Now that January's month of sobriety is well and truly over and the wine intake has started to creep up again it is, perhaps, comforting to remember that the 8th March is the feast day of St Duthac, a Scottish bishop, who died in 1065. One of his miracles concerns a man who had drunk too much at a great feast and had a hangover. He sent some pork to St Duthac to ask the saint to cure his sore head. But Duthac’s disciple left the pork and a golden ring on a grave while he went off to pray. A kite, flying overhead, spotted the feast and stole both ring and pork. Duthac commanded the kite to return, took the ring from the bird, but allowed it to eat the pork as a reward for its obedience and the man’s hangover was cured.

If you don’t have local saint you can call upon to cure the after-effects of a party, there are a few other
remedies you could try. Gervase Marham,writing in 1611, said that if you didn’t want to get drunk, you

Field Cabbage or Colewort

should mix powdered betony and colewort and swallow as much of the mixture every morning 'that will lie upon a sixpence'. I’m not sure if this lessened the effects of alcohol or simply made you too queasy to drink.

Last summer I took a chatty ride down the Grand Canal in the company of Michael Portillo and a television crew. We were filming an episode of Great Continental Railway Journeys in which Mr Portillo investigated Europe in 1913, the last year of the old world and its ways before the apocalypse of the Great War. The programme was screened again recently, reminding me of the other journey I made in the weeks before the filming, the one around my own library.

I’d been asked to prepare information on how a British visitor/expatriate in Venice would have found the city in those final months of peace. The closest to that time that I had written was 1901, the period of my children’s novel, The Mourning Emporium.

I’ve said before that there are many Venices – one for each epoch of her history. While her built environment has not changed drastically since the sixteenth century, each of her walls holds successive layers of history, as a tree’s rings express its age.

So Venice in 1913 was a whole new place for me to explore.

I was surprised to find quite how many well-known Britons were living on the Grand Canal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed some of their most English of names had become attached to the sonorous roll call of palazzo titles. This is not to say that coming to Venice was like coming home for the British traveller, but there was much here that resonated with British notions of  Empire, Literature and Art. Venice was already imprinted on the traveller's mind via Byron, Browning, Wordsworth, Ruskin, Arthur Symons and many others.

In London, an image of la Serenissima had been etched into the imaginations of thousands who flocked to see the illuminated acquatic spectacular Venice, The Bride of the Sea, at Olympia.


On the eve of the Great War, Venice was still a romantic destination. 'Il turismo di massa' kept Venice on any European itinerary. The Futurists had recently staged a protest - denouncing the old- fashioned romantic view of Venice. In handbills launched in fluttering thousands from the clock tower in July 1910, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti urged the Venetians to raise themselves to Modernity. The first thing they had to do was  'murder the moonlight':

We repudiate the old Venice, enfeebled and undone by centuries of worldly pleasure,though we too once loved and possessed it in a great nostalgic dream.
We repudiate the Venice of foreigners, a market for counterfeiting antiquarians, a magnet of snobbery and universal imbecility, a bed whose bottom has been staved in by caravans of lovers, the bejeweled hip-bath of cosmopolitan courtesans,the cloaca maxima of passéism.
We want to cure and heal this putrefying city, this magnificent sore from the past. We want to reanimate and ennoble the Venetian people, fallen from their ancient grandeur, drugged by the morphine of nauseating cowardice and debased by the habit of shady business.
We want to prepare the birth of an industrial and military Venice that can dominate the Adriatic Sea, that great Italian lake.
Let us hasten to fill in its little reeking canals with the ruins from its leprous and crumbling palaces.
Let us burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for cretins, and raise to the heavens the imposing geometry of metal bridges and factories plumed with smoke, to abolish the cascading curves of the old architecture.

It was a masterpiece of oratory, but loving couples were not going to be denied their gondolas, their kisses on bridges, their cascading curves and their moonlit adventures.

Meanwhile  there were signs of a different kind of doom approaching. Indeed Italy herself had been at war with Turkey over Libya between 1911 and 1912. It was the Italians who had pioneered the idea of aerial bombardment: there was no reason to expect that the Austro-Hungarian airforce would spare Venice, Italy's main naval base in the Adriatic. Even before the advent of aeroplanes, Austrians had not scrupled to bombard Venice with canon balls during revolution and siege of 1848-9.

So those travellers arriving in 1913 might have been among the last to see San Marco's basilica in its glory. Soon the portals would be walled up with sandbags and the four famous horses packed up and sent to Rome for safekeeping.

Meanwhile, as a kind of omen of what was to come, dancing on the Lido proved a fatally explosive experience for one young woman.

C'était au Lido, lieu de plaisir recherché pour ses fêtes et où l'on dansait avec l'ardeurs et la fougue particulières à ces bals vénitiens. Soudain, un orage éclate, brusque, rapide, et un éclair zèbre le jardin où les danseurs allaient interrompre leur valse : la foudre tombe et frappe une charmante jeune fille qui s'affaisse, foudroyée, sur la poitrine de son danseur. Celui-ci n'éprouva qu'une sorte secousse et laissa glisser le corps de la jeune fille, morte sans un cri sans un geste.

photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

As the Great Continental Railway programme was based on the train network in 1913, my research initially focussed on Santa Lucia station.

In that year, the railway itself was still a relative newcomer in an antique city. The 222 arches of the railway bridge over the lagoon were built by Venice’s Austrian occupiers between 1842. The station opened 1846. (The current building dates from 1955).

For many, the railway represented a kind of psychological unseaming of Venice, a triumph of Teutonic efficiency over romantic isolation. She had been a virgin city, unbreached by any enemy invasion for 1400 years. (Napoleon was permitted to stroll in, by negotiation).

I don’t think it is surprising that two years after the railway opened the Venetians rose up in revolt against the Austrians, who besieged and bombarded the city for sixteen months, and were thereby forced to destroy parts of their own bridge. Below is Vittorio Emanuele Bressanin's painting of the Austrians bombarding the railway bridge, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons



Ruskin in 1843 - before the Railway. Photogravure of lost watercolour  after George Richmond. Wikimedia Commons

John Ruskin hated the bridge that interrupted the serenity of la Serenissima. He felt it reduced Venice to the state of a British industrial slum. He was working on the second and third volumes of his Stones of Venice when he first beheld its incursion. And Ruskin always saw Venice as a warning for the British Empire.

In The Stones of Venice, Volume I, Ch. Xxx. Ruskin approaches Venice gondola hired in Mestre: he does not hold back his feelings. He's ever the master of the devastating short sentence, strategically placed.

The silver beak cleaves [the water] fast; it widens: the rank grass of the banks sinks lower, and lower, and at last dies in tawny knots along an expanse of weedy short. Over it, on the right, but a few years back, we might have seen the lagoon stretching to the horizon, and the warm southern sky bending over Malamocco to the sea. Now we can see nothing but what seems a low and monotonous dockyard wall, with flat arches to let the tide through it; this is the railroad bridge, conspicuous above all things. But at the end of those dismal arches there rises, out of the wide water, a straggling line of low and confused buildings, which, but for the many towers which are mingled among them, might be the suburbs of an English manufacturing town. Four of five domes, pale, and apparently at a greater distance, rise over the centre of the line; but the object which first catches the eye is a sullen cloud of black smoke brooding over the northern half of it, and which issues from the belfry of a church.

It is Venice.

Indeed the British train traveller would have arrived in a part of Venice already devastated by Napoleon, who had suppressed the convent and church of Corpus Domini, the original church of Santa Lucia and other buildings here in his cull of Venetian churches between 1806 and 1810. here is how the area around the station looked in 1650 when Matthaeus Merian drew his map.

On October 24th, 1915, a full moon guided a squadron of Austrian planes into Venice. They circled for two terrifying hours before releasing their bombs. The intended target was the railway station, but it was the Scalzi church that took the punishment. A chilling photograph of the damage can be seen here. The new ceiling is a work on canvas by Hector Tito (1859-1941).

