Quantcast
Channel: The History Girls
Viewing all 2760 articles
Browse latest View live

Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Making the Glasgow Style by Catherine Hokin

0
0
"Every object which you pass from your hand must carry an outspoken mark of individuality, beauty and most exact execution."Charles Rennie Mackintosh

 Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Glasgow is having a bit of a do this year to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of architect, designer and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh, one of the city's favourite sons and one of the most creative figures of the twentieth century.But who is not Frank Zappa, the moustachioed man who my daughter, despite having lived here for a year when she announced this loudly in the University gift shop, thought was printed on posters all across the city. Moving on. Mackintosh's influence is everywhere in Glasgow, from stylised roses to buildings as diverse as tea rooms and churches to the iconic Glasgow School of Art. There's a whole programme of events but the main draw is the exhibition running from now until the end of August at the (also iconic and only 10 minutes walk from my house which I still have to pinch myself about sometimes) Kelvingrove Art Gallery: Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Making the Glasgow Style. 

 Kelvingrove Art Gallery: Daily Record
Glasgow was the birthplace of the only Art Nouveau movement in the UK . ‘The Glasgow Style’ is the term given to the design and decorative arts and craft work produced between about 1890 and 1920 by teachers, students and graduates of The Glasgow School of Art. At the centre of this style is the work of the Glasgow Four: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, his future wife Margaret Macdonald, her sister Frances Macdonald and Frances’s future husband, James Herbert McNair, artists who were also part of a wider group known as The Immortals. Another nickname attached to them, because of the unearthly, ghostly quality of some of their designs (particularly the distorted female figures which were influenced by Aubrey Beardsley) was the ‘Spook School’.

The Glasgow Style draws on an eclectic mix of influences. It incorporates classical Greek elements which were the hallmark of a slightly earlier Glasgow architect, Alexander 'Greek' Thompson. Like much late nineteenth century art there is also a discernible love affair with Japan as that country's Meiji restoration period increasingly opened it up to the West. There is Celtic imagery, particularly round lettering but the strongest element which can be seen across all the different media the artists worked in was a twist on Gothic Revival.

 House for An Art Lover
That is not to say, however, that the style was backward-looking. The Glasgow Four were regarded by contemporaries as avant-garde. Mackintosh's work revolved round creating a balance between opposing forces: darkness and light, line and curve, abstraction and sensuality. He made use of devices such as creating contrasts between interior spaces, contrived by mixing white walls and pastel motifs with others that were dark, using stained wood. His exteriors are equally as challenging. Scotland Street School has two circular towers embedded in the front wall that look like the towers in old Scottish castles whose function is to contain dark and narrow spiral staircases. These towers, however, are formed almost completely from a glass window and contain an empty space which has no purpose at all except to fill the building with light. Writing in the Guardian in 2015, Oliver Wainwright described Mackintosh's designs for the 1901 Glasgow International exhibition as fantastical concoctions of domes and spires, featuring smooth monolithic towers crowned with skeletal lanterns and curvaceous pediments topped with wiry finials and flagstaffs. The Hunterian experts call it “very unorthodox and impossible to label stylistically”... I’d suggest fantasy-sci-fi-medieval: it could be a palace straight from Game of Thrones.

 Anne Macbeth Sleeping Beauty Embroidered Panel
Glasgow Style, however, is not only about architecture, or solely about Mackintosh. In 1890, a Government Act redirected alcohol tax into investing in technical and manual instruction for workers and Glasgow School of Art took full advantage of this new funding to extend its remit beyond the traditional arts such as painting and sculpture by opening a Technical Arts Studies department. This introduced a range of crafts for study including pottery, embroidery, metalwork, stained glass and woodcarving. At the same time some of Glasgow's industries such as iron were also developing new techniques, including cast iron moulding for ornamental use. All of these became part of the new design movement and all are included in the Kelvingrove show.

 The May Queen - Margaret MacDonald
An important aspect of the Glasgow Style, and too often overlooked but not by this exhibition, was the role played by women, including artists Frances and Margaret MacDonald, the illustrator Jessie King, metalwork designers Margaret and Mary Gilmour and the embroiderer Ann MacBeth. Margaret Macdonald, a wonderful artist in her own right, had an enormous influence on Mackintosh's work, which he was always the first to acknowledge: Margaret has genius, I have only talent. Although her name is not always next to his on completed projects, her curving sensual style can be traced in almost all of it, helping him to create the tension his work depended on. As Daniel Robbins, formerly curator of British Art and Design for the Glasgow Museums and project coordinator of a previous Mackintosh exhibition put it: She opened up to him a new intellectual world in which the artist is a self-conscious person.

 The Glasgow School of Art
The Glasgow Style was not a long-lived movement: the Four had gone their separate ways by the turn of the century and Mackintosh never secured another big building project after the Glasgow School of Art was completed in 1909. Tastes were changing and Mackintosh had no interest in the type of steel and glass constructions coming into favour via America, plus he had a terrible problem sticking to budgets. His end was a sad one, including a period of time spent in Suffolk during World War One in which he was treated with hostility by locals for having too many European friends. Plus ca change. Many of his buildings still stand but they fell into disrepair when he was out of fashion and are only more recently being given the attention they deserve. It is an awful irony that it was the 2014 fire in at the GSA which brought Mackintosh's name back to the fore through the destruction of his wonderful library. That fire certainly showed the depth of feeling Glasgow still has for 'Toshie' - I live very close by and my abiding memory is how many people, from all works of life, simply stood there and wept. Fingers crossed the restoration should be unveiled in 2019 - I think there might be another bit of a do. In the meantime get yourself up to Glasgow and marvel at the exhibition - I might even show you a couple of good pubs nearby.


Frances Hodgson Burnett's adult fiction, by Leslie Wilson

0
0

photo by Herbert Rose Barraud
I re-read 'The Making of a Marchioness' recently, a novel I first heard of via Nancy Mitford, in her 'The Blessing.' Like 'The Shuttle,' by the same author, it's published by Persephone books and I began to be curious about the rest of her adult output; I also got hold of Gretchen Gerzina's autobiography of Burnett.

Like most people, I expect, I first encountered her through her children's work; rather curiously, I heard of 'The Secret Garden' when I read Noel Streatfeild's 'The Painted Garden.' Clearly this was the wrong way round. I'd heard of Little Lord Fauntleroy, as a term of abuse and contempt, I'm afraid. I read 'The Secret Garden, then 'A Little Princess', and finally I found Fauntleroy, in an early 20th century edition, in a second hand bookshop on the other side of the river from where we lived in Kendal, when I was about thirteen. So I read Fauntleroy when I had almost left children's books behind, (you got an adult library ticket at the age of fourteen, and most of my books came from the library: I could never otherwise have financed my reading habit.)

Frances Hodgson Burnett had an interesting and difficult life, which I don't  wish to recount in detail, but in brief, she was born in Manchester, where her father lost all his money. The family then emigrated to Tennessee, where they lived in poverty. Like Louisa May Alcott and her fictional Jo March, Burnett began writing stories for magazines, and earned money for the family that way. She had an up-and-down financial life, but continued to be self-sufficient and to support her family. She had two sons, one of whom died young of TB, and two disastrous marriages. The first ended in divorce, after years of living apart; the second was an abusive relationship and her husband, an English actor, blackmailed her into the marriage. She finally got the courage to get rid of that second husband.
Out of an incredibly prolific output, I'm going to talk about four books. I shan't talk about 'Making of a Marchioness' because it's pretty well known, and if I do ever blog about it, I'd like to give it a blog all to itself.

'The Shuttle' deals with marriages between American heiresses and British aristocrats, and it begins with a rather ineffectual American heiress, Rosalie Vanderpoel, who marries a British aristocrat and waster, is taken back to his dilapidated house in the country and his horrific mother, and is bullied into signing over all her money to Sir Nigel. He also cuts her off from her family. Her younger sister, Bettina, is cast in a different mould; a strong woman, who, when she comes of age, announces to her father that she's going to England to find out what has happened to her sister.
She finds a woman who has been physically and emotionally abused, a shadow of the pretty sister Bettina once knew, However, with her father's money and her own force of personality, Bettina renovates the house for her young nephew, and when Sir Nigel returns, stays on to defend her sister against him. She also finds a love interest on her own account. That's enough about the plot, to avoid spoilers.


What interested me was that this subject matter could find readers in the Victorian era, and the issue of domestic abuse (which arises in 'The Making of a Marchioness' too, is in no way softened. One of the most powerful passages in the book occurs when Vanderpoel senior becomes aware that Bettina has fallen in love, which, given his eldest daughter's experience, cannot be called a risk-free option.
'If a man who was as much a scoundrel, but cleverer - it would be necessary that he should be much cleverer - made the best of himself to Betty - ! It was folly to think one could guess what a woman.. would love. He knew Betty, but no man knows the thing which comes, as it were, in the dark and claims its own - whether for good or evil. He had lived long enough to see beautiful, strong-spirited creatures do strange things.' Hodgson Burnett knew herself to be such a strong woman, and knew that even such a woman could fall into the hands of an abusive partner.


Burnett when older: Library of Congress
I found 'A Lady of Quality' much harder to read, partly because it's written in a rather ghastly pastiche of 17th/18th century language. Though Henry James apparently admired it. Tastes change. Rather too much 'twas,' and not at all the delightful, simple, yet powerfully frank voice which I enjoy in this author. It deals with Clorinda, the daughter of an English gentleman, the child of a downtrodden wife who dies after giving birth to her, who is raised as a boy by her father, but then decides to adopt women's clothing and women's manners after a rebuke by the curate. This is in no way an act of submission; rather of assertion and strategy. Of course the men come after her, but she has no dowry. A handsome young wastrel flirts with her, without any intention of marrying her. She's strongly attracted to him, but her pride won't let her show it too much. She then marries an elderly nobleman, and is quickly widowed. Meanwhile, she's found the man she really loves, but the egregious wastrel, Sir John Oxon, tries to blackmail her into marrying him. I'd better stop now, for fear of spoilers. Clorinda is almost terrifyingly strong and independent; she's balanced by her elder sister Anne, who adores her, but is physically weak and nervous. And yet Anne has her own strength, which Clorinda values. Pairs of women, one weak, the other strong, keep popping up in these novels, and it's hard not to suppose that they correspond to the two sides of Burnett's own character, particularly in regard to her second marriage.
From A Little Princess, my copy,
Again, it's staggering that such a devastatingly strong woman should have been a popular fictional character in the Victorian period, and it knocks into a cocked hat our ideas about demure Victorian heroines. A good thing, that.

'The Head of the House of Coombe' was published in 1922, Burnett's last novel. A feather-headed young woman from Jersey marries a young Englishman who has no money and, apparently, less sense. They have a baby, who she ignores. She lives a life of extravagance, fashion, and debt, and her husband then dies. The servants disappear and she's left on her own till one of her aristocratic friends, a rather strange Marquis, bails her out financially. The world then supposes she's his mistress. She isn't. Her neglected little girl meets a kindly boy in the Park, and plays with him several times, but when his mother discovers who little Robin is, she takes the boy back to Scotland to save him from the taint. Subsequently, Lord Coombe discovers that Robin is not only neglected but abused, and he dismisses her nursemaid and gets her a loving one, gets her educated, builds her a delightful extension to live in, still in the house of 'Feather', which is her mother's nickname.

One can easily recognise elements from the children's books here: Feather strongly resembles Mistress Mary's neglectful mother, and Robin, like Sara Crewe, is consigned to a garret till rescued by a masculine well-wisher, and installed in pleasant rooms, Coombe does not, however, adopt Robin. There's a second volume, apparently, but I haven't read it.

I was interested in this recurrence of the emotionally absent mother. Burnett was not a huge success as a mother; partly because she had to work so hard. Her boys were left behind, missing her, when she voyaged to England to promote her books. Letting it be known that her second son, Vivian, was the inspiration for 'Fauntleroy' wasn't the best move any mother ever made, either. When Lionel was dying of TB in Paris, she went away during his last days to refresh herself in England; she did get back before he died. I don't wish to be judgemental about that. But afterwards she wallowed in grief; remained in England while Vivian wrote letters to her begging her to come to him. He was naturally, grieving greatly for his beloved elder brother. What really stuck in my gullet was her letter to him, telling him that all his needs had always been met, and she had to devote herself to a foundation for poor boys that she had set up in London. Here, she sounds like Mrs Jellaby in 'Bleak House', and though much about Mrs Jellaby makes me wince, I can understand some of what Dickens was lampooning. I do wonder whether Burnett was aware of any element of 'Feather', or Mistress Mary's mother, in herself. Perhaps not. Neither Feather nor Mrs Lennox indulged in philanthropy.

The reason I haven't read the second volume of this novel is the hideous jingoistic subplot of the novel, complete with evil Prussian spies (one of whom wants to rape Robin, and she's rescued only in the nick of time.) Burnett, looking back, characterises the Germany of that time as a nation that believed 'that the world has but one reason for existence - that it may be conquered and ravaged by the country that gave them birth.' Flip back to 'The Shuttle' and consider this passage.
'I believe you would always think about doing things,' said Lady Anstruthers. 'That is American, too.'
'It is a quality Americans inherited from England,' she said lightly, 'one of the results of it is that England covers a rather large share of the map of the world.'
 Only of course, Hodgson Burnett didn't see the British Empire as anything but benevolent. I think further comment is unnecessary.

Illustration from 'That Lass o'Lowries'.


I approached 'That Lass o' Lowries' with some trepidation, because it's full of north-country dialect and though I'd found bits of it quite acceptable in 'The Secret Garden,' I wasn't sure how well I could manage large quantities of dialogue written in it. In fact, it didn't cause me any problems at all, and I honestly think this novel is the best of her adult work. It deals with one of the women who worked underground in the mines. At school I was shown pictures of them dragging trucks along rails underground, acting as beasts of burden, and they were represented to me as pitiable. Joan Lowrie, the heroine of the novel, is a different creature.

'The man's jacket of fustian, open at the neck, bared a handsome sun-browned throat' (though one does wonder how she managed to get it sun-browned, working long hours down the pit). 'The man's hat shaded a face with dark eyes that had a sort of animal beauty, and a well-moulded chin.'

