"500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art" - Joan Lennon
↧
↧
In search of Babylon's dragons - Katherine Roberts
Over the past month, I've been painting the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (for the e-covers of my Seven Fabulous Wonders series, but that's just an excuse for some fun). In doing so, I unearthed one of the strangest creatures in history... the Babylonian "dragon", shown here on the Ishtar Gate, constructed around 575BC by King Nebuchadnezzar II:
The two children are playing a game called Twenty Squares - sometimes called the Royal Game of Ur - on a simple board scratched into the pavement, just as the guards of Babylon might have done to pass the long hours of their shift. The walls of Babylon are blue-glazed brick with gold bricks for decoration, and on the gate you can see two types of creature that are extinct today - aurochs and sirrush. The dragon perched on the top left is obviously my fantasy side rearing its ugly horned head... but in case you think I've invented the creatures entirely, here is a reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, which uses the original bricks found at Babylon:
There also is/was (I believe it suffered in the recent war) a replica of the Ishtar Gate in Iraq, too:
You may scoff at the idea of flying, fire-breathing dragons straight out of a fantasy novel. But auroch skeletons have been found, and the bulls shown on the Ishtar Gate are now accepted as an extinct creature that once roamed the banks of the Euphrates. So why not the other creature... the dragon?
Take a closer look:
You'll see it has a single straight horn in the middle of its forehead and a curly horn (or ears?) at the back. It also seems to have scales and a thin lizard-like body, much like dragons that could possibly be descended from dinosaurs. It has bird-like claws on its hind legs, but those paws on its forelegs look more like a lion's, and it seems to have hairy (or feathery?) legs. Significantly, it has no wings. Some people think it might actually be a unicorn - another creature that has made the leap into legend. The Babylonian texts call it a 'sirrush' or 'mushussu'/'mushkuku' (depending on how you interpret the cuneiform), and it is shown on cylinder seals of the period being led by a halter, where it appears to be about the size of a large dog.
So what do you think? Did this creature exist? Have we just not found its skeleton yet, or maybe mistaken its bones for those of other creatures - lions/birds/lizards? In my story, the sirrush sheds its skin like a snake and emerges with a pair of beautiful wings, explaining how it might have flown away into legend.
![]()
It's not too big a leap of imagination (at least not for me!) to believe a few remaining dragons might have been kept alive in a royal garden or park such as the second Wonder of the Ancient World, the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Perhaps this vanished Wonder was actually an exotic zoo, as imagined by my Japanese publisher?
Whether Babylonian dragons existed or not, they are certainly alive and kicking in my book. And now they have entered the 21st century on the ecover, which after some digital wizardry looks like this:
![]()
More Seven Wonders paintings at Reclusive Muse.
www.katherineroberts.co.uk
 |
| The Ishtar Gate... with a Babylonian dragon? |
The two children are playing a game called Twenty Squares - sometimes called the Royal Game of Ur - on a simple board scratched into the pavement, just as the guards of Babylon might have done to pass the long hours of their shift. The walls of Babylon are blue-glazed brick with gold bricks for decoration, and on the gate you can see two types of creature that are extinct today - aurochs and sirrush. The dragon perched on the top left is obviously my fantasy side rearing its ugly horned head... but in case you think I've invented the creatures entirely, here is a reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, which uses the original bricks found at Babylon:
 |
| Ishtar Gate of Babylon - reconstruction, Berlin |
There also is/was (I believe it suffered in the recent war) a replica of the Ishtar Gate in Iraq, too:
 |
| Replica of the Ishtar Gate in Iraq |
You may scoff at the idea of flying, fire-breathing dragons straight out of a fantasy novel. But auroch skeletons have been found, and the bulls shown on the Ishtar Gate are now accepted as an extinct creature that once roamed the banks of the Euphrates. So why not the other creature... the dragon?
Take a closer look:
 |
| sirrush (from Koldewey's The Excavations at Babylon, 1914) |
You'll see it has a single straight horn in the middle of its forehead and a curly horn (or ears?) at the back. It also seems to have scales and a thin lizard-like body, much like dragons that could possibly be descended from dinosaurs. It has bird-like claws on its hind legs, but those paws on its forelegs look more like a lion's, and it seems to have hairy (or feathery?) legs. Significantly, it has no wings. Some people think it might actually be a unicorn - another creature that has made the leap into legend. The Babylonian texts call it a 'sirrush' or 'mushussu'/'mushkuku' (depending on how you interpret the cuneiform), and it is shown on cylinder seals of the period being led by a halter, where it appears to be about the size of a large dog.
So what do you think? Did this creature exist? Have we just not found its skeleton yet, or maybe mistaken its bones for those of other creatures - lions/birds/lizards? In my story, the sirrush sheds its skin like a snake and emerges with a pair of beautiful wings, explaining how it might have flown away into legend.
It's not too big a leap of imagination (at least not for me!) to believe a few remaining dragons might have been kept alive in a royal garden or park such as the second Wonder of the Ancient World, the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Perhaps this vanished Wonder was actually an exotic zoo, as imagined by my Japanese publisher?
 |
| Japanese edition of The Babylon Game |
Whether Babylonian dragons existed or not, they are certainly alive and kicking in my book. And now they have entered the 21st century on the ecover, which after some digital wizardry looks like this:
***
Katherine Roberts' Seven Fabulous Wonders series is re-available as ebooks for Kindle and epub formats, or you can download the complete collection of seven books for half the combined list price as the Seven Fabulous Wonders Omnibus.
More Seven Wonders paintings at Reclusive Muse.
www.katherineroberts.co.uk
↧
GREENWAY by Adèle Geras
In the middle of April, I spent five days at Greenway. This is the country home of Agatha Christie, on the banks of the River Dart, just across the water from the pretty village of Dittisham.
Greenway House was built in 1792 but Agatha bought the property in 1938 and spent many holidays here. The house is large and square and stuccoed in cream. It looks over lawns and trees and a magnificent array of magnolias, rhododendrons and camellias. The sun shone for the whole time we were there and the shrubs were at their very best. Since 2009, Greenway has been a National Trust property and the old servants' quarters have been turned into an apartment that can sleep 10 people. It's comfortable and also old-fashioned....you feel that Agatha herself might easily come walking into the lounge or sit at the dressing table in one of the bedrooms. In the bookshelf in my room, for instance, I found a Gwen Raverat's Period Piece with this dedication:
I read and loved Agatha Christie back in the 1950s and early 60s, but now have a personal connection with the Queen of Crime. My daughter, Sophie Hannah, has written a new Hercule Poirot novel and has been obsessed with all things Christie for eighteen months or so. The name of this novel is embargoed till tonight but I will put it up in a comment below this post so if you want to see what it is, come and have a look tomorrow.
Here is one of the paths leading down to the river. Agatha was very keen on gardening and there are gardening books on many bookshelves. The planting is inspired. Periwinkles, bluebells, tulips, fuchsia and banks and banks of azaleas make a walk around the property a real pleasure.
This typewriter was on the windowsill at the end of the passage in the guest apartment. I suppose that means it's not actually the one Agatha wrote on...that would have been moved to the House itself. Still, it's an old machine and it's here so I like to think she must have written at least a letter or two on it. It is, whoever used it, a beautiful object, I think.
The first thing that strikes you as you walk around the house is what a collector Agatha was. Here are some snuffboxes, but she also assembled a great deal of crockery, ornaments, books, pictures, and assorted pieces of archaeological pottery, connected to the work of her husband, Max Mallowan. She used to accompany him to his archaeological sites and work on her books while he was overseeing the digs.
This doll ( above) has, like a great many dolls, a touch of the sinister about her. Below is the portrait of Agatha when she was four. I love it because the artist has captured exactly a kind of sulky boredom that's not often depicted by artists.
And here is the top of the grand piano, full of family photos.
There are several dressers in the house. On this one, alongside the crockery, is a skull, which struck me as appropriate.
A great many books are displayed both in the house and in the apartment. You can see scrapbooks and letters and on various tables there are envelopes addressed to the author, looking as though they've just been delivered. I wanted to take photos of these but for some reason my camera decided to malfunction just at that moment.
Here are some of the toys arranged on a sofa. I love the mad look on the eyes of the doll on the left. And that teddy has been loved to bits by someone, maybe even Agatha herself.
Finally, wisteria, growing beside the greenhouse in the Walled Garden. The greenhouse is full of tropical plants and cacti. There are espaliered trees, and a herb garden with everything in it: sage, marjoram, lemon balm, dill, orange-scented thyme, rosemary, and bay.
Agatha Christie called Greenway "The loveliest place in the world." She had travelled widely but Greenway's tranquil atmosphere, and the thousand shades of green that she could see from the windows of her house made this place into the best kind of home. Her benevolent and inspiring presence is everywhere here. If you find yourself in the area, it's a wonderful place to visit. I loved my time there.
↧
'Toad, Long Crippler and Snake' by Karen Maitland
 |
| Leechwells at Totnes, Devon |
Recently a triangular immersion pool was discovered behind one of the walls. This, together with the three springs and three branches of the path leading to the wells, made a number which was important both to the medieval Christian – three times the trinity – but also to those who still followed the elder faiths, for nine was the number of completeness or wholeness. So what must have been an ancient pre-Christian site, easily became adopted as site of Christian pilgrimage.
 |
| Offerings are still left at the leechwells today |
For me one of the most fascinating aspects of this magical place are the ancient names given to the three springs which are in the photo above, from left to right, ‘Toad’, ‘Long Crippler’ and ‘Snake’. They sound like the ingredients of a witch’s cauldron in Macbeth. By tradition the spring known as ‘toad’ was supposed to cure skin diseases, ‘long crippler’ which is an ancient name for a slowworm, cured eye problems and ‘snake’ healed snake bites and melancholia. But why would the names of three creatures believed in the Middle Ages to be poisonous come to be associated with healing wells?
 |
| Witch feeding her her familiars or bids in the form of toads. |
 |
| A slowworm otherwise known as a blindworm. |
Snake– that is more obscure. Although the Rod of Asclepius, the serpent-entwined staff, has been adopted as a medical symbol, this cannot have been the association here. We only have one poisonous snake in Britain and today few people are bitten, so I can’t imagine many people in Totnes today would have cause to rush to the spring for treatment. Yet, in the middle ages and earlier there are a large number of legends of plagues of snakes infesting towns generally driven out by saints such as St Hilda, St Keyna and St Birinus. Birinus when dying from a adder bite, declared that anyone who stayed within the sound of the church bells at Dorchester would henceforth be protected from snake bites. The Tenor or heaviest bell at Dorchester cathedral, cast in 1380, is inscribed with the prayer ‘Protege birine quos convoco tu sine fine. Raf Rastwold’ – ‘Birinus, protect for ever those whom I summon. Ralph Rastwold. And the superstition says that vipers will slither away at the sound of the bell.
 |
| Witches adding a snake and other creatures. |
No snake or adder ere can dwell.’
Were there plagues of snakes in the middle ages? Certainly more people worked on the land then, therefore there may have been more bites. But a more probable explanation was that the adder or viper was associated with evil and the devil, so was thought to be a creature of ill-omen bringing bring bad luck. In Christian times, a snake spring might have been used not so much to cure actual bites, but to break of run of bad luck or misfortune and to ward off evil.
So if you are visiting Totnes – you might want to take a bottle with you to fill at the snake spring just in case.
↧
Writing Historical Fiction for Dyslexic Readers
by Caroline Lawrence
In 2013 I was approached by Barrington Stoke, a publisher who specialises in fiction for dyslexic readers. They ask established writers to write books in their particular field of expertise for dyslexic and reluctant readers. I was excited when they asked if I would be willing to write a book of around ten thousand words specifically geared to teenage boys.
I immediately thought of the Aeneid, one of my favourite works of Classical literature. Nobody does gory battle scenes better than Virgil. One of the best stand-alone stories from the Aeneid, with plenty of gore, is the story of the doomed night raid by Nisus and Euryalus. It’s visceral, exciting and almost cinematic (like much of Virgil) in its descriptions.
I wanted a killer first paragraph to hook reluctant teen readers. Inspired by the classic openings of two films, Sunset Boulevard and American Beauty, I opened my story with a narrator telling what it feels like to die.
![]()
I was young when they killed me. Just a teenager.
They say death on the battlefield wins you true glory.
They say when someone stabs you it doesn’t hurt.
They say it feels like a fist punching you.
That you hardly even notice it in the excitement of the battle.
They are wrong.
You do notice when someone plunges a sword into your body.
It doesn’t feel like a fist punching you. It feels like a heavy, iron, double-edged sword. The blade pierces your skin, parts your muscles, scrapes your bones and pops your organs.
It burns cold. Freezes hot. Then makes you want to puke.
It does not feel glorious.
It hurts like Hades.
Which is where I am bound.
