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Judith Kerr Obituary by Janie Hampton

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photo: Rex Shutterstock
Judith Kerr, esteemed writer and illustrator of children’s and young adult books, died last week aged 95. I had two memorable phone conversations with Judith. The first was when I was researching my book on Girl Guides and the Second World War, which included Jewish Girl Guides coming from Nazi-occupied Europe to Britain. Judith told me about her arrival from Germany in London, aged 13 in 1936. Born in Berlin, her father was a well-known German-Jewish journalist who openly criticized the Nazis. In 1933 he was warned that his passport might be confiscated, and he fled Germany, just a day before he would have been arrested. Shortly afterwards his wife, Judith, and her brother followed. The family travelled via Switzerland and Paris and settled in London. 
Judith had left school when the Second World War began. By now speaking perfect English, she worked first as a secretary and then volunteered for the Red Cross, before being awarded a scholarship at the Central School of Arts in London. Later, she described an air- raid in London as vividly as a picture: ‘The sky was red, reflecting the fires on the ground, and in it hung clusters of orange flares which lit up everything for miles around. They looked like gigantic Christmas decorations floating slowly, slowly down through the night air. In the distance, yellow flashes like lightning were followed by muffled bangs – the anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park. Suddenly a searchlight swept across the sky. It was joined by another and another, crossing and re-crossing each other, and then a great orange flash blotted out everything else.’ Judith met her future husband, television scriptwriter Nigel Kneale, in the school canteen where she was teaching, and he suggested she join the BBC as a scriptwriter.
The second lively conversation I had with Judith was when I was writing about the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. I was searching for other cultural events that year, and Judith told me about her work at the BBC television studios in Lime Grove. Nigel Kneale, known as Tom, was writing a science-fiction television serial when he, Judith and their colleagues watched the coronation on a black and white television. The Quatermass Experiment was to be about an alien arriving on Earth, but Kneale could not decide where the alien should land. As the coronation reached its climax, he realised that most television viewers had now seen inside Westminster Abbey: this would be the perfect place to first see the alien. ‘There was neither a budget nor the possibility of filming in the Abbey, so we bought a guide book, which included a photo of Poets’ Corner,’ Judith told me. Making television drama in 1953 required ingenuity and imagination. They photographed the guide book’s photo, blew it up and pasted it onto a canvas panel. ‘Then I put on a pair of wash-leather gloves, while Tom stuck bits of curled wire and twigs onto them. We cut a slit in the backdrop, and Tom put his hands through, wearing the gloves. He waggled his fingers very slowly. That was the scariest moment of the drama – when ‘the vegetable’ first appeared, this creep-crawly alien thing with tendrils which had absorbed the bodies and souls of two astronauts. The cameras could not move, and the cameraman saw everything upside down and back to front. It was all filmed live for the television, while another camera showed the actor in terror.’ 
Mog the Cat. copyright HarperCollins
Judith and Kneale were married in 1954 and had two children. When they complained that children’s books were boring, Judith told them stories about ‘Mog’ the cat. Later she wrote and illustrated the stories, and the series of 18 titles about Mog were published from 1970 to 2015. ‘Cats are very interesting people,’ she later said. After 30 years she wrote Goodbye Mog in which the cat died, a brave step for a children’s writer.
The Tiger who Came to Tea. copyright HarperCollins
Probably her best-known book was The Tiger Who Came to Tea, which also began in order to liven up her children’s day. Asked by BBC presenter Emily Maitlis if the tiger symbolised the the overturning of suburban life during the 1960s sexual and social revolution, she simply replied, ‘No, it was about a tiger coming to tea.’ Kerr’s ability to see the world from a child's perspective enabled her to write and draw exactly what a child wants to see, not what an adult thinks they should. She never wasted their time by repeating in words, what was already in the illustration. The illustrations were clear and simple, with only the essential people and objects in them. Published in 1968, the book has never been out of print. 
Judith Kerr at work
Judith’s son was eight when he saw the film The Sound of Music and commented, 'Now we know what it was like when Mummy was a little girl.' Judith was determined that he, and other children, should know what life was really like and so wrote the semi-autobiographical Out of Hitler Time trilogy. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Bombs on Aunt Dainty (originally published as The Other Way Round) and A Small Person Far Away, describe childhood among of the rise of the Nazis in Germany, life as a refugee in Britain during World War II, and the post-war years. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit won the state-funded Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (German Children's Literature Award) in 1974 and became a set text in German schools. In 2004, she said, 'I think of the business of the Holocaust, and the one and a half million children who didn't get out as I got out, in the nick of time -- I think about them almost every day now, because I've had such a happy and fulfilled life and they'd have given anything to have had just a few days of it. And I hope I've not wasted any of it: I try to get the good of every bit of it because I know they would have done if they'd had the chance.'
After the death of Nigel Kneale in 2006, Judith found writing and drawing even more important and continued publishing books into her ninth decade. Over 50 years, she published more than 30 books. Her publisher at HarperCollins, Charlie Redmayne, said she was 'a wonderful and inspiring person who was much loved by everyone. She was a brilliantly talented artist and storyteller. Always understated and very, very funny. She loved life and loved people - and particularly she loved a party.'
photo Daniel Sambraus/AP
Judith Kerr was awarded an OBE in 2012 for services to children's literature and Holocaust education. A year later, the ‘Judith Kerr Primary School’ in London opened as Britain’s first German-English state bilingual school. Just a week before she died, Judith was nominated at the British Book Awards as Illustrator of the Year. She leaves her son Matthew Kneale, a prize-winning novelist and author of ‘The English Passengers’ and daughter, Tacy, who designs special-effects for films. 
Anna Judith Gertrude Kerr, 1923 -2019. 








Oh I'd love to do that... by Ruth Downie

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A surprising number of people would love to be archaeologists, and if you want to know what it takes to be a real one, you’ll have go and find one and ask. But... if you want to be a sort of archaeological hanger-on - the kind of enthusiastic amateur who gets involved in the action but doesn’t have to fill in the Health and Safety forms - well here, based on my own experience, are a few skills you might like to cultivate. 

Not all of archaeology is about digging holes, but a lot of it is, so let's be honest - 

A fondness for mud can be useful.

Nice clean mud
Not such clean mud
In later years you will be able to look at photos of your own special patch of mud and wonder where it was and what was so interesting about it. 
Don't ask.
A limited sense of dignity.
Below is just a practice run at mapping what’s under the ground without disturbing it. But - those jeans have a metal zip and the boots have metal eyelets, which will interfere with the magnetometer readings. A more suitable outfit would be tracksuit trousers, wellies, and plastic specs held on with elastic. Now that’s what I call style. 
Look, no mud!
The ability to watch out for marauding seagulls 
No untrained volunteer is going to be let loose with the drone any time soon, but any fool can act as lookout for birds. So that’s what I did, while the expert took the photos for a 3D image of the hill.
Nice work if you can get it.
Enough short-term memory to be able to follow instructions for the day 
even if you’ve forgotten how to work the thing you’ve also forgotten the name of by next week. 
It's a THEODOLITE. I looked it up.
The ability to get on with people
You and your companions may be working at close quarters in a remote location for many hours at a time. Resist the urge to sing, tell jokes or recount the plot of last night’s “Game of Thrones”.
 
Where no-one can hear you scream.

The ability to hover
For those times when there is nowhere to put your feet without standing on the archaeology. No-one has ever captured this on camera.

A sense of wonder
Because archaeology can take you to some seriously beautiful places. 

Longis Bay, Alderney

A sense of mustn’t-grumble.
These tyres were used to weigh down the plastic sheet protecting a Roman villa site over the winter. At the start of the next digging season they were always full of stagnant water and frogs, which made them all the more fun to remove.
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An appreciation of facilities with a fine view.



The ability to improvise



A vivid imagination 
From this small chunk of pottery you have to conjure up the massive clay vessel that carried olive oil all the way from the south of Spain to a sheep farm in Roman Britain.
(Closely related to the Eye of Faith - for those times when something probably isn’t there butall the diggers convince themselves that they can see it emerging, which makes digging more interesting.)

The willingness to do the same thing over and over again… Clay pipes are the cigarette papers of our ancestors. Our local society spent three seasons looking for a clay pipe kiln and failing to find it. After we'd dug up and washed thousands of broken stems the appearance of any scrap of pipe bowl with a pattern on it was a cause for excitement.

Even the humble home veg plot may have been a smoker's paradise in times past.

Looking on the bright side
Finding nothing proves that there was nothing there. Thus in your own small way, you have just extended the sum of human knowledge. So it wasn’t a complete waste of time after all, was it?

BUT sooner or later there will be a Magic Moment
Here’s one of them. Nobody had seen this in over 1700 years.

A scrap of Roman 'best china' with the maker's name stamped on it.
So, if I've tickled your fancy... 
Here are one or two ways to get involved - if you have more suggestions please chip in with comments. 


Futurelearn do some great online archaeology courses and if you look carefully, many are still free.

UK-based DigVentures - tech-savvy archaeologists running online courses, crowdfunded digs and live-stream events.

Get to know your local museum/local archaeological society. They will know people with trowels and places to wield them.

If you find something interesting - ask at the museum or, in England & Wales, look at the Portable Antiquities Scheme. 

If you’ve got a metal detector - join a local detectorists’ club for advice on how and where to detect within the law.
Two of best sites I've dug on were found by metal detectorists


The world-famous Roman site at Vindolanda relies heavily on volunteers, but book early if you want to dig - it's like getting tickets for Glastonbury.



Ruth Downie is the author of the MEDICUS series of murder mysteries featuring Roman army medic Ruso and his British partner, Tilla. 
www.ruthdownie.com







.

May's Guest - Jacqueline Winspear

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This month's guest is the best-selling author of the Masie Dobbs series of crime novels, Jacqueline Winspear. She was born and raised in Kent and emigrated to the USA in 1990. She has written extensively for journals, newspapers and magazines, and has worked in book publishing on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Here she talks to Charlotte Wightwick about the role war journalists played in bringing the USA into World War II, the role of women during war time and the fascination of writing a long-running series. 

The American Agent revolves around the murder of Catherine Saxon, an American war correspondent in London during the Blitz. Can you say a little about the work of war correspondents in London at this time, and in particular your inspiration for Catherine's character?

There were many war correspondents in Britain during the war, not only from the USA, but representing our Commonwealth allies, and those countries already invaded by Germany. However, the focus in this book is chiefly the journalists who reported news of bombing during the Blitz to the USA – via both radio (or “the wireless”) and print media. Obviously, a good number of those reporters were Americans, and of particular interest in The American Agent is the work of Edward R. Murrow, who broadcast for CBS from a small studio in the bowels of the BBC in London...I was drawn to the fact that Murrow revolutionised broadcast news in a manner that set the scene for the type of reporting we see today. Prior to his broadcasts (and he typically broadcast between midnight and 3:00am, a time when Americans would be sitting down to dinner), the BBC was a very formal environment – in the early days the men who read the news would wear dinner jackets and bow ties. Little emotion came into the reporting, and it was very matter of fact, delivered in the clipped tones of Received English.
 