The Bridge of the Scalzi already existed in 1913, but not in the sterile curve of marble we see today. That bridge dates only as far back as 1934, so our tourists would have seen an iron construction dating from 1858 – 60, by Alfred Neville, a British engineer, who was also the author of a flat iron bridge at the Accademia. It is thought that this bridge too was in the sights of the Austrian bombers. It was the Scalzi's misfortune to be exactly in between the bridge and the railway station.

But arriving at the station back in 1913, the traveller would emerge blinking into a scene straight out of a Canaletto painting, but not nearly as serene or silent. The air would have rung with the importuning of the gondoliers, the facchini (porters) and gransieri (the men who hooked the boats and held them steady). There would have been a few motor boats, a couple of omnibus boats, and the steam ferries still known vaporetti, which started in 1881.

old style vaporetto with gondola

The vaporetto represented good value for the Edwardian traveller on a budget. E.V, Lucas, writing in 1914, noted joyously that the Grand Canal was bargain: ‘For fifteen centimes one may travel its whole length in a steamboat, and back again for another fifteen, and there is no more interesting half-hour's voyage in the world.’ That same journey now costs 7 euros.' Even then, however, there were strikes. Lucas noted that a vaporetto strike in April 1914 turned the gondoliers into ‘plutocrats’

Augustus Hare, another writer of the pre-war period, claimed that two sets of people ought always to live in Venice: those who have heart complaints and those who are afraid of horses; the peaceful floating gondola life would be so suited to them

Whether heart-sufferers or equinophobics, I am fairly sure that my visitors to Venice in 1913 would have been readers. The long journey through the Alps and across the plains of the Veneto would have given them plenty of time to catch up with their reading.

So, crammed in their valises, would have been the Venetian poems of Byron and Browning. They would have Augustus Hare’s jaunty little travel guide ; also, if they were lucky, William Dean Howells’s splendid Venetian Life. The more learned would have read the readable parts of John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. They might have read the Wilkie Collins story, 'The Haunted Hotel'. They would have been titillated by Henry James’ Venetian novels, The Aspern Papers (1888) and The Wings of a Dove (1902).

There would not yet have been suicide/misery-tourists, as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, published in its original German in 1912, would not be available in English until 1925. Nor would they have access yet to the manuscript that would become the most notorious roman a clef about the English expatriate scene in Venice, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, by the self-styled Baron Corvo. Its publication did not take place until 1934, when all the protagonists were safely dead.

But if they arrived in October 1913, the British tourists would have heard about the redoubtable writer’s somewhat shabby death, which took place in Palazzo Marcello, not far from the station and on the same side of the canal: just to the right of the Vendramin Calergi palazzo where Wagner had died in 1883, his body bundled into a gondola by night and taken to the station for its final journey to Bayreuth.




Palazzo Vendramin Calergi left and Palazzo Marcello at right

Baron Corvo was in reality simply Frederick Rolfe, an Englishman who had spent the last six years of his life in Venice thoroughly upsetting the entire British community here.

He was a writer, a painter, an active practitioner of ‘Greek Love’, a photographer, a mild pornographer, but above all possibly the most ungrateful spongers who ever lived, who wound his way like a tapeworm into the heart of anyone who befriended him and then harassed them with toxic letters demanding cash, sometimes signed 'Your Faithful Enemy'. As he told one of these generous enemies, in Venice Rolfe was principally engaged in dying as slowly and publically and annoyingly as possible. For several years he lived pretty much on fury and paranoia alone. He was reduced to starving, to living on a boat, where he believed that the crabs and rats would eat him alive. But in fact he died in the Palazzo Marcello, apparently of a heart attack that came on while he was removing his boots. Such an unromantic end would have infuriated him. He is buried on the cemetery island of San Michele.

Frederick Rolfe dressed up as a priest in 1886 photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

While he was busy dying, Rolfe amused himself with scribbling the book that would be published as The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. Nicholas Crabbe, the protagonist, rescues a young girl from an earthquake in Messina and rather improbably brings her to Venice where she becomes his private gondolier, dressed as a boy – a cross-dressing veil that enabled Rolfe to write passionately of his homosexual proclivities. Soon the girl is speaking and eating Venetian, and saves the acerbic Crabbe from himself.

Nothing could save the expatriate British in Venice from Crabbe’s/Corvo’s vicious pen, however. Many of them are mercilessly parodied in the book.

In 1913, as now, the British tourists would not have had to wait long for retail opportunities in Venice. A large number of palazzi on the grand canal were antique shops at that point … selling off Venice’s heritage bit by bit, partly as a result of awful restorations that were more like pillaging. Frescoes and mouldings were literally scraped off the walls.

The Fondaco dei Turchi is where the cultured British tourist would have gone for a little light history. Between 1890 and 1920, this old Turkish foundation housed the core of the city’s museum, the Correr collections. Painfully cultured tourists would also go to shake their heads knowingly and complain about the place. One of the great scandals of the late 19th century was the brutal over-restoration of the fondaco, ‘overpristinated’ as the Venetians put it, between 1860 and 80.


E.V. Lucas found the museum a dismal duty: 'It is necessary to visit the collections preserved here, but I cannot promise any feelings of exultation among them. …Since none of the exhibits have descriptive labels (not even the pictures), and since the only custodians are apparently retired and utterly dejected gondoliers, the visitor's spirits steadily fall.'

At left, the 18th century Ca’ Gussoni-Grimani-della Vida, near San Felice, can be distinguished by its stripy stemma. British historian and famous Venice obsessive Rawdon Brown had been its proprietor  – having ruined himself by trying to restore the haunted Ca’ Dario further up the canal. He had bought the Dario for £480 in 1838, and then moved to Palazzo Businello and finally ended up the Gussoni in 1852, where he stayed till he died in 1883. His life work was the Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, ambassadorial correspondence, edited diaries of Marin Sanudo. The rest of the time he applied himself as a diligent 'fixer' for the expat community, finding them palaces to buy or rent and facilitating introductions to the good and great.  In fact Venice of the 19th and early twentieth centuries was dominated by two gentlemen called Brown. Horatio Brown (no relation to Rawdon) was to take over much of his research and social function.

Ca' Pesaro in 1900 from Brooklyn Museum Archives, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

At right is the florid Ca’ Pesaro, started by Baldassare Longhena in the 17th century. Modern Art was just dawning as a concept at the turn of the twentieth century. This palazzo was donated to the city by the Duchessa Felicita’ Bevilacqua La Masa. It became the first modern art museum in Venice, in 1902 – seven years after the first biennale of art in the Giardini (which Napoleon had destroyed several more convents and churches to create). Lucas described the museum as ‘the Tate Gallery of Venice’. He also noted, ‘I have been absolutely alone in this building, save for the custodians. The Venetian can live very easily without picture galleries, ancient or modern.’





At left, at the turning into Apostoli canal is a palace called Smith, or, to be precise, the Ca’ Balbi Smith Mangilli Valmarana. In this palazzo lived the British reason that Venice was drained of Canalettos. To this day, scandalously, there are only two Canaletto paintings left in the city, both at Ca’ Rezzonico. Consul Joseph Smith, friend of Casanova, died here in 1770, having extensively remodelled the place to suit his personal grandeur. In his time, Joseph Smith’s palazzo had been an essential place to visit on any British Grand Tour. He was a wheeler art dealer, and agented for Canaletto, even bringing him to London in 1746 for ten years.

Still on the left, is Ca’ d’Oro, the oldest gothic palazzo on the Grand Canal, dating from the 1430s. Another big 19th century vandalism scandal was what the ballerina Marie Taglioni did to mutilate the inside of this palazzo in the name of renovation, removing the gothic stairway from the inner
courtyard and the balconies that looked over it. The stairway was reconstructed in the early 20th century.

