleeing, a city mired in corruption and under threat of toxic development.

It's an old trope that Venice shall surely sink one day. And indeed danger has lately come to her by sea. However Venice is not drowning. She's being strangled by earthly greed. The monstrous cruise ships function as a symbol for everything that menaces the existence of a place held up for centuries as a model for all cities. As Professor Settis says, from the high decks of these ‘skyscrapers of the seas’, tourists literally look down on little Venice, oblivious to the fact that their very presence diminishes and endangers the city.

When ignorance, contempt and arrogance are thus allied with a ruthless desire for profit, it is the equivalent of a hostile invasion or a plague.

Professor Settis's book bears an ominous title: If Venice Dies. And the reason for the ‘if’ in the title is this: ‘if Venice dies, it won’t be the only thing that dies: the very idea of the city – as an open space where diversity and social life can unfold, as the supreme creation of our civilization, as a commitment to and promise of democracy – will also die with it.’ Fragile Venice, meanwhile, teeters on the brink. At least one funeral has already been held for the city.

I was privileged to be present when Professor Settis brought his vision of a city on the precipice to a tribal gathering of Venice in Peril in London last month. It would do a disservice to the eloquence of the author, who’s been described as ‘the conscience of Italy’, to try to encapsulate his book in a few paragraphs. Instead, I'll pick up on just a few ideas he raises.

Firstly, how do cities die?

In three ways: when invaders physically destroy them; when they are aggressively colonized; and finally, ‘when their citizens forget who they are and become strangers to themselves and thereby their own worst enemies without even realizing it’. Venice, argues Professor Settis, is losing her identity, suffering from the kind of dementia that leads only to a slow extinction of consciousness. When that ‘hesitant, final curtain’ falls, then the tangible horizon also darkens, because ‘the same air and blood binds the great monuments of art, nature, and history to those who created them, or look after them, or dwell in them.’

It will require not just awareness but active measures to save the beauty of Venice, which – as John Ruskin would argue – inevitably also represents its virtue.

A city has a soul, is a thinking machine.

The body of the city is made of walls, buildings, squares. The soul is found in its living inhabitants but also in ‘a living tapestry of stories, memories, principles, languages, desires, institutions and plans.’ This inner city remains largely invisible to the uninformed eye, but its conflicts, triumphs and visions are in fact inscribed on the walls, buildings and squares. You just need to pause, look, read. The city is a theatre of memory, both individual and collective – or it should be. The very voids tell stories.

the forgotten slab with a mortar and pestle,
symbol of the defeat of the conspiracy

Why, for example, is there a (relatively) modern building in Calle Baiamonte Tiepolo near Sant’Agostin? It’s because the palace of Baiamonte Tiepolo, originally on that site, was razed as a punishment for his conspiracy in 1310. In response to the plot, Venice created its Council of Ten. A column of infamy was erected in Sant-Agostin, precisely to preserve those events in civic memory ... but now sits in a dusty store-room of the Doges Palace, where no-one may see it, despite passionate appeals for its restitution. The only trace that remains is a broken flagstone, usually covered with cigarette butts. This is what happens when a city forgets itself. It does not even remember why it needs not to forget.

Venice is the paradigm of the historical city, argues Professor Settis. Moreover, like ‘a celebrity patient’, its ills attract more attention than other places. Yet Venice is also the paradigm ‘of the modern city like Manhattan. It’s a thinking machine that allows us to ponder the very idea of the city, citizen practices, urban life as sediments of history, as the experience of the here and now, as well as a project for a possible future.’

A servile monoculture cannot save the city.

Venetians are outnumbered 140 to 1 by tourists at present. Residents must shackle themselves in service or subjugation to the monoculture of tourism - or leave. The plurality of dignified work is thus lost in a city once famous for her craftsmen, architects and artists. Many foreigners have second (or third, or fourth) homes in Venice. But a majority of those spend just a few days a year in the city. These are not the citizens whom Venice needs, not ‘the makers and guardians of its memories’.

A hit-and-run tourist monoculture is also inimical to the nuance of memory, and to dignity. In fact, it humiliates the city. ‘The skyscraper ships that pass by Venice constantly proclaim that Venice isn’t forever young and yet still perfectly formed, but is instead old, moribund, and poor, and must stretch its hand out to tourists and ask for alms.’

An image used by the campaigners NOGrandiNavi who
seek to divert the huge cruise ships away from the heart of the city

Moreover, these ships distort and destroy Venice’s historic skyline. They ‘parade their pompous arrogance and trespass into Saint Mark’s basin, defying with their tacky bulkiness the ancient basilica, the Doges’ Palace and the horses stolen from Byzantium.’ The city is colonized and wrecked by these ‘veritable spaceships of modernity, temples of consumerism.’ They are ‘cookie-cutter machines that produce standardized pleasures … portray the blandest sort of mass tourism as a highly personalized experience.’