When you write for Barrington Stoke there are two stages of editing. The first edit is for the story itself – structure, continuity and comprehensibility. The second edit aims to weed out words and phrases that might trip up dyslexic readers. Ruth, my main editor, warned me to avoid participle phrases and complicated sentences from the beginning as these would almost certainly be cut. I tried to keep the syntax as simple as possible and the vocabulary, too. As fans of Hemingway and Robert B. Parker know, you can tell a good story with simple words.
I had just finished the first draft of The Night Raid when I went to a boys’ prep school called Summer Fields in Oxford to do a week as writer in residence. This was my target audience: boys 8-12 years old. I didn’t have time to read long passages during my workshops, but I gave the manuscript to Sophie Palmer, one of the English teachers there. The great thing about Sophie is that she herself is dyslexic and knows all the problems other dyslexic readers might have. Sophie read the first couple of chapters to the boys in her class and they came back with some great comments. My favourite was one boy’s criticism, that it seemed too much like a movie!
Sophie also gave me a checklist of things boys like:
1. a hero they can relate to
2. adventure – straight into action
3. all goes wrong – failure – then all goes right
4. setting the scene
5. creating a sense of foreboding
6. when the reader knows something the main character doesn’t
7. twists and turns
8. a good title and front cover
9. humour
10. quick pace
I took on board some of her suggestions, especially those which entailed changing words the boys didn’t understand.
I also showed an early draft to Llewelyn Morgan, a respected professor of Classics at Oxford and an expert in Virgil. He gave me the thumbs up and so did his son Tom, "aged 10 and a harsh critic".
![]()
Writing a version of Virgil with such strict constraints was strangely satisfying. I found my prose tauter and tighter. I found I could write historical fiction without using exotic words. Under my editor’s encouragement, I changed column to pillar, slaughtered to butchered and rations to food.
Unfamiliar words were simplified or explained. Callus became hard patches of skin. Palisade became spiked walls. Eternity became all time.
The specialist-dyslexic editor, Mairi, also made some basic changes, like replacing adjectives with action verbs. Nodded happily became nodded and smiled. I said quickly became My next words came fast. And muttered sourly became muttered sour words, which I much prefer.
I don’t think my retelling has lost anything because of these constraints. In fact I think my writing has become clearer and more accessible. With the fabulous cover Barrington Stoke have produced I have an excellent chance of catching the attention of normally reluctant readers, especially teenage boys. If this target audience finds their interest sparked by a simply-told glimpse into Virgil’s great masterpiece then it will have been well worth the effort.
![]()
The Night Raid, Caroline Lawrence's first book for Barrington Stoke, will be launched on Monday 12 May at Summer Fields School in Oxford. You can read a sneak peek HERE.
 |
| The Roman poet Virgil |
I immediately thought of the Aeneid, one of my favourite works of Classical literature. Nobody does gory battle scenes better than Virgil. One of the best stand-alone stories from the Aeneid, with plenty of gore, is the story of the doomed night raid by Nisus and Euryalus. It’s visceral, exciting and almost cinematic (like much of Virgil) in its descriptions.
I wanted a killer first paragraph to hook reluctant teen readers. Inspired by the classic openings of two films, Sunset Boulevard and American Beauty, I opened my story with a narrator telling what it feels like to die.
They say death on the battlefield wins you true glory.
They say when someone stabs you it doesn’t hurt.
They say it feels like a fist punching you.
That you hardly even notice it in the excitement of the battle.
They are wrong.
You do notice when someone plunges a sword into your body.
It doesn’t feel like a fist punching you. It feels like a heavy, iron, double-edged sword. The blade pierces your skin, parts your muscles, scrapes your bones and pops your organs.
It burns cold. Freezes hot. Then makes you want to puke.
It does not feel glorious.
It hurts like Hades.
Which is where I am bound.
When you write for Barrington Stoke there are two stages of editing. The first edit is for the story itself – structure, continuity and comprehensibility. The second edit aims to weed out words and phrases that might trip up dyslexic readers. Ruth, my main editor, warned me to avoid participle phrases and complicated sentences from the beginning as these would almost certainly be cut. I tried to keep the syntax as simple as possible and the vocabulary, too. As fans of Hemingway and Robert B. Parker know, you can tell a good story with simple words.
I had just finished the first draft of The Night Raid when I went to a boys’ prep school called Summer Fields in Oxford to do a week as writer in residence. This was my target audience: boys 8-12 years old. I didn’t have time to read long passages during my workshops, but I gave the manuscript to Sophie Palmer, one of the English teachers there. The great thing about Sophie is that she herself is dyslexic and knows all the problems other dyslexic readers might have. Sophie read the first couple of chapters to the boys in her class and they came back with some great comments. My favourite was one boy’s criticism, that it seemed too much like a movie!
Sophie also gave me a checklist of things boys like:
1. a hero they can relate to
2. adventure – straight into action
3. all goes wrong – failure – then all goes right
4. setting the scene
5. creating a sense of foreboding
6. when the reader knows something the main character doesn’t
7. twists and turns
8. a good title and front cover
9. humour
10. quick pace
I took on board some of her suggestions, especially those which entailed changing words the boys didn’t understand.
I also showed an early draft to Llewelyn Morgan, a respected professor of Classics at Oxford and an expert in Virgil. He gave me the thumbs up and so did his son Tom, "aged 10 and a harsh critic".
Unfamiliar words were simplified or explained. Callus became hard patches of skin. Palisade became spiked walls. Eternity became all time.
The specialist-dyslexic editor, Mairi, also made some basic changes, like replacing adjectives with action verbs. Nodded happily became nodded and smiled. I said quickly became My next words came fast. And muttered sourly became muttered sour words, which I much prefer.
I don’t think my retelling has lost anything because of these constraints. In fact I think my writing has become clearer and more accessible. With the fabulous cover Barrington Stoke have produced I have an excellent chance of catching the attention of normally reluctant readers, especially teenage boys. If this target audience finds their interest sparked by a simply-told glimpse into Virgil’s great masterpiece then it will have been well worth the effort.
The Night Raid, Caroline Lawrence's first book for Barrington Stoke, will be launched on Monday 12 May at Summer Fields School in Oxford. You can read a sneak peek HERE.
↧
↧
April Competition Winners
The winners of the April competition are:
Liz
Margaret Skea
Gerry McCullough
Please send your land addresses to:
readers@maryhoffman.co.uk
to claim your prizes.
Congratulations!
Liz
Margaret Skea
Gerry McCullough
Please send your land addresses to:
readers@maryhoffman.co.uk
to claim your prizes.
Congratulations!
↧
Hair in all the wrong places – Michelle Lovric
My forthcoming novel, The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, is about hair.
Long, vigorous yet soft, feminine hair. Hair that flows in rich torrents from seven pretty heads. Hair that can be put to work, making money for men who peddle long-tressed dolls and quack medical products for the scalp.
For The Harristown Sisters is set in the 1860s, the age of arch pseudo-medicine, when human perfectability was for sale in a bottle whose contents could be advertised without any regulation as to truth or safety. A new power-base in the feminine purse, in the mid nineteenth century, shared a cultural vortex with the Pre-Raphaelite painters and the poets who both celebrated and problematized the hair of women as an expression of passionate and unruly desires.
And the matrons of England and America were encouraged to spend on their hair, on the principle that a husband would remain captivated by his wife’s long-flowing feminine charms while her sensible housekeeping extracted only dry compliments.
It was the age of Edward’s Harlene, Koko for the Hair and most of all the preparations of America’s Seven Sutherland Sisters, who had thirty seven feet of hair between them. They are pictured in one their classic poses below - they performed in circuses and shows where they sold their Scalp Food and Hair Restorer, being living advertisements for the efficacy of these potions. These sisters provided the inspiration for my novel, though I chose to set it in Ireland and Venice, where the Pre-Raphaelites, the earlier artists who inspired them, and the dawn of photography had more cultural resonance in my study of hair.
In the course of my research I also explored the problem of hair where hair should not be. In mid-Victorian times, this was personified by Julia Pastrana, the diminutive Mexican ‘Baboon Lady’ who danced the Highland Fling and sang on the stage to the horror and delight of American and British audiences.
Weeds are sometimes described as plants simply growing in the wrong place. Hair that grows abundantly in the prescribed zones is a bio-marker of desirable breeding stock. A hand running through a curl attached the beloved’s head finds only pleasure and sentiment. But when hair appears in the wrong place – such as in our soup – we feel revulsion and a sense of dirtiness.
Julia Pastrana – a gentle soul who spoke three languages and loved sewing – suffered from hypertrichosis. She was furred all over her body, had a beard and a simian visage caused by another rare condition, Gingival hyperplasia.
The treatment of Julia Pastrana taps into two key moral debates of our own time: where does celebrity culture cross over into criminal intrusion and venality at the expense of the prey? And why is the ‘disgusting’ such a viable commodity? Embarrassing bodies, sexual failure, eating disorders: there’s a pornography of body dysfunction paraded on the television screens every night of the week.
A play and a film have been written about Julia Pastrana, and a third is in production. The Ass Ponys recorded a song about her mind, life and marriage, with a refrain ‘He loves me for my own sake’, highly ironic under the circumstances.
It is less than two years since Julia Pastrana’s body finally received a picturesque burial in her native Mexico. As an exercise in empathy, during the writing of The Harristown Sisters, I decided to write a personal essay as Julia Pastrana. People who are monstered rarely have voices. It is the way of dehumanization to render the victim silent. I wanted to give Julia the privilege of looking out of her anathematized body, instead of merely being looked at. I also wondered what she would have thought about her posthumous repatriation to Mexico, and finally concluded that it would find small favour with her.
This part of my research was not published, but it informed a great deal of what I wrote about in The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters.I wonder if others among you find that some of your most interesting work stays off the published page? Examples, please!
This post really ends with that question, but below, as an optional extra, is my personal essay as Julia Pastrana. Michelle Lovric's website
Unless otherwise attributed, the pictures are courtesy of Wellcome Images, which has recently made its wonderful historical collection available for general use.
The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters is published on June 5th by BloomsburyJulia Pastrana
Eighteen thirty-four, I’m born in Mexico, a baboon of a baby, hooded whiteless eyes filled up with lucent brown. My jaw thrusts out like an orange, or a bustle, split by two great slugs of lips snug over double rows of teeth. My forehead slopes steeply back; there’s fur on my feet, and shags and tufts and gouts of hair everywhere, everywhere that hair shouldn’t be.
By three my beard was tied with string. My tribe in Sinaloa de Leyvamumbled things about my mother but they let me live. Ma slapped children when they screamed at the sight of me, but I guessed from her averted eyes and sparing hands that she wished me unborn. I could not crawl back inside her so I grew away from her.
I peaked at four and a half feet, with breasts, beckoning thighs, a supple dancing style, a melodious voice, a tongue for languages, a cool hand for pastry, and a desire to please the men with hair where hair should be.
A pink ribbon round my beard now, tight-laced in a Spanish dress, I was hired as a servant girl to the governor of Sinaloa. My mother’s eyes were opaque as the cart took me away. She did not wave
The governor brought me out after dark to serve port to male guests. One of them, a Mr Rates, watched me with long eyes through the candle flames. Late in the night, he threw a purse across the table.
Mr Rates was my first handler. He handled me onto the stage: Gothic Hall, New York, was deemed the best place for a gothic beast like me. I was twenty then; sang and danced with fluent grace to jungle roars from the stalls, and roses flung, quite hard. Behind my whiteless eyes, I learned English and dreamt of soft hands parting my fur with caresses and a man who’d let me dance for him, unpaid.
My billing was ‘The Marvelous Hybrid or Bear Woman’, she of the gorilla’s jaw, ape’s eyes, and hair where hair should not be. The New York papers showed their love: ‘terrifically hideous’, they said I was.
The doctors lifted, inserted, prodded till I cried. Mott from the Medical Society pronounced me ‘the most extraordinary being of the present day’, being the result of my Mexican mother mating with an orang-utan. Proof of her depravity: she’d sold me to the circus. If I mentioned otherwise, Mr Rates told me quietly, he’d skin me for my pelt and stuff me.
‘Then,’ he reflected, ‘you’d be pure profit. No cost in food and board. Remember this.’
The demi-monkey waltzed with soldiers at a military gala, knowing the fellows had been dared, feeling their reluctance through the tense fingers on my back, where my gown crushed the fur almost but not quite flat.
In Boston I was styled ‘the Hybrid Indian: The Misnomered Bear Woman’– by the Horticultural and the Boston History Society. Neither could decide whether ‘animal’ or ‘vegetable’ best described the thing I was.
Mr Rates sold me to J.W. Beach of Cleveland. From him, I came into the possession of one Theodore Lent, my small-eyed darling, my bearded destiny, who, judging me worth the passage, carried me off to London, where they went mad for me and the hair that grew where hair should not be, while I fell deep in love with Lent, and he not at all with me.