Joan is a woman of character, though she is often physically abused by her no-good father. She shortly takes in an unmarried mother of a small baby who was seduced and kept, till she became pregnant, by the son of a local squire. Liz is one of those weak counterparts to the strong female lead who I've observed in other novels. Joan protects Liz, though she's sometimes irritated by her, and drives the pompous parson out when he comes to moralise at the poor girl.

'Does tha see as tha has done her any good?' she demanded, 'I dunnot mysen.'
'I have endeavoured to the best of my ability to improve her mental condition,' the minister replied.
'I thowt as much,' said Joan. 'I mak no doubt tha'st done thy best, neyther. Happen tha'st gi'en her what comfort tha had to spare, but if you'd been wiser than yo' are, you'd ha' let her alone.'' And she sends him off with: 'Howivver, as tha has said thy say, happen it'll do yo' fur this toime, an' yo' can let her be for a while.'


Joan Lowrie is one of several characters in the novel who can see patronising hypocrisy for what it is, and have no hesitation in speaking their mind about it. I did find the working-class characters convincing and well-drawn, though there are traces of patronage in the portrayal, but far less than one would fear to discover. Perhaps this is because Burnett herself had been desperately poor, and must have had to do with working-class children in Tennessee. But Joan is right up there with Elizabeth Gaskell's working-class heroines, or some of George Eliot's women. Tough, yet kindly, and less ferocious that Clorinda in 'A Lady of Quality,' she has a quality of genuineness, and you can't help but love her. I do recommend this book.

Photo: project Gutenberg

I WANT MY MUMMY: Two strange medieval spices by Elizabeth Chadwick

0
0
Mummy.  Les Livres des Simples Medecines.
Not all items classed as spices in the Medieval period had a culinary use.  Some were medicinal and not what we would regard as a spice today.  One item a physician might require for his preparations was a spice known as 'tutty'.  Tutty was a panacea consisting of charred scrapings from inside chimneys.  But no just any chimney.  It was no good popping up to the castle in summer and taking a surreptitious rasp of the soot while the fire was out.  Oh no.  Tutty was specifically scrapings from more exotic climes, its point of export to Europe being Alexandria in Egypt. Sold in small quantities, it was expensive.  The word comes from the Old French 'Tutie' which in turn comes from the Arabic Tutiya.  Modern definitions give it as on oxide of zinc which gathers on furnace sides where copper or brass is smelted.

To go with your tutty, you might want another spice for your supply chest called 'momie', 'mumia' or 'mumm'.  A drug handbook of 1166 defines 'mummy' as a kind of spice collected from the tombs of the dead.  This doesn't mean thousands of years old Egyptian mummies as we might imagine, but slightly more recent embalmed corpses that still have a bit of give in them.  A 15th century treatise, the Livres des Simples Medecines, tells us that it is 'A spice or confection found in the tombs of people who have been enbalmed with spices as they used to do in ancient times, and as the pagans near Babylon still do.  This mummy is found near the brain and the spine.  You should choose that which is shining black, bad-smelling and firm.  There was another kind which was opaque, white, and easily crumbled to powder, which should be rejected.  The Livres illustration for the product apparently depicts a corpse in an open coffin.
Mummy was thought to be efficacious in the prevention of nosebleeds when combined with the juice of a plant called 'shepherd's purse'. Indeed, its main function was to stop bleeding.  If a person was spitting blood because of injury or malady, they were advised to put a mummy pill under the tongue, the latter made from mummy, mastic powder and water in which gum arabic had been dissolved.

The full magnificent Livres des Medecines can be accessed by clicking on this link:
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6000422n.image

Tosca by Miranda Miller

0
0

    As a novelist, I’ve never doubted that fictional characters are real; we all know what we mean when we refer to Sherlock Holmes, Hamlet, Mr Micawber or Lizzie Bennett. It gets more complicated when fictional characters interact with historical facts.

   Puccini’s Tosca is one of my favourite operas and for many years I simply responded to the glorious music, accepting the romantic and melodramatic plot on its own theatrical terms. The photo above shows Enrico Caruso as  the painter Cavaradossi, Tosca's lover.   Tosca is set in Rome in 1800 and the novel I’m writing at the moment is set in Rome in 1805. Seeing the opera again recently, I wanted to know more about its political and historical background. Was there really a villainous chief of the secret police called Scarpia and an irresistible diva called Tosca? No, is the short answer, but the story of how they gathered enough imaginative moss to still fascinate us in the 21st century is an interesting one.

   Puccini's grandfather, Domenico Pucccini, was in Naples in January 1799 to study with the composer Paisiello. He wrote a long letter to his father describing the chaos as the Queen, Maria Carolina, who had vowed to avenge the death of her sister Marie Antoinette, encouraged the massacre of all Jacobins and Republicans. "Here we are then in the most detestable anarchy, with everyone in mortal danger, especially we poor foreigners, who, if heard speaking differently, are immediately called "Jacobin" and given a shotgun "pill" in the chest—not the most pleasant medicine in the world." This is the same Queen who, in the opera Tosca, has asked the famous singer to perform at the Te Deum at the Palazzo Farnese to celebrate a great victory at Marengo. Later, news comes that Marengo was in fact a victory for Napoleon. In the opera, as in my novel, Napoleon is an invisible presence, seemingly invincible, who the characters argue over.

   As well as these stories Puccini must have heard as a child, about the revolutionary martyrs who were burned and tortured by reactionary royalists, his opera is based on a play by Sardou, La Tosca.

   This was written as a vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt and became a huge international success in the late nineteenth century. Shaw despised Sardou’s melodramas, which he referred to as Sardoodledom, but audiences loved them. Sardou’s grandfather had been a barber in Napoleon’s army and for his grandson, as for Puccini, it was the revolutionaries who were admirable. In Act 1 of the opera Cesare Angelotti has escaped from the dungeons of Castel S. Angelo, the round building below, and is hiding in the church where Cavaradossi is painting.

    Tosca herself, in both the play and the opera, is devout and disapproves of such wickedness as atheism and reading Rousseau and Voltaire. But, because she is passionately in love with the painter Mario Cavaradossi, she forgives his sinful politics. Tormented by jealousy, she follows her lover to Angelotti’s hiding place and Scarpia, of course, has her followed. Later, in the Castel S. Angelo, while Mario is tortured in the next room, she agrees to sleep with Scarpia in return for a safe conduct pass to take both Mario and herself out of the Papal States. Scarpia pretends to her that he will arrange a fake execution for Mario at dawn and then allow them to go free. As Scarpia bears down on her to demand his reward, Tosca stabs him.

   Although Sardou’s play is far too long for modern audiences - at 5 Acts compared to the opera’s 3 - it does expand interestingly on the politics and motivation of the characters, and gives us a powerful feeling of the danger of the times We learn that Angelotti has been sentenced to three years in prison for possessing a volume of Voltaire and also, unofficially, for recognising Lady Hamilton, who he picked up as a prostitute in Vauxhall Gardens years before. In fact, the lovely Emma did play a most unlovely role in Naples during the bloody period following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. An intimate friend of Queen Maria Carolina, she had herself rowed out to watch a famous republican being hanged from the yardarm of his own ship. We also learn from Sardou that clothes were intensely political and could be a matter of life and death: if you wore a powdered wig and buckled shoes you were a royalist; if you had a beard or a mustache and plain dark clothes you were assumed to be free thinking and revolutionary.

   Puccini’s opera has a rich historical background. Italy had long been divided into a number of small states, with the Pope in Rome ruling the Papal States in central Italy. After the French Revolution, in 1798, a French army under Napoleon marched into Rome, where there was no real resistance from the very unmartial Romans. The Pope, Pius V1, was taken prisoner and transported to France. where he died a year later at the age of 81. The short lived Roman republic was ruled by seven consuls and, in the opera, Angelotti was one of them. However, many ordinary Roman people hated their new rulers and mocked La Repubblica per Ridere ( the ridiculous republic).

   Although the Pope was an absolute monarch the Church was generous to the poor. Very few Romans starved, and they did not want to be ‘liberated from slavery.’ Some aristocrats, including the Borghese family, were happy to compromise with the French. They were told to make a list of their valuables and anyone who opposed the Republic had all their possessions and property confiscated. Napoleon himself never came to Rome and soon found that he needed his troops in Egypt. So, after only a year, the Republic came to an end. As someone says in Sardou’s play, the French left Rome by one gate and the Neapolitans entered by another. Both armies looted shamelessly and many of Rome’s most cherished works of art, including the Apollo Belvedere and The Laocoon, ended up in Paris, in the new Muséum central des arts de la République in the Louvre.

      In May 1800 Napoleon once again brought his troops across the Alps to Italy and on 14 June his army met the Austrian forces at the Battle of Marengo., seen here in this painting by Lejeune. The action of both the opera and the play takes place immediately after this. For those who admired Napoleon, all this bloodshed and suffering was justified because Europe was regenerated.

   As always, there is another point of view. The Catholic novelist Piers Paul Read has written a fascinating novel, Scarpia (2015) which is written with great sympathy for those who were loyal to the monarchy and the church. In his version of the same story, Scarpia is a decent, honest Sicilian nobleman who despises revolutionaries. At the end of Puccini’s opera Tosca, after stabbing Scarpia to defend her honour, finds that her lover Mario really is dead. She leaps heroically to her death from the battlements of the Castel S. Angelo, crying, ‘O Scarpia, avanti a Dio!’ ( O Scarpia, we meet before God).

   I hope it is forgivable to reveal such a famous ending. At the end of Read’s accomplished novel, however, Tosca is confronted by Scarpia’s devoted friend, Spoletta:

   “‘You vile whore,’ he shouted. What did you hope for? To escape? To claim a crime of Passion? An appeal to the Rota? A pardon from the Pope? Is that what you imagined?’

   Then, “Spoletta took seven strides to the castellated ramparts, lifted her high above his head, and threw Floria Tosca over the wall.”

    And so we storytellers play with fiction and history, often to the annoyance of professional historians.


Another way of marking time, by Carol Drinkwater

0
0


                                     The month of Messidor, from the Latin 'messis', corn harvest.

Dates are on mind as this week as I have celebrated a big birthday. I was hunting about to see what of note in history occurred at around the same time as my birth. Instead, the internet led me to the Republican Calendar. (I am not that old!)

I have lived in France for over thirty years and I am ashamed to admit that I have only just discovered the Republican Calendar. Am I alone in this ignorance?

On the 6th October 1793, or 15 Vendémiaire, An II, the Convention decided to create a new calendar for a new Republic, fixing the start date as the day when the Republic was proclaimed, namely the autumn equinox, 22nd September 1792.

The seven-day week was replaced by a ten-day one called a 'decade'. The day names were changed to primidi (day one), duodi, tridi, quartidi, quintidi, sextidi, septidi, octidi, nonidi and décadi.

Months were made up of three decades (or thirty days). They year ended after Fructidor with 5 supplementary days and a 6th, Day of the Revolution, for leap years.

The French poet, Philippe François Nazaire Fabre, created names for the months. His inspiration came from the seasons and events in Nature. The Republican Calendar began its year in the autumn with the month of Vendémiaire. Vendage in French or vindemia in Latin is the grape harvest.
The names given for each month are really beautiful.

Names were also given to each day of the year and they were chosen from trees and flowers, plants, animals and farm tools.

Alas, Napoleon I who, of course, was not in favour of a Republic abolished this newly-devised calendar in 1806 and returned us to the Gregorian one.



23rd April 2018, is quintidi (day 5) Floréal in the year of CCXXVI, celebrating the nightingale. Nightingale Day in the Flowering month of 226th year.

My birthday, 22nd April, was celebrating the hawthorn.




I have taken these beautiful designs off their Twitter page, @sansculotidesso I hope I am not abusing any copyright.

A beautiful way to count the days of our life, eh?

www.caroldrinkwater.com






Hinskey Outdoor Pool by Janie Hampton

0
0

Hinksey Pool is a welcome oasis in Oxford
Oxford has one of Britain’s best outdoor swimming pools. Surrounded by trees and blossom with a view of distant hills between the flowering bushes, Hinksey Outdoor Pool is one of Oxford’s special summer places. When it opens at 7 a.m., local residents arrive in their swimming costumes and dressing gowns. After a few lengths they stroll home for breakfast, and are replaced by laughing schoolchildren, grannies like me getting fit and everyone in between. And it is all thanks to cholera. 

Oxford from Hinksey Hill, by William Turner of Oxford, 1789-1862, painted c.1840.
The railway line and swimming pool are now beyond the two bushes on the right.
Up to the mid-19th century, the citizens of Oxford drank straight from the River Thames, and there were regular outbreaks of cholera. Despite the authorities banning pig sties next to the streams running into the Thames, there were three main outbreaks of the ‘Indian Disease’ in the 19th century. In the first, in 1832, there were 200 known cases and a 50% death rate. ‘Beware of late and long sittings, dancings, revellings, surfeitings, and such like,’ warned the Oxford Board of Health just before the St Giles Fair in 1832. ‘Beware of  unknown Companies in the distempered atmospheres of Booths , Show Rooms, and Canvas or Boarded Apartments. — Infection lurks a long time in Stone or Brick Buildings; it may continue in the materials of Wooden, Woollen, and Hempen inclosures; and who knows where the Booths of a Fair were last erected? But especially beware of Drunkenness, for it has been found to bite as a serpent and to sting as an adder. Many who have raised the cup in merriment to their lips, have in agony lamented their excesses, and at their deaths have left a last legacy of warning to the Drunkard. — Death smites with its surest and swiftest arrows the licentious and intemperate — the rash, fool-hardy, and imprudent.’ 
Contaminated 'Monster Soup' flowed through Oxford in the River Thames.
Better times began for the residents of Oxford when in 1844 the Great Western Railway line was constructed from London, terminating in south Oxford near Hinksey village. Railways need a lot of gravel, and there was plenty in Hinksey. So a vast quarry was dug, which soon filled with fresh spring water. When in 1854 the connection between drinking water and cholera was made, the City of Oxford spotted an opportunity to bring health to their people, and bought the new lake and land around it from the Earl of Abingdon. They then built a pumping station powered by steam engines, which served the local residents during the day with clean water. If a fire broke out at night, a policeman woke the boilerman who fired up the pumps. To ensure the water was not contaminated, the Waterworks Committee kept animals and people out with high fences and to inspire confidence in the quality of the water, the land was landscaped with trees and neat hedges. However, the Oxford photographer Henry Taunt complained of the number of freshwater shrimps coming out of his taps, and mussels regularly blocked the valves in the fire brigade’s engines. 

