A moving and inspiring encounter with Dutch wartime history

June 19, 2015, 1:00 am

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On a recent visit to my father’s birthplace, Amsterdam, I went to the Verzetsmuseum - the Museum of the Dutch Resistance - which is to be found in the leafy Plantage district to the East of the city. Like the far better-known Anne Frank Huis, it illuminates a dark time in Holland’s past - May 1940 to May 1945 - when the country was under Nazi occupation, and 100,000 Jews were amongst those sent to their deaths in concentration camps. The museum documents what took place during those years, focusing on the growing resistance to the Nazi presence both by political activists and by those who - although not necessarily identifying themselves as such - nonetheless took part in acts of resistance. It is these stories of bravery and self-sacrifice that the museum commemorates, using artefacts - letters, newspaper reports, photographs, and personal possessions - to illustrate what day-to-day resistance meant.

Here, for example, are the cardboard prints used to create the metal ‘stereotypes’ needed for printing one of Holland’s 1,300 underground newspapers. These included Het Parool (The Password), Vrij Nederland (Free Netherlands), Waarheid (Truth) and Ons Volk (Our People). To be found in possession of these would have meant arrest and deportation to a concentration camp (a fate which overtook at least 20,000 Dutch citizens), and so it was essential to keep such material hidden - in a bag with a false lining, such as this one.

This suitcase was one of the many smuggled into Holland and used for transmitting coded messages back to England. Since the signals these devices emitted were easy to trace, it was essential that the person transmitting kept on the move, and that the equipment could be jettisoned quickly if necessary. Even so, many agents were caught - which meant certain death. Of the 20,000 members of the Dutch Resistance arrested and sent to concentration camps, around 2,000 were executed, although many others did not survive their imprisonment.

     

Here’s the typewriter on which political activist Coba Veltman typed pamphlets calling for a national strike, in February 1941. Shocked and angered by the rounding up and deportation of young Jewish men in Amsterdam, following an outbreak of civil unrest in which a Nazi sympathiser was killed, Dutch dockworkers organised a strike, which was supported by transport services and businesses across the city. The strike was put down with extreme severity, but it helped to galvanise public outrage against anti-Semitism across the country.

This letter, found on the back of a cardboard notice listing regulations at Scheveningen Prison, was written by Arie Addicks, sentenced to death for distributing the underground newspaper, Het Parool. ‘Having worked for freedom, I’m now having to pay a high price for it,’ he writes, adding wryly, ‘The stake was death. I lost this match.’

Another grim reminder of the ‘price’ some Resistance fighters had to pay is seen in the museum’s display about Hannie Schaft, a young Communist activist, who, together with her fellow student, Truus Oversteegen, took it upon herself to kill men who’d been identified as collaborators. To do this, she sometimes disguised herself as a man, wearing glasses she didn’t need, in order to fool the authorities. Eventually she, too, was caught and executed.

Thankfully, not all the stories related in this fascinating museum have an unhappy outcome - and there are many objects on display here which lift the spirits, if only because they show the ingenuity and humanity of those struggling against oppression. These include examples of forged identity papers, and the tools used to make them, which were turned out in their thousands, in order to enable Jews and other proscribed minorities to escape detection and deportation.

One of my favourite exhibits is the pair of hiking boots, worn by Eleanore Hertzberger during her escape to England with her husband Eddie in 1943. The boots look well-worn - as indeed they might, since the young couple travelled by a rather roundabout route, through occupied Belgium and France, and across the Pyrenees. Exhausted and soaked to the skin, they were forced to crawl on hands and knees for the last part of the journey. It’s a scene straight out of John Buchan, or Le Carre.

I’m happy to say they made it - unlike some of the brave people whose lives are showcased here. What’s heartening is to discover how many people preferred to resist rather than capitulate, even if it meant their own lives - and those of their loved ones - were put at risk. I’m grateful to the Museum for giving me such a moving insight into what life was like for many of my father’s countrymen, during the War years - and for giving me permission to use some of their wonderful archive of photographs.

Museum of the Dutch Resistance

Plantage Kerklaan 61 

(620 2535, www.verzetsmuseum.org) 

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Was This the First Manned Flight? by Ann Swinfen

June 19, 2015, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: Hot 100 2015 by Imogen Robertson

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Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Since earliest times, it seems, mankind has looked up at the birds and dreamed of flying. The ancient legend of Daedalus and Icarus embodies both the dream and the potential disaster.

Leonardo da Vinci in the early sixteenth century believed flight was possible and designed several prototype aircraft but – as far as we know – never attempted to fly them. There are many cases documented throughout history of flight enthusiasts making themselves wings out of everything from feathers to cloth and wood. As their attempts generally involved jumping off high buildings (or sometimes bridges), these usually ended either in farce or tragedy.

 

Montgolfier balloon flight 1783

Progress began to be made in the eighteenth century with the development of balloon flight, first carrying animals and then men. These balloons were at the mercy of air currents, so the next step was to invent a means of steering, hence ‘dirigibles’, first developed in the nineteenth century and in regular use during the first World War. 

Dirigibles & other balloons early 20th C

After the tragedy of the Hindenburg in 1937, the inherent dangers of being carried through the skies under a balloon filled with highly inflammable gas were recognised, and dirigibles or ‘airships’ fell out of favour.

Other nineteenth century experiments with flight included the development of gliders and kites which could carry a man.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the new goal was to develop a heavier-than-air flying machine which would carry a pilot, could take off and land safely, and could be steered. The race was on. A host of enthusiasts in different countries – particularly Britain, France, Germany and America– began to experiment with many designs of wing structure, fuselage shape, construction materials, steering mechanisms, and engine types. On the whole, the inventors were secretive and competitive. They wanted to be the first to achieve manned flight in a heavier-than-air machine, and they wanted to be sure no one stole their patents.

It has been generally accepted for many years that the first successful manned flight was in a flying machine designed by the Wright brothers and piloted by Orville Wright on 17^thDecember 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. But was it, in fact, the first?

 

Wright Brothers

A young man named Preston Watson was born in Dundee in 1880 into a fairly prosperous family and attended the fee-paying private DundeeHigh School. He did not go to university full-time, but seems to have attended classes in physics at Queen’s College (then part of St AndrewsUniversity, later the University of Dundee). From childhood he was obsessed with the idea of flying and spent many hours on the shores of the River Tay, watching the flight of birds, particularly gulls and – unlike other pioneer aircraft designers – took note of the way they banked when turning, something which was to prove decisive in his later designs. He also shot and examined birds, in order to try and understand the mechanism of their wings.

Preston Watson was a keen athlete, very physically fit, and accustomed to the long training essential to ultimate success, a lesson which was to prove useful in his work on aircraft. A colleague described him as very calm, never dismayed by setbacks.

He was helped financially by his father, although Watson senior was not wholly enthusiastic about his son’s schemes, even on the eve of the first World War, when Preston Watson’s skill and experience would prove invaluable. With this financial assistance, and the help of his elder brother, James Yeaman Watson, Prestonbuilt a number of prototype aircraft at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries. Construction took place in Dundee, but he needed a wide flat stretch of land to attempt flight, which he found near Errol in the Garse o’Cowrie, a stretch of fertile alluvial land to the west of Dundee, lying between the Tay to the south and the hills to the north.

 

One of Preston Watson's early planes

Because the soil is rich this is an area which is intensely farmed, and it was the owners of the Muirhouses and Leys farms who eagerly joined in the project, as well as providing a stretch of ground to carry out the experimental flights. A whole host of enthusiasts lent a hand and witnessed the various attempts.

Preston Watson was responsible for two major innovations. The first was the ‘parasol’ or ‘rocking’ wing, which improved stability and made it possible to bank when turning, the technique he had observed in the flight of gulls. This wing design was considerably more sophisticated than that of the Wright brothers. His second innovation was the invention of the ‘joystick’, a single stick controller for up and down, turn and bank movement, a true breakthrough in aircraft steering. His design was essentially the prototype for the modern system.

In August 1903, Preston Watson made a series of manned, controllable and heavier-than-air flights at Errol which were reported in the local press. These therefore took place some four months before the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk.

 

Preston Watson's third aeroplane

Why, then, is the credit for the first flight given to the Wrights?

At the time, competition between the early inventors was fierce, not to say cut-throat. In subsequent years the Wrights were involved in many legal battles over patents and design claims against their rivals. There is a further twist to the story. The original Wright aircraft is now held by the Smithsonian National Air and SpaceMuseum in Washington, D.C.In order to gain possession of the aircraft, the Smithsonian was obliged to sign a contract with Orville Wright’s estate in which they agreed never to recognise that anyone else was the first to fly.

 

Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1905

To this day, they are unlikely to recognise flights by an unknown young Scotsman over remote farmland which took place four months earlier.

The rivalry between designers had more than a personal aspect. The military potential of aircraft was quickly recognised by forward-looking strategists, although the military establishment (especially in Britain) was slow to catch up. After the first flights, the next ten years saw rapid developments in aircraft, and these were the years leading up to the first World War. France was particularly keen to be in the forefront of aircraft design, acutely aware of the growing industrial and military might of her neighbour, Germany.