The Rialto was the first bridge in Venice and the only one for centuries. Originally a pontoon in the 12th century, then a wooden bridge in 1255, it was burned by Baiamonte Tiepolo in the 1310 conspiracy that led to the creation of the Council of Ten. The next one collapsed under excited wedding crowds in 1444 and another one in 1524. Eventually a stone bridge built in 1591. Below is watercolour of it by Maurice Prendergast, painted in 1911 or 1912, and capturing all its pre-war gaiety.

painting courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

I always think of William Beckford here, a notable 18th century English eccentric who wrote the comic gothic masterpiece, Vathek, which was Byron’s favourite book. Contains a cannibal queen and a monstrous camel called Alboufaki. Cultivated readers would have been familiar with William Beckford’s Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents, with its descriptions of languid noblemen arriving here at the market at dawn, in their black robes, after a night of gambling and debauchery. They came to buy grapes to refresh their jaded palates before going home to mourn their losses and sleep the whole day.

Under the bridge, and a few palazzi up on the right, the sixteenth century Palazzo Coccina Tiepolo Papadopoli was one of the few noble houses open for visitors in 1914. Lucas: ‘the efficient and discreet French major-domo is less formidable to several visitors than to one. The principal attraction of the Papadopoli Palace is two carnival pictures by Tiepolo; but the visitor is also shown room after room, sumptuous and unliveable in, with signed photographs of crowned heads on ormolu tables’. Photographs of the palazzo during this period still exist and confirm Lucas’s description. However, I take exception to Lucas’s jibe of ‘unliveable’ as it is the Venetian home of the Irish protagonists of my forthcoming novel, The True & Splendid History of The Harristown Sisters.



Henry Layard courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Also on the right is the rather austere Ca’ Cappello Layard. Archaeologist Sir Henry Layard was hailed as ‘the man who made the Bible true’. He had excavated Nimrud and Ninevah, delivering the treasures of ancient Mesopotamia to Britain. Rawdon Brown found the palazzo for Sir Henry and Lady Enid in 1874. After serving as a diplomat in Constantinople, Sir Henry retired to Venice with his wife in 1880, moving into Ca’ Cappello in 1883 following a massive restoration They began to amass an astonishing collection of art. They owned Gentile Bellini’s superb portrait of Sultan Mehmet II which used to have a room to itself, which it shared with a parrot . They also works by Carpaccio and Giovanni Bellini, all of which were eventually left to the National Gallery in London.
The Layards were prime movers in expatriate British society. They held formal receptions every Tuesday and a musical soiree every Friday, hosting visiting royalty, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and luminaries like John Ruskin. Food served by gondoliers in gold sashes, but was said to be perfectly horrible.

The house was nicknamed ‘The Refrigerator’ because Lady Enid insisted on such frigid formality in everything. Even her picnics on the Lido were served in six courses by white-gloved servants. For 51 years, Lady Enid wrote regularly in her journal. Her 8000 page diary includes over 14,000 entries. The Venetian chapters are littered with the names of all the most illustrious expatriates and foreign visitors of the time.

Henry Layard had helped revive the glass trade in Murano along with the Salviati family. But his big preoccupation was setting up the English church in Venice

He died in 1894. In November 1913, Lady Enid Layard was just one year dead. Up until the end, she was involved in charities including setting up the Cosmopolitan Hospital for English Sailors on Giudecca. She was one of many people who tried to help Baron Corvo. Characteristically, he repaid her by parodying her as Lady Pash in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole.

As the canal curves into the 'volta' we see the 1th century Ca’ Giustinian. Wagner had written Act II of Tristan and Isolde there. It became a business school in 1868 and is now the principal seat of Venice’s university. This etching shows something much missed in Venice today: the plentiful striped awnings on the boats and terraces of the city.

The Gaudi-esque Chimneys of the Palazzo Fortuny are visible from the canal at this point. The Spanish artist Mariano Fortuny came to Venice in 1899. His figure-caressing silk clothes, which rippled like the Grand Canal, were to make him famous. Only the richest of British tourists could afford his creations however. His famous Delphos gown, created in 1907, and inspired by the chiton of ancient Greece, was far beyond the purses of ordinary tourists. The pictured one is available to buy here  - price on request.). You’d also need a certain amount of self-confidence and daring to dress in the Delphos: it was designed to be worn without underwear. Proust was a great enthusiast of Fortuny’s sumptuous dresses, comparing them to musical harmonies. He must have seen them both in Paris and during his visits to Venice, where his itineraries followed those of his literary hero, John Ruskin. After the war, Fortuny would purchase as site on the island of Giudecca in Venice from Giancarlo Stucky, a close friend and owner of the wheat mill next door (now the Hilton Hotel). The new Fortuny factory occupied a space once occupied by yet another convent closed down by Napoleon.

Ca' Viaro Martinengo Volpi

Although the phoenix of the Ca’ Viaro Martinengo Volpi is centuries old, I feel it constitutes a kind of stone premonition.

One of the palazzo’s century owners, Count Giuseppe Volpi, brought electricity to Venice in 1905. Volpi is a controversial figure. He dropped out of university and went east to seek his fortune. He became rich exporting tobacco from Montenegro, investing his money in the nascent electricity business. On the eve of the Great War, Volpi was busy negotiating an end to Italy’s own war with Turkey. He would later found the Venice Film Festival and serve as Italy’s finance minister. He escaped prosecution for collaboration with Mussolini’s regime, and died in 1947.

On the left nearby we see the rather undistinguished Ca’ Benzon, salon of Marina Querini Benzon, where Byron was a frequent guest. She was a scandalous old woman, sometimes known as el Fumeto, the steamy one, because she would walk around with hot polenta between her breasts to keep warm. When Napoleon had subsumed Venice into his Regno Italia, she was in San Marco wearing an indecent Athenian petticoat slit to the thigh, dancing around the liberty tree and pyre on which they burned the Golden Book, the charter of all Venice’s noblemen. But her most memorable claim to fame was her alleged role as Lamberti’s heroine in the song ‘La Biondina in Gondola’, in which a man watches a woman seductively falling asleep.

There were rumours that Byron slept with her, despite a large age difference. From here and from the other salon, of Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi, the poet would swim home from receptions in full evening dress, holding a torch aloft. He met the last female love of his life at one of their salons: Teresa Guiccioli.


Speaking of Byron, just a little further up on our left are the four Mocenigo palazzi. Byron came to live in one the middle pair in 1818 and stayed till 1819. For Byron’s exploits in Venice, see my earlier blog The Goes the Neighbourhood. Enough said.

Almost enough said. It behoves me to explain that Venice invented sexual tourism, and has always drawn the playboys of the western world. John Day described it as ‘the best flesh-shambles in Italy’. Thomas Coryat, the British traveller, deemed Venice in 1611 a city of 20,000 women so loose that they ‘opened their quivers to every arrow’. Her upper-class prostitutes were like geishas: educated and pampered. Some were kept by a club of noblemen, each having his own appointed evening. Others were honoured – Veronica Franco had her books of poetry and letters published. Even humbler prostitutes were treated with certain respect, as merchants of their own persons. Girl orphans had become one of the lucrative tourist spectacles of Venice, performing in choirs and orchestras.

The gondolas (described by one writer as ‘knowing swans’) used to have little enclosures – felze– for added privacy – all the better to facilitate a Venetian tradition of adultery that favoured the wives.

Leo Rauth, Venezianisches Nocturno,  1910 Wikimedia Commons

By the Venetian system, each noble woman had her legal, dynastic husband (to ignore her) and also an acknowledged lover (cavalier servente or cicisbeo) to pay her attention, as described by Byron in his Don Juan. The poet was a prime beneficiary of the system himself. All his cohabiting conquests in Venice were married women: the draper’s wife Marianna Segati, the baker’s wife Margherita Cogni and the count’s wife Teresa Guiccioli. In order to ensure the legitimacy of the first born son, women were faithful to their husbands for the first year. This state of purity was indicated by a row of pearls at the throat. Thereafter, she might choose her own lover. The arrangement, like the city, was both romantic and practical, as Giorgio Baffo, Casanova’s godfather, put it:

The professional whore
Is an over-used item,
But someone else’s wife
Is a private resource.