Murrow knew he had to bring in the human factor to have any impact on American audiences, for whom the war was very much “over there and nothing to do with us.” On one occasion he famously took recording equipment into the street to record the footsteps of people running for cover in a bombing raid, and he repeatedly went into shelters to record the voices of ordinary people, and later accompanied the crew of a Lancaster bomber on a raid into Germany. This immediacy began to have an impact on American opinion, and effectively shortened the distance between the two countries... Other reporters had an impact too – Mollie Panter Downes in her “Letter From London” in the New Yorker did her part, as did JB Priestley, Vernon Bartlett and Cecil Beaton with his photography, published in Life magazine. They were, if you will, the agents of change in American opinion.

The character Catherine Saxon is an amalgam. I have been interested in the work of women war correspondents since my early teens, so I’m very familiar with so many of those women who have effectively put their lives on the line to tell the story of what is happening in a war zone. In a way Saxon is a blend of Clare Hollingworth, Marguerite Higgins, Dickey Chapelle and Martha Gellhorn – and so many others I admire. I could go on listing names!

A big theme of the novel is whether or not the Americans will join the war, and the work of the media, undercover agents and propaganda to try and bring that about at this time. Why did you choose to focus on this? 

It’s such an interesting period, and I am drawn to the role of soft propaganda in a time of war – and indeed, in the time leading up to war. In an earlier book, Elegy For Eddie, one of the continuing characters, a writer, is part of a group who are charged with developing appealing stories about Britain – her countryside, industry, people, farm life, children etc. The initiative was to give the people a deeper sense that they had something to be proud of in Britain, and an emotional connection to their country. This was part of the story was based upon fact – there was that emphasis in newspaper and magazine storytelling, as it was clear to the government that another war was on the cards, and they wanted the people to be ready to take up arms and be ready to protect their country – they wanted them ready for war, and most people were reluctant to consider war as they’d lost so much in the years 1914-18. Edward R. Murrow and his “boys” in WW2 were considered to be one of Churchill’s greatest tools in the job of getting the USA behind Britain’s war effort.

Maisie is torn in this novel between her life as an investigator, her voluntary work as am ambulance driver, the child she wants to adopt and the possibility of a new romance. How far do you think these pressures were typical for women of Maisie's generation?

I think multiple pressures are typical for women of any generation! My grandmother had to keep her job and had to consider the safety of her ten children. Many women worked, volunteered and cared for families in dreadful conditions following the repeated bombing night after night after night. I have visited the archive of the WRVS (In the war it was simply the WVS – Women’s Voluntary Service – the “Royal” designation came later), and simply reading the very detailed reports from every woman who worked through the Blitz and subsequent bombings would leave readers in no doubt that multiple pressures were very much the lot of women – and continue to be so today.

This is the 15th Maisie Dobbs novel. What is it that keeps bringing you back to her? And can you give us any insight into what will be coming next for her?

From the time I knew I had not just one novel, but the material for a series, I wanted to move my characters through time. I wanted to see how they grew and changed with experience, and how they were impacted by the events of their day and the trials and tribulations of their lives – creating that overall arc of story keeps me coming back to the series. I wanted to create a saga in the traditional sense, but one underpinned by the journey through chaos to resolution that is at the heart of mystery. Ultimately, life is that mystery, and I am buoyed forward by the journey not only of Maisie Dobbs, but her fellow characters – and history itself. History frames the story – and that is the only “insight” I can give for what comes next!

The American Agent (number 15 in the bestselling Maisie Dobbs series) by Jacqueline Winspear is out now and published by Allison & Busby. Previous titles in the series are being reissued by John Murray.

Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick - the ammonite on the mantelpiece

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Searching for inspiration for this month’s Cabinet of Curiosities, a Google search (note: other search engines are available) reminded me that the original Cabinets often contained wonders of Natural History. This in turn made me think straight away of my own tiny pieces of natural history, a crystalline ammonite and a few chunks of belemnite found on the beach at Lyme Regis.

These are both common fossils – I spotted the belemnites myself, and the ammonite came from the same hour’s fossil-hunting tour (albeit from the guide, whose eye was much keener than mine) – but they bring me enormous pleasure despite that.

Fossils from Lyme in turn make me think of Mary Anning. As a scientist, she’s one who was long neglected, although in recent years her importance has started to be recognised.

Mary was born in 1799, the daughter of a carpenter. Her father supplemented the family’s earnings by selling fossils from the beach to the gentry who were starting to visit Lyme. When he died, Mary and her brother continued to sell their finds as a way of supporting themselves and their mother.

Mary became highly skilled, not only at finding new fossils, but also at understanding them. Her notes and drawings are detailed and exact. She made some of the most important and spectacular finds of the period, just as palaeontology was opening up whole new worlds of ancient creatures. She was a pioneer especially in the discovery of ancient marine reptiles such as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs. Men like William Buckland, the Reverend Conybeare, Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen all benefitted from Mary’s discoveries and expertise.
Mary Anning. Source: Wikimedia Commons

But as a woman – and a working class woman at that – she stood no chance to joining any of the learned scientific Societies in London, or even seeing her name in print as an expert writing about her finds. Nor did they usually even pay her especially well: money was a concern for most of Mary’s life. Mary died of breast cancer in 1847, at the age of 47.

In recent years, Mary’s story has become increasingly well-known. You can find it told (and her finds clearly labelled as hers) in museums such as the Natural History Museum, and several biographies exist. Her importance has been recognised by the scientific establishment. Her story has also been told through historical fiction including Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures and by our very own Joan Lennon in the Daughters of Time anthology. Currently there’s a film in production which will help to bring her name to an even wider audience, as well as campaigns to get her onto the new £50 note and for a statue of her to be erected in Lyme.

Ms Anning was clearly a highly intelligent woman, who was knowledgeable, skilled and a true expert in her field. She lived at a time when incredible new discoveries were being made, and which she contributed to enormously. In many ways she was remarkable. But in others she was entirely unremarkable – or at least similar to countless women and working class people throughout history, who have got on with the hard grind of daily living, doing whatever needs to be done to make ends meet, knowing that they were likely to receive little credit and less glory for their hard work.

My ammonite sits in pride of place on my living room mantelpiece, a tiny monument to the wonders of Nature, and to the countless people like Mary who have contributed to our understanding of nature, science and history.
My own tiny ammonite, which nonetheless has
pride of place on my mantelpiece. 


You can find out more about Mary Anning at https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/mary-anning-unsung-hero.html and about the campaign to erect a statue in her honour at https://www.maryanningrocks.co.uk/





May's Competition

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To win a copy of Jacqueline Winspear's The American Agent (see yesterday's guest post) just answer the following question in Comments:

“In the American Agent, Maisie comes to admire the war correspondents living and working in London during the Blitz. Which real-life journalist do you admire the most, and why?”

Then email your answer to me at maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk so I can get in touch with you in you win.

Closing date 7th June

We are sorry our competitions are open only to UK Followers

"We don't do God" by Mary Hoffman

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No, not a post about Alastair Campbell. We try to keep this site a politics-free zone.

Two things I've seen recently have got me pondering about how difficult it is to show faith, or religious calling, in a work of art.

The first was a relay (in the cinema) of Francis Poulenc's opera  Dialogues des Carmelites from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The second the film called simply Tolkien, which traces the life of the author of The Lord of the Rings from childhood to the life of a don at Oxford, writing the fateful sentence (in particularly beautiful script): "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit." The postwar life is just sketched in.

Francis Poulenc

The Poulenc opera is all about the faith of the Carmelite nuns of Compiègne, whose resolution on martyrdom led them to the guillotine in 1794.

At the finale (SPOILER ALERT) nearly twenty nuns walk voluntarily through the crowd, singing Salve Regina, up to a scaffold where, one by one, they are beheaded by the guillotine. There can be no finer test of faith than willingly to be killed for it.

And yet, how does the opera portray this?

The story is relatively simple. A young aristocratic woman named Blanche de la Force, the daughter of a Marquis, joins the Carmelite order of nuns because she is afraid of the violence of the Reign of Terror. There she meets another young novice, Sister Constance, who has a dream that the two of them will die on the same day.

The Prioress is dying and does so in agony, believing God to have forsaken her. The new Prioress goes away and, in her absence, with the convent's Chaplain having been forbidden to carry out his office, another nun, Mother Marie, holds a secret ballot in which all but one of the order votes for martyrdom.

Sister Constance reveals herself to have been the one who held out against death but says she has changed her mind. Meanwhile, Sister Blanche runs away back to her old home. Was she actually the one who voted "no"? Officials of the Revolution come to the convent and take the nuns to prison, where the sentence of death is passed on them all.

At the climax, Sister Constance, who is the last of the nuns to take the fatal journey, falters and is comforted by the sudden appearance of Blanche, who follows her to the scaffold, singing.

The composer, unrecogniseable here from the exuberant, joyful Poulenc whose Gloria I have sung, along with most amateur choristers in the UK, does have the advantage of being able to convey in music what can't be demonstrated in words.  But does that help?

Not for me. The agony of the dying Prioress is more convincing than the death wish piety of Blanche at the end. Her father has already been guillotined, her brother has escaped (we assume) to another country. She is working as a servant in her old home, now owned by her former servants. It's enough to make anyone feel she had nothing to live for.


Plenty of religion is portrayed in Dialogues des Carmelites, even if not - to me - convincingly. The argument against Dome Karukoski's film about Tolkien is that he leaves religion out altogether. When Tolkien's mother died, he was twelve (having been four when his father died) and she put his and his brother Hilary's welfare in the hands of Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan. Mabel Tolkien had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1900, four years before her death and her faith was as important to her son as it was to her. Her Baptist family cut her off because of her conversion. Father Francis was her close friend in times of trouble and poverty.

Karukoski's defence at leaving Tolkien's faith out of the film was:  "[W]e have scenes where he attends communion and helps Father Francis to show that he was a man of faith. There are also layered scenes, where he looks up to the heavens for an answer as if asking God for help. There's another scene where a figure is on a cross. Many people won’t notice those hints because they’re so eternal"Leah MarieAnn Klett (May 10, 2019). "'Tolkien' director on honoring life, legacy of famed 'Lord of the Rings' author (interview)". The Christian Post.

That's pretty feeble, isn't it? Looking up at the sky from the WW1 trenches? Anyone might do that. But I do have some sympathy with both creators. Religious impulses are essentially internal and can't easily be shown in pictures or music. Novels might do better, with interior monologues, but I could think only of Rumer Godden's In this House of Brede and The Anchoress by Robyn Cadwallader, reviewed on this site here. 

Please give me examples of works of art which convincingly demonstrate a person's faith (any religion) or vocation.

J R R Tolkien in 2016


Nicholas Hoult, who plays Tolkien in the film




A Mini Greek Odyssey: Our Mythological Half Term. By Anna Mazzola

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We had no real choice. We had to go to Greece. Some months ago, my eight-year-old son read the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan. Since then, his obsession with Greek mythology has become all-consuming. We receive daily quizzes on our knowledge of the Titans and the Gods. We’ve dressed up as Medusa and Perseus. When half term came, we could go only head for the Peloponnese and Athens.

In case you too are compelled to go on a Greek mythology holiday, I’ve set out below some of the places we visited, and some of the sites we intended to go to but missed due to the other important occupation of young children: spending lots of time on the beach.