So in 1884, after a law was passed that drinking water had to be filtered, huge water tanks and filter beds were dug near the lake and a dozen men were employed at the improved water works. Filtering sand was dredged from the river, while coal brought in carts from canal barges was then taken away as ashes. By 1934, Oxford’s population had risen to over 80,000 and Hinksey could not supply enough water. It now all came from Swinford Water Works, 5 miles west of Oxford. The Water Committee handed over the lake, land, pumping station and filter beds for recreation. The pumping station is still South Oxford Community Centre; Hinksey Lake is popular for swans, fishing and junior rowers; the cooling pond is used by ducks, model boat enthusiasts and in cold winters, skaters; and Hinksey Park has tennis courts, football and a playground. 
The new diving board at Hinskey Pools, 1936. 
But best of all was the Jubilee Pools which opened in 1935, the 25th year of King George V’s reign. The filter beds were converted into three swimming pools and two changing rooms were built – one for men, one for women and children.  On the opening day, children from St Matthew’s Infant’s School were invited to sing to Alderman Brown, the Mayor of Oxford. ‘The Jubilee Pools had no fences around them, just the pools,’ recalled Peter Horwood one of the schoolboys. ‘You put your swimming costume on in the morning when you got up, go and have a swim, play in the fields out the back, then go and have another swim. It was all free.’ During the Second World War, the pools were closed and the RAF used them for dinghy and life-saving practice. After a drowning accident in 1958, fences were erected and adult swimmers charged 1 shilling (5p) and children sixpence (2p). Individual changing huts were also installed with a balcony above for spectators.
Hinksey Pools in 1965. copyright Oxfordshire County Council.
In 1960 a roof top café opened, but by 1990 the season lasted only 6 weeks and the pool closed in 1994 when the filter system broke down. 
Hinksey Pool by Bruno Guastalla, in 1994.
Bob Price is retiring this May after 35 years as Labour Councillor for Hinksey Park ward. He told me that his proudest achievement has been the refurbishment of Hinksey Pool. Since it reopened in 1997, two of the filter pools have been filled in and grassed over for sunbathing, the heated pool (temp 25oC) now has a shallow area for children and a deeper section for serious swimmers, clean individual changing rooms, hot showers, and on sunny days a café serving cappuccino, panini and ice cream. On cold days, the pool steams and swimmers are rewarded with free hot chocolate. When the moon is full the pool stays open until midnight. Bliss. 
Clean, warm water now greets swimmers whatever the weather.
www.janiehampton.co.uk

http://www.fusion-lifestyle.com/centres/hinksey-outdoor-pool
http://lizwoolley.co.uk/
www.southoxford.org/local history
The Changing Faces of South Oxford and South Hinksey, Book 2, Carole Newbigging, Robert Boyd Publishing, 1999.



Princess Ida by Lynne Benton

0
0

I’ve just come back from seeing a 21st century production of a 19th century operetta by the late, great Gilbert and Sullivan.  The reason for my attendance at this event was because my oldest granddaughter, at university in St Andrews, was directing the show, so of course we went to support her, and had a thoroughly good time.  We were most impressed by the talents and professionalism shown by the cast and the small group of musicians, and felt that our granddaughter had done a grand job in this, her first, directorial role.  (Of course, we weren’t a bit biased!)


However, we couldn’t help wondering how relevant the story is today.


Princess Idaopened at the Savoy Theatre on 5 January 1884, the eighth of Gilbert and Sullivan’s fourteen collaborations.  The opera satirises women’s education and Darwinian evolution, which were controversial topics in conservative Victorian England, but Gilbert was also aiming his satire squarely at Women’s Emancipation. When Princess Ida was revived in 1926, The Times said: “It was after the fairies of Iolanthe had wrought havoc in the British Constitution that Gilbert turned to the companion task of showing how fatal it would be if women ever presumed to be anything but fairies, and cocking a cynical eye at Tennyson’s Princess, wrote Princess Ida, or Castle Adamant.



The Times was right, in that the story is based on a narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson called The Princess (1847), written following the founding in the same year of the first college of women’s higher education, Queen’s College, London.  In 1870, when women’s higher education was still a radical concept, Gilbert wrote a farcical musical play, based on the poem, also called The Princess,and subsequently lifted much of the dialogue of Princess Ida directly from his 1870 farce.  However, Girton College, Cambridge, had been established in 1869, and by the time Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated on Princess Ida in 1883, the idea of a women’s college was no longer considered revolutionary.  Indeed, Westfield College, the University of London’s first women’s college, which had opened in 1882, is cited as the model for Castle Adamant, and certainly women’s higher education was very much in the news in London at the time.




 Based, as several of Gilbert’s plots are, on misunderstandings, children married or affianced at an early age and brought up with no knowledge of each other, and a certain amount of cross-dressing, mistaken identities and so on, at first sight Princess Ida would seem to have little relevance to the world of today.  (Mind you, some of Shakespeare’s plays, such as Twelfth Night, involve similar problems, so maybe we shouldn’t blame Gilbert too much!)


It is hard to tell the story of Princess Ida simply, but I will try.  The story concerns the young Prince Hilarion, who was married at the age of one to Princess Ida, a few months younger than he.  Since then they have never seen each other, but now Hilarion is 21, his father, Hildebrande, insists that it is time he claimed his bride.  However, when Ida’s father, Gama, arrives with his three sons, he tells Hildebrande that Ida has forsworn the world of men and formed an all-female university at Castle Adamant.  Indeed, he says, “No men are allowed within its walls, and it is so feminist an establishment that although the ladies rise at cockcrow, every morning the crowing is done by an accomplished hen”.



Naturally, this being G&S, Hilarion and his friends, Florian and Cyril, decide to break into Castle Adamant dressed as women and impersonate female students, hoping to persuade Ida to change her mind.  Princess Ida is intrigued by these three “new students” and feels a strange connection with Hilarion.  However, Florian’s sister Psyche recognises them and explains the philosophy of the university to them: namely, that women are superior to men and should rule the world in their stead.  But having by now taken a fancy to Cyril she promises to keep their secret, and warns them to avoid Lady Blanche, who originally helped Ida form the university but now wishes she was in charge herself.  Then Melissa, Lady Blanche’s daughter, arrives, discovers their secret and falls in love with Florian, so that when Lady Blanche sees the boys and guesses their secret immediately, Melissa convinces her that if she helps Hilarion to gain his love, Ida will leave Castle Adamant to marry him and leave the university to Lady Blanche.  This is music to Lady Blanche’s ears, so she agrees to help the boys.



But just as all is about to go well, Hildebrande arrives with his army and threatens to kill Ida’s father unless the princess agrees to marry Hilarion.  Ida refuses, and rousing her students to fight the male invaders, declares that she will die before she will be Hilarion’s wife.


As the army lays siege to Castle Adamant, Ida prepares her students to fight them, but soon discovers that the girls are not too keen on the idea of fighting all these young men.  She is distressed by her students’ betrayal of all she has taught them, so when her father, Gama, and her three brothers arrive, Ida agrees to allow them in.  


Her three foolish brothers, having just removed their armour as being too heavy and uncomfortable, challenge Hilarion, Florian and Cyril to a battle to decide Ida’s fate, but are roundly defeated.  



Hilarion then makes an emotional appeal to Ida, pointing out all he has learned about women and marriage during his time at Castle Adamant, and declaring his love.  Moved, Ida admits that she does love him, so she accepts him as her husband and, along with Psyche and Melissa, leaves the university, leaving a delighted Lady Blanche to rule over Castle Adamant.



It remains one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s less frequently performed operettas, but retains much of their perennial charm.  However, I do wonder what Gilbert would have thought of it being performed by students of both sexes at a mixed university!


Genghis Khan's Girls by Katherine Roberts

0
0

Our April guest is Katherine Roberts. Not only was Katherine one of the first History Girls; the book she talks about here, Bone Music, is published by The Greystones Press, the independent publisher set up by Mary Hoffman and her husband. Here is a photo that Katherine posed for on the occasion of the virtual launch of Bone Music and The Sword of Ice and Fire by John Matthews.


If that doesn't whet your appetite enough, here is a bit more about Katherine:
Katherine Roberts won the inaugural Branford Boase Award for her debut novel Song Quest (Chicken House/Scholastic 2000). Since then she has written many more fantasy and historical books for young readers, including the Seven Fabulous Wonders series based on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and I am the Great Horse, telling the story of Alexander the Great from the horse's mouth. She lives in Devon and is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Penryn in Cornwall.

A recent study of the genetic legacy of the Mongolssuggests that 1 in 200 males alive in the world today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan. If you consider the infamous Mongolian warrior lived well into his sixties and took several wives as was the custom of his people, who between them bore him 11 legitimate children, and that he no doubt sired an unspecified number of illegitimate children as he built an empire four times the size of Alexander the Great's, this is not as surprising as it first seems. So who were the women in Genghis Khans life, and what did they think of the small boy, originally named Temujin, who grew into such a ruthless conqueror?
The quotes below are from my novel Bone Music, which is in turn based on a 13th century Mongolian text known as The Secret History of the Mongols (Chinese: Yuan Ch'ao Pi Shih) thatcombines legend and history to tell the story of Genghis Khan's early years.

Princess Borta (or Borte) – Genghis Khan’s childhood sweetheart and first wife.
We first meet the Khan's first and most important wife when she is 10 and Temujin is just nine. Temujin's father Yesugei the Brave, leader of the Mongol Alliance, rides with his eldest son across the steppe in search of a suitable girl. They find her in Dei the Wise’s camp, a chief blessed with beautiful daughters and rich herds. At this stage, Temujin and Borta's betrothal has the flavour of a royal wedding, with the camp's shaman joining the young people’s hands and calling on the spirits of their ancestors to bless the match:
 As the two chiefs linked our hands together with a chain of flowers, a strange shiver went through me and I wished they would let me have a drink, too. Our shaman blessed the union with his horsetail staff, which tickled, making me want to giggle. Apart from that idiot Jamukha throwing a stone at Temujin when he tried to kiss me, we got through it without too much embarrassment.” (‘Bone Music’, Borta’s Story)
Jamukha later becomes Temujin's blood brother, or anda. I used artistic licence in having Jamukha here at the start of the story, but historically the two boys became bitter rivals for the leadership of their people and, however their rivalry started, it was never going to end well.
In Bone Music, Borta also has a pet deer called Whisper, which she rescued from the forest and that later becomes her shaman-animal, carrying her spirit in reflection of the Mongol people's ancestors, Blue Wolf and Fallow Doe. Later, she fashions a violin from the skull of her deer and plays it in battle to call down a storm to frighten Jamukha's forces, while the other shamans play an imaginary version of the Mongolian horse-head fiddle known as a morin khur:
Behind the old men, my beautiful wife stood on a rock against the sky, her black hair loose to her waist, holding her delicate deer-bone violin. (Bone Music, Temujins Story.)
Horse head violins are still an important part of Mongolian culture, although these days the sounding box is usually made of wood rather than covered with horse hide, and the traditional horsehair strings have been replaced by nylon, leaving just the carving of a horses head on the neck of the instrument as a reminder of its legendary origin.
Mizu basyo at Japanese Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
 Lady Hogelun – Genghis Khan’s mother.
Yesugei the Brave originally stole Temujin’s mother from the Merkid tribe when she was travelling to her wedding and made her his first wife, at the same time making bitter enemies of the Merkid people. When Yesugei is poisoned on his way back across the steppe from Temujin and Borta's betrothal ceremony, Hogelun immediately recalls her son from Dei the Wise’s camp and tries to get the Mongol Alliance to accept the boy as their new leader. But an ambitious chief called Kiriltuk takes advantage of Temujin’s youth to seize control of the Alliance, and drives the family out of his camp todie of starvation over the winter. However, Lady Hogelun (who is pregnant with Yesugeis daughter at the time) has no intention of letting her sons die, and orders Yesugei's second wife to help her gather berries and dig for onions, until their boys are strong enough to bend their bows and hunt for meat. She also takes on the unenviable task of raising her sons to be honourable warriors - a job made difficult because Temujin and his eldest half-brother Begter are always at each others throats. When Temujin kills Begter after a violent quarrel that started over some fish their younger brothers had caught, a furious Lady Hogelun gives the boys the old bundle of arrows' lesson:
Snap it! Mother said, handing Khasar one of my arrows. Khasar gave me an apologetic look, but obeyed. The shaft broke at once, and I groaned inwardly at the thought of having to whittle another one. Then Mother took five of my arrows and held them together in a bundle, which she passed to me. Now you, Temujin, she said, knowing very well I wouldnt break them even if I could, because making good arrows to replace them would have taken me ages. After the bundle has been passed around all the boys, who in turn fail to break the arrows, Lady Hogelun presses her lips together and tells them sternly: The broken arrow is Begter. These five are the rest of you, strong only if you stick together. Up here, we have no friends except our own shadows, and no whips except our horsestails, so you ungrateful horde of savages had better stop fighting each other if you want to live to see your children grow up!(Bone Music, Temujins Story)
This is a lesson Temujin takes to heart, and he later makes alliances with the other tribes in order to defeat his enemies.
Old Khoga– Borta’s servant.
When Temujin finally arrives to claim his bride, Borta’s mother (no doubt worried about her daughter in the young khan’s war camp) gives Borta one of her most trusted servants. Khoga is devoted to her young mistress and tries to save her when the Merkid raiding party attacks their camp while Temujin is away, after Borta falls off her horse and breaks her arm:
Old Khoga turned out to have more sense than any of us that morning. She had been following us along the track, seen me fall, and came puffing up the slope to help. She took one look at my arm, bundled me into the yak cart and pulled the sheepskins over me to hide me from the raiders.(Bone Music, Bortas Story).
Khadagan–warrior girl.
Some Mongol girls trained as warriors so they could ride and fight alongside their brothers. When Temujin is captive in Chief Kiriltuk’s camp awaiting punishment for killing his half-brother Begter, he persuades one of the braver girls to help him escape. Her name is Khadagan, and later she joins the rebellion among the Alliance families who defect to join Temujin. Towards the end of the story, Khadagan is entrusted with a message by the increasingly desperate Jamukha:
I needed a messenger who could get into Lady Borta’s yurt alone, someone Anda Temujin would trust.Is that girl still around?” I asked Yegu. “The warrior girl who came to my tent the winter we spent with Kiriltuk’s Alliance? Send her to me.” Jamukha hopes to win Borta's aid by returning the skull of her pet deer, which he rescued from Temujin's camp following her capture by the Merkids but lost to a wolf. Needless to say, this does not go down well with Borta: The gift of the deers skull didnt work out quite as Id planned. Khadagan returned with news that Borta had given birth to a son, together with Bortas threat that if I came anywhere near her or her child, shed tell Temujin that I was the wolf. (Bone Music, Jamukhas story.)
Temulun– Temujin’s little sister, given a boy’s name to protect her from the evil spirits who steal babies from their mothers in the night.
Temulun was born in exile and grows up in a rough camp with her four brothers and remaining half-brother. She thinks she is a boy, but as the Khan’s sister she will be valuable for making alliances with other tribes through marriage when she grows up. Jamukha recognizes this and, in one of his attempts to remain in Temujin’s camp (and close to Borta), he asks his anda for the girl's hand in marriage.
“I was thinking of your sister, actually,” Jamukha said into the silence that had fallen between us and threatened to divide us again. “She’s strong and pretty, rides well too.” Temujin, who is still thinking of which Merkid bastard might have got his wife pregnant during her captivity in their camp, is caught completely unawares: “Be serious!” I said, realizing what he meant. “Temulun’s only nine!” (‘Bone Music’, Temujin’s story).
Upon which, Jamukha points out that Temujin was only nine when he was promised to Borta, rubbing salt into the still-raw wound. It might actually have been a good match when Temulun was old enough to marry, but by then the rivalry between Temujin and Jamukha had escalated beyond repair.
Genghis Khan and three of his four sons