One of the least endearing things and strangest things about Byron – a compulsive dieter himself – was the fact that he could not stand to watch a woman eat. He also despised women writers: ‘Of all bitches alive or dead a scribbling woman is the most canine’. I suppose he never forgave Mary Shelley for trouncing him so comprehensively in the art of ghost stories during a wet summer at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816. Mary’s story would be published as Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818. Byron did, however, think well of Italian women in general. He thought they were the best kissers in the world, because they practised so often on religious icons.

At this point I am going to leave this tour of the Grand Canal, to be continued in my next History Girls blog. To come: Casanova, Browning's parrot Jacko, The Lady with the tame cheetahs and Cole Porter.

I have been distracted by a skype conversation with another History Girl in which we were arguing about which of our male characters would have been a desirable lover. As Byron, in my humble opinion, could not possibly have been, it is seemly to draw a veil at this point.



Michelle Lovric’s website

Great Continental Railway Journeys

The True & Splendid History of The Harristown Sisters will be published by Bloomsbury on June 5th 2014

Unattributed photos are by the author or her sister, Jenny Lovric. Venetian etchings and ephemera from the author's own collection.

Vaslav Nijinsky (1889/90-1950) & Tamara Karsavina (1885-1978) in 'Le Spectre de la Rose', 1911[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Alina Cojocaru and Vadim Muntagirov  in 'Le Corsaire', English National Ballet, October 2013 by ASH (English National Ballet) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

Etching of Anna Pavlova (1881-1931) by Ernst Oppler [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Isadora Duncan (1878-1927) Photograph by Arnold Genthe Library of Congress, [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons

'Two Dancers Entering the Stage' by Edgar Degas (1834-1917)  Harvard Art Museum/Fogg Museum  [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Ancient Greek funerary stele of a female dancer Museo archeologico regionale, Palermo Photograph by Giovanni Dall'Orto (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

(N.B. I would like to make clear that in the discussion above, and the photographs chosen, I am in no way criticising individual present-day dancers - I am only trying to demonstrate the general point.)

Katherine Parr NPG

An unsung woman like Dot

Tanya Landman's brand new novel is a tour de force. The voice of Charley - born Charlotte - does not waver, and the story of a girl from slave to freedom via the American Civil War and service in one of the black regiments of of the American Army as a 'Buffalo Solider' in the 19th century Indian Wars, pulls no punches.

The story of the Buffalo soldiers, African Americans who fought in segregated regiments of the American army in the 19th century is one I first heard about courtesy of Bob Marley.  I am not sure how well known this story is in the UK. For many of us the American West is a white country and it's important that Tanya Landman has shone a light on other histories. Landman  knows her stuff, Apache, her earlier Carnegie shortlisted  novel was also set in the mid century West  and covers similar territory.

It also features a rather wonderful walk on by Bill Cody, who I have to admit is one of my favourite characters. The stories of the cottage hospital at Llandudno full to the brim with Indian braves from his Wild West show, laid low with Welsh flu contracted on the long ride from Dolgellau to Portmadoc has always been one of my favourites.

Even though this is not really a slave narrative - the concerns at the heart of the book, for me were more to do with the mistreatment of the American Indians, and Charley's eventual realisation that she had been lied to again by her white masters, the people she was fighting and killing and policing were no monsters. That she was on the wrong side. That even when there was some kindness shown by those in power, there was always a cost and it was always involved compromise.

There's an awful lot of death and destruction and pain in this book. Rape and lynching and senseless violence in every form. It is in no way an easy read, and although there are moments of snatched love and humour and comradeship, Charley rides and shoots her way through life with tightly gritted teeth, and as everyone she  loves is killed. Charley manages to survive, and thankfully find her own freedom, even as she is painted out of her country's  history.

There's loads that drew me to this book, I've always had an itch for American 19th century history and Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee is one of my top non fiction reads (I can't say favourite, it is too sad).  America's history of taking care of it's indigenous peoples is no better or worse than that other ex British colony, Australia, where the local people were hunted down for sport. And there are parallels between the way both the Native Americans - Indians in Landman's book - and the black population are lied to, betrayed and ultimately dispatched in a variety of cruel and unusual ways.

Charley does, thank heavens find some peace by the end of the book. I do think it might well have been unbearable without it. If this book doesn't find itself on the awards lists next year my hat (and I would like it to be one of those Vivienne Westwood monster western hats as worn by Pharell) will be eaten.

On more thing. Another reason I wanted to read this book was that Charley is based on a real African American woman; Catherine Williams who enlisted and served as a man, William Cather.  And this resonates rather well with my own story in Daughters of Time, set during the Crimea and featuring Mary Seacole and her British Hotel.

Buffalo Soldier is out on April 3rd

Catherine

Catherine's latest book is Sawbones, an 18th century forensic murder mystery.

by Marie-Louise Jensen

The History Girls' visit to Aphra Behn's tomb the week before last was a deeply moving experience. I hadn't quite anticipated how emotional I would find it. But to stand there and see her epitaph in the great Abbey itself brought it home to me just how revered she was in her own lifetime to merit such a prestigious resting place.

We were there to celebrate the launch of Daughters of Time, but I'm writing about that separately on the 19th March on Serendipity Reviews. What I wanted to muse upon today is why and how Aphra Behn has come to be so largely forgotten in the literary canon?

At school I was taught that the first 'real' novels in the English language were Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders and we duly read and discussed them. Our (female) English teacher didn't mention Mrs Behn's Oroonoko to us nor any of the other earlier candidates to this title. We certainly didn't read Oroonoko.

Neither did we read anything by her on our A-level exam syllabus. Not by her nor any other works by a woman.
Is there any reason why Mrs Behn's works have been excluded from the works that are studied or that do the rounds on those dreadful lists of '100 books you should have read'?
Her plays were of the Restoration era and it's fair to say that few of her contemporaries have made it onto such lists either - be they male or female. But then many were so trivial, that they scarcely merit inclusion. Not so Aphra Behn's plays. The Rover, for example, which I refer to in The Girl in the Mask, deals with complex issues of love, marriage, prostitution. That is to say the position of women in society. Surely an enduringly important theme? Oh...maybe not when white, middle-class men are selecting exam texts.
And Oroonoko? Why was that less worthy of our attention as a class of eager 17 year old students (mainly girls) than Moll Flanders? That decision cannot possibly have been based on a lack of important themes. Oroonoko examines the issue of slavery while Moll Flanders is largely an entertaining romp, and a male view of a woman if I ever saw one.

I can only assume that Behn's work had been so thoroughly forgotten and buried under the groaning weight of male scholarship by then that my English teacher didn't even know about her. Or that with her too, she was sticking firmly to the notion that 'the boys wouldn't like her'. That was her reasoning behind choosing ten out of ten books by men and she told me so quite openly when I begged to study Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte as a lightening of the load of Milton, Lawrence, Auden, Muir, Dickens, Chaucer etc. (It was exactly the same at university where I was honestly told there were no books worth reading by women in German).

How much good it would have done our self-esteem to have read Aphra Behn at school - and other books by women too - and to be able to look up to women pioneering in and excelling at writing centuries before we were born. And how I would like to think things had changed since my far-off school days, but I'm certain that they haven't changed one bit.
How do I know? Because when I offer author visits to schools with my 'girl' books, I'm almost invariably told thank you, but no, the boys in the school wouldn't be interested.
We have a long, long way still to go.
I feel deeply concerned for the girls out there. I really hope lots of them find Daughters of Time and discover that there have been women writers, women warriors, powerful queens, leaders, devotees, campaigners and thinkers throughout history, no matter what anyone tells them. And I hope many more women visit Aphra Behn's tomb in future and understand the trail that she blazed for us.