Britainformed the Royal Flying Corps in 1913, which was to play a significant part in the war, mainly in reconnaissance and bombing, although their planes were often victims of German planes designed more for fighting. Preston Watson, like so many patriotic young men, was eager to volunteer his services to the nation. With his skills, he should have been welcomed with open arms. Instead, he had a dismissive interview with a Major Merrinden. Merrinden told Watson that, at 34, he was too old to be a pilot. This was a lie. The top age was 40. The real stumbling block was the fact that he had not attended a public school. He was turned down as a pilot and told to try for a job at an aircraft factory.

 

Preston Watson

Watson was not so easily discouraged. He trained for his pilot’s license at his own expense and through other contacts was commissioned as a Flight Sub Lieutenant in the Royal Naval Air Service in April 1915. Above all, his experience in aircraft design was of paramount importance. Leo Anatole Jouques, owner of Jouques Aviation Works, contracted to the British government, recognised Watson’s value. Jouques contracted with Watson to build fifty-six planes to Watson’s designs, plus parts for another 150, Watson to receive a royalty for each.

On the morning of 30 June 1915, Preston Watson set out to fly from Eastchurch to Eastbourne, a distance of some sixty miles. The aircraft was not one of his own designs, but a Caudron GIII. The plane was believed to be in good condition, but it had been involved in an accident a fortnight earlier. About an hour later there was cloud and rain above the Cross-in-Hand Inn in Sussex and the field opposite. Several locals heard engine noise followed by a loud explosion. The engine noise ceased and parts of an aircraft fell from the sky. Preston Watson died instantly. He left a widow and two young sons. The elder was himself to die on active service in World War II.

That might have been the end of the story.

However, in the 1950s, Preston’s elder brother, James Yeaman Watson, decided that as a tribute to his brother he would try to establish that Preston Watson had in fact made the first manned flight in a heavier-than-air aircraft. He sought out statements from those who had been present or who had assisted at those early flights and he assembled any surviving documents from the period, although many had unfortunately been lost. His case was roughly dismissed by the leading ‘expert’ at the time, Charles Gibbs-Smith.

In 2014, Alastair W Blair and Alistair Smith published The Pioneer Flying Achievements of Preston Watson. Commenting to the Dundee Courier when the book was launched, Alastair Blair had this to say about Gibbs-Smith’s reaction to James Watson’s efforts to establish his brother’s claim: 'Mr Gibbs-Smith was very scathing in his appraisal of Watson's claim. He seemed to think that someone without a great deal of education and who came from the back of beyond could never have accomplished anything in the field.'

This was clearly not the opinion of Leo Anatole Jouques, who was so keen to build planes to Preston Watson’s designs for the government during World War I. It is difficult now to establish the claim, in the face of the Smithsonian’s contractual agreement (surely a very strange approach to history), despite the eye-witness accounts collected by James Watson.

A full-scale model of Preston Watson’s Plane One, built by the Dundee Model Aircraft Club, will be presented to the Dundee Museum of Transport on 30^th June at a celebration in honour of its designer. 

The story of his life and the early history of aviation is told in full in Blair and Smith’s book. Perhaps on the centenary of Preston Watson’s death, we should pause to remember the achievements of this young pioneer of flight.

Ann Swinfen
http://www.annswinfen.com

Hot 100 2015 by Imogen Robertson

June 20, 2015, 4:30 pm

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Franz Eugen Köhler,  Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen

Happy Solstice all!

The midsummer fires were, I believe, normally lighted on the feast of St John, which is the 24th June, so you still have time to gather your kindling Or perhaps you'd rather use the occasion for a bit of divination.

In Steve Roud's Guide to the Superstition of Britain and Ireland we are reminded the Eve of St John was the time to pick pieces of valerian, stand them in a little mound of clay and name them after members of the household.

Check them in the morning and anyone whose plant is fallen or drooping the next day might not see the Summer Solstice again. For the less morbidly minded, name the plants after potential sweethearts and if the plants are bending towards each other in the morning, romance is certainly in the air.

Personally though, I'll be pondering the History Hot 100 of 2015 from History Extra. It's one of those lists that probably means very little, but nevertheless provokes a lot of questions about history and our relationship with it.

Do go and take a look - it makes very interesting reading for those of us involved in the business. 

The list is, apparently 'the product of six weeks voting by readers and historians who were asked to nominate the historical figures they are most interested in at the moment.' I would love to know how large the sample is. 

The first thing that strikes me is the focus on political leaders rather than writers, artists or even scientists though I am glad to see Turing in the top 25. Jesus and Shakespeare are there too, but I think it's compulsory to have them in the top 25 of any poll. 

I think the list also shows the enormous sway that is held by television and film - in fact, I wonder if Turing would have made it in were it not for Mr Cumberbatch. I'm sure Thomas Cromwell is there thanks to the BBC's masterly dramatisation of Mantel. 

And we also see the influence of topicality. I would love to know if there was a list before Richard III was discovered in the car park, and if so where he was on it. Seeing Wellington and Bonaparte there in the year of the 200th anniversary of Waterloo makes sense, as does the inclusion of William Marshal 800 years after Magna Carta.

Which makes me wonder, how aware are my fellow novelists of upcoming anniversaries when thinking about your next books? I tend just to follow the next idea, but I'm beginning to think I'm missing a trick. 

Entry 100 is Joan of Arc - two below Elvis Presley. 

Hopefully Manda Scott's new novel - Into the Fire will boost her ranking in the History Hot 100 of 2016. 

Into The Fire is just out, but the way, and according to The Times it is 'a masterclass in writing historical fiction'. 

Once I've done pondering the list, I shall be reading it in the long summer evenings of the coming week, by the light of the midsummer fires, with a stalk of valerian tucked behind my ear. 

www.imogenrobertson.com

All the Perfumes of Arabia by Kate Lord Brown

June 21, 2015, 4:30 pm

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Perfume is the key to our memories – Kipling said ‘it makes our heartstrings crack’. It evokes people, a place, a time. Here in the Middle East, fragrance is highly prized, and enjoyed everywhere from malls scented with the delicious smell of incense and oud burning in gently smoking mabkharas, to the dedicated perfumeries found in every souk. 

 At home, incense is burned to fragrance robes, and perfume is offered as a refreshing gift for visitors. During my first trip in the Middle East, after dining with a princess/interior designer one night, she carried round a crystal bottle of sandalwood oil and anointed the wrists of her guests. It was a great honour, and the scent of sandalwood still evokes the sights and sounds of that trip more clearly now than any photograph.

Perfume comes from the Latin ‘per fumum’ meaning ‘through smoke’, and it is either extracted from the natural world, or created synthetically to produce scents that cannot be stabilised, or to invent entirely new ones unknown in nature. It was in Arabia that perfumes were first distilled. By about 1500 many of today’s scents such as cedar wood, calamus, costus, rose, rosemary, spike, and incense had been extracted. In the 1900’s chemical characterisation of the oils led to expansion of production, and paved the way for the modern perfume industry.

The finest perfumes may have up to 100 ingredients, and while there are only four or five taste qualities there are over 40,000 identifiable odours. After being sprayed onto the skin, each fragrance goes through a number of stages. At first, you smell the top note, which is volatile and refreshing. Then, as the fragrance melds with your skin, a full middle note becomes apparent. Finally, when the perfume fully reacts with your own chemistry, the base or end note persists. Floral perfumes focus on jasmine, rose, lily of the valley or gardenia. Spicy scents are carnation, clove, cinnamon, or nutmeg. The woody fragrances often present in aftershaves are vetiver, sandalwood, cedar wood, and oak moss. Blends of these basic groups create the perfumes we love. For example, ‘Orientals’ are woody, mossy, and spicy with vanilla or balsam, and musk or civet accents. ‘Herbals’ focus on fresh clover and sweet grass. The ‘Leather-tobacco’ fragrances contain (not surprisingly), leather, tobacco and birch tar. Lighter Aldehydic fragrances have fruity characters. Men’s fragrances often have a vibrant blend of citrus, spice, leather, lavender, fern or woody elements. Here, it is Oud, the dark resinous heart of Agarwood that is most highly prized, and it forms the core of favourite perfumes for the home and individual.

Alongside all the familiar brand name perfumes, you find stalls and boutiques selling what looks like kindling or driftwood. Even in supermarkets like Carrefour you will find a section selling incense and resinous perfumed wood alongside the shisha pipes and charcoal.

Browsing the jewel-like gilded bottles in one of the local souks, you may think that the elaborate, elegant designs are a new trend, but even in early history packaging was integral to the whole luxurious experience. The earliest known perfume bottle dates to 1000 BC. Gold, silver, enamel, copper, glass and porcelain bottles gained favour during 18th century, and the 19th century saw a trend for classical designs. During the 1920’s Lalique revived the interest in bottles with moulded glass creations that set the trend for today’s dazzling range of designs. It was a joy researching the history of perfume making for 'The Perfume Garden', and realising how our love affair with fragrance goes back to the earliest of times. There is something magical, alchemical about the way perfume conjures the past - I wonder what your favourite scents are, or whether you have come across interesting historical fragrances in your research?