Athens


The Acropolis 


The Acropolis, the famous rocky outcrop rising about the city, is not only where the last big battle in Riordan’s Blood of Olympus took place, but the site of the Temple of the goddess Athena, patron of Athens. According to the legends, it was on the platform beside the temple of Athena Nike that King Aegeus awaited the return of Theseus from slaying the Minotaur.


Temple of Athena 


At the nearby Erechtheion you can see the site of the first ever olive tree, brought forth by Athena’s spear. You can also spend time finding the marks that Poseidon’s trident left in the rock.

Sacred Cats of the Parthenon (maybe)


Temple of Olympian Zeus


The largest temple in Greece, which the Roman Emperor Hadrian dedicated to Zeus, leader of the Olympians, commissioning a statue of the great God, and of course one of himself. Only fifteen of the Corinthian columns still stand, but they give you an idea of its enormity.

Temple of Poseidon


High on the cliffs of Cape Sounio to the south of Athens lie the windswept ruins of the once majestic temple of Poseidon, God of the Sea. Built in around 440 BC, it may have been razed to the ground by Xerces, as punishment for the Athenians' defiance. Byron, being Byron, carved his name here.




The Peloponnese


Mycenae


In Greek mythology, the still-beautiful citadel of Mycenae was founded by the hero Perseus - son of Zeus and Danae, slayer of Medusa - who employed Cyclopes to build the walls of Mycenae with giant stones that no human could move. According to Homer, the place is named after the nymph Mycene, daughter of Inachus, king of Argos.



Don’t miss the Treasury, a beehive shaped structure that you can walk inside and which according to legend is the tomb of Agamemnon.

Ancient Delphi 


When Zeus released two eagles from opposite ends of the worlds, their paths crossed in the skies above Delphi, establishing it as the centre of the earth. From the 8th century BC onwards, people came from all over the ancient world to consult the Delphic Oracle – the words of Apollo spoken through a priestess, or Pythia.

It’s no longer possible to see the Oracle’s fume-filled cave in the ruins of Temple of Apollo, but it’s still worth asking for a few prophecies. You never know your luck.



Epidaurus


The Sanctuary of Epidaurus was a healing sanctuary, dedicated to Ascelpius, God of Medicine. He is depicted in his temple here with a staff, a dog and a serpent. Ironically, it was in this sanctuary of healing that I fell down some steps and broke a finger.

Once you’re suitably dusty, head to the nearby Sunken City, where you can snorkel above ancient ruins, avoiding the less ancient sea urchins.


Nestor’s Cave 


After an afternoon at the stunning Voidokilia beach, I recommend climbing up to the cave beneath the castle. According to myth, Nestor's Cave is where Hermes hid the cattle stolen from Apollo. Nowadays, however, it seems to be mainly inhabited by bats.



And Many More…


Of course there are many more mythological sites in Greece – Delos, Olympus, Thebes, Knossos, Crete. If the mythology obsession continues we may be back there in the next year.

One last thing: while we were away, I read Circe by Madeline Miller. What a rich and marvellous book. If you haven’t yet read it, I recommend that you do.




Featured image: Odysseus in the Cave of the Winds by Stradanus (possibly 1590-1599).

_____________________________________

Anna Mazzola is a writer of dark historical fiction.

https://annamazzola.com
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

Ashurbanipal and the 4th Plinth - Katherine Langrish

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Behold Ahurbanipal, King of the World! So he liked to style himself, and he wasn't too far from speaking the truth: from 669 to c.631 BCE he was king of an empire that stretched from Cyprus to Iran; even Egypt came under his sway, and his city Ninevah was then the largest in the world. The British Museum recently held an exhibition about him and his empire, and I was lucky enough to get into it for the penultimate day. It was full of wall-plaques from Ashurbanipal's palace at Ninevah, exquisitely carved in a sort of comic-strip technique. Photos were encourage, and I took a lot. In the one above, you can see the king hunting lions; he seems to have accounted tfor rather a lot of them, if the reliefs are to be believed. At the top of the picture he looks on as the carcasses of lions he has killed are presented to him by kneeling servants. At the bottom, he gallops after a new prey - wild asses.


There was a good bit of  'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair'  about Ashurbanipal's public face. Mind you he had perfectly good practical reasons for wanting to instil massive respect and reverence in his subjects. He ruled an area so vast that communications from one side to the other must have taken weeks; he had to rely on the dubious loyalty of vassal kings - some of whom were his brothers and rivals - and be prepared to go to war with them if they got above themselves. This also seems to have happened a lot.It may have helped to have spirits like these on side. This is an 'ugallu' or Great Lion.


Though the exhibition is now over, there's a very good British Museum blog about Ashurbanipal here: https://blog.britishmuseum.org/who-was-ashurbanipal/ so I don't need to go into his life-story and anyway I'm far from an expert on Ancient Ninevah! What follows is really just glimpses of the exhibition via my photos, and a few impressions.


For one thing, Ashurbanipal regarded himself as and indeed was a man of culture and peace, as well as of war. In the relief above, a beautiful lioness (I know) is relaxing in the shade of trees and vines in his menagerie. Ahurbanipal valued learning and boasted of his knowledge of arithmetic, reading and writing. He "developed the first systematically collected and catalogued library in the world", collecting together hundreds of thousands of clay tablets, 30,000 of which are kept by the British Museum. Some on display included parts of the Epic of Gilgamesh, medical texts, spells, letters, history...


The tablet below is part of a letter to the king from the Chief Exorcist describing how he has cured the Crown Prince. But for another child of the king, he has been less successful...


Touchingly he writes, 'As to what the king, my lord, wrote to me - "I am feeling very sad. How did I become so depressed for this little one of mine?" - Had it been curable, you would have given away half your kingdom to have it cured. But what can we do? Oh king, my lord, it is something that cannot be done.'

When Ashurbanipal went to war, he was brutal and whole-hearted. The relief carvings show all the horrors in clear and graphic detail. Here, the Elamite city of Hamanu is being stormed. The king's Assyrian soldiers rush up a siege ladder to the the battlements; his archers fire arrows, men are flung from the walls and corpses float in the river. It's war reporting: you could move from scene to scene, frame after frame.




Elamite prisoners are marched away, fetters around their ankles...




... the citadel is looted, destroyed, set alight...



... and the Elamite king is captured. Here he is in his bulbous head-dress, being pushed into a chariot. Note the stalking lioness at bottom left - is this a metaphor?





We left, our minds full of images of ancient wars, and went on to see the musical 'Come From Away'which strikes a wonderful balance of commemoration and celebration as it relates the true story of the thousands of passengers from 38 planes which were re-routed to the small town of Gander in northern Canada on the day of the September 11 attacks. As its wikipedia entry puts it:

"The characters in the musical are based on (and in most cases share the names of) real Gander residents as well as some of the 7,000 stranded travelers they housed and fed. The musical has been received by audiences and critics as a cathartic reminder of the capacity for human kindness in even the darkest of times and the triumph of humanity over hate."

 
We emerged from the theatre into Trafalgar Square, and there on the Fourth Plinth, we saw this.




It's a Lamassu, one of the winged guardians of Ninevah - and it's a modern sculpture called 'The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist' by Michael Rakowitz. I will quote from the London Assembly link https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/arts-and-culture/current-culture-projects/fourth-plinth-trafalgar-square/whats-fourth-plinth-now:

"Michael started The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist project in 2006. It attempts to recreate more than 7,000 objects which have been lost forever. Some were looted from the Iraq Museum in 2003, while others were destroyed at archaeological sites across the country during the Iraq War.
For the Fourth Plinth, Rakowitz has recreated the Lamassu. This winged bull and protective deity guarded the entrance to Nergal Gate of Nineveh (near modern day Mosul) from c700 BC until it was destroyed by Daesh in 2015.

"The reconstructions in The Invisible Enemy project are made from recycled packaging from Middle Eastern foodstuffs. The Lamassu is made from 10,500 empty Iraqi date syrup cans. This represents a once-renowned industry now decimated by war.

"The inscription is written in Cuneiform, one of the earliest systems of writing, on the side of the Lamassu reads: 'Sennacherib, king of the world, king of Assyria, had the inner and outer wall of Ninevah built anew and raised as high as mountains.'"

Well... Sennacherib was Ashurbanipal's grandfather. I found the coming-together of these three cultural events with their conjurations of conflicts both ancient and modern - the exhibition, the musical and the statue on the plinth - both meaningful and extremely moving.

History is a live project.



Visit Katherine's website at www.katherinelangrish.co.uk
and her blog at Seven Miles of Steel Thistles






Journalism from a More Leisurely Time - Joan Lennon

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My sister has been writing a biography of our grandmother, based on her letters from China, which my cousin has painstakingly transcribed.*  I've had nothing to do except read and be fascinated.  However, when I take my glasses off, I can read very tiny print.  So, when on a recent visit to my sister, a scanned page from The Perth Courier (a rural/small town Ontario newspaper) for 26 February, 1892 emerged, I de-spectacled myself and got stuck in.  My task was to see if there was any mention of our great-grandfather's musical activities.  I found several, but that wasn't all that was happening at that time, not by a long shot.  Let me share with you two pieces of heart-stopping drama and horticultural/geological interest -

RUNAWAY - A runaway of an unusual nature took place last Thursday.  Mr. John Lally, of North Burgess, called at the house of Mr. Murphy, 3rd Line Bathurst, leaving his team untied while in the house.  A passing train frightened them and off they went towards town.  Upon reaching the 3rd Line tollgate, they took to the railway track as a shortcut to the Wilson Street crossing, but had not proceeded far when they met a freight train going west.  The horses turned out in time to save themselves, but the locomotive caught the cutter and smashed it.  A horse blanket fell out on the rails, which was cut in two by the wheel of the engine as neatly as if done with scissors.  The horses were not injured.

and -

QUEER PEBBLE - Mr William Scott, Manion post office, Bathurst, brought us on Wednesday a stone or pebble, marvellously like a potato, and which looks as if it were one of those vegetables turned into stone.  It is about three inches long and two thick.  It is the best counterfeit potato we ever saw.

Just in case you might be thinking that it was nothing but sturm and drang in Ontario back then, I was also able to decipher and note down the following calmer, poetic advertisement for clothes, which begins -


NOW

That the cold stormy winds of winter are about to depart, to make place for the more genial and balmy breezes of spring, and old mother earth is about to lose her white winter robe, and the thousands of lower animals are losing their heavy and shaggy old coats - man, that he may live in harmony with nature, finds it necessary to lay aside his cumbersome winter clothing and don the 


LIGHT SPRING ATTIRE

Which is always so acceptable after wearing the heavy robes necessary during our Canadian winter.

In order that everyone in Perth and the surrounding country may make this change conveniently, and at the first appearance of spring, I wish hereby to intimate to them that I have just opened my spring stock of


HATS AND CAPS,
GLOVES,
SPRING UNDERWEAR,
NECKWEAR, ETC.

And, in case the reader had not yet completely caught the writer's drift, he continues -

As Nature in the childhood of the year which is the spring given to the year a complete change of clothing, the beauty of which none will dispute, so Nature, through the agency of fathers and mothers, expects that all the boys, youths and children will also receive a change, thereby imitating as nearly as possible the example of nature, which example few, if any, will lead you astray.