How it clamped my heart when my love billed me ‘The Nondescript’. He claimed it meant my marvels surpassed description. It did not. ‘The grotesque’s dancing is like a fairy’s,’ the London papers wrote. ‘The monster sings romances and lilts Highland Flings to perfection.
Charles Darwin wrote of me kindly, but published me in The Variation of Animal and Plants under Domestication.
By now I spoke a lady’s English. My knitting was a credit to me, though my Theodore refused to touch the gaiters I made him. He’d swallow my little suppers with an averted face.
He coached me to tell of twenty marriage proposals turned down: to say that no admirer had yet proved rich enough to catch my glistening eye.
‘There will be someone,’ he promised, ‘There’s always someone with an itch for a thing like you.’
He toured me in Berlin and Leipzig to raise my price. I acted in a play, Der curierte Meyer. A German boy falls in love with a veiled woman. But when he goes offstage, I lift the gauze, convulsing the audience with hilarity at the horror of my baboon face. When my lover sees me unveiled, his cure is instant. I rehearsed with Theodore, till I could take it without flinching.
No rich suitors came to marry me, but other handlers loomed in, offering terms and smiles. Theodore proposed. On our wedding night, he closed his face, the shutters, the curtains and put out the light. He divided me rough and sudden from my girlhood. In the morning, he was gone, and stayed gone for days. I did not allow the stained sheets changed and lay sleepless on my hardened blood, remembering. My heart beat like jungle rain when he appeared again; I cried from joy if his lips curved upwards. His eyes never smiled when they looked on me.
In Vienna he let more doctors pay to do what he had done in the darkest part of me, with sharp cold tools instead of his hard heat and shouted obscenities. He locked me in our rooms by day. In Poland and Moscow, he grew crueller and harder though I stood on tiptoe in everything to please him. He still came to me some nights, roaring on gin. He clapped his hand over my great lips, grasped the bedstead rungs and laboured on me. Afterwards he’d fling himself from me, groaning, to vomit in his chamber pot and strode swearing from the room.
Yet he got a child on me.
No baby ever had such a delightful layette, every item stitched by me. The nursery I had painted all the colours of hope. Of course I wondered what was growing inside me, the little stranger was already beloved. Theo kept away. If I saw his face, it was in profile only.
He did not burn the anonymous letters but left them for me to see. You have mated with a beast. You have stained mankind with bestiality.
The birth tore my narrow hips apart. Worse than pain was the sight of my son who took after me with whiteless eyes, bustle-jaw and hair where hair should not be. I slapped myself so as not to scream at the sight of him. His hours of life were thirty five.
‘Put it in a bucket and throw it in the river,’ Theodore told the maid.
Puerperal sepsis seized me like a serpent, poisoned me, shook me, till I saw Sinaloan ghosts again, the New York stage, Theodore’s face. My widower did not visit my deathbed, sent the photographer instead. He was in deep negotiations to sell our two corpses to Professor Sukolov at the Anatomical Institute in Moscow, and had gone to buy a monkey the height of a two-year-old child. The public, he told the maid, loving horror as they did, would not accommodate a baby, even semi-human, stuffed. ‘Better this,’ he said, wringing the monkey’s neck and kissing the maid’s.
At the sound of his lips on her skin, my hairless soul rose from my corpse. No funeral. Instead, I watched Sukolov dissect the monkey and me side by side on stained slabs. I saw the scalpel separate my skin, cried out soundlessly when he chose a finer blade for the poor small creature. I began to feel for my monkey child a fierce new love.
For six months, the professor hovered over us, extracting, scouring, packing, stitching us to such perfection that we retained our colour and our form. My sawdust-stiffened limbs were mounted in my old dancing pose, hand on hip. A crucifix hid the seam that held my breasts together. Sewn into a short Spanish dress, I was set up in a glass case, my false simian son in a sailor suit on a pedestal in a separate box where I might stare at him as the paying customers did.
News came to Theodore of the great crowds we drew and the great sums made for Sukolov. Our marriage certificate, presented to the American consul, robbed the Russian professor of his hard-won profits. That gaunt February of sixty-two, Theodore shipped us back to England; charged a shilling a look at the ‘Embalmed Nondescript’ and her progeny. Then he hired us out to a travelling museum of curiosities, I, the monster with hair where hair should not be, still topped the bills and filled the tents.
By now Theodore had found a girl near as hairy as myself. He set her up as “Zenora Pastrana”, my sister. He married her as well. The four of us, two living and two dead, toured till Theodore tired – his calculating mind slowed for the first but not the last time to a sick ticking. He rented his first wife and supposed son to a Vienna museum. With my corpse retired, he claimed that Zenora was me. The two repaired to St Petersburg, bought a waxworks. It was there my Theodore, Zenora’s Theodore, the stock exchange’s Theodore went mad. In the asylum, my spirit watched him long days writhing on his bed. It danced my Highland Fling for him, combed the hair where it should be, and touched him till he shrieked. He died insensible or perhaps fully sensible of me for the first time.
In eighty-eight, Zenora left Russia, reclaimed our bodies, toured them. Wooed by a young man, she sold us to an anthropological exhibit in Munich. J.B. Gassner put our bodies on the German fair circuit. At a circus convention in Vienna, he auctioned the monstrous Madonna and her brute baby. For a quarter of a century we passed from hand to calloused hand for cash.
The new century felt the old disgust for a pair of creatures with hair where hair should not be. In ‘twenty-one, Haakon Lund bought us for his Norwegian chamber of horrors. That was the year my name was divided from my body. ‘Julia Pastrana’ was not listed on the bill of sale. The new generation of shilling-payers did not think me real, but a diabolical confection of horsehair and leather, a relic of more barbarous times before Modernity, its brute lines, featureless towers, slot windows, slack chairs and inhumanly pale renders. I thought Modernity a diabolic confection of vanity and laziness. Modernity and I agreed to disagree.
When the Nazis thundered into Norway they ordered us destroyed. But Lund made them believe an Ape woman tour would line the Third Reich’s coffers, while showing to a hairy nicety miscegenation’s awful perils. On the strength of the world’s worst ever idea, my monkey son and me outlasted the war and the pale blue eyes that despised us up and down the Rhine.
‘Fifty-three and the good times were over for monsters. Lund stored his chamber of horrors, including us, in a warehouse outside Oslo. Rumours spread of a ghastly ape haunting the midnight dust. Teenage horror-seekers broke in, surrounded us, opened their mouths in ‘O’s and screamed till I thought our glass would shatter. Lund’s son Hans saw new money in the teenage stories in the press. He set us back to earn.
But now at last, someone remembered the old ape lady Julia Pastrana. In ‘sixty-nine, Judge Hofheinz, collector of curiosities, hired detectives to hunt down the Female Nondescript. Hans set up a bidding war for our corpses, only to withdraw from the sale to profit from the press’s frantic delight. He put us on the circus routes of Sweden and Norway, then shipped us to America. Here a New Age public finally found its conscience and cried out against the poor corpses paraded. So Hans rented us to Swedes. Again I travelled until people, month by month, grew ashamed of seeing me. I settled into years of peaceful warehouse dust, tender as fingers on my cheek.
Then the vandals came. They tore off my son’s arm, punched his little jaw, threw him in a gutter where the mice ate him. By the time he was found, he was in small scraps. I was left alone in my glass case looking at his empty pedestal, year on year.
‘Seventy-nine, I was stolen in the night. Once more, I was separated from my name. Children found my arm protruding from a ditch. The police pulled an entire woman, with hair where it should not be, from the mud and leaves. A crime against a woman dead a hundred years could not be chased. And who would charge dead Theodore with selling his wife, living and dead?
They delivered me to the Norwegian Institute of Forensic Medicine. I lived in its basement, a friend to mould and unsolved case files.
Nineteen-ninety, I felt the old cold draft of a journalist swooping down on me. I sold more newspapers when my ugly tale was knitted to my old body again.
Norwegian priests pressed for a Christian burial. A compromise – a sarcophagus in Oslo’s Museum of Medical History, a small DNA extraction first.
Twenty-twelve they sent me back Mexico, a burial my home country. A Roman Catholic mass was said over me. My coffin was borne to the cemetery in Sinaloa Province where I had begun. Instead of dirges the band played jaunty music, as if it were a fine thing to lay the dancing baboon-lady in earth at last.
But I shall hardly rest in peace.
For why was I repatriated to a backwater I left gratefully at twenty? Was I not celebrated worldwide, a star of the stage, the newspapers’ darling? Should I not have had a hollow in the actors’ graveyard in Covent Garden? Or lie with the other famous clever ladies in Saint Pancras field?
Or better still, I should have been allowed to sleep beside my Theodore, to lie and lie beside him for immemorial nights; to watch him gyre in his grave as the muscles died and shrank and danced his bones on leathery strings. Everything would drip from us, except my deathless hair, wrapped around his every place, a black wreath, a furring, a stirring of living hair everywhere on Theodore, everywhere my hair should justly be.
↧
The Boy from Titchmarsh and the Queen's Tiara
I was delighted to see the Queen’s choice of tiara when she entertained President Michael D. Higgins at Windsor Castle last month. Not that I’m particularly a connoisseur of tiaras, but I happened to know a bit about the Vladimir from researching my just-completed novel, The Grand Duchess of Nowhere.
![]()
The Vladimir tiara can be worn one of two ways, either with its original pendant pearls or, alternatively, with emeralds. Her Majesty chose the emerald version, in honour of her Irish guest. I hope he noticed. How the Vladimir came into the possession of the Queen is quite a saga. It was originally the property of Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, the wife of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich. Grand Duke Vladimir was an uncle of Tsar Nicholas II. The Grand Duchess was known familiarly as Miechen, and she was an Olympic-standard collector of gems, dropping into Faberge and Cartier as you and I might swing by the supermarket. She also had a very generous husband who understood that after giving birth the thing a woman most longs for is a parure of diamonds or sapphires.
Miechen had three sons and one daughter, all intended to be the eventual recipients of her jewel collection, but history took a different turn. By early 1917 Miechen, along with many other Romanovs, had headed south to Crimea, away from what they supposed were temporary political disturbances in St Petersburg and Moscow. That Miechen left behind most of her jewels in the Vladimir Palace is evidence enough that she believed she’d be going back.
As the revolution gathered pace Miechen began to accept that she was facing exile and with it the pressing need for ready money. She needed her jewels, but how to retrieve them from a city now under the control of the Petrograd Soviet? Enter stage left Bertie Stopford, an Englishman who preferred to speak French, a vicar's son from Titchmarsh in Northamptonshire, neither soldier nor diplomat but somehow free to move around wartime Russia and be an entertaining friend to women like Grand Duchess Miechen.Miechen had three sons and one daughter, all intended to be the eventual recipients of her jewel collection, but history took a different turn. By early 1917 Miechen, along with many other Romanovs, had headed south to Crimea, away from what they supposed were temporary political disturbances in St Petersburg and Moscow. That Miechen left behind most of her jewels in the Vladimir Palace is evidence enough that she believed she’d be going back.
A plan was quietly hatched. Stopford and Miechen’s son Boris, dressed as boiler repair men, entered the Vladimir Palace by the tradesman’s entrance, made their way to Miechen’s boudoir and sprang her jewels, including the pearl drop Vladimir tiara, from her safe. The precious items were taken out of the palace in tool bags. How they were spirited out of Russia is still unclear, perhaps by diplomatic courier, courtesy of the British Embassy, perhaps concealed in someone’s clothing. A tiara would certainly have been difficult to secrete in one’s bloomers. However it was done, Miechen’s jewels made it out of revolutionary Russia. Their value though was greatly diminished in a market flooded with gems belonging to exiled Romanovs. Cheaper pearls were becoming available too, from Japan. Fortunately for Miechen she didn’t live long enough to feel the pinch of their devalued worth, but after her death her children had to get whatever they could for them in order to pay off her debts. They were disposed of discreetly. Wealthy potential buyers were approached. Psst. Want to buy a diamond and pearl tiara, one careful previous owner?
The Vladimir was acquired by Queen Mary, the wife of King George V, and it was her idea to use some emeralds she had lying around and have them mounted as alternatives to the pendant pearls. 'To ring the changes', as the fashion editors say. When Queen Mary died her granddaughter, our present Queen, inherited the Vladimir tiara, with its two sets of pendants, and it was the emeralds that were aired at Windsor in April.
As for Bertie Stopford, I don’t know if he was rewarded for his derring-do. Perhaps the gratitude of a Romanov Grand Duchess was all he ever wanted. He lived out the rest of his life, mainly in Paris, with no visible means of support except lots of dinner invitations and the occasional commission from buying and selling antiques. He was a gadfly and name-dropper par excellence, but when he died in 1939 his estate only ran to the cost of a 30 year lease on a plot in the Bagneux Cemetery. In 1970 the man who rescued the Vladimir tiara ended up in a communal grave. His world and his so-called friends had faded away. But his true wealth, of course, were his memories, as recorded in his Russian Diary of an Englishman, Petrograd 1915-17.