Why weren't all the Germans like Maria von Maltzan? By Leslie Wilson

June 22, 2015, 4:30 pm

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Nazi boycott of Jewish shops. Photo: German Federal Archive

One month after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag building went up in flames. The arson was blamed on Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch communist, and he was executed for it a year later. It seems that most historians agree that van der Lubbe did set the building on fire - but what is beyond doubt is that it was a great opportunity for Hitler, who persuaded the President of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg, to suspend civil liberties. In the aftermath, Communists and Social Democrats were arrested, tortured and imprisoned. Some of them never emerged from the 'wild' concentration camps the SA (Brownshirts) set up. Some of them never got so far. The Social Democrat Minister-President of Mecklenburg, Johannes Stelling, was tortured to death and his body was tied up in a sack and thrown into a river. Twelve other Social Democrats were thrown in the same night. Paul Löbe, the former President of the Reichstag, was kidnapped, arrested, and put into a camp. Social Democratic councillor and officials in Braunschweig resigned their posts when they were threatened with violence; one refused and was beaten to death, and this pattern was repeated across Germany. Trades Unions and other 'Marxist' organisations (like the Schrader League that my grandfather had belonged to) were dissolved, often after the premises had been trashed and the administrators beaten or murdered.

And of course, the Nazis began to attack the Jews. Maria von Maltzan, a young German aristocrat, reponded to the boycott of Jewish businesses (which happened in April 1933), in characteristic fashion: 'Posters were fixed to Jewish shops with the words: 'Germans, don't buy from Jews!' I couldn't resist just going into such a little shop, with uniformed boycott supervisors standing in front of it. They stopped me at once and asked what I wanted to buy.' She told them she wanted to pay a bill. Once she was inside, the shopkeeper, an elderly Jewish woman, said to her: ''For God's sake, you're putting yourself in pointless danger!' Maltzan's response was: 'I hadn't thought of that for a moment.'

Maria von Maltzan, from book jacket

Maria von Maltzan was an exceptional person, stubborn, and if not fearless, a risk-taker. One can imagine how easily other people would be deterred by the heavies standing outside the Jewish business, particularly since they probably knew exactly what they were capable of. However, even Maltzan quickly realised that she did need to be careful. The Gestapo interrogated her as a communist sympathiser and a friend of Jews. Possibly she was saved from the worst by her aristocratic status and her father's reputation as a German war hero. Nevertheless, she soon learned that as a person involved in resistance, she couldn't be cautious enough.

And once she had achieved her doctorate in natural history, in Munich, she couldn't apply for any posts in research establishments or biological institutes, because such posts were reserved for Nazi party members, and she wouldn't join the Party.

I have been reading a book which I can't praise enough: Richard J Evans's 'The Third Reich in History and Memory.' It is a collection of essays, elegantly and accessibly written, and in the essay entitled: 'Coercion and Consent', he considers and rebuts the contention of historians that the vast majority of the German people supported Hitler and that an extensive apparatus of terror wasn't necessary.

This is based on the observation that the Gestapo, as an organisation, was far smaller than the Stasi in the so-called 'German Democratic Republic', and that after 1933 the concentration camps (as opposed to the death camps in the East) were used for criminals and 'anti-social elements.' However, these historians are ignoring the role of the courts in prosecuting anyone who stepped out of line, and many of these people ended up in prisons and penitentiaries.

This struck an immediate chord with me, having sat one afternoon in the German historical Institute reading reports from a German court (I think it was Hamburg). The example that stuck in my mind was the man who had joked in an air-raid shelter that Hitler had invaded France to get back his ball, which had been shot off in the First World War. The story about Hitler's missing ball was of course commonplace in Britain, and perhaps the man had got it from secretly listening to the BBC. In any case, he got a hefty prison sentence, and there were many other such cases.

In 1935, 23,000 inmates of state prisons and penitentiaries were classified as political offenders. Others were just guillotined. Contrary to what David Cesarani claimed in the Letters Page of the Guardian when 'Alone in Berlin' was published, the judicial murder of the elderly couple in Fallada's book was far from exceptional.

Ploetzensee prison Berlin: photo ThoKay

When, shortly before her death, I asked my grandmother what it was like to live under the Nazis, she glanced over her shoulder before she answered; so I saw the 'German glance', which her contemporaries in the West had been able to abandon. My grandmother's ongoing mental illness, her hours of brooding and inner anguish, had preserved it intact. What she remembered, first and foremost, from living under the Nazis, was fear. She told me then about Nazi women coming to the house and inspecting everything and then saying: 'You're scum. You'll end up in concentration camp.' That must have been in 1933, when my grandfather was fighting for his job. However, the 'German glance' was necessary, if you were going to say anything incautious, in a world where the Nazi surveillance apparatus extended to the lowest level officials, the 'Blockwart' whose job it was to collect and transfer information about everyone living in his small area. Nazi womens' organisations, schools, and the Hitler Youth, all kept tabs on the population. Bruno Bettelheim undoubtedly had this in mind when he remarked that the whole of Germany was a concentration camp.

Maria von Maltzan couldn't take up the career she wanted because of her political views; other people were threatened with the loss of their jobs if they stepped out of line. My grandfather was one of millions controlled by their jobs (he also had a mentally-ill wife and I would think her safety, every time she was taken into mental hospital, was guaranteed by his being a senior police officer. If he had been a dissident, she might have been murdered as so many patients were.) Nazism was no different from any other totalitarian state; people were controlled through their jobs.

Of course there were people who were enthusiastic about the Nazi state. The unpleasant refugee Czekalla in my novel 'Last Train from Kummersdorf,' talks big about killing people in Russia, and finally mutters that he was meant to be a big landlord out there. Some people will go along with all kinds of abuses for personal benefit - and the Nazi system made it its business to bring out the worst that the human race is capable of. Brutality, racial hatred, callousness, were promoted as virtues in Nazi Germany. Sebastian Haffner, in his 'Defying Hitler' describes how he and his fellow lawyers were taken off to a kind of boot camp and given military training. (this seems to have been standard practice, with professionals) 'It was remarkable,' he observed, 'how comradeship actively decomposed all the elements of individuality and civilisation.' We all know that soldiers commit horrific crimes, both off their own bat, or because they are told to. In his study of German police units who were taken off to murder Jews, Christopher Browning shows how powerful the sense of peer pressure was, in persuading the policemen not to step out, where the option of doing so was given them. ''Who would have dared,' one policeman declared emphatically, to 'lose face' before the assembled troops.' It's a situation I explored in 'Last Train from Kummersdorf' where the lad Hanno tells the girl Effi how his friends were tormenting an old Jewish man, and he walked away from it - and felt guilty afterwards.

photo: Wikimedia Commons

I once gave a talk to a group of schoolchildren about how people could be brought to participate in mass murders, and when I told them about this, the boys, in particular, all nodded reluctantly, and understood exactly what I was talking about. It's what happens in the playground when children are bullied, and I don't think I'm trivialising it when one considers that bullied children often kill themselves.

However, one must also remember that one motive for establishing the 'controlled' situation of the extermination camps and the gas chambers was that the troops who had been carrying out killings were getting post-traumatic stress disorder, which suggests that they did have some kind of conscience about committing murder. And also, the men who stepped out of murder duty were often self-employed, and didn't feel they needed to worry about their future work prospects after the war.

At this point, I can imagine someone saying: 'Oh, yes, but you're fuzzing ethical issues. People are always responsible for their actions.'

And this, according to Richard Evans, is a key issue. 'Anything that implies constraints on the free will of historical actors puts a potentially serious obstacle in the way of establishing their culpability.' In other words, if one questions the validity of the 'consent' of ordinary Germans to Hitler, one provides perpetrators with the excuse that they acted under duress, which could get them off in the courtroom.

I'm not a lawyer, but I can see the ethical problem. It seems to me, though, that those men who took part in the murders of Jews in eastern Europe definitely did commit murder. And if you have done such a thing, it cannot be changed, even if you acted through fear, or, in the case of the younger men, were so conditioned by propaganda and bad teaching that you had no ethical equipment to stop you doing this. You've still done something bad and it cannot be undone. But I think the greater responsibility lies with the people who planned for this to happen.

The idea of willing Nazi supporters, about a nation who were eager to invade other countries (in fact the initial response to the outbreak of war was largely fear and gloom) has been a part of the story the British have been telling themselves about the war for the whole of my life. A few years ago, I went with a Jewish friend to watch the documentary about Belsen which appalled the British when it was shown after the war (it's not easy to watch now, either). The commentator said: 'If you hadn't fought the war, this might have been you.' (It wasn't at any stage stated that the poor people in the camp and the mass graves were mainly Jewish.)

mass grave, Bergen-Belsen. Photo Lieutenant Alan Moore

The fact that the Germans were deemed to be particularly monstrous, peculiarly inhumane and cruel, gave extra lustre to the war that had been fought against them, and undoubtedly made people feel their sufferings had been worth while.

There's something else, though. If you discount the fact that Nazism was a terror state - and I still hear people and read people doing so, even nowadays - it may be a reassurance. 'They' were different, 'they' came from a corrupt culture. If you assert that Nazism could have been fought by simple acts of refusal (there were quite a few, and many of them ended in the deaths of the dissidents), then naturally, it couldn't possibly happen anywhere else, like here. I think that's a very dangerous illusion. If we are convinced, for example, that British people wouldn't stand for that kind of thing, we may ignore the fact that similar structures of surveillance and criminalisation of dissent are being set up, not hypothetically, but now, as I am typing these words.