Even if the sentence itself may have wandered off track a little.

Journalism and the art of advertising from a more leisurely time.  Worth taking your glasses off for.



* I blogged on The History Girls about my mum as a small girl in China here, and my grandfather's experiences as a medical missionary here.




Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
The Slightly Jones Mysteries
(A fiction series for 8-12 year-olds set in the 1890s, 
featuring girl detective, Slightly Jones)

D-Day and Memory

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Sometimes, I don’t mind admitting, it’s a struggle to know what to write for my monthly History Girls post. I shy away from the learned essays of some of my colleagues – not only do I not feel qualified, but often I simply don’t have the time to do the necessary research.

But today is the 75thanniversary of the Normandy Landings, generally known as D-DAY, so I couldn’t really write about anything else. The Normandy Landings, on 6thJune 1944, marked the start of the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France. This was the largest naval, air and land operation in history, and laid the foundations for the Allied Victory in Europe.  D-Day is a general term for the start date of any military operation, often used when the exact date is either secret or not yet known, but this operation was so significant that nowadays, when you hear the term D-Day, it tends to refer to the events of  6thJune 1944.



At the commemorations this week, there will be very few veterans left to remember their experiences and their fallen comrades. Anyone who participated in World War Two is very elderly now, just as, when I was a child, the veterans of World War One were very old. Listening to an American veteran describe his D-Day experience on BBC Radio 4 this week, I reflected on the first time I became aware of D-Day – indeed the first time I became aware of any commemoration. It was 1979, and I was ten. My P6 teacher, Mr Thompson, told us that it was 35 years since the D-Day landings. Few of us had heard of them, so he took the opportunity to give us a history lesson – one of those impromptu lessons so frequent then and so rare now. I remember him telling us that it didn’t seem so long ago to him, but we didn’t get that at all. 35 years! Three and a half times our lifetimes! Grown-ups were weird.



Since then, I have taken a group of school children to visit the Normandy landing beaches. We visited the Bayeux tapestry the same day. I wonder which felt more real to the children. The tapestry was ancient but it was tangible; we could see if not touch it, and buy miniatures for our walls.  The beaches, on the other hand, were empty, just sand and sea and a cold Channel wind. We had to people them with our imaginations. For the few veterans who travel there this week for the commemorations, I suppose they will people the beaches with their own memories of seventy-five years ago.





That impromptu history class of Mr Thompson’s was forty years ago. It doesn’t seem so long ago to me now.  




A LOVESOME THING.......by Adèle Geras

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Part One

The other day, I visited the Cambridge University Botanic Garden with two old friends from my schooldays. Since coming to live in Cambridge in 2010, I've visited often but not often enough. Every time I go there, I promise myself to be there for longer. To look more carefully at all that's growing there; to examine the marvellous specimens in the glasshouses.  But the truth of the matter is, I generally go there for  lunch or tea with friends, and we end up strolling through the wonderful forty acre site. Situated right in the middle of Cambridge and very close to the station and to many bus routes, it's a real oasis. You go in and immediately you are in a sort of paradise, an enclosed space which takes you into a landscape of trees and water and grass and, according to the time of year, different flowers and shrubs. 







The photographs here are my own. I could have taken hundreds more. The Botanic Garden was founded in 1826 by John  Henslow, who was Charles Darwin's mentor and teacher. It's now part of the University and there are many scientists involved in all kind of fascinating experiments in plant science and related fields. It's very user friendly, especially since the café opened a few years back. The food is excellent and it was the first place I noticed which provided a bookshelf full of picture books for its youngest customers. You can sit outside under umbrellas and be surrounded, in the case of  my last visit, by beds of beautiful irises.

  





For someone who loves gardens so much, I have a very lazy relationship with them. I'm happy to walk in them, write about them, photograph them, discuss them, enjoy them in every way. The one thing I'm not prepared to do is work in a garden. I do not like gardening, but I like the results of gardening. My own garden is much better now than it was nine years ago when I moved into my house, and that's not thanks to me but to the local firm which has been looking after it, Atlas Gardens. I'm very grateful to them.



Part Two.

 I visited the RHS Chelsea Flower show with Linda Newbery (a very good hands-on gardener who knows everything about plants of every kind) and Celia Rees, whose garden I haven't seen but who also strikes me as very knowledgeable. I've never been before and by the end of the day I'd walked over 8 kilometres: something I've never done before. It was a day so full of sensations and sights that I'm going to struggle to describe it here. Maybe many of you have visited and know all I'm going to say, but for those who haven't, here are my impressions.

A bit of history first. I had no idea that the RHS was founded by John Wedgwood, son of Josiah Wedgwood in 1804 and that the inaugural meeting of the seven men who were the first members of the new Society took place at Hatchard's bookshop in Piccadilly. The Wedgwood Garden was most beautiful, and had a pavilion next to it full of equally lovely china and delicious-looking teas, like Strawberry and Cucumber.


I was delighted to see that there was a real emphasis throughout on Education. The RHS are very good at spreading the word, through their gardens, the number of shows all over the country that they put on and the way they encourage everyone to live in a greener, more sustainable fashion.




We didn't get to see the D-Day 75 Garden close up. All the tickets for the day we were there had been sold. But its presence at Chelsea is an education in itself. The Chelsea Pensioners paraded while we were there, and there were thousands who saw them and talked about them with their friends and the history passes on...


Below is one of my favourites: an African garden that emphasised the importance of educating girls. The motto Education Changes Everything chalked up on the blackboard is a good one and one that applies everywhere in the world.




The Welcome to Yorkshire Garden won the People's Choice prize and I voted for it. What struck me about Chelsea (and I had to keep asking Linda about it!) was the fact that every one of these small gardens had been created from absolute scratch and that in a matter of weeks an empty wasteland is transformed every year into a gathering of most beautifully-designed gardens. This one had lock gates and water and a cottage and you could have sworn it had been there for hundred of years.



The Japanese garden was my absolute favourite, I think, but I wouldn't have the courage to shower in that building on the left! You can't see it from the photo but it is a shower room...maybe the glass becomes opaque in some magical way when you turn on the taps.


Thematically, wildness was the thing. All the gardens were unkempt and I was delighted to see this and feel much less guilty about my lawn now. I was particularly impressed with this flight of very unkempt steps.








Here is the notice that greets you at the entrance to the Artisan Gardens. It's made of strands of wool and is full of beautiful colours. 






Here are some foxgloves, for no better reason than that they're beautiful. And the bees were having a wonderful time crawling into them.



The Main Pavilion was astonishing. A huge area in the marquee filled with every kind of flower and plant and lots of wonderful vegetables too, some of which seemed surreal in their cleanness and hugeness, like illustrations from a children's book. 



There were notices all over the show and this was my favourite and I am putting it here because I love the way it's expressed. That last line has the force of poetry. Also, it's true.


'Lighthouse of Wonders' by Karen Maitland

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Henry Winstanley's Eddystone Lighthouse
If I could time-travel, one of the places I’d love to go back and visit would be the 'Essex House of Wonders', home of Henry Winstanley in the 17th century. Winstanley was merchant, artist, architect and engineer, born c.1644, and was the designer of the first Eddystone Lighthouse, which in many ways, was as extraordinary as his own house.

Winstanley filled his home with wonderful mechanical devices of his own design. In an accounted printed in 1823, Michael Rough gives some tantalising examples – 
"being taken into one particular room of his house, and there observing an old slipper carelessly lying in the middle of the floor, if, as was natural, you gave it a kick with your foot, up started a figure before you; if you sat down in a chair, a couple of arms would immediately clasp you in, so as to render it impossible to disentangle yourself till your attendant set you at liberty; and if you sat down within a certain arbour by the side of the canal, you were forthwith sent out afloat to the middle of the canal from whence it was impossible to escape …"
Winstanley's Geographical Playing Card
No.18/275, circa 1676
Photo: Halibutt
In the 1690’s, Winstanley devised a successful visitor attraction known as the ‘Water Theatre’ in Piccadilly, London, combining fountains, automata, mechanical surprises and fireworks. It featured The Wonderful Barrel, which sounds like an early vending machine, because it could produce both hot and cold drinks. He also designed and produced a set of Geographic Playing Cards which sold well.

He invested his money in merchant ships, two of which foundered on the treacherous Eddystone rocks, off the Plymouth coast. On learning that it was considered impossible to mark these rocks at sea to warn shipping, he announced that he would build a lighthouse there. Even though he was supported by Royal Navy ships and men, it took over three years to build because the conditions were so dangerous. Waves and wind perpetually lashed these savage rocks.

A further hazard was the French ships. England and France were at war, so a naval ship had to guard the men on the rocks at all times, but in June 1697, the guard ship was ordered to re-join the fleet and a French privateer vessel slipped in, kidnapped Henry Winstanley and destroyed all that had been built. King Louis XIV had Winstanley returned to England, declaring "France is at war with England, not with humanity." The lighthouse was finally completed in November 1698. During the five years this lighthouse was in operation not a single ship was wrecked on the Eddystone rocks.
Henry Winstanley 1644-1703
Self-portrait c.1680


But Winstanley’s fate was to be forever bound up with this lighthouse. Unlike the cramp and spartan living quarters in most lighthouses, his extraordinary Rococo lighthouse was fitted with a colourful and luxurious stateroom, of which he was so proud that he said that he would like to be in the lighthouse during ‘the greatest storm that ever blew under the face of the heavens.’

Whether this was prophetic or an amazing coincidence, Winstanley was in the lighthouse, overseeing repairs, on the night of 26th November 1703. That was night in which the worst hurricane ever to strike southern England, reached its full and deadly force. By morning, the Eddystone Lighthouse had vanished into the sea taking with it its eccentric designer, Henry Winstanley and five other men inside. They were six of an estimated 8,000 to 15,000 lives who were lost in that storm.

A few days later, a ship carrying tobacco from Virginia to Plymouth struck the Eddystone rocks and all hands perished.
'Shipping off the Eddystone Lighthouse
Artist: Attrib. to Vilhelm Melbye 1824-1882

Following the destruction of the first lighthouse, Captain John Lovett leased the rock, and was allowed to charge passing ships a toll of one penny per ton. He had new lighthouse built, designed by John Rudyerd, which survived almost fifty years. On the night of 2nd December 1755, the top of the lantern caught fire. The three keepers attempted to put it out with buckets, but were driven out onto the rocks and were rescued by boat as the tower burned. Sadly, the 94-year-old keeper, Henry Hall, died several days later from ingesting molten lead from the lantern roof.
John Rudyerd's Eddystone Lighthouse of 1708
Artist: Isaac Sailmaker C1633-1721



The third lighthouse was built of granite blocks by civil engineer John Smeaton who based the shape on an oak tree. The light was first lit on 16th October 1759 and it remained in use until 1877 when erosion to the rocks under the lighthouse caused it to shake whenever large waves crashed against it. Smeaton's lighthouse was dismantled and rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe and is now open to visitors.

