South of Granada, by Sue Purkiss

September 15, 2014, 6:00 pm

≫ Next: THE INVINCIBLE HENLEY by Penny Dolan

I’m afraid this is another holiday post – about Spain – so look away now if you’ve had enough of them!

I have been to Spain before, but only very briefly. The first time was when I was a teenager, and I was spending a few weeks with a French family who had a holiday cabin in the Landes. From there, we went for a day trip to San Sebastian. I remember narrow dark streets, shops hung with hams and festooned with strange-looking sausages, old women enveloped in black clothes.

The second time was a few years ago, to Barcelona. But the Alpujarra is something very different. It's a remote area in the Sierra Nevada, north-east of Malaga, and its landscape is different to any I've ever seen. This much was already obvious from the aeroplane window. The mountains were a sandy colour, patterned with black dots - trees - and turquoise rectangles. I thought at first that these must be swimming pools, but later realised that most must have been reservoirs; each farm has its own. Later, as we drove along the coast road from Malaga the heat was almost solid, but the sky was unexpectedly cloudy, and the strangely shaped hills looked parched and drab.

Trevelez, high in the Alpujarra

But then we turned off into the mountains. The Alpujarra (or Las Alpujarras – both forms are used) lies behind one range of mountains and on the slopes of another. So it’s not easy to get to. Gerald Brenan, a friend of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey etc, lived here in a very remote village called Yegen for many years after the first world war, and wrote about his experiences in South of Granada. Then, he had to use mostly mule tracks to get about: roads were few and far between, and none of them were paved. (Virginia and Lytton visited him there - imagine them on mules!) Now there are roads – truly terrifying roads (to a wuss like me) – which leap across viaducts and bridges over deep gorges, and cling – just – to the mountainsides.

A plaque to 'Don Geraldo', on the house where he lived in Yegen. The book's been in print ever since he wrote it, and everyone knows who you're talking about when you ask where he lived.

In the summer, there is virtually no rainfall. But in winter it snows, and the people of the Alpujarra have, over the centuries, become expert at harvesting and conserving the melt-water. They direct it through ancient stone channels, originally made by the Moors, and through pipes, to irrigate certain areas of the land for farming, to supply villages and farms, and to flow from the fountains of which there are several in every village. So although in high summer much of the landscape is burnt brown, there are also patches of green – woods with chestnuts, Pyrenean and holm oaks, gardens punctuated with slender evergreen spires, and small fields and orchards with olives and figs, pears and apples, quinces and mulberries. (Which are the most delicious fruits EVER – like huge blackberries, but sweeter and with the most intense flavour.)

This particular well has naturally carbonated water - very invigorating!

The villages are a jumble of white cubes, perched on steep slopes – they’re said to be very like the Berber villages of north Africa, which isn't surprising as, like the irrigation systems, their architecture derives from the time when the Moors ruled Spain. The flat roofs were useful during hostilities – villagers could use them to get about, and to throw rocks at their enemies as they milled about in the narrow, winding streets. They’re made of local materials – a framework of chestnut beams, topped with slates and stones and then a kind of cement made from local rocks: the walls infilled with stones and earth, the

roofs topped with chemineas ( white chimneys), essential in the cold winters. Now they are painted white and decorated with pots of bright geraniums and purple morning glories, but this is recent; in Brenan’s day they were unpainted, so that they looked to him like ‘something that has been made out of the earth by insects.’ In the house where we stayed there were farm implements carved from wood: the people had to rely as much as they could on what was around them, because the only way to bring goods in was by mule, over steep mountain paths.

A street in Busquistor.

It’s a difficult, uncompromising land – yet over the centuries, the people who live there have bent it to their will – or at least they’ve found a way to live with it. Terraces and small fields have been carved out of the mountainsides, buttressed with stone walls and carefully irrigated to produce tomatoes, peppers, beans, potatoes – and wheat, which used to be threshed on circular paved terraces called eras; nowadays they make good viewing points.

Of course, things are changing. But you can still see the results of an intimate relationship between the people and the land. It’s all so utterly different from an English landscape. What would they think, the people who have learnt how to live in this dry land over centuries, of a country with a climate like ours, which far from irrigating its gardens, often bans hosepipes in summer?

Next month, the Alhambra - a lasting monument of the Moors' achievements in Spain, and a dream of intricate beauty.

PS I meant to say something about how when you first visit a place, your impressions are very vivid, and you soon feel as if you know it. But of course you don't. You have to live there, season after season and year after year - and particularly, you need to be able to talk to the people who live there. I couldn't do that, because I don't speak Spanish.

But Chris Stewart (who has a measure of fame for having been the drummer with Genesis on their first album) does live there on a farm called El Valero, and he's written several books about his experiences. The first was a best-seller, and is called Driving Over Lemons. They're very funny, and enjoyable whether you've been to the Alpujarra or not. But I was reading the fourth one this morning - Last Days of the Bus Club - and it has a chapter on a recent Christmas when, after months of drought, the heavens opened. 'There were slender cascades where there had never been cascades before... adding to the tumult, the crash and tumble of rockfall after rockfall, as familiar crags and pinnacles dissolved before my eyes and vanished in the raging grey water.' In one night, the river Trevelez forged for itself a different route, and much of Chris's farmland was swept away.

That chapter went a long way towards explaining how that landscape, with its dramatic gorges and strangely sculpted peaks and valleys, was formed. As a visitor, all you get is an introduction.

Right - off to learn Spanish, ready for next time...

↧

THE INVINCIBLE HENLEY by Penny Dolan

September 16, 2014, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Scotland decides today by Elizabeth Laird

≪ Previous: South of Granada, by Sue Purkiss

A week or so ago, browsing my ragbag poetry shelves, I opened up “Criminal Minds”an anthology by Anne Harveyand found this poem, a version of a poem by Villon. The canting style reminded me of cockney thieves and robbers, and those highwaymen on Shooters Hill:

To All Cross Coves

Suppose you screeve? or go cheapjack?

Or take the broads? Or fig a nag?

Or thimble-rig? Or knap a yack?

Or pitch a snide? Or smash a rag?

Suppose you duff? Or nose and lag?

Or get the straight, and land your pot?

How do you melt the multy swag?

Booze and the blowens cop the lot.

Fiddle, or fence, or mace, or mack;

Or moskeneer, or flash the drag;

Dead-lurk a crib, or do a crack;

Pad with a slang, or chuck a fag;

Bonnet, or tout; or mump and gag;

Rattle the tats or mark the spot;

You can not bank a single stag;

Booze and the blowens cop the lot.

Suppose you try a different tack

And on the square you flash your flag?

At penny-lining make your whack

Or with the mummers mug and gag?

For nix, for nix the dibbs you bag!

At any graft, no matter what,

Your merry goblins soon stravag:

Booze and the blowens cop the lot.

The Moral

It’s up the spout and Charley Wag

With wipes and tickers and what not.

Until the squeezer nips your scrag:

Booze and the blowens cop the lot.

The verses aren’t by the everyday Anonymous, but by a Victorian: William Ernest Henley, who was born in Gloucester, England, in 1849, and I wanted to know more about this man who seemed so fascinated by rollicking language. It became an oddly circular investigation.

As a child, Henley had poor health, developing tubercular arthritis at twelve. The son of a bookseller and publisher, Henley was at Gloucester's Crypt Grammar School when a new headmaster, T.E. Lawrence, arrived.

His mission was to improve the standing of the school, and so he was keen to inspire his older Crypt pupils with a love of literature. As Henley’s father had died, Lawrence took a particular interest in the boy’s struggles, encouraging him to write poetry, and eventually to study at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Henley’s illness had persisted. In 1868, aged 19, his left leg was amputated below the knee and from then on, he wore a wooden leg.

Aged 24, and with an almost gangrenous right foot, Henley was admitted to the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh.

There, Joseph Lister,the pioneer of sterile surgery, performed radical surgery and saved the limb, although Henley had to endure more painful treatment for another two years.

During this period, Henley met Robert Louis Stevenson and the two young men formed a very strong friendship.

For a few years, the two worked, planned projects and encouraged each other as they attempted to make their living as writers, and it was Henley, working as a journalist and reviewer, who arranged a publication deal with Longmans for Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses.”

Henley himself became editor of “The Scots Observer” and, later, of “The New Review”. As editor of the “Magazine of Art”, Henley lauded the work of new artists like James McNeill Whistler and Auguste Rodin. He encouraged writers like Conrad, Yeats and HG Wells, was friends with Rudyard Kipling and J.M.Barrie. Henley’s only daughter Margaret Emma, who called Barrie her “fwendy-wendy, became the origin of Wendy in “Peter Pan” although sadly, aged five, she died.

Now, as I gathered all this information together, I had been imagining a faint, slight fellow with a romantically aesthetic look. I was wrong. Henley acted no invalid. Stevenson wrote this about Henley:

“A man of great presence;

he commands a larger atmosphere,

gives the impression of a grosser mass of character than most men.

It has been said of his presence that it could be felt in a room you entered blindfold.

There is something boisterous and piratic in his manner of talk.”

This description led me on to the piece of the Henley story that I like the most, one that I did not expect.

W.E. Henley with his piratical manner - and his wooden leg - is thought to be the model for one of Stevenson’s strongest characters: Long John Silver, the infamous mutineer and pirate of "Treasure Island."

How glorious! Suddenly the poem that started my investigation, Henley’s rumbustious "To All Cross Coves" made sense after all.

Then, as happens, I discovered another surprising Henley link. While I was tracking down my “cove”, I heard items in the news about the military Paralympics that were taking place in some of the still existing Olympics venues.

Now, when young Henley wrote his poems at Crypt school, trying to survive all the difficulties that life was throwing at him, he wrote these lines, in a poem with the title "Invictus".

“I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul”.

So the determined, wooden-legged, sometime-invalid Henley was the poet who inspired the passion that led to the recent Invictus games. How very circular an investigation I'd been on! ( I am avoiding a certain range of male perfumery, although perhaps Henley would not mind . . .)

And, meanwhile, I have another reason for posting this post today.

Henley – an Englishman who lived in Edinburgh – and Stevenson the Scot were once close friends. Although they fell out, mainly because of slights and misunderstandings and wives, the two men missed each other to the end of their days, and grieved over the lost friendship and what might have been.

Tomorrow the Scots vote whether to become Independent. They choose whether to break away from the United Kingdom. At one level, I know it is all about politics, economics and logic and the Scots are free to choose as they wish.

However I, living in Yorkshire, have no say in the matter, other than the thought of Britain being divided fills me with unexpectedly real sorrow. I am not sure I trust any "hand of history" men. Good wishes to all, no matter how the day goes.

Penny Dolan

↧

Scotland decides today by Elizabeth Laird

September 17, 2014, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Dial 'M' for Murder: the role of the telephone in 20th century film and fiction - by Christina Koning

≪ Previous: THE INVINCIBLE HENLEY by Penny Dolan

Elizabeth Laird is one of our doughty Reserves. Today she agreed to take Celia Rees's 18th of the month slot, because of the referendum and her ancestry.

Today's the day. Scotland decides.

And I'm confused and anxious.

There are other History Girls who are much better qualified than I am to write on this momentous day. Some will be longing to stride confidently into the future of an independent Scotland. Others will be fervently hoping that the Union will prevail. But I'm confused and anxious. I feel as if my parents are on the brink of divorce.

Recently, I had my historic DNA analysed through the website www.scotlandsdna.com. By spitting into a test tube, I have learned that my mother line goes back to the first Mesolithic people who colonised Scotland 8000 years ago when the ice receded.

My mother's great grandmother with her family in Fife

By asking my brother's son to do his bit for family history (only men, who carry the Y chromosome, can trace the father line) I discovered that my father was descended from the Picts of central Scotland. This was a satisfying corroboration of the story passed down through the generations, which begins: A man came from the north as a factor to the Laird of Duchall. He was called the Laird's man, afterwards, for shortness Laird. "The man from the north" has always been an enthralling figure to me and now I know he existed.

My father's grandfather and his family in Glasgow

How do any of us, in this turbulent age of travel and uprootings and intermarriages know who we are and where we belong? All my life I've "known" that I was Scottish. My father was the first member of his family to settle outside Scotland. The names running back through his generations are Laird, Barr, Risk and Blair. My mother was a New Zealander, descended from Scottish emigrants. The names in her family are Thomson, Armstrong, McKenzie, Glasgow. It's the weight of my ancestors, my memories of childhood visits to my aunts in their warm and welcoming Scottish houses, the pictures on the walls of our own family home, the oatcakes on the tea table, the books on the shelves and the stories passed down by mother and father that have given me my identity.

But outwardly I appear to be entirely English. I grew up and was educated in England, and though I've lived in many places all over the world it's to London that I've always returned. My accent is decidedly southern English. My children feel that London is their home (though one lives in Saudi Arabia and the other will one day move to Canada with his Canadian wife). For the past fifteen years, I've flitted between our house in London and our flat in Edinburgh, and my heart never fails to lift as I step out of the sleeper at Waverley Station, or cross the Tweed at Berwick and know that I'm "home". And when I go back to our village of origin in Renfrewshire, I have an uncanny feeling that every other elderly woman looks pretty much like me.