I think the danger in Britain is not of a sudden slashing clampdown, as in 1933 in Germany, but a slow creeping paralysis that makes it harder and harder for anyone to dissent. Where that may lead is hard to tell because no more than Germans in 1933 are we capable of looking at history from the other end and seeing what is going to happen. However, just consider that people who oppose fracking have recently been described by Tory politicians as 'extremists.' I will say no more.

KING JOHN'S BLING by Elizabeth Chadwick

June 23, 2015, 4:30 pm

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King John's tomb Worcester Cathedral

As a writer,  much of the need-to-know detail for my novel is the background material culture of my settings. While it's vitally important to get the mindset and attitudes right so that I don't end up with modern people in fancy dress, a part of this is knowing the world in which my characters lived, and immersing myself in it as thoroughly as I can in order to convince the readers – although the more I study the more I realise how much in the shallows I still am even after more than 40 years of research!

Since King John and Magna Carta are so much on the agenda at the moment I thought this might be fun for my June post on The History Girls.

Supposing King John walked in on us right this minute. What might we see? Let's take it that it's a decent time for him and not too politically fraught. He is prepared to be affable. What does he look like?
We don't have a lot to go on from his own time. Contemporary historian Gerald of Wales tells us that his height was slightly below average and he was not as tall as his father or his older brothers Henry and Richard.  His tomb in Worcester Cathedral was opened in 1797, where he was found to have been placed in a stone coffin. The corpse was somewhat decomposed with the dried skins of maggots dispersed over the body. He had been dressed in a full length robe of red silk damask. That's a kind of wool fabric woven with silk and often patterned. There was a badly decomposed sword and scabbard in his left hand. He didn't wear a crown, but on his head was a coif that the antiquarians thought was perhaps a monk's cowl, perhaps placed on his head to cut down the time he might have to spend in purgatory. Modern historians now believe the cowl to be the cap he wore on his head at his coronation that was intended to soak up the holy oil with which he had been anointed. So it was in its own way as Royal as a crown. The skeleton was measured and turned out to be 5 foot 6 1/2 inches tall. So we know John's height and part of what he was wearing. It's the same outfit more or less, that is on his tomb effigy today. He may well have worn this robe to his coronation too.

We don't know what colour his hair was. People often think that he was dark-haired but that comes from books, film and TV. An illuminated sketch of him hunting from a century after his death shows him as being blonde, but really we have no idea.

A blonde king John out hunting - made 100 years after his death.

We do know from his correspondence that he liked to wear jewels around his neck and a black leather belt. Here's the letter about the jewels:
  'The King to Geoffrey FitzPeter. We had lost the precious stones and jewels which we were accustomed to wear around our neck: and Berchal the bearer of these presents, found them, and liberally and faithfully brought them unto us; and for his service we have given him 20 shillings worth of rent at Berkhamsted, where he was born.'

And the piece about the black leather belt
'on 27 June at Winchester, know that on the Friday next after the nativity of St John the Baptist, we received at Winchester 12 silver cups, and amongst other articles is specified the plain black leather belt with which the king was usually girt.'

Plaster cast mould of John's effigy in the Cast Court at the V&A Museum. Note the jewelled collar and red robe

So, we can imagine him in a full-length red patterned gown, jewels around his neck and a black leather belt around his waist. He might have one of those silver cups in his hand and it will contain wine. Perhaps a strong one from Poitou. We know his wife liked to drink strong wine from that region because he ordered it for her when she was at Marlborough. John himself enjoyed wine from Le Blanc near Poitiers. 150 casks of it were delivered to his sellers at Southampton sometime before September 1202. There were numerous wines at that period and they had different qualities. The wines of Auxerre were famous for being as 'clear as a sinner's tears.' Or how about this one  - here's a description of a raisin wine from John's time, written by Alexander Nequam who have been Richard the Lion heart's breast-brother.  Oz Clarke eat your heart out!

'Raisin wine which is clear to the bottom of the cup, in its clarity similar to the tears were penitent, and the colour is that of an ox horn. It descends like lightning upon one who takes it – most tasty as an almond nut, quick as a squirrel, frisky as a kid, strong in the manner of a host of Cistercians or grey monks, emitting a kind of spark; it is supplied with the subtlety of a syllogism of Petit-Pont; delicate as a fine cotton, it exceeds crystal in its coolness'

Royal servants Reginald of Cornhill and John Fitzhugh were vitally important in the procurement of luxury goods in John's household and the maintenance of the same. Luxury goods they purchased included spices, fabrics, fruit, nuts, fresh fish, wine and wax. Cups and dishes were bought and mended. There is a mention on the accounts requiring five drinking horns to be ornamented with silver, and for the Kings own drinking horn to be ornamented with gold. So perhaps we ought to take that silver cup off him and put a drinking horn in his hand instead, and it will be decorated with emeralds rubies and sapphires. Rings were bought from Italian merchants at one point amounting to £226 13s 4d. The major producer of emeralds, rubies and sapphires were India and Sri Lanka (the latter known in the Medieval period as Sarandib), so these jewels had a long way to travel. At this point in history the faceting that we see today on gemstones was unknown and the jewels would have been polished in the smooth cabocchon style that makes them look like lumpy boiled sweets!

Cabochon tourmaline ring circa 1200

If John was feeling magnanimous, he might hand over some of these cups and jewels as gifts, or as diplomatic sweeteners. So for example he gave three gold rings set with sapphires to the King Norway

William, John's tailor (who also had brief to buy luxury goods for the King), in November 1214 was given a pile of textiles intended to be made into clothes as gifts from King John to Peter des Roches Bishop of Winchester. The materials included silk cloths, quilts, squirrel furs, scarlet cloth, grey cloth for a bed covering, six pairs of fasteners, and a gilded saddle with silk cloth and gilded bridle reins. Scarlet cloth cost eight shillings for a length of 37 inches -a measurement that was known as a cloth yard. Each finished cloth was made of 24 of these clothyards and required about ninety pounds of the finest English wool. This would take at least 36 sheep to provide and probably a lot more and that was before the cost of the dyestuff.  Just over three modern yards of cloth cost eight shillings which would be somewhere around a week's wages for a household knight.

If King John's cloak happened to be lined with super special ermines, that is the winter coat of the stoat, it would have cost him 100 shillings. Lambskin linings cost between six and seven shillings each, and a panel of northern squirrel fur cost 20 shillings.

If King John had walked into this room with his servants you would have noticed that their outfits were colour-coded. Stewards had robes of black and brown. Huntsmen wore blue and green. The nurses and washer women wore blue and green also

Back to John himself. In March 1213, Reginald of Cornhill supplied gold lace to William the Tailor to make a surcoat for the King. That's interesting because lace from the 13th century doesn't seem to have many surviving examples. In Winchester in 1210, miniver was bought to make John a nightgown. This doesn't mean he actually slept in it as such, it was more in the way of a luxurious dressing gown to lounge about in!

At Easter 1213 William the Tailor made three blood red robes, one for John, one for his queen and one for William D'Albini, although the latter's cost less. He also received a gift of a ruby red robe that was lined with green cendal (a form of silk). True red being such an expensive dye, it was commonly featured in royal robes. Ghent in Flanders was the centre for the best dyed red cloth. There are more accounts for robes lined with green cendal for members of the royal household including John's brother William Longespee Earl of Salisbury and John's own bastard son Richard FitzRoy.

John loved his jewels and display as we've already seen. One of his purveyors bought  150 gold leaves to gild 567 lances for theatrical display. We have a chamber receipt for 'one staff ornamented with 19 sapphires, and another with 10. A golden cabinet set with stones. 21 rings. A staff ornamented with six garnets, a silver cabinet with precious stones. Then there was the golden case made to hold the Kings 'ambergris apples' - an early form of pomander. This really gives you a feel for the colour and the richness of the period which you don't see in the bare shells of  the draughty castles that are all that are left to use,  but if you go somewhere like reconstructed interpretation of the King's bedchamber at Dover you begin to realise what a colourful, rich and textured world the 12th century aristocracy lived in.

casket late 12thc

You see reenactors today – and I'm one myself - who strive to emulate the clothing and trappings of the time, but it high status cases we cannot begin to replicate the wealth of a medieval king such as John. People often say that his reign wasn't his fault that inherited Richard's debts and a bankrupted realm. Does this look like bankruptcy? John, whatever you think of him has to be one of the most gifted fiscal geniuses in terms of raising money that England has ever known. It's also one of the reasons among many for Magna Carta.  But I just wish I could blur time for a moment and experience the full effect as it originally was.  
Elizabeth Chadwick

Henry II's bed replica. Dover Castle

If you can get to the Magna Carta Exhibition at the British Library in London, do go - there are some bishop's accoutrements that give an idea of the wonderful textiles being produced in the 13thc, as well as a scrap of embroidered fabric from John's tomb.