The fourth lighthouse was designed by James Douglass, using Robert Stevenson's developments of Smeaton's techniques. The light was lit in 1882 and it is still in use today.
Smeaton's Lighthouse rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe
Photo: Dave Skinner


Bad Guys Make Good Plots by Kate Innes

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Kate Innes
We are doing something rather unusual today. We are losing founder member Caroline Lawrence, who has been posting on the 9th of the month for nearly eight years, since we began in July 2011.


As you can imagine, Caroline is a hard act to follow and, for the next four months, on 9th, we have some guest posts with fellow history enthusiasts, beginning with Kate Innes.

Kate Innes was once an archaeologist and museum education officer, but she now enjoys living in the past by writing historical fiction. Her first novel, The Errant Hours, is a Historical Novel Society Editor’s Choice and included on a medieval reading list at Bangor University. The sequel, All the Winding World, was recently published. Her poetry collection, Flocks of Words, was shortlisted for the International Rubery Award. Kate runs creative writing workshops around the West Midlands.

www.kateinneswriter.com @kateinnes2 @kateinneswriter


Battle_of_Courtrai - Chroniques de France ou de St Denis, BL Royal MS 20 C vii f. 34
A story needs a villain – someone to get the action going and make the protagonist look heroic. This is as true for historical fiction as it is for any other kind. We love to shiver at their evilness and then gloat as they get their comeuppance. And history certainly has plenty of real villains to choose from for the historical novelist. It is jam-packed with good material for bad guys.

In All the Winding World, my latest medieval novel set in the late 13th century during the Anglo-French War, one particular historical character galloped into the plot displaying all the necessary qualifications. Rich, cruel, self-centred, eccentric, creepy, sadistic – Robert II Count of Artois had it all. Including a gory and well-deserved demise.

You’ve probably never heard of him. Neither had I. Born in 1250 AD, he was the son of Count Robert I and Matilda of Brabant – and nephew of the sainted King Louis IX of France. However, the piety of his uncle had not rubbed off. Count Robert II was a hedonist with the means to satisfy all his many and varied desires. At birth he had inherited the wealthy territory of Artois on the border between France and Flanders, as his father was already dead when he was born.

Over the course of his early life, he became a ruthless and talented military leader, taking part in many of the wars that were prevalent in the 13th century. He married three times and had several mistresses. This was not unusual, as women were highly likely to die in childbirth. So, based on this brief biography, perhaps you could say that he was a typical aristocrat of the time.
Aberdeen Bestiary – The Wolf
But his choice of pets was a real giveaway that he was villain material. The Count of Artois was known to keep a pet wolf, which he allowed to hunt across his lands, eating the herds of the local peasants (hopefully not the peasants themselves). He had a large castle and walled park at Hesdin (now Vieil Hesdin) in Boulogne North East France stretching over eight hundred hectares, which he filled with the most extraordinary attractions. The Count was said to enjoy practical jokes, and his park was designed to freak people out in many imaginative ways. If you’d like to know what it might have looked like, a detail of a painting can be viewed on this website: http://www.medievalcodes.ca/2015/04/the-marvels-of-hesdin.html

We often think that medieval people had little in the way of what we would call ‘technology’. But this was not so. As well as real exotic animals, Hesdin housed automata – skillfully constructed mechanical beings that moved, ‘spoke’ and frightened the guests. In a later set of accounts, these were described as including a talking mechanical owl, caged birds that spat water, and waving monkeys covered in badger fur. I can think of several horror films featuring this kind of thing.

Detail from The Luttrell Psalter, British Library Add MS 42130
The park also provided numerous ways of being dunked in water and covered in soot or flour. All designed apparently to amuse, if not the victim, then certainly the Count. The engineers who made these marvels would have employed devices used in both agriculture and the military, and their inventions were to have a profound impact on William Caxton, the first man to run a printing press in England when he visited it in the 15th century.

But I digress. If a story has a villain, it follows that he must get his just deserts. It happened to the Count a few years after the action of my novel, but it was worth waiting for.

Robert, along with the cream of the French aristocracy, rode into Flanders in July 1302, to teach the region a lesson. After two years of brutal occupation and unrest, the people of Flanders had revolted against the French rule in May 1302 and killed many Frenchmen in Bruges. King Philip IV sent in 8,000 men to quell the uprising and put Count Robert II of Artois in charge. But when the two armies met outside the town of Kortrijk (Courtrai) on the 11th July in what came to be know as the ‘Battle of the Golden Spurs’, all did not go as the French had planned.

The French cavalry proved to be no match for the Flemish infantry and their pike formation. In the end, three hundred noblemen of France were slaughtered by the yeomanry of Flanders. In revenge for French cruelty, they took few if any knights prisoner, counter to the usual practice of holding nobles for ransom. Count Robert was one of those to be killed, in a most satisfying and humiliating way.

Battle of the Golden Spurs in Kortrijk 1302
Robert of Artois was surrounded and struck down from his horse by an extraordinarily big and strong Cistercian lay brother, Willem van Saeftinghe. According to some tales, bleeding from many wounds, Robert begged for his life, but the Flemish refused to spare him, claiming that ‘they did not understand French.’

This is what the Annals of Ghent had to say about the matter:

“. . . the art of war, the flower of knighthood, with horses and chargers of the finest, fell before the weavers, fullers and the common folk and foot soldiers of Flanders . . . the beauty and strength of that great French army was turned into a dung-pit, and the glory of the French made dung and worms.”

‘Good riddance!’ one can almost hear the fed-up peasants of Artois cry.


(All images Public Domain)


Tetchy Madonnas when you need them – Michelle Lovric

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Make your way around any corner in Venice and you may lock eyes with a Madonna in a niche or a miniature chapel. She might be painted, sculpted or made from mosaic tiles. There may be a candle, a lamp or a vase in front of her. She usually cradles the Holy Infant. These street shrines are known capitelli (or capitèi in Venetian dialect). Many date back to the 15th century, a time when they provided not just metaphorical and spiritual illumination but actual street-lighting. Most are to be found, for that reason, in ‘sottoportici’ (tunnel-like passageways) or by bridges and near jetties.

The city appointed people to set a lantern in every capitello by night. There was a tradition of leaving flowers there too. To lend sanctity to business arrangements, contracts might be signed in front of them. And of course a Madonna might serve as a kind spiritual proto-security camera on the street: few would want to commit a crime in front of those steady eyes. Those were times when no one would have dreamed of stealing a holy image, but most often, these days, the Madonnas are behind bars, like solemn canaries in ornate cages.


There are more than 500 capitelli in Venice: 136 in Castello; 91 in Cannaregio; 43 in Santa Croce; 43 in San Polo; 114 in Dorsoduro, of which 35 are on Giudecca; 83 in San Marco. It is interesting to note that the highest proportion of the figures are in the poorer zones of Castello and Cannaregio. The painting above, by James Holland, is entitled A Shrine in Venice (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). It shows women of the city sewing, talking and praying in front of a capitello, which serves both as an extension of sacred space but also as a meeting place.


I’m not the only or even the first person to notice that the Virgins inside these little chapels often look rather disapproving. I discovered that my artist friend, Christine Morley, who’s recorded many of them, has also felt the aura of severity that radiates from some of these Virgins. To Christine, they seem like stern gate-keepers to a world beyond the wall, a secret place behind the forbidding bars and grates of their niches.

Of course, over hundreds of years these Venetian Madonnas have seen it all, which may account for their expressions. Meanwhile, full of grace She obviously is, but is not the Virgin Mary one of the most put-upon women ever?

A couple of years ago, I started holding conversations (in my head) with some of these dimly-lit ladies-of-the-night as I walked around the city. Those conversations took a turn I had not expected. This is why: although each street-Madonna is as individual as Her artist could render Her, each personifies the same Mother of God. So I felt that the Madonnas from Castello to Santa Croce would in fact talk with the same voice and have the same preoccupations – including annoyance at noisy passers-by waking the Holy Infant when She’d just got Him down.

No matter whether painted or carved, my Madonna-of-the-moment was always irreproachably virtuous in tone, but also just a little bit reproachful, not to say tetchy. Irritation is a gift for a writer: it scratches up interesting vocabulary. So you won’t be surprised to hear that this slightly vinegary Madonna-of-many-manifestations soon became a character in a children’s book, The Wishing Bones, which will be published next month.

Children have always had the run of Venice. It’s safer than cities with carriages and now cars. In The Wishing Bones, I write of the ‘secret sacred ties’ between Venetians, binding all her citizens to one another with affection. The picture below right shows mother holding her child up to a painted Madonna at capitello near the entrance to the Doges Palace (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). A slightly older Venetian child, on his or her daily journeys, would pass by dozens of Madonnas, and it seemed logical to me that their universal Mother would probably have a few things to say to them. I imagined that Our Lady would be keen on personal hygiene in a city that was obsessed with health matters (if Venice ever got the reputation of being a sick city, her international trade would have been in danger). So I thought She’d probably want Her supplicants to have clean hands. Running noses would be absolutely out.


 

Venice identifies comprehensively with the Virgin Mary. The city’s very founding date – March 25th – is the same as that of the Annunciation. This scene is depicted in marble on the Rialto Bridge. But in my book, Our (understandably Ornery) Lady has to deal with rival protectresses of the city: mermaids who live beneath it. Pagan mermaids and Madonnas – bound to be a problem. Then there’s a convent where fake relics of saints are churned out by orphans working as slaves in cruel conditions – an offence to any mother. Saint Lucy’s bones have been kidnapped. A prophecy dictates that, if this happens, the secret sacred ties between Venetians will break down, leading to blows and blood in the street. Really, for a Madonna in 1740, when The Wishing Bones is set, there’s a lot to be tetchy about.

The whole issue of mermaids and Madonnas is played out, in everyone’s favourite church of Santa Maria degli Miracoli. Inside, Tullio Lombardo’s friezes of beautiful young mermaids enclose an ancient miracle-working painting of a Madonna. In The Wishing Bones, the young Miracoli mermaids, clearly victimized by adolescent hormones, briefly flee their frieze to join the villains. (Then they’re very sorry).


Back to the real-lifeVenetian capitelli. They have their own story arc. While loved and maintained by the state and the public, the street-Madonnas have not been immune to passing time. By the middle of the nineteenth century the little chapels were under threat, some degraded by the centuries, some removed or damaged during restructuring and renovations. So in 1870 a group of young Catholics set up an organisation to defend them. The city was divided into sections and groups of young Venetians patrolled the streets, making sure all was well with the capitelli.

By the twentieth century, the chapels were under a different threat – chemicals coming from the factory suburb of Marghera. A new generation of capitelli protectors, the Amici dei capitèi, was formed but later absorbed into one of the bigger organisations that protect sacred monuments, I.R.S.E.P.S.



It's not surprising that the gondoliers still have their own waterborne capitelli. These little green shrines are to be seen at the stazioni where the traghetto services run. Inside their mullioned windows you can make out tiny Madonnas. If Venice were living her best life right now, those Madonnas would be doing something to protect her from the cruise liners.