My primary home is in London, so I can't vote today. I'm glad. I know I'd stand there in the voting booth, biting my lip, chewing my nails, vacillating. My head tells me that Scotland might well be better off freed from the dysfunctional government in London, with its Europhobic bigots, its welfare-busting instincts and its cosy relationship with the big city boys. But my heart desperately wants my beloved parents to stay together and sort things out between them. I love Scotland, but I love England too.

I'd go with my heart. I'd vote No.

But I'm anxious and confused.

Elizabeth Laird's latest book:

↧

Dial 'M' for Murder: the role of the telephone in 20th century film and fiction - by Christina Koning

September 18, 2014, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: 'The Skull Beneath The Skin: The Nearness of Death in History' by Not A L Berridge

≪ Previous: Scotland decides today by Elizabeth Laird

Having just published a novel – Line of Sight (Arbuthnot Books, 2014) – in which the telephone plays a key role, I’ve been thinking about the significance of this particular piece of technology, invented (or at least patented) in 1876, by Alexander Graham Bell, but only in common domestic use for around a hundred years. It wasn’t until after the First World War, that the telephone became ubiquitous in middle-class households; right up until the late 1960s in Britain, there were still those who, for reasons of economy, were obliged to make their calls from public telephone boxes. I can still recall when these were activated by the magical pressing of ‘Button A’, followed by the insertion of the necessary coins, to connect the call. ‘Button B’ could be pressed to return the coins, if it wasn’t possible to connect the call (i.e. if no one answered).

As late as the early 1970s, it was not uncommon for people to share a ‘party line’ with another subscriber, affording regular opportunities of ‘listening-in’ to others’ conversations – a privilege of which the switchboard operator could always avail herself (and they were nearly always female), if she felt so inclined. Calls could be – and frequently were – ‘cut off’ at a crucial moment. Love affairs could be thrown into crisis, financial ruin precipitated, and even murder committed, by means of this most seductive, but also potentially treacherous, instrument.

All this offered rich potential for novelists and film-makers – in fact, it’s hard to imagine how the literature and cinema of the mid-to-late twentieth century could have managed without the telephone – thedeus ex machina whose ringing could herald delight – but more often, meant disaster. Think of any Humphrey Bogart film – The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye – and you think of Bogart as private detective Philip Marlowe, sitting in his office, with his feet on the desk and a fifth of whisky in the side-drawer, talking on the phone to whichever dimwitted police sergeant or duplicitous dame he’s currently trying to outsmart.

Think of Grace Kelly, in Hitchcock’s Dial ‘M’ for Murder, hearing the phone ring in the study, and going to answer it – unaware that she is about to confront her would-be murderer. Or, skipping forward a couple of decades, but staying with the film-noir mood, think of Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes, in Chinatown, with sticking-plaster on his nose and a telephone receiver clamped to his ear, trying to make sense of the lies and half-truths he’s been fed about the Mulwray case. Yes, the telephone and the murder mystery were made for each other.
There are a number of reasons for this. One (to stay with cinema a moment) is that the telephone and the cinema are roughly contemporaneous. Both represent the ‘modern’ world of change, speed, transience. A letter takes time to write – and read. A phone call can be made in a few minutes. Similarly, the narrative pace of a novel can seem slow, by contrast with the quick-fire cutting between scenes to be found in cinematic story-telling. And one other obvious reason why phone calls are so important a part of most screenplays is that they offer a very condensed way of imparting information. When the plot is a thriller, this is all the more essential. Keeping the suspense going means not slowing down your story with unnecessary explanations. Dialogue – in films and novels of the 1930s and after – is markedly crisper, snappier, and more concise than that to be found in, say, your average nineteenth century novel.

Which brings me to my ‘top ten’ of fictional telephone conversations. It’s no accident that they all belong to the same period: from a few years after the First World War to a decade or so after the Second World War (roughly, 1925 – 1965) – a Golden Age, when the telephone was essential to communication. And what telephones they were! None of your flimsy little hand-held devices, but large, sculptural Bakelite objects – usually black – the sound of whose ringing was full of foreboding and whose receivers felt heavy as lead in the hand. These (and the ‘Candlestick’ instruments which preceded them, one of which features on the cover of Line of Sight) had a dramatic presence in their own right. No wonder they so often appeared as harbingers of doom in the darker films of the inter- and post-war periods.

So here’s Chandler, in The Long Goodbye (1953):

I was about ready to hit the hay when Detective-Sergeant Green of homicide called me up.

‘Thought you might like to know that they buried your friend Lennox a couple of days ago right in that Mexican town where he died. A lawyer representing the family went down there and attended to it. You were pretty lucky this time, Marlowe. Next time you think of helping a pal skip the country, don’t.’

‘How many bullet holes did he have in him?’

‘What’s that?’ he barked. Then he was silent for a space. Then he said rather too carefully: ‘One, I should say. It’s usually enough when it blows a guy’s head off…’

This hard-bitten, laconic mood is even more pronounced in Simenon’s 1931 story, The Bar on the Seine. Here, as in other police procedurals of the era, conversations – whether carried out on the telephone or otherwise – have a staccato, minimalist quality. These are not people who waste words, or indulge in fancy phrase-making. For them, the telephone is the perfect medium to convey the bleak truths they need to convey. In this story, Maigret finds himself defending a man condemned to the guillotine:

Maigret was talking to the examining magistrate on the phone.

‘Hello! Yes! Just give me another ten minutes… His name? I don’t know yet… Yes, of course I’m serious. Do I ever joke about these things?’

He put down the receiver and started walking up and down his office.

That’s as emotional as Maigret ever gets. And – just to round off this trio of thrillers, before moving on to other kinds of telephone calls in fiction, here’s Le Carré's 1964 novel, Call for the Dead, in which George Smiley makes his first appearance, investigating the mysterious death of a former agent:

The telephone was ringing upstairs. Smiley got up.

‘Excuse me – that will be my office. Do you mind?’

Smiley walked slowly upstairs in a state of complete bewilderment. What on earth should he say to Marston now?

He lifted the receiver, glancing mechanically at the number on the apparatus.

‘Walliston 2944.’

‘Exchange here. Good morning. Your eight-thirty call.’

‘Oh – Oh yes, thank you very much.’

He rang off, grateful for the temporary respite.

This call – like many to be found in detective fiction – turns out to have a bearing on the plot, which isn’t always the case in every novel. Some telephone conversations seem to have no apparent point at all, other than to tell you what kind of characters you’re dealing with – and that they do very well. Take this passage from Vile Bodies, Waugh’s 1930 satire on the ‘Bright Young Things’ of Jazz Age London. We really learn all we need to know about Adam and his inamorata, Nina, from this bright, seemingly vacuous, conversation:

Presently the telephone by Adam’s bed began ringing.

‘Hullo, yes.’

‘Lady to speak to you… Hullo, is that you, Adam?’

‘Is that Nina?’

‘How are you my darling?’

‘Oh, Nina…’

‘My poor sweet, I feel like that, too. Listen, angel. You haven’t forgotten that you’re going to see my papa to-day, have you… or have you? I’ve just sent him a wire to say you’re going to lunch with him. D’you know where he lives?’

‘But you’re coming too?’

‘Well, no, I don’t think I will if you don’t mind… I’ve got rather a pain.’

Or consider this very different, but no less eloquent, piece of character description – from Elizabeth Bowen’s 1948 novel, The Heat of the Day, in which the loving, if slightly exasperated, relationship between a mother and her grown-up son, on leave from the war, is conveyed entirely through one side of a telephone conversation:

‘Hullo?’ she said – whoever it was had failed to press Button A. Then – ‘Oh – you – oh, darling!… You are, are you? For how long?… However, that’s better than nothing. But why didn’t you tell me? Have you had any dinner?… Yes, I’m afraid that might be best: I don’t think I’ve got anything in the flat. How I wish you’d told me… And directly after that you’ll come straight here?… Of course; naturally; don’t be so idiotic… Yes, there is just at the moment, but there soon won’t be… No, no one you know… Soon, then – as soon as ever you can!’

She hung up, but remained to black-out her bedroom…’

Of course this passage tells us a great deal more than the fact that Stella loves her son. Because the conversation is being overheard by a man she has every reason to fear – the government agent, Harrison, in charge of delving into the past of Stella’s lover, Robert. Harrison, it transpires, is in love with Stella. All, or at least some, of this is conveyed in that superbly understated ‘No, no one you know’, in answer to her son’s (implied) question as to whether anyone is there with her at that moment.

It’s nuances such as these which make telephone conversations in books and films (and plays) so compelling. There are so many layers of meaning, and shades of intonation – all put across to the listener, and of course the reader, in the fewest possible words. Still sticking with the mood of wartime paranoia, consider this telephone conversation from Greene’s The Ministry of Fear (1943), in which a man driven half mad by guilt after the death of his wife, reaches out to another lost soul:

‘I want to speak to Miss Hilfe.’

‘Who is that?’

‘A friend of hers.’ A disapproving grunt twanged the wires. He said sharply,’Put me through please,’ and almost at once he heard the voice which if he had shut his eyes and eliminated the telephone-box and ruined Holborn he could have believed was his wife’s. There was really no resemblance, but it was so long since he had spoken to a woman, except his landlady or a girl behind a counter, that any feminine voice took him back… ‘Please. Who is that?’

‘Is that Miss Hilfe?’

‘Yes. Who are you?’

He said his name as if it were a household word. ‘I’m Rowe.’

There was such a long pause that he thought she had put the receiver back; he said, ‘Hullo. Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wanted to talk to you.’

‘You shouldn’t ring me.’

‘I’ve nobody else to ring…’

The bleakness of the last line is characteristic of Greene’s style, of course, but it is also typical of many such moments of communication – or non-communication – in works of fiction of the period. Wartime London (note the glancing reference to ‘ruined Holborn’ in the above) was a place of darkness and shadows; of transients, ‘passing in the night’, on their way to unknown destinations. Here, from Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, published in 1941 and subtitled, with grim humour, ‘A story of darkest Earl’s Court’ – is the following exchange between the hapless and hopeless George Harvey Bone (one of those characters who is always referred to by his full, and rather awkward, name), and Netta, the mercenary minx with whom he is desperately in love:

He pressed button A and heard his pennies fall. He said ‘Hullo.’

‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘Yes!’

She was in a temper all right. He could tell because there was an exclamation mark, instead of a note of interrogation, after her ‘Yes’. Funny how she got into these tempers – after being so peaceful and saying ‘Perhaps it’s because he’s so big that he’s so silly’ the night before – but oh, how characteristic! He knew his Netta all right by now.

‘Oh, hullo, Netta,’ he said in studiedly polite and and gentle tones, though of course this would only add to her fury. ‘This is me.’

‘What? Who is it?…’

‘This is me. George.’

‘Oh.’

‘Have I interrupted you in your bath or something?’

‘No, I was asleep. What do you want?’

‘Oh, I’m awfully sorry. I was ringing up about today – that’s all.’

‘What do you mean – “today”?’

‘I mean this evening.’

‘What do you mean – “this evening”? What about this evening?’

And so the ghastly conversation drags on, with poor George getting himself increasingly tied in knots, and the poisonous Netta pretending not to understand what he is trying to say, but understanding it all too well. As often as not, telephone conversations in films and books can show us relationships that are not working, as well as those that are. In this passage, from Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925), the ringing of an – unanswered – telephone says all there is to say about a marriage that has gone sour:

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one, and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind…’

The unanswered call is of course from Tom’s mistress, about whom the ‘sceptical’ Jordan Baker has just been telling Nick, the narrator. Sometimes, a telephone only has to ring to bring about a change of mood – sharply conveyed, in this instance, by Nick’s irrational desire to look his fellow guests in the face, ‘and yet avoid all eyes’.

Even though the ‘shrill metallic’ sound of the telephone seems made for such moments in fiction, bringing with it unwelcome news, as often as not, it would be a pity to end this little survey of best telephonic exchanges in novels without a couple which aren’t to do with murder or mayhem. So here is a typically winsome exchange, from E.F. Benson’s Lucia’s Progress (1935), in which the eponymous Mayoress of Tilling and all-round social butterfly, Emmeline Lucas, talks to her darling friend and confirmed bachelor, Georgie Pillson, (who is feeling rather out-of-sorts):

‘I’m beginning to see my way,’ she thought, and the way was so absorbing that she had not heard the telephone bell ring, and now Grosvenor came in to say that Georgie wanted to speak to her. Lucia wondered whether Foljambe had seen her peeping in at his window this afternoon and had reported this intrusion, and was prepared, if this was the case and Georgie resented it, not exactly to lie about it, but to fail to understand what he was talking about until he got tired of explaining. She adopted that intimate dialect of baby-language with a peppering of Italian words in which they often spoke together.

‘Is zat ‘oo, Georgino mio?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said Georgie in plain English.

‘Lubly to hear your voice again. Come sta? Better I hope.’

‘Yes, going on all right, but very slow. All too tarsome. And I’m getting dreadfully depressed seeing nobody and hearing nothing.’

Lucia dropped dialect.

‘But, my dear, why didn’t you let me come and see you? You’ve always refused.’

‘I know.’

There was a long pause. Lucia with her psychic faculties alert after so much Bridge felt sure he had something more to say, and like a wise woman she refrained from pressing him. Clearly he had rung her up to tell her something…’

And here, from a novel whose actual publication date of 1960 doesn’t prevent its belonging unquestionably to the 1920s – P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves in the Offing– is the way that telephones ought always to be answered:

I was about to reach for the marmalade, when I heard the telephone tootling out in the hall and rose to attend to it.