Other sources used in this article:
Lost Letters of Medieval Life English Society 1200-1250 edited and translated by Martha Carlin and David Crouch - University of Pennsylvania Press 2013

A Description of the The Patent Rolls in the Tower of London to which is added an Itinerary of King John with Prefatory Observations by Thomas Duffus Hardy, F.S.A. of the Inner Temple. 1835

Serving the Man that rules: Aspects of the domestic arrangements of the Household of King John 1199-1216 - Henrietta Kaye.  Thesis submitted to the School of History at the University of East Anglia 2013.

King John - Treachery, Tyranny and the Road to Magna Carta by Marc Morris - Hutchinson 2015

ETHEL WHO? by Eleanor Updale

June 24, 2015, 5:30 pm

≫ Next: Holidaying on the French Riviera, Grand Hotel Style by Carol Drinkwater

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Last month, I was inspired by an old magazine to write about aluminium knickers.

I warned you then that the publication might prove to be a treasure trove for History Girls posts.  So here's something else from the June 1945 edition of Everybody's.

The magazine carried a full-page review of the premiere of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes at Sadlers Wells.  

The article, though wildly enthusiastic about Britten's achievement, was in part a lament for the state of British music, and the failure of this country to appreciate its native talent.  The reviewer, Ronald Hilborne, put it like this:

With the twentieth century, English composers such as Goring Thomas and CV Stanford wrote opera after opera.  In vain.  Stanford’s “Much Ado About Nothing," music and words in our native idiom, was generously heard by London in 1901 - for two nights.  Then it was thrown out.  The late Dame Ethel Smythe, the finest woman composer the world has yet seen, composed a vigorous opera with a Cornish setting called “The Wreckers” It was eventually give an enthusiastic first night in 1906 - in Germany.

The bold type is the magazine's own.  Hilborne could not have been more enthusiastic about Dame Ethel.  I wondered why (as I thought) I had never heard a note of her music.

It didn't take long to find a performance of the overture to The Wreckers on YouTube.  It's wonderfully stirring stuff.  You can find it here.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maozbZsiK0c 

And there is a recording of the entire opera, although it doesn't seem to have originated in a stage performance.

The opera didn't receive its American Premier until 2007, more than a hundred years after it was written.

The story of The Wreckers is perfect for the new Poldark generation: salt of the earth starving Cornish-folk scavenge on wrecks for survival, and a love affair comes to a watery end.  It's no more far-fetched than European operas that are performed all the time.  Why has it been confined to near-oblivion?

The same question might be asked of Smyth's moving Mass in D, and many of her chamber works (which can also be tracked down on the internet).  

But who was Ethel Smyth?

Ethel Smyth  by John Singer Sargent, 1901 [National Portrait Gallery]

Well, she was born in 1848, and died in 1944.  After battling against her parents to be allowed to study music, she learned composition in Leipzig.  She knew Schumann, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, and was romantically involved with various well-known men and women of her era.  But she lived in suburban Surrey, near Woking.  Perhaps that explains the dismissiveness of the British artistic community about her work.
Smyth was not only a prolific composer. She wrote several books, and she was a leading campaigner for women's suffrage.  In 1910, she wrote to Mrs Pankhurst, lamenting her previous ignorance of the cause, and offering to do whatever she could to support it.

As well as taking direct action, Smyth donated her musical talent to the cause.  And it is in this context that I found I had, after all, known one of her works for many years.
Ethel Smyth wrote the famous March of the Women, which you can hear on YouTube, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65NuypEkg-4

Here's the first verse:

Shout, shout, up with your song!

Cry with the wind for the dawn is breaking.

March, march, swing you along,

Wide blows our banner and hope is waking.

Song with its story, dreams with their glory,

Lo! They call and glad is their word.

Forward! Hark how it swells

Thunder of freedom, the voice of the Lord.

The anthem was first heard at a rally in the Royal Albert Hall in 1911.
Years later, Smyth gave her own account of the event:
In those early days of my association with the W.S.P.U. occurred an event which, in her pride, the writer must recount ere the pace becomes such that a personal reference would be unthinkable, namely the formal introduction to the Suffragettes of ‘The March of the Women’, to which Cicely Hamilton fitted the words after the tune had been written – not an easy undertaking. A suffragette choir had been sternly drilled, and I remember Edith Craig plaintively commenting on the difficulty of hitting a certain E flat. But it was maintained that the interval is a peculiarly English one (which is true) and must be coped with. We had the organ, and I think a cornet to blast forth the tune (a system much to be recommended on such occasions), and it was wonderful processing up the centre aisle of the Albert Hall in Mus. Doc. robes at Mrs Pankhurst’s side, and being presented with a beautiful baton, encircled by a golden collar with the date , 23^rd March 1911.

Suffragette March in Hyde Park [National Portrait Gallery]

It is said that in 1912, an impromptu performance of The March of the Women was conducted by Smyth from the window of her cell in Holloway Prison, using her toothbrush as a baton.

By 1922, she was no longer considered a risk to society, and she was made a Dame. In her last years, she became deaf, and stopped composing.  By the end of the Second World War, she was dead and, if the article in Everybody's is a guide, already on her way to being forgotten by the musical establishment.  

Maybe some opera house, perhaps inspired by the popularity of Poldark, will put on a full production of The Wreckers, and give her back her place in Britain's musical history.

Dame Ethel Smyth [National Portrait Gallery]

www.eleanorupdale.com

Holidaying on the French Riviera, Grand Hotel Style by Carol Drinkwater

June 25, 2015, 4:01 pm

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I am suffering from Deadline-itis. Two deadlines glaring at me with fanged intentions. As always during these stressful moments, it seems that all the world apart from me is in holiday mode; either on holiday or about to depart.
I go out so rarely at present due to the pressure of work that when I receive an invitation from friends who have arrived here on the coast, it is a rare treat and reminds me that the Côte d’Azur is more than a  Spaghetti Junction for tourists. It has some quite remarkable locations and buildings, each with its own story to tell.

                                                      One of the Carlton's Belle Epoch cupolas

According to legend the hotel's twin cupolas were modelled on the breasts of the dancer-actress-courtesan, Carolina Otero, christened 'la Belle Otero'. Until recent renovations, the restaurant on the hotel's top floor was named La Belle Otero in celebration of the Spanish beauty.

The friends I linked up with this week were staying at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. A seven-storey linen-white building boasting 343 rooms as well as ten capacious penthouse suites on the top floor with views to the Bay of Cannes beaches and the Mediterranean. ‘Luxe’ as the French say. Deluxe beyond my dreams. My pals were staying in the Grace Kelly suite. We drank champagne on their private terrace and enjoyed the sun descending over the water. One of them asked me whether I had known that the Carlton with its Belle Epoch domes had been built in 1911. I would have mistakenly dated it a little later and we began a conversation about the birth of tourism along this coast. Antibes, Golfe Juan and the Cap d’Antibes were the haunts of the Americans whereas the British and the Russians preferred Cannes. Nice was more cosmopolitan. Each of these three resorts has its grand hotel. The Negresco in Nice, the Carlton in Cannes and the mythic Hotel du Cap right on the water at Antibes. And each hotel has a remarkable and glittering history.

So, as I will not be going on holiday this year I will visit each of them here!

                                                           Garden view Hotel du Cap

The Grand Hotel du Cap. "Un établissment mythique et incomparable". Its first incarnation was as the Villa Soleil, built in 1869 as a private residence byHippolte de Villemessant,  the founder of Le Figaro newspaper. He very generously offered his fabulous Napoleon III-styled pad to ‘writers seeking inspiration’. (If only!)
In 1887 it was sold to Antoine Sella, an Italian hotelier. It opened as the Grand Hotel du Cap in 1889 and has never looked back. Its Eden Roc pavilion was built in 1914. The same year as its heated seawater pool, which is truly invigorating to swim in, was cut out of the Mediterranean cliff-side. Thirty-three cabanas were built into the rocks facing the sea. Marc Chagall spent time drawing sketches in one of these cabanas.
I am assuming that the pool was heated back in 1914, because it would have been used exclusively for winter swimming. During the long hot months of summer, this coastline was deserted. Until the early twenties when high society and the intellectual elite, led by the wild energy of hugely wealthy Americans, took to the beaches and to villas nesting in pine groves to party, paint, write and compose through all seasons of the year.

                                                            The Plage de la Garoupe

I wrote about the American expat millionaires, Gerald and Sara Murphy and their impact on the Riviera in my History Girls blog:
the-history-girls.blogspot.fr/2014/06/the-jazz-age-and-french-riviera-carol.html

The Murphy couple once rented the Hotel du Cap for an entire summer. This was unheard of in the early 1920s because at that stage this coast was exclusively a winter resort. It is claimed that it was Coco Chanel who invented ‘the tan’ in 1923 when she was photographed in a backless dress exposing skin that had caught the sun while on a French Riviera cruise. Up to that point, weathered flesh was associated with the working classes, but from that summer onwards, it was chic to allow one’s skin to be tanned. Sporting a suntan became a sign of wealth and beauty.

Coco and Dog

Scott Fitzgerald, one of the Murphys' friends and regular house guests immortalised the Hotel du Cap as the Hotel des Etrangers in Tender is the Night. Most of the major film stars who are flown in for the Cannes festival stay at the Grand Hotel du Cap. Past visitors have included Orson Welles, Ernest Hemingway, Marlene Dietrich, Churchill, De Gaulle, J.F. Kennedy and the Burtons who honeymooned there.