It will not have escaped your notice that this year is the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. There have already been masses of documentaries, dramas, articles and books to mark the event - one particularly interesting series, Britain's Great War, came from Jeremy Paxman. And there's still some time to go before we reach 28th July, when the war actually began.

Kaiser Wilhelm

What's fascinating to me is that after a hundred years, historians are re-evaluating how it came to happen. It was never easy to understand. Why should the assassination of an obscure Austrian archduke have led to such a vast and savage cataclysm? Well, it was all to do with alliances, we were told. That was what I used to tell children too, back in the day when I was an English teacher and taught the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. In fact, it was even more complicated than it used to appear. Like most things, the way events unfolded had much to do with personalities. Take Kaiser Wilhelm, for example. He was a child born with a withered arm whom his mother, one of Queen Victoria's daughters, found difficult to love. According to a recent documentary about him and his two cousins, King George V of England and Nicholas, last Czar of Russia, Wilhelm was always the one who didn't fit in, the one who nobody really liked. When it came to negotiating with Russia and England, the relationships and antipathies between these three cousins must have played a part. Fascinating ground for a novelist to explore.

But I am allowing myself to be distracted. The divisive figure I'm intending to write about isn't Kaiser Bill, it's Jeremy Paxman. Last Thursday, Wellington School hosted a prestigious conference at Westminster. The subject was Schools and the Great War Centenary, and the speakers included, as well as a number of eminent historians, Michael Morpurgo and Ian Hislop (who recently co-wrote an excellent TV drama about The Wipers Times).

According to a report in The Times on Friday ( I can't provide a link because access to The Times online is not free), Paxman used the occasion to weigh into schools, which, he apparently said, are 'relying too much on poetry when introducing pupils to the realities of the First World War.' He went on: 'It seems to me poetry is part of the problem of how we teach World War One... All that is taught is about the pointless sacrifice. It's not helpful to see the whole thing through the eyes of poetry... Luxuriating in the horror of the thing really won't do and doesn't set out to answer really interesting questions.'

Please note: I am relying on the report in The Times. I wasn't there. I emphasise this to be clear that I'm very aware, as we all are on this blog, that it's important to get your facts right.

Now, as I said before, I used to teach war poetry. Before this, I studied it at school. I was immensely moved by it - by its beauty, by the pity of it, and because for the first time, through poems like Dulce Et Decorum Est and Strange Meeting, I could really see how the form of the poetry was indispensable to the meaning. Because it seized my imagination, I went on to read more about the war. And when I was teaching, I saw the same poems have a very similar effect on the wide range of pupils that I taught. More than anything except, perhaps, Of Mice And Men, reading these poems created a still and silent classroom. They spoke to the students in the same way that they had spoken to me.


As well as I could, I put them into context. I talked to the students about the causes and the nature of this particular war. (And yes, I even showed them the last episode of Blackadder. I admit it, and I don't regret it, because the effect of that last scene was electrifying.) But - here's the thing, Mr Paxman: as an English teacher, my priority was not to teach them about the war. There was another department that did that - the history department. Are you forgetting about the historians? You shouldn't. Without their teaching, none of those eminent historians at the conference would have been inspired to go on and study history.

So - please. Just think it through a little. 'Poetry is no way to teach the Great War' might make a nice soundbite. But your argument is based on a false premiss: poetry is not the way the Great War is taught - it's only a small part of it. You don't need to take inaccurate shots at teachers to make an interesting argument - they are already targets for flak from all quarters quite often enough.

Michael Morpurgo, of course, had a different approach. 'Stories engaged pupils in a way that history books sometimes failed to do, he said.' (The Times)

Just one last thought before I leave the subject of TV programmes about the war. Last night, interviews were broadcast with veteran soldiers from all sides. The interviews were offcuts from the 1964 landmark series, The Great War. Now, I remember sitting down with my whole family to watch that. It was horrifying and mesmerising.

And yet, my grandfather was himself a veteran. I knew he had fought in France. I was thirteen. Why did it never occur to me to go and ask him about his experiences? It's not always easy to explain the things we do, is it - or the things we don't do.

Rachel Short, an organisational psychologist says that the key aspects of “game changers” were their intellectual independence, the fact that they were socially eclectic and that their motivation was guided by initiative, resilience and deep-rooted self-belief. Unsurprisingly, the words “difficult” and “bossy” came up again.(Not the word "cranky", though that might fit too.) It seems that bossy girls and women – and you will have your own favourite heroines– are often those who make things happen, however subtlyor noticeably they manage it. Perhaps “bossy” is a kind of compliment, after all?

Shell cone from Western Front

We welcome to the blog today Tansy Rayner Roberts, to tell us more about the Cranky Ladies of History blog tour and crowdfunding project. Here she introduces us to a forgotten Roman poet.


Tansy is a fantasy author with a PhD in Classics who lives with her partner and two daughters in Tasmania, is one of the three voices of the Hugo-nominated Galactic Suburbia podcast, and won a Hugo for her fan writing in 2013. She also write crime fiction as Livia Day and is the co-editor of the forthcoming FableCroft Publishing anthology Cranky Ladies of History.

Tansy blogs at tansyrr.com and you can also find her on Twitter.





                                                            Sulpicia in her own words

On the whole, history tends to disapprove of women being cranky. Or outspoken. Or in anyway… unsatisfied with their lot in life beyond the roles of mother, daughter, wife.
When I was studying Ancient Rome, it was definitely noticeable that all the women we read about fell into one of two categories: the modest, virtuous paragons of womanly perfection, and the wicked vixens who were out to destroy men.

There really was not a lot of nuance to be found. Ambition, pride and power were all female vices, even though they were considered manly virtues.

The Romans even invented the word ‘virago’ meaning ‘woman who acts like a man’ as a grave insult.

There were times when studying the women of Ancient Rome did rather affect my morale.

The worst part of it was the words. There are almost no words left to us which were written by Roman women. It’s not that Roman women were not educated - many of them were, among the upper classes. But no one saved their words. No one thought they were worth saving.

The most ‘outspoken’ Roman woman we have is a girl poet, Sulpicia, whose lines were saved by the happy accident of being written on the back of a book of Tibullus’ poetry and for a long time they were attributed to him.

Sulpicia is pretty much the only woman whose words have actually survived from Ancient Rome to the present day. We know of others who wrote literature, letters and even biography (Agrippina’s family history is a particular loss to posterity as it’s impossible to imagine it wouldn’t have been full of juicy political scandal and that it would given us a whole new way of looking at her as well as the Emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty)

Only in the later 20th century did Latin scholars take Sulpicia seriously as a poet worth reading rather than a gendered curiosity and even then, many fell over themselves to explain her away. Those who have read Joanna Russ’ How To Suppress Women’s Writing will not be surprised as some of the arguments used against Sulpicia’s very existence.

She wrote it but… if she really was a woman, it isn’t very good.

She wrote it but… she must have actually been a man because it’s *too good* for a woman to have written it.

Sulpicia was cranky. She wrote a whole poem about how much it sucked to be spending her birthday in the country, away from her secret lover Cerinthus.

She also complained about Cerinthus chasing after cheap tarts, took a break from a fevered illness to compose a poem in the hopes of raising his sympathies, and wrote another out of apology to him for leaving him in the lurch.

There’s a sweet honesty about her, and a sharpness that I really enjoy because, finally, here is an ordinary Roman woman telling her own story.

Oh, and there were even days when she wasn’t cranky at all, just loved up and happy with the world:



Venus has kept her promise. Let people talk, who never

themselves have found such joys as now are mine.

I wish that I could send my tablets to my love

unsealed, not caring who might read them first.

The sin is sweet, to mask it for fear of shame is bitter.

I’m proud we’ve joined, each worthy of the other.