But this is real life, and fiction can only imagine away the brutal ugliness and danger of the cruise ships. That’s increasingly hard, with the news of the massive Viking Sigyn running down a smaller vessel on the Danube in Budapest two weeks ago; with the vast MSC Opera smashing, out of control, into a river-cruise boat and then into the Zattere in Venice on June 2nd; with the 30th anniversary of Marchioness disaster approaching in August; with the Thames now threatened with the arrival of Europe’s biggest party boat, the Ocean Diva, which is the length of a football pitch and hosts 1500 revellers. The great historic cities of Europe are succumbing to Dubai-ification.
 
Not just Venice but Barcelona, Amsterdam, Bergen and many others have succumbed to this brutal commodification by the mega-companies that run fleets of vast boats. The protest movements are energetic and creative, but what Venetians called 'interessi' are deeply entrenched. Too many people, it seems, have fingers in the pie: not just the cruise operators but also those institutions that licence piers and party boats; also, those companies that service and provide catering for them.
 
Too much greed leads to too many monsters cramming into the same far-too-finite waterways. The danger to life and the ruination of heritage views are all too visible; possibly worse are the invisible dangers of nitrogen oxide, sulphur and particulates, for marine fuel is many times more toxic that land diesel. These poisons make their ways into the lungs of the citizens and they also destroy public art. The statue at right, on the Gesuati church, is just a few hundred yards from where the MSC Opera struck the shore. In a city without cars, boat emissions are the only reason for the blackening and blunting of this saintly figure.

Writing about, and so living in the 18th century, I can blot the mega-ships off my horizons. However, into my next book, currently entitled The Palace that Ate Boys, has crept the notion of certain public offices in the city – those charged with protecting Venice – instead welcoming in a terrible blight in exchange for sackfuls of money …

Michelle Lovric's website
The Wishing Bones is published on July 25th in the UK.




Last week marked the second anniversary of the terror attack at London Bridge and the Borough Market. Five hundred people were locked in or out of their homes for days, as their streets became a crime scene. A year ago, at Southwark Cathedral, members of the community performed a play made up of excerpts of their longer testimonies. This year, the Cathedral has posted the text of Testimony online so everyone can read it.

A holiday in Occupied France

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In April I had the good fortune to spend nine days in the south-west of France, in a little town called Castillon-la-Bataille, and in Bordeaux. I needed to scope out scenes for the new book and working out how SOE agents and the Resistance could get around during the day and night unseen to do their sabotage. The town, then called Castillon sur Dordogne, was in Occupied France (the Dordogne was the border).

I stayed with the delightful Janie and Mickey at Chez Castillon, a four-story town house in a side street near the market square.


I knew I'd made the right decision to go there when Janie told me that in WW2 the house had been used as a hospital for German officers. Right, I thought, it's going in the book!! The Germans didn't have the lovely swimming pool, though...


 In the Second World War, Castillon-la-Bataille was called Castillon-sur-Dordogne, as it lies on the lovely Dordogne river.  The name changed on November 27, 1953 to commemorate the Battle of Castillon in 1453, in which the English forces were defeated. It was the last battle of the Hundred Years War.
 



In WW2 the town was on the frontier between Occupied France and Vichy France and there was a checkpoint on the bridge over the Dordogne.  It's now such a pretty bridge, as you can see, but it’s not the bridge that stood there in 1943. That bridge was blown up and it will suffer the same fate in my book.


The demarcation line between Occupied France and Vichy France was very idiosyncratic, especially around Castillon. For a distance it followed the Lidoire river, which flows into the Dordogne near Castillon, then it went along the Dordogne for a short distance, before turning south to Sauveterre-de-Guyenne.


Under the Franco-German Armistice Convention France was divided up on 25 June 1940 into two main zones on either side of an arbitrary line that cut across départements, municipalities, fields and woods. The position of the line changed according to German whims and requirements. 

The German-occupied northern zone covered just over half the country. In the south was a "free zone" with the town of Vichy as its “capital” and a puppet government. The Germans kept the entire Atlantic coast along with the main industrial regions. A whole series of measures that severely restricted movement of people, goods and postal traffic between the two zones was enacted. The Germans put pressure on Vichy France at will by “opening” or “closing” the line when they wanted. Thus they kept a stranglehold on France and its economy.

For a while not even letters could pass between the zones. 
It wasn't until September 1940, that the “interzone card”, or “family card”, could be exchanged by families or friends. It  bore a series of pre-printed formulae and only allowed correspondents to provide very brief and impersonal news. Not a single word could be added to it. 


At almost 1,200km, t
he demarcation line was too long even for the Germans to guard entirely. Sentry boxes and barriers were set up at crossing points and there were regular patrols along the border. There was a similar system on the Vichy side, although it was a good deal patchier owing to lack of men and resources.

The demarcation line could only be crossed at official crossing points and upon presentation of an identity card and an Ausweis (pass) provided by the Kommandanturen (Offices of the German authorities, responsible for military and civil administration of a given area). 


The Ausweis was only granted if the application was accompanied by a full set of documents including identity photographs, certificate of nationality and reason for crossing, and it was given only in accepted cases of urgent need (births, burials or serious illnesses of close relations). All those wishing to cross were faced with an endless series of procedures and interminable waiting periods. 


 Anyone living within 10km of either side of the demarcation line could request an “Ausweis für den kleinen Grenzverkehr” (pass for local cross-border travel) allowing them to move across, but only for a set period of time.



The Germans took over the richest agricultural and industrial regions: the occupied zone produced 72.5% of wheat, 78% of barley, 80% of oats, 70% of potatoes, 87% of butter, 95% of steel and 76% of coal. With raw materials “confiscated” to supply the German economy,Vichy France's industrial and agricultural sectors severely disabled if not completely paralysed. The situation became particularly difficult in areas bordering the line, with companies cut off from their workforces and farmers from their fields. Difficulties in obtaining provisions led to major food shortages, even the serious risk of starvation. 


Unsurprisingly, smuggling became rife. on foot, by bicycle, by rowing boat, in carts full of manure, in barrels – all possible methods were employed to smuggle black market goods. Also people. From a few smugglers acting on their own initiative, came entire networks smuggling escaped English and French prisoners of war, Alsatians and Lorrainians who refused to enlist in the German army, volunteers eager to serve Free France, and anyone else who felt threatened.

Here is an account of one such incident, when Gilbert Renault (one of the most famous French agents in France, also known as Colonel Remy, Raymond , Jean-Luc , Morin , Watteau, Roulier , Beauce and Remy) was smuggled across the demarcation line near Castillon:

“Everything is ready ... I saw the
 doctor, we are expected tonight at his place for dinner. Here's the plan: we go by bicycle with the drôle(a south west France expression for a young boy). We stop right next to the line, the French side. About five hundred meters away is the German position. I leave you with Pierrot and the drôle. I continue cycling and will go past the German patrols using my border permit. Pierrot and the drôlewill take you through a large meadow along the sunken road on the left. It is visible from the station but tonight, with rain, and no moon, it will be fine. You will reach the Lidoire; is a stream that flows into the Dordogne. They’ve not yet had a lot of rain, so you just have to take off your shoes and roll up your pants to the knees. This stream marks the boundary line between the occupied zone and the free zone. On the other side, immediately in front of you, there is a small meadow and a farm which is just down the road. They won’t betray you. Besides, I'll be waiting for you on the other side of the Lidoire. We will find the doctor’s car a little further on."
Castillon Station, from where they could have been seen...
Those who lived through those years remember the fear, especially as the SS monitored the border until their departure to the Eastern Front.

"There were incessant controls in the vineyards, three or four times a day. But we managed to pass people across the line. My father put their spade on the shoulder so that they had the appearance of farm workers. Once in the vineyards of the free zone, they could run away,"said Joël Baudet (below)


Controls became stricter and more numerous from the spring of 1941, when Wehrmacht soldiers were replaced by customs officers. Patrols and controls became the order of the day, and it was no longer unusual for pursuits to continue and shots to be fired inside the free zone itself.

This is the account of an English woman who was trapped when the Germans invaded, and desperate to return to England. I like to think she tried to cross at my bridge:

World's News (Sydney, NSW), Saturday 14 November 1942, page 7

The Germans occupied the whole of  France on November 1942, and abolished the demarcation line in February 1943. A number of restrictions remained, however, in particular with regard to movement of goods, and conditions in the whole of France were grim until liberation in 1944. 

Finally - My hosts, Janie and Mickey told me that it was on the balcony of this building that the collaborateurs horizontale (women who fraternised with Germans) were exhibited after their heads were shaved. 
According to Janie, the women in Castillon were a lot luckier than those in a nearby village, where they were shot.





On Misogyny

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by Antonia Senior

A friend of mine has a glorious tradition. She still reads with her near-teenage son every night. To my absolute joy, she is currently reading Mary Renault with him, in an attempt to introduce him to complex, layered prose.

I bow to no-one in my veneration of Mary Renault. But my friend is less convinced. She sent me a text this morning: "Is the casual misogyny in Mary Renault's books intended to reflect the mores of the age or was she just very unenlightened? I never noticed as a child but returning to them as an adult it's starting to irritate me."

They are reading The King Must Die, the first in Renault's two book series about Theseus. Her Theseus is brilliantly realised. Swaggering, arrogant and full of his own destiny.


But, my friend replied, all the women are either witches or sex symbols. 'I read it to my son interspersed with lots of commentary along the lines of You Can't Treat Girls Like That.'

To be clear, this friend is one of the most brilliant women I know - intellectually fearless, and hugely successful in her chosen career. I love the idea that she is worried that her son's attitude to women might be more shaped by a book from a long dead writer, than by the extraordinary role-mother he has.

She is not wrong about the women in The King Must Die. Theseus' mother is distinguishable largely by her wonderful breasts: 'smooth as milk and the tips so rosy that she never painted them, though she was still wearing them bare, not being, at that time, much above three and twenty."

His first wife is the witchy  Queen of Eleusis, whom he beats, humiliates and ousts from her role as matriarch, establishing a patriarchy - much to the relief of the henpecked young Eleusian lads. In Crete, he treats Ariadne like a painted doll. He abandons her on Naxos when she partakes too freely of the Dionysian rites; and the implication is clear that Theseus' God is the Apollonian vision of harmony and wisdom, not the mad, womanly, bloody call of the maenads.

The joy of reading Renault is how immersive her fiction is. There is no other writer of historical fiction of whom you would whisper: 'Perhaps she was actually there?'

So my answer to my friend was this: that Ancient Greek society, particularly in Athens, was revoltingly misogynistic. Women were not educated, could not be citizens, did not own their own property, were not allowed the freedom to walk the streets and were covered in public.

So what, as historical fiction writers, do we do about that? We have two clear choices, in my opinion. We can write an anachronistic female character who walks in the Agora thinking feisty, proto-feminist thoughts because she has been educated by her anachronistically enlightened Father. Or we can, as a more general rule, attempt to be as true as possible to the actual lives, values and mores of the societies about which we write, and trust our readers.

There are practically no women in The Last of the Wine, the great Athenian novel about Alexias and Lysis, lovers during the Peloponnesian War. But this reflects a great irony that modern day women just have to lump: the greatest, early flowering of intellectual thought and art and culture in the Western World was in a society devoid of female input. We have few references to women at all - such as the shrewish wife of Socrates. Aspasia is one who emerges - she was the compaion of Pericles, but she was not respectable. Expensive prostitutes - hetairai - were allowed to be educated and witty and literate; wives not so much.