                The Cap d'Antibes has ideal sailing waters. One of the reasons why the Greeks in the 5th century B.C founded Antibes (Antipolis) as one of their northern trading posts 

In 1964, Rudolph August Oetker, a German industrialist, was sailing with his wife along the Riviera coast and spotted the hotel. Five years later he acquired it. This very prestigious address set in eleven acres of magnificent palm and pine gardens is now part of their “bouquet” of international hotels known as the Masterpiece Collection. So exclusive is it that it only opens for the season in late April before the film festival and closes in October. Until recently, it was renowned for accepting only cash. Guests either paid their bills from suitcases of money or wired the funds on ahead. This policy changed a couple of years back.

The Carlton Hotel (now managed by Intercontinental).  The site of 58 Boulevard de la Croisette was purchased in 1908 by the British businessman, Henry Ruhl, who invested in luxury hotels. In order to build on the location he began looking for investors and found the majority of the money from the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia, youngest son of Emperor Alexander III.
The Carlton was opened in early January 1911, but reached it definitive version in 1913 after Ruhl had purchased an abutting hotel, La Plage, and used the space to create a new wing for the Carlton. Ruhl chose the name Carlton because there was a hotel in London with the same name. It is Scandinavian for 'town of the free man'.
Grand Duke Michael, rather a ladies man, had been sojourning regularly in Cannes since the late 1890s. He financed the construction a golf course at neighbouring Mandelieu-La Napoule. Back in Russia he spoke of the Riviera town of Cannes as at a 'city of elegant sports'. Soon Russian high society was flocking to this coast and spending vast sums of money. Their wealth and extravagant living, along with members of the British royalty who also frequented this Riviera spot, certainly put the town on the map.

The Carlton's Belle Epoch luxury only lasted one year due to the outbreak of war, at which point the hotel was requisitioned as a field hospital. One of its more famous patients was the writer Blaise Cendrars who in 1915 was seriously injured and was obliged to have his arm amputated at the makeshift hospital.
There were tough days post-war for the Carlton. Europe, France, was in a slump and the Russian Revolution of 1917 caused it to lose vital clients and wealth. In 1919, it was on the market for one million francs.
In 1920, Coco Chanel was in Cannes with her boyfriend of the moment, Grand Duc Dmitri Romanov (nephew of Michael who had helped finance the establishment). She was there to meet with an exiled Franco-Russian perfumer to create her own essence. The result was Chanel 5. Brilliant and forward-thinking as she was, Coco was the first designer to use her name to brand her perfume.

In January 1922, the Carlton was given the opportunity to host the League of Nations conference which unfortunately did not achieve its goals but it did give birth to the Societé des Nations which has evolved into the United Nations. A political gathering of such eminence gave much-needed publicity to the hotel.
Fast forwarding to 2011 when the G20 was hosted in Cannes, Obama occupied the same suite as had Colonel Harvey, the US ambassador who had represented the United States at the League of Nations in 1922.

Grace Kelly met her in Prince, Rainier III of Monaco, at a prearranged rendezvous at this hotel. At the time she was shooting To Catch a Thief with Cary Grant directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Many scenes were set at the hotel. The Rainier-Kelly courtship was brief and Hitchcock was a witness at their wedding. Fascinatingly, the Greek shipping tycoon Aristote Onassis had been attempting to set up a marriage between Rainier and Marilyn Monroe.

While on the subject of 'catching thieves', the Carlton has been the target of several high-profile jewellery heists. Two in particular, one in 1994 when the thieves got away with over $60 million worth of jewellery and precious stones and another in 2013 when the stolen cache was reported to have been somewhere near $137 million. In both cases, nobody has been charged, no criminal cited as responsible.
Thriller stories in their own right!

Negresco, Nice

The Negresco in Nice. The last of this trio of grand hotels to be constructed, the Negresco dates back to 1913. A Romanian innkeeper's son, Henri Negrescu, who at the age of fifteen left his home town of Bucharest to head for Paris to become a gypsy violinist, was the inspiration behind the birth of this pink-domed beauty. After Paris, Negrescu worked in hotels in London and Monte Carlo, but decided to settle on on the Riviera coast where luxury tourism was a burgeoning business. He took the job as director of the restaurant of the Municipal Casino in Nice. It was here he commenced plans to build a sumptuous hotel to attract the very wealthiest of guests. Once the finance was in place, he commissioned the star architect Eduard-Jean Niermans to design the hotel. The design included the pink dome (see above). Whether Niermans or Negrescu wanted the dome to flag to their very wealthy clients that the Negresco would match the style and luxury of the Carlton in Cannes, I do not know. In its hall hangs a magnificent crystal chandelier. It boasts 16,309 crystals and was crafted by Baccarat for Czar Nicholas II who was never able to take delivery of it. It remains one of the largest crystal chandeliers in the world. The hotel opened its doors on 8th January 1913.

Baccarat crystal chandelier, Hotel Negresco

The hotel was listed as a National Historic Building in 2003

When WWI commenced, the Negresco was also taken for use as as a hospital. Unfortunately for Henri Negrescu the downturn in tourism after the war and the renovations required to give the hotel back its five-star status led him into dire financial straits. He never recovered his investments. The hotel was seized by creditors in 1920 and sold to a Belgian company. Negrescu died in Paris that same year, a broken and ruined man at 52 years old.

Henri Negrescu

1868-1920

The hotel has had a checkered history with some challenging financial ups and downs over the decades until 1957 when it was sold to the Augier family. Renovated by Madame Jeanne Augier to a standard that included mink bedspreads, it has clawed back its quality rating. Today, its Chantecler restaurant has  two Michelin stars, and the hotel is a member of the Leading Hotels of the World.

Among the legion of famous names who have passed through its doors, Salvador Dali comes to mind. I do smile when I think of him tucked up beneath his mink cover.

The travel writer Eric Newby wrote glowingly of a meal he had eaten in the Chantecler restaurant at the end of his journey for the book, On the Shores of the Mediterranean. 

Paul Theroux in his Mediterranean travel book, Pillars of Hercules, loudly criticises Newby for his blatant kowtowing. 

Having written two Mediterranean travel books myself (The Olive Route and The Olive Tree) travelling as a woman alone to some pretty dangerous territories, there are a few handfuls of mud I could sling at Theroux, but not here. Here, I will finish my visit to three hotels built to feed the dreams of the wealthiest of tourists and this desk-bound writer by a quote from Theroux's chapter on Nice. 

(Note: Paul T does not give the name of his 'friend's' book!).

'There was a placard in front of the Negresco's Chantecler restaurant with a quotation from my friend Eric Newby, cobbled together from the six pages he devotes to the Negresco in his book on his trip around the Mediterranean: "One of the greatest restaurant (sic) in France… newest Mecca for gourmets… most beautifully presented meal … my entire life …best I ever ate or am likely to eat," blah-blah-blah.

Newby! Singing for his supper! Hang it up, Eric!'

So, back to my deadlines after a day out as a virtual tourist.

Carol Drinkwater

www.caroldrinkwater.com

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Jami Attenberg's Saint Mazie, by Louisa Young

June 26, 2015, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: Fighting Cocks and Showcased Skeletons, or Respect in Retrospect, by Clare Mulley

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This is Jami Attenberg, a young Brooklyn novelist who is as good as they all wish they were. You may have seen her earlier novel The Middlesteins, which dismembers a 'typical' American Jewish family and their entanglement in food and love and fear and greed and insecurity and their mother, who is, perhaps, or perhaps not, eating herself to death. I liked this book so much I did that sneaky thing a novelist can do in this miraculous century - I located the author, and met her, and got to be her friend. 

When I did so, Jami was in the middle of the novel which has just come out: Saint Mazie. She talked about this woman, Mazie Gordon, who was angelic and diabolical and may have written a memoir of her extraordinary life, only probably not, and how she, Jami, had realised that if it didn't exist she wanted to write it - and I would prod her, transatlantically, willing her to get on with it, so that I could get on and read it. 

Mazie Phillips Gordon was a 'well-known figure', as they say, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 20s and 30s. She was a fallen-saintly cinema-keeper, owning and operating a seedy movie house called the Venice, at 209 Park Row, where after 13-hour stints selling tickets, perusing the neighbourhood and talking to all comers, she would go out and help the ruined men of the Depression who gathered in that area. 

Mazie has survived into the modern imagination really only because in 1940 Joseph Mitchell published an essay about her in the New Yorker. 'Mazie has a genuine fondness for bums,' says the intro to the article, 'and undoubtedly knows more bums than any other person in the city. This tells about her movie house to which bums are admitted free; about her Samaritan tours of the Bowery and environs distributing change to the bums; dragging the drunk ones to flop houses, calling an ambulance, when one has been injured. Fanny Hurst (a novelist) visits Mazie frequently, and admires her greatly. "She's the most compassionate person I've ever known. No matter how filthy, or drunk or evil-smelling a bum may be, she treats him as an equal," she said.

