Quantcast
Channel: The History Girls
Viewing all 2764 articles
Browse latest View live

The Bristol Bus Boycott, by H.M. Castor

September 11, 2013, 5:30 pm
$
0
0

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, 28 August 1963.

[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons


Two weeks ago yesterday, the 50thanniversary was marked of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and of Martin Luther King’s most famous, extraordinary and brilliant speech – the “I Have a Dream” speech – which he gave that day. (Footage of the full speech can be seen by clicking here– and if you haven’t watched it in a while, it’s well worth taking the time.)

That same day – August 28th 1963 – was also a significant one in the struggle for racial equality in Britain. Its events were on a smaller scale, and they are not widely remembered now, but this was a watershed moment with momentous consequences. This was the day when the Bristol bus boycott – “the nation’s first black-led boycott against a company openly practising a colour bar”* – achieved its objective.

(*Madge Dresser and Peter Fleming, Bristol: Ethnic Minorities and the City, 1000-2001.)

Nearly seven and a half years after Rosa Parks defied Alabama’s segregation law by refusing to give up her seat on a bus, Guy Bailey applied for a job as a bus conductor in Bristol, in the south-west of England. It was April 1963. Guy was 18 years old, a well-educated former Boys’ Brigade officer, and the son of a Jamaican British Army veteran. He hoped that, after working as a conductor, he would one day be able to progress to being a bus driver. Wearing his best suit and tie, he arrived for his pre-arranged interview. To his astonishment, however, the manager would not see him – he was not even allowed into the interview room.

The manager’s secretary told Guy all the vacancies had been filled. When he said he knew that couldn’t be true, since a friend of his had rung up that very day and been told there were plenty of jobs, the manager came clean, shouting from inside his office to say that the bus company didn’t employ black people.

Guy was shocked. But he had a teacher at night school, Paul Stephenson, who wasn’t. Paul, a youth officer who had grown up in Essex with his African father and white British mother, was a passionate admirer of the US civil rights movement. He remembered Rosa Parks’ courageous stand, and the 1955-56 bus boycott that had followed, which Martin Luther King had helped lead. Now, he felt, it was time for action in Bristol.

Rosa Parks (& Martin Luther King), c. 1955
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Paul Stephenson had helped his pupil Guy Bailey set up the interview with the Bristol Omnibus Company. When the company refused to see Guy, this was the trigger Paul needed. With considerable skill, he got the local press on board with the story and called for a bus boycott, to last until the colour bar was lifted. Soon the national press was carrying the story too.


Black residents of towns and cities all over the country encountered discrimination of many kinds, but in other cities - even as close to Bristol as Bath - black crews did work on the buses. In Bristol, however, the bus company’s colour bar was an open secret – it had already been made public by the Bristol Evening Post in 1961. But to discriminate in this way was entirely legal, so nothing had come of the Post’s revelations. What’s more, the bar was supported by a majority of the drivers and conductors themselves, even though black members of the same union (the TGWU) worked in the company’s garages.


A 1960s Bristol bus.
Photograph by Linda Bailey. 
[CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

As the boycott gathered support, marches were held, and pickets organised at bus depots and along bus routes. Tony Benn, then the MP for Bristol South East, supported the boycott, as did his party leader Harold Wilson. In London, Caribbean diplomats spoke out against the bus company. And as the weeks passed, the pressure on the company, and on the drivers and conductors – both from the public and from within the trade union movement – grew. At last, on 27th August, the drivers and conductors voted to end the colour bar, and the following day the bus company announced its change of policy. There would henceforth be “complete integration” on the buses.


The next year, Harold Wilson became Prime Minister. He met with Paul Stephenson and told him that he planned to take action against racism. The Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968, brought in by Wilson’s government, were the first pieces of legislation in the U.K. to address racial discrimination.


There was a long way to go. Legislative changes were one thing - seeing them enforced, let alone combating the underlying prejudice itself, was of course quite another. But the Bristol bus boycott was nevertheless a major achievement - and one that deserves to be remembered, 50 years on.




For more details about the Bristol bus boycott, see an article on the BBC’s news website here. 


For a fascinating history of ethnic minorities in Bristol, from medieval to modern times, see Madge Dresser and Peter Fleming, Bristol: Ethnic Minorities and the City, 1000-2001.




H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII, for teenagers and adults - was published in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster last month. It is published in the U.K. by Templar, in Australia by Penguin, and in France by Hachette.

H.M. Castor's website is here.

↧
Search
↧

August Competition Winners

September 12, 2013, 1:00 pm
$
0
0
The Winners of Sam Angus's book are as follows:

Andrea Peace
Ruan Peat
Rhiannon Markless
Sarah Gore
Karen


Please contact Kate Wright Morris: kate@wrightmorris.co.uk to claim your prizes.

And congratulations!
↧

The Past is Now - Almost Catherine Johnson

September 14, 2013, 12:00 am
$
0
0


In case you're worried this blog is simply a bit of puff for my lovely new book, please understand it isn't, but it does refer to it - ahem - quite a lot. But as the book isn't out for two weeks there's nothing you can do about it anyway and I assure you, as Emil and Gustav in Emil and Detectives knew in 1929, anything that's 'simply about advertising' isn't worth bothering with. 

 Last Saturday morning I had the honour of accompanying a Young readers' book group, they meet normally in the basement or the garden of Victoria Park Books in Hackney and they (joy of joys!) read, discuss and think about books. Each month it's a different title. They draw pictures, they ask very pertinent questions (they've read the books) and they are a great bunch of kids. I and some of their tame adults - the group ranges from around 9-13 - took them to The Old Operating Theatre, which is in an attic above a church (I am not lying) adjoining Guy's Hospital in London Bridge. The Operating Theatre was built in this attic, it's not a recreation, and although it dates from the early 19th century - 1810-20 - it's not so different from the operating theatres that Ezra McAdam, my protagonist would have known in the 1790s. Here we all are. 



We did talk about the book, which in short is a forensic murder mystery set in 1792 with teenagers. Silent Witness in costume with kids with plenty of body snatching and some Geo politics thrown in for good measure (that is sort of a joke, it's a romp). And they asked lots of wonderful questions about character - where do they come from, why Ezra and Loveday? And I was thinking more about this all week.

If you write I'm sure you recognise the two (I expect there are more) ways characters grow. With me they either spring fully formed into my consciousness or you kick them around until they take shape. Ezra sprung, this is how it was. I was in The Hunterian - another wonderful London museum when we passed a painting of some 'slave children with vitiligo' you know the skin disease? This was a particular fear of mine it was something  some of the more nasty minded girls at school used to swear would happen to my children, and it's always lurked at the back of my mind. Just along from the painting was a tumour in a jar. There are lots of tumours in jars in The Hunterian, this one was labelled 'cut from the cheek of a boy in St Kitts'. Now Ezra never did have vitiligo, but I immediately imagined John Hunter - or a man like him, in my book he's called Mr McAdam - visiting the West Indies to look for 'curios' and finding, not in St Kitts but in the Blue Mountains outside Kingston, a boy with a horrible tumour. John Hunter seeing the boy so miserable, bought him, took him back to London, whipped it off and trained him up as his apprentice. He's 16 now, clever, studious and always thoughtful,  the complete opposite to Loveday Finch, of course, who is a  magician's assistant and prone to rash and impetuous acts. To be utterly candid I think she grew out of Susan from the film Desperately Seeking....but honestly she's not Madonna at all, she's far more interested in swords and would slice you open if you started on pointy bras.


So there he was my hero, the story and the world just tumbled out (it doesn't always work like that believe me)

So why, another perceptive young reader asked, did you set the story in London? Well, to be honest London is a character of it's own. It's a true world city and, more importantly, has probably always been so. It's unlike the rest of England, an island of diversity, filth and opportunity attracting people from everywhere. And that got me thinking, if I was writing the story set now what would my protagonists look like? Who would they be?

The characters in Sawbones include Ezra, originally from Jamaica, his unlikely friend Loveday, who is British born but has made her living across Europe, Anna, the draper's daughter, from a family of Huguenot refugees and Mahmoud a prince of the Ottoman Empire on the run from school and much much worse. Yes, I do know he shouldn't be there, read the book if you want to find out why. Anyway I thought if I wrote the book nowadays and re cast the main players, Ezra would be the thoughtful overachieving overseas adoptee bought to London as a baby from China or Guatemala. Loveday might be Canadian, visiting with the Cirque du Soleil, Anna might be the hard working scion of a family of refugees done good, maybe from Somalia or Iran and Mahmoud would be the son of a Russian oligarch escaped from Eton with a price on his head from some or other of his Dad's dodgy colleagues. And apart from the improvised surgery and the grave robbing it still might work.



↧

Pushing up Profits

September 14, 2013, 5:30 pm
$
0
0
by Marie-Louise Jensen

How do you make a quick buck selling smuggled goods? Or even selling goods to be smuggled? You have to convince your potential client that the goods you are selling are superior even when they are shoddy.

The profit margin in smuggling was already pretty high, especially in the early years of the eighteenth century. And the risks were reasonably low. But there always seem to be a few rogues who don’t scruple to cheat anyway.

There were endless popular tricks. One was for cloth or lace. You take a piece of really good quality cloth and tack it onto something inferior. Sooner or later, you’re bound to get a gullible client who doesn’t unroll the whole thing and just looks at the first bit.

Smuggling tea, which began when duty was put on it in 1724 (just after the time Smuggler’s Kiss is set), was also open to cheating. I've mentioned this in a previous post, but good quality tea was smuggled across the channel and then often adulterated with other dried leaves before being sold on.

More devious still was putting a small insert into a barrel of brandy. This was filled with good quality brandy. You could then safely offer a buyer the chance to taste (tapping this small section, of course). They would be impressed and buy a whole barrel of rough, undrinkable stuff and not discover until it was too late.

 


When I hear stories of toxic substances in drugs and contraband cigarettes, I realise nothing much has changed. And as we've seen with the horsemeat scandal recently, it isn't restricted to illegal goods - though it is a particular problem with them as they bypass any regulation.
↧

Five Favourite Museums: by Sue Purkiss

September 15, 2013, 5:00 pm
$
0
0

Of course, I don't believe in astrology. Our lives ruled by spinning balls of matter light years away? Utter nonsense, of course. But there is one Libran trait that I undeniably have in spades: the ability - no, the compulsion - to see both sides of everything. This means that choosing anything takes ages - a coat, for instance: " Shall I have the teal blue? Or would grey be better? And a flared one or a straight one? Or should I not get either of those, should I...?" It wastes so much time. So I'm experimenting at the moment with choosing according to the first thought that pops into my head.