Renault can write great female characters. The Bull from the Sea is centred around  Theseus' love for Hippolyta, and she is a character who leaps from the page, sword-bright and vivid. Their first meeting is a fight. "She stood with gleaming arms under the fading sky and the little moon, straight, slight and strong." I have read The Bull from the Sea so many times that I can quote whole passages from it by heart - but I never read the last third unless I need to cry.

Alexander's mother, Olympias, is also brilliantly realised in Fire from Heaven. She is passionate and political, jealously guarding her territory and privilege from the depredations of her husband, Phillip.

Most of the time, however, Renault's most memorable characters are male. If you have read the books as often as I have, they are constant companions: Alexias and Lysis, Theseus. Bagoas, the Persian boy. Simonides, the brilliant, ugly poet. Nikeratos, the actor. Hephaestion. Alexander himself.


The above is my bust of Alexander - a much cherished 30th birthday present from my husband. It's not the real Alexander - it's Renault's version in my head: the brilliant, beautiful boy who can't rest until he has conquered the world.

In the same week that I was having this exchange, I was listening to a brilliant audio dramatisation of Antony Trollope's The American Senator.  This gave me a clue as to how to deal with this thorny mismatch between my feminism and my historicity as a novelist. The lead character in The American Senator is Arabella Trefoil, one of my favourite characters in all of literature. She is a decade into her search for a husband; a dedicated, enervating, humiliating and ceaseless quest. In true Trollopian fashion, she is constrated with Mary Masters - a sweet, noble girl who does the right thing and loves purely.

Trollope can be a bit of a prig, and a moralist and he has severe views about women's conduct; what we might term an actual historical misogynist, rather than a modern historical fiction writer pretending to be a misogynist. Yet he writes Arabella, his anti-heroine, as such a rounded, whole character that he clearly ends up adoring her. She has all the best lines. She gets all our sympathy.

Arabella is honest. She recognises her lack of agency, and that her only hope of financial advantage and societal position is to be married. When all her hopes appear to be confounded, again, Trollope writes: [She was} sick of the dust of battle and conscious of her fading strength.

The Trollopian answer is to be a novelist first: to make all the characters - male and female - as rounded, human, vivid, fallible and brightly-burning as possible. Then the politics will take care of themselves.

'Never to see the like again in this world' - Pepys and the Coronation

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by Deborah Swift

I've spent the last three years writing a trilogy about three different women that feature in Pepys' Diary. Now that rather epic journey has come to an end, and I'm leaving Pepys' Diary behind for research in pastures new.

Someone asked me which was my favourite episode in the diary, and the one that stands out for me is the Coronation of Charles II.
'it is impossible to relate the glory of this day'
So says Pepys, never one to be lost for words, and his fly-on-the-wall response to this massive overturning of national events fascinates me. The re-establishment of Charles II as a constitutional monarch changed the country from what amounted to a republic, back to a monarchy-led state with many immediate and long term effects. In these days of entrenched views on Brexit, we can see that populations can, and do, change their minds.

Pepys, who was initially brought up with Puritan leanings, was so taken up by the return of the exiled prince that he couldn't wait to be part of this sudden turn-around and even went over to the Hague to greet the prince and the fleet.

There were a few awkwardnesses though - in the transition from Cromwell's Parliament to the restitution of the monarchy, the old order had to be repealed and the new reinforced. Thus the ships in the fleet that had been named after Parliament victories, such as The Naseby had to be rapidly re-named The Royall Charles.

Whilst journeying back from the Hague, Pepys is treated to the prince's own version of his escape from Worcester. Many of our pubs retain the names 'The Royal Oak' (commemorating his escape from Worcester), and 'The King's Head',  from this era where the celebration of the monarchy was at its height. Pepys's later relationship with the King must have been cemented by the fact he made this extra effort to meet and greet him on his return.


On the day of the Coronation Parade, Pepys is up at the crack of dawn and putting on his new coat for the occasion -
Up early and made myself as fine as I could, and put on my velvet coat, the first day that I put it on, though made half a year ago.
 It seemed no expense had been spared for the procession through London,
The streets all gravelled, and the houses hung with carpets before them...
So glorious was the show with gold and silver, that we were not able to look at it, our eyes at last being so much overcome with it.
The Coronation Cavalcade passed through four specially constructed arches (see picture at the bottom of the post). The designs can be seen here and include titles for the arches like ' Garden of Plenty', 'Temple of Concord' and ''Return of the Monarchy'. That must have been a rush for the masons responsible!

Pepys got up at 4am the next day for the actual Coronation, and found himself a good view from a scaffold at the north end of Westminster Abbey. He had to wait until 11am to see Charles arrive.
And a great pleasure it was to see the Abbey raised in the middle, all covered with red, and a throne (that is a chair) and footstool on the top of it; and all the officers of all kinds, so much as the very fidlers, in red vests.
Unfortunately the crucial moment was lost to Pepys,
the King passed through all the ceremonies of the Coronacon, which to my great grief I and most in the Abbey could not see. The crown being put upon his head, a great shout begun, and he came forth to the throne

Afterwards silver commemorative medals were thrown to the congregation, but Pepys was unable to catch one. Pepys then has to go out to take a pee, but resumes his description of the outside of the Abbey, in which he says he saw '10,000 people, with the ground covered with blue cloth; and scaffolds all the way.' In a city of 40,000, that is a pretty good turn-out.

At one point in the feast afterwards, the King's Champion is brought out, 'all in armour on horseback, with his spear and targett carried before him' and a proclamation made:
And a Herald proclaims “That if any dare deny Charles Stewart to be lawful King of England, here was a Champion that would fight with him;” and with these words, the Champion flings down his gauntlet, and all this he do three times in his going up towards the King’s table.
Charles must have had quite a jittery moment then as he waited with baited breath to see if there would be any objection to him becoming King. But nobody objected, and no doubt the King's Champion was somewhat relieved also.

Once the day's events were over, ' it fell a-raining and thundering and lightening as I have not seen it do for some years' and Pepys tells us that the people set great store by this as an omen from above, though he himself dismisses the idea as 'a foolery to take too much notice of such things.'

Without Pepys's vibrant description, so much detail would have been lost to us. A picture doesn't give you the reaction of the people, and this is what is so appealing about Pepys's descriptions and opinions.

By the evening bonfires are burning all over the city to bathe it in an orange glow, and Pepys is dead drunk, so much so that he says, 'if ever I was foxed it was now, which I cannot say yet, because I fell asleep and slept till morning. Only when I waked I found myself wet with my spewing. Thus did the day end with joy every where.'


You can find the diary entry here: https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1661/04/


All pictures from Wikipedia unless linked.

Find my books www.deborahswift.com

Follow me on Twitter @swiftstory

Intrigue, Treachery and Betrayal at the Japanese Court - by Lesley Downer

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The neglected wife - Lady Tsukiyama

In 1578 a scandal ripped through the princedom of Mikawa, domain of Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu. Ieyasu was 36 at the time and had recently snapped up the neighbouring domain of Totomi, so his power was growing - but it was as nothing compared to that of his neighbour, the fiery warlord Oda Nobunaga (whom I'll call Oda to keep things clear).

This is the story of the terrible fate of Ieyasu’s first wife.

The great lord - Lord Imagawa Yoshimoto
Wives of the Warlords III
Lady Tsukiyama’s Treachery 
Like all women of high class in those days Lady Tsukiyama had been married to Ieyasu in a political marriage to cement the alliance between the Houses of Imagawa and Tokugawa. She was just 15 and he was 14. At the time Ieyasu was a hostage in the House of Imagawa. She however was the niece of the great Lord Imagawa Yoshimoto himself. Perhaps she thought she’d been demeaned by being married off to a miserable hostage.

After Ieyasu was released they lived in Okazaki Castle, the capital of Mikawa. She bore him a son and heir, Nobuyasu, and a daughter. But after 13 years of marriage, when Ieyasu took over the neighbouring territory of Totomi in 1570 and moved to Hamamatsu Castle, he left her in Okazaki and surrounded himself with concubines (nineteen, to be precise).

Just three years had passed since Ieyasu and his powerful neighbour and ally, Oda, had inflicted a massive defeat on Lord Takeda Katsuyori at the Battle of Nagashino. Katsuyori retreated to his snowbound castle in the northern land of Kai and plotted to wrest back control of Japan.

Using a Chinese doctor as her conduit, so the story goes, Lady Tsukiyama smuggled a letter or letters - some say as many as twelve - to Katsuyori asking for help. She begged him to have her husband and Oda killed, take her son Nobuyasu under his protection, make him lord of the old Tokugawa territory, and find her a new husband from among his generals. In exchange she would betray her husband and Oda - perhaps send a signal to Katsuyori at a time when Ieyasu would be at his most vulnerable, when he was planning to be away from the castle.
The enemy: Takeda Katsuyori

Katsuyori, so the story goes, replied. He promised to give Nobuyasu one of Oda’s provinces (which by then he would have captured) and to marry Lady Tsukiyama to one of his generals who was a widower. Delighted with this answer, Lady Tsukiyama prepared to flee the castle for Katsuyori’s camp.

A case of fake news ...? 
Sharp eyes will have noticed some holes in this story.

For a start, why would Lady Tsukiyama want to take such an extraordinarily foolhardy course which risked punishment by death if it was discovered? Was she jealous of all those concubines, angry at being left behind in Okazaki Castle, or was it just general bad temper? And how precisely did she plan to betray her husband given that they lived in different castles, nearly 70 kilometres apart, a long day’s walk on foot (which was how people travelled in those days)? It’s said that Lady Tsukiyama wrote the letters in order to secure a future for her son. But he was Ieyasu’s recognised heir. He already had a future.

In fact the story only became widely known and accepted as fact in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, long after all the protagonists were dead and the truth could never be discovered.

So how did the story come to light?

The Daughter-in-Law’s Revenge
Lady Tsukiyama's son, Nobuyasu
Lady Tsukiyama doted on her son, Nobuyasu. He had been engaged to Oda’s daughter, Princess Toku, when they were both 4 years old. They were married 4 years later to seal the alliance between their fathers. But even though it was a political marriage they’d grown to love each other. All three - Lady Tsukiyama and her son and daughter-in-law - lived together in Okazaki Castle.

In due course Princess Toku had two daughters but no son. Lady Tsukiyama was clearly not fond of Princess Toku; maybe she thought she’d supplanted her in her son’s affections. She urged Nobuyasu to take a concubine so as to produce a son and ensure the succession. She even found one for him and presented her to him.

Princess Toku was incandescent.

Two Sisters
Oda had secretly installed two young sisters in Okazaki Castle to protect and spy for his daughter, Princess Toku. The older served as one of Lady Tsukiyama’s maids, the younger as one of Princess Toku’s. According to the story, the older maid was rifling through Lady Tsukiyama’s appurtenances when she found the incriminating letters to Katsuyori. It does seem a little odd, however, for her to have found them if they had already been sent.

The older maid told her sister who told Princess Toku. Princess Toku, no doubt bursting with glee, wrote to her father, Oda, revealing everything. According to one version of the story she forwarded the incriminating letters to him. One account says there were twelve, another that she added a list of twelve crimes committed by Nobuyasu and her mother-in-law against her.