Mazie with her bums: 'She's a drinker, a smoker, a fighter, and a caregiver'

'She seemed like she’d be a real hoot,' Jami says. 'I don’t know how to write without humor. I’m of the school of thought that if you wait long enough everything eventually gets funny. And it was Mazie’s sense of humor that I originally connected to in the original article. I imagine in part it was that sense of humor that helped her to deal with these men. It felt necessary to me to write her that way. But I did set out with the intention of writing some heartbreak in this book. I wanted to kill characters off! I think after the last book, where you spend 300 pages wondering whether the protagonist [Edie, the intensely fat mother in The Middlesteins] will live or die by the end, I wanted to make some life and death things happen throughout. I approached the book with the intention of expressing the ideas of compassion and empathy and hopefully that filters through.' 

Given that Maizie was real, I ask, and that the way you tell her story rings so true - how much did you need to invent?

'I invented everything!' Jami says. 'I mean I knew where she worked and that she had two sisters and a brother-in-law and that she was known as The Queen of the Bowery and helped homeless men for decades. But the book is really her origin story, how she got to what little bit I did know about her. I’m glad you think it rings true though.' 

The New York Observer quotes Jami as saying that Mazie felt like a piece of New York she didn't want people to forget about, and if Mazie is a compelling heroine so too is New York, equally flawed and equally heartbreaking. 'It’s a rough and tumble place, full of people from all over the world,' Jami says. 'It scales high and low and everything in between. An excellent place to drink gin.' And she has peopled it with some glorious characters - an on/off lover, The Captain, who sends the postcards Mazie pastes inside her kiosk; George the neighbour, her heartbreaking brother-in-law and impossible sisters.  They come to life through Mazie's diaries and letters, and in interviews conducted by Nadine, a young modern film-maker who is conducting what is turning into a kind of oral history project, and the hipster who found the mythological 'memoirs'. It could be a mess but it is extremely readable, a full-on page turner, with the mood of one of those tender-hearted madcap wise-cracking 1930s comedies. If they made a film of this you'd want Myrna Loy, Buster Keaton and Louise Brooks to be in it, and Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien, and Gloria Grahame and Mae West - all the grand old sassy dames and poignant over-coated guys. 

'Most of the minor characters just showed up and hung around for a while,' Jami says, 'offering me up a tidbit of information here and there about Mazie, until, maybe 100 pages later, I knew exactly what I was going to do with them. The only person who was mostly fully formed from the outset was George Flicker, Mazie’s neighbor. Because I needed someone from the same streets as her to talk to me.'

She does really take you to those streets. I ask her how she gets there: 'For Mazie, I read a lot of books! Lots of non-fiction books and some photo books and also I watched films from the era and little clips of things on Youtube. I found a great website that had audio recordings from the era. Basically anything that put me in the room. 

'My best ideas occur to me when I’m away from the computer, away from reading, away from consuming information, people, culture. It’s the quiet time, the downtime, when my brain is allowed to process everything, that I find the ideas rising to the surface. But I need all the consumption of everything else first in order to get to the place where an idea might exist. So the ideas come from the noise and the silence working together.'

Extract from Saint Mazie

Mazie’s Diary, September 12, 1916
On the way home from work who did I see but our little
Jeanie twirling around on a street corner. I stood off to the
side and watched her for a while in her candy-colored tutu.
Our little sweetheart. Her cheeks were flushed pink from the
sun. Our father loved to dance, is what I was thinking. You
can’t dance on the street forever, is also what I was thinking.
But I want her to anyway.


Mazie’s Diary, September 23, 1916
Tonight I met two sailors from California. San Francisco
seems so far away, how can it even be real? One was tall and
one was short and that’s all I can remember. Names, I don’t
know. I got so many names in my head all the time.
They said New York reminded them of home, it being so
close to the water. But in San Francisco the mist and the fog
come off the ocean so thick you can’t see one foot in front of
you, that’s what they told me.
I said they were lying, and they laughed.
I said: What’s so funny?
But then they never answered.
I danced with the tall one while the short one watched
us, smiling hard. He looked like he was burning up. When
the tall one dipped me, the tie from his uniform tickled
my face. I love a man in uniform. Any kind. I think they
walk taller when they got something formal to wear. When
they got a place to go. The tall one asked me how old I
was.
I said: Old enough.
He said: Old enough for what?
Then they both laughed at me some more. But I’m old
enough for anything. They don’t know but I know.
The tall one tasted salty when I kissed him but later I saw
him holding hands with the short one. They were so slim and
pretty in their uniforms. Sometimes I just want a uniform of
my own.



George Flicker
She was unapologetic about who she was and haughty to
those who questioned her, even if they didn’t say anything out
loud. Like my mother for example. The two of them did not
like each other at all. People sometimes think “chutzpah” is
a compliment but not the way my mother said it. Sometimes
she would cross to the other side of the street when she saw
Mazie coming, and she did not do it quietly. She coughed
and she stomped. My mother was a tremendous noisemaker.
If Mazie cared she didn’t show it. Once I heard her shout,
“More room for me,” after my mother had sashayed her way
across the street.



Mazie’s Diary, November 1, 1916
Jeanie bought me a birthday present, a pretty dark purple
bow, nearly the color of the night sky. I asked her where she
got the money, and she told me she saved every penny from
dancing next to Bella.
She said: She lets me keep a penny for every ten we make.
I said: That doesn’t seem fair.
She said: It was her idea to have the show in the first place.
Bella says people with the brains make the money.
I said: You got brains.
She said: I just love to dance.
I asked her how much change she had and she told me it
was a lot. I told her I’d show her where I hid you if she’d
show me where she hid her change.
I said: We could trade secrets.
Jeanie showed me all the change she had, a few bills at least.
Hidden in her suitcase in the closet, the same suitcase we used
when we came to town from Boston. I asked her if she was
saving for anything. She didn’t say anything. I told her she
could tell me anything, that she was my sweetheart, my little
girl. Finally she got very close to my ear.
She said: I wouldn’t want to go forever, but I’d like to join
the circus.
I told her I’d come with. I’d ride on top of a horse with a
crown on my head and she’d be an acrobat and fly high up
above me. The Phillips Sisters, the stars of the show. All the
men would swoon at our feet. That part I liked the best but I
didn’t tell her that.
Jeanie said: But what would Rosie say?
I said: She wouldn’t say anything. She’d just be in the audience
clapping like everyone else.
Jeanie said: Do you think that’s true? Wouldn’t she miss us?
I said: We’re just daydreaming here, Jeanie. Don’t ruin it.
Jeanie said: All right. I guess she’d be in the front row then.
I said: She’d be our biggest fan.
Mazie’s Diary, November 7, 1916
I have to work in the candy shop again today. Boring. Only
little kids coming in there all day long, dirty change, sticky
paws. The bell rings on the front door and I look up and it’s
the same thing over and over. I feel like a dog when that bell
rings. Waiting for someone to feed me with something interesting
to look at.
I’d rather be running errands for Louis at the track. I like
the track. There’s grass and trees, blue sky cracking above
us, but then everyone’s smoking cigars, too. I like the way it
smells clean and dirty at the same time. Plus everyone’s having
a nip of something. The flasks those men have, jewels crusted
in them. Whatever it takes to hide the money. But they’re
generous though with sharing what they got. Makes it so I
don’t even mind the horseshit.
But Louis doesn’t like it when I come. The track’s no place
for a woman, that’s what Louis says. Of course he says that.
He doesn’t like the way the men there look at me. I thought
he wanted me to get married, but Louis doesn’t trust any of
those men, at least not with me. But he’s one of those men. I
like to kid him.
I said: Rosie found you at the track. How’d she find you?
I poke him with my finger.
I said: Is it cause you’re so tall, Louis?
He doesn’t answer me.
I said: Cause you stick out like a giraffe?
Nothing. Louis keeps his cards so close it’s like there’s no
deck at all.
I think I’ll eat all the chocolates in the shop today. All the
chocolate kisses, all the chocolate bars. I’m going to tear off
their wrapper with my teeth. And I’ll eat all the Squirrel Nut
Zippers and Tootsie Rolls. Chew till my jaw hurts. And all
the caramel creams and butterscotch twists and peanut butter
nuggets and those sweetie almond treats. I’ll suck on all the
the lollies till they’re gone.
I’ll eat and I’ll eat and I’ll eat just so I never have to look at
any of those stinking candies ever again.