So when I thought of doing a little round-up of museums-I-have-loved for this month's post, my first instinct was to make a spider chart of all the leading contenders, note down their plus points etc etc. But in the interests of my new policy of under rather than over-thinking, I decided instead just to see which ones floated, all by themselves, to the top of that murky cauldron that is my brain. And here they are.

D H Lawrence's Birthplace, at Eastwood in Nottinghamshire

I think this was what actually started me thinking about museums the other day; somewhere or other I read that the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Sons and Lovers is coming up. I come from a town not far from Eastwood, where Lawrence was born and brought up. It's a mining town, not very pretty: not an easy place. My dad lived in a similar terraced house when he was a child, so I was very interested to go and see what it would have looked like inside. My father was one of six; how could they all have fitted intoi a two-bedroomed house? 

Well, it didn't really answer that question - but it did show what the house would have been like. It was easy to imagine Mrs Morel, trying to keep up her standards with her bits and pieces of Nottingham lace and her framed pictures and the inevitable aspidistra. Easy also to imagine how Lawrence came to feel hemmed in and claustrophobic, so that he would eventually seek out the clear light and wider spaces of Cornwall, Italy and Mexico. If you want to understand Lawrence - and I suspect his time is about to come around again - then Eastwood is a good place to start.


Musee de la Resistance, near Brioude, in the Auvergne

(Sorry for the lack of accents - I don't know how to do them in Blogger.) This is a small,
locally run museum which we visited some years ago while on holiday in the Auvergne. There are other more glamorous resistance museums, but there was something intensely visceral about this one. It was on the first floor, above a garage, maybe, or a shop. On the walls was a handwritten account of the war, and beneath are glass cases crammed with documents from the village - inert pieces of paper which were full of drama: a letter, for instance, from a woman who wrote to the authorities denouncing members of the resistance: after the war, she was shot. There were photographs of men who were captured and deported or shot, and letters - the last words their families had from them. That woman - perhaps her descendants still live in the village, alongside those of the men she sent to their deaths? And she wasn't the only collaborator. A disturbing museum to visit, but again, one that left you with a strong sense of connection to the time and place it commemorated.


Museum of Somerset, Taunton

This is very different: a recently refurbished museum in Taunton Castle, full of marvellous things, including this beautifully carved dead tree. Upstairs there is a turret room with quotes on the walls about Somerset done in exquisite calligraphy, and when I was there a while ago there was an audio visual display as you went up the stairs of the starling murmurations that you can see on the levels in winter. You get a real sense here of the sweep of history and of landscape.



National Portrait Gallery

This is one of my favourite places to go to in London. It's not actually a museum, of course,
but it fulfills some of the functions of one: how else can you get so close to people of the past? Go to one room and you can immerse yourself in the court of Elizabeth 1: to another and there is Thomas More, hero of A Man For All Seasons, villain of Wolf Hall. Gaze at this representation of him with his family, painted by someone who stood in front of him and spoke to him, and see what you think of the man. 

There's so much to see here, and always something different. There's also a fantastic range of postcards which are great for workshops about character.


ss Great Britain

And finally, the beautiful ship, now permanently moored in Bristol. This has been
painstakingly and lovingly restored; when it first arrived it was just a rusty shell, but now as you walk through it you can see clearly the contrast between a first class cabin and what life was like in steerage. The picture shows the galley. An accompanying exhibition space has much more information, and also diaries and letters from passengers, and the chance to dress up as a Victorian. This is a joy of a museum to visit; children love it too, particularly, believe it or not, the cabin with the talking toilet.  

It was after visiting the ship that I wrote my book for children, Emily's Surprising Voyage, about two children from very different backgrounds who meet on board ship as they set sail for Australia. 

So what would you say is your favourite museum? (Or, well, one of them... No pressure!)
↧
↧

MY CORAM CUP by Penny Dolan

September 16, 2013, 10:00 pm
$
0
0



 Ever since the National Theatre’s poignant production of  “Coram Boy”, based on Jamila Gavin’s novel for young people, I’ve longed to visit the Foundling Museum. Living in Yorkshire, my trips to London are usually filled with precious family events so it wasn’t until this summer, as part of a short burst of house-sitting, I was able to make the visit. 

Just me, myself.

Paul Theroux, talking about travel writing recently, said writers should always travel alone, except for their notebook. Although my expedition was not a great one, I recognised what he meant.


Well, what a remarkable August day it became! Having mislaid my pocket-sized A to Z ( a well-worn palimpsest of post-it notes and scribbled addresses) I had to decipher the poorly shown street names on my phone, in the dull light of a drizzly morning.

I stared around than usual. I strolled through several garden squares, nicely replanted to reveal their original 18th Century designs and worried the work would be undone by austerity cuts. I enjoyed the Georgian architecture of the district more keenly than during visits when I’ve been wracked by publisher-meeting nerves.

Then just before noon, I bumbled in through the Foundling Museum’s door, all that's left from what was once the Foundling Hospital. 

I was immediately greeted and ticketed by a keen young thing. However, she also thrust a large round disc bearing the number 5 into my palm.  

Er, why? 
She repeated her explanation twice.

 Then her words connected with an item I’d partly glimpsed a day or two before on the Foundling Museum website: EXCHANGE. 

I had become “one of the ten randomly selected participants who can take home a piece of this constantly changing artwork today.” I had become involved with the work of the conceptual artist, Clare Twomey.

Clare had been invited by The Foundling Museum to create a piece of art inspired by the Museum. The Foundling Hospital, begun by Thomas Coram, used art to attract wealthy sponsors and it was this collection that began the Royal Academy.  Clare's interest, as I understand it, was in the human interactions within the story.
The intention was to provide a home for babies and children whose mothers were unable to care for them. There were only a limited number of places, and after the mother had been interviewed, the selected child was handed over and that was that.  

Mother. Child. Two things that should go together were separated.

From thoughts like those, Clare devised EXCHANGE,and this is how it worked for me. 

Outside the "gallery", like the mothers before the Board, I was told that I only had one chance. I was shown into a large basement room where 1,550 apparently identical white cups and saucers were arranged across five large tables. On the date of my visit, some were no longer pairs. just saucers.

 Mother. Child. Cup. Saucer. 



My task was to go round the room, choose one cup only, pick it up and read the good deed, printed within a blue or pink design, on the bottom. If I agreed to do the deed – interpreted in some way to suit my situation - then I could take the cup away with me. If not, I had to replace the cup in the saucer and walk away, like those mothers had to walk away.  

No second chance. No other option. What’s decided is decided.

I went around, reading all the now-empty saucers, their words identical to the promised deed on their missing cup. Then I studied the apparently identical pairs, rather as the wealthy sponsors might do, surveying the rows of identically uniformed foundling children or the list of petitions..

Afterwards – I was going to write “after the ceremony” because that is how it felt– all the participants who had chosen a cup queued up. We had our number and deed recorded in a log book. Unlike the Foundling Hospital children, whose names were changed on entry, we were able to write our own names and thoughts.

A few extra visitors had arrived, like tardy mothers. They stood around hopefully, asking if they could be part of the project.
“Not today”, they were told, as others had been in the past.   

Not selected. No second chance for you, my dear.
Meanwhile, my blue printed cup was swaddled tightly in paper and placed in a discreet brown paper bag. I brought my cup back home, eventually, to Yorkshire as a reminder to do my good deed when I could.

In case you are interested, my task was to “Use one day of annual holiday to volunteer for a charity.” Being self-employed and without fixed holidays, this task takes some re-thinking. What I take the "deed" to mean is “Go out and do something practical to help people for a day rather than just noodling, daydreaming or writing about it.” Suggestions welcome.


EXCHANGE as an event, closed on the 15th of September, but if you’d like to find out about EXCHANGE, or join in with the project by doing a good Coram deed yourself – sadly, without any cup as inspiration – you can find out about it by click this EXCHANGE or the one above. And if you haven't visited the Foundling Museum, do go!

Penny Dolan.

ps. As my children’s novel, A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E (Bloomsbury) included a homeless child needing shelter, the entire unplanned experience on a wandering sort of day felt highly serendipitous!

pps. Apologies! 

I've may have given this post a misleadingly alliterative title (MY CORAM CUP) because EXCHANGE was set up and curated by THE FOUNDLING MUSEUM

The CORAM FOUNDATION (now known as CORAM), which is a children’s charity, is not directly involved with arranging the curatorial programme at The Foundling Museum.




↧

Protection Against Witches - Celia Rees

September 17, 2013, 4:30 pm
$
0
0
I was visiting an old house outside Machynlleth, in North Wales, when I noticed a pair of old shoes in the hearth. The guide said that they had been found while work was being done on the fire place. Explanations as to how they had got there, or why, were vague. They had been 'forgotten'; they were abandoned because they were 'worn out'; just 'left' for no apparent reason; they'd belonged to a child who had out grown them. The shoes were worn but not unwearable. Shoes were not lightly discarded. My grandfather had a last upon which he would repair the family's shoes. The heels on the shoes were uneven. One was more worn than the other and one was built up. They were small, but not a child's shoe. They probably belonged to a small woman with one leg shorter than the other, or perhaps a deformed foot. She would have walked with a distinctive gait, favouring one leg more than the other. Such shoes are rare survivals. They were worn until they fell apart. So, why were these here? I didn't believe for a minute that they had been left, forgotten or abandoned. They had been placed in the hearth deliberately. They were an example of an apotropaic object. Apotropaic meaning having or reputed to have the power of averting evil influence or ill luck (OED); from the Greekἀποτρόπαιος averting evil (ἀποτρέπειν to turn away, avert). These kinds of objects are usually found in old houses, above or near doorways, chimneys, or in the roof space. Shoes are common. Perhaps they belonged to someone who spent a lot of time by the hearth, tending the fire, doing the cooking, looking after the house. Perhaps she could not move far, anyway, because of her lack of mobility. Perhaps the idea was that, in death, that person would continue to protect. Seeing something like this brings alive one of the least accessible areas of history, that of folk belief, magic and, in this case, the power of witchcraft.

In the past, such belief was not just common, it was literally part of people's lives. Rather more macabre than a pair of old shoes, mummified cats were sometimes built into the fabric of buildings: above the hearth, in the chimney, between the walls. They didn't get there by accident. They were deliberately placed at entrance and exit points, or in the body of the house, put there to protect the occupants, to ward off evil, to keep the witches away. 