[Sulpicia I, translated from Latin by Jon Corelis]


https://sites.google.com/site/romanelegy/sulpicia

This post is written as part of the Women’s History Month Cranky Ladies of History blog tour. If you would like to read more about cranky ladies from the past, you might like to support the FableCroft Publishing Pozible campaign, crowd-funding an anthology of short stories about Cranky Ladies of History from all over the world.

Gerda Taro © International Center of Photography.

 
It’s always interesting hearing why authors of historical fiction are drawn to their eras. For me, the early twentieth century has always felt tantalisingly within touching distance. I grew up with my Great Aunt Rose’s tales of helping the Resistance in Occupied Holland, and hiding her husband from the Nazis in a secret room in their Middleburg hotel. I saw my grandfather sit night after night at his old mahogany dining table, surrounded by dogeared photographs of his comrades from Dunkerque, lost in his memories.

The early years of the twentieth century felt close – I wanted to understand why these experiences were still vivid, why they haunted my family. Later, when I specialised in twentieth century art, and particularly photography, at the Courtauld Institute, I realised that even history this close to our present day becomes ‘lost’. When I studied Man Ray, why were there so few mentions of Lee Miller’s remarkable war photography in the standard text books? Why did Robert Capa’s mythical figure throw such a shadow over Gerda Taro’s body of work? In writing about the Spanish Civil War in ‘The Perfume Garden’, I wanted to give Taro her correct place as his equal.

Gerda Taro © International Center of Photography

Capa by Taro © International Center of Photography

Writing historical fiction feels, at its best and most exhilarating, like detective work. A tiny clue can spark years of research. For ‘The Beauty Chorus’, it was a tiny obituary for one of the ‘Spitfire girls’ – the women who flew with the Air Transport Auxiliary. The great joy of writing twentieth century histfic is that you have the privilege of talking to people who lived that history. I spoke to women now in their eighties and nineties, who told me exactly how it felt to fly those planes, and gave me details for the story that can’t be found in any text book.

Diana Barnato Walker © ATA Archive, Maidenhead Heritage Centre.

It’s that wealth of experience which is so thrilling to draw upon – and how well documented the era is. I love that it’s possible to immerse yourself in archives of unpublished papers, diaries, that you can listen to the same music, watch the same films. I’m still a ‘new’ writer, and each book is a steep learning curve, but finding these fragments of ‘forgotten’ history, and breathing life into them, conjuring a fictional story around them is like nothing else. I hope I never stop learning.



So, that’s my story – I’d love to hear why you are drawn to the era(s) you write about …

Kate's latest book

Greenham women gather at the base in 1982. Photo: Ceridwen

I found out about the Bomb when I was about seven, when my primary school teacher informed us, in a slightly panicky way, that it didn't matter that the Russians had their 'rockets,' as we had our 'rockets' and if they fired theirs at us they might kill all of us, but we would also kill all of them. I failed to find this reassuring, and in any case, it seemed so ghastly that I went home and begged my parents to tell me it wasn't true. 'I'm afraid,' my father said, 'it is.'
For anyone too young to remember these things, from the end of the war onwards, between the end of World War 2 and the end of the 1980s, so-called Communism dominated Russia and Eastern Europe. In fact it was an empire of territories taken over by Soviet Russia after the Second World War; Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, etc, and ruled by state terror. What was called the Iron Curtain was a border which the citizens of these countries were not permitted to cross, and across the Curtain the West and the East looked mistrustfully at each other, armed to the teeth. I have to remember that a child born on the day the Berlin Wall fell is now twenty-two years old. (Oh, dear, that makes me feel old.)
Then there was the Cuban Missile Crisis. 'We're waiting for the Americans to attack Russia with their rockets,' a classmate said, 'and then we'll send our rockets to them, and that will be the end of the world.'

Letter from John F Kennedy to the Soviet Union's Mr Khruschev about Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba Source: Wikimedia Commons

 When my parents rather unwisely took me with them to see 'Dr Strangelove', when I was about twelve, I wouldn't stay in the cinema, I found the film too terrifying. And yet, as I went into my teen years, the balance of terror faded into the background and seemed almost liveable with.
Forward to 1978, when I had just put my first baby back for a sleep after feeding her, and heard someone say on the radio that a nuclear war was inevitable and we would have to learn to cope with one. I thought of my little, helpless sleeping child, and found myself in frightened, angry tears.
I had my second baby in December 1980, by which time the decision to deploy Cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe had been taken, and the SS20s, the Soviet equivalent, were being deployed on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The policy of a balance of terror (Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD) had been replaced by a new policy: the Cruise missiles could get beneath radar defences and fly undetected to Moscow. This was called 'a limited nuclear war in Europe.' How you could call it limited was hard for some of us to understand, when the firepower of each Cruise missile was equal to ten Hiroshima bombs, and there were sixteen missiles in every convoy.

Endangered species? Photo: David Wilson

The day after my younger daughter was born, I stared out at the trees outside the John Radcliffe Hospital and saw instead enormous engines of destruction rolling, threatening my children. Within six months the Government's 'Protect and Survive' leaflet had been issued to households. Mrs Thatcher was proclaiming that we must fight the Evil Empire of the East, and telling us that we could survive a nuclear strike by making a Fall-Out Room and hiding in there when the bomb fell. Of course, that would only be useful to those living well away from Ground Zero (the point of impact). 'Better dead than red,' we were told. However, my mother, who had experienced conquest by the Red Army, did not agree. If the Russians scared Mrs Thatcher, she scared me. Badly.

I never worried about telling my kids about sex, but I worried about telling them about the bomb. I tried to keep it from them for as long as possible, but my elder daughter heard things at school, so I had to tell them, though I tried to soften the bad news. Kathy, who was then about six, said: 'Children shouldn't have to hear something like that!' I knew exactly how she felt.
In September 1981, while I and the other people in our village were shoving through doors leaflets called 'The effect of a one-megaton bomb on Carfax,' a group called 'Women for Life on Earth' marched from Cardiff to Greenham Common, where the Cruise missiles were to be stationed. I remember someone telling me that some women had chained themselves to the fence and said they would stay there as long as the Cruise missiles were there. I was, frankly, sceptical.

In 1985, the missiles were already at Greenham, and we moved to live in Berkshire. I was so naïve I didn't realise I was moving into the heart of nuclear country. The initial wave of protest had damped down a bit, but then Chernobyl happened, and I was worrying because the children had walked home with me, in the rain. Human beings keep going in the comfortable hope that the worst won't happen. Chernobyl was an uncomfortable reminder that it sometimes does. And a leaflet for the local peace group came through the door of our new home, and I rang the number on it and joined. I became more and more active in the local CND; doing something helped enormously with the fear. I also took part in two pieces of civil disobedience and was arrested. The first was at the Burghfield nuclear bomb factory near Reading, and was part of the Snowball campaign - you cut a piece of MOD fence and were arrested and then went to court and argued that you had committed a crime to prevent the greater crime of nuclear war.

Being arrested at Burghfield, 1987. The white suits were meant to be radiation suits. I am on the left. My arresting officer was quite rough - I saw him later, at another demo, and pointed out that he hadn't needed to be, and he apologized.