‘Bertram Wooster’s residence,’ I said, having connected with the instrument. ‘Wooster in person at this end. Oh hullo,’ I added, for the voice that boomed over the wire was that of Mrs Thomas Portarlington Travers of Brinkley Court, Market Snodsbury, near Droitwich – or, putting it another way, my good and deserving Aunt Dahlia. ‘A very hearty pip-pip to you, old ancestor,’ I said, well pleased, for she is a woman with whom it is always a privilege to chew the fat.

‘And a rousing toodle-oo to you, you young blot on the landscape,’ she replied cordially. ‘I’m surprised to find you up as early as this. Or have you just got in from a night on the tiles?’

I hastened to rebut this slur…’

It’s passages like these, with all their economy and wit, which make one regret the passing of the Golden Age of Telephones. A rousing toodle-oo to you, too.

↧

'The Skull Beneath The Skin: The Nearness of Death in History' by Not A L Berridge

September 19, 2014, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: Ightham Mote by Imogen Robertson

≪ Previous: Dial 'M' for Murder: the role of the telephone in 20th century film and fiction - by Christina Koning

My husband has a cold. The house reeks of eucalyptus, the bins are full of tissues, and the air is loud with complaint. My sympathy of Day One has eroded into the irritation of Day Four, and it’s only a matter of time before I say, ‘Well, you’re not actually dying, are you?’

But of course that’s a modern luxury, and a hundred years ago I wouldn’t have dared say it. A ‘chill’ can lead to bronchitis, pleurisy, or pneumonia, and in the days before antibiotics these were often fatal. It might even be the precursor to influenza – and the pandemic of 1918-1920 killed between 3-5% of the entire world’s population. A mere cough could be the first sign of ‘consumption’, ‘phthisis’, ‘scrofula’, ‘Pott's disease’, or the ‘White Plague’ – the global killer we’ve now learned to call ‘tuberculosis’. Everyone knows that if a character in a historical drama is seen to cough, then the next scene is going to be a funeral.

'At Rest': The death of Little Nell in 'The Old Curiosity Shop' by George Cattermole

We still fear some of these things. TB is making a comeback, pandemics are always good for newspaper sales, and we are once again being advised to take precautions our grandparents took for granted. Yet the fact we need to be told to cover our mouths when we cough shows the astonishing degree of our modern complacency. The miracles of modern medicine have stripped away so many of our natural fears that we’ve come to see science as a shield against death itself.

But when we write historical fiction that shield has to be the first thing to go. There’s obviously huge variation in place and period, but awareness of sickness and mortality colours every one of them, and our characters can’t but share in it. How can they do otherwise when they’re seeing it every day?

'The Beggars' by Brueghal the Elder

And really they would be. There’ve been sick beggars on the streets since before even Roman times, and as late as the 17th century it was impossible to walk the length of the Champs Elysée and remain ignorant of the reality of blindness, paralysis, lameness, dropsy, or even disfiguring cancers. Nor was visible sickness restricted to the poor. Smallpox struck kings as well as paupers, and even Elizabeth I bore the scars of it on her face and hands as evidence that she had faced death and survived. Almost equally prevalent (especially in mainland Europe) were the terrible signs of syphilis, on which many medieval church gargoyles are deliberately modelled to show the deadly wages of sin.

Smallpox victim 1911 Illinois Bust of tertiary syphilis

But syphilis didn’t end in medieval times, and neither did most of these other horrors. Fast forward to the civilization of Victorian England and we can laugh at the grotesque minor characters populating Dickens’ novels – but the truth is that he was largely describing what he saw. Some deformities were caused by accidents or war wounds – eye-patches, wooden legs, and hooks for hands – but many others are immediately recognizable to doctors as the result of childhood illness or malnutrition.

'The Internal Economy of Dotheboys Hall' from 'Nicholas Nickleby' by Phiz

Goitres were a consequence of iodine deficiency, ‘hunchback’ is kyphosis, often caused by poor childhood nutrition, bandy legs were a sign of rickets, while ‘cripples’ with atrophied limbs were probably victims of polio. Many of these conditions are still with us in the poorer countries, and when we look at those heartbreaking photographs of children with cleft lips and palates it’s hard to believe that not very long ago we’d have seen these in London too.

All these things are an essential part of the ‘historical world’, and we often have enormous fun writing them. With In the Name of the King I was delighted to find the real character of Fontrailles was genuinely a ‘hunchback’, and only wish I’d had the space to develop the ways in which that affected his personality. I also took a hideously writerly pleasure in basing my fictional Comte de Vallon on a real-life syphilitic nobleman whose return to society was eased by Louis XIV requesting his courtiers ‘not to notice his having no nose.’ Anything out of the ordinary is grist to a novelist’s mill, and I was going to grind it all I could.

But sometimes it’s in the 'ordinary' that the real gold is buried. We can write historical novels where nobody gets ill at all, and yet the characters will still have been shaped by a world in which these things happen. Their perception of cruelty will be different, their ideas of fairness, even their concept of religion, and they will be constantly aware of their own mortality. Dreadful as they were, the hunchbacks and crooked legs were tokens of those who had survived, and served as a terrible reminder of the many who did not.

People could and did die of the most minor things, and the fact they were so imperfectly understood only added to the sense of a random destiny that could strike at any time. This 1665 Bill of Mortality raises far more questions than it answers, and while ‘sore legge’ might be tetanus, for instance, what are we to make of medical causes of death listed as ‘Bedridden’, ‘Suddenly’, or even ‘Grief’? Yet the one that brings home to me most powerfully the reality of the pre-antibiotic world is described in that ominously single word – ‘Teeth’.

And of course we have to show this awareness in our writing. We can’t have characters say modestly ‘It’s just a scratch’ when everyone would have known that a scratch could kill. We can’t even give them a quick bout of toothache and then forget about it. Ridiculous as it is, we even have to let most of our characters believe it’s possible to die of a broken heart.

But the risk that would have affected most people sooner or later is that of pregnancy, and we can’t ever take that lightly. Even today we know of the risks of miscarriage, and many couples won’t officially announce a pregnancy until the first three months are safely passed – but in the case of Louis XIV’s brother Philippe, the Queen was never acknowledged to have even been pregnant until the child was born and had stayed alive a full calendar month.

Madame de Sevigne by Lefebvre

The risk to the mother was almost as great, as we see in that figure of 23 childbed deaths in a week. In 1671 the famous French letter-writer Madame de Sévigné began a letter to her married daughter in this rather cryptic fashion:

'Today is the sixth of March. I beg you to tell me how you are. If you are well, you are ill, but if you are ill, then you are well. I hope, my child that you are ill, so that you will be in good health for at least some time to come.’

The mystery is clear once we realize the daughter was due to menstruate, and what her mother feared more than anything was another pregnancy.

But what I actually find most fascinating about that letter is the way phrases we now use as mere formulae had real meaning in the past. ‘Tell me how you are’ is not the standard ‘How are you?’ with which we greet each other today, usually hoping we won’t be told the answer. Those of us over a certain age still tend to begin letters with the polite ‘I hope you’re well’, but this has already come to signify a broader enquiry in which health plays little part.

1864 Civil War letter with standard opening

It was different in the 19th century. I included a letter in Into the Valley of Death which began with the then-standard phrase ‘I hope this finds you well as it leaves me’, but it wasn’t until a reader asked me about it that I began to see its real significance. Outside London, a letter could take days to reach the recipient, and the writer’s awareness of time reveals a very real concern for the risk of ill-health. The most they’ll commit to is ‘I’m well at the time of writing’, because they know perfectly well that in a week or so they may not be. This seems strange in a time when even the most deadly disease usually gives the sufferer at least a few more months of life – but in 1854 a man who wrote ‘I am well’ on Monday could be dead by Friday. It’s true the phrase is a standard one and would often have been used without conscious thought, but behind it is a mindset that knows the sword of Damocles can fall at any minute.

And this one phrase exemplifies two of the things I love most about writing historical fiction. The first is the everyday reality of a bygone world, which can give us not only great texture but also the kind of plot development unthinkable in a contemporary work.

My favourite example is in Pride and Prejudice, where Jane Bennet walks in the rain to a dinner with two desirable bachelors, and quickly develops a cold which makes her return impossible. The house is only three miles away from her own home, but she is of course too ill to be moved, and in such a condition that requires her equally marriageable sister Lizzy to come and attend her.

This is brilliant. True, if Jane’s cold had been anything like my husband’s then her hosts would have bundled her out of the house in two minutes flat, but if we assume the phlegmier stages were passed invisibly in the bedroom, then the plot mechanics are perfect – and I challenge anyone to devise a contemporary narrative which would achieve such a result.

But, as usual with Austen, there’s far more going on here than plot. Jane’s mother deliberately sent her daughter out in the rain in the hope of engineering this very situation, and Mr Bennet is only half-joking when he hopes she’ll find it a comfort if her daughter dies following her orders. Austen is of course writing about her own time, but she uses those perceptions to create both story and character unique to that age, and I'd love to be able to emulate her.

But the second aspect I love is the Sword of Damocles itself, and the way in which awareness of death gives an extraordinary intensity to life. Our own lives are too safe to imagine it easily, but I’ve found the most useful comparison is to wartime. When living through war we’re all at once back in a time when life is cheap, death can strike without warning, and the only moment there might ever be is now. We might normally find incomprehensible the religious fervour of bygone ages, but even an atheist prays when the house they’re sitting in is being bombed. We might laugh at the superstition of the past, but from verbal rituals to ‘lucky socks’, you’ll find no people more superstitious than soldiers in even a modern war.

Everything is more concentrated and intense. The friendship forged between men who face death together is far deeper than that between those who use the same coffee machine, and when time is short, then love and passion soar as never before. And people take risks. Mad, exhilarating, even heroic risks – because there is so little to lose. Live through war, and we begin to understand some of the heroic lunacy of even sixteenth century peacetime, when men and women risked their lives for power, for politics, for religion, and for love.

It's no coincidence that the most passionate romances are often set in war

I write war in my novels anyway, but I’d still want to study it for the insight it can give us into the past. War is a magic door that can take me right back in time, to a world where death lurks round every corner - and where there are far worse things to deal with than my husband’s cold.

***

Well, OK, I am A L Berridge really, just filling in a gap in the schedule. And I hope you noticed I didn't mention Crimea even once...

↧

Ightham Mote by Imogen Robertson

September 20, 2014, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: The Angels of Mons by Kate Lord Brown

≪ Previous: 'The Skull Beneath The Skin: The Nearness of Death in History' by Not A L Berridge

Where has she taken us now?

One of the best holidays I had before I left home was when my brothers were travelling far afield and Mum and Dad offered to take me to Shropshire in the caravan. They sweetened the deal by saying they would take me to as many stately homes as I could handle. I can handle a lot of stately homes.

I’d sit in the caravan of an evening with the National Trust handbook saying ‘I want that, and that and that’, rather in the manner of a Russian oligarch with a copy of the Lady Magazine - though perhaps they don’t do their house choosing in a caravan.

I stopped studying history at school at fourteen, but had a voracious interest in the matter of history - the houses, the furniture the silted layers of story found in houses made and remade, in the blocked up windows, the great halls with medieval carvings, Tudor panelling and Victorian battle banners.

I’m not sure I ever really wanted one of my own - though if anyone wants to offer me an estate, I’ll give it a go, but I wondered even then about living under the weight of so much history. It would be like living in your own 3D memento mori. Also my father used to tell us about going to see Lord Barnard - must have been the father of the present one - to give the staff a quote for moving some furniture down to London from Raby Castle, and described him as sitting in one of those deep porter’s chairs in a cavernous hall next to what my father described as ‘rather a meagre fire’. The way he told it made the caravan feel very cosy.

Anyway, my love of snooping around National Trust Properties hasn’t abated with age and I’ve married a man who likes scrabbling around in old stuff too. Neither of us drive though, so when Mum and Dad offered to take us out for a day in Kent and asked if there was anywhere we wanted to go, I was straight on the National Trust site and nominated Ightham Mote near Sevenoaks.

It’s a gem. A 14th century moated manor house build of Kentish ragstone with a great hall which is still watched over by an oak carving of a green man. There is also some civil war armour in there which they found in the 1890s in the moat.

Part of the fascination of the place is that it was continuously inhabited from when it was build until the twentieth century, the fabric has not been dramatically altered - only adapted. The Trust has not tried to impose a particular period on the house, so upstairs one finds a former solar set up as a 20th century sitting room and you are encouraged to sit there and read more about the house by the Vicrtorian fireplace by the light pouring through the leaded windows.

The hand-painted wallpaper

You go via an Edwardian bathroom to a chapel with 16th century German stained glass and ceilings painted with Tudor roses and into a long drawing room with 18th century hand painted wall paper and a Tudor fireplace. The fireplace was found to be far too large for the room when it was delivered to the house, so the owners raised the roof of that wing to accommodate it. The volunteer guides were enthusiastic and well-informed and had a tangible love of the place.

The house was nearly lost when it was put up for auction in 1951. The proposal was to demolish it or convert it into flats, but three local men bought it to prevent that happening. They hung onto it until a buyer they could trust with the funds to conserve the house could be found. The eventual purchaser was an American gentleman in who took it on, loved it, and left it to the National Trust on his death.