Bone Music ends when Temujin becomes Genghis Khan and ruler of all the people who live in felt tents at a large gathering of the clans in 1206. After that, he goes on to conquer many other people, from the Chinese Kin and Sung people to the east, the ancient Tanghut people of northern Tibet, and the Moslem kingdoms to the west as far as Hungary and the Mediterranean coast. Along the way, he took other wives to cement alliances:
Yesugen and Yesui  - Tartar sisters, who became good friends with Borta.
Ibaka - Kereyid girl, later given to one of Temujin's generals Jurchedei as a reward for service.
Gurbesu - Naiman girl.
Khulan- Merkid girl who accompanied the Khan on his western campaign.
Chaka- Tanghut girl.
Genghis Khan died in 1227 on campaign, possibly of sickness after a hunting accident when he took a fall from his horse. But there is another, more colourful, version of his death involving the wife of a Tanghut chief, whom he seized as spoils of war after killing her husband on his (second) Tanghut campaign.
Gorbeljin the Fair - Queen of the Tanghuts.
Ashamed that she has been violated by her people's enemy, she sends a message by bird to her father vowing to drown herself into the Black River. But first she washes herself until her beauty returns and shares Temujin's furs one last time, thus 'passing a mortal illness into his blood'. When the old Khan eventually falls asleep, Gorbeljin slips away and throws herself into the river as she has promised to do - although, in true legendary fashion, her body is never found.


April competition

0
0




To win a copy of Katherine Roberts' Bone Music (see yesterday's post), answer this question in the Comments below


"If you had Borta's power to spirit-travel in the body of an animal, which animal would you choose and why?"

Then copy your answer to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk so that we can get your prize to you.

Closing date: 7th May

We are sorry our competitions are open to UK Followers only

La Reine Blanche by Mary Hoffman

0
0
The "other" Mary Tudor

No, not England's first  Queen Regnant but Henry the Eighth's favourite sister.

If this new biography had its title translated into The White Queen, readers might think it was fiction, like Philippa Gregory's novel of the same name, about Elizabeth Woodville.


As it is, the subject's life is so extraordinary that Sarah Bryson might well have presented it as fiction. (The subtitle is a bit misleading: it's not just a collection of letters, though these are drawn on.)

I have written about the first Mary Tudor on here before. I am particularly interested in her and her second husband, Charles Brandon, at least partly because one of my sons-in-law is their descendant. I know, I know. It's only two days since Katherine Roberts told us that 1 in 200 men in the world is directly descended from Genghis Khan.

But I look at my son-in-law's hooded eyes and a Plantagenet looks back at me. I have his family tree going back to Frances Brandon and can see back to Henry Vll beyond that. Another ancestor helped that same Henry become king by rallying to his side at the Battle of Bosworth.

Family connections aside, Mary Rose, sister of Henry the Eighth, would be a fascinating subject to anyone. Henry Vll and his wife, Elizabeth of York famously married both to legitimate his rather shaky claim to the throne and to bring an official end to the "Wars of the Roses," or Cousins' War. They had four children who survived infancy: two boys and two girls. The boys were Arthur, who died as a teenager a few months after marrying Katherine of Aragon, and Henry whose marital history is all too often rehearsed.

The older daughter was Margaret, named for her formidable grandmother Margaret Beaufort, and married to James lV of Scotland  (Mary Queen of Scots was her granddaughter). She came between the two sons. The last surviving daughter was Mary Rose, five years younger than the brother who would become king.


This portrait suggests she shared the red-gold hair of her brother and niece Elizabeth. Prized as sons were, the royal couple had two already and no reason to anticipate Arthur's early death so perhaps they were relaxed about the new baby's being a girl. Because royal princesses had their own advantages: they could be married off to other European royals.

Mary had her first marriage proposal when she was three; it was rejected. But then the proposed husband was "only" the son of a Duke. The royal toddler knew nothing about it of course; such matters were sorted out by fathers. Her older sister was to be married to a king and her father intended nothing less for his second daughter.

In fact Mary was first "married" at the age of five to Charles, who would not only go on to be King of Spain but Holy Roman Emperor too. Her father would not have known this for certain at the time of their proxy wedding and indeed Charles - an infant himself - was also "only the son of a duke"  but that dukedom was Burgundy, one of the richest and most influential in Europe.

So Mary Rose could have become Empress but settled for Duchess. But not until she had first been a queen.

Her life was filled with all the little luxuries her brother could give her, especially rich fabrics for clothes. He became king when Mary was only thirteen and seems always to have favoured her, sending her letters and presents whenever she was not at court. And of course Mary had gained a sister-in-in-law, Katherine of Aragon, to whom she became very close.

Her brother became impatient with the way that negotiations for Mary's marriage to Charles, now Prince of Spain, were being dragged out, by Charles's father Ferdinand and grandfather Maximilian, who was Holy Roman Emperor . So Henry started to cast around for another suitable husband for her.


His choice fell on Louis Xll of France, aged 52, who had been married twice before. His first marriage had been annulled and his second ended in the death of his wife, Anne of Brittany, who was worn out by stillbirths and miscarriages both with Louis and her first husband.

Mary was eighteen when this marriage was suggested to her and this is the point when she leaps out of the pages of history and becomes a real woman, just as fearless as her brother. This is when she famously extracts the promise from him that, if she "did marrie for our pleasure at this time ...that you will suffer me to marry as me liketh to do." This is how she puts it in the letter she sends Henry after Louis' death.

And straightaway we can imagine these redheaded siblings facing off and the teenager telling her big brother (who happens to be king of England)  "I'll marry this old guy to please you, but when he dies I get to choose my next husband."

It is inconceivable that she didn't already have her eye on Charles Brandon, lately made Duke of Suffolk, as a candidate for spouse number two. He was a dashing figure at court and the nearest thing Henry had to a best friend. He was very attractive to women and had already been married twice, in slightly scandalous circumstances and was now an eligible 30-year-old widower (albeit betrothed to his ward!).

But if we think that Mary was anything other than a compliant and obliging wife to the man who was over thirty years her senior, Sarah Bryson puts us right. She seems to have behaved in relation to her husband King Louis and his court with exemplary modesty and courtesy. She was equipped with the most gorgeous clothes and jewels - a sop to her vanity from her brother to sugar the pill of marrying this much older man?

Whatever their marriage was like, it lasted only three monhs and then Louis was dead. It was at this time that Mary was dubbed "La Reine Blanche."


I imagine the calumny that Louis died because of over-exerting himself in the bedchamber with his teenage bride started almost immediately. He was more likely to have fallen victim to the gout that plagued him. But whatever the cause of his death, it seems clear that Louis doted on his young wife and treated her with great favour and kindness.

Mary had got off lightly. A wonderful trousseau, loads of bling and only three months of having to submit to an old man's embraces. But now she had to extricate herself from France. And who was sent to bring her home? Why, none other than Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk.

Henry must have known what a risk he was taking in sending his glamorous friend. He even extracted a promise from Brandon that he would not marry Mary without the king's permission. And such permission would not have been forthcoming, since Mary was now back on the marriage market, still young and beautiful and with the added advantage now of having been a queen. And Charles was of a far inferior social rank.

But Mary was no longer a pliant child or even a bargaining teenager; she took matters into her own hands and proposed to Brandon herself! Within days of his arrival in France they were married.


To marry in secret, without the king's permission, was very dangerous but Henry was caught in a trap. This was his beloved younger sister and his best friend. Although he was furious and stung them with a huge fine, of course he took them back into his confidence and favour.

It took a lot of hard work for the errant couple to regain Henry's trust . There were letters full of flattery, there were tears and protestations, self-abasement and promises for the future. And a whopping great diamond, known as The Mirror of Naples, given to Mary by Louis on their marriage and now offered to the English king.

They returned to England together 503 years ago, almost to the day, on 2nd May 1515. Mary had to hand over all her returned dowry to her brother but she must have thought her new husband worth the financial sacrifice.

They lived mainly at Suffolk Place. Mary was the second-highest ranking lady in England after her sister-in-law, Queen Katherine, and by February 1516, Charles Brandon was restored to all his roles at court. Katherine gave birth to a daughter in February 1516, after Mary's unsanctioned marriage, and the child was named after her aunt. This little girl became the woman the world knows as Mary Tudor.

Just under a month later Mary and Brandon had their first child, a boy, whom they named Henry. By such reciprocal gestures was the reconciliation sealed. Their second child, Frances, was born in the following year. Another daughter, Eleanor, was born in 1519.

In 1520, Mary, still only 24, twice-married and mother to two children, attended with her husband the fabulous Anglo-French encounter known as the Field of Cloth of Gold. But  before that, she met for the first time the man who had been her  fiancé, now King Charkles V of Spain. It makes her seem a woman we can recognise when Sarah Bryson tells us she ordered a whole new wardrobe for this occasion.

In France, Brandon was the star of the jousts and how Mary must have rejoiced at his prowess. Here she was, a Dowager Queen, married to the man of her choosing, sister of a king and dressed and bejewelled in splendour while her handsome, athletic husband shone in the lists. In the five years since she had last been in the country her life had changed much for the better.

But then two years later Mary and Charles's son Henry died. And the next decade showed a decline in her happiness. Another son, also called Henry, was born but lived until only eleven years of age.

By 1527 Henry was trying to get an annulment of his marriage to Katherine and was focused on marrying Anne Boleyn and fathering a legitimate male heir. Until such time as he had one, little Henry Brandon, Earl of Lincoln  was a candidate for the English throne.

Mary was horrified. Not at the thought of her son losing his place in line to the throne but because Katherine was genuinely her friend and she thought her brother's behaviour reprehensible. She developed a hearty dislike for Anne Boleyn, whom she had known in France.

And how painful it must have been for Mary that her brother enlisted her husband to take messages to to the stricken queen, telling her of her fate. In 1533, shortly after Anne's coronation, Mary died. She was only 37 years old.

Her little son died the following year but by then Charles Brandon had re-married. Three months after Mary's death he married his 14-year-old ward (no not the one he was engaged to before he married Mary). Catherine Willoughby, a great heiress, had been picked out to be little Henry's bride but Charles decided he would be the more suitable husband, especially because he was greatly in need of money.

Sarah Bryson makes it clear that, although it was a love match, Charles and Mary had their burdens to bear. With the return of her dowry to Henry and the huge fines they had to pay the king because of their unauthorised marriage, the couple was always strapped for cash. They had to keep up the most lavish of appearances at court and Brandon often had to seek loans.

They lost both of their sons (albeit the second after Mary's death), Mary missed a good friend in Katherine of Aragon and she herself suffered many episodes of an unspecified illness throughout her life. She retained the title Queen of France for the rest of her days and was clearly proud of it. But for eighteen years she was married to a man whom, for all his faults, she clearly loved.

The daughter, wife and sister of kings and grandmother of the queen with the shortest reign in English history, the first Mary Tudor has at last found a worthy biographer in Sarah Bryson, who has done her subject a great service in this vivid and absorbing book.

Sarah Bryson
(All photos public domain)






Lace and blade... and historical fiction, by Gillian Polack

0
0

This month, whenever I read a book I react to it. My reactions are visceral. The systems of names in fantasy worlds (historical and other) gave me negative ones. I wanted to invite the authors over, get out my trusty whiteboard, talk them through all their decisions and show them what they did then I wanted to sit back and watch them do better. “Their next novel,” I said,’ Would work for more readers. And it would have more resonance. And it would be more sparkly.” I stopped myself there, for ‘sparkly’ made me think of another negative visceral reaction: the one I had to sparkly vampires. Bingo. My reaction to poor naming systems in any kind of fiction is the same as my reaction to sparkly vampires. 