The witch bottle is another of the apotropaic objects sometimes found in old houses. The one seen here is a 16th or 17th century Bellarmine or Bartmann jug, so-called for the bearded face seen on the stoneware vessel. An example found in the bed of Westminster Abbey's millstream during excavations in 1904 was described its collector, Edward Prioleau Warren as:

“stoppered down with a cork; upon opening it, and washing out the contents, there was found within it…(i) a small piece of cloth or serge, formerly red, cut carefully and neatly into a heart shape, and stuck full of brass round-headed pins, each pin bent; and (ii) a small quantity of hair, ostensibly human, and small finger nail parings. I think there can be little doubt as to the nature of this deposit inside a corked jug…It is a malevolent charm, the intended victim of which was a woman, and it is perhaps permissible to surmise that the depositor and evil-wisher was of the same sex. Perhaps a maidservant who had a grudge against her mistress, and who could easily obtain the clippings and prunings of her toilet...”

His interpretation was one of malevolence, but it is just as likely to have been a counter-charm placed to ward off witchcraft. It is possible that the contents were collected from the witch him or herself, so that the bottle actually contained the witch, such as the one found in Penelope Lively's The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, or the bottle collected by Margaret Murray and now in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. 



This bottle is described as a "Small glass flask of bilobed shape, silvered over the inside and stoppered. This is reputed to contain a witch, and the late owner, an old lady living in a village near HOVE, SUSSEX, remarked, “they do say there be a witch in it, and if you let un out there’ll be a peck o’trouble."

As, indeed, happens in The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. I  don't know if Penelope Lively had this bottle in mind when she wrote the book, but I find these kinds of objects both fascinating and evocative. They suggest a deep and abiding fear of and belief in witches. They are found in all kinds of buildings, from the grandest houses, to simple dwellings which would indicate that such belief was ubiquitous. From the highest to the lowest, no-one was exempt.
↧

Stories from along the Great Silk Road and two objects for the Cabinet of Curiosities

September 18, 2013, 5:00 pm
$
0
0


Theresa Breslin

We’ve had a wonderful summer - we can’t often say that it Scotland – and now it looks set to be a glorious autumn. I’m feeling very buoyant and thought that I’d include special items in this month’s post. There is a story for you and also two objects for the Cabinet of Curiosities - these give you a puzzle to solve.

But first you have to read the Blog… 

It was a big dream of mine to travel along the Great Silk Road. I’d thought about it ever since reading the adventures of Marco Polo when I was about twelve years old, and hearing my father recite Coleridge’s magnificent poem that begins:

‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

And so, injected with medically prescribed health-protecting substances, fortified by various vitamins, weighed down with a skip load of anti-diarrhoea tablets and carrying a packet of Jacob’s cream crackers (proven on my various research trips in the past to be the best sustenance for a gippy tummy), plus a large sun hat, off I went to cross the desert and travel through Uzbekistan.

Land of the Khans, of the mighty Timur, the warrior known as Tamerlane, who crushed the Golden Horde; meeting place of ancient nations and empires, with a fabulously rich history, Uzbekistan is a truly unforgettable country. From the spice market in Samarkand to the desert fortress of Khiva via the caravanserai and trading domes of Bukhara, it was crammed with breathtaking architecture, home to the most hospitable and friendly people, and bubbling with stories and legends. 

Image Copyright Scarpa
Possibly the most famous collection of anecdotes and jokes are those of  Hoja Nasreddin. 

Many countries claim to be the birthplace of this storyteller and trickster, but his tales display the natural wisdom of common folk with themes that transcend national boundaries. 

He is part philosopher, part comedian, part buffoon.



 
Often the story has a twist in the tail where the
seemingly weaker character gets the better of 
the bully or a rich or pompous person. 

Bookshops in Bukhara and the newsagent stands 
on the streets of Samarkand sell little booklets with 
selections of the many hundreds of tales attributed to him.   


Years ago I wrote a twist-in-the-tail historical story about a traveller lost in the desert which is in the collection Through Sand, Snow and Steam but the one that came to me after travelling across the Kyzyl Kum desert has a tale within a tale, part of which is based on a true and shocking story from that region. You can read On the Shoulders of Othershere, or download it, free of charge.  

Image Copyright Scarpa

In one of the Trading Domes a stallholder became interested in the notebook and pen I carried. I made him a gift of them and, in return, he presented me with a tiny portrait of Hoja Nasreddin on his donkey, beautifully hand-crafted from camel skin. 

The Storytelling Sage is positioned near my desk, from where he keeps a mischievous eye on my writing. 




Finally, the puzzle of the Cabinet of Curiosities:
 
Image Copyright Scarpa

The two objects pictured are hand made from wood. They were integral to Uzbek family life as far back as anyone can recall and are still in use, mainly outwith the towns and cities. Although used separately their purpose is the same. 

You can post a Comment here or Tweet or Facebook me your ideas as to what they might be.
I'll be mightily impressed if you can work out their use without recourse to the Internet. 

I might not reply immediately. By the time this Blog is up I hope to be in Petra – probably the subject of a future post…. 

Photographs  © SCARPA

http://www.facebook.com/Theresabreslinauthor    
Twitter: @theresabreslin1  
http://www.theresabreslin.co.uk/ 

LATEST BOOKS
Spy for the Queen of Scots 
The Traveller (from dyslexia friendly publisher Barrington Stoke)
Divided City  Playscript now available.

↧
Search

'The Shame and the Glory' by A L Berridge

September 19, 2013, 4:30 pm
$
0
0


On Friday 13th September five people squeezed past an enclosure of roadworks and stood on a pedestrian island in Waterloo Place to conduct a Remembrance Service in the rain. Japanese tourists pointed and took photographs, cab-drivers slowed and stared out of their windows, but for the most part London only glanced and walked by.


Of course they did. It wasn’t November and this wasn’t the Cenotaph, and Remembrance stops at a hundred years. Who cares about the fallen of the Crimean War?

Well, I do actually, and I was one of the five. With me were Colonel Jeremy Burnell RM, Defence Attaché to Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova, his fifteen year old son Charlie, Glenn Fisher from the Crimean War Research Society, and a former bugler of the Royal Artillery called Steve Fletcher. We were there to show we cared, and to mark the launch of an Appeal to build a proper war memorial to our war dead out in Crimea.


 I realize how fatuous that sounds – I can see it as I’m typing it. The Crimean War was 159 years ago, the men are long dead, and what possible good will it do them to stick up another chunk of stone? Perhaps the honest answer is ‘nothing’ – but in that case what’s the point of Remembrance Day? What’s the point of all the flags and ceremony at any military funeral? ‘When they’re dead they’re done with’ – is that it? Give them a decent grave, and that’s enough?

The British dead of the Crimean War don’t have decent graves. They don’t have graves at all. Many were buried in haste, but such military cemeteries as we did have were bulldozed on Khrushchev’s orders during the Cold War and nothing was left even to mark where they lay. Generals and common soldiers fared alike, and the fragments of bone still to be found scattered in the soil round Sevastopol might belong to General Cathcart (Wellington’s ADC at Waterloo), or to Captain Hedley Vicars at whose funeral an entire regiment wept, or perhaps just to a sixteen year old private who charged with the Light Brigade at Balaklava. They’re all there, lost in the dust, two thousand miles from home.

Original British cemetery at Cathcart's Hill 1855
They’re not alone, and the cemeteries of our French and Turkish allies suffered a similar fate in the dark years. But the Iron Curtain is down, Ukraine is independent and open, and everything should be different now. I knew memorials had been built and when I made a research trip to Crimea in 2011 I was very much looking forward to seeing ours. 

Here’s the Turkish memorial garden, beautifully tended by a local Crim-Tatar family employed by the Turkish government.



Here’s the French memorial complex, equally immaculately kept, and adorned with fresh flowers from the French government.






This is ours.



I probably don’t need to say how I felt when I saw it. As a historian I was shattered by the failure to honour men who had done and given so much, as a British woman I was sick with shame at this public display of my country’s neglect, but as a human being I felt I’d been kicked in the gut. I’d read these men’s letters and diaries, I’d studied their exploits and understood their privations, I’d even seen their paintings and photographs, and this was a desecration of the graves of men I knew.




I came back home with a mission, and I’ve been on it ever since. It’s been a long and frustrating journey, with door after official door slammed in my face. War dead since 1914 are properly looked after, and there is an entire Commonwealth War Graves Commission to ensure they’re respected abroad – but before 1914 is ‘history’ and nobody cares. Monuments in this country have a special War Memorials Trust to watch over them – but Ukraine is ‘foreign’ and not their concern. Military charities like the British Legion have the living to look after, and can’t be expected to extend their help to the dead. So many organizations, so many different responsibilities, but in each case there’s a loophole that allows the Crimean War to slip through. 

The only answer looked to be private enterprise, but that had been tried in the 1990s when a Colonel Ivanov of Sevastopol proposed a joint venture with donors in the UK to build the memorial I’d seen myself. Land for such a purpose is traditionally gifted to the country whose soldiers it honours, but in this case Colonel Ivanov promptly claimed it as his own, and proceeded to charge visitors even to view the monument their money had constructed. Legal wrangling dragged on for years without result, the deadlock was complete, and the cheaply built memorial had fallen inexorably into ruin. 





 But I wasn’t the only person who cared. While I was firing off letters as ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’, our Embassy at Kyiv was busy coming up with an answer. The Ukrainian government had already given us a new obelisk at nearby Dergachi, and the plan now was to expand this into a proper memorial, with a new and simple ‘Place of Contemplation’ at the original site of Cathcart’s Hill. Defence Attaché Colonel Jeremy Burnell was determined to make this happen, and was already working on the official permissions that would prevent anything like the Ivanov debacle ever happening again.

Colonel Jeremy Burnell, Royal Marines

What he didn’t have was money. Embassies have a small fund for maintenance of war graves, but nothing that could possibly allow them to build one. Jeremy could commission plans, he could work with Colonel Peter Knox of the Crimean War Research Society to obtain details of all the regiments that needed to be honoured, but beyond that he could not go.

In 2012 Major Colin Robins of the CWRS brought the two of us together. He introduced me to Peter Knox, Peter introduced me to Jeremy, and something in the air went ‘click’. Jeremy would pursue his plan through all the administrative and legal barriers - and I would raise the money.

It hasn’t been easy even getting to the starting line. This time the fundraising had to be clearly organized and funneled through official channels, but I couldn’t find a single organized body to host the Appeal. It was the same old story, that the Crimean War was in nobody’s remit, and even the very willing National Army Museum couldn’t help. The CWRS would have liked to, but their members had already lost a lot of money through the Ivanov disaster and it wasn’t right to expect them to shoulder it alone.


 It was History Girl Michelle Lovric who broke the deadlock. Sitting calmly on her balcony overlooking the Thames, she said to me gently, ‘You’re not the only writer who cares about history, you know. Why don’t you try the Historical Writers’ Association?’

Ding! I couldn’t believe I’d never thought of it before, but I went straight to the HWA Committee and of course Michelle was right. Robert Low, Manda Scott, Anthony Riches, Robyn Young, Michael Jecks, Ben Kane and Lloyd Shepherd – every of them offered promotion and support.