I had another reason for going to Ightham Mote though beyond curiosity and the need for a bit of fresh air. I think it will be the model of the house in a novel I’m working on at the moment. I’m not the first to be inspired by the place - wikipedia tells me that both Anne Easter Smith and Anya Seaton have both set novels there. Fair enough, I think I’ll be transporting it to Suffolk and renaming it, but I’ll be keeping the rest from the painted chapel to the fish-filled moat, the surrounding woodland to the medieval orchard and this will be the house my characters live in. I shall give them the glamour and the draughts and observe what happens from the comfort of my centrally heated London flat.

Yes, that is a Grade I listed Doghouse in the courtyard

www.imogenrobertson.com

↧

The Angels of Mons by Kate Lord Brown

September 21, 2014, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: FAT IS A HISTORICAL ISSUE by Leslie Wilson (with a footnote about attacks on artistic freedom)

≪ Previous: Ightham Mote by Imogen Robertson

The commemorative service at Mons during the summer reminded me of an interesting tale from WW1 that I came across researching the work in progress. As ever, much of the research has hit the cutting room floor in the final telling - however tempting it is to shoehorn in a fantastic bit of history, if it doesn't serve the story, you have to let it go.

On August 23rd 1914 the British Forces were confronted and outnumbered by enemy troops at Mons. The 'Victory by Christmas' looked set to turn into a protracted nightmare. In the heat of the battle - so the legend goes - a soldier called upon St George for help.

The accounts of angelic and divine intervention at Mons came from several sources. Arthur Machen's 'The Bowmen' is one of the most well known. Printed six months after the event, and conveniently 'unable to reveal sources for security reasons' it was at once military propaganda and a morale boost for the troops and public. Machen described the visions as 'English angels with longbows'.

Another account surfaced in a parish sermon, and reached the newspapers. From William Doidge of the Scots Guard, to Brigadier General John Charteris who wrote to his wife on 5th September 1914 of an 'angel of the Lord on a white horse and with a flaming sword', the accounts came from sources across the spectrum of the British forces.

The retreat of the 80,000 from Mons to the Marne saw them caught up in a nightmarish battle of shrieking, thundering guns and shells that tore men limb from limb. In the midst of this furnace of torment, the idea that someone cried 'May St George be a present help to the English' has more than a whiff of propaganda about it. And yet. There are many different accounts of a line of angelic shapes beyond the British line, a cloud of arrows descending on the enemy, and of slain men found with arrow wounds. Or of individual warriors with 'a shining about them', and of three vast angelic figures hovering over enemy lines protecting the British. It was enough to turn one 'old contemptible' I read about from a hard drinker to a teetotal pillar of the community.

Then there was a group of Coldstream Guards, the last to retreat from the Battle of Mons, cut off and lost in the Mormal forest. They had dug in for a valiant last stand, when a tall slim angel apparently beckoned them towards an open field, and a hidden sunken road where they were able to effect their escape from the enemy swarming towards them.

Angelic intervention, or mass hallucination? Whatever the truth, the story of the Angels of Mons helped morale and saw British troops through the hell to come at Loos, the Somme and Passchendaele. It would be interesting to know how many of the HGs have come across tales of supernatural intervention researching their historical periods?

↧

FAT IS A HISTORICAL ISSUE by Leslie Wilson (with a footnote about attacks on artistic freedom)

September 22, 2014, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: MOOCHING IN MUSEUMS: A photo roundup by Elizabeth Chadwick

≪ Previous: The Angels of Mons by Kate Lord Brown

Writing in the Guardian about the increase in obesity recently, Rosie Boycott, food advisor to the Mayor of London, said (in the middle of some very sensible talk about school dinners) 'Go back fifty years, and virtually no-one was(obese). For women, size 10 and 12 was the norm, rather than 14 and 16 today - and we ate three meals a day, with tea thrown in for special occasions. Most of us didn't eat unless we were sat at a table at a regular time of day.'
I am totally in favour of healthy eating initiatives, nor would I query that there are far more obese people about than there used to be - what I do decry is the rosy glow that is currently bathing the food culture of the '50s - which was, in my memory, dreadful. Granted, I did not eat British food at home, so my memories of it are mainly derived from school dinners. But those school dinners are now also seen in the same glow of nostalgia.

My mother with her pupils, probably about 1960

I remember fatty stewed meat (which made me retch - I was told it was 'white meat' and wondered who the teacher thought he was fooling), limp salads consisting of one lettuce leaf, one slice of beetroot, a slice of hard-boiled egg (placed next to the beetroot so that the colour could run into it), a quarter tomato, a piece of dried-out cucumber, and a splash of salad cream, which I loathed; at home, we had mayonnaise, plenty of tomato, no ghastly beetroot, and cut-up apple and nuts with the lettuce). And a boiled potato. The vegetables tasted only of steam, having been cooked for hours to beat the resistance out of them. Fish came in a thick stiff jacket of batter; I wanted to leave the batter and only eat the fish, but was forced to 'eat up everything on your plate'. And every day there was pudding; sometimes this was nice, sometimes as penitential as first course (tapioca 'frogspawn' anyone?).
Now, since then I have had traditional British food which was good - my aunt Mollie, who I first went to stay with as a teenager, served up the most wonderful roast dinners, with Yorkshire puddings that floated away, instead of the slabs of moist stodge I had at school. But my impression from my schoolmates was that the first course was to be endured in case the pudding was nice. And often, it was - syrup sponge, for example.
My friends came to school always furnished with one or two bags of sweets, which they mainlined at playtime (so much for only eating when sat down at table). I wasn't allowed sweets except as an occasional treat, which did my popularity no good, as I had nothing to exchange. On the other hand, when the school dentist arrived with his van, they disappeared inside it and emerged, lurching from the effects of gas, and blood running out of their mouths from the extraction.

School nativity play, Holme County Primary School, probably about
1959. I am playing Mary.

Sweet rationing ended in 1953, with what the BBC described as a 'sugar frenzy'. Toffee apples, sticks of nougat, and liquorice strips were the biggest sellers, but men in the City queued up in their lunch breaks to buy boiled sweets and boxes of chocolates to take home. 'One firm in Clapham Common gave 800 children 150lbs of lollipops during their midday break from school.' BBC 'On this Day'. Sugar remained on ration, but after that, people laid into sweet stuff in order to make up for what they felt were the privations of the war years.
I can believe that people might have been trim in the early '50s, when rationing had forced them to eat fairly healthily - but in the later '50s, I can remember plenty of plump ladies who must have been between sizes 16 and 18; indeed, my memory of comfortably-off middle-class ladies was that they were mainly that size, but usually corseted, which gave them the appearance of upholstery. There were less hugely fat people, it is true; they were normally said to have 'glands' (the rest of us being strangely lacking in these anatomical features). There were also fat kids at school with me. 'Puppy-fat' it was called.

Edwardian Northern Irish relatives, showing
the effects of plenty of good farm fare

Go back much further, and you will find plenty of stout people. In an 1890 Girls Own Annual, 'Medicus' handed out advice to girls anxious to lose 'adipose tissue' (a high-protein, low-carb diet with more than a taste of Atkins). Flora Thompson writes in 'Over to Candleford', 'Food had to be of the best quality and not only sufficient, but 'a-plenty' as they expressed their abundance.. Many of the great eaters grew very stout in later life; but this caused them no uneasiness; they regarded their expanding girth as proper to middle age. Thin people were not admired. However cheerful and energetic they might appear, they were suspected of 'fretting away their fat' and warned that they were fast becoming 'walking miseries.' And the nudes of great art were largely - well, what would be considered nowadays to be large.

My Baker grandparents between the wars (centre); I think
it is Auntie Nellie on their right, who is definitely
about size 16.

Fashion models of the past look big, compared to today's hungry-looking striders down the catwalk. And it is odd that, in an era when the admired look is pathologically thin, we have more obese people than ever before.Given the recent study that demonstrated the negative effect of 'fat-shaming' (those who were abused found it much harder to lose weight than people whose own efforts were encouraged and supported) perhaps our culture of 'fat-shaming' is one factor in what we are seeing. Clearly, sugar added to ready meals, and advertising of unhealthy food and drink are also major contributors. Also, we should not forget that for some people, size is not down uncontrolled appetites but to illness. But when unhealthy thinness is paraded as an ideal, and magazines attack celebrities for being slim rather than stick-thin - women in particular are being told that their body is not 'good enough', and that induces despair and hitting the doughnuts.

On quite a different topic - Hilary Mantel is attacked for writing a story about a fantasy attempt on Margaret Thatcher's life. Various Tory politicians want the police sicked onto her (not sure if that is the right spelling, but it seems appropriate.) This is incredible, and smacks of the Thought Police. Thatcher is dead, for God's sake, she never did get assassinated, anyway. So need we beware of what we write now, for fear of the police, even when we are writing about history?

↧

MOOCHING IN MUSEUMS: A photo roundup by Elizabeth Chadwick

September 23, 2014, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: BLAME IT ON THE BUILDINGS by Eleanor Updale

≪ Previous: FAT IS A HISTORICAL ISSUE by Leslie Wilson (with a footnote about attacks on artistic freedom)

Over the last couple of months I've had occasion to be out and about at various appointments and events that have brought me to London. Whenever I'm in in the capital I always make sure to have my trusty camera with me, and if I can squeeze in a visit to a museum to take research shots and photographs of interesting images (some outside my medieval timeline) then I do. Those shots, being my personal property can then be used to illustrate my blog, enhance reader interest and enjoyment on my website page, Facebook page and Twitter. They spark lively discussions and help readers to visualise aspects of bygone ages.

My photo archive is also a great inspiration for scene setting and character moments in my novels. I can imagine my characters using these items. I can create anything from an ambience to an entire scene from a photograph. They are portals through which my imagination can step into the past.

I thought for my monthly turn on the blog, I'd post a selection of my recent shots from The Wallace Museum, the British Museum, the Victorian and Albert Museum and The Museum of London. (and one from a recent visit to Lincoln Cathedral). My specialist period is the twelfth century, but the wider Medieval is fair game, and I've been known to go earlier and later if something particularly intrigues me! Enjoy!

Reliquary head of St. Euistace circa 1180 - 1200 from Basle, Switzerland. Fits over a sycamore core containing relics. Made from silver gilt with gems of recycled Roman glass, amethyst, rock crystal and chalcedony. British Museum.

Anglo Saxon crozier head with what's known as a 'Tau' design to rrepresent the Green letter 'T'. Christ's crucifixion is carved on one side and on the other the risen Christ tramples a lion and a dragon. Walrus ivory. British Musem.

German horse armour circa 1480. The Wallace Collection.

Shoe 1660-1680. Leather with silk, embroidered with silk. Wooden heel. English. V&A

Wonderful Italian smoothing iron circa 1700. V&A

Fabulous ring brooch circa 800. Gilded silver decorated with gold wire and green glass. Elements of both Irish and Scottish design.

Close up of 12thc column from Lincoln Cathedral showing Adam and Eve eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge while the serpent gnaws on their genitals!

Flintlock duelling pistols in case dating to 1810. Museum of London.

Shoe dating to 1300. Museum of London.

White flower brooch set with a Sri Lankan pink tourmaline. Possibly a man's hat badge. Circa 1400 British Museum

Water sprinkler for watering tender young plants. 1400-1500 British Musem

Leather protective case to hold a high status drinking cup of Syrian glass. Circa 1400-1500 V&A

And here is the cup itself. Known as the Luck of Edenhall, talisman of the Musgrave family in Cumbria and said to have belonged to the fairies. In actual fact it's Syrian glass and dates to around 1350. V&A

The V&A also has an area known as 'The Cast Court' where Victorian replica casts of effigies and famous objects can be seen. This particular one is the head of the effigy of Berengaria of Navarre, queen to Richard I. What especially interests me is the pillow case design. I love little details like this!

Detail from the Syon Cope 1300-20. Originally a chasuble but adapted foruse as a cope. It's made from linen embroideredwith silk, gilded silver and silver.It probably originates from London. V&A.

And finally, to finish, something from a later century, but very apt. A bookish biscuit tin dating to 1901. I'd love one of these. I've seen them for sale on e-bay but a bit too pricey. The V&A should sell replicas in their shop!

↧

BLAME IT ON THE BUILDINGS by Eleanor Updale

September 24, 2014, 7:00 pm

≫ Next: The Song of the Whale and my Visit to Biarritz by Carol Drinkwater

≪ Previous: MOOCHING IN MUSEUMS: A photo roundup by Elizabeth Chadwick

Now, does this theory hold up? Sometimes, when things go wrong, we end up blaming the buildings in which events take place, rather than looking at the human behaviour at the heart of the problem.

I was set off thinking about this when - to my astonishment - I spent eight hours completely absorbed in a session of Edinburgh City Council’s Planning Committee.

I’m not going to inflict all the grisly details of the meeting on you, but suffice it to say that it hinged on a proposal that has powerfully churned local juices: the fate of Craighouse: one of Edinburgh’s seven hills.

Craighouse is (theoretically) a comprehensively protected site of national ecological and environmental significance which is home to several grade A listed buildings, some dating back to the 16th century. It’s adjacent to Craiglockhart, which was made famous by Pat Barker in her ‘Regeneration’ trilogy.