Meanwhile, after the shipwreck of the Costa Concordia in 2012, a new law has forced all cruise ships to stay 2.3 miles from Italian shorelines. The only exception: Venice.

Venice has a price-tag and her patrimony is for sale.

An act signed into law in 2010 by Silvio Berlusconi and Roberto Calderoli turned Italy into ‘a gigantic real estate supermarket’. The ownership of heritage sites was transferred from the nation to individual authorities, including Venice. At the same time, the values were quantified and the ‘assets’ became available for sale to private interests. In Venice, whole islands were thus put up for land-grabs – Certosa and Poveglia; also, many buildings in the historic centre. A law requires Venice to provide yearly reports on her real estate disposals alongside her city budget. Venetians, like the inhabitants of other historic cities in Italy, no longer have a right to their own city. Market forces have robbed her citizens of those rights.

Venice is a glove thrown down to the modernity.

Professor Settis quotes the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri: ‘Even in its current cadaverous state, Venice is still an unbearable challenge to the world of modernity. Venice only manages to make its heard in a whisper, but this is still simply unbearable to our technological world …’ Only the lagoon has protected Venice from suburbanization and the ‘fatuous rhetoric’ of skyscrapers. Instead, the state allows the floating skyscrapers unfettered access. Meanwhile, the scandal of MOSE exemplifies ‘how Venice’s problems have been used as a pretext to invoke empty rhetorical formulas of preservation, while actually allowing private interests to rob the city blind.’

Professor Settis outlines various projects to modernize Venice, using her fragility as a pretext for punishing her. ‘In each case, it is seen as essential to desecrate this this glorious city which has proved so annoying to the preachers of modernity in the same way that a virgin might frustrate a Don Juan who thinks himself irresistible.’

A Vitruvian Oath for architects?

Doctors have their Hippocratic Oath, which forbids them to do harm to those they tend. Professor Settis has conceived the idea of a Vitruvian Oath for architects, to ensure that they serve the built environment and its citizens – privileging good work over profit and devotion to virtuous place-making over the narcissistic demands of commercial clients. More than anything, a Vitruvian Oath would require an architect to undertake a scrupulous study of history before imposing his creativity on a precious context. This is increasingly not the case in today’s architectural schools: ‘it’s almost as if the memory of our past were a burden to rid oneself of in order to live in a mindless present’.

On the contrary, Professor Settis argues, ‘the urgency of the present prompts us to re-examine the events of the past not as a mere accumulation of data, or as dusty archive, but as the critical living memory of human communities. This would be the only way in which the past could be leavening for the present, a reservoir of energy and ideas that we could use to build our future.’ When Professor Settis conceived this idea, it was contemplative and playful. But institutions are starting to take it seriously.

What can be done to save Venice?

Professor Settis told Venice in Peril that it is not enough to simply stop bad development. Active measures are needed to ensure that the city does not become a mummified tourist attraction. He sees hope in a limit on second homes, and in positive incentives to rebuild the small industries that once thrived in the city, creating both dignified and creative employment for Venetians. In the book, he writes also of re-utilizing the many vacant buildings in Venice, and of incentivizing research, training and apprentice schemes. These things cannot be achieved without a new pact between citizens and their city. He does not discriminate against incomers. You don’t have to be born in Venice to be part of this. You simply need to be committed to bringing the city back to life, which also entails restoring her memories and her self-respect before it is too late.

As I wrote the above, I noticed Giorno per giorno still lying on my desk. Picking it up, I discovered that it started with a list of Patron Saints. I think Patron Saints are another aspect of Venetian life that could do with revivification. Perhaps we shall not lay too many offerings on the altars of San Giuliano l’Ospedaliere or Santa Marta … protectors of hoteliers. But Venice would profit from the intervention of the following:
San Tommaso apostolo – architects
San Giovanni evangelista and San Luca – artists
San Crispino and San Aniano – shoemakers
San Eligio – ironmongers, clockmakers and jewellers
San Giovanni Bosco – publishers
San Giuseppe – carpenters
San Omobono – tailors
Sant’Elena – dyers
Sant’Agostino di Ippona – typographers
Santa Chiara d’Assisi – glassmakers

And yes … San Nicola di Mira – navigators.

Michelle Lovric’s website

If Venice Dies is published in English by Pallas Athene.

When I write I have to have a clear picture of how my characters look, including how they dress and style their hair. So before I began to write about the wartime era I looked into the sort of hairstyles that were around in the early 1940s.

Hair was worn in a style that was feminine and soft, and always dressed off the face. It was often flat on top, so that a hat could be placed easily. One thing was sure - hair would not have been worn messy. A woman's hair had to always appear styled and neat. In the early 1940s, going out with "bed-hair" would have been social suicide.