This cute realisation led me into temptation. Grand and gross temptation. I wanted to write about all the ways some writers get names wrong because they want to use the history they know and they really don’t know as much history as they think… but in this company (where the writers and readers don’t make such daft assumptions) it would be nothing more than me sounding off. In fact, it’s probably my body telling me that I need a coffee.

The feelings I got a month earlier when I read a kinda-historical sword and sorcerer series (“lace and blade” they call themselves) were more comforting. I find it interesting that a couple of volumes of lace and blade stories took some of the key facets of good historical fiction and transformed them into fantasy without triggering my ‘this is wrong!’ emotions. So many of my historian friends read fantasy rather than historical fiction. This might be one of the reasons why.



Every genre and sub-genre has something that tells readers “this is us.” I’ve talked a lot to writers – for I teach these things – about word choice and sentence structure, period-of-preference and place-of-preference (some of my serious thoughts and other writers thoughts on this can be found in History and Fiction) and all of these are important genre attributes. They’re not, however, what lace and blade fiction borrows so successfully from historical fiction.

Let me start with historical fiction, for it isn’t a single genre, and lace and blade doesn’t borrow from all historical fiction. I could equally start with sword and sorcery , for lace and blade still has some of sword and sorcery’s bold language and larger-than-life events. Today, however, I’m interested in the historical side.

There were several concepts that pushed the stories in a certain direction. I want to call them names; the highwayman one; the smuggler one. Where criminal activity is presented as sexy. Vampires in lace, but with more action and less drinking from humans. Some of Anne Rice’s vampire fiction comes close in how it’s framed, which is why I thought of vampires. Rice also has a sense of place and a sense of time (the novels have a historical sense), and that’s closer to lace and blade (or lace and blade is closer to it. Which is closer to the other depends on who one asks and how much of a fan of a given writer that reader is) but it’s not our world. It’s not our history.

This is where lace and blade starts. Almost our world, but not. It has a bit in common, too, with the movies of the 1950s, like Burt Lancaster swashbuckling around a ship in The Crimson Pirate. Very romanticised, often somewhat tongue in cheek and slightly sophisticated. The past as it could have been, with magic and more derring-do. 



This is one area of overlap with historical fiction novels. Going back as far as anything that contains Sir Percy Blakeney, derring-do and charm and elegant deception and derring–do, redeeming someone from an impossible situation has been an aspect of historical fiction for a log time. Some novels contain it in spades. Especially the derring-do. 

As far as Sir Percy, however? That’s drawing a line where no line is. Sir Percy is a point of time to remember, not the first. Nor even close to the first. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is another first-but-not-first. If we go back earlier, there are some wonderful romps by Italian writers, who use French heroes and ...change the stories. 

Lace and blade, therefore, belongs to a long tradition of stories that make life more exciting in a safe way. I already knew that. This wasn’t what I was reacting to.

I felt the emotions. For some stories, I felt the dream “This is the way the world could be.”
These reoccurring themes come straight from historical fiction. Some sword and sorcery work also contain them, but in all cases it’s possible to trace it back to a sense that honour and love and, in many cases, tricking evil into doing good that itself comes from a particular type of historical fiction. This historical fiction was dominant in the twentieth century but really began with Jane Austen’s England and with John Gay’s operetta.

My change of vocabulary in that last sentence means I need to stop soon. I’m turning into my academic self and she’s capable of being terribly tedious on this subject, albeit more accurate. Just think of highwaymen in love (John Gay), of manners and people and a quietly elegant society (Jane Austen). Add Georgette Heyer into the mix, and a dozen other writers. Transform the story, step by step and lo, lace and blade emerges. If I were writing lace and blade then I’d say ‘emerges triumphantly from the ruins’ for the sub-genre really enjoys a magnificent turn of phrase. It’s not for the subtle. 



It’s also strongly linked to historical fiction, but it’s a fantasy genre. The history is part of the fabric. The power, the passion* and the elegance are its hallmarks. Magic, mystery and a certain trickiness.

What struck me was that the passion side of it comes from historical fiction. Each emotion can be traced and, in the best stories, it matches rage of love and loss in historical fiction. By this, I mean that it can be passive, and it can be deep, and it can govern the whole story. While lace and blade is a variety of adventure fiction, it’s one that shares something very important with one less fantastical genre in particular.

*Australian political jokes creep in on weeks like this

The West Ham Vanishings: Unsolved Crimes in Victorian London - By Anna Mazzola

0
0
The criminal history of London in the late 19th century is dominated by one man: Jack the Ripper. But he may not have been the only serial murderer stalking the streets of London. During the 1880s and 1890s a series of children and young adults disappeared from West Ham in London’s East End. The crimes were never solved and it's not clear whether they were the victims of one person, or of several. However, the author of a recent book claims to have found the killer.




Strange and secret people


I first came across the West Ham Vanishings in Carole G Silver’s Strange and Secret Peoples where she notes that the second girl to disappear, twelve year old Eliza Carter, ‘returned briefly before her final disappearance to tell her school friends that "They" (the fairies) had kidnapped her and now forbade her to go home.’

This seemed very curious to me. I read as much as I could about the disappearances, including newspapers of the time, but Silver's was the only reference I could find to fairies. Other reports noted that Eliza had been terrified of a man, or simply of returning home. Whoever it was she was terrified of, it seems she had good reason to be. Eliza was never seen again. However, the blue dress she had been wearing was recovered from West Ham Park, all of the buttons sliced off.





The killer identified?


Like Eliza, most of the other victims went missing from the streets and were never seen again. The first was Mary Seward, 14, who lived only a few houses away from Eliza Carter. The third was Clara Sutton, her friend. The fourth was Amelia Jeffs, 15, who lived on the same street as Mary Seward. However, Amelia, or “Millie” was found, violated and strangled.  

In a 2016 book, Rivals of the Ripper, author Dr Jan Bondeson put forward the theory that a builder named Joseph Roberts, a key suspect in the murder of Amelia Jeffs, was responsible for both the West Ham vanishings and another series of horrible crimes against young girls in Walthamstow in the 1890s.


Others have suggested that, given reports of several strange individuals, including women, in the West Ham vanishings, the abductors may have been human traffickers. Which brings me back to Eliza Carter and the fairies.




‘Fairy’ was one of the many terms for a prostitute in the Victorian era, and I initially wondered if Eliza was hinting that she was being forced into prostitution. I now think that, given the lack of references elsewhere, Carole Silver’s comment may simply be a mistake or a misreading. That's a view shared by Dr Beachcoming on his blog.

However, I owe Carole Silver a thank you because it gave me the inspiration for my second novel, The Story Keeper. That too features a series of girls who disappear, one of whom is called Eliza. However, rather than use the real children of West Ham, I decided to transport the story to the Isle of Skye. There the girls are said to have been taken not by fairies exactly, but by the Sluagh, spirits of the restless dead. It is for Audrey, the protagonist, on Skye to collect the local folklore, to establish whether the abductors are indeed spirits or something altogether more human. 

  

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. The Story Keeper will be published in July 2018.






2nd image - West Ham Park
3rd image - Village street in England, 1890, via News Dog Media

"The sweet of the year": Shakespeare’s spring flowers - Katherine Langrish

0
0


It’s Act 4, Scene 3 of ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and Autolycus the thief is singing a song about spring.

When daffodils begin to peer
With hey, the doxy over the dale,
Why then comes in the sweet of the year
For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.

The white sheet bleaching on the hedge
With hey, the sweet birds, O how they sing…

Introducing himself to the audience as a follower of Mercury (god of thieves) and a ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’, he intercepts a country yokel heading to market to buy provisions for the sheep-shearing festival – a shopping list which includes sugar, currents, rice, saffron, mace, nutmegs, ginger, prunes and raisins. (How and why did the English turn from these yummy groceries to our 20th century taste for the plain and boiled?) Relieving him of his money, Autolycus heads for the festival itself, where he expects to ‘make this cheat bring out another’.



Next scene: Perdita arrives at the sheep-shearing festival like a vision of spring – ‘No shepherdess/But Flora, peering in April’s front’ – to hand out flowers like a more positive version of Ophelia. ‘Reverend sirs,’ she welcomes Polixenes and Camillo, ‘For you there’s rosemary and rue. These keep/Seeming and savour all the winter long./Grace and remembrance be to you both/And welcome to our shearing/.’  When the middle-aged Polixenes protests with mild irony: ‘Well you fit our ages/With flowers of winter’, Perdita adds to them ‘flowers of middle summer’: ‘lavender, mints, savory, marjoram,/The marigold, that goes to bed wi’ the sun/And with him rises, weeping.’ If it’s springtime though, how does she have these summer flowers to hand? 

The answer is simple: it isn’t springtime. As Thomas Tusser points out in ‘Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry’ (printed in 1557,  a year before Elizabeth I became queen and seven years before Shakespeare was born) sheep-shearing happens in June.

Wash sheepe (for the better) where water doth run,
And let him go cleanly and drie in the sun,
Then shear him and spare not, at two daies an end,
The sooner the better his corps will amend.

Besides reminding us with his jog-trot lines just how wonderful Shakepeare’s poetry is, Tusser underscores the rural reality that lies behind the play. Though probably not with quite so many expensive ingredients, English as well as Arcadian farming wives were cooking plentifully for the sheep-shearing feasts.

               Wife make us a dinner, spare flesh neither corne
               Make wafers and cakes, for our sheepe must be shorne,
               At sheepe-shearing neighbours none other thing crave
               But good cheere and welcome like neighbours to have.

Act 4 of ‘The Winter’s Tale’ is, therefore, set firmly in the month of June and that is why Perdita has only summer flowers to distribute. (And rosemary and rue, which are available all year round). But then why has Autolycus just been singing so merrily of spring? And Perdita herself conjures spring in her next words as, speaking to Florizel, to Mopsa and Dorcas, she wishes she had some springtime flowers to gift and suit their youth.


…daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses
That die unmarried ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength – a malady
Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The flower de luce being one. O these I lack
To make you garlands of.


Well, Shakespeare is able to have it all ways: and why not? Sheep-shearing happens in early summer, but Autolycus’s song and Perdita’s speech conjure up springtime too. Both are times of rejuvenation and hope, the sweet of the year… and the young lovers Perdita and Florizel represent the hope of healing for their parents’ breach. ‘The Winter’s Tale’ is steeped in a tisane of flowers.


‘With fairest flowers,’ says Arviragus in ‘Cymbeline’, speaking sad words over the body of the boy Fidele (actually his sister Imogen, not really dead, just drugged):

Whilst summer lasts and I live here, Fidele,
I’ll sweeten thy sad grave. Thou shalt not lack
The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor
The azured harebell, like thy veins; no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, who not to slander
Outsweetened not thy breath...   [Act 4 Sc 2]

Shakespeare associates primroses with youth and beauty, but often in contexts of fragility and death. (Though, growing en masse, these delightful flowers appear as ‘the primrose path’ of worldliness or temptation: Ophelia begs Laertes to avoid ‘the primrose path of dalliance’ and the Porter in Macbeth claims to have ‘let in some of all professions that go the primrose way to th’everlasting bonfire.’) Perdita’s primroses ‘die unmarried’: a sentiment echoed by Milton in ‘Lycidas’: ‘the rathe primrose that forsaken dies’. The archaic  word ‘rathe’ means ‘over-eager’, ‘too early’. Primroses don’t live to see the summer… but then neither do daffodils, and no poet seems ever to have regarded them as emblematic of early death. Flowers affect us in very different ways. Our native daffodils ‘come before the swallow dares/And take the winds of March with beauty’: they are tall, daring, triumphant flowers with actual golden trumpets. In ‘Shakespeare’s Wild Flowers’ (1935) Eleanour Sinclair Rohde says:-


"In Shakespeare’s day daffodils were favourite flowers for chaplets, and he refers to this fact in ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’:

… I’ll bring a bevy,
A hundred black-eyed maids that love as I do
With chaplets on their heads of daffodillies…"[Act 4 Sc 1]


In fact Shakespeare’s collaborator John Fletcher was probably responsible for these lines, and the context in which they occur is an obvious borrowing from the death of Ophelia – a mad, lovesick girl, knee-deep in a lake, singing and plaiting garlands of waterflowers. It’s nothing like as good, though. I’m tempted to imagine two professional playwrights, writing to deadlines:

 ‘Will, what am I going to do with the Jailer’s Daughter?’ – ‘The one with the unrequited love for Palamon?’ – ‘Yup.’ – ‘The usual, I suppose. Can’t she run mad?’ – ‘I suppose so. What do mad girls do?’ – ‘I don’t know… mess about with flowers? Look, I’m busy. Read this and do your own version.’ [Will tosses over a copy of Hamlet…]

Primroses are pale, low, poignant, early, ‘rathe’ – they come before the spring is well advanced and we wonder if they’ll survive the next frost. Gertrude’s words at Ophelia’s funeral – ‘I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d, sweet maid, And not t’have strewed thy grave’ – might echo the sentiments of many an onlooker at a spring funeral, as the wastage of winter took its toll of young people made ‘lean’ by January blasts.   


But spring is always a time of resurrection. Fidele lives and, revealed as Imogen, is reunited with her repentant father and husband. Perdita’s mother Hermione, long thought dead, descends from her plinth to embrace her daughter and bless her marriage with Florizel. Wounds are healed. Families are made whole. It is the sweet of the year and time to rejoice. 



Picture credits

John Fawcett plays Autolycus in The Winter's Tale (1828) by Thomas Charles Wageman
Perdita distributes flowers in Act 4 of The Winter's Tale [untraced origin]
Flower de luce, or yellow flag iris: Redouté's Les Liliacées, 1808
Primroses and Bird's Nest: William Hunt, 1790-1864
Wild Daffodils, Narcissus Pseudonarcissus:, Antoine de Pinet, 16th century
Ophelia, detail: John Millais, 1852, Tate



Nomenclature of Colours - a Book Review by Joan Lennon

0
0

Before there were DIY paint charts and high-fidelity digital shade matchers, there was Werner's Nomenclature of Colours.  In 1814, Patrick Syme (Flower-Painter of Edinburgh) adapted the pioneering work of Abraham Gottlob Werner to make it "highly useful to the Arts and Sciences, particularly Zoology, Botany, Chemistry, Mineralogy, and Morbid Anatomy".  His aim was "To remove the present confusion in the names of colours, and establish a standard".