The second was part of a Christian CND peace protest on Ash Wednesday; we were to 'ash' the MOD building in Whitehall in token of repentance, as Catholics have ash put on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent. As it happened, on that day (February 6th, I think, 1988), the MOD decided to stop us, having been ashed the previous year, and surrounded the building with crowd barriers and a line of police. However, monks and nuns grabbed the media attention by leaping over the barriers (I found a weak spot in the defences and nipped in there without having to hurdle). 62 of us were arrested; we made the front pages of most national newspapers, and when I rang up the local papers about it the next day they were delighted. 'Mum in demo charge,' their headline went. Incidentally, being locked up in a cell, and then prosecuted, made me wonder what it must have been like to risk far worse things in Nazi Germany - and that was crucial for my later writing career.
 My actions shocked a lot of people, but others were impressed, because I was so obviously not an extremist, just a local mother-of-two, and it made them think how important the issue was. I must stress that I was taking less risks than others in carrying out these two actions, being self-employed. When I subsequently became co-ordinator for the Burghfield Snowball, I dissuaded several sixth-formers from getting arrested, because of the possible impact on their future careers. I hope they haven't held it against me, but that came back to me when I wrote my story in the DAUGHTERS OF TIME anthology, about the girl who runs away to Greenham.
From about 1986 onwards, I also went regularly to Greenham, for the women were still there, year after year, in spite of evictions, vigilante action, and police brutality. At first, I took them a lot of wood that I'd found piled up at the back of our garden: in fact it wasn't much use for the Greenham fire, and would have been better left to support beneficial organisms in the garden, but the women graciously took it anyway, and my car was used, subsequently, to go and load up more useful wood and bring it to the camp. I was never arrested at Greenham, nor did I take part in big demos there (apart from turning out in the middle of the night to demonstrate against the Cruise convoy when it came in). But every few weeks I got restless and would head off there, bearing vegan food. One night, too, a friend and I went to do a night watch, so that the women could sleep. It was the birthday of one of the women, a very young woman called Lynne, and she got a lot of spray paints for a present. I heard a woman say that one day she got fed up with spraying noble slogans and just painted 'Nerdy, nerdy, noo-noo.' There was a very cold winter and a lot of snow. I used to wonder if I'd find a lot of frozen corpses sitting round a cold fire, but the women survived, thanks to Gore-tex survival bags.
I never took photographs when I went there, but if you want to see some amazing photos of the Cruise convoy as I saw it, and described it in the DAUGHTERS OF TIME story, you can go to http://reportdigital.wordpress.com/2013/11/15/photos-30-years-ago-this-week-cruise-missiles-arrive-greenham-common-womens-peace-camp-and-cruisewatch-todayinhistory-women-cnd/ 
The paint on the launchers, if you scroll down on that site, was quite likely put there by my friend Lynette Edwell, a redoubtable lady from Newbury (she appears, with her permission, at the end of the story) who would put a bin bag full of rubbish in the path of the convoy, which then had to stop to make sure it wasn't an explosive: she would profit by the halt to throw paint. Once, the entire convoy was stopped by a potato in the exhaust pipe of the lead vehicle. The potato was subsequently displayed in the US forces mess, thus showing that they did have a sense of humour!

The missile silos today. Photo: David Wilson

There was conflict at the camp, and abrasiveness too, but for me, and for the Peace Movement as a whole, Greenham was quite vital, a source of energy and insight. It made it impossible for women to be regarded as secondary, because they had demonstrated courage, resourcefulness, surviveability and sheer toughness. If, as Joan Ruddock asserted, the Cruise convoy was never able to melt into the countryside (which was the idea, thus evading a Soviet first strike in times of tension) it was due to the Cruisewatch organisation which the Greenham women participated in and which tracked it on its war-preparation exercises on Salisbury Plain ('they do survival games,' I was told, 'but we're better at it than they are.') Well, I knew they were.They also knew, by watching the base, when it was likely to go out. Of course, in a time of war, the women would have all been interned, but all along the route every time it went out posters and placards went up, thus keeping it in public consciousness.
The women weren't just woolly-hatted idealists keeping the watch outside the base; they were clued-up in international law, in strategic, military, and policy issues. They went to Russia and challenged the 'official' peace groups who wanted to co-opt them as part of their propaganda campaign. They made contact with dissident, real peace groups, and protested if anything happened to them. They fought the issue of the enclosure of the Common tooth and nail, and were vindicated in the end when it was shown that the US occupation was in fact illegal and thus most of the convictions of women for criminal trespass were invalid.
The other crucial thing was that Greenham women 'made the links.' Single-issue campaigning it wasn't, really. We all learned about the military-industrial complex, about the connection between the threat to life on earth, and dispossessed populations in the South Pacific; about the conditions of uranium miners; about sexism in daily life, domestic violence and racism, and the link to the violence of the nuclear stand-off.
And it truly changed my ideas about myself as a woman. It demolished frontiers in my mind, and made it possible to think outrageous things. Ultimately, I believe it made it possible for me really to become a writer.

Decorating the fence 1982 Photo:Ceridwen

 Writing the story about Greenham Common, in DAUGHTERS OF TIME, brought so much back, especially when I wrote the opening, where the young heroine watches the convoy come in as I once stood, confronting the very engines of death whose phantoms had rolled towards the hospital as I stood there with little Jo in my arms. When I'd written it, I realised that it reads like dystopic fiction - but it was real.
The nuclear brinkmanship of the Eighties is often credited with bringing the end of the Cold War, and those people who assert this dismiss anti-nuclear protest as pointless and counter-productive.
However, during that period, there was an episode when the Russians thought they saw the Cruise missiles coming over, and almost launched the SS20s in response. The world escaped by a hairs-breadth. We were incredibly lucky. But to say that the lucky escape validates the policy is like saying that a person who drives their car along a crowded motorway at 130 mph has done the right thing, because they were lucky enough not to get involved in an accident. I still believe that the governments of the time took enormous and criminal risks. I believe all of us were right to protest; and perhaps, without that protest, even more hideous risks might have been taken. I honour and respect the gallant and dedicated women who stayed all those years at Greenham, and am proud that I was able (both figuratively and literally) to help keep the fire burning,

The Common restored, with silos in background. It is now a nature reserve. Photo: David Wilson.

Before I embarked on my trilogy about Eleanor of Aquitaine, I wrote a stand alone novel titled LADY OF THE ENGLISH about Eleanor's illustrious mother in law the indomitable Empress Matilda whom history has frequently labelled as one of the crankiest, ill-tempered and 'bossy' women in the Medieval world. Indeed, she does seem to have been her own worst enemy at times but was she really the overblown termagant that some have mad her out to be, or is it just branding?
 Matilda was the daughter of King Henry I of England and his Anglo-Scottish Queen Edith who changed her name to Matilda when she became the royal consort.
Little Matilda, the future Empress was their first child, born near Abingdon in February 1102.  When she was just over eight years old her parents sent her to Germany as the future bride of Emperor Heinrich V, together with her dowry of ten thousand marks of silver.
Matilda and Heinrich married when she was twelve to his twenty eight,  It seems to have been a stable match despite the age gap and Matilda appears to have had a rapport with the German people and they with her. She fulfilled her role as consort to the hilt, interceding on behalf of supplicants as a peacemaker and sponsor of royal grants.  She was often at her husband's side and travelled extensively with him, even to Italy.  During the time between her betrothal and marriage she had become fluent in German.  The overview is of a lively, cooperative young woman, riding the waves of her situation rather than making heavy weather of them - doing her duty and enjoying it.
Sadly, Heinrich died in 1125, leaving the childless Matilda in limbo.  Without heirs there was no role for her in Germany, except perhaps the Church, and for a young royal woman of 23, that was not an option. Matilda's father had a use for her in his realm.  His only other legitimate child, the heir to his throne, William, had drowned during a drunken evening crossing from Normandy to England. Most people will know the story of The White Ship.( The White Ship disaster ) Being widowed, Henry had recently married a nubile young woman, Adeliza of Louvain, but despite him having more than 20 illegitimate sons and daughters, Adeliza showed no sign of providing him with a replacement heir.
Matilda was summoned home and a marriage arranged for her with the son of Henry's troublesome neighbour,  Count Fulke of Anjou. The latter was about to set out to be crowned King of Jerusalem, leaving behind his adolescent son Geoffrey to rule Anjou.  Henry decided to pair up his daughter with the lad. There Matilda was, a grieving empress, returning from the courtly, formal atmosphere of German imperial circles to find herself betrothed at her father's behest to the stripling son of a count. When they married he was not yet 15 years old to her 26. She had gone from being the consort of a mature and dignified emperor to the marriage bed of a green boy. There is some muted evidence that she was not happy with this state of affairs and protested, but Henry I, an alpha male accustomed to exercising his will, pushed the match through anyway.