The planning committee was deciding whether to allow a developer to build several modern blocks there.

If you want more information and background, look here. The planning case is a wonderful example of the civic mess we are in in the 21st century, but this is not the place for me to vent my spleen about that. Instead, I’m going to talk about mental illness and architecture.

The link to Craighouse is its use for much of the past 130 years. At the heart of the site is New Craig, a purpose built mental asylum designed in the 1880s.

It is a grand building in the French style, with a mighty staircase, grand hall and billiard room.

Many of our classic mental asylums are on similar (if somewhat less lavish) lines.

Across the country, they were at first absorbed into the NHS, but have been decommissioned over recent years: condemned for their association with a cruelty and abuse, much of which was exposed during the golden age of television documentary film-making at the end of the last century.

It might come as a shock to hear how unfair is the link between the buildings and what went on inside them. To my parents’ generation the buildings were seen as ‘Victorian Monstrosities’, almost inevitably generating the horrors inside. But if you look back to the words of the people who commissioned and designed the old asylums, it becomes clear that they had the best of intentions.

Those old asylums are valuable properties now partly because they are often surrounded by extensive grounds. They had market gardens, farms and workshops, not only for the maintenance of the ‘mother ship’. but also for the restorative effect of work - especially outdoor work - on the inmates.

It’s true that the man behind New Craig, the psychiatrist Sir Thomas Clouston, had some (to us) pretty alarming views about 'self-abuse', and so on, but he and the architect Sydney Mitchell, deliberately built therapeutic features into their plans. It was their over-medicating successors, and a society reluctant to pay for quality carers who messed everything up. The buildings were not inevitably the cause of that, but somehow it was the buildings, and the concept of large-scale institutional care, that got the blame.

The same is true of general hospitals, with their ‘Nightingale’ wards: designed to provide ventilation, cleanliness and good eyelines for the nurses. It’s hard not to pine for them when visiting the stifling, shopping-mall style centres of infection and neglect built in the past thirty years or so.

But the mental health cycle of enlightenment and horror is not new. Way back in the 17th century, Robert Hooke was asked to design a new building for the squalid Bethlem (Bedlam) hospital in London. He did it with as much élan as the buildings he created alongside his friend Sir Christopher Wren. Even though he was forced to abandon some of the most grandiose elements of his plan, Hooke gave his ‘Bedlam’ airy proportions and even the new sash windows he’d invented and installed in some of the grandest houses of the day.

His aim was to provide an humane environment. But within a century, under the supervision of 'correctionist' supervisors, who denied inmates the use of the grandest internal or external spaces of the site, the Bedlam at Moorfields was a byword for cruelty and abuse, and playground for voyeurs, paying to watch the lunatics.

The solution? another new building - this time in Lambeth, on what is now the site of the Imperial War Museum.

In the late 18th century, a crucial 'enlightened' attempt to contain and care for the mentally ill took place at The Retreat in York.

It was a Quaker institution, and when, in 1797, George Jepson took control there, he introduced a kinder regime than that of his contemporaries elsewhere in the city - not least because he felt that lunatics, like wild animals, were more likely to be tamed by gentleness than force. The Retreat went on to become a model for asylums worldwide.

I invented an enlightened Victorian mental asylum for one of my books (Montmorency’s Revenge) and set some of the story in a real American example - Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane.

Like so many hospitals, that institution has changed its name as the very words ‘Asylum’ and ‘Insane’ have suffered from an association with the conduct of the mid-20th century doctors and nurses who practiced under its roof. Language, like building styles, can become contaminated in the public mind.

So did the buildings themselves generate the bad behaviour of the staff inside or the public on the outside? I like to think not. But then I find myself reflecting on the concrete and steel sheds in which so much modern medicine is practiced, and wondering whether some of today’s heartlessness by be generated, or at least exacerbated by, environmental factors. It’s hard not to long for the rolling acres of the old asylums. But ultimately, it’s people who are responsible for poor care, and they can find a way to abuse or let down their patients in any environment.

And finally, in case you’re wondering...

Despite a day-long series of speeches opposing the Craighouse development, the councillors narrowly allowed the plans through, thanks to the developer’s argument that they can’t afford to maintain Craighouse without converting the listed buildings into flats and constructing new residential blocks and car parks on the surrounding land. That put me in mind of the Vietnam War, and the famous quote from a US Major, explaining the obliteration of Ben Tre in February 1968: “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it”.

Apparently, Craighouse's A-listed buildings and their surroundings are so needy of TLC that the only way their owner can afford to save them is by contravening multiple planning laws and destroying everything that makes them special. Never mind that, under the law, the owner of a listed building has an obligation to maintain it. In future, buying one, and then pleading poverty, will be a ticket to by-passing the planning regulations. Once again the buildings, and not the people, get the blame.

www.eleanorupdale.com

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The Song of the Whale and my Visit to Biarritz by Carol Drinkwater

September 25, 2014, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: Women of the Warsaw Uprising, by Clare Mulley

≪ Previous: BLAME IT ON THE BUILDINGS by Eleanor Updale

Many years ago, in a period of my life that is almost history now, while I was filming the TV series All Creatures Great and Small, I was invited to take part in a Save the Whale rally which was to be held in Trafalgar Square. It was a Sunday. A high stage had been erected in the centre of the square and each of us was to present our reading or give our speech to a bank of microphones that relayed the message to thousands and thousands of people who had gathered to support the event. I read an extract from Moby Dick. The conservationist and television presenter, Sir Peter Scott, was the main focus of the occasion. He was the chairman and founder of the World Wildlife Fund International, an organisation that I had aligned myself with back then. I was particularly interested in its conservation of threatened marine life and habitats as I had recently become a qualified scuba diver.

Sir Peter Scott 1909 - 1989

I have tried to date the year this rally took place, but I have failed. The end of the seventies or early eighties, no later. Aside from the fact that it was the first and only time I have ever appeared on the BBC evening News at Ten, what I most remember about this event was Sir Peter’s introduction and a recording he had made of the song of humpbacked whales. Try to picture it: a fine clear starlit evening, possibly a dozen of us high on a stage surrounded by banks of microphones and floodlights, the sky clear, and what seemed like half of London standing at our feet. Sir Peter steps forward, introduces his work with WWF and then switches on his recording of the whales singing. Recalling it today still sends shivers up my spine. Because we were in an open space, the recorded songs rose into the evening. The audience were utterly silent, as were we. These great mammals were communicating with one another and on this special occasion with us. Today, we can Google and find recordings on the internet but back then, not. Sir Peter told me later a most extraordinary fact that has stayed with me all my life. When conservationists began to study whales in earnest they found that each whale travels oceans throughout any given year and then makes its way to its mating waters. No matter which route it has taken, no matter how separated it might have been from others of its own species, when they come together again, each whale has a new verse/stanza/addition to its song and that added unit is the same for all whales. Somehow or other, across oceans it would appear that the whales have stayed in touch, in communication with one another, have extended their song, created their narrative together.
I am still awed by this information.

In our twenty-first century world of Facebook, emails, blogs etc, such a far-reaching ability to communicate might not seem so remarkable, but it is. I was already respectful of the majesty of these cetaceans, still, Sir Peter, on that exceptional evening, blew my perception of nature wide open. He transmitted to me his respect for the natural world and I have been grateful to him for that gift ever since.

I have just returned from a work trip to Biarritz. For those who don’t know it, it sits at the south-western edge of France, bordering Spain and overlooking the wild Atlantic Ocean. It is one of the great surfing spots of the world. It is Basque country first, French second. The locals are fiercely proud of their Basque language and heritage and I determined that during this visit I would try to find out a little more about the location and its people. The town itself has a fascinating history and was made popular as a holiday resort by Napoléon III when he built his beloved Empress Eugénie a summer villa overlooking the rocks and surf in 1855. Even after the fall of Napoleon’s dynasty in 1870, Biarritz remained a fashionable summer spot. The French state, once again republican, took possession of the Empress’s possessions, a bank took the villa and turned it into a casino before it became, in 1893, a prestigious hotel visited by royalty, including Queen Victoria.

I paid a visit to the town’s Musée de la Mer where, extraordinarily, they had a small exhibition on about the history of whaling. Aside from sitting for half an hour with the seals, this was where I spent most of my afternoon.

Aside from Japan which has a millennia-long whaling history, the origins of organized whale hunting begun here along this Basque coast, some one thousand years ago. The first mention of Basque whaling is recorded as 1059. At its peak, there were forty-nine ports with whaling establishments along the Basque coast. It was a dangerous occupation with the fishermen, whale-hunters, setting out to sea in small boats with harpoons. Their principle target was the North Atlantic right whale, caught during its migrating period between November and March. During this season, men were positioned in on-shore watchtowers (vigias) near the coast or in the lower Pyrénées. When a whale’s blow or spout was spotted, the watchmen lit fires to alert the sailors in the hunting boats to set off to sea.

This lighthouse in Biarritz stands on the spot of what was once a vigias, a stone watchtower.

Up to the seventeenth century, the Basque hunters had the territory to themselves and hunted off their own shores but fewer whales began to pass by – they had been overhunted and, rather shockingly, the hunters had been targeting calf whales because they were easier to catch. Possibly, also, the mammals were smart enough to eschew this route. Once the right whales were gone, the whalers were obliged to travel greater distances to catch their prey and they made for Greenland and Norway where vast schools of whales were to be found. Sometimes, the whalers were away for months on end. Around the year 1600, a Dutch explorer, William Barents, discovered the island of Spitzbergen off the coast of Norway. This was rich whaling territory and before long both the Dutch and British were sending fleets to these icy waters to harpoon the great beasts. Originally, they looked to the Basque fishermen to teach them the technique. In 1612, the Basque towns of Saint-Jean-de-Luz and Saint-Sebastian sent twelve whaling boats, but they were soon seen off by both the British and the Dutch who wanted all for themselves.

The technique used by both the British and the Dutch was to send small boats with roped harpoons to the whale, which once killed was dragged back to the mother ship where its skin and blubber was stripped off and boiled down to make the whale oil. Whale oil was a very valuable commodity. It was originally used for lighting (long after olive oil had lit the streets of such great cities as Rome and Alexandria, I must add). Later, the oil went into cosmetics, soap, margarine etc.
So competitive did the industry become that Britain and Holland almost went to war over who had the territorial rights to these waters. And then the Americans got involved. Their boats set sail from ports such as Nantucket, sailed huge distances and were often at sea for up to four years. (When I read this, my thoughts were with the wives and children of those men, what an existence.)

The Basque whalers were being left out. By the nineteenth century, the commercial trade that they had excelled at and lived off had become moribund along this Atlantic coast of France and Spain and the right whale was gone. Only five or six sightings were noted throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, factory ships were being sent to sea, by the Norwegians, Americans, Japanese. They were hunting all whales indiscriminately and would kill the beasts and produce the oil on board. The numbers of whales hunted was alarming. Thirty-three thousand blue whales were recorded as destroyed in the nineteenth century, for example.

Coincidentally, as I write this on 15th September 2014, the 65th meeting of the IWC is opening in Slovenia. What is the IWC? Founded in 1986, the IWC is a global intergovernmental body charged with the conservation of whales and the management of whaling. Japan and Iceland continue to hunt and slaughter whales and are regularly flouting the internationally agreed bans. As well as keeping whale catch limits under review, the Commission is working to promote the recovery of depleted whale populations. They are creating sanctuaries where commercial whaling is prohibited. Their work is essential if whale populations are to be maintained and certain species not become extinct.

As I took in all this information and so much more at the fine sea museum in Biarritz, I realised that the International Whaling Commission was founded several years after our rally in Trafalgar Square. Sir Peter Scott and the WWF were instrumental in creating awareness, in changing the course of marine history. That evening was a moment in that history whose impact I could not have appreciated at the time as I listened to that haunting, never-to-be-forgotten song.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

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Women of the Warsaw Uprising, by Clare Mulley

September 27, 2014, 5:00 pm

≫ Next: If you want to know the time, ask a policeman by Susan Price

≪ Previous: The Song of the Whale and my Visit to Biarritz by Carol Drinkwater

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Warsaw Uprising. By the summer of 1944 the tide of the Second World War had turned. The Soviets, now Allies, had reversed the German advance, and France was fighting towards liberation. Sensing change, the Polish government-in-exile authorized their highly organised resistance ‘Home Army’ to rise up against the extremely brutal Nazi forces occupying their capital.

On the 1st August thousands of Polish men, women and children launched a coordinated attack. The Poles had faced invasion on two fronts at the start of the war, and were well aware of the dual threat to their independence. Their aim now was to liberate Warsaw from the Nazis so that they could welcome the advancing Soviet Army as free, or at least fighting, citizens. Moscow radio had appealed to the Poles to take action, but the Red Army then deliberately waited within hearing distance for the ensuing conflict to decimate the Polish resistance before making their own entry. The Warsaw Uprising is remembered as one of the most courageous resistance actions of the Second World War, but also one of the most tragic.

Gravestone of a female resistance fighter,
Powąnski Cemetery, Warsaw.
(Copyright Clare Mulley)

A couple of years ago I travelled to Warsaw to research my last book, The Spy Who Loved, a biography of Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, the Polish-born Countess who became Britain’s first female special agent of the war. While there I visited the famous Powąnski cemetery where many of Krystyna’s family are buried, along with (parts of) Chopin and other famous Poles. Walking around I was very struck by several memorials like the one above, which shows how a Polish woman who died in 1999 chose to be remembered – fighting for the freedom of her country fifty-five years earlier.