In Syme's arrangement, each colour is numbered, named, its constituent parts explained, a small square of colour shown, and then comparisons made to exactly which bit of a well-known animal or plant or mineral it is most like.



No. 24, for example, "Scotch blue, is Berlin blue, mixed with a considerable portion of velvet black, a very little grey, and a slight tinge of carmine red."  It is most like the tint seen on the "Throat of Blue Titmouse", the "Stamina of Single Purple Anemone" and "Blue Copper Ore".

And that is where I get completely hooked.

Gold Fish lustre abstracted ... Beauty Spot on Wing of Mallard Drake ... Breast of the Robin round the Red ... Old Stems of Hawthorn ...

Poetry.

Today, the book's most well-known user was Charles Darwin, who took it with him on the HMS Beagle and referred to it, as the Publisher's Note describes, "to craft his descriptions of what he saw, such as the changing colour of cuttlefish ... 'clouds, varying in tint between hyacinth red and chestnut brown' ... and the 'beryl blue' colour of the glaciers he saw in South America."

Werner's Nomenclature of Colours is published as a Natural History Museum facsimile volume.  It is a pleasure to hold in the hand, and full of the quaint and the poetic as well as the historical, the practical and the scientific.  I recommend it for your antiquarian browsing delectation.





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

A House with History by Sheena Wilkinson

0
0
My house doesn’t have much history. It was built in 2002 and I’m the only person ever to have lived there. Of course the land it was built on has a history – everywhere does, but there’s nothing in the house itself except what I have brought to it.

Not so for my friend Claire Davis, whose Bow home announces its distinguished history proudly in the blue plaque by the front door. For this tall 19th century terraced house played an important role in women’s history. The early twentieth century East End of London was a hub of feminist activity, including a suffragette shop at Bromley-by-Bow, and a working women’s hostel on the Old Ford Road. But it was in Claire’s very house where, in 1914, Sylvia Pankhurst and her friend Nora Lyle-Smyth set up one of the most forward-looking and practical initiatives of them all, the East London Toy Factory and Babies’ Nursery.



I’ve been a frequent visitor to the house since the late 1990s when Claire and her husband Frank bought it, and I’ve always assumed that the attractive brick building in the back garden was purpose-built for the toy factory. Not so, Claire tells me: the building was already there when Sylvia and Nora found the house. ‘It was quite common then to have small-scale factories in domestic settings.’ Of course the building made the premises perfect for Pankhurst’s plan. What made the factory special was that it included a workplace nursery, the first place to do so, some sources say. Sylvia Pankhurst’s feminism was of the sort which recognised the realities faced by working-class women, especially in wartime conditions.


The toys they made were high-end dolls and wooden and stuffed toys, sold to outlets such as Selfridge’s. The factory closed in 1934 when such luxury toys became too expensive to produce and not economically viable.


women at work in the factory 


But you can find this out in a book or online. What I was really interested in what it feels like to live, and bring up four daughters, in a house with such a feminist history. Claire says she was always aware of the toy factory, because of the blue plaque. Local history walks often include a visit to the house, especially recently when interest in the suffrage movement has blossomed. I wondered if Claire’s own professional life, which has included supporting women through early parenthood, was directly influenced by the house, but she says it’s more of a happy coincidence. ‘Women are not always given choices,’ she explains, ‘and it’s empowering for them to be able to share information with other women.’


the toy factory in the garden

Happy coincidence or not, I think Sylvia Pankhurst would have approved. A couple more coincidences – Claire and her youngest daughter Agnes travelled to Ethiopia some years ago, to visit a friend. Ethiopia is, of course, where Sylvia retired to, and she is buried there. Claire and Agnes visited her grave. And I, browsing through a 1918 art magazine, found an advertisement for a painter/supervisor in the very factory I knew so well. Naturally I sent it to Claire and it’s framed and displayed in the hall, which makes me happy every time I visit.


I suppose we all add little bits of history to the places we go to, whether there’s a blue plaque or not.


My own small addition to the house's history 







MR.PEACOCK"S POSSESSIONS by Lydia Syson. A review and an interview by Adèle Geras

0
0





This novel is pleasurable on so many levels that it's going to take me a while to list them all, and to do so without any spoilers.

MPP, as I'll call it, is a novel that explains and illuminates a short moment of history in a place so remote that I'd never (to my shame) ever heard the name Kermadec Islands before. This is where the story unfolds.


The time is 1879. Mr Peacock and his family have bought an island some way off the coast of New Zealand. Some Polynesian Islanders arrive on Monday Island to help the Peacocks turn it into a paradise. It was the dream of such a Utopia that drove the family there, but things are desperate for a while until Kalala and Solomona and the others appear.


The narrative is divided between two points of view, which belong to  Kalala and Lizzie, the second Peacock daughter. There are six children at the beginning of the novel and a baby, Joseph,  is born soon after they get there. Ada, Albert, Billy, Queenie and Gussie are the names of the others. Gradually, nature is brought somewhat under control and matters improve. Then Albert goes missing...


That's all I'm going to say about the plot, except that it's full of twists and turns and surprising development.  It unfolds in tantalising ways, moving from one event to the next in a series of shocks and revelations that are breathtaking but also quite logical. You, as a reader, keep saying: yes. Yes, of course, I ought to have realised that.


In her answers to my questions that follow that review, Lydia Syson, who used to be one of our number on this blog, tells us that the story is based on her husband's family history. This gives a solid layer of fact and real events to the novel. She has also clearly fallen in love with Monday Island and she brings it so beautifully to life that we are there with the Peacocks, in this lush but unforgiving place. We get to know the landscape and the immensity and beauty of the ocean that surrounds the island. 

Her greatest skill though is her ability to inhabit her characters. Kalala tells his story in the first person and that works perfectly, where it could easily have been embarrassing. I'm going to quote a passage from the beginning of the book to demonstrate: 


High and dry we stand on deck on the big palagi ship called Esperanza, Auckland-bound, and the two-blooded deck boy from Samoa tell me as he passes, without a smile, that the Esperanza is word that signifies hope, in the language of the silver mines. Then on flies my mind, wayfinding without a body, all over and everywhere, wandering, wondering. How long will we voyage in this ever-cooling air, and see no other island?


Lizzie and her siblings are equally well-drawn. You miss their company when you turn the last page. And that's perhaps the greatest achievement of this novel: it stays with you. I've been haunted by it since I finished reading it.  I hope very much that it gets the attention and praise it deserves. 


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Many thanks, before I ask these questions, to Lydia who's allowed

me to use the photographs, and helped me with posting them here.)

1  1)  How did the idea first come to you, and what has changed in the novel between your first impulse and the finished book.


Like my last three books, Mr. Peacock’s Possessions takes off from family history – but this time it’s my husband’s.  On a visit from New Zealand, his aunt Madeleine told me the extraordinary story of her uncle’s family, the Bells, who in 1878 decided to make their home on an otherwise uninhabited Pacific Island, hundreds of miles from any other human settlement. Exceptionally remote, it was then called Sunday Island – now Raoul – and it’s the largest in the Kermadecs, a chain of small volcanic islands about halfway between Auckland and Tonga. My husband’s great-aunt was married to the youngest child, ‘King’, who was born on the island in 1889. Tom and Frederica Bell first arrived on Sunday Island in 1878 with six children aged from eleven to one, and high hopes for the future. The captain who brought them sailed away, promising to return in three months.  They found their provisions were rotten and they never saw that ship again. 

(Frederica Bell, Denham Bay, 1907/8)
I could see the possibilities for a novel almost as soon as Madeleine began talking, and I quizzed her furiously – she remembers it well! It turned out that a journalist had written a book about the ‘Crusoes’ of Sunday Island' in the 1950s, based on the memories of King’s sister Bessie, who was nine when they first landed.




 But this was a very sanitised account, Madeleine warned me. The real father was even more brutal than the iron-willed ‘despot’ described by Elsie Morton. Morton’s book was gripping in the way survival narratives and island stories so often are: full of hardship and catastrophe, every disaster eventually overcome by hard work and bitter determination – and usually some hymns and prayers. But I found the holes in it more interesting than anything. Who were the unnamed Pacific Islanders who came to work for the Bells two years into the thirty-five they spent on Raoul? Why was one of these ordained? 



(The Patriach, Tom Bell, aboard the Amoruku in 1911, after a terrible cyclone had destroyed everything the family had built. just one of many setbacks over three decades.)
The novel had originally been commissioned for Hot Key’s YA list. But what had started in my mind as a thrilling Robinsonade – a tale of goat hunts, hut-building, cyclones and near starvation, – grew quickly darker and more complex, and my publisher soon moved it onto a newly launched list for adults, Zaffre. 


I picked away at different aspects of Oceania’s broader history. I explored the fascinating history of Niue in particular – named Savage Island by Captain Cook. I read Melville, Ballantyne, Stevenson and a variety of seafaring memoirs And I discovered a world in flux: missionaries, whalers, beachcombers, traders and work gangs criss-crossing the seas, land and people both seemingly up for grabs.

(King Bell on Raoul Island, 1907/8when the first scientific expedition came to the Kermadecs.)
The island – so beautiful, so fertile and yet so treacherous - was a gift in terms of setting, plot and metaphor. Family relationships remained at the heart of the novel. But I became preoccupied with faith and doubt, blindness and insight.  The parallels I found between the intimate world I was creating and the bigger historical picture allowed the book also to became an exploration of power and possession, and migration, forced and voluntary. 


   2) How long did it take you to write and what are your working methods? You have 4 children so I imagine juggling doesn’t begin to cover it.  


I wish I could pretend I have a writing routine and religiously write x number of words a day. I don’t. Mr Peacock’s Possessions has been made possible by three years of a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellowship at The Courtauld Institute of Art. So I’ve been teaching for one or two days a week, and trying to research or write for the rest – but of course there are also school visits, CWISL events and organisation (Children’s Writers and Illustrators for Stories and Literacy -(Children’s Writers and Illustrators for Stories and Literacy - http://cwisl.org.uk), and the usual domestic demands faced by anyone who works freelance at home and has multiple teenagers. I have a fantasy of reaching to the floor for my laptop as soon as I wake up, not speaking to anyone, and writing for several hours in bed first thing in the morning. This never happens. But I do often go back to bed when the house has emptied, especially in winter, and I definitely do my best and most concentrated writing tucked up under a duvet at the top of our South London Victorian terrace, with a view of sky and treetops.


I am devoted to the writing software Scrivener, which I use to keep my research in order and get a very rough first draft in place. I like to get a good sense of my chronology from the outset, but don’t necessarily write in order. (Scrivener makes this easier than it sounds, and takes the agony out of planning, and also restructuring when you realise it’s not quite working.) 


This time I wrote the past tense sequences first – how the Peacock family arrive on the island, and the extreme challenges they faced in the first two years. The events here closely follow what actually happened to the Bell family, and as I started I imagined these sections might have something of the feel of a nineteenth-century adventure story for children. And then the weaving began. . . I started to develop Kalala’s first person present voice – more on that below – and this is intercut with the close third person perspective of Lizzie, Mr. Peacock’s golden girl.  And all along beside this, crazy amounts of research – not just history, but linguistics, anthropology, psychology, ornithology, midwifery, botany, geology. . . 


After nearly a year, I had the slabby clay of the first draft.  My partner read it on his kindle on our summer holiday, and was gratifyingly entranced in canoes and buses and boats while we backpacked with the family around Nicaragua, and I looked at volcanoes and black sand and cloud forest and wondered how different these might be in the Pacific.  (An exceptional summer holiday for us – we were meeting our eldest who had been travelling for 7 months.) Another few months followed of fairly substantial rewriting, during which I asked my agent to read just the first 5,000 words, mainly to get her reaction to the voice(s). Then it was time to send it to my new editor.  Terrifyingly, but not unusually, she was not the person who’d commissioned the book. I was utterly convinced that my contract would be cancelled any day. I braced myself for weeks. But she loved it. And then the publication date moved back, and we had a great long period of time to work together on the manuscript, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Eleanor Dryden is an extraordinarily dedicated editor, prepared to spend hours discussing every nuance and layer, and brilliant at teasing out what she needed from me. She managed to be patient, demanding, ruthless and supportive in all the right ways. I can hardly even say how many drafts there were in total, but I know that under Eli’s guidance, I went on writing, re-writing and researching for another year before the book was ready to be typeset and shared further. Along the way I had feedback from my brother, my agent, an agency intern, a very old and very trusted friend,Tig Thomas, who very generously reads all my manuscripts just before line-editing stage and always improves them, and also from historian Mark Darby, whom I’d come to know by email after reviewing his Spanish Civil War book for The History Girls, and he read it with a New Zealander’s eye.  


I didn’t think then I had the faintest hope of making it to New Zealand, let alone ‘my’ island, so I was particularly grateful to Mark. But to my amazement I ended up emailing my very last corrections in March from Auckland, still swaying from my voyage on the HMNZS Canterbury. Thanks to the Pew Trusts, who’ve been campaigning for years for a much-needed ocean sanctuary in the Kermadecs, [in late February I joined a crew of scientists, educators and young environmentalists on a Sir Peter Blake Trust expedition http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/archived-projects/global-ocean-legacy-kermadec ] in   to Raoul. So now I know what colour the sea there really is and how flying fish behave; I’ve seen the giant limpets, muttonbirds, wideawakes, tropic birds, gropers and turtles in my book; I’ve swum with sharks; I’ve flown over the volcanic crater and I’ve watched the horizon for hours and days without seeing another vessel or habitable land. But, disappointingly, despite months of planning, biosecurity measures and lack of resources meant we were refused landing permits. So I never actually set foot on the island! 