Their official involvement broadened the affair into a national appeal, and now it became possible for the CWRS to sponsor it as the designated registered charity. It’s the CWRS who have provided the bank account, their volunteers who’ve built the Appeal website and are informing every step we take, but it was still the little HWA who made the first move. Writers and lovers of history – people like us. 


I should have known. In my very first post for the History Girls I questioned the integrity of making a living by ‘digging up the dead’, and justified it to myself by arguing that we did it out of love. Now I know I was right, and we’re going to prove it by honouring the memory of those we are laying to rest.

That’s what I was doing last Friday. The 13th September was the anniversary of the British Fleet’s arrival in Crimea, and we chose it as the day not only to launch our Appeal, but also to pay tribute to the men whose London memorial lies bare even on Remembrance Day. 

  
We did it all. Jeremy laid a wreath for the British Embassy, Glenn laid one for the CWRS, and I laid one for the HWA. We read aloud a poem by a Red Army soldier who’d been stationed at Cathcart’s Hill in 1939, and performed Binion’s Act Of Remembrance. Steve Fletcher stood in the rain and played ‘The Last Post’ and ‘Reveille’ for men whose memorials are silent in November.


There were many years’ neglect to make up for, but when I laid the flowers on the stone it felt as if I were back in Crimea and tending those forgotten graves.


Next time I hope I will be. We’ve only just started and there’s a long way to go, but if people are kind, then one day our new memorial will be built, and we will have a full and proper service for those men whose glory Tennyson promised would never fade. 

Please, let it be so. It’s in our hands now, and in those of everyone who cares about people who lived a long time ago. Our great great grandfathers are out there – men our own grandmothers might have known, and without whom many of us wouldn’t exist. Our history is out there – a war that was futile imperial folly, but for which men fought with such courage that the Victoria Cross was struck in their honour. It’s all out there, everything that defines us. Our pride, our glory – and our shame.


You can donate to the Crimea Appeal here.
Photographs of wreath-laying by Shen Drew, whose site is here.
Steve Fletcher can be found here.
A L Berridge can be found just about anywhere except here.
↧
↧

Radical Chic by Imogen Robertson

September 21, 2013, 1:11 am
$
0
0

First of all, if anyone missed Louise's post yesterday please go and read it at once. It's great and it's important. I'll wait. 

Secondly, my apologies if you are interested more in the history part of this blog rather than the writing bit. This post is definitely about the latter. Ok? I'll get on with it now.

Until I was 16 I went to Hummersknott Comprehensive in Darlington, then for my A-Levels I went to my father’s old Public School, Cheltenham College. As a result the first question in my first interview at Cambridge was: ‘So, Miss Robertson, you gained some radical chic by attending a comprehensive, then switched to the public school system when it really mattered, hmmm?’ Though the question had remained seared in my memory for the last twenty years, I can’t remember what my answer was. I’m sure though that it began with a certain amount of throat clearing.

My career as a writer (I love starting sentences like that, although we all know the word career has invisible quotation marks around it), began when I started going to poetry workshops run by Roddy Lumsden. The workshops started that very important mental transition between ‘Writers are all beloved of the Gods; it’s about innate talent and if I can’t write perfectly straight away, it means I can’t write,’ and the rather more useful: ‘Holy Hell, if I actually work at this and read widely and critically I can get better at it.’ 

I remember going to my first class worried that the other attendees were going to be pensioners writing about cheerful robins in rhyming couplets. Apologies to pensioners and cheerful robins, and rhyming couplets for that matter - I’ve nothing against any of them - but I was thirty and a TV director at the time so inclined to be a bit of an arse occasionally. Anyway, when I arrived in the strip lit grey classroom of destiny I found that I was the oldest and by far the least cool student in the room. After that life was full of little popping noises as my assumptions and presumptions exploded one after another. I went to  Roddy’s workshops regularly for more than five years, so from the time I started writing seriously to the point where I’d published three novels, thereby jumping the money fence from poetry to crime fiction. I’ll go back to the workshops, which are now at The Poetry School, as soon as I can find a brain cell that isn’t fried by deadlines and historical research. During those years I met, worked with, drank with and admired some brilliant poets, many of whom now have collections out in the big, bad world. I do admit though that those words, 'radical chic' have come back to me at various times; during readings in bars and warehouses, standing in crowds of whooping beautiful people, and admiring the panache and performing skills of many of the poets reading. 

One of the ‘younger and cooler than me’ people in the room in those first weeks of workshops was Wayne Holloway Smith. Wayne is a superb writer and one of the best readers I’ve ever heard. He also knows how to throw a very chic party and at the beginning of this year he decided to hold a series of salons with banjo playing, readings, mini-lectures, amazing food and exquisite hand drawn maps to lead the audience to his flat in the backstreets near Kings Cross. I suspect that I was invited because Wayne knew I was likely to turn up with some really excellent cheese, but he covered well by asking me to write a short story. As it was February, I came up with a 'to be read round the glowing embers, M.R. James' type thing. 

Now Sidekick Books, creators of some of the chicest books out there, have published an anthology taken from the readings given at Wayne’s salons. My story is in there too. The collection is called ‘Follow the Trail of Moths’ and is beautifully illustrated by Sophie Gainsley. Please buy it at once.Again, I suspect I’m in there because Wayne knew I'd bring cheese to the launch at his new spacious flat in the back streets near Limehouse. I did. The flat was heaving with beautiful and interesting people, the readings started late and while the buses and DLR trains passed in the background, we passed a bottle of whisky round the audience, listened and whooped.

There is though something rather unpleasant hiding in that original question from my Cambridge interview, which is, I think, the invisible suggestion that radical chic is all a comprehensive education is good for. There are also always plenty of people around happy to suggest the poetry world is meaningless and pointless once the chic is removed. Both suggestions are rubbish. The poets I’ve met and heard in the classes and at readings are the frontline troops of language. They use English with more bravery, imagination and inventiveness than any other group of writers I know. Working with them taught me what slippery and subtle creatures words are, always telling more than you think possible, creating impossible worlds out of the everyday and music that can rise up out of a page as a single voice or with the force of a massed choir. So what I got from Hummersknott and from the London poetry scene was not a touch of radical chic, what I got was a hell of an education.   
↧

Dear Author ... by Kate Lord Brown

September 21, 2013, 4:30 pm
$
0
0

As a new writer, the novelty of receiving letters and emails from readers is still fresh and wonderful. My favourite message to date came from a gentleman of a certain age, who wrote to thank me for the considerable pleasure my book had brought him and his beloved during the 1960s. I had to break it to him gently that I am not Sir Richard Burton, the 'fabulous lover, daring explorer' and translator of the classic erotic text The PerfumeD Garden, but a mother of two whose new book about the Spanish Civil War was named The Perfume Garden by my publishers after its original title 'The Perfume Box' was - ironically - deemed too suggestive. He was quite charming, and promised to read the novel.

Perhaps you've had similar experiences with both good and tough feedback? I've come to the conclusion that two readers can read the same passage and find completely different things. Leaving aside the gladiatorial online review arenas, the trolls and sockpuppets, for every reader who takes the time to send a handwritten note to say they liked the book, and yes, your fictional version of the person they knew was bang on, there is another telling you that you got it horribly wrong. 

How do you deal with this? Do you engage? Argue your case? One of the most common complaints about my debut 'The Beauty Chorus' was that people didn't eat that well during WW2. This was my fault entirely, and I've learnt a good lesson. The food, in fact, had been researched religiously. All I needed to add was something to the effect of 'mmm this beef stew is delicious, but it's not a patch on the stews we had before the war', or 'aren't I lucky that shellfish isn't rationed and Daddy brings me care parcels from the fishmonger on Chelsea Green'.




The academic in me wants the historical framework of the story to be watertight, and only a fraction of the research is used. Perhaps it is the same with your novels? I hope somehow that all that work is there, shoring up the story, even if worn lightly in the final book. As Hemingway said: 

'If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.' 


Facts are one thing, but getting the emotional timbre of your story right is more subjective. One lady in her nineties who read 'The Beauty Chorus' reported back that I was wrong - no one ever cried, even when their friends were killed in plane crashes. And yet during the research, from talking to other people, and reading first hand accounts the reminiscence that affected me the most was the woman who opened up and said that women would often go to the cinema alone so that they could weep privately in the darkness. This touched me - and said everything about the lack of privacy then, and the need to keep a stiff upper lip in public.


Historical fiction with its blend of fact and imagination is a challenging genre, and I hope to keep learning something new with every book. When I read that even the great Bernard Cornwell admitted to putting snowdrops in Arthurian Britain, it was comforting to learn that even the writers I admire most are human. What are your favourite letters from your readers - have you had any snowdrop moments? Or have any readers made your day by letting you know when you got something right? 

In the meantime, if you feel like rustling up a WW2 recipe for lunch, here is a lovely simple pea soup from 'War-time Cookery' 1940. Enjoy:

Pea Soup

  • 1lb of mixed leeks, onions and celery
  • ½ pint cooked peas [soak overnight with bi-carbonate]
  • 1oz fat
  • Mint
Fry together, put in I pint of cooked peas, minced, and 1 quart of water. Boil until tender, thicken with rice or potato flour, sprinkle a little chopped mint on top.



↧

The Hitler Routine, by Leslie Wilson

September 22, 2013, 5:00 pm
$
0
0


Source: Bundesarchiv no 102-13376
I read it first in the Metro newspaper, which I picked up on the tube. 'Brand's Hitler routine leaves a Nazi taste' the headline proclaimed. I sighed, then read it, wondering why I bothered. On Saturday, the affair appeared on the front page of the Guardian. For anyone not now privy to this story, Brand used his acceptance speech at the GQ Men of the Year Awards to remind Hugo Boss, who sponsored the award, of their Nazi past. The original Hugo Boss, who died in 1948, was a Nazi party member, and supplied uniforms to the Brownshirts, the SS, etc. The firm employed slave labour during the war, and was finally forced to cough up reparations to their victims in 1999. They did, however, set up the Hugo Boss Prize for art in conjunction with the Guggenheim Foundation, who seem not to have felt queasy about this association.

I am not writing this to attack Russell Brand, or to defend Hugo Boss or GQ magazine (especially not since the awards host apparently made his own deeply offensive 'jokes' about Stephen Fry's recent attempted suicide.)

It will always be a source of deep pain to me that the Holocaust happened; at the same time, the fact that I am half German, and therefore know that the horror was perpetrated by ordinary people, has made me think long and hard about the human condition and the way people can be brought to do evil. This has not been comfortable, but it has given me some insight.