To her despair, Krystyna Skarbek, then stationed in Italy, was not able to join her compatriots during the Warsaw Uprising. However I was honoured to meet one of the female veterans of the conflict at an event at the Polish Embassy earlier this year. A few months later I had the pleasure of meeting her again at her north London home, where she generously shared her memories of the uprising with me over a cup of strong coffee and some delicious Polish pastries.

Hanna and me at the Polish Embassy earlier this year.
(Copyright Clare Mulley)

Hanna Koscia, as she is now, was just sixteen when she was attached to a Home Army first aid team in the centre of Warsaw. Her role included nursing, and fetching supplies and the injured, sometimes while under fire. On one occasion her life was saved when the wounded female fighter she was carrying took the full force of the fire directed at them. The soldier died an hour later, a moment Hanna will never forget. Another time she was sent out alone to collect some glass bottles of methylated spirits from the city Polytechnic, to serve as basic antiseptic. Climbing back through the ruins she was caught in a bombing raid. Flying debris smashed one bottle, and Hanna felt the meths soak her shirt. A moment later incendiaries started to fall. ‘At that point I realized I was going to die’ Hanna told me, adding quietly, ‘I was a bit afraid, but not much’. Incredibly, Hanna survived the conflict, becoming one of the first female POWs detained in a camp in Germany. To her delight, she was finally liberated by Polish soldiers in May 1945.

Polish Home Army white and red armband,
courtesy of The Warsaw Rising Museum

Despite the heroism of the Warsaw Uprising, it is a conflict still not well known outside Poland. So I am thrilled that Hanna’s story has been published in full in this month’s issue of History Today magazine. Furthermore there are some wonderful new resources being launched to mark the 70th anniversary of the conflict. Two films in particular stand out:

- Powstanie Warszawskie (Warsaw Uprising) is the world's first feature film to be made entirely from authentic newsreels. The Home Army had commissioned reporters and cameramen to record the conflict during August 1944. It is this footage that has now been colourised and assembled to retell the story of the uprising. You can watch a trailer for this powerful film here:

- Portret Żołnierza (Portrait of a Soldier) is an independent documentary directed and produced by Marianna Bukowski. Marianna spent many hours interviewing her friend Wanda Traczyk-Stawska who, as a 16-year-old girl, fought as a Home Army soldier. While watching some of the original footage from the uprising, Marianna was deeply moved to see Wanda firing her ‘Lightning’ gun during the conflict. Her intimate and very personal film explores Wanda’s story, asking what makes a teenage girl choose to become a soldier. Although currently still in post-production, more information can be read here.

- I am also looking forward to reading a new book on the conflict, Warsaw 44 by Alexandra Richie, a critically acclaimed author whose father-in-law is a veteran of the Uprising.

The Warsaw Rising was fought over 63 days between 1st August and 2nd October 1944. An estimated 18,000 Polish insurgents lost their lives, as well as between 180-200,000 civilians – many during the mass executions conducted by the Nazi German troops in reprisals. On a private visit to Krystyna Skarbek’s grave earlier this year, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski emphasized to me that the Home Army commanders were counting on the rapid advance of the Soviet army into the city when they took their decision to rise up. For Wanda Traczyk-Stawska and Hanna Koscia however, the fight was more personal than strategic. ‘We were children of the occupation – we wanted to be free and it was for this freedom that we fought so fiercely’, Wanda told Marianna Bukowski. Hanna was equally clear about her own motivations, telling me, ‘you have to understand how many people had already been killed, what the view was ahead of us… the reality of the situation was that you can’t give up when there is no good alternative for yourself or for others… We just simply had to fight’.

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If you want to know the time, ask a policeman by Susan Price

September 29, 2014, 2:31 am

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≪ Previous: Women of the Warsaw Uprising, by Clare Mulley

This is a lovely post from one of our History Girl Reserves, Susan Price, about a once well-known Music Hall song...

If you want to know the time, ask a policeman.

The proper Greenwich time, ask a policeman,

Every member of the force has a watch and chain, of course,

If you want to know the time, ask a policeman!

My childhood was haunted by snatches of music-hall song and jokes. My Grandfather Price, I'm told, was a great fan of the music-hall, especially the high-kicking dancing girls. (And I heard, passed down from him, tales of the dreaded 'peaky-blinders' long before they became a TV series.)

They don't do repairs in mid-ocean.

They don't do repairs on the deck.

So for two blessed years, me trousers was hung

From a wart on the back of me neck!- boom-boom!

To this day, I've no idea what this is about. I didn't understand these half-remembered bits of verse. As with nursery rhymes, I learned them by their rythmns, without knowing or much caring what they meant.

She looked at me coy,

She said, 'You're not a boy.

Get off! You're a dirty old man!' - boom-boom!

That star of children's TV, the puppet fox, Basil Brush, used to end all his jokes with 'boom-boom!' too. But long before Basil came along, I knew that was how you ended a joke. I asked my Dad why, and he said it was because, in music-hall, there was a live orchestra in the pit, and at the end of every punch-line, the drummer would give two thumps on the bass-drum. Later, the comics added it themselves.

I'm one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit... (Often said in reference to Dudley castle.)

My old man said 'Follow the van...'

'You don't know Nellie like I do,' said the bird on Nellie's hat...

'Here's a joke worth eighteenpence...'
'On the day I was born, my father threw a party in the yard.
The party was my mother.

'My parents were in the iron and steel business.
My mother ironed and my father did the stealing.'

'My father died as he was addressing a public meeting.
The platform collapsed and he broke his neck.'

But I was talking about 'Ask A Policeman.'

The only bit of this song I learned as a child was the chorus quoted at the top of this blog. I had a vague idea that it was a song in praise of fine, upstanding British Bobbies, who would always greet you with a smile and give you the time of day. I once asked my Dad (that fount of all knowledge) about it, and he more or less confirmed this. Perhaps he was protecting me from the hard and cynical world, but I have the impression that he'd never given much thought to the song himself (he was more of a Duke Ellington man.)

My researches reveal that 'Ask a Policeman' was written by Augustus Durandeau (music) and E. W Rogers (lyrics,) and first performed by James Fawn in the 1890s. The first verse and chorus go:

The police force is a noble band, that safely guard our streets.
Their valor is unquestion'd, and they're noted for their 'feats,'
If anything you wish to know, they'll tell you with a grin,
In fact, each one of them is a complete "Enquire Within."

Chorus.

If you want to know the time, ask a policeman.
The proper Greenwich time, ask a policeman,
Every member of the force has a watch and chain, of course,
If you want to know the time, ask a policeman.

But that idea that the song is one of love for our cheery, helpful policemen? Those last lines from the chorus - 'Every member of the force has a watch and chain, of course,' - was sung with a knowing nod and wink to the audience. It was a reference to a well-know urban tale of the time. Everybody knew that when policemen - who were usually working class - came across a well oiled gentleman, the policemen not only gleefully took advantage of their office to arrest the gentleman for being 'drunk and disorderly' when he was only a little high-spirited, but also stole the gentleman's pocket-watch.

A gentleman's expensive pocket-watch, a little miracle of clockwork engineering, accurately counting off the seconds and minutes, was the coveted gadget, the iPad of its day. A police constable couldn't afford one. Yet they always had one! - Because they stole them from their betters.

I suppose there's never been a time when the Police Force has been surrounded by the warm glow of love and approval from the public it serves - despite the necessity of having some such institution. But when the Force first came into being, it was hated not only by the criminal classes (both rich and poor), but by everyone. And especially by those who considered themselves respectable and rather above the common herd.

The Police were, in the main, lower-class men, granted the power to enter the houses of their betters, to ask impertinently about their whereabouts on the night in question, and even to arrest them on suspicion of crimes. Before the establishment of the Force, justice had been in the hands of the local gentry, as was proper. Fellow gentlefolk could be counted on to understand the difficulties a gentleman might find himself in.

And so arose the story of the thieving policeman who - instead of arresting real criminals - targeted the squiffy toff, just so he could pinch his watch. And what if the toff had smashed a few shop-keepers' windows, or broken some street-lamps? - It was only high-spirits, and outrageous to call it 'criminal damage' as if it had been done by some rowdy costermonger or navvy.

If you stay out late at night and pass through regions queer
Thanks to those noble guardians of foes you have no fear.
If drink you want and 'pubs' are shut go to the man in blue,
Say you're thirsty and good-natured, and he'll show you what to do.

Chorus.

If you want to get a drink, ask a p'liceman.
He'll manage it I think, will a p'liceman.
He'll produce the flowing pot, if the 'pubs' are shut or not,
He could open all the lot, ask a p'liceman.

If your servant suddenly should leave her cosy place,
Don't get out an advertisement her whereabouts to trace.
You're told it was a soldier who removed her box of clothes -
Don't take the information in, but ask the man who knows.

Chorus.

If you don't know where she is, ask a p'liceman
For he's 'in the know' he is, ask a p'liceman.
Though they say with 'red ' she flew yet its ten to one on 'blue,'
For he mashes just a few. Ask a p'liceman.
Who guards the guardians? Those set to prevent you buying drink at certain hours, will also see there's a profit to be made in supplying it. And another persistent tale about the early policemen was that they spent most of their time, when they were supposed to be on duty, sitting in some comfortably-off man's kitchen, eating his food and flirting with his cook and maids.

Given that there is so much unspoken meaning behind the words, I'm puzzled to guess how much should be read into the verse about the maid. The master's concern to trace the missing maid could be nothing more than kindly concern - but would the original audience have heard more than that? And why has the policeman lured her away? 'A Masher' was the current term for a strutting young man, but here it seems to have a more sexual meaning. Are we meant to understand that the servant ran away because she was pregnant by the policeman? - Or ran away to live with him? Is there even a hint that police-officers were involved in prostitution? Or am I reading altogether too much into it?

(It’s also interesting to see that ‘pub’ is given in inverted commas, as a piece of exciting new slang.)

The Policeman's villainy comes even nearer home in the next verse:-

Or if you're called away from home, and leave your wife behind
You say, 'Oh would that I a friend to guard the house could find,
And keep my love in safety,' - but let your troubles cease!
You'll find the longed-for keeper in a member of the p'lice.

Chorus:

If your wife should want a friend, ask a p'liceman,
Who a watchful eye will lend, ask a p'liceman
Truth and honour you can trace, written on his manly face -
When you're gone he'll mind your place, ask a p'liceman.
My favourite verse is the last. I enjoy the neatness of the rhyming. It also reminds us that an obsession with losing weight is not such a modern thing as we think.

And if you're getting very stout your friends say in a trice
'Consult a good physician, and he'll give you this advice:
Go in for running all you can no matter when or how
And if you'll have a trainer, watch a bobby in a row.

Chorus.

If you want to learn to run, ask a p'liceman.
How to fly, though twenty 'stun', ask a p'liceman.
Watch a bobby in a fight - in a tick he's out of sight!
For advice on rapid flight, ask a p'liceman.
So, in addition to being a thief, a seller of illicit drink, a lurer away of servant girls and a seducer of wives, that nasty lower-class plod is a coward too!

That was 1890. By 1919, Marie Lloyd was singing,

"But you can't trust a special like an old time copper
When you can't find your way 'ome!"

Marie Lloyd

Thirty years had passed. The Police Force had become an accepted fact of life - and it was the new idea of 'specials' that was attracting suspicion.

Susan Price is an award winning writer for children. She is now self-publishing and is a founding member of the Authors Electric blog.

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September competition

September 29, 2014, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: Hidden treasures by Mary Hoffman

≪ Previous: If you want to know the time, ask a policeman by Susan Price

Due to circumstances beyond our control, we were unable to bring you our scheduled guest yesterday. Very sorry. I did not find this out till 25th.

(But we did have a lovely post from Sue Price about policemen in Victorian Music Hall songs).

So, we don't have our expected September competition.

But Elizabeth Chadwick has stepped in to save the day and is kindly offering one precious copy of her new book, The Winter Crown, to the best answer to this question:

"If Eleanor of Aquitaine time-travelled to your doorstep, name three things you would show her/do with her for the day"

(Well, it's not a question but you know what we mean.)

Please use the Comments below for your suggestion and we'll choose the best. Closing date 7th October.

And very unusually, just for this month, the competition is open internationally.

↧

Hidden treasures by Mary Hoffman

September 30, 2014, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: George Orwell and the Civil Wars by Claire Letemendia

≪ Previous: September competition

A month ago I was in Tuscany, staying near a tiny hill town called Pari.

Pari, on the Siena to Grosseto road

It chanced that my husband's oldest friend, known since they were both twelve, was staying half an hour's drive away, with his sister, in another small town, by the name of Torri. "Torri" = "towers" though we could see only one. It belonged to the Abbey of Santa Mustiola, first recorded in 1070.

(The Roman Martyrology records under 3rd July: “At Chiusi, in Tuscany, in the reign of the emperor Trajan, the holy martyrs Irenaeus, deacon, and Mustiola, a matron, who were subjected to various atrocious tortures and merited the crown of martyrdom”).