Geoffrey of Anjou from his funeral plaque

While all this was going on, Henry was debating the succession. Since it was fairly clear his new wife was not going to provide an heir, he needed to look to other avenues.  He had been grooming his nephew Stephen to take the crown, but with Matilda home, he had two for the price of one so to speak.  Matilda being closest to him in legitimate blood, he made her his heir and had all of his barons swear allegiance to her at Northampton.  It was never going to work and many of those who did so were only paying lip service and wondering how they could get out of it.  Henry very possibly had his eye on his daughter as a brood mare.  If young Geoffrey of Anjou could get a son on her, then in the fullness of time the child could inherit.
The notion of being governed by a woman flew in the face of the way a warrior society operated. Women were equipped to be peace-makers and child-bearers; they were the grease that turned the cartwheels.  They weren't expected to direct the cart.
There was a popular theory that women's wombs had a tendency to go wandering about their bodies - a condition known as hysteria.  When that happened, the only thing to do was burn a feather under the afflicted woman's nose so that the womb would smell it, be disgusted and hasten back to its rightful place.  You just couldn't have creatures like that deciding your policies and governing a country. If a woman was hard and incisive and dealt with matters in a 'manly' way then the fear was that she was unnatural - a woman with balls, and you certainly didn't want one of them either.  Indeed women who spoke their mind were parodied in the kind of tales that appear in  The Fabliaux (scurrilous poems of ribald social comment). The Gelded Lady is one such story which ends on the comment that good women were deserving of affection but heinous shrews deserved only ruthless treatment and abuse...God curse the wife who disrespects!


'Les bones devez molt amer et chier tenir et hennorer, et il otroit mal & contraire a ramposneuse de put aire:...Dahet femme qui despit homme!

Geoffrey and Matilda didn't settle down well to married life immediately.  Indeed, within a year they split up.  Circumstances are unknown; we can't say for sure that differences of personality were the root cause, but a betting person would probably not be too much out of pocket if they took a punt on that reason.  However, the marriage was not for dissolving. After a sojourn at her father's court, Matilda was packed off back to her teenage husband. It was to be another 18 months before their first child, the future Henry II put in an appearance, but that must have taken the pressure off Henry I in terms of the succession dilemma.  Only let the little chap grow to maturity and he could have the job.
Meanwhile, Matilda, the new mother had very little time to draw breath before she was pregnant again and little Henry was only 15 months old when she gave birth to his little brother Geoffrey. The effort almost killed her and at one point her life was despaired of. Fearing the end was nigh, Matilda requested to be buried at the Abbey of Bec of which she was particularly fond.  Her father, however, had his own ideas and told her it would be Rouen Cathedral because he said so.  As it happened Matilda recovered but she wasn't permitted to choose her own resting place.
Just over a year later, Matilda was in Anjou, pregnant for the third time when Henry I died of the infamous 'surfeit of Lampreys.' There's a whole other story attached to that, but that's for another occasion. By the time she had absorbed the news, any chance of being crowned queen had been snatched from her by her cousin Stephen, who claimed the crown, saying that Henry I had named him his heir on his deathbed.  There was some doubt about the veracity of such a claim but in any event Matilda could do little about it.  She was far away with a child to bear - another son, this time christened William.  However, once she was safely delivered of her third son, she set about the fight for the throne and the duchy that had been snatched from under her nose,
She had allies including two of her own illegitimate half-brothers Robert and Reginald, who became her mainstays.  A proportion of the barons who had sworn for Stephen were not entirely happy to have done so, and when she showed her willingness to fight for her crown, they prepared to rally to her banner.  Leaving her sons with their father, she crossed to England and ;prepared to take Stephen on.  It was another woman who gave her safe-landing in England.  Her stepmother, Adeliza of Louvain was lady of Arundel, and she opened her gates to Matilda and her entourage when they arrived.  Adeliza was not so much a lady with cojones, but more of a steel magnolia. She was pious, tender, beautiful, and determined in a quiet, understated way to obtain what she wanted.  You can read Adeliza's story here on my Living the History blog. : Biography of Adeliza of Louvain
Even though Matilda had landed to try and win her crown, her efforts were still conducted under the auspices of her brother Robert of Gloucester. The barons felt much safer dealing with him than with Matilda. Treating with a woman of firm political views acting in her own power was just too big a notion for them to swallow. They complained that she treated them haughtily. A pro-Stephen chronicle of the time says that she refused to listen to the advice of men

'What was a sign of extreme haughtiness and insolence when the King of Scotland and Bishop of Winchester and her brother the Earl of Gloucester, the chief men of the whole kingdom, whom she was then taking round with her as a permanent retinue, came before her with bended knee to make some request, she did not rise respectfully, as she should have, or agree to what they asked, but repeatedly sent them away with contumely, rebuffing them by an arrogant answer and refusing to hearken to their words...she no longer relied on their advice as she should have and had promised them, but arranged everything as she herself thought fit and according to her own arbitrary will.'

From this I read that she had her own ideas and that the barons thought she ought to be listening to theirs instead.  Matilda's attitude, acceptable in a man, was not to be tolerated in a woman.
One might think from some of the writings about her that Matilda was an abrasive, cold, unpleasant sort, but there seems, amid the hostility, to have been a thread of genuine loyalty and affection for her. She seems to have had a warm understanding with her stepmother Adeliza of Louvain who was prepared to risk the wrath of King Stephen and work her way around her Stephen-supporting husband to offer Matilda a safe landing at Arundel.  Her half brothers Robert and Reginald were fiercely loyal to her; so was Brian FitzCount lord of Wallingford who wrote a treatise extolling her right to rule. Matilda was mostly on excellent terms with the Church. The monk Stephen of Rouen praised her greatly and said she was much loved by the poor. She was,  according to him:
 'wise and pious, merciful to the poor, generous to monks, the refuge of the wretched, and a lover of peace.'
(but obviously prepared to forego that peace to fight for what had been stolen from her).  Another clergyman remembered her as a woman of 'intelligence and sense.'
  In later life, once her son Henry was sufficiently grown to take over where she left off and comfort the male courtiers with his masculinity, Matilda acted as his deputy in Normandy, her power now that of advisor and deputy and no longer viewed as a threat.
Matilda's story is a thousand years old now, but I have to say that at the same time it's still relevant today. They say the past is another country. They also say that nothing changes.

I've just broken one of my personal rules, and done a book review. Luckily, the work in question turned out to be more than good. It was Professor Jerry White's Zeppelin Nights - an account of London in the First World War - and I urge you all to read it when it comes out in May, but that's not what I'm on about here today.

One of the minor characters in Zeppelin Nights intrigued me, and I decided to find out more about him.
His name was Henry Cockayne Cust, and he was one of the 'Souls' group (including various Asquiths, Balfours, Gaskells, Lytteltons, Tennants, etc) who considered themselves more intellectually refined than the rest of Society. But Cust is best remembered as a world-class philanderer.



Born in 1861, Cust was a nephew of, and prospective heir to, Earl Brownlow of Belton House near Grantham in Lincolnshire (who outlived him).   Belton, a fine late-17th century building with an extensive estate, is now a National Trust property, open to the public.

Giraffes go way back in history. San people recorded them in their rock art and during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut in the 15th century BC, giraffes were brought back from the Land of Punt and there are paintings of them in her mortuary temple. In Egyptian hieroglyphics, the symbol of a giraffe stands for ‘to predict or foretell’. The actual word giraffe comes from the Arab word ‘xirapha’ which means ‘one that walks swiftly’. But the Paris giraffe was only the second to have ever been seen in Europe. The first had been a gift to the Lorenzo de Medici in 1486.