As the author of two novels about the time, I can hardly complain about the interest people show in that period; but I do deeply dislike the facility with which Nazi Germany is too often trotted out, and cheap 'jokes', snap judgements, etc, are made. The 'jokes', like Rob Brydon's intrusive crack about Stephen Fry, are no joke if you are at the receiving end. If you then fail to laugh, you are, of course, accused of being lacking in a sense of humour. I've been in this situation myself, when people have said this kind of thing - and I do not exaggerate: 'You're half German? So do you keep a pair of jackboots in the cupboard?' (ha, ha).

picture by Brian Solis www.brian
solis.com.bub.blicio.us
via wikimedia Commons
What I have also had said to me is that the things done in Nazi Germany are 'different' from, and should not be compared to any human rights abuses carried out by governments or commercial corporations nowadays. Yet I think this shows one of the dangers of history. It has been said that the past is another country: Nazi Germany, and the Germans, can doubly become that other country, that place whose evils are so much worse than our own are perceived to be, that one can make onesself feel righteous by condemning them.

Actually, there are immediate and dreadful concerns in today's clothing industry - not only the horrific conditions in the garment factories where our clothes are largely made up. Consider the production of cotton. Adults and children are employed for long hours at derisory wages, often as bonded (or slave) labour, kept hungry, working with dangerous machinery and exposed to chemical pesticides, nearly half of which are considered toxic enough to be classified as hazardous by the World Health Organisation (source: Enviromental Justice Foundation). This idea of 'difference' can mean that we can in on the one hand condemn (rightly, of course) Hugo Boss's use of slave labour in Nazi Germany and the fact that ordinary people at that time failed to prevent that horror, to say nothing of the murder of Jews - but on the other hand consider it inconsequential that the people who supply the cotton we wear impose similar conditions on their unfortunate workers. And to come back to Russell Brand - maybe not all the cotton he wears is solely fairtrade or organic.


Picture courtesy of Environmental Justice Foundation;
see link below.

















Not only can we sleep at night; we can sleep comfortably on cotton produced at the cost of human suffering. Egypt is one of the countries who employ child labour. What price the lovely Egyptian cotton towels you can get in John Lewis? I keep meaning to write to them about it, and keep forgetting. I am too busy. I guess people in Nazi Germany were too busy, especially once the war got started. And they were in danger if they asked the wrong questions about what was going on. The worst thing that will happen to me is that John Lewis ignore me, as they did when I asked about human rights issues and pineapple juice.


Bundesarchiv picture no 183-R99542 : the Jewish
Michael Siegel forced to walk barefoot carrying
a poster that says: I will never again complain to
the police
As the robber Macheath puts it in Brecht's Threepenny Opera, 'How does a human live? Just by hourly/Tormenting, stripping, attacking, throttling and devouring humankind.*' This was the condition of life in Nazi Germany (my grandmother went mad thinking about it; was haunted by it, and the accompanying sense of guilt, to her life's end.)Alas, Macheath's observation still holds good nowadays - however true it is that the horror of the Holocaust has not as yet  been paralleled. We are frequently told that it is squeamish to complain; we need arms exports, low-cost labour, environmental destruction etc etc as a necessary prerequisite to economic success (and imprisonment without trial, torture and mass surveillance are 'unfortunately essential if we are to defeat terrorism).

Now as then, human beings ignore the horrors that are perpetrated in their names, or only give them a fleeting glance, and get on with their lives; some don't care, some feel powerless (or too busy), some are intimidated or made to feel uncool. But every time they focus, without reflection, on the evil committed out there in Germany, back in history, and believe its perpetrators to have been utterly and satisfactorily different from themselves, what they come away with is a set of blinkers, not any useful insight.



*Brecht's words do, of course, sound much better in his original lyric, 'Denn wovon lebt der Mensch? Indem er stündlich/ Den Menschen peinigt, auszieht, anfällt, abwürgt und frisst.' Better still to Weill's music.)



For information about cotton and human rights, try

http://www.ejfoundation.org/cotton/issues

http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/05/30/uzbekistan-grant-access-cotton-monitors
Uzbekistan Forces over a Million into Cotton Fields – Watchdog: http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66453

http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/









↧

It Ain't Necessarily So....

September 23, 2013, 4:30 pm
$
0
0
When I embarked on my novel about Alienor of Aquitaine, The Summer Queen,  I wanted to know what she looked like, so I checked around to see if there were any sources that described her physical appearance.  If there were any, I didn't want to commit a faux pas by giving her the wrong physical attributes at the outset.
As a less experienced author, influenced by other writers of both fact and fiction, I had in the past given her long, raven-black hair.  But now, with a three book contract under my belt and Alienor centre stage rather than peripheral, I felt I needed to nail the truth if it was out there.  After all, even in the medieval period, primary sources do yield hints and descriptions.  There are vivid ones of  Alienor's second husband Henry II that portray him as a choleric red-head with sparkling grey eyes, his height just above average but not tall, and his build chunky.  Women tend to be less well represented in primary sources beyond stock phrases about their beauty or nobility (or perfidy) but personal physical attributes are rare.  However, I embarked on my search and hit the many biographies and histories produced about her and her family to see if there were any pointers.  The research told me plenty, but not quite what I was looking for...

W.L.Warren in his biography of Henry II calls Alienor a 'Black-eyed beauty.' 


Frank McLynn in Lionheart and Lackland: 'Eleanor of Aquitaine had a dark complexion, black eyes, black hair, and a curvaceous figure that never ran to fat even in old age.'

Desmond Seward  In Eleanor of Aquitaine the Mother Queen: 'She was a beauty - tall with a superb figure that she kept into old age, lustrous eyes and fine features (it is likely that her hair was yellow and her eyes blue).'

Douglas Boyd  in Eleanor April Queen of Aquitaine: 'Her face was humorous and alert, framed by long auburn hair flowing freely from beneath the coronet.  Her eyes according to legend were green and fearless.


Alison Weir  in Eleanor of Aquitaine, By the Wrath of God Queen of England: 'It is more likely that she had red or auburn hair since a mural in the church of Sainte Radegonde in Chinon which almost certainly depicts Eleanor and was painted during her lifetime in a region in which she was well known, shows a woman with reddish-brown hair.'

Marion Meade in Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography: 'Eleanor, exceptionally beautiful at fifteen, had matured into a saucy, hot-blooded damsel, and perhaps he (her father) feared that, unproperly chaperoned, she might grant excessive courtesies to some ardent knight...If she conformed to 12th century Europe's ideal standards of feminine beauty...she must have been blond with grey or blue eyes set wide apart.  Her nose would have been straight, her skin white, and she would certainly have had a long, slender neck, firm breasts, and perfect teeth.'

So, after my trawl, I had her as a curvy, hot-blooded brunette, an insatiable gorgeous blond teenage sex-pot, and an alert, good-humoured green-eyed red-head.

These are all 'factual' secondary sources, and it's interesting what a variation of opinion there is, the more so because there is NOT ONE SINGLE description of Alienor of Aquitaine in any written source and there are no proven visual sources either despite Alison Weir's 'almost certainly' remark. Her opinions of the Chinon mural portrayal is optimistic to say the least when studies now tell us that the clothing on the crowned figure is male and it is probably her eldest son Henry the Young King. Which makes total sense given that the mural shows Henry II riding out followed by four people and he had four surviving sons by Alienor. When he made his will, he left John the youngest, to be cared for by the Young King, which also makes sense of the more child-like figure riding beside the crowned one. The scholarly interpretation immediately stymies the green-eyed red-head theory.
click to enlarge.  Photo courtesy of John Phillips.  Henry and (most likely)
his four sons in the chapel of St. Radegonde at Chinon
 Marion Meade's comment about a 'saucy, hot-blooded damsel' is astonishing as there is not one iota of proof that Alienor's early personality tended in this direction.  It's all assumption built on incorrect understanding of medieval mindset and primary sources.  For example, Alienor is often stated to have been louche in her attitudes because her grandfather led a scurrilous life, writing very explicit crude poetry and running off with another man's wife, making her his mistress and refusing to give her up even when excommunicated for the sin.  But Alienor was only around 3 when he died, hardly old enough to have been corrupted.  There is no evidence that her own parents were as flamboyant as the generation before.  Then, when one looks at the wider field, one finds that scurrilous rude poetry was the norm of the day everywhere. One only needs to look around at  works such as The Fabliaux, to see that William IX of Aquitaine was operating within the cultural flow, not outside it.  When one looks at Alienor's first husband, Louis VII of France, who was in later life renowned for his piety, then one also finds a scurrilous grandparent in Philip I, who guess what... ran off with someone else's wife, made her his mistress, had children with her and was excommunicated for refusing to give her up.  Obviously such decadent relatives in the family line, didn't prevent Louis from treading a moral path, so why should the same turn Alienor into a 'hot and saucy damsel?' 

With reference to the hair colour again, I was interested to find in Alienor's ancestry, a Duke of Aquitaine called William 'L'Etoupe' meaning 'towhead' i.e. he had blond hair.  So that is how I have protrayed her in The Summer Queen because at least it's one proven genetic marker amid all the rampant speculation!

It fascinates me how historical non facts become historical facts and how writers supposedly producing factual works can get the details so utterly round their necks. Do they crib from earlier works?  Do they make it up as they go along?  Have they read the 'fact' so often that they believe it?  The myth and the made up are so often repeated that eventually they become the truth.  Having made Alienor a blond, I was taken to task by one reader who said that it was genetically impossible for Eleanor and Henry II (a red-head) to have produced dark-haired Prince John.  Now, I know that the reader's grasp of genetics might have been slightly off kilter as it is possible for a red-head and a blond to have a dark-haired child, but the point I am making here is that yet again, we don't know what colour Prince John's hair actually was. That he's almost always portrayed in films and novels as a saturnine type (probably in keeping with the vagaries of his nature)  has sunk into people's notion of his appearance and has become accepted fact.
King John hunting, 13thC.  He's a blond here!

The above examples are just localised,  based on my own trawling of a subject during research. There are many more abounding throughout the centuries and far less trivial than physical appearance. I'm sure people could cite examples from their own delving into particular historical passions.  History is not just set of opinions seen from different angles, but is often made up how we want it to be or how we have imagined it, and often becomes a false fact because we don't have the necessary awarenesses ourselves to view the fully rounded picture.

Gershwin was right in Porgy and Bess.  It ain't neccessarily so!







↧
↧

SCOTLAND IN STITCHES by Eleanor Updale

September 24, 2013, 5:30 pm
$
0
0

We all know about the Bayeux tapestry: a masterpiece embroidered to commemorate the Norman Conquest.


It has endured for nearly a thousand years.