Our friends had discovered that the Cloisters of this Abbey would be open on Monday and Friday mornings at rather approximate times, so off we went on the first available Monday, before our trip to San Gimignano, to see what there was to be seen.

The cloisters at Torri

Which actually turned out to be quite a lot. The cloisters date from the 13th or 14th century though they have been restored. The cloister has loggias on three levels, the lowest of which is decorated with black and white marble and supported by columns, some intricately carved.

But its glory is really the sculpted capitals.

This is a fairly conventional Adam and Eve, being tempted in the Garden of Even. Some others have interlaced abstract designs, which are quite Celtic in flavour.

But others are of animals

Some, like these two ?geese, ?doves have their necks entwined, providing a symbol of harmony and love.

Others, of similarly unclear taxonomy, are more involved with their own anatomy than with the other half of the couple.

But on the whole there is more entwining than tail-chewing. And none of the biting of others that Michelle Lovric told us about in Venice in few weeks ago.

The second loggia is built of brick, whose pinkness is reflected in the herring-bone pattern of the cloister floor. The third loggia is made with wooden columns. It's a strange development, isn't it? For the quality of materials to diminish, the closer to heaven the eye progresses. It suggests that the valuable marble and rich carvings were intended to impress those who strolled at the lower levels.

Crest at Torri Creative Commons - Ian McKellar

Eneo Silvio Piccolomini, whose family crest this is, became Pope in the mid 15th-century. His Papal name was Pius ll and he came from a family that grew to be of immense wealth and power in Siena and its surroundings. many things in that region are named after him - from a full-frescoed library in the Duomo by Pintirrucchio to a long road leading towards the Porta Romana.

And on certain days in Siena, the highly-decorated floor, normally covered, is exposed for vistors to see.

The Erythraean Sybil by Antonio Federighi

There are ten Sybils altogether, twice as many as Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And many other subjects, like a huge Slaughter of the Innocents. 600 years on from this decorative scheme it is hard to put ourselves into the mindset of the first viewers, any more than we can understand the animal iconography of a century or two earlier in Torri.

But it's always worth seeing any art treasure which is not often available to the traveller. Have you found other examples?

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George Orwell and the Civil Wars by Claire Letemendia

October 1, 2014, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: KINGSTON PENITENTIARY, by Y S Lee

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Claire Letemendia has just joined us - welcome! From November the regular spot of the 2nd of each month will be taken buy another newcomer, Gillian Polack.
As a new member of The History Girls Reserves, I’ll introduce myself by confessing to two passionate affairs in my life. My obsession with the English Civil War era started when I was about ten, growing up in Oxfordshire surrounded by historical sites related to that turbulent time. I’m still a victim, as I dive into my third novel of a trilogy about the shadowy exploits of Laurence Beaumont, a Royalist spy in the First Civil War. Meanwhile, in my twenties I enjoyed an intense seven year relationship with George Orwell, writing about his political development for my PhD. I believe his true birth as a committed socialist dates from his experience in the Spanish Civil War serving with a radical leftwing militia on the side of the Republican Popular Front against the army of General Franco. As was the Cavaliers’, the Republicans’ was a lost cause; the war ended in their defeat and a long period of authoritarian rule. Orwell went on to describe both the military action and the complex political in-fighting within the Front in what I consider his best non-fiction work, Homage to Catalonia.

Here’s a photo of Orwell (tallest figure standing, third from the right) taken in March 1937 at the front near Huesca, in Catalonia. The woman in the picture is his wife Eileen, who had come from England to visit him. On the 20th of May that same year, he was shot through the neck by a sniper’s bullet. Had it struck him just a millimetre to the left, he would have been dead and perhaps lost to posterity as an author. His voice remained permanently weakened.

But is there any connection between the man most celebrated for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four and the English Civil Wars? Curiously enough, yes. Much earlier in the thirties, after his stint in the East with the Burma Police and his forays into the world of English tramps and Parisian low life, Orwell worked briefly as a private tutor while he was struggling to begin his writing career. Richard Peters, one of the boys he tutored, remembers him saying he would have sided with the Cavaliers during the English Civil War ‘because Roundheads were such depressing people’. Peters saw him as ‘temperamentally… a Cavalier, lacking the fervour and fanaticism of the Puritan.’

Later on, while teaching at a boys’ prep school, Orwell composed a play for his young students to stage about the Battle of Worcester and King Charles II’s timely escape from capture by Cromwell’s forces. Yet again Orwell showed his preference for the Cavaliers, although not much of his future promise as a writer. In letters to friends, he described the play as ‘mucky’ and complained how he had to make all the suits of armour himself. One boy who acted in it must have felt more enthusiastic since he kept a copy, now in the Orwell Archive at University College, London. It does contain some rather cringe-worthy speeches, and concludes:

MESSENGER: Sir! Sir! The king’s escaped! His ship has left the harbour. They fired that shot as they crossed the bar. The soldiers arrived just a minute too late.

CAPTAIN CHAMBERS: Ten thousand curses…

SIR JAMES DIGBY: Good people all, this is a joyous time/ When our good king, long in most dangerous plight/ Is safe at sea and bound for friendly France./ We’ll honour it with song, and silver too/ Sir Edward here and I will give you all/ To drink good health unto his majesty./ Long may he flourish, and soon come the day/ When the usurper Cromwell ends his sway;/ Peace, freedom and prosperity shall reign/ When England has her own true king again!/ Come, sir, if you’ve a song, let’s hear it.

Orwell rarely wasted any of his personal experiences, cannibalising them instead for his fiction. The play pops up in his novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, as does the mind-numbing activity of constructing armour with brown paper and glue.

The above scene was painted by Francis Henry Newbery in 1924-7, shortly before Orwell wrote his school play. It depicts the flight of Charles II through the town of Bridport in Dorset, on his way out of England after the battle. Disguised as a servant, he apparently stopped at the George Inn for a quick bite.

Orwell’s interest in the Civil Wars resurfaces in 1940, some five years before Animal Farm appeared. He returned to the subject with a far more mature political perspective in a review of some books for The New Statesman and Nation, a publication that had turned down two of his pieces on Spain, probably because he had castigated the British left, especially the intellectuals, for refusing to criticize the totalitarian aspects of the Stalinist regime and its ruthless suppression of the radical and Anarchist parties during the Spanish war. Of Christopher Hill’s groundbreaking work, The English Revolution, he writes: ‘Obviously a Marxist version of the Civil War must represent it as a struggle between a rising capitalism and an obstructive feudalism, which in fact it was. But men will die for things called capitalism and feudalism, and will die for things called liberty or loyalty, and to ignore one set of motives is as misleading as to ignore others.’ Of another book, he remarks: ‘It is a pity that [the author] fails to make a comparison between the seventeenth century and the one we are now in. A parallel undoubtedly exists, although from the Marxist point of view the latter-day equivalents of the Diggers and the Levellers happen to be unmentionable.’

Clearly Orwell felt a community with the radical egalitarianism and anarchism of those two sects suppressed by Cromwell: at this point he was keenly awaiting a democratic socialist revolution. And he seems to be hinting at a darker parallel: between modern-day capitalists with Royalists; and Marxists or possibly Stalinists with the Puritans. In a separate article, however, he talks of twentieth century war as a quite different animal from previous historical conflicts. Sheer power, of itself and for itself, had become the prize, as Hitler and Stalin had grasped all too well. This, in a nutshell, is his warning message in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eight-Four: not that a truly democratic society will never exist or that human decency will inevitably be crushed, as happens to Winston and Julia, but that such things can occur if we’re not watchful and allow our liberties gradually to slip away.

Reading again the Putney Debates between the Levellers and Cromwell’s faction in the army, I was reminded of the animals suffering under the pig dictatorship in Animal Farm: they had fought so hard to rid themselves of human rule, only to witness their struggle for freedom and equality betrayed. The Levellers had argued that nearly all men should have a vote. In the words of Colonel Thomas Rainsborough:

‘For really I think that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee; and therefore truly, Sr, I think itt clear, that every Man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own Consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.’

For Cromwell, these radical ideas threatened not just law and order, but the sacred distinction between property owners and other Englishmen. And so the Levellers’ subsequent attempted revolt was firmly stamped out.

Images: Wikipedia Commons

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KINGSTON PENITENTIARY, by Y S Lee

October 2, 2014, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: Written in stone - Katherine Langrish

≪ Previous: George Orwell and the Civil Wars by Claire Letemendia

When giving people directions to my house, I sometimes say, "Turn right at the Penitentiary." They usually think I'm joking, but in fact I'm entirely serious. I live within view of Kingston Penitentiary, Canada’s oldest and most notorious prison.

Kingston Penitentiary, c. 1901 (photo from "Souvenir views of the city of Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and the Thousand Islands, River St. Lawrence", 1901, via wikipedia)

Kingston Penitentiary was built in 1833-34, using blocks of limestone quarried by convict labour. (Actually, the building is older than the country itself: until Canada’s Confederation in 1867, the city of Kingston and its penitentiary were located in the British colony of Upper Canada.) When Charles Dickens visited Kingston in 1842, he found the town distinctly underwhelming. It had just suffered a disastrous fire that razed large portions of the city centre, including City Hall and the public market. Dickens’s rather sniffy assessment? “It may be said of Kingston, that one half of it appears to be burnt down, and the other half not to be built up.”

He must have cheered up as he drove westward along the shores of Lake Ontario, because when he reached the nearly-new Penitentiary, Dickens had nothing but praise for it: “There is an admirable jail here, well and wisely governed, and excellently regulated, in every respect. The men were employed as shoemakers, ropemakers, blacksmiths, tailors, carpenters, and stonecutters; and in building a new prison, which was pretty far advanced towards completion. The female prisoners were occupied in needlework.” I’m willing to bet that everything was extra-tidy and well-organized that day, for the celebrity visit.

This building houses the woodworking and machine shops for inmate instruction. (photo credit: Boardhead, via wikipedia)

Dickens’s impression of the prison might seem excessively rosy but the Pen was a newer facility, built along more humane principles. For example, teaching trades to inmates aimed to reduce recidivism. However, prisoners were also subject to very strict discipline: inmates “must not exchange a word with one another under any pretence whatever”. Further, they “must not exchange looks, wink, laugh, nod or gesticulate to each other”. Inmates were flogged for breaking these rules. At the time of Dickens’s visit, there were roughly 400 inmates, including 24 females. The women were housed in “the Female Department”, a separate building within the grounds, until a new facility was built for them in 1934.

Some of the nineteenth-century inmates were children: there is a record of Antoine Boucher, an eight-year-old boy, who was sentenced to either two or three years’ imprisonment (my sources differ) in 1845. A twelve-year-old named Elizabeth Breen is also on record as having been flogged, as well as an eleven-year-old called Alex Lafleur. His offense? Speaking in French.

In its early days, those employed at KP were required to live within earshot of its bell. In the event of an emergency, the bell was rung and all employees mustered to help out.

An aerial view of Kingston Penitentiary, ca. 1919 (photo credit: Library & Archives Canada, MIKAN no. 3259972, via wikipedia)

The penitentiary was in continuous use for 178 years until it was closed in 2013. Kingston Penitentiary was designated a National Historic Site in 1990 – an honour that sat uncomfortably with its use as a maximum-security jail. Because of its historical significance, it can’t be razed. There’s already a national penitentiary museum across the street, in the former warden’s Victorian red-brick home. And who on earth would buy a condo retrofitted into a place of such suffering? Until someone figures out how to use the space (the site is next to a harbour and looks out onto Wolfe Island, the largest of the Thousand Islands) there it stands, a constant reminder of the gritty and shameful aspects of our history.

(In October 2013, I was privileged to take a tour of the now-empty prison with my camera. If you’d like to know more, please check out Kingston Penitentiary, Part 1 and Kingston Penitentiary, Part 2 at my personal blog.)

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Written in stone - Katherine Langrish

October 3, 2014, 9:30 pm

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Sunkenkirk

As a children’s author, I make occasional school visits to talk about ‘where ideas come from’ and the stories behind the historically based fantasies which represent most of my output so far. At the end of each visit the children ask questions. Though some require a certain amount of patience to answer (eg: ‘What made you start writing?’ when I’ve just spent forty-five minutes explaining that very thing) many more are intelligent and thoughtful, even insightful. The best question ever put to me was from a boy of 13 or so who asked, ‘If you could go back to anywhere in the past, where would you go?’

No one had asked me that before. No one has asked it since. I had to stop and think. Where wouldI go? There’s a short story – could it be by Ray Bradbury? – about time-trippers who go back to the beginning of the First Century to try and witness the Crucifixion. It all goes wrong for them. I thought about that; it didn’t seem appropriate: and suddenly I knew just where I would want to go. ‘Stonehenge,’ I said. ‘I’d love to go back to when they were building Stonehenge, and find out what they were really doing there.’ The boy nodded seriously. To him, too, it seemed a good time and place to visit.

I’m writing this in a week in which we’re learning more and more about Stonehenge and its landscape: the story, whatever it is, is becoming ever more fascinating. But we’ll still never really know what they were doing there, will we? Not for sure, even if we can speculate. Has any trace of what they believed come down to us? What were their myths and legends? What hero stories did they tell?