(Lydia Syson in the beautiful sea.)
So many different stages then. Seeing the finished hardback just a week ago was a glorious moment.  If only – and most authors will sympathise - I hadn’t immediately spotted a typo. Mea culpa. My very final proofread was under difficult circumstances and a mortifying error crept unnoticed into my author’s note: the Maori name for New Zealand is of course spelled Aotearoa – ‘the Land of the Long White Cloud’.


    3) Was it your intention to educate your readers in certain aspects of history that they may not have known about? No spoilers, but how the story unfolds reveals something surprising and horrifying...


Yes and no. I was horrified myself by what I learned, and I also wanted to suggest through the storytelling how easily horrific histories can become buried.  


We often think of the nineteenth century as the great era of abolition and emancipation, but in fact the slave trade simply changed its name, its organisation, its victims and its locations. After the American Civil War, cotton and sugar production shifted to the Pacific. The people of the small scattered islands of Oceania were particularly vulnerable to exploitation.  First the blackbirders came. Then the indentured labour recruiters. The Pacific Labour Trade tore families and communities violently apart, and far too many people have never been able to recover their ancestors’ stories.  Slavery and human trafficking continue to thrive all over the world, including in the UK.  Purely in terms of numbers, more people are enslaved now than at any time before in history. So though I never want to be didactic, actually, yes – I did hope to draw attention to all these things.


I’m in the middle of putting together an online bibliography for readers who want to follow up on any of my sources, as I have with all my books, and this should be available from publication day – May 17th.  Of course I’d recommend reading Mr Peacock’s Possessions first, but after that this article https://readingthemaps.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/new-zealands-slaving-history.html)

offers excellent insight into New Zealand’s slaving history. It’s by Scott Hamilton, NZ historian and author of The StolenIsland (2016).  Australia’s hidden history of slavery is explored  here. https://theconversation.com/australias-hidden-history-of-slavery-the-government-divides-to-conquer-86140   And you can join Anti-Slavery International – the world’s oldest human rights organisation – here. https://www.antislavery.org


4) When I reviewed Jane Harris's SUGAR MONEY, I asked her whether she was nervous at reactions to her writing (very well) in the voice of a young man of different racial origin from her own. In these days of 'cultural appropriation' and the like, did this give you any pause at all? You write very beautifully partly from the point of view of a native Islander!


Thank you! And it certainly did.


As I began work on Mr. Peacock’s Possessions, the world of children’s publishing was waking up to the call for more diverse and inclusive representation. Young readers of all backgrounds, ethnicities, abilities and sexualities urgently needed to see more characters in books who reflected their own lives and experiences. Protagonists, not token side-kicks. Most writers for children felt a shared responsibility to make this happen, with sensitivity and care, no matter what their own identity might be. Meanwhile, in adult publishing, a reverse move was taking place, for equally valid and important reasons.  Writers whose colour and class give them easier access to a public voice through publication – including me – have been forced to think more carefully about what stories they have the right to tell.  


I always felt it was extremely important politically to put my young Pacific Islander, Kalala, at the centre of this story. I don’t want to overemphasise my own anguish – particularly in the context of the truly agonising histories I’m exploring here – but it was a huge dilemma. If, once it became an adult novel, I abandoned my attempt to create a convincing voice for Kalala, if I didn’t allow him to speak for himself, I risked marginalising him and all the Polynesian people in the book. Mr. Peacock’s Possessions could have become just another book about an encounter with the ‘other’ told through the eyes of an ‘innocent’ white girl.  One predictable point of view. In rendering the entangled stories of two imagined groups of people meeting and living alongside each other on an invented version of a real island, I needed to portray the ways in which all my characters navigate between cultures. I wanted to draw upon and expose, but never, I hope, abuse the very real and horrific histories which inspired the novel, histories currently little known beyond academia. And I wanted readers to be completely swept up by these histories.


I write about other times and places because my circumstances mean most of my travels are necessarily in my head, and my explorations take place largely in libraries and archives.  Of course I’d have loved to go to Niue.  I couldn’t. I hope one day I will. I still can’t quite believe that at the very last minute I reached the Kermadecs. 


I don’t expect all readers to agree, but it felt wrong to censor myself for fear of an anticipated judgment. And novels simply can’t be written by committee, so a book has to get to a certain stage before it can be shared.  In the end, family circumstances in the last six months made it very hard for me to get the manuscript into the hands of the readers who mattered most to me, as I had planned. But before Mr Peacock’s Possessions went to print in the UK, I was overjoyed to be introduced to one very important reader - the multi-talented teacher and writer Ioane Aleke Fa’avae, an expert in the history, culture and language of Niue, and winner of the 2014 Creative NZ Pacific Heritage Award. Thanks to his warm blessing – and a spelling correction – my anxieties about the book’s reception have diminished considerably. And copies of the finished book are on their way to Niue now. 


5) Can you speak at all of your next book? 


I’m afraid not. No mystery…just don’t quite know myself yet.



My Secret Drawer by Karen Maitland

0
0
The Old Red Lion Inn, Holmes Chapel. Photo: David Dixon
When I was a little girl I became obsessed with the dream of finding a secret drawer and spent many fruitless hours searching and prodding every piece of furniture in the house. I was doomed to failure, because everything was a mass-produced, post-war, utility piece. I also almost knocked myself out on several occasions trying to walk through the back of wardrobes in the vain hope that one day I’d emerge into Narnia. I quite quickly realised the Narnia adventure was never going to happen, but my 'secret drawer' fantasy never really went away. So, I was thrilled when, a few weeks ago, two dear and generous friends sent me an unexpected parcel. It turned out to be a George III writing slope made between 1795-1810, which contained not one but two secret drawers.

My friends restore antique boxes and in stripping this one down to clean it, they discovered its secret. If you merely opened up the writing slope you’d never guess they were there, but remove one of inkwells and lift out a series of tiny wooden panels in the right order and you find a hidden catch which releases a false back, behind which the drawers are concealed.

Dragon's Blood trees (Dracaena cinnabari
Socotra Island, Yemen. Photo: Rod Waddington
One drawer contained a residue of a blood red powder. The novelist in me would like to think it might be powdered ‘dragons blood’, the costly resin from a tree such as Dracaena cinnabari, believed by alchemists and physicians to have great healing powers and later used for dyeing wood to make violins. But the red substance is probably powdered red ink of the kind once used on legal documents.

The other drawer contained a stained fragment of paper which looks as if it might have been torn from the top right-hand corner of a much-folded letter. Written on it is a name and address.
W.Booth
Red Lion,
Holmes Chapel,
Cheshire.

My friends decided to research the address and discovered the wonderful story that the Old Red Lion Inn at Holmes Chapel is reputed to be haunted by a pale woman in a dark habit and white wimple. Legend has it that she was the victim of immurement and was walled up alive in one of the rooms. Just a legend of course and there are many such tales all over the country, with little or no basis in historical fact, but the idea is remarkably persistent in folk myth. There is also a story that in 1745, some of Bonny Prince Charlie's men stopped off for a little refreshment at the Red Lion on their way south to try to take the throne.
Holmes Chapel with the Red Lion Inn, 1853

Holmes Chapel was originally called Hulme and then Church Hulme. The earliest document discovered which mentions the Red Lion Inn comes from the will of Thomas Gandie in 1625. The inn became an important stop-over for travellers using the daily stage coaches. And in 1738, John Wesley, travelling between Oxford and Manchester, is reported to have preached at the inn. Perhaps his blessing protected it, for tragically on 10th July 1753, fire broke out in the village burning down 18 of 20 houses. Only the church, two cottages behind it and Red Lion Inn were spared.

London to Birmingham Stage, 1801
Painting by John Cordrey
Of course, my writing slope dates from some years after these events, but here the novelist in me takes over. Why was this address torn from a letter and left in the box? Was it simply a correspondence address the owner of the box wanted to keep because he had to write to someone working or staying in Chapel Holme? The Booths were certainly a prominent family in that area. Had the owner arranged to meet this person at the inn, perhaps for an hour or so, as they transferred between stage coaches on route to Oxford or Manchester or somewhere else? Does the red legal ink, if that’s what it is, give a clue to the owner’s profession and was it in that capacity he'd perhaps arranged to meet W.Booth at the Red Lion Inn? And why was the address put in the secret drawer? Was it simply to ensure they didn’t mislay the scrap of paper or did they have some reason for concealing it? The possibilities are endless.

When I was a child searching for a secret drawer I had longed to find a magic stone hidden in it or charm that would take me back in history, like the bed knob in Mary Norton’s ‘Bedknob and Broomstick’. As an adult, I've found a scrap of paper that does just that, and I am just as childishly thrilled now as that little girl would have been all those years ago.

London's Mithraeum Liturgy

0
0
On the evening of Thursday 17 May 2018, just over a week from the date of this post I, Caroline Lawrence, will be meeting with children aged 8-12 (and their guardians) at an ancient Roman underground temple: London’s Mithraeum. This will be the first #MuseumsAtNight hosted by the Mithraeum at Bloomberg Space, which only opened to the public last year. 

I will be doing some fun interactive activities with the children to prepare them for the Immersive Experience on the site of London’s Mithraeum, now back in its original place. (If you want to see what I’ll be doing with the kids, check out my blog post: Interactive Mithras.) 


Mithraism was a mystery cult that arose in Rome (or possibly the coast of Turkey) in the middle of the first century AD, around the same time as Christianity. Unlike Christianity, Mithraism was a mystery cult and by definition kept its rites and rituals secret. There were no scriptures so almost everything we know about it is guesswork based on archaeological evidence and a few peripheral literary sources, some of them hostile. 

The god Mithras seems to have had elements of the Indo-Iranian god Mithra (without an S), but with added qualities from other deities. Like Serapis and Sulis Minerva, he was syncretistic, i.e. a hybrid god, one to be added to hundreds of others.


If the symbol of Christianity is the cross, the symbol of Mithras was a very complicated scene of the god stabbing a bull while surrounded by signs of the Zodiac and other heavenly figures, including two torchbearers called Cautes and Cautopates, possible threshold guardians to the Gates of Heaven. Also crowded into the scene were creatures such as a dog, a snake, a raven and a scorpion. 


Trying to reconstruct the rites, rituals and beliefs of Mithras based on this mysterious image would be like someone trying to reconstruct Christianity based on the image of a crucified man along with accounts of a few of his miracles. 

One theory is that Mithras was a god who created the world by slaying a cosmic bull. (However the word ‘tauroctony’, i.e. ‘bull-slaying’, does not appear anywhere in antiquity.)

Another theory is that the bull represents evil which cannot be destroyed, only disabled, and that the stabbing is an apotropaic attempt to weaken its power and bring some good out of it. 


The definitive book on Mithras
However there are also scenes of Mithras and the sun-god Sol enjoying a banquet on a bull’s skin, so it seems the first theory is more plausible, though the bull-stabbing did also seem to have apotropaic powers. 

Unlike almost every other religion known to us, Mithraism was only open to men. The small, exclusively male congregations met not in a temple but in an underground space designed to partly resemble a cave. In fact the use of the word ‘mithraeum’ is nowhere attested. Instead we find references to Caves of Mithras

Another of the aspects we can be fairly sure of is that there was a hierarchy of different grades in this Mystery Cult. The idea of rising by promotion would have been a familiar one to soldiers and male citizens of the Roman Empire.


We believe there were seven grades of initiation ranging from Raven to Father. Each grade had its own name, ruling planet, colour, attributes and possibly even noises. The aim of moving from grade to grade was possibly to achieve immortality of the soul by ascending through the seven heavenly spheres of purification or knowledge. 

A fascinating mosaic showing the grades by attributes can be seen on one of Ostia’s seventeen Mithraea, named after Felicissimus, who dedicated the mosaic. 

The seven grades, from lowest to highest, were these: 
(Latin  – English – special planet – colour – attributes)
Corax – Raven – Mercury – Black – raven, beaker, caduceus
Nymphus – Bridegroom – Venus – Yellow? – lamp, diadem
Miles – Soldier – Mars – Orange – sling, helmet, spear
Leo – Lion – Jupiter – Red – thunderbolt, sistrum, fire spade
Perses – Persian – Moon – White? – crescent moon, dagger
Heliodromus – Sun-Runner – Sun – Gold – torch, crown,  whip
Pater – Father – Saturn – Purple – Persian cap, staff, sickle

Pictoral evidence hints that each grade could only be achieved by enduring a humiliating and frightening initiation. This often involved the initiate being stripped, blindfolded and threatened with death. Following the initiation of a new member the followers of Mithras would celebrate a banquet, an important part of the brotherhood as the layout of over four hundred Caves of Mithras show. 


The Mithraic feast by Judith Dobie, snapped at the Museum of London

Another tantalising find concerning Mithras is a possible liturgy written on the walls of the Santa Prisca Mithraeum at Rome. 


For those of you who have studied Latin, (children included), I thought it would be fun to publish the Latin liturgy created especially for Londons Mithraeum by Roger Tomlin, the brilliant scholar who has translated many of the Vindolanda and Bloomberg tablets, ancient Roman documents that have defeated mere mortals.

Roger has replicated a possible liturgy based on the graffiti from the Santa Prisca Mithraeum. 

What follows are Latin phrases that sharp-eared visitors to London’s Mithraeum might ‘overhear’ when they descend to the ancient temple for the Immersive Experience. The one word you might not recognise is Nama. This is the Persian word for ‘Hail!’ and the Sanskrit word for ‘I bow’, still used today by everyone who takes a yoga class when they say, Namaste: ‘I bow to you’ or ‘I thank you’.  

London’s Mithraeum Liturgy 

(spoiler alert: don’t read this if you want the immersive experience to be a surprise)

[The lights in the Mithraeum go down and there is silence for a moment. Then the sound of a door creaking open and footsteps. Men greet one another. The splash and trickle of water. Footsteps on gravel. The haunting sound of a horn blares out.] 

[PATER] Nama Coracibus, tutela Mercurii 
Hail to the Ravens, under the protection of Mercury  

[RAVENS] Nama Patri, tutela Saturni  
Hail to the Father, under the protection of Saturn

[sistrum joins the horn]

[PATER] Nama nymphis, tutela Veneris
Hail to the Bridegrooms, under the protection of Venus

[drums join the horn]

[BRIDEGROOMS] Nama Patri, tutela Saturni   
Hail to the Father, etc. 