The Messenger 
Warlord of warlords:
Oda Nobunaga by Giovanni Nicolao
The messenger who carried the letter to Oda was one of Ieyasu’s most trusted vassals, Sakai Tadatsugu. When Oda read the letter he could hardly believe it. He interrogated the messenger, asking him if he knew anything about these crimes. Sakai said the letters were genuine and confirmed ten out of the twelve crimes listed. Oda, Princess Toku's father, had to conclude that the accusations must be true if Sakai confirmed them. And that meant that Ieyasu’s son Nobuyasu really had been plotting against him.

It seems Nobuyasu had a terrible temper and had fallen out with Sakai over a woman, so Sakai bore him a grudge. Perhaps Sakai didn’t realise what the full implication of confirming Princess Toku’s allegations would be - and perhaps Princess Toku didn’t either.

The Terrible Consequences
On the 4th day of the 8th month of 1578 Oda sent Sakai Tadatsugu with a message for Ieyasu that his son Nobuyasu was not fit to be the governor of any province. If he was not eliminated now, Oda warned, he would do great harm in the future. He ordered Ieyasu to execute his own son forthwith.

Ieyasu was devastated. But he couldn’t afford to go against Oda's orders. Their alliance was all-important. Poor Nobuyasu, who was only 20, vehemently denied all the allegations. But Oda insisted. In the end Ieyasu had to order Nobuyasu to commit seppuku - to kill himself by cutting open his own belly.

Ieyasu said, ‘I have been looking forward to having him succeed me. It is a disgrace and a pity to let him die so young. But having this formidable enemy, Katsuyori, we cannot do without Oda’s help.’
Okazaki Castle

Nobuyasu’s retainers were devastated. Several offered to die in the young man’s place. But Oda  would not be mollified.

The only thing we know for sure, that is preserved in the historical record, is that Oda commanded Nobuyasu’s death and Ieyasu had to obey. It’s said that Ieyasu loved and trusted his son and ordered his death with the greatest of grief and remorse. But at this point ensuring the survival of the Tokugawa clan was more important than saving his son’s life.

Nobuyasu committed suicide on the 15th day of the 10th month of 1579 at the age of twenty. Ieyasu often spoke of his grief over his son’s death.

As for Lady Tsukiyama, in the end she was just collateral damage. Oda did not order her death and neither did Ieyasu. After all, she was just a woman. But Ieyasu’s retainers understood what they had to do. On the 29th day of the 8th month of 1579, a month before her beloved son’s death, she was killed by either one or two retainers, according to one account. Another version is that she drowned herself, yet another that she committed suicide by slashing her own throat.

It seems totally obvious that Lady Tsukiyama didn’t write any letters. Princess Toku made the whole thing up in order to spite her mother-in-law. But the consequence was that she accidentally brought about her own husband’s death and robbed Ieyasu of his first son and heir.


As for Ieyasu, he fathered another heir and went on to found a dynasty of shoguns that was to last for the next 250 years.


Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale of love, death, plots and subterfuge in nineteenth century Japan and is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

All pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Let's Talk about the F-word by Susan Vincent

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I’m a dress historian. Since this is my first blog for The History Girls, I thought I’d clamber onto my soapbox (I don’t need much persuading) and rant a little about ‘fashion’ – or the f-word as I like to call it. Although I swear like the proverbial trooper, as a dress historian ‘fashion’ is a word that seldom sullies my lips.

So why is this? What have I got against the F-word?

First off, fashion is only a tiny part of the bigger dress system and it plays only a supporting role in the life-long drama of us and our clothes. Let’s think about this for a bit. In childhood – from babygrows to school uniforms – we’re not wearing fashion. Let’s face it, for the most part we’re not even wearing things of our own choice.


Then we grow up … and that makes surprisingly little difference. What we wear to work has to meet dress codes, whether those codes are overt (as in uniform) or unarticulated (as in what colleagues wear and line-managers expect). At home we relax in garments that we deem comfortable and practical – things to wear on the sofa watching Netflix, or when cleaning the bathroom. Special, ritual occasions also have their own sartorial norms and expectations. Think wedding dresses – the bride and the guests – suits, and even funeral wear.


All these are finessed by fashion, but their fundamentals lie much deeper. Then in older age our relationship with fashion becomes even more distant, as the clothes that are made for young bodies no longer fit, and as growing physical incapacity weighs in to influence us.


And don’t get me started on the other factors that impinge on our choice of garments. As every one of us knows, we make purchase decisions not on the basis of fashionability alone, but also within the constraints of price, fit, fabric, availability, body image and subjective aesthetics. I might like a trend, but loathe it on me. Or I might like it on me, but it’s uncomfortable, or too expensive, or entirely unsuitable. (What you do mean, historians aren’t wearing diamond tiaras this year?)


We even wear garments – or let’s be specific here, I even wear garments – that I don’t much like, but have bought in desperation at not finding anything to fit my body and my needs any better. In these cases, it’s the least worst option.





My point is that most of what we wear – most of what anyone has ever worn in the past – is not fashion. And as a dress historian, what I am interested in is how people have lived their lives with and through these clothes of theirs.

How has a person’s garments helped shape their physical experiences and their emotional lives, their memory and their relationships? What can dress tell us about much bigger cultural ideas – about decency, health, technology, work, wealth? Looking at dress, what can we read about ethnicities, age and gender? What are the economics and politics of production? How are garments obtained, maintained, re-used, and disposed of? What effect does the life cycle of clothing have on the environment? on resources? on the health of the workers who made them?

The list of questions is endless, but by using the word ‘fashion’ we shut down the conversation we can have with clothes. We limit our view of this whole, rich sartorial world. It’s like being interested in food, but looking only at cordon bleu cooking and the experience of dining at restaurants.

 

There’s actually much more to my dislike of the F-word – when you look closely at fashion even as a sub-category, it wobbles alarmingly and threatens to disappear, and I actually suspect that fashion is not a thing at all, but an idea and an aspiration. However, this will do for a start.

In the meantime, if you’ve enjoyed the – yes, I do have to use the word here – fashion plates in today’s blog, then take a look at the Rijksmuseum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (at the Costume Institute Fashion Plates). Both have wonderful online collections of costume prints, and far too many hours can be frittered amongst their delights…

Susan Vincent






PS
If you're interested, the images above are, in order:

1. ‘Bonjour! Chapeau, de Camille Roger’, Gazette du Bon Ton, 1921. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Costume Institute (Women 1921, Plate 018)

2. ‘Théorie de l'Art du Tailleur: Costumes d'enfants’, October 1837. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (no. RP-P-2009-3155)

3. ‘Godey’s Fashions for February 1872’, Godey’s Lady’s Book, Philadelphia, 1872. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Costume Institute (Wedding 1870–1929, Plate 006)

4. Journal für Fabrik, Manufaktur, Handlung, Kunst und Mode, Leipzig, 1796. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (no. RP-P-2009-2753)

5. ‘Costume Parisien, Cheveux à la Titus’, Journal des Dames et des Modes, 9 April 1799. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (no. RP-P-2009-1425)

6. ‘Costumes Parisiens, Robe de chambre’, Journal des Dames et des Modes, 1913. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (no. RP-P-2009-1779)

7. Wenceslaus Hollar, ‘Winter’, London, 1643. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (no. RP-P-OB-11.250)





Where art began: Lascaux - by Sue Purkiss

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I can just imagine the readers of this blog, who quite rightly expect evidence for every assertion, sniffing suspiciously at that title. "How do you know?" murmur my imaginary readers. "How can you be certain that's where it began? There are new discoveries all the time - who knows what remains to be found in Siberia/Australia/Africa?"

And of course that's quite true, and it's one of the reasons why the study of prehistory is so fascinating at the moment. There is new evidence all the time - new finds, new technologies which allow for more accurate dating and upend existing theories - and I am only an enthusiastic amateur. But Lascaux and the other painted caves of France and Spain must certainly have a strong claim - the art in Lascaux is reckoned to be approximately 20,000 years old - so I hope it's a forgivable claim.

I first became fascinated by cave art when I visited a less well-known cave in the region five years ago: Pech Merle. It's one of the very few caves now which you can enter: most of them, including Lascaux, are now closed to the public because exposure to people and to air from the outside has led to damage from microscopic organisms which threatens the very existence of the paintings which everyone wants to see. So it was a great privilege to see the strange spotted horses of Pech Merle. But I found myself even more moved - haunted, even - by the hand prints. They are so vivid, so real: like a message winging its way across 20.000 years, a message that says Hello! I was here, and I'm just like you...  Almost equally striking were the small footprints, preserved in what was then mud, now rock, which are said to be those of an adolescent, a teenager - was s/he an assistant to the painter? Or someone who came to marvel at the latest artworks? I doubt we'll ever know: but incontrovertibly, s/he was there: a person who laughed and chatted and feared and hoped, just as we do today.


Just thinking about those hand and footprints brings back that sense of wonder, of a shiver in the fabric of time, of a strange connection.

So, as you might guess, ever since I went to Pech Merle, I've been looking for a way to incorporate all that into a book. I tried one way, which didn't work. And then I tried another way. This time, the cave is a very important part of the book: but it is set in 1942. Why? Because that was another important time in the long history of this part of south-western France. It's another era that I keep returning to, as do so many other writers: and why wouldn't we? My parents both served in the war. When I was a child, it seemed immeasurably distant to me, but in fact it was only a few years away, and although I wasn't particularly aware of it, I was living with some of its immediate consequences. And quite apart from all that - there are so many stories to be found in the huge history of the war: so much drama, so much of every kind of emotion - so much human nature, which is surely the basic stamping ground of every writer of fiction.

Well, so for various reasons to do with my story, I decided to base my story not on Pech Merle, but on Lascaux. I found lots to read about it, and its story fitted beautifully with the one I wanted to tell. I had already written a first and second draft, but I wanted to go there before writing what may or may not be the final draft.

And so here we are - the friends we are staying with, my husband and I, on a cool and cloudy day in May, outside the museum. I'm alert, not just to all I'm about to see, but also to how it will impact on my story. The first thing I notice is that the landscape is not quite how I had imagined it from the descriptions I've read, the pictures I've seen. It is less hilly. There is a hill - the hill where, somewhere, the cave lies hidden, and at the bottom of which the museum now stands. My imaginary village, Senlac, is more like some of the other villages we've already seen on the Dordogne and the Vézère - the one below, for instance - with hills and limestone cliffs closer to the river, and much more forest. This doesn't matter too much: my village and cave are loosely based on Lascaux: I'm not writing a guidebook, I'm writing fiction. Still, I store the observation away.



We walk up towards the museum. And then we are stopped in our tracks by this glorious wildflower meadow in front of it: a tapestry of  poppies, cornflowers, daisies, some kind of dark red giant clover, and grasses of all kinds - all of it rippling gracefully in the wind. Utterly beautiful. It's actually quite difficult to tear ourselves away and go inside for our guided tour, but that's what we're here for, so obviously, we do.

And actually, I think I'm going to stop there, and leave the museum itself for next time, because this post is already long enough. So I'll leave you with the flowers, and the museum, waiting to reveal its treasures.


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