Hairstyles in the 1940s were fuller and longer than those of the 1930s and hair was cut in a rounded U-shape at the back, curving up towards the ears. There were always a lot of layers because the hair was usually worn in curls or soft waves, usually just below shoulder-length. Straight hair was simply unfashionable.

To achieve the curls, girls who couldn't afford a weekly "wash and set" at the hairdresser would pin up their wet hair in bobby pins each night to make pin-curls.

If you've ever been tempted, this is a good tutorial on how to set easy pin curls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yughhvjKf9c

Although the loosely waved page-boy was a very popular style, so was a more sophisticated and set look such as those below.

"ELEGANT SOPHISTICATION........ in these new coiffures" The Australian Women's Weekly (1933 - 1982) 17 August 1940: 39 (The Homemaker). Web. 9 Mar 2018 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article47116871>

As war rationing really began to bite, women still spent time and effort on their hairstyles, but no longer wanted lots of waves in intricate designs. Hair was worn shorter, in a practical style, still curly with a wave or two at the front. This sort of style looked good under small hats and military hats and could be hidden under turbans if the hair was dirty. One such style was the "Maria" style, which came in 1944 (http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article59182619).

An iconic war-time hairstyle was the "Victory Roll". The name seems to have come from the corkscrew through the air by RAF pilots before landing, if they had successfully downed an enemy plane. The hair was divided at the front and curled up and out, in a rather aerodynamic form.

Here is Betty Grable, rocking a Victory Roll.

And if you want to reproduce it, see this tutorial:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01sh5tk

And how did I use bobs and curls to define my characters? Each of the heroines of my five novels to date has specific hairstyle. And just like a girl of the 1940s I found my inspiration in the hairstyles of the movie stars of the period.

A Stranger in my Street (2012)

https://deborahburrows.com.au/books/a-stranger-in-my-street/

Personally, I don't think that there is any hairstyle more elegant than the loose pin curls we associate with 1940s Hollywood.

I'm sure that is why sad, sweet Meg Eaton, the heroine of my first novel, A Stranger in my Street, has her light brown hair in a shoulder-length bob.

In my mind's eye I saw Meg's hair as being similar to this gorgeous photo of Lauren Bacall.

Taking a Chance (2013)
https://deborahburrows.com.au/books/taking-a-chance/

The heroine of my second novel, Taking a Chance, is Eleanor (Nell) Fitzgerald. As a fashion journalist with her own newspaper column giving tips on beauty and fashion, I thought that Nell was likely to style her hair into something a little more interesting than a bob.

So I decided that her signature style would be the "unbroken roll." I got the idea for the hairstyle from an article in The Australian Women’s Weekly of 28 March 1942.
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article47488001

But even a fashion journalist has bad hair days. When her hair was not looking its best, Nell puts it into a snood.

A snood is a lacy hairnet or crocheted bag (often homemade) that gathered up the hair so that it sits on the nape of the neck.

Here is American actress Carole Lombard wearing a snood.

Sometimes I wish that snoods were still in fashion, as they hide a lot of sins and (in my opinion) look very elegant.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article47488001

Apparently it was Vivian Leigh (or, rather, her costume designer in the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind) who was responsible in no small part for the popularity of the snood in the 1940s.

But that was not the whole story of course. A snood kept loose hair properly and safely confined when women were doing war work in factories.

A Time of Secrets (2015)
https://deborahburrows.com.au/books/a-time-of-secrets/

My third novel is set among the military intelligence units of wartime Melbourne - the most elegant and European of the Australian cities.

In the book, Stella Aldridge, the pretty, clerical heroine wears her thick, wavy ash-blonde hair at shoulder length and parted at the side.

The side part was a feature of the 1940s, as it was the foundation for most styles of that era.

I pictured Stella's hair as being similar to Katharine Hepburn's thick mop.

Ambulance Girls(2016)

https://deborahburrows.com.au/books/ambulance-girls/

Lily Brennan, the Australian ambulance driver who narrates the first book in my Ambulance Girls trilogy, which is set in the London Blitz, has very curly hair and dimples. This, combined with her small stature, gives her a bit of a “Shirley Temple” look, which she detests.

Not the most sophisticated hairstyle, but naturally curly-haired girls will understand the difficulty Lily had in making her curls behave.

Ambulance Girls Under Fire (2018)
https://deborahburrows.com.au/books/ambulance-girls-under-fire-published-2018/

The very sophisticated Celia Ashwin, “a thoroughbred, from the auburn hair framing her smoothly oval face in a loose bob to her aristocratically narrow hands and feet,” is the heroine of my most recent novel.

Celia is not impressed when another character likens her to the oh-so-glamourous Rita Hayworth, but I did have the beautiful titian-haired Rita in mind when imagining Celia's full page-boy hairstyle and side part.

Isn’t she gorgeous?