↧
Jack-in-the-Green and the living ritual, by H.M. Castor
 |
| Jack-in-the-Green, Bristol, 2014 (Note the face above the yellow flower!) [All photos copyright H.M. Castor unless otherwise labelled] |
[O]ne of my colleagues [was] asked by a friend about our collaboration with [Joseph] Campbell: "Why do you need the mythology?" She held the familiar, modern opinion that "all these Greek gods and stuff" are irrelevant to the human condition today. What she did not know — what most do not know — is that the remnants of all that "stuff" line the walls of our interior system of belief, like shards of broken pottery in an archaeological site. But as we are organic beings, there is energy in all that "stuff." Rituals evoke it.
(Extract from Bill Moyers’ introduction to The Power of Myth
– a series of conversations with Joseph Campbell.)
Compared to the lives of our ancestors, our lives in the 21st century are very short on ritual. Shout me down if you will, but I’ll hazard a guess that, unless you attend a daily religious service, are a warden of the Tower of London (say), or – at certain times of the year – happen to be the Queen, you are likely to take part in what might be called a ritual much less frequently than the vast majority of your forebears. On the power of ritual, and what we might have lost as a society through its decline, there is much to be said – I won’t go into it here. Instead, I’d just like to tell you what happened to me the Saturday before last.
It was the first Saturday in May – the day, I’d (just) heard, when the Bristol Jack-in-the-Green would be making his annual appearance. Setting off in the morning, he would spend several hours processing through town, and by mid-afternoon would be passing along the main shopping street near where I live. From there, he would go on to be ritually ‘slain’ on a common not far away.
I didn’t know Bristol had a Jack-in-the-Green.
I didn’t, if truth be told, know what a Jack-in-the-Green was.
Hastily I reached for my copy of Steve Roud’s excellent book The English Year: a month-by-month guide to the nation’s customs and festivals, from May Day to Mischief Night. Roud told me that, from the late 18th to the early 20th century, Jack-in-the-Green had appeared as “an integral part of the [May Day] celebrations put on by chimney sweeps,” during which they collected money “to help see them through the summer, the lean period of the trade.”
And there was a vivid description of Jack’s appearance, from A.R. Bennett’s memoir of a south London childhood in the 1860s:
A lusty sweep — for strength and endurance were necessary for the due performance of the part — covered himself down to the boots with a circular wicker frame of bee-hive contour, carried on the shoulders, and terminating in a dome or pinnacle above his head. The frame was entirely concealed by green boughs and flowers… A small window gave egress to his gaze, but was not very obvious from without, and one seldom caught a glimpse of the perspiring countenance within.
[quoted in The English Year by Steve Roud, p.210]
 |
| 18th-century print (hand-coloured by Simon Garbutt, 2006), of the chimney-sweeps' May Day "Jack in the Green" in London Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons (ownership and copyright of the original hand-coloured artwork retained by Simon Garbutt) |
 |
Jack im Grünen, 1863 Otto von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld: Das festliche Jahr in Sitten, Gebräuchen und Festen der germanischen Völker. Mit gegen 130 in den Text gedruckten Illustrationen, vielen Tonbildern u. s. w. Spamer, Leipzig 1863. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München[Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons] |
 |
Illustration from an article, 'May Day in Cheltenham', 1893 Journal “Folk-Lore: A Quarterly Review of Myth, Tradition, Institution & Custom" Vol. 4, 1893. [Published by David Nutt; public domain via Wikimedia Commons] |
The historian in me pounced on the German connection with interest: since Jack-in-the-Green appeared in England in the late 18thcentury, when many things from Germany were in vogue, was he a straightforward import? Was he connected with chimney sweeps in Germany too? How far did the tradition there date back?
But I didn’t get any further with this – I had to go and see the real Jack. With my (rather reluctant) 10-year-old daughter for company I set off, and on the main street we soon heard drums signalling Jack’s approach.
An account from 1900, quoted in The English Year, said that Jack-in-the-Green looked like “a big bush… bobbing up and down” – I soon saw that this was a perfect description. Jack bobbed, jigged and spun around while his band of green companions (I’ve seen them called ‘bogeys’ or ‘bogies’ on some websites) played instruments, sang, walked backwards to warn him of upcoming obstacles, and daubed the noses of any willing bystanders with a smear of green face-paint.
 |
A 'bogie' at Jack in the Green, Hastings 2004 by Nicklott (Own work) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons |
 |
| Some of Jack's followers in Bristol this year were younger than others... |
The procession halted at one point for a bit of morris dancing (with Jack twirling in the centre of the circle), and then progress was resumed. Jack was picking up a fair few followers as he went, but plenty of other people he passed just waved, grinned or took pictures.
My daughter and I hadn’t planned on following him, but we were beguiled, and a short while later found ourselves accompanying Jack onto the common.
In the middle of the common Jack stopped, surrounded by his green companions and a circle of onlookers. He moved around the crowd, bobbing little bows here and there, approaching people as if investigating them… but any attempts at escape were blocked by the ‘bogeys’ with admonishing shouts of “Now, Jack!”
There was more dancing… and the recitation of a poem about ‘the Green Man’.
And then, after a swift surreptitious escape was made…
…Jack was hoisted into the air…
...toppled...
… and ‘slain’ with ferocious jabs of a stick.
After that the kids piled in (my daughter included) and pieces of Jack’s greenery were pulled off and handed out for everyone to take home.
So, what had we just witnessed? A bit of silliness? A meaningful tradition? Given the inclusion of a poem about the Green Man, some people – The English Year’s author Steve Roud included – might not have approved.
So, what had we just witnessed? A bit of silliness? A meaningful tradition? Given the inclusion of a poem about the Green Man, some people – The English Year’s author Steve Roud included – might not have approved.
[Jack-in-the-Green’s] history and reputation have been sadly misrepresented. Despite the fact that Jack dates from the late eighteenth century, lasted for little more than 150 years, and was an urban rather than rural custom, he is routinely claimed as an ancient pagan tree-spirit, or as a personification of a vegetation god who dances to welcome the spring. He has also become inextricably tangled up in the complex modern persona of ‘the Green Man’, that powerful symbol used by the romantic wing of various eco-friendly and New Age groups. He has thus been absorbed into the amorphous blend of foliate heads (as the Green Man carvings in churches were previously called), medieval wildmen, Robin Hood, Gawain and the Green Knight, and anything or anyone else ‘green’, who are all now equated with vegetation and nature spirits. Needless to say, there is not the slightest evidence that Jack-in-the-Green has any connections with these other characters, but it is probably impossible now to rescue him from such dubious company.
[The English Year by Steve Roud, p.212]
With my historian’s hat on, I do appreciate the important distinctions Steve Roud makes, but the Jack-in-the-Green procession I saw was not performed as a historical re-enactment – it was performed as a living ritual. And a question springs to mind: what is wrong with letting Jack-in-the-Green evolve? May Day celebrations have been many and varied over the centuries, and new versions of them have always developed – surely – out of what has gone before. Jack-in-the-Green did not appear in the 18thcentury out of the blue (as it were); in making such a feature of green boughs and flowers the chimney sweeps were continuing a much older tradition of welcoming in the spring/summer, and in symbolising this new season in the form of a figure, were they not drawing inspiration from other figures? Strictly speaking, it might be ‘wrong’ to equate Jack with ‘the Green Man’, but he was a green man, a figure of nature, a figure of the May, without doubt.
Would it be better if, today, Jack’s followers smeared their faces with chimney soot and carried sweep’s brushes, since that would be sticking to Jack’s specific and particular origins? Personally, I don’t think so (though neither am I objecting, if they want to). The heart of the ritual is the marking of May Day, and I think you can let some bath water go while still hanging on to the baby.
I also think it’s important to remember that legends, myths and symbols inevitably shift and alter as they are viewed from different perspectives in different eras. Indeed they mustif they are to continue to carry any meaning. In the current climate (literal and metaphorical) it is not surprising that a symbol like ‘the Green Man’ is gaining new popularity, and while any claims made to a straightforward lineage might be mistaken, it is not true (either) to say that the Green Man is a new invention. We have a soup of traditional figures and stories that – for centuries – has been energetically stirred. And we must go on stirring, because setting symbols in aspic will eventually render them lifeless and irrelevant.
So, for me, the point lies in asking ourselves whether a symbol or a ritual still carries some living energy – can it still mean something to us? I don’t know about you, but the coming of sunshine and warmer weather has a profound effect on me (not as profound as if I had lived before central heating and tarmacked roads, but profound enough nevertheless). And to my surprise, I found last week that doing something more to mark summer’s arrival than putting away my jumpers and saying ‘What lovely sunshine’ could have meaning. I wasn’t the only one.
My 10-year-old daughter, as I mentioned, had been reluctant to come with me to find Jack-in-the-Green. Go and look at a man dressed in leaves? She didn’t see the point. But at bedtime that night she told me it had been ‘the best thing ever’. Why? Neither of us could quite put our finger on it. Something to do with the feeling of community? Something to do with the fact that the only point was the ritual itself (no presents, no sweets, no commercialization!)? Something to do with how it was playful, symbolic, silly and serious, all at once? We didn’t know. But we’d gone with no expectations, except of seeing a curiosity. And we’d come back having – rather mysteriously – loved it.
Thanks to Mike Slater, there's footage on Youtube showing the whole of the final part of Jack's journey in Bristol on May 3rd 2014, including the morris dancing and the ‘slaying’. It can be seen here (the action begins at 2:09 mins).
↧
↧
LADY CROOKBACK – on disability and invisibility in historical fiction. By Elizabeth Fremantle
 |
| Lady Mary Grey |
My own daughter was paralysed as a baby and for many months we believed she would never walk. Happily she did, but that experience fuelled my desire to give a voice to one of history's invisible women and to articulate something of the kind of life she might have led as both court insider and outsider. One comes across the occasional man with physical differences in historical fiction: Bucino the dwarf of Sarah Dunant's In the company of the Courtesan, George RR Martin's Tyrian Lannister and polio victim Tomas Ashton of Rosie Allison's The Very Thought of You. All these characters play a pivotal part in their respective narratives, with Ashton as a damaged romantic lead in the mould of Jojo Moyes's quadriplegic hero in Me Before You, Lannister as a key character and Bucino as the protagonist of Dunant's novel. But there is a distinct absence of women with disabilities at the heart of historical fiction. It seems that women are allowed flaws of character, and a prevalence of women with psychological challenges can be found, but bodily flaws seem to be taboo. Looking to the past for literary examples offers little. There is the wheelchair-bound Edith in Stephan Zweig's wonderful Beware of Pity and a number of tragic girls like Beth in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Love For Lydia Springs to mind too, who are defined by debilitating illness but it is hard to find empowered women who do not conform to the physical norm. It is for this reason that I chose to take that ambassador's grim appraisal at face value when creating the character of Mary Grey. I didn't want to tone down her disabilities or blur them in any way and felt it was important for her to live on the page as she was in life and allow her, in some small way, speak for all the invisible women of her time.
 |
| The Infanta of Spain with her dwarf |
Here's a short extract from Mary Grey's story. In it she is only nine-years-old and reeling from the execution of her beloved sister Jane.I hand my gown to Magdalen, who holds it up, saying with a smirk, 'How does this fit?' She dangles it from the tips of her fingers away from her body.
'This part,' I explain, pointing at the high collar that has been specially tailored to fit my shape, 'goes up around here.'
'Over your hump?' Magdalen says with a snort of laughter.
I must not cry. What would my sister Jane have done, I ask myself. Be stoic, Mouse, she would have said. Let no one see what you are truly feeling.
'I don't know why the Queen would want such a creature at her wedding,' Magdalen whispers to Cousin Margaret, not so quiet that I can't hear.
I fear I will cry and make things worse, so I think up a picture of Jane. I remember her saying once: God has chosen to make you a certain way and it cannot be without reason. In his eyes you are perfect – in mine too. But I know I am not perfect; I am so hunched about the shoulders and crooked at the spine, I look as if I have been hung by the scruff on a hook for too long. And I am small as an infant of five, despite being almost twice that age. Besides it is what is in here that matters; in my mind's eye Jane presses a fist to her heart.
Sisters of Treason will be published on 22nd May
ElizabethFremantle.com
↧
Strange Fruit, Ida B Wells (and Kate Beaton again) Catherine Johnson
In the 19th and the early part of the 20th centuries lynching was a not uncommon occurrence in the Southern States of America. Of course lynching is not unique to this part of the world. In every country at one time or another the powerful have extracted summary punishments on the less powerful with or without reason.