For the past few months, I''ve been involved in the production of a modern narrative tapestry:  The Great Tapestry of Scotland.  At over 500 feet, it's more than twice the length of the Bayeux.  It's the result of about fifty thousand hours of work by over a thousand volunteer stitchers all over Scotland.  Small groups of women (and some men) each tackled a panel depicting an incident or theme from Scottish history. Miraculously, it's finished, and it went on display at the Scottish Parliament this month, before setting off on tour. 

The project was the brainchild of the wonderful Alexander McCall Smith - a serious contender for the title of Nicest Man In the World.  The herculean task of writing the narrative went to the historian Alastair Moffat, and the 160+ panels were designed by the artist, Andrew Crummy.  You can see and hear more about how the tapestry was made at this website:  http://scotlandstapestry.com/index.php

The tapestry tells the story of Scotland from the very earliest times to the present day.  This panel is five episodes in:


All the things you would expect are included in the story (Robert the Bruce, Mary Queen of  Scots,, Bonnie Prince Charlie, etc) but there's lots more, with a firm emphasis on the lives of ordinary people.
Here's the panel depicting the Black Death in the fourteenth century:



The picture below shows part of the panel I worked on (with a group of authors and publishers, including fellow History Girl Elizabeth Laird).  It commemorates the foundation of the ancient universities.


Although some of the stitchers were very accomplished, many of us had very little experience of embroidery, and had to learn as we went along.  We stitched everywhere: at home, at book festivals, at work. I 'watched' all eight episodes of Broadchurch through one long night, without looking at the TV screen (and I guessed whodunnit in Episode One.  Maybe that's the answer).

As the tapestry approaches the present day, it covers the birth of the Edinburgh Festival, the production of the Hilman Imp, and the establishment of the Parliament at Holyrood.  People had to stitch TV cameras, computers, factories, scientific instruments, and bridges.  Not all the episodes are set in Scotland itself.  This is how one group interpreted the Scots' impact on India:


Do try to catch the tapestry if it comes your way.  Seeing it assembled for the first time at the Parliament was a truly moving experience.  As a bit of a dunce on the subject of Scottish History, I found it a very palatable educational tool, too.  I am honoured to have been allowed to play a  part in something that will, we hope, be enjoyed by people for centuries to come.

I've only been able to give you the tiniest taste of what the tapestry is like.
You can see a news reports on the exhibition here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-23958346

We are all hoping that eventually a permanent home can be found for the tapesty in a place where Scottish people and visitors to Scotland can get to it easily.  So if you happen to know someone with a very big hall they want to fill, just get in touch, and I will pass the word on.

www.eleanorupdale.com
↧

NAPOLEON SLEPT HERE –Dianne Hofmeyr

September 25, 2013, 9:30 pm
$
0
0

When you mention the town of Tolentino, few know of it beyond perhaps that it has a clock tower with three clock faces and is in the heart of le Marche in Italy. But from the 16th to the 19th February 1797, Napoleon slept here.

In the course of the Italian campaign, Napoleon had occupied Ferrara, Bologna, Ravenna, Imola and Faenza. Pope Pius VI begged for peace and the armistice of 23rd June 1796 was signed at Bologna whereby the Pope undertook to pay 21 million francs, give up Ferrara and Bologna and surrender 500 codices from the Vatican Library and 100 works of art, which were to go to the Louvre in Paris. The French commissioners reserved the right to enter any building, public, religious or private, to make their choice and assessment of what was to be taken to France.

But the Pope violated the terms and when he found Napoleon was on his way to Tolentino, sent a papal delegation to draw up another Peace Treaty. They resided at the very quiet and peaceful monastery of St Nicholas while the forces of France arrived… the French General Victor and 15 000 men and the following day, Napoleon himself with General Berthier. Napoleon established his quarters in a suite of rooms on the first floor – the piano superiore– of Count Parisani’s Palazzo in the centre of town.

One has to imagine the scene. I’ve tried to find accounts but am not sure of their accuracy. One has it that a house had to be knocked down in the narrow street to accommodate the throng of people who accompanied Napoleon to this small walled city. One can also imagine the upheaval in the Parisani household. The rooms still retain part of the furniture and wall paintings of this period along with the desk where the treaty was signed and Napoleon’s red damask-swagged bed.

What I have, are my photographs of these rooms that I found unexpectedly one day as I wandered around the narrow cobbled streets of Tolentino, looking for a kitchen shop. What struck me was the intimacy of the rooms, despite their grand finishes and the beautiful light that came through the shutters of the open windows. It was an unexpected jewel of a museum totally empty of another person.

First in Napoleon's suite at the Palazzo Parisani Bezzi, is a sitting room with a ceiling finely decorated with faux marble, the upper walls finished with a frieze of ribbons and floral motifs.

The room next door where the treaty was signed has walls completely covered in the original gold damask with two lavish consoles, a large mirror and the table where the treaty was signed. The rafters have wood panel finishes with floral motifs, while the strip beneath shows biblical scenes surrounded by garlands, cherubs and scrolls. 



Next is the bedroom used by Napoleon, the walls finished in red damask and towering over the room, the massive canopied bed also in red damask.


Then there is a washroom with a Tuscan styled vault, reminiscent of a garden pavilion with lavish decorations of ribbons, flower garlands and allegorical figures. 


Beyond is the chapel with rich paintings on the walls from Biblcal scenes like Jacob's ladder shown here, and a plaster relief of VM – the Virgin Mary – the same motif as on the headboard of the bed.



Negotiations began on the morning of the 17th and Napoleon apparently, to intimidate the Italians, went so far as to theatrically tear up several pages of the treaty and knocked over an ink well – the stains of which can still be seen – and threaten he would not be able to hold back his troops should the papal delegation fail to sign.

On the afternoon of the 19th the Treaty was signed. Added to the regions that the Pope was forced to give up to France, were Avignon and Romagna.

Ironically in May 1815, eighteen years later, the Palazzo Parisani Bezzi hosted Baron Federico Bianchi, commander of the Austrian troops, who defeated Joachim Murat, brother-in-law of Bonaparte, at the fort of the La Rancia on the hills just outside Tolentino, just a few weeks before Waterloo. This has become known as the Battle of Tolentino and is seen as the first battle fought for the unification of Italy.

Odd that Napoleon gained his Italian spoils and lost most of them again at Tolentino – a little known Italian, walled medieval city in le Marche that has remained unspoilt since those times and which one enters by passing over the ponte del diavolo– the bridge of the devil – built in 1268 (and a town which also has a marvellous high-design kitchen shop called Casa Oggi)

Totally off at a tangent... but writers and mothers will understand the need to share the news announced in the Bookseller this week – Penquin has made a pre-emptive bid on my son's first YA novel. Can't stop smiling.
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/penguin-buys-hofmeyr-ya-debut.html.


↧
Search

The oldest floating ship in Africa . . .

September 27, 2013, 4:07 am
$
0
0
... is named after a vicar. Here he is, on the left: Archdeacon Chauncey Maples, with his friend and fellow missionary William Percival Johnson, in 1895 :


The year this photograph was taken was the year the Archdeacon died. He was 43. At 24 he had left the UK for Zanzibar, where he had set up schools for freed slaves. He was on his way to start work as the Bishop of Nysaland when his ship capsized on Lake Nyasa (as it was then called - Lake Malawi, now). Eighteen Africans on board survived, but Maples and a fellow missionary, Joseph Williams, drowned. He was dragged down by the weight of his cassock.


And here is the ship: SS (now MV) Chauncey Maples, four years after her launch, on Lake Malawi.


She was designed by IK Brunel's son Henry Marc Brunel, built in Lanarkshire, and then dismantled again into kit form. There were 3481 parts, weighing 150 tons, to be shipped to Lake Nyasa in vast packages, by cargo ship to Portuguese East Africa, and then towed in barges up the Zambezi. 

The last 350 miles were overland. The parts, including the 11-ton boiler, were hauled and carried by Ngoni tribesmen, at an average of 3 miles a day. 

The ship took two years to reassemble (the part numbers had been printed before galvanisation, so they were difficult to read) and was launched in June 1901. 

She cost £9000, and her job was to be a hospital ship, a missionary school, and a temporary emergency refuge from slave traders. 

During World War One she was a troop carrier and gunboat; in 1953 she was sold as a trawler. Here she is in the 1950s: 



In 1967 the Malawian government bought her, to act as a passenger and cargo ship. The lovely comedian, singer and cleverclogs Kit Hesketh Harvey, who was born and brought up in Malawi, remembers her well from the 1960s.



And then she went into a decline, laid up in Monkey Bay, with a low-down bar on the bridge. My cousin was having a drink there one night and thought, 'Wouldn't it be marvellous if . . .?'   Her motto, nb, is: 'With ordinary talents and extra-ordinary perseverance, all things are attainable' - (Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1786-1845)

So, the Malawian government has contributed, and a huge amount of money has been raised - half a million for example just from The Big Row this month, sponsored by City firm Thomas Miller. 

A recent examination found that Chauncey Maples' tough Victorian steel hull, though single -skin not the modern double-skin, is better and stronger than those of many younger boats. 

Work has begun to fit her up to do her own old work - a travelling hospital for the communities round the lake who have little or no access otherwise. 



Life expectancy in Malawi is under 50. 
-


I know this isn't the place for fundraising, so I won't give a link to that,  but it's easy to find the appeal on the web.

www.chauncymaples.org

↧

CLICK FOR HISTORY by Eleanor Updale

October 24, 2013, 5:30 pm
$
0
0


I was planning something pretty earnest for this month, but it needed a photo specially taken in London, and a change in my travel plans means it will have to wait for another time.
YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE MISSING
Photo by Adam Jones adamjones.freeservers.com
via Wikimedia Commons

My first idea for a replacement was something equally worthy.  I thought I’d give an example of how profoundly the Internet has affected the research process.  I was going to illustrate it with the story of my own quest, ten years ago, to find a fragment of a torn 17th century letter, which turned out to be in the archives of an ancient British bank (the main body of the sheet being in Australia). 
Back at the turn of the century (and even though the Internet was beginning to make our lives easier) the shoe-leather side of historical research took ages. We still had to consult card indexes, with all their vulnerability to misfiling, illegibility and loss. Sometimes, a long journey to an archive would result in disappointment: either the thing you were looking for was not there, or there was a policy that only the staff could undertake a search. They were unfailingly helpful and polite, but they were inevitably operating at a disadvantage – not really knowing what you were after, no matter how good the brief; blind to the resonance and inspiration of apparently irrelevant items; prisoners of the little summaries written by the original cataloguers, who had read the documents with the preconceptions and value judgments of their own time. 