The archaeologist Francis Pryor, in his book ‘Britain BC’, writes of the Northern Irish Bronze and Iron Age site known as Navan Fort (County Armagh):

The Cattle Raid of Cooley describes how the mythical hero Cú Chulainn helps Conchobar, king of Ulster, based at his capital Emain Macha (pronounced Owain Maha) exact retribution for a cattle raid carried out by warriors of the rival power of Connacht, to the south. Scholars are agreed that The Cattle Raid of Cooley refers to events in pre-Christian Ireland. There can be no doubt that Emain Macha was the capital of the Ulster kings. And it just so happens that it is also the Irish name for Navan Fort.

... Chris Lynn has made a special study of the symbolism and imagery surrounding Navan. He considers that the huge, post-built structure that was erected in 94 BC was a bruidne, or magic hostelry; these have been likened to an Iron Age Valhalla. According to the Irish epics the heroes were lavishly feasted in the bruidne, then at the end of the meal it was burned down around them and they were immolated where they sat.

Pryor adds that such a tradition might have been ritually rather than literally observed. Here, perhaps, is a tiny glimpse of the significance of a prehistoric monument, preserved - as they say - in legend and in song. It’s exciting, stirring, it gives me goosebumps, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. What were the stories the builders of Stonehenge told about it? We have none earlier than the medieval conjectures of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who thought that Merlin built it with the help of Irish giants.

It’s not just Stonehenge though. Over 1000 stone circles can still be seen in the British Isles, even if many are small and insignificant. I once took my husband and children to try and rediscover a little one on the moors above Malham in the Yorkshire Dales, where I used to live. It’s marked on the Ordnance Survey map, and I’d visited it by myself years before: a rough group of a few knee-high boulders leaning out of the moor-grass. We couldn’t find it, and not only that, there was an inexplicable, lowering, heavy gloom about the day which sapped our spirits. The children whined, we felt depressed: we gave up and returned home to discover, later, an eclipse of the sun had been happening during our walk. Not a total eclipse, but enough to explain the failure of the light, the doomy sense of pointlessness we’d felt. And whoever built that little circle, thousands of years ago – what would they have made of our experience?

In the Lakes recently, driving back over Black Combe from the coast at Ravenglass, I spotted the tiny symbol of a stone circle marked on the route map. It took a bit of finding, diving up the tiny twisting roads and finally squishing the car into a hedge and tramping up a mile and a quarter of rough trackway towards a distant farm. I wasn’t expecting much. I thought it would be like the Malham circle, a small set of minor stones poking out of the turf. As we drew nearer to the farmhouse, we saw this:

And getting closer, this:

This was no minor stone circle. It's called Sunkenkirk, or Swinside Stone Circle, on the north-east side of Black Combe, and it's almost complete, containing 55 stones. (I made it 58, but that included some broken bits.) We tied the dog to the gate, as there were sheep and cattle in the field, and went in.

Once inside, I tried to photograph it in quadrants. The circle lies - like Castlerigg - on a high, flattish plateau surrounded on all sides by a horizon of noble hills. It feels like a dancing floor or a theatre.

It even has a sort of ceremonial porch on the southeastern side, a set of double stones flanking the entrance.

It was a beautiful, serene afternoon. The worn stones glowed in the late sunshine. The circle was so complete, it felt as though the people who built and used it had only just gone away, instead of being dust for 5000 years.

But who were they? Why did they build it and what did it mean to them? We have only the name Sunkenkirk, and a tale - for we will always tell tales - that it was built by the Devil, who busied himself at night in pulling down and removing the stones of a church which was being built in the day. That's a new, young story, perhaps a hundred years old. We will never know what stories were told about this circle immediately after it was built, or through most of the rest of its long, long history.

In an essay called 'Burning Bushes' (from 'In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination', Virago 2011), Margaret Atwood speculates on the value of art to early societies: that those who possessed

... such abilities as singing, dancing and – for our purposes – the telling of stories – would have had a better chance of survival than those without them. That makes a certain sense: if you could tell your children about the time your grandfather was eaten by a crocodile, right there at the bend of the river, they would be more likely to avoid the same fate. If, that is, they were listening.

Language and narrative are inextricable one from another. Every sentence we speak lays a narrative template over experience and alters our perceptions. In the beginning was the Word: we create our own worlds in our own images. If you can tell a ‘true’ story about the crocodile at the bend of the river, fiction and myth spring at once into existence. Because you can tell another story, about how bravely your grandfather fought the crocodile (even if you weren't there yourself): and that leads almost inevitably to the question of where he is now - surely not mere crocodile food, but a hero in the world of ancestors, who passes his wisdom down to you and maybe speaks to you in dreams.

Some years ago I visited this grassy barrow. There it is the in the middle of the photograph, looking just like so many I've seen in England: but we know who lies there, and who buried them, and when, and why. It's the burial place of the Plataean forces who fought alongside the Athenians commanded by Miltiades, against the Persians under Darius, at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. We know, because the story was written down. And knowing it sent prickles down my spine.

The battle of Marathon was written as history (though maybe not history as we conceive of it today) not too long after the events themselves. 'The Cattle Raid of Cooley' was only written down centuries after the events it purports to describe, after the oral tradition and mythification process, the business of turning fact into fiction, had got well under way. Yet as in the tales of Troy and Knossos, some truths were preserved in the storytelling, like flies in amber. But there are no such stories for Stonehenge, no hero tales from Sunkenkirk. And that's why, if I could travel back in time I'd still go to the the third millenium BC and visit them.

Because I want to know their story.

Picture credits

All photos copyright Katherine Langrish except the photo of Marathon: Wikimedia Commons.

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A Chairy Tale - Joan Lennon

October 4, 2014, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: Maximum meaning, minimum means by Lydia Syson

≪ Previous: Written in stone - Katherine Langrish

I was thinking about the first time my dad took me to see Norman McLaren's film Neighbours, among other Canadian Film Board films, and remembering how appalled I was. I can't think I was very old - certainly young enough to be thoroughly scared when the two men kill the mothers and babies. (I wasn't nearly as bothered by them killing each other. And I remember thinking the flowers were being much too forgiving at the end.) If you haven't watched it in a while, or if you've never seen it, it's well worth a look.

And then I remembered this ... I welcome you to take a few moments to return to 1957 (or go there for the first time if you're that bit younger) and watch A Chairy Tale by Norman McLaren with music by Ravi Shankar on sitar and Chantur Lal on tabla.

And they sat happily ever after ...

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.

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Maximum meaning, minimum means by Lydia Syson

October 5, 2014, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: A delicate exotic fruit.....by Adèle Geras

≪ Previous: A Chairy Tale - Joan Lennon

Sometimes it feels that a day doesn’t go by without another author penning another set of rules for writing. But if I were ever to pin a maxim above my desk, it might not be a writer’s rules, but a graphic designer’s: Abram Games’ characteristically pithy definition of good design, ‘maximum meaning, minimum means’.

Who is Abram Games? You may think you’ve never heard of him, but I’m sure you’ll recognise his posters. He produced some of the most iconic images of the twentieth century, from the Festival of Britain logo to the controversial ‘blonde bombshell’ ATS recruiting poster.

I was drawn to the centenary exhibition currently on at London’s Jewish Museum because he produced exactly the kind of war posters which influenced both the cover design and content of my last two books, ‘A World Between Us’ and ‘That Burning Summer’, and also because I saw parallels between Games and the life I imagined for my fictional hero, Nat Kaplan. I discovered at the museum a remarkable man who, like so many of his generation and background, owed his greatness partly to his bloody-mindedness.

He was determined individualist who believed firmly in ‘the people’. Naomi Games, who last month gave a fascinating talk about her father, once asked him why the profiles he used in his posters always faced left. He clearly thought the answer was obvious. Games was a lifelong socialist, though never a member of any political party. Like my Nat, the International Brigade volunteer in ‘A World Between Us’, he was born in Whitechapel with East European origins. His photographer father was born in Latvia, while the family of his seamstress mother, who made his painting smocks, came from Łódź.

Of course Games was at Cable Street on 4^th October 1936, when the East End famously blocked Mosley’s Fascist march. By 1939 he was producing posters for the Spanish War Relief Fund.

This Spanish Youthship Appeal, bearing the message ‘Send them milk’ shows his genius for visual pun – a white milk bottle perfectly echoes the shape of the black bomb, a light and smiling baby’s face gazing at one, a dark, crying infant terrified by the other. Years later, in 1962, his ‘Freedom from Hunger’ poster series for the UN would turn ears of wheat into the ribs of a starving child, a juxtaposition of even greater and more startling economy.

He used an airbrush for the Spanish poster - an effect evoked by Jan Bielecki on my Hot Key book covers - and this remained his favoured technique until the late '50s. He’d learned it in his father’s photography studio, where his job was to touch up photographs, adding colour tints and, well, ‘airbrushing’. Apparently he was such a virtuoso with the tool he even used it to sign cheques. (His father’s 1918 airbrush pencil is in the exhibition, and there will be an airbrush demonstration at the museum on November 11th.)

Naomi Games mentioned the influence of the 1936 Surrealist exhibition in London on her father and his contemporaries. You can see it, for example, in the transformation of the Houses of Parliament into a writing hand casting a vote, in a wartime poster designed to encourage the armed services to perform their civic duties too: ‘Serve as a soldier, vote as a citizen.’ Hands and faces appear frequently in Games’ posters; they are, after all, invaluably expressive devices. Call me monothematic, but it struck me that there was another obvious influence on Games - the poster art of the Spanish Civil War. Designed for a largely illiterate population, these images also often feature hands and faces, and rely on the briefest of texts for their effect. Their bright colours and modern graphic style had an enormous impact on British volunteers, including Orwell, who arrived in Barcelona in December 1936 and wrote in Homage to Cataloniaof the revolutionary posters that ‘were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud.’ There’s an excellent collection in the Imperial War Museum in London, which also houses some of Games’ best work, and you can see and find out about the Southworth Collection in this brilliant online exhibition, The Visual Front.

This poster asks for donations to protect the orphaned children of anti-fascists, while below, a collage of fists, factory and fighter plane exhorts competitions at work to spur on industrial production to help the Republican war effort.

The only person in British army history ever to have the title ‘Official War Poster Artist’, Games' persuasive visual shorthand was exceptional. He made over 100 posters, conveying exactly the kind of messages that make twelve-year-old Ernest so anxious in my novel, That Burning Summer. When Games began infantry service in 1940 he was horrified by the dull, monochrome and ineffectual information posters he saw plastered on the walls of army barracks. Soon he was able to replace them with colourful, succinct, emotional appeals about health, cleanliness, pilfering, rumour and countless other aspects of wartime life.

Several of Games’ designs were rejected for being ‘too Soviet’. A few brought him into open clashes with the authorities. Bevin actually ripped one off the wall of a public exhibition. The text was patriotic enough: ‘Your Britain … fight for it now’. But the image clearly stated that it was the new progressive Britain, embodied in modern public architecture, that was worth fighting for, not the old, socially divided nation, which Games represented by a child with rickets in a lightless city slum. Churchill banned the poster, calling it a “Disgraceful libel on the conditions prevailing in Great Britain before the war… the soldiers know their homes aren’t like that”; his lack of recognition of the real conditions facing returning soldiers no doubt helped him lose the 1945 election. Now malnutrition and poverty is bringing rickets back into Britain’s GP surgeries while the pioneering Lubetkin-designed Finsbury Health Centre shown in the poster has recently fought off demolition threats. The image has acquired new resonance.

Games’ brain seemed to work in slogans; the texts he wrote himself were as minimalistic as his images. ‘I am not an artist. I am a graphic thinker,’ he said. ‘The harder I work, the simpler it looks.’ It was only when he began to work for London Transport that he realised his ambition of an entirely word-free poster. But even so, as Naomi Games discovered when she began to scrutinize her father’s work with a magnifying glass, he managed to hide lettering in almost all his posters, quietly and lovingly scattering everywhere the initials of his wife, his children, and even his lover.

‘It is permissible to break all the rules…but only successfully.’ This statement from Over my shoulder, a book in which Games set out his professional philosophy, is reproduced on one of the museum’s walls. Like so many of Games’ working rules, it has application far beyond the field of graphic design. He always had to balance work for the causes in which he believed with work for commercial clients, like Guinness, the Financial Times, BOAC and the Jersey Tourist Board. For this last commission he was asked if he could ‘do’ a girl in a bikini on a beach. Yes, he replied, and went away to produce his playful and prize-winning designs in which the letter ‘J’ is transformed into deckchairs, shells and sticks of rock. ‘What happened to the girl in the bikini?’ they asked. ‘I said I could do it. I didn’t say I would.’

I laughed when I saw his comment: ‘I do my best work for Jewish causes, and they give me most trouble.’ I wanted to cheer when I read, in Over My Shoulder, ‘We have seen the results of the sell-out to the client on a grand scale in Nazi Germany, in other dictatorships, and in Russia and the satellite countries, where designers are held under rigid control. A designer must therefore be convinced that what he is doing is right, not only for himself but for his fellow men.’ (Some things are too important to reduce to a slogan.) An autodidact whose old school report stated that he was ‘weak’ at drawing, Games didn’t believe in art schools. Yet for seven years he taught one day a week at the Royal College of Art, where another set of initials provided another working maxim. A designer has to work with the ‘three cs’ he told his students – Curiosity, Courage and Concentration. But don’t forget the Cash and the Cheques, Games would add, ever the idealistic pragmatist.

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