But in the Southern states, right up until the civil right movement, lynchings were public spectacles, crowds would gather, postcards were produced as souvenirs, members of the crowd might point out to interested relatives exactly where they stood in relation to the victim. Or as in the picture below, from a 1930s lynching, smile for the camera. By the way, the girls are holding shreds of murdered men's clothes (two were hung in this case) which were highly prized souvenirs.
 |
| From Without Sanctuary Allen, et al. |
Ida B Wells was a firebrand and a blazing star who deserves recognition here, as well as in the USA. She was born in 1862, a slave, just months before the emancipation act in 1863. Her parents believed in education and she was sent to college, leaving only when her parents and baby brother died in order that she could work as a teacher and support her remaining siblings. She later attended evening classes at Fisk University and was the first black woman to write for a white newspaper. She toured the world speaking out against the horrors of lynching after her co workers in a community store she set up were lynched. (The stores' white owned competitor was not happy).
Not only that she refused to give up her seat in a railway carriage and protested in 1893 against the exclusion of blacks from the Chicago World Exposition.
And that's not all - she was one of the first women in public life to actively keep her own name and not take her husbands' after marriage. She had four children, wrote a heap of books and set up the National Association of Colored Women, which became part of the NAACP.
Her later life was concerned mostly with education and writing and she died, aged 68 in 1931, as many of us might want to in mid sentence, writing a book.
 |
| Ida B Wells by Kate Beaton |
If you'd like to learn more
her writing is free here
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Southern-Horrors-Lynch-Law-Phases-ebook/dp/B0084CGSRA/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1399988558&sr=1-2&keywords=ida+b+wells
And there's a rather wonderful biography by Mia Bay : To Tell the Truth Freely
http://us.macmillan.com/totellthetruthfreely/MiaBay
And because there is never enough Kate Beaton ever there's a link to a series of comic strips about Ida B Wells below.
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=356
Catherine Johnson's latest book is Sawbones, an 18th century forensic murder mystery.
↧
Roads for Runaways
by Marie-Louise Jensen
.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image%2F*)
Researching 18th century roads in England for my most recent book was a fascinating learning experience. I'd read of poorly maintained roads, of course, and of toll gates and pike roads, but they were all vague terms that swirled about in my mind rather. I'm far from an expert now, of course, but I did learn some interesting things. What is interesting is, that it wouldn't be the first time that roads have been put into private hands in the UK.
In the 17th century, most of the roads here were in such an appalling state that travel was a penance. It's hard to imagine just how bad appalling is. Imagine the narrowest, most rutted and muddy lane you've ever seen, completely impassible for cars, send a riding school along it with big trains of horses every day, add a few herds of cattle and you are probably accurately visualizing one of England's main 17th century thoroughfares.
Maintaining the roads was the responsibility of the parish through which they ran. Each parishioner was obliged to give a number of days labour per year to maintain the road and a local squire would be appointed to oversee it.
As with any voluntary, unpaid task, adherence was patchy (like the roads!) And for practical and financial reasons only local materials were used, so in boggy areas, you'd get boggy roads.
Another huge problem was that in a populous parish with a little used road, the road would probably be fine. But there were sections of the great North Road, for example, that passed through scantily inhabited parishes where it would have been a full-time job for the few residents to maintain the roads adequately.
Thus as travel increased, with a growing economy and early industrialization, the system didn't work.
In the early 18th century, the government began handing over sections of road which were to be maintained in return for charging travellers toll.The Turnpike Trusts, and the turnpike roads, were born.
Initially, this scheme was so successful that it was quickly expanded. The turnpike roads helped speed up travel considerably.
In the long run, many of the problems we see today in privatized services surfaced. Some trusts maintained their roads meticulously, others pocketed the money and let the roads go to rack and ruin. Travellers were furious at paying toll for such roads and eventually road maintenance was taken into government hands.
The road my runaway flees on is the Great Western Road, or what was also known as the Bristol Road or the Bath Road which ran westwards from London. Although this, of course, is only the start of her travels. But more about that in later posts.
Runaway is published by Oxford University Press on 5th June 2014
↧
Writers' Houses 2: Lawrence of Clouds Hill - by Sue Purkiss
When I first saw Lawrence of Arabia, there was one particular scene that caught my attention. Lawrence (aka Peter O’Toole) was making a point about mind over matter. He lit a match, and he held his finger within the flame. He gazed at it, bright blue eyes intent, face unmoving. Then, quietly, he said something to this effect: “It’s not that I don’t feel the pain. It’s that I don’t allow myself to show it.”
This was interesting. It spoke of a man with striking powers of concentration, self-belief and self-discipline – an ascetic. A man following the beat of his own drum, not that of others.
In civilian life Lawrence had been an archaeologist, but in 1915 he was sent to the desert to negotiate with the Arabs as a representative of British Intelligence – of the Great Game, of Empire. But he held on to his own conviction that the Arabs should be allowed to rule themselves, and played an important part after the war, as an adviser to Winston Churchill, in bringing about self-government in Iraq and Jordan.
I knew little more about him than this. But a few weeks ago, I went to Clouds Hill, his retreat in Dorset , and there I learnt a great deal more.
Clouds Hill is a tiny white-washed cottage in a clearing in the woods near Bovington, where there is and was a Tank Corps camp. After his wartime activities, his post-war political campaigning on behalf of the Arabs, and the completion of his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence
Built in 1808, the cottage was in desperate need of essential repairs. To fund this work, Lawrence sold the gold dagger which had been made for him in Mecca Dorchester I wrote about last month. I don’t think he would have known Emma, but he did become good friends with Thomas Hardy and his second wife, Florence
 |
| The upstairs room |
So he had a large window put in upstairs which would give him enough light to write by. He had very definite ideas about interior design, and was influenced by the ideas of William Morris: there was a certain harking back to mediaeval, monastic simplicity. Objects were designed to fulfil a function, not simply for the sake of their appearance. Clouds Hill had no paint or wallpaper; it was decorated with wooden shelves and panelling and undyed leather hangings. There was no gas or electric light; nothing but candles. Friends – including E M Forster, George Bernard Shaw and his wife, and friends from the ranks - would come and talk, and listen to the music he played on his state-of-the-art phonograph, and be offered tea and tinned snacks.
Later, when he started to make good money from his writing, he did more to the cottage – but it never became a conventionally appointed house. He didn’t want a kitchen, but he did get the downstairs damp-proofed and created a room with a large, leather-covered day-bed next to the small window, for reading in the daytime. At night, he used a chair with an integral table and sconces for candlesticks, in which he sat by the fire, surrounded by his collection of hundreds of books, many of them given to him by their writers. He also contrived a system for bringing and heating water to the bathroom he put in also on the ground floor – ‘Give me the luxuries,’ he declared, ‘and I will do without the essentials.’ (Such as an indoor toilet!) He also bought new varieties of rhododendron to plant on the wooded slopes around the cottage, and built a thatched cottage for his beloved Brough motor cycle. Sadly, he met his death on the Brough. In 1935 he was all set to retire from the army and live full-time at Clouds Hill; but riding back from the camp one day he had to swerve to avoid two boys on bicycles, and he came off. He died a few days later, and is buried in the churchyard at nearby Moreton. (The church there has the most beautiful engraved windows, created by Laurence Whistler – not to be missed.)
 |
| Lawrence and the Brough |
A quiet but insightful guide told us more about Lawrence Ireland , had abandoned his first wife and family and come to live in England Oxford , where Lawrence Carchemish in Syria , digging with Leonard Woolley, before being posted to Cairo
Two of his brothers were killed in the war, his father died just afterwards in the flu epidemic, and then his mother and another brother went to China Lawrence
It’s a green, peaceful, quiet place: a place, as Yeats puts it, ‘where peace comes dropping slow.’ A world away from the desert and the fates of nations, and an insight into a remarkable and unusual man.
↧
↧
TYPING A WAY TO THE TOP by Penny Dolan
How often does one understand something you should have known all along? While working on my Mary Wollstonecraft story for the Daughters of Time anthology, I started thinking about education for girls, and especially my own mother’s education. So today, because May was her birthday month, let me tell you a little about the schooling of Evelyn Gladys Rose, fourth child and only daughter of an army family.
I knew where she went to school, because I went to the school myself : Noel Park School, Wood Green, North London. The school is one of the generation of imposing “triple-decker schools” familiar in urban areas, built to last. The healthily high-ceilinged rooms have large windows to let in plenty of light but set well above any inattentive child’s eye level. The schools have large halls and, as any current staff would agree, a quantity of staircases. Sometimes one can still find “Boys” and “Girls” carved in stone above the once-segregated entrances. Noel Park School, when I knew it, still had a “Boys” playground and a “Girls & Infants” playground, divided by a high brick wall and each with its own outside lavatory block. We never went to the top of the school..
In 1921, the school-leaving age was raised from 12 to 14, but it was the 1926 Hadow Report on Education and Adolescents that led to pattern of classrooms that my mother knew.
Her Noel Park School taught Infants on the ground floor (5-6 years) Juniors on the middle floor (7-11years) and the Seniors (12-14) up on the top floor. The division at age 11 was chosen for practical reasons. Some of the boys,
I believe, went to a nearby secondary school, where the emphasis was on technical education.
Her Noel Park School taught Infants on the ground floor (5-6 years) Juniors on the middle floor (7-11years) and the Seniors (12-14) up on the top floor. The division at age 11 was chosen for practical reasons. Some of the boys,
I believe, went to a nearby secondary school, where the emphasis was on technical education.
There was, however, one way out of Noel Park. After a year, able children could win a scholarship to Glendale Grammar School. Among my mother’s “treasures” is the letter offering her a coveted place, but - a familiar tale of the times - she did not go. The uniform was expensive and the overall cost would be too much.
My grandfather, she hinted, refused to give his permission. One of the reasons she gave was that it was because she was a girl. My mother only mentioned this disappointment a couple of times, but I wonder if the incident drove her on all her life. So she studied typing and shorthand, becoming a formidably accurate typist, and during World War II, she left home and joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and was in the typing pool at High Wycombe, across the corridor from the office of Arthur “Bomber” Harris. My mother never really stopped working. Her typewriter was her identity. With her toddler in the back seat, she cycled the country lanes of then-rural Cheshunt and Nazeing, collecting and delivering freelance typing.
Later, she got a job as a typist and then secretary at the impressive Woodhall House, home of the local gas company but now the Wood Green Magistrates Court. One afternoon, aged around eight, I went up the drive, through those polished doors, edged up to the Reception desk and asked to see her. In an era when female office staff hid any hint of “children”, my mother the secretary was not at all pleased to see my after-school face, especially when my reason was too complicated to explain. I think I had wanted to prove to my friend that my mum really did work in such a palatial building.
My mother kept at it. Eventually became the personal secretary to one of the top “Gas Men” up in London and after retirement worked on at the St John Ambulance Brigade Headquarters. Such determination! Even as she lay dying, she was struggling to get out of bed to go to work. (What would I get out of such a bed for, I wondered? Soon after that moment, I started trying to write.).
My mother had always wanted me to achieve, too. She wanted me, her daughter, to have the education she hadn’t had. She was the one who was keen on my education, the one who pulled all the strings she could to get me into the local single-sex Convent Grammar School. She was also the one who picked up the pieces between one disastrous school incident and another, the one who pushed me into becoming a teacher. Before the second wave of feminism, my mother was determined to show everyone that girls are just as good as boys and just as deserving of their education and place in the world. Maybe she echoed some of Mary Wollstonecraft's ideals?
However, back to that WAAF typing pool. I recently met up with my mother’s best friend. Shortly afterwards, she sent me two pages from her autograph book of that time. On the left page is a verse by Johnnie, a man who was often calling in to the pool, giving his view of the WAAF typists. On the opposing page is my mother’s spirited reply. Both verses are below.
The Song of the Airman
Beauteous maidens, garbed in blue,
Hindering those with work to do,
Drawing pay for doing naught,
Doing things they didn’t ought,
Powdering noses, apeing fashions,
Eating much more than their rations,
Affected girls with silly laughs
Useless, muddling, blundering W.A.A.F.S.
The W.A.A.F.S Lament
Stalwart he-men, big and strong (?)
Boasting, bragging all day long,
Thinking they do all the work,
Walking round with saintly smirk,
Trying to behave but finding
This ordeal much too binding.
Unfortunately they’re not rare men,
There are too many b - - - - y airmen!
Apparently, she delivered standing on a chair, and to much applause by all the girls. Good on you, Gladys!
ps. I do know, and my mother and father certainly knew, that that war took many lives, especially of airmen, so I hope you will read this verse in the context of the post and the time. Thanks.