 
Photo: Dr. Marcus Gossler, via Wikimedia Commons
Even then, some libraries would communicate only by post, and demanded written references to show that you were entitled to ask a question in the first place.
So much of that has gone.  If anything, the problem now is wading unaided through a superfluity of undersourced information.  But uniting the two halves of that letter would probably be a quick job these days...

... Or so I imagine.  I didn’t get as far as that comparatively simple task.  Instead, caught up in the egg-whisk of the search engine, I hit on the idea of seeking out a digital image of a random 17th century letter from anyone, anywhere, and unpicking it for you. So I put in some very broad search terms (digital, letter, archive, university etc) just to see what would pop out of the Internet Lucky Dip.
 
The very first search result was from Duke University in North Carolina, USA.


As it happens, there are some distinguished researchers in my period there, so I thought it was all ‘meant’, and I clicked on. And that’s when you were rescued from my plan, because what I hit on was the most wonderful archive of AmericanTV advertising.  Duke has put online thousands of television commercials created or collected by the D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles advertising agency.  They date from the 1950s to the 1980s.



 If you know my book Johnny Swanson, you will understand why my heart leapt.   
Part of the plot of that book is based on 1920s classified ads, so I was already primed to relish diving in to one of the best resources for getting a feel for the social tone of a time and place.


If ever you fancy a lost afternoon, this digital archive is the place to go. It’s the reality behind Mad Men, with all the deification of doctors, flagrant peddling of bogus science, and manipulation of maternal concern.  Everything is interesting: the scripts, the camera angles, the clothes, the narrative structure of the ads, and the extensive exposure of children’s bodies, in a purely innocent way that would be unthinkable today. As you would expect, the unintentional humour trumps any real jokes.

I would love to embed some of the films here, but there are threats about copyright, etc, so here’s the link:
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adviews/

I particularly recommend the ads for Vick’s vapour rub:


http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adviews_vicks/
Of course, my interest was entirely academic and soberly historical (ahem). Duke University is, without doubt, a highly respectable place with a serious and important archive. These advertisments are just as important historical sources as the letter I meant to look for.  But they're fun too.  If you need a bit of a diversion from real life, and don’t mind losing a huge chunk of work time, give this archive a click.

www.eleanorupdale.com
↧
↧

IN SEARCH OF NEIL AGGETT – Dianne Hofmeyr

October 25, 2013, 9:30 pm
$
0
0


Historical fact? Or Historical fiction? It depends on who tells the story. I grew up with History books so slanted toward a single viewpoint that they were almost subversive, but at the time I believed they recorded the absolute truth.

When a young doctor of 28 was found hanging in his cell while under the 90 day Detention Act which allowed prisoners to be held without recourse to a lawyer or trial, and which could be re-instated for another 90 days as soon as the first ran out…. was this suicide? Was it assisted suicide? Or was it murder? Had his interrogators tortured and killed him and made it look like suicide, or had he in fact taken his own life?

What is fact? What is fiction? Either way he died in police custody.

In Parliament in South Africa, in 1982, the Minister of Police, Louis le Grange, announces… "the detainees in police cells or in prison cells are being detained under the most favourable conditions possible… All reasonable precautions are being taken to prevent any of them from injuring themselves or from being injured in some way or from committing suicide."

Two days later, Dr Neil Aggett is found hanging from the bars of the steel grille in his cell in John Vorster Square. He has spent 70 days in detention. He is the 51st person and the first white person, to die in detention. This is fact.

In the week after his death, 90 000 workers down tools and hold a national half hour work stoppage. 15 000 workers, more than 200 nurses in uniform from Baragwanath, the black hospital (hospitals were segregated then) where Neil worked, together with his friends and family follow the coffin on its seven kilometre journey from St Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg to the cemetery of West Park. The city comes to a standstill. No funeral for any South African statesman has ever made a greater impact. This is fact.

Beverley Naidoo's book, DEATH OF AN IDEALIST, explores the journey of the sports loving schoolboy who became a doctor and then an unpaid trade union organiser whose life ended so abruptly. The photographs in the book show a bright open-faced boy staring out from the page with his tennis and cricket teams. And later photographs of him with his friends on their vegetable co-operative, growing cabbages, looking like true 70's hippies.

A friend of Neil’s in the audience at the London launch of DEATH OF AN IDEALIST, said the following:

· The foundations of a civil society are based on individual accountability for moral, ethical issues. Neil’s fundamental idealism was to do good in the world and to live a simple and generous life.

· Neil’s story reflects the capacity an individual has to mobilize others out of apathy… an apathy that is becoming more obvious in present societies.

· Prisons are a world of total institutionalization, not only for detainees but also for the police who act behind impervious walls, where even good people are capable of bad acts.

Beverley Naidoo, who herself was banned from South Africa in her early 20’s and whose first youth novel about two children who travel to the city to find their working mother, Journey to Jo’burg, was banned in South Africa – a first for a children’s novel set there – has written a poignant story of a family bewildered by their son’s death and the political furore it caused.

DEATH OF AN IDEALIST is as much the story of a remarkable young man as it is a reminder that every generation needs its idealists. 

In Beverley Naidoo’s hands Historical fiction is explored against the template of Historical fact.

↧

After All That - by Louisa Young

October 26, 2013, 4:01 pm
$
0
0
I have been much engaged with Aftermaths recently. My most recent novel was set in the First World War; it required a sequel, so what choice is there? I wanted to call the sequel After All That; the publishers didn't care for it. Sales thought it sounded like the punchline of a laddish anecdote. I'd thought it sounded like Goodbye to All That. Ah well - goodbye to all that. We're calling it The Heroes' Welcome. I'm very pleased with it.

An aftermath is a very different thing to write about to a war. How can it live up? Nothing happens, except people sit about in shock, going 'Bloody hell, did I really survive that?' It's not quite so full of - oh, peril, and action and narrative drive. Plot. (And there is a funny modern issue when writing about this period - I don't want to use anything they used in Downton Abbey. And sadly, from flu to facial reconstruction, from class war to black musicians, Julian Fellowes has swept every corner to find all the obviously interesting lines of approach. He hasn't followed them very far, but he has certainly mentioned a great many.)

In a sequel, you have to go where history forces you. You can leap, of course, but the only direction, chronologically, is forward. I decided just to sit in 1919: a quiet year (so quiet that Juliet Nicholson called her book about it The Great Silence) but one during which, quietly, a great advance was made: the step from the end of the war (goodbye to all that) to the start of the modern age, the actual twentieth century.

The advantage of a sequel, of course, is that you know your characters pretty well by now. I knew what they would want, and I wanted to give it to them. They'd had quite a hard time of it in Book 1. I knew just what I wanted for Rose, the tall thin kind dry one, who'd nursed with a passion, who put up with everyone, who was in her thirties, who had no intention of getting married thank you very much.
And so it's back to the archives . . . .

And what a pleasure it is.

Eleanor Updale wrote very amusingly the other day about researching on line; for me this time it was wading back into the joys of serendipity and misdirection in searching on paper. I was in the bowels of the Red Cross building in the City of London, metal filing cabinets, rubber bands, friendly archivist, photocopies, old blue cloaks in strong cardboard boxes, fascinating distractions everywhere you look. And what I was after: the VAD Scholarship scheme.

Here it is - the letter Rose received:



Devonshire House, London W1

Dear Madam,
On behalf of the Joint Committee of the British Red Cross and the Order of St John of Jerusalem, I have the honour to ask you to fill up the enclosed ‘Scholarship Scheme Form’ if you wish to train for definite work after demobilisation. The Joint Societies have decided to give a sum of money for scholarships and training, as a tribute to the magnificent work so generously given by V.A.D. Members during the War. 
Training will be given for those profession for which the work done by members would make them particularly suitable, such as the Health Services or Domestic Science. A preliminary list is appended with the approximate period of training. and probable salary to be gained when fully trained.
A limited number of scholarships to cover the fee and cost of living will be given to those who pass the qualifying examinations with special proficiency, but in other cases it is hoped to assist materially those members who wish to be trained for their various professions in centres all over the country.
The work of VAD members is beyond all praise, and we very much hope that they will again be leaders in important patriotic work which equally demands the best of British womanhood.

Yours faithfully
MARGARET AMPTHILL
Chairman, Joint Women’s V.A.D. Committee. 


Here is the the list of things to be taken into account:

Length of Service. - Members must have worked officially in a recognised British Unit prior to January 1917, and have continued working until their services were no longer required. 
Recommendations. - Applications for Scholarships must be forwarded with a recommendation from :-  (a) The Matron ...   ...   ...    For Nursing Members working in Military Hospitals. 
A new Medical Certificate will be necessary.   
Age Limit. - 20-40.  
Standard of Education. - Certain Scholarships will require a high and definite standard of education which will be taken into consideration. 
Applications.- Application should be made before March 31 1919. 
Further correspondence. - When a form has been filled up by a Candidate, forwarded by her Officers, and approved, further correspondence will be carried on confidentially with the Member with regard to the amount of financial assistance required and other matters.




There was the list of things she could apply for a scholarship to study, with numbers of how many applied, how many were given scholarships, and how much money was spent:

There was another story altogether, that of Eileen Price and her experience in Salonika, and her voice. How lovely that this should qualify. How right. And yet how easy it would have been, had the committee been made up of Jobsworths, to dismiss her application. (Author controls urge to race off down a different path. . .)



And here is the committee: all women. All rather interesting women. Revert to Google - yes. Very interesting. Early breastfeeding research . . .  orphans of Guernica . . .  differentiation of curricula for boys and girls . . .  maternal mortality . . .  League of Nations . . . identification of risk factors for breast cancer . . .  the first ever published epidemiological questionnaire . . .   




 And here are the actual women who won the scholarships that Rose applied for:



Later, I read in the records about the ones who pass and fail their exams, who apply for further funds for further training, and the one or two who, to the committee's great disappointment, drop out and get married. Because, and oh how easy it is to forget, a married woman did not work. That's it, ladies. Less than a hundred years ago we had to choose between our work, and our love, our children, our own family. 


They also had this sweet alphabet book, put together by a talented nurse artist: here is her self-portrait.


And here is her portrait of her colleagues.




I was so happy to sit among the papers which would allow my dear character Rose, the right sort of wench, to honour her ambitions. I was so pleased to know who would have interviewed her, on what day, at what time even! I put Eileen Price in the waiting room with her.  Rose is going to become a doctor. This is how it would have happened. It may be a small, aftermath-of the-drama kind of thing, but it is her own life. 
↧

Found in translation? Biographer Clare Mulley considers the importance of language to identity.