[drum, horn, rattles]

[PATER] Nama Militibus, tutela Martis
Hail to the Soldiers, under the protection of Mars

[RESPONSE] Nama Patri, tutela Saturni

[PATER]  Nama Leonibus , tutela Iovis   
Hail to the Lions, under the protection of Jove

[drum, horn, rattles]

[RESPONSE] Nama Patri, tutela Saturni

[PATER] Nama Persis, tutela Lune  
Hail to the Persians, under the protection of the Moon  

[RESPONSE] Nama Patri, tutela Saturni

[the men’s voices are getting louder and louder.]

[PATER] Nama Heliodromis, tutela Solis  
Hail to Helios’ couriers, under the protection of the Sun  

[RESPONSE] Nama Patri, tutela Saturni

[PATER] Nama Patribus ab oriente ad occidentem, tutela Saturni 
Hail to the Fathers, from east to west [lit. from rising to setting sun], under the protection of Saturn.

[RESPONSE] Nama Patribus! Et patri nostro 
Hail to the Fathers and to Our Father
Silvano et Pontifici, tutela Saturni
and priest Silvanus, in the protection of Saturn

Nama Patribus, Nama Patribus!

[drumming and rattling reaches a crescendo then the trill of a single flute. Sound of men eating, laughing, clink of cutlery, glugging of wine… The sound of a spoon on a glass beaker for attention:]

Honesti, socii, propinemus!
Gentlemen, companions, a toast! 

Mithras quoque miles, robora nos ad diem,
Mithras, also a soldier, give us strength for the day!
Roma regit populos, rex tu tamen omnium.
Rome is above the Nations, but Thou art over all!

Nama Mithras! Nama Mithras! 

[Everyone cheers]

[Partly muffled by banter, the Father utters final prayers]

Mithras, salva nos... orare… nocturnos… 
placatos… vias multas fecisti..

[We hear solitary footsteps receding…
Then the creak of hinges, the slamming of a door and…
… the wind, the universal sign of abandonment and desolation.]

And when the lights come on again you are in for a surprise!


Caroline Lawrence is currently working on a time travel book involving a 12-year-old Londoner named Alex Papas, London’s Mithraeum and the bones of a 14-year-old girl from Africa who died in 3rd century Londinium. The working title is Ways to Die in Londinium. Caroline will be brainstorming ideas and doing a reading from this work in progress at London’s Mithraeum on the evening of Thursday 17 May 2018. Book your FREE place HERE

Not the Villa Pisani at Stra – Michelle Lovric

0
0
The weather could not have been more golden, and the company could not have been more intelligent, attractive and beloved. Before we set off for the villa, I printed out some information that I translated for said company as we drove through the rolling plains of the Veneto. It’s always hard – emotionally and physically – to leave Venice, but it seemed that it was worth tugging against nature to visit the magnificent Villa Pisani at Stra.

The villa was built by the Golden Book Pisani family of Santo Stefano, who grew wealthy through their mercantile and property businesses. Their principal seat in town is now the glorious Conservatorium of Music just behind the Palazzo Barbaro. Other seats include the Gritti and the Pisani Moretta palaces, both on the Grand Canal. Alvise Andrea Pisani (1664-1741) was appointed ambassador to the court of the Sun King and became doge (1735). But the family vice of gambling, along with the fall of the Venetian Republic, led to crippling debts. The Pisanis sold their vast villa at Stra to Napoleon in 1807 for 1,901,000 Venetian lire. Napoleon, then King of Italy, appointed as viceroy his stepson Eugène Beauharnais, who was installed in the villa – until the Battle of Waterloo in 1814 delivered the estate to the Habsburg imperial family, who enjoyed it as a summer retreat. In 1866, when the Veneto entered the Kingdom of Italy, the Villa Pisani became the property of the State. Notable visitors included Wagner and D’Annunzio. The first official meeting between Mussolini and Hitler was staged here in 1934. Meanwhile, the vast garden has long been acknowledged as one of the finest in Italy.

All this was so very interesting that I was a little disappointed when it turned out that I’d made a mistake. None of us realized this until we actually arrived at a different Villa Pisani, this one being the Villa Pisani Bolognesi Scalabrin at Vescovana. Oops.
 

Well, it was still a Pisani villa. A quick regrouping of research materials revealed that after the sale of the sumptuous Villa at Stra, the Pisani family lavished their attention on this one. The last Countess Pisani, Evelina van Millingen, enriched the splendid garden and the park, particularly with tulips. (Her name sounded familiar, and she turned out to be, as I suspected, the daughter of Julius Millingen, who attended Byron on his deathbed. There’s no getting away from that man! And the ‘van’ therefore appears to be an aspirational affectation).


Less grand, more crumbling than the one at Stra, the Villa Pisani Bolognesi Scalabrin also boasts a beautiful though small formal garden. According to the website, the garden was designed to be admired from the villa’s central terrace and rooms on the first floor. It is called "Crispin de Pass’, referring to an image in the Hortus Floridus by Crispin de Pass (1614). According to the villa’s website, ‘It was an extraordinary project keeping in step with the new style that was popular in England and was influenced by the Edwardian architect Sir Reginald Blomfield (1856 - 1942) with architectural pieces and topiaries, a historical throwback to when garden and house were a single project. The publication "The Formal Garden in England" proposed the return to the tradition of the garden of the 1600s. The garden of Vescovana shows in every element the two souls of Evelina van Millingen: her strong English roots expressed in her Victorian taste - moderated by the secular history of the Pisani family, is united with the Italian traditions, and became a well-balanced blend of a highly architectural setting and the naturalness of the surrounding park. The presence of statues, vases and fountains are clearly due to the Italian influence.’ 

The Villa Pisani Bolognesi Scalabrin had advertised its Spring ‘GIARDINITY PRIMAVERA’ far and wide and had succeeded at pulling in what I would estimate as a minimum of 5,000 guests to picnic and dine the day we were there. The villa had printed tickets – 8 euros each for adults, and there were plenty of those to go around. Nor did I notice any shortage of wine or plates of food being carried from the kitchen. There were other ways to spend money too – handicrafts and artwork for sale, and a treasure hunt for children.

just mentioning it: the ducal corno
rendered on somegarden ironmongery
The weather stayed beautiful. The food was reasonable for catering on such a massive scale. The waiters dashed about valiantly in the heat. It was pure pleasure to lunch overlooking the topiary, flowerbeds, statues and decorative ironmongery, including a small rendition of the Doge's corno hat, in case anyone missed the fact that the Pisani family had risen to the highest office of state.
No label
and no staff to ask but
Perhaps this is Evelina?
The Pisani family died out in 1880 with Evelina's husband Almorò. In 1900, after her death, the villa passed to a distant nephew of Almorò, the Marquis Carlo Guido Bentivoglio of Aragon, whose daughter Elisabetta was married to Count Filippo Nani Mocenigo. At the end of the 1960s, the grandchildren of the Marquise Bentivoglio, the Nani Mocenigos, sold the property to Mario and Mariella Bolognesi Scalabrin.

But the advertised 70,000 tulips appeared somewhat sparser than those shown in the publicity. Instead of a formal planting, paths had been set through a pretty wildlflower meadow dotted with some tulips. Beyond that, the gardens were more on the wild side.


The frescoes inside the villa were possibly the worst I have ever seen.


Some space was devoted to a collection of specialized tulip vases.


Among the ornaments was quite the ugliest statue in Northern Italy, in my opinion.


 Modern sofas and conference chairs took up most of the space.

However, the thingthat was most in evidence was … queues. For the enormous stream of people arriving in response to the publicity, only two staff members were selling tickets. You were requested to book in advance, which my hosts had done, but there was no separate admission for those who had obeyed the directive. There was no list of names. You still had queue all the same along with those who had not booked, and you had to physically buy the tickets with cash. Nor did the restaurant and bar accept credit cards, no matter how big the party. In fact, it turned out that the waiters did not take money at all, so you had to queue up to pay at the cassa. A distracted woman handed me half my due change, until I protested. Worst of all, for all the thousands of people who arrived from far and wide … there were three toilets, one of which was broken. Those were the longest queues of all, with many children and older adults in visible distress, as they waited up to 40 minutes.

Being a public holiday, the Guardia di Finanza were not in evidence. The whole fiesta was run on a full cash economy that must have netted the owners of the Villa Contarini Bolognesi Scalabrin a very fat payday.

The family symbol in the garden appears to be a proud strutting peacock, much in evidence. After I’d risen to the cream of my third queue, it occurred to me that I had spent more time queueing than strutting proudly about the garden, the villa and its offerings. It did seem that the owners of the Villa Pisani might have shown more consideration for its two-legged golden eggs, by hiring portable lavatories and adequate staff to man the tills and the ticket office. It appeared somewhat cynical to accept the bookings and do so woefully little to provide for the comfort of the guests. Cynical and maybe a little contemptuous. 

After all, such costs could have been set against all the tax they will of course pay.


Michelle Lovric’s website

PS I was delighted to see that you can buy a Pisani family crest mouse mat on Amazon, ‘made with polyester surface for easy and smooth mousing’.
 






Fake or fortune (or perhaps both)

0
0
Although I'm fascinated by the Second World War and write novels set in that period (1), I also have a Master of Philosophy degree in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and that's why I am sitting in Harrison Stinson Hall at the University of Michigan, Kalamazoo. I'm at the 53rd International Congress of Medieval Studies, munching a banana and free chocolate.

The chocolate came from my friend Lisa Fagin Davis (2), and is a gift from the Medieval Academy of America. I have just returned from a stall in the merchandising section of the conference, where a charming man is selling pages of medieval manuscripts. Lisa sent me over there and I asked to see the work she thought might interest me.

Here it is in all its glory:



It was lovely to hold and view up close. It is gouache and gold with traces of pencil on vellum, and from a series called 'The Hunting Party'. The colours are bright, the picture beautifully rendered, and the illumination glorious. It can be yours for a mere $3,700.

Only, it's a fake.

The painting is by an unidentified artist who worked in the nineteenth century known as 'The Spanish Forger' (although it is likely that he actually was French). 

The Spanish Forger was spectacularly successful in selling his work as original medieval illuminations. Nowadays they pop up in collections all over the world.

Here is one of his pieces in the University of Sydney:



Spanish Forger cutting, University of Sydney,
Special Collections, s.n. (
Voelkle Catalogue L134)

A glorious piece in The Walters Art Museum:


The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r

And this one's at the University of Pennsylvania:


Univ. of Pennsylvania, LJS MS 33

His works fooled many experts and art collectors. No one suspected forgery until 1930 when the curator of the Pierpont Morgan Library, Bella da Costa Green (who will one day be the subject of a blog of her own), refused to support the purchase of the lovely piece below for the Metropolitan Museum in New York.


The Betrothal of St. Ursula
(The Morgan Library and Museum, New York)

The panel was later tested using neutron activation analysis and it was discovered that the green pigment was copper arsenite, otherwise known as Paris Green, a paint pigment not available before 1814. Bella was absolutely correct. There was no way the painting could be authentic, although it had been painted on medieval vellum.

And that is how he got away with it for so long. The Spanish Forger (as Bella da Costa Green dubbed him) painted his works on the vellum or parchment leaves of genuine medieval books, by painting in blank margins or scraping off original writing. He also 'completed' unfinished miniatures or added miniature paintings to illustrate genuine medieval choir books. He knew full well that illustrated leaves were much more valuable than plain ones and probably made a fortune.

Lisa told me that several pointers now clearly give him away. As she put it, 'backs and boobs', but also gold, head tilt and facial expressions.

Backs: If you look at the back of the paintings you can sometimes actually see where he has scraped away the original writing. In the piece I saw (pictured above) at the back of the painting faint lines are visible, from its original purpose as a choir book. This is a lovely picture of two noble ladies and a gentleman playing chess. The back (dorse) of the page tells a different story. It's a snippet of liturgy and never would have been in the same book as such a secular scene.


NY, Columbia Univ.,
Plimpton Add. MS 18
NY, Columbia Univ.,
Plimpton Add. MS 18 (dorse)

Boobs: He appears to have been rather obsessed with large-breasted women in low-cut gowns. The sort of cleavage he painted is just 'wrong' in an authentic medieval work.
We are not subtle
medieval maidens

Just not medieval cleavage...
      
Still not medieval cleavage.



Gold: Lisa tells me that the Spanish Forger painted his miniatures in the wrong order, by applying the colour before the gold leaf. In medieval pictures gold was always applied first and then burnished. Only then was the illustration added, so that examples exist of unfinished miniatures where the only thing that has been applied is the gold. In the Spanish Forger's work, the gold sometimes overlaps the colour and that's absolutely wrong!

Head tilt: Many of the Spanish Forger's individuals have a tilt to their head that would not have been seen in medieval paintings.

The Betrothal of St. Ursula
(The Morgan Library and Museum, New York)


Way too much cricked neck.

Ouch! My neck hurts.
Expression: his subjects tend to look a bit too 'sweet', cloying rather than pious. Here is an original fifteenth century artwork from the University of Pennsylvania collection. The Virgin's expression is pious and not cloyingly sweet: 
Lewis E 96 Book of Hours, Use of Paris
from the Special Collections
of the Free Library of Philadelphia
 
Psst, I'm not a forgery.
(detail from above)
















I am! But I'm still worth money
(detail from picture at right)








Univ. of Pennsylvania, LJS MS 33


Ironically, the Spanish Forger's work is now highly collectable, and worth real money. And when items are valuable, forgers appear. The Spanish Forger's work is itself subject to forgery. 

Caveat emptor...


(1) See https://deborahburrows.com.au/. My latest novel, Ambulance Girls Under Fire, is out in e-book form and the trade paperback is available in Aust/NZ. The novel will be published in the UK in July 2018.

(2) Lisa's blog on the Spanish Forger may be found here:
https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2014/01/18/manuscript-road-trip-the-spanish-forger/

Viewing all 2760 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images