↧
A Visit to Chatsworth - Celia Rees
A couple of weeks ago, I visited Chatsworth for the first time. I went with an old school friend. Neither of us had ever visited but we had always wanted to go. It was a mothers and daughters trip with a friend along as well. A Ladies Excursion, much in the tradition of Jane Austen. In fact, it had first been mooted after a viewing of Death Comes to Pemberley. A fiction about a fiction had fired a desire to visit the source of such literary inspiration. My friend and I had visited houses as school girls, the ones local to us: Packwood House, Baddersley Clinton, Warwick Castle. In those days, the National Trust wasn't nearly as organised as it is now. There wasn't always a tea room and the shop was the guide to the house and a couple of postcards. Not even any fudge. Some houses were still in private hands and you were shown around for 1/6 by a trusty retainer or sometimes by the owner and had the feeling of rooms just vacated, rather like Lizzie's visit to Pemberley. Things are different now.
Chatsworth is the stateliest of stately homes. The seat of the Dukes of Devonshire and one of the few really great houses still in family hands. From the moment it comes into view, suddenly brought to you by the artful curve of the drive, it is designed to overawe and impress, to flaunt position, wealth and power. We come to boggle and gawk, just as the visitors did in Austen's day. The interior is as grand and elegant as the Baroque exterior, from the great entrance hall to the glitter and gleam of the dining table that seems to go off to infinity.
I find it almost impossible to imagine what it would have been like to live in such a place. The Devonshires have a mini British Museum in the Chapel Corridor, complete with an enormous Roman foot and two life size statues of the Egyptian Lion Goddess, Sekhmet. They even have their own sculpture gallery, not to mention paintings by Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Singer Sargent, Renoir and Lucian Freud. The family is still collecting, adding contemporary pieces to the historic collection.
It is rare to see such art and artefacts in private hands. The wealth that could acquire and own such things is as awesome as the items themselves.
Whenever I visit a house, grand or not, there is always something that snags my attention. Usually, it's something that I didn't anticipate, that I didn't expect to see. At Chatsworth it was the Mineral Collection. It wasn't that I was surprised to see a collection of fossils and minerals, collecting was a popular pursuit in the 18th and 19th Century in the spirit of the Enlightenment and scientific enquiry, what surprised me was that this was the collection of Georgiana, first wife of the 5th Duke of Devonshire, famous beauty and socialite, who I had previously associated with Keira Knightley and big hair.
I, too, am interested in minerals and fossils. It is not an interest shared by everybody, my companions had moved on smartly. As I examined the specimens, I felt an entirely unexpected kinship with the notorious duchess. It made a kind of sense. Many of the minerals were beautiful and valuable, precious and semi precious, but it was not just that. This is Derbyshire, the Devonshire wealth came as much from under the ground as above it.
In a house like this, there is only so much you can absorb. It was time for the shop and tearooms before moving on to the gardens.
↧
War Girl - War Artist WW1
by
Theresa Breslin
‘A moving collection of the untold stories of women in the First World War…’
WAR GIRLS is an anthology of short stories exploring how the First World War changed and shaped the lives of women forever. Publication date is 5thJune 2014 with contributions from myself, Melvin Burgess. Berlie Doherty, Anne Fine, Adèle Geras, Mary Hooper, Rowena House, Sally Nicholls, and Matt Whyman.
My own story, Shadow and Light, is inspired by the artist and volunteer nurse Norah Nielsen Gray. Norah was born in 1882 in the Scottish seaside town of Helensburgh. She grew up there showing early artistic talent, and when the family moved to Glasgow, she studied at the Glasgow School of Art. The inspirational director at the time encouraged women to attend even on a part time basis, and appointed a special ‘Women’s Warden’. (I’m not sure whether the thinking behind this was to protect the women or the men!) Norah was noted for her portrait painting and while still a student had a picture accepted for the Royal Academy. She was also acclaimed for her use of colour and this was one of the slender threads of information that glowed brightly when I was collating facts for my story.
Of course, like many stories, the origins of Shadow and Light lie in the past, germinating for years before they coalesce into something which might produce a piece of work. Writing The Medici Seal meant that I had studied Leonardo da Vinci’s technique of sfumato. Doing book notes to be included in the recently published new edition of Remembrance meant that I’d returned to the Imperial War Museum in London last year. Although the galleries were operating under restricted access due to the WW1 refurbishment, some rooms holding relevant paintings were still open. It was one of those serendipity things where, if the main sections dealing with war had been available then perhaps I wouldn’t have spent so long with the paintings - looking again at stunning canvases of John Singer Sargent, and then browsing in the shop and finding the book, Women War Artists. During World War One only 4 women were commissioned as official war artists as opposed to 47 men! The employment terms for the women were more severe and in the 1919 Exhibition out of 925 works a mere 15 of the paintings were by women.
I read the book and thought - surely there were more women painting images of World War One? Trawling the Internet I came across Norah Nielsen Graywho, despite having no commission, painted war scenes. I looked at her paintings and read about her life and got that shivery feeling when you realise that you’ve stumbled on something. She wasn’t only a significant major artist she was also brave - while leading a successful and comfortable life she volunteered to join the Scottish Women’s Hospitals as a nursing assistant.
These hospitals were set up in France by Dr Elsie Inglis, a British doctor and suffragette based in Edinburgh who pioneered medical care for women. When war broke out Dr Inglis approached the British government with an offer to help, but was told to ‘go home and sit still’ (!) She then wrote to the French government and under the auspices of the French Red Cross established two hospitals staffed with women: doctors, surgeons, ambulance drivers, admin staff etc. { Note to self: Dr Inglis deserves a blog all of her own}
Norah became one of Dr Inglis’s team of women hospital staff based at Royaumont Abbey Hospital just outside Paris and there she painted in her spare time. When the war was over the Imperial War Museum, recognizing her talent, wanted to purchase one of her paintings - a scene inside the hospital – as it was thought that the War Museum should have a record of what was done “by the British for the French Army in the way of Hospitals”. Norah was a feisty women and insisted that the painting should be acquired for the General Section and not be put into the ‘Women’s Work’ Section, as the museum proposed. They responded by saying that the purchasing budget for the General Section had been exhausted. Norah refused to let them have the painting which is why, (and also thanks to the efforts of Argyll and Bute Area Librarian Pat McCann), it now hangs in the Gallery of the West King Street library in Helensburgh.
 |
| © This painting is owned by Argyll and Bute Council |
More information here http://tinyurl.com/ndm94qy
A year after Norah refused to give them this painting the Imperial War Museum commissioned her to paint another record of the staff at the hospital. This version now is now part of the Museum’s collection.
For my purposes more research was needed: getting out my archived WW1 notes, poring over old maps of France to locate a fictitious ambulance base somewhere between Amiens and Albert – quite deliberately to be directly in the line of the German breakthrough during their Spring Offensive of 1918. It was not British Government policy to place women in the front line so I had to contrive a means whereby my characters would be in real and active danger. I had to take time to tease out the characters, for although Norah is the inspiration this is not the story of her life at all. I have made my young artist drive an ambulance as many women did. She has her own family and back story. And here I must pay tribute to the editors at Andersen Press for their patience while I wrestled with various ideas.
So, my story is about a young artist called Merle who, in the autumn of 1917, arrives in France with her friend Grace to work as ambulance drivers. Back story is dribbled in as they acclimatise and move south in the company of one Captain George Taylor with whom Merle has an immediate clash.
Without over emphasising the horror I’ve been as true as I can to the conditions in which these women worked. Merle paints when she can, but the sights and sound of the patients she transports from the hospital trains is with her and the war is moving closer each day until finally Albert falls. The German army breaks through the Front Line and is advancing rapidly just as another hospital train is due to arrive at the railway station…
Throughout the drama I’ve tried to weave the glowing thread of colour and artistic interpretation that first alerted me to the potential of the story.
I hope you enjoy it and the other stories too – they are, as it says in the blurb, …moving portraits of loss and grief, and of hope overcoming terrible odds
*NOTE: A WAR GIRLS panel event will take place at 6p.m. on 19th June at Lancashire Infantry Museum in Prestonchaired by a journalist from BBC Lancashire with Carnegie Medal winning writers:Theresa Breslin, Melvin Burgess, Berlie Doherty and Anne Fine.
The painting, Hôpital Auxilaire D’Armée 30, Abbaye de Royaumont,hangs in Helensburgh Library and is owned by Argyll and Bute Council. It is reproduced here with their permission.
Book Covers via publishers
Theresa Breslin writing on WW1:
↧
'The Odessa Massacre and why historians should study Ukraine' by A. L. Berridge
Warning: This is a longer, grimmer piece than usual, and if you’re looking for entertainment I’d strongly advise you to skip it! This is for those who like their history raw…
People are being killed in Ukraine. That’s ‘current affairs’, of course, and won’t be ‘history’ for at least another twenty years, but that doesn’t mean historians shouldn’t be studying it very closely indeed.
Because in Ukraine the battleground is history itself – and every single ethnic group in the country has good historical reasons for hating the others. Ukrainians hate Russians because of years of oppression under Stalin, and in particular the atrocity of the Holodomor. Crim-Tatars hate Russians for displacing them, and particularly for Stalin’s mass deportations in 1944. Jewish citizens are wary of both Crim-Tatars for their role in the ‘round-up’ of Jews under the Nazi Occupation, and Ukrainians who participated in Jewish murders and served as notoriously vicious guards in the concentration camps. Russians hate both Tatars and Ukrainians for their collaboration with the Nazis, and resent the fact that the break-up of the Soviet Union left them a stranded minority in a country full of people who hate them back.
All these grievances are valid - but the problem comes when none seem able to recognize those of the others. Russians, for instance, were legitimately furious when their traditional Victory Day parades were banned as ‘pro-Russian rallies’ – but on May 18th the Russian Federation tried to ban the Crim-Tatars’ own little memorial parade in Crimea on the grounds that it would be ‘provocative’.
 |
| The Tatars went ahead with the commemoration anyway |
But Victory Day is the big one – and it was on May 9th that we saw the biggest split between Ukrainians of different ethnic origin. You won’t need to speak Russian to understand the reaction of the crowd in this video, for instance, when at 1” the Ukrainian nationalist governor of Kherson calls Hitler a ‘liberator’ who saved the country from Stalin:
My personal sympathies are with the woman and old man who wrest away the microphone – but that’s perhaps my own historical bias showing, since my country fought alongside the Russians against Hitler. Such a bias would currently be very dangerous in Ukraine. Even the traditional symbol of remembrance, the ‘St George ribbon’, marks someone as a ‘pro-Russian’ and a legitimate target, and those who wear them are known derisively as ‘Colorado beetles’ after the orange and black of the stripes. This little French video even shows footage from Lviv when 'Right Sector' thugs tear the St George ribbons from veterans' chests as they go to lay flowers on their comrades' graves.
 |
| 'Colorado beetles' - Resistance Veterans in Sevastopol May 9th 2011 |
I can’t defend those actions, but I can in a way understand them. How can those who suffered under Stalin distinguish between ‘good Russians’, whose Red Army did more than any other to achieve victory over Hitler, and ‘bad Russians’ who oppressed, tortured and murdered so many in the dark years of the USSR? Yet both things are true. History isn’t a question of ‘either/or’, but a long procession of ‘and…and’s, and if we show only half the picture then it’s no longer history, but propaganda.
But there’s a worse kind than that, when history is deliberately rewritten to support a current agenda. I was first drawn into this when I read newspaper accounts of Crimean history like this one, which constructed their entire narrative round the Tatars being displaced by evil Russian invaders. Say – what?? All these pieces began in the late 13th century, completely omitting the fact that the ancestors of Russia were already there in the people of the ‘Kievan Rus’, and it was they who were displaced by the Tatars in the Mongol Invasion from 1223. Crimea was actually the birthplace of Russian Orthodox Christianity in the 10th century, and Kiev was the original capital of Russia.
 |
| Vladimir Cathedral in Crimea where Prince Vladimir of Kiev converted to Christianity |
Even the later history has been blurred. Very few articles mentioned that Crimea was only transferred to Ukraine in 1954 as a kind of ‘wedding gift’ by Khrushchev – a gift that might reasonably have been returned when the break-up of the USSR led to the ‘divorce’ in 1991. None I’ve seen offer any hint of Crimea’s resistance ever since: of the mass protests of 1993-4 and 2009-2010, or of Ukraine abandoning even the pretence of independence by removing the pro-Russian President Meshkov, and scrapping the entire Crimean constitution. Nope, none of that. Nothing to interfere with the concept that Crimea was always Ukraine’s, and Russia had no right to it at all.
But even more disturbing was this recent blog by the ‘Euromaidan PR’ which attempted to do away with the earlier history altogether – claiming Russia had no relation at all to the Kievan-Rus, and had merely hijacked the concept to justify their invasion in the 17th century. It’s an astonishingly inaccurate piece of old-style propaganda, but what I couldn’t understand was why they’d even bother. These events were centuries ago – why couldn’t the Maidan just leave history as history and move on?