October 27, 2013, 5:00 pm
$
0
0
Last week my biography of Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, the first woman to work for Britain as a special agent in the Second World War, was published in Poland. I think she would have been delighted that, in a way, she was finally coming home. There is no doubt that Poland was always home for her, albeit a home that had sometimes rejected her, and one to which she could not return after the war when the country was run by the Soviet-sponsored Communist regime. By the time of her death, in 1952, this courageous and deeply patriotic woman had adopted British nationality along with her British nom-de-guerre, Christine Granville, of which, she wrote, she was 'rather proud'. However she remained, above all, a patriotic Polish émigré, switching effortlessly between Polish, English and French depending on her audience. In addition to everything else, Krystyna/Christine is a fascinating study in identity. 

Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville

Krystyna's childhood home, Trzepnica, Poland

Of course, biographies are studies in identity too, but when my book was translated into Polish this took on deeper meaning. Would the Christine that I had researched, pictured and tried to present, be the same Krystyna that emerged on the pages of the Polish edition? Would the translation release her from the English idioms that she had never completely mastered, but which she enjoyed playing with for effect, and enable readers to hear her voice more clearly, more directly? Would the 'English sense of humour' she displayed in her letters to British friends, be lost, and, looking back, what nuances had I failed to catch when translating the woman to the page in the first place. Just how defined are we by our language, our nationality, and the nationality of those who aim to describe us?

Interestingly, my Polish publisher has changed the title of the book. Instead of The Spy Who Loved, which refers to Krystyna’s deep-seated desire for adrenalin, danger, men and, above all, freedom - for her country and for herself, the Polish edition is called, The Woman-Spy: A Pole on His Majesty’s Secret Service. Pleasingly there is still a hint of Bond here (Ian Fleming was inspired by Krystyna), but the central intrigue is now not that she was a passionate woman, but that she was a Polish woman working for the Brits. 

The British cover

The Polish cover

Krystyna, and later her lover Andrzej Kowerski, were exceptional in being Polish nationals employed by the British special services during the war. Krystyna’s reasons, however, were entirely pragmatic. She was in southern Africa with her second husband, a diplomat, when Poland was invaded in September 1939. By the time she was back in Europe, Poland had fallen - but had not yet established its Government-in-Exile. Desperate to join the fight against the Nazis occupying her homeland, Krystyna stormed into the British Secret Services HQ and demanded to be taken on there and then. Her plan, soon put into action, was to ski over the perilous Carpathian mountains, sometimes in temperatures of -30 degrees, smuggling money and propaganda to the fledgling Polish resistance, and information, radio codes and microfilm back out. By the time she arrived in Budapest for her first mission, however, the Polish underground was getting organised and were determined to maintain their independence. As a result the main resistance group, the ZWZ, refused to work with Krystyna because officially she was already a British agent. This was a legitimate concern. The two countries might be allies but their interests would not always be aligned. ‘We are the Polish Underground,’ one officer put it colourfully, ‘and we do not wish the British to peek inside our underpants’.

Once in occupied Warsaw, however, Krystyna did join a fiercely independent Polish resistance group: the Musketeers. Unfortunately they would later be disbanded in disgrace; their leader assassinated for having entered into talks with the Nazis regarding the Russian threat. Krystyna would now never be accepted by Poland's exiled government. Putting her life on the line was not enough, being passionately patriotic but not especially political, she had failed to play the strategic game. In her haste to serve her country she had in some Polish eyes betrayed it.

Krystyna Skarbek, in British uniform
When the war in Europe ended, Krystyna was left stateless. She knew she could never return to Poland under the Communist regime. She may not have been aware that the British had at one point traded her name with the NKVD (precursor of the KGB), but being a pre-war Countess and war-time British special agent was enough to guarantee she would not be well-received. Yet the British, for whom she had put her life on the line for six years, the longest tour of duty of any female special agent, dismissed her with only £100. When someone in the British administration suggested she was not entitled to further deployment or citizenship because she had been fighting for Poland rather than Britain, she rightly remonstrated that this was rather 'hard', given that 'I have got into so much trouble with the Poles because I worked for the firm'. The last British memo relating to her stated, ‘she is no longer wanted’. It was not our finest moment.

Ultimately Krystyna did gain British citizenship, having at one point refused to accept honours from a country that would not give her residency. When she died, in 1952, she had been awarded the British George Medal and the OBE, along with the Croix de Guerre from France, and an array of ribbons that any General would have been proud of. Yet among her collection, now kept at the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, is one unofficial badge of honour; a silver gorget (designed to be worn at the throat) in the shape of a shield embossed with the Polish white eagle. Because she was a British agent, Krystyna has never been honoured by the Poles, and this badge was perhaps her own private statement of her loyalty to, or token of appreciation from, the country that she served if not on paper, than certainly within her heart.

Krystyna's medals. The gorget is centre top. 

Publically recognised or not, Krystyna was never an exclusively British heroine. In fact despite being honoured officially here but not in Poland, she is probably better known in Poland today. Certainly the book launch at the Warsaw Uprising Museum next week is being organised by wonderfully generous and enthusiastic Poles, and attended by the Polish President, the Foreign Minister several other cabinet members, as well as the British Ambassador. Earlier, during my research, I had also found plenty in Polish archives, and through interviewing Poles both in Britain and Poland who, or whose relatives, had known Krystyna. On the other hand there was even more information in British archives. But how did she view herself, and in what language did she choose to communicate?

Krystyna was born and brought up in an area which is now Poland, but was then part of the Russian Empire. Belonging to a family of patriotic aristocrats, she spoke Polish at home, but French at her convent school. By the time she arrived in London in 1939, via Europe and southern Africa, she spoke some English too, although French remained her default foreign language. As a result, when the British sent her to Hungary it was under the guise of being a French journalist. It was here that Krystyna met her compatriot, soul-mate and partner-in-arms, Andrzej Kowerski, and their language of love was definitely Polish; she was his affectionate 'kotek' or kitten, and he her 'kot', her cat. In Egypt she took classes in English and Italian. She now spoke English charmingly, if not always very accurately, with a lilting accent and similarly seductive turn of phrase. She would often translate idioms literally if she felt it added impact, such as when telling admirers how she loved to 'lie on the sun'. But then even her French was idiosyncratic. She was 'fluent but rather breathy', one friend noted, and her natural manner was to speak in a 'halting... panting fashion'. Always conscious of the power of language, when she felt  her Polish charm could not get her what she wanted, Krystyna would simply petition friends to write on her behalf 'in your King's English'.

All of the letters I traced in Krystyna’s own hand were written in English – although still with the odd Polish endearment and literally translated turn of phrase thrown in. 'Perks kochany' - literally 'Darling Perks' - she boldly opened one 1945 letter to Harold Perkins, her formidable SOE boss. This letter, the rest written in English, is a wonderful testimony to her courage and determination. 'May be you find out I could be useful getting people out of camps and prisons in Germany - just before they get shot', she wrote, 'I should love to do it and I like to jump out of a plane even every day'. So brave, yet she clearly also felt nervous that her English might be letting her down, adding 'Sorry for the spelling!' in a rather jarring ps.

Krystyna's letter to Harold Perkins, March 1945 (TNA, HS9/612)

It seems that Krystyna mostly thought in Polish; this was the language that shaped her and best expressed - possibly even helped to define - her feelings and ambitions. As she learnt more languages she enjoyed collecting other useful turns of phrase, 'quel potron' (what a coward) was a favourite that friends remembered, as was the pleasingly expressive: 'bloody fool'. As with her approach to friendships, it seems that Krystyna would pick and choose her language to suit her mood, intentions and audience.

Wherever I was researching, I tried to get to the truth of this extraordinary woman, but the fact is that there were many truths. Krystyna could be kind and generous, even with her life, but she could also be cruel and self-centred. She was tough and fiercely independent but also rather vulnerable. She lied, exploited and deceived, but she fought for justice, freedom and honour. Her mother was Jewish, her father was anti-Semitic; she was brought up a Catholic but converted to secure a divorce; she was a pre-war beauty queen and a highly-trained special agent fighting among men. She spoke several languages, was known under about twenty names, and she had two nationalities. It was the same Polish Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek that became the British Polish émigré Christine Granville.

The truth is that we can only understand Krystyna in the context of her country, although it often rejected her, and in the context of her times, although I would argue that in many ways she was ahead of them. In life Krystyna was informed by, and let down by, Poland and Britain, but both her birth-country and her adoptive-country seem ready to embrace and honour her now. And if the Polish translation of my biography helps to reframe and present another flavour of this complex woman to the world, then that is certainly appropriate and I am absolutely delighted.

www.claremulley.com
↧
Viewing all 2764 articles
Browse latest View live
More Pages to Explore .....
Search

Latest Images

Eco Data 4/26/24

Eco Data 4/26/24

April 25, 2024, 5:00 pm
‘Pay day every day’ may become Shangri-La Group, BPOs’ secret to happy employees

‘Pay day every day’ may become Shangri-La Group, BPOs’ secret to happy employees

April 25, 2024, 5:51 am
Nonprofit donates custom home in this East Bay city for Marine injured in...

Nonprofit donates custom home in this East Bay city for Marine injured in...

April 23, 2024, 7:00 am
New private rooms on Tokaido Shinkansen change the way we travel from Tokyo...

New private rooms on Tokaido Shinkansen change the way we travel from Tokyo...

April 22, 2024, 6:00 am
Ukraine bans military from online gambling amid addiction concerns

Ukraine bans military from online gambling amid addiction concerns

April 22, 2024, 5:17 am
ಮಂಡ್ಯದಿಂದ ಸುಮಲತಾ ದೂರ; ಹೆಚ್‌ಡಿಕೆ ಪರ ಪ್ರಚಾರಕ್ಕಿಳಿಯದ ಸಂಸದೆ –ಬರ್ತಾರೆ ನೋಡೋಣ ಎಂದ...

ಮಂಡ್ಯದಿಂದ ಸುಮಲತಾ ದೂರ; ಹೆಚ್‌ಡಿಕೆ ಪರ ಪ್ರಚಾರಕ್ಕಿಳಿಯದ ಸಂಸದೆ –ಬರ್ತಾರೆ ನೋಡೋಣ ಎಂದ...

April 20, 2024, 8:08 pm
OCBC Bank Singapore Offers Up to 2.8% p.a. Fixed Deposit Promotion from 21...

OCBC Bank Singapore Offers Up to 2.8% p.a. Fixed Deposit Promotion from 21...

April 20, 2024, 12:38 pm
National Poetry Month 2024: Maxine Starr

National Poetry Month 2024: Maxine Starr

April 19, 2024, 9:56 am
Vegan Chicken Pot Pie

Vegan Chicken Pot Pie

April 19, 2024, 9:18 am
Firefox UX: On Purpose: Collectively Defining Our Team’s Mission Statement

Firefox UX: On Purpose: Collectively Defining Our Team’s Mission Statement

April 19, 2024, 7:03 am