I’m afraid I think I understand it now. The same source on Twitter actually claimed there were no Russians in Crimea before WW1, but when I pointed out this would have meant we’d fought the Crimean War of 1853-6 against an opponent who wasn’t even there, a Crim Tatar entered the conversation as follows:
That word – ‘iatrogenic’. This man didn’t even see the Russians as people, but as a disease infecting his land. That was why it was necessary to rewrite the history – to ‘other’ and dehumanize them by portraying them as ‘aliens’. There are very good reasons for doing that to a particular ethnic group, and this 22 second video of Ukrainian parliamentary member Iryna Farion explains them very well:
‘We should have driven the enemy out of Ukraine as early as 1654…. That’s why these alien creatures who have come to Ukraine deserve only one thing. They need to be killed.’
She’s ostensibly referring to ‘pro-Russian separatists’, but those last sentences make clear she is talking about every ethnic Russian in Ukraine.
But we have seen this kind of dehumanizing before, and that’s another reason why we desperately need a historian’s perspective on what’s happening. George Santayana famously said, ‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ – and this is one part of Europe’s past we must never, ever allow to happen again.
And it could do. Even if we look only at the pictures and iconography it’s impossible for anyone familiar with the 1930s and 1940s to miss the similarities. Take this poster, for instance. The legend reads ‘Swearing makes you turn into a Moskal’ – and ‘Moskal’, like ‘Colorado’, is a pejorative term for a Russian. The picture could have come straight from the pages of Der Stürmer.
So could those images attached to unverified accounts of atrocities, often involving a very blond Ukrainian girl with startlingly white skin.This revolting one from the Facebook page of Ukraine’s Right Sector actually dates back to 1945 – as if absolutely nothing has changed.
Other images are even more familiar, and on a History blog I doubt I need to comment on these:
There are ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine all right, and in 2012 the Jewish Times was already expressing concern about Svoboda having won seats in the Ukrainian RADA. They were a dominant force in the Maidan protests, and the BBC did a good six minute piece about them for Newsnight which you can see here. This video paints an even stronger picture of what’s happening in Ukraine today, but I advise against watching the last few minutes where the images are appallingly graphic.
Of course there’s propaganda here too. Svoboda holds very few seats, the Right Sector hasn’t even formed an official party, and many supporters of the Kiev government find them just as repellent as we do. We could even tell ourselves it’s a lot of fuss about something that’s not much worse than our own EDL.Or we could have – until May 2nd and possibly Europe's worst single atrocity since WWII.
Odessa.
I find it difficult to write about this. I was one of about 600,000 people who watched the whole thing happening live, and just thinking about it still makes me shake. But there’s a survivor’s account in Russian here with a decent English transcript here, there’s another with English subtitles here, and two more (slightly sanitized) here. Analyses tend to be emotionally and sometimes politically charged, but this one gives a clear overview, this one is useful to explain the staging, this one provides good context, and all are well supported by primary sources. Verified footage and photographs of the whole thing are available all over the net, but viewer discretion is strongly advised, since the most important evidence is inevitably inside the charnel house itself.
What I can’t do is link you to Western mainstream media, since all have refused to cover it. The official story is that there was street fighting in Odessa provoked by the ‘separatists’, and as a result the House of Trades Unions ‘caught fire’ and about 39 people ‘died’ in it.
What actually happened is this:
A rally of nationalists and football fans was indeed provoked to violence when they were fired on by men wearing the red armband associated with the Right Sector. Some of these also wore the St George’s ribbon of the ‘separatists’, although they mingled happily with police, and even fired from behind their protective line. Their efforts succeeded in drawing a now maddened mob to the House of Trade Unions, where more than 200 ethnic Russian men, women and children had been harmlessly camped since February. These peaceful protestors were panicked into fleeing inside the building, which was then deliberately set on fire with Molotov cocktails prepared by pretty Ukrainian girls much earlier in the day.
The mob watched it burn. When a fire engine tried to get through they blocked it. When victims fell or jumped to their death from the windows, they cheered. When desperate faces appeared at the windows they chanted, ‘Burn, Colorado, burn!’ When some victims tried to escape from lower floors men in the crowd shot at them. When some made it out through the flames they were beaten to death with baseball bats and iron bars. It’s all on tape – and can be verified frame for frame with footage that was streamed live through four different cameras.
 |
| Child looking out at the window. 'Burn, Colorado, burn!' |
Even that wasn’t all of it. Killers had already entered the building, and while the mob chanted outside many Russians were already being murdered within. Some were shot, others apparently gassed, but bodies were found with only head and shoulders burnt black, as if they had been doused by some flammable mixture and set alight. Again, it’s all on tape – much of it recorded by Right Sector thugs who entered the building afterwards to both rob and mock the dead.
We don’t know how many died. Only 48 deaths have been officially recorded so far, but as many again are reported ‘missing’, and survivors claim there were more still. Even so, it’s not the numbers that are most shocking, but the way it was done – and the fact ordinary people were so easily transformed into monsters. It is the inhumanity that makes it so unbearable.
Just one example. In this short clip you hear a woman screaming inside the burning building, and the crowd comment on it. I’ve had two people independently verify what the man closest to camera is saying, and it’s this – ‘That’s not a woman, it’s a separatist’.
‘Dehumanization’ again, and the whole business is riddled with it. Ukrainian Nationalists have been posting pictures like these on Twitter and Facebook every day:
Nor is it just the mob. Ukrainian columnist Kateryna Kruk wrote that ‘Odessa cleaned itself of terrorists’, and presidential candidate Julia Tymoschenko even congratulated the ‘heroes of Odessa’ for fighting for ‘our Ukraine’. I have yet to see one single expression of remorse.
And still the West is silent! The EU statement on the subject suggests the motive might be to ‘prevent escalation’ – but inevitably it’s having the opposite effect. Not only have we told every ethnic Russian in Ukraine that they can be beaten, tortured, and murdered without anyone lifting a finger to help them, we have also emboldened their murderers. Whatever violence follows, we will be at least partially responsible.
Which is yet another reason why historians are needed here. When the media are silent or skewed, then tribalists rush to fill the vacuum, and in the subsequent ‘info-wars’ it becomes harder and harder to find the truth. ‘Disinformation’ already abounds, such as the fake ‘doctor’ who posted a harrowing tale on Facebook and was subsequently found not to exist. Mud is also thrown at genuine sources, so that cries of ‘photoshopped!’ greet the worst stills from Odessa footage – but the material streamed live could not be faked, and I’m afraid I’ve been able to match it every time.
We need a historian’s approach. We need calm, common sense that will look for primary sources, seek to verify everything, and always remember that people lie to suit their own agenda. Yes, this is ‘current affairs’ rather than history, but why on earth should our approach be any different? None of us would consider a historical newspaper from one ‘side’ a reliable source – so why should we think our own are any better today? Why are we so sceptical about the propaganda of the 19th century – and apparently rarely question that of the 21st?
But there are reasons, and here's just one example to illustrate them:
The catalyst that toppled Kiev’s president and brought the US and EU galloping into the fray was the shooting of upwards of 70 Maidan protestors by the riot police – the ‘Berkut’. It was obviously intolerable for a president to fire on his own people, and it was a wave of that understandable outrage that swept the present ‘interim government’ into power.
 |
| Remembering the Maidan victims |
However, considerable evidence has since emerged that the police were innocent, and the shootings were actually a deliberate provocation to achieve precisely this happy result. Since then even the head of Ukraine's own investigation has been forced to admit that the bullets in the bodies don't match the guns used by the police, and there's really no evidence against them at all.
And that’s wrong. Truth doesn’t ‘take sides’ and neither does history. My sympathy is entirely with the victims of Odessa, but that doesn’t stop me recognizing that ethnic Russian separatists have also committed atrocities of kidnapping, torture, and maybe even murder. I loathe the Odessa murderers, but know there were also good people among the Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom even erected scaffolding to try to rescue the victims. Again it’s a case of ‘and-and’ rather than ‘either-or’, and to believe one thing does not negate belief in another.
 |
| Odessans try to save victims from the fire |
We can still speak out, without being ‘tribalists’ who only believe one side’s version of events. If only we could all approach current affairs and history with a genuinely impartial interest in truth, then info-wars and propaganda wouldn’t stand a chance. Maybe news media would start to be more honest. Maybe some people would even reconsider what they're doing.
And maybe people wouldn’t be dying in Ukraine.
***
The website of the Very Not Communist A L Berridge can be found here.
***
The website of the Very Not Communist A L Berridge can be found here.
↧
↧
Tobias Pleasant by Imogen Robertson
So Theft of Life is published tomorrow and I wish it all the best. It’s had a good start. People I really like and admire have said kind things about it, and it’s been shortlisted for the CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger, which is immensely pleasing.
Sometimes in the course of writing a novel, you discover people who stay with you, and even though they never make it on to the page explicitly, you hope something of their spirit is in the book. For me while writing Theft, that person was Tobias Pleasant, so I thought I’d take the chance to introduce you to him.
While I was combing through the Old Bailey archive looking for voices of black Londoners in the late 18th century I came across the record of the trial of one Michael Daniel, who on 14th November 1780 held up John Lane Esquire of Hillingdon and robbed him of a purse containing two guineas. One of the key witnesses for the prosecution was Tobias Pleasant, a servant of John Lane who, the record notes after his name, was black. He had been a servant of John Lane’s for over 32 years. You can read the full record of the trial here.
 |
| Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin 1808 |
The account of the trial made a great impression on me. So often we get only fragments of testimony, but in this case we have several paragraphs from Tobias as he recounts the robbery, reporting the crime at Sir John Fielding’s office, and identifying the prisoner. Two of his comments struck me in particular. When confronted with an armed robber he thought to protect his master from the highwayman and the highwayman from himself by saying, he reports: ‘Honest man, don’t commit a rash action, my master will give you his money.‘ Admittedly a generous interpretation of the word ‘honest’ there though. Then, when he was pressed as to whether he was sure the man in the dock was the man who had robbed Lane, he replied ‘Upon my oath he is. I am very sorry to say it; life is sweet, I wish I could save him, but I must speak the truth.’
Michael Daniel was found guilty and sentenced to death. I thought for a while that Daniel had escaped the noose as he was not among those hanged on 6th December 1780, but he did end up at Tyburn on 20th February 1781.
Life is sweet, and I'm glad Tobias thought it so. In the 18th century it was often also brutal and short. Another detail emerges from the court records. Tobias Pleasant was a musician. He says that Michael Daniel was suspicious of him, keeping his pistol pointing in his direction and Pleasant thought it might be because he had his French Horn under his coat and Daniel probably thought it was a fire-arm. Black musicians were popular in London at this time, and it seems there was a general belief that they were particularly good horn players. Oludah Equiano’s master wanted him to learn the French Horn when he was a child, and he did end up learning it years later while living in London. Another of the voices of the Old Bailey, Edward James, was a trumpet player.
I wanted very much to know more about Tobias Pleasant, but have found only a couple of scraps. According to the baptismal records of St John’s, Hillingdon, he was baptised in January 1763, but he testified he entered the service of John Lane in November 1747, so he was an adult at baptism. This is pure speculation, but might that baptism have marked the point when he ceased to be a slave and became a servant? It was a common belief that baptised Christians could not be slaves, and many people who arrived as slaves in England took the opportunity to be baptised, hoping it would give them some protection from being sold again. It may have been a purely personal and spiritual decision for Tobias, of course. In the baptismal record he is described as a Negro (Mr Lane’s). That possessive is chilling.
 |
| Ignatius Sancho by Thomas Gainsborough |
Where he was born is a mystery. Was he one of the hundreds of thousands captured in Africa, such as Equiano or Quobna Ottobah Cugoano? Or was he born into slavery like Ignatius Sancho? Perhaps he was never a slave at all, but that late baptism and the ‘Mr Lane’s’ in the record makes me think he was. It seems Lane’s family had interests in the slave trade, and there are a lot of ‘Lanes’ in the Legacies of British Slavery database, though I have not managed to find direct connections.
Mr Lane did not mention Tobias in his will of 1791, though he left legacies to a number of servants, so I suspected Tobias Pleasant predeceased him. He did. There is a record of his burial, again at St John’s on 6 May 1784. This time he is recorded as ‘a Black’, and servant to John Lane. I can find no sign of his marrying or having children, though that doesn’t mean he didn’t, but looking at the other bequests in John Lane’s will, I would have expected any children of Tobias’s to received something, and I can find no mention.
So why, with so little of the life of Tobias Pleasant recorded, am I about to claim that it was him and men like him who brought an end to slavery? Simple really, the apologists for slavery stated again and again that Africans were not quite human. They were cunning, lazy deceitful animals, and slavery was a kindness saving them from cannibalistic savegry. The presence of people like Tobias Pleasant in Britain, just living their lives in the community, made it clear that this argument was, in the words of Thomas Clarkson‘malevolent and false’. I have no doubt that the popular groundswell against slavery in this country was at least partly due to the fact that more and more ordinary British citizens were meeting Africans like Tobias Pleasant and recognising the racial arguments for slavery as the lies they were.
 |
| Hogarth - Marriage a la Mode |
I can find nothing else on Tobias, though I do have one tit-bit. John Lane bought the original paintings of Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode in about 1750 for a bargain price in a sealed auction. In fact, he was so embarrassed at the price he got them for, he offered Hogarth the chance not to go through with the deal, but Hogarth insisted he take them. Lane received many offers for the pictures over the following years, but would not part with them. He died in 1791 and left his fortune to John Fenton Cawthorne who sounds like a right piece of work. He sold the Hogarth paintings as soon as he could, was drummed out of parliament for corruption in 1796 and vigourously fought against any legislation limiting the slave trade, in which his family had interests. I can’t help wondering if Tobias Pleasant helped take those amazing pictures to John Lane’s house in Hillingdon in 1750. What did he think of them and their sharp satire of society manners, this man who believed life was sweet, standing up behind his master’s carriage with his French Horn under his coat? It’s questions like that, and people like Mr Tobias Pleasant, that made me write Theft of Life in the first place.
 |
| From The Royal Albert Memorial Museum Exeter |
www.imogenrobertson.com
↧
A Visit to Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Al Thani Museum by Kate Lord Brown
Driving west of the city into the desert, I often passed a sign to 'Sheikh Faisal's Museum' on the way to Al-Samriya where you can ride Arabian ponies on the date farm, but it's only last month that a school holiday 'staycation' allowed enough time to visit. The museum has something of a legendary status among expats - it has, it's said, something for everyone. Islamic antiquities? A collection of dazzling quality and depth. Sports cars? Everything from some of the earliest cars in the region to a Formula 1 racer. From fossils to Crusader arrow heads, a passable homage to the 'Bar at the Folies-Bergere', Sufi drums, muskets, swords, butterflies, priceless carpets, calligraphy, furniture inlaid with mother of pearl, and an entire Syrian palace room rebuilt next to displays of dhows and aeroplanes. Among other distinctions it is the world's largest private collection of armory.
Sheikh Faisal generously opened his private collection of 15,000 objects from four continents to the public in 1998, and shared treasures amassed over 55 years of collecting. I was particularly interested and touched to see rooms devoted to other cultures and religions. As a collector of Islamic antiquities the Sheikh clearly has a marvellous eye, and the huge collection has been housed in a purpose built desert fort, constructed along traditional Qatari designs.
After leaving university, my first job was as an art consultant, curating Orientalist and contemporary Arab art for collections destined for palaces and embassies - and this collection has something unique, I think. It feels organic - like each piece has been chosen with love, and there is a joyous quality to it. I was also surprised by the colour - living here you grow used to the bleached tones of sand, sky, sea, and grow thirsty for colour. I loved the exuberance of the carpets and textiles.
The museum is both a noble, philanthropic gesture to preserve and share the region's history at a time when it is hurtling towards the future and developing rapidly, and the extraordinarily rich private collection of a man with a great eye for beauty. If you ever visit Doha, a visit will be the highlight of your trip - in the meantime, I hope you enjoy and are inspired by a short virtual tour. Here are a few of my favourite things:
A traditional Qatari interior
Dhows
Sufi drum
Syrian Palace
Crusader arrow heads
Prince Ali Rida of Lorestan
If you are in Doha, you can call to arrange an appointment to see the collection. Entry is free, and there is no cafe or shop so pack plenty of water for the trip to the desert. Allow at least half a day for your visit. Further details: http://www.fbqmuseum.org/index.php/about-us.html
↧
Eglantyne Jebb, The Woman Who Saved the Children, by Clare Mulley
Ninety-five years ago this month, in May 1919, a remarkable woman called Eglantyne Jebb, and her sister, Dorothy Buxton, changed the world.
Many years ago, I worked as a rather struggling corporate fundraiser at Save the Children. One day I came across a line written by Eglantyne, the charity’s founder, when she was also finding it hard work to raise funds. ‘The world is not ungenerous’ Eglantyne wrote, ‘but unimaginative and very busy’. That struck a chord with me, and I became rather intrigued about this woman, who spoke with such immediacy but who is so little known today.
In 2001 I went on maternity leave to have my first child - thereby showing far less dedication to the cause than Eglantyne, who never had children of her own and worked tirelessly for the charity until she died. As I had two weeks before my due date, I decided to spend a some time finding out a bit more about Eglantyne.
Looking through the papers in Save the Children's archive, then in the charity’s basement, I came across the leaflet below. Although entitled ‘A Staving Baby’, the photograph actually shows a little girl from Austria who is two-and-a-half year old. Her disproportionately large head, compared to her body, is the result of malnutrition.
In the top right hand corner you can just see Eglantyne’s scribbled word ‘suppressed!’ The exclamation mark shows her personal indignation at the policy of the British Liberal government to continue the economic blockade to Europe after the First World War as a means of pushing through the harsh peace terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Eglantyne believed that the British public was unaware of the terrible human cost of this policy and set out to change things.
In the spring of 1919 she was handing out these leaflets in London's Trafalgar Square, a traditional site for public protest. One account even has her chalking up the pavements with her messages ‘Fight the Famine’ and ‘End the Blockade’, in suffragette style. Eventually, the government had her arrested.
When her case same to court that May, Eglantyne knew that legally she did not have a leg to stand on as her leaflets had not been cleared by the government censors under the Defence of the Realm Act, which was still in place. Nevertheless she insisted on conducting her own defence and, focusing on the moral case, she gave the court reporters plenty to pad out their stories with.
The Crown Prosecutor is the only person in this story with a name to rival Eglantyne’s. He was called Sir Archibald Bodkin, and he did not spare Eglantyne in his condemnation. She was found guilty and fined £5. ‘This’, she wrote to her mother, ‘is the equivalent of victory’, because she could have been fined £5 for every leaflet she had distributed, over 800, or even been given a custodial sentence.
Furthermore, after the session had officially closed, but before the court had been cleared, Sir Archibald came over and pressed a £5 note, the sum of her fine, into Eglantyne’s hands. Technically she had been found guilty, but clearly in the Crown Prosecutor’s eyes Eglantyne had won the moral case. This would be the first donation towards a new fund that Eglantyne and her sister Dorothy now vowed to set up – the ‘Save the Children Fund’.
As you can see from the photo above, of the front page of The Daily Herald, the British newspapers gave the story prominent coverage. Eglantyne was also featured in The Times, The Mail, The Mirror and The Guardian.
But Eglantyne knew that, pleasing though this coverage was, publicity alone would not feed the starving children of Europe. Determined to capitalize on the publicity, she and Dorothy decided to hold a public meeting and see if they could win further support for the cause. Being ambitious women, they booked the biggest venue they could find: the Royal Albert Hall. Reports tell us that in the event, there were not enough seats in the hall for the numbers of people who arrived.
However, to their horror, Eglantyne and Dorothy soon realized that many of the audience had arrived with rotten fruit and vegetables to throw at the ‘traitor’ sisters who wanted to give succour to 'the enemy'. At first Eglantyne nervously mumbled her words, but her voice rose with her passion, until she called out; ‘Surely it is impossible for us, as normal human beings, to watch children starve to death without making an effort to save them’. The crowd in the hall were shocked. Then, in the silence, a collection was spontaneously taken up.
Within ten days Eglantyne, Dorothy and the fledgling Save the Children Fund had invested in a herd of dairy cows to provide a sustainable source of nutrition to the children of Vienna. Thousands of lives were saved, and that was just the start…
I am proud, and very grateful, to have worked, even just for a few years, at Save the Children, an organisation which is still doing such wonderful work to save the lives, and improve the life chances of millions of children all over the world. If anyone would like a copy of my biography of the extraordinary and inspirational Eglantyne Jebb, which won the Daily Mail Biographers Club prize, you might like to know that all author royalties go to Save the Children.
Clare Mulley www.claremulley.com
Many years ago, I worked as a rather struggling corporate fundraiser at Save the Children. One day I came across a line written by Eglantyne, the charity’s founder, when she was also finding it hard work to raise funds. ‘The world is not ungenerous’ Eglantyne wrote, ‘but unimaginative and very busy’. That struck a chord with me, and I became rather intrigued about this woman, who spoke with such immediacy but who is so little known today.
 |
| Eglantyne Jebb at her Save the Children desk, c.1921 |
In 2001 I went on maternity leave to have my first child - thereby showing far less dedication to the cause than Eglantyne, who never had children of her own and worked tirelessly for the charity until she died. As I had two weeks before my due date, I decided to spend a some time finding out a bit more about Eglantyne.
Looking through the papers in Save the Children's archive, then in the charity’s basement, I came across the leaflet below. Although entitled ‘A Staving Baby’, the photograph actually shows a little girl from Austria who is two-and-a-half year old. Her disproportionately large head, compared to her body, is the result of malnutrition.
 |
| Eglantyne's leaflet, 1919 |
In the top right hand corner you can just see Eglantyne’s scribbled word ‘suppressed!’ The exclamation mark shows her personal indignation at the policy of the British Liberal government to continue the economic blockade to Europe after the First World War as a means of pushing through the harsh peace terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Eglantyne believed that the British public was unaware of the terrible human cost of this policy and set out to change things.
In the spring of 1919 she was handing out these leaflets in London's Trafalgar Square, a traditional site for public protest. One account even has her chalking up the pavements with her messages ‘Fight the Famine’ and ‘End the Blockade’, in suffragette style. Eventually, the government had her arrested.
When her case same to court that May, Eglantyne knew that legally she did not have a leg to stand on as her leaflets had not been cleared by the government censors under the Defence of the Realm Act, which was still in place. Nevertheless she insisted on conducting her own defence and, focusing on the moral case, she gave the court reporters plenty to pad out their stories with.
The Crown Prosecutor is the only person in this story with a name to rival Eglantyne’s. He was called Sir Archibald Bodkin, and he did not spare Eglantyne in his condemnation. She was found guilty and fined £5. ‘This’, she wrote to her mother, ‘is the equivalent of victory’, because she could have been fined £5 for every leaflet she had distributed, over 800, or even been given a custodial sentence.
Furthermore, after the session had officially closed, but before the court had been cleared, Sir Archibald came over and pressed a £5 note, the sum of her fine, into Eglantyne’s hands. Technically she had been found guilty, but clearly in the Crown Prosecutor’s eyes Eglantyne had won the moral case. This would be the first donation towards a new fund that Eglantyne and her sister Dorothy now vowed to set up – the ‘Save the Children Fund’.
 |
| Daily Herald, 16 May 1919 |
As you can see from the photo above, of the front page of The Daily Herald, the British newspapers gave the story prominent coverage. Eglantyne was also featured in The Times, The Mail, The Mirror and The Guardian.
But Eglantyne knew that, pleasing though this coverage was, publicity alone would not feed the starving children of Europe. Determined to capitalize on the publicity, she and Dorothy decided to hold a public meeting and see if they could win further support for the cause. Being ambitious women, they booked the biggest venue they could find: the Royal Albert Hall. Reports tell us that in the event, there were not enough seats in the hall for the numbers of people who arrived.
 |
| Crowds queuing to hear Eglantyne Jebb and Dorothy Buxton talking at the Royal Albert Hall, 19 May 1919 |
However, to their horror, Eglantyne and Dorothy soon realized that many of the audience had arrived with rotten fruit and vegetables to throw at the ‘traitor’ sisters who wanted to give succour to 'the enemy'. At first Eglantyne nervously mumbled her words, but her voice rose with her passion, until she called out; ‘Surely it is impossible for us, as normal human beings, to watch children starve to death without making an effort to save them’. The crowd in the hall were shocked. Then, in the silence, a collection was spontaneously taken up.
Within ten days Eglantyne, Dorothy and the fledgling Save the Children Fund had invested in a herd of dairy cows to provide a sustainable source of nutrition to the children of Vienna. Thousands of lives were saved, and that was just the start…
 |
| The Woman Who Saved the Children, A biography of Eglantyne Jebb by Clare Mulley |
I am proud, and very grateful, to have worked, even just for a few years, at Save the Children, an organisation which is still doing such wonderful work to save the lives, and improve the life chances of millions of children all over the world. If anyone would like a copy of my biography of the extraordinary and inspirational Eglantyne Jebb, which won the Daily Mail Biographers Club prize, you might like to know that all author royalties go to Save the Children.
Clare Mulley www.claremulley.com
↧
More Pages to Explore .....