Mazie’s Diary, January 3, 1917
Last night Rosie and I split a bottle of whiskey. This was after
I came home, on time for once. I came in to say good night
and the bottle was next to her in bed. I couldn’t tell how long
she’d been drinking. All I knew was she was already knee-deep
in it. She was mourning something, I didn’t know what. Louis
was nowhere. Jeanie was sleeping. I got under the covers with
Rosie, and she handed me the bottle.
I said: What are you thinking about?
She said: Our parents.
I said: Well that’ll do it.
She said: Do you remember what happened in Topsfield?
That story again. She and I had talked about it before,
when Jeanie wasn’t around. Topsfield, that was right before
she left us behind.
We were all out together, a real, happy family for the day.
Papa holding me with one hand, Jeanie in his other arm,
Rosie wedged between him and Mama. Papa was not handsome.
His eyes drooped, and his skin was the color of cold,
watery soup. And those lines around his mouth and eyes
made him always look furious, which he was. Lines don’t lie.
But he was tall and young and had so much hair, and I remember
him as strong. That day, out in the world, he was
our father.
We walked together like that. A ruddy-cheeked barker
and his wife, the world’s fattest woman. There was the darkskinned
rubber man, skinny as stretched taffy. His face was so
calm, like turning himself inside and out was nothing to him.
He was born to bend. I remember the sun was bright, and it
was nearly fall, but it was still warm. I was squinting, seeing
the world between tiny slits in my eyes. Men with low-slung
hats waved hello to Papa. Everyone knew Horvath Phillips, for
better or for worse.
But to Rosie I said: I remember that he left us that day.
Because I knew that she wanted that to be my only memory.
He told us to stay put, said he’d be back, sliding that flask
from his pocket as he walked away. There were men in white
face paint pretending to tug on an imaginary rope. The sun
began to set. Jeanie was tired and we found a bench and
Mama took her in her lap. My skin stung from the sun, my
stomach was sick from sweets.
Mama said: Should we try to find him? I don’t know.
She was talking to Rosie, who was the only one of us old
enough to understand that the question was not a simple one.
But I can’t remember her saying anything. She was just simmering.
Mama said: Yes, we’ll wait.
Then it was dark and the mimes were gone, most of the
families too. Just young people floating around, also some
lonely-looking men. Mama still kept turning her head around,
thinking he’d come back.
Rosie said: If you don’t go find him, I will.
They argued about Rosie wandering around at night by
herself. Rosie started fighting for us to just go home already.
Mama didn’t want to walk the roads by herself. She was
here. Found the most terrifying man in town to marry, that
couldn’t have helped much either.
Mama finally gave in to Rosie, and agreed we should try
to find him. I remember this sigh of her shoulder, and then
Jeanie nearly rolled off her lap.
She wasn’t pretty anymore then, Mama. Her hair was thin.
She pulled clumps of it out, and so did he, when he was mad.
She still had the knockout hips though. I walked behind her
as we went to find him and I remember those hips, because
I have those hips too. A little girl with her arms around her
mama, her face sunk in her hips.
Rosie had known where he was all night. Mama did, too.
Those two had just been playing a game with each other for
hours. Because back behind the big top was an open field
lit up with lanterns and white candles, and filled with people
dancing in a frenzy. There was a small stage in the middle of
it, packed with men playing all kinds of instruments, accordians,
fiddles, guitars, a washboard and spoons. A man sang in
a deep growl, French, now I know, but I didn’t then. There
was a sign at the front of the stage, the Cajun Dancers is what
they were called.
The audience was so caught up in the moment, moving
faster and faster, laughing and grinning, they were almost hysterical.
I could feel the heat coming off their bodies, and then
I was nearly hysterical too. The lust of those people is a lust
that I hold in my heart. They were gorgeous and free.
Mama put Jeanie down next to me, and we held hands, and
then we looked at each other. While Rosie and Mama scanned
the crowd, we began to dance our own dance. We were never
going to sit still, Jeanie and me. Not like good girls did. I
The grass tickled the backs of my legs.
I looked up and there was Rosie, pulling away from
Mama, and working her way through the crowd. She had
found Papa. He looked happy, is what I remember thinking.
His eyes were closed, bliss, and his face was relaxed, the
lines erased for the moment. He embraced a young, plump,
black-haired woman in a long green gown. The dress rose
and crashed while they danced. I don’t know if he knew the
woman or not, if she was the reason why he was so content,
or if it was just the dancing. Maybe he just loved the
freedom. More than once I have wondered if it would have
been easier to forgive him for all that he did if he had just
up and left our home, rather than stayed put and laid his
cruelty upon us.
I said: I remember you grabbing his arm, and I remember
you pointing to us. You shamed him. You were so bold.
Papa bowed to the woman he had been dancing with, and
then walked with Rosie back through the crowd, which somehow
managed to keep moving and part for them at the same
time. Or at least that’s how I remember it: Everything faded
into the background except for Rosie and Papa.
I said: It was a long ride home.
Rosie said: I felt like I aged ten years in that time.
I said: She tucked us in so quietly that night. She kissed every
part of our face.
Rosie said: I didn’t get to go to sleep. He took me out
back.
I said: I know.
Rosie said: Until I passed out from the pain.
I said: Oh, Rosie.
She was too drunk. She sounded confused.
I said: You were right, and he was wrong.
Rosie said: I’m sorry I left you there.
I said: We didn’t blame you for leaving us. I didn’t, anyway.
Jeanie didn’t even know what was happening.
Rosie said: And I came back for you didn’t I?
I said: You did.
Rosie said: I was always trying to do the right thing by us
even if she wouldn’t.
I said: You did.
She said: I take care of you, right?
I said: Rosie, we love you. You know we love you.
Rosie said: I’m not bad, am I?
I said: You’re not. You’re a good girl.
We drank until we slept. Rosie more than me. When I
woke, there was Jeanie, sleeping between us. I don’t know if
she heard us. I wouldn’t want her to hear it. I wouldn’t want
her to remember any of it.


Mazie’s Diary, March 1, 1917
The sun was rising when I took off my shoes this morning.
Rosie stood at the door and stared me down. I turned my
back on her and wrapped the covers around me, put my head
on the pillow, and prayed for peace. God heard me.
I don’t know much about praying. It feels like you could be
trading on one thing for another, and maybe the thing you’re
trading isn’t really yours in the first place.
Rosie just crawled into bed with me. No yelling. We started
whispering to each other.
I remember when Jeanie and I were little we used to crawl
into bed with her and Louis and rub her blue-tinted fingers
and toes, breathing on them with our hot breath. All I wanted
was to be warm and close like that forever.
She said: What if you get a baby in there?
She rubbed my stomach. When she touched it I felt ill. The
last thing I wanted was a baby to lug around all day. And I’d
never fit into my pretty dresses again.
She said: Then no respectable man will ever want to marry
you.
I didn’t want nothing to do with marriage with a respectable
man or any other kind of man. Not once in my life
did I ever dream of my wedding day, no white dresses, no
goddamn diamond rings. I only ever dreamed of freedom.
The love I have is with the streets of this city.


Mazie’s Diary, March 20, 1917
Oh, Rosie. My poor, dear Rosie.
This morning she took us girls to a dusty little gypsy parlor
on Essex, empty except for a few plants and a folding table
and chairs and a vase with a peacock feather in it. I didn’t want
to be there, and neither did Jeanie. Golly, Jeanie’s so pretty
now, skinny and pretty, with her pale skin and puffy lips and
moony eyes. I swear she floats when she walks. Still she had a
sour face, just like I did. After being sweet for so long, turns
out she’s a Phillips girl, after all.
The gypsy pushed aside some curtains and came in from
the back room. She was wearing a chain of thick gold coins
around her neck, and the coins clinked together as she moved.
find that glamorous. To me it’s just another gypsy, but
Rosie has always had a thing for them.
At first she acted like we weren’t there. We could have been
ghosts. She lit some incense on the table in front of us, watered
some plants in the front window. Then I noticed the
plants were dead, gray leaves, stems tipped over. I felt like I
was nowhere all of a sudden.
The gypsy sat down at the table with us, told us her
name was Gabriela. She smiled at Rosie, and Rosie smiled
at her. There was a love there. She looked into my eyes
and held them there. The long stare. Searching for something,
but I didn’t give her a damn thing. Then she looked
at Jeanie’s eyes, and then back into Rosie’s eyes. We were
just sitting there waiting, all of us. All right already, is
what I was thinking. We get it. You know how to hold a
room.
She told us we were there for our sister, like I needed to be
reminded Rosie existed. How can I forget?
She didn’t have an accent, like other Roma I’d met. She
had thick eyebrows, and they made her look serious. She
could have been old, she could have been young, I couldn’t
tell.
She said: I needed to meet you in order to help your sister.
You are all in the same home. You are living one life together.
You are family. You are sisters. You are connected in this life,
and the last one, and the next one, too.
A scam if I ever saw one, I thought. I couldn’t wait to tell
Louis when I got home. I looked at Jeanie, thinking she’d be
on my side. But she was drooling over everything the gypsy
said. What a sucker.
and I groused, but finally I put my hand in hers. With her index
finger, she traced a few lines on my hand.
She said: Life, money, good.
She was nodding her head.
She said: Well, money will come and go. Mostly come
though.
Her hands were cool and soft. Her nails were clean. I admire
a well-kept hand. She rubbed a thumb along a line across
the top of my hand, and then a line beneath that.
She said: But this is no good.
She squeezed my hand tightly and released it.
She said: No love for you. You will spend your life alone.
I pulled my hands back.
I said: I got company whenever I like.
Rosie shushed me. I don’t care, I don’t need anyone telling
me about my life.
Jeanie said: Now me.
She shoved her hands in the gypsy’s. Gabriela smiled at
Jeanie like she loved her. The warm glow of a con artist. She
told her she had a strong love line, and she pointed to something
on her head. She told her she will marry well. A rich
man. She asked if she liked rich men. As if she wouldn’t want
a rich man! I watched Jeanie’s face. She was considering it,
though she didn’t answer. But she smiled. Maybe she smiled
like it was funny. I would have said, Who cares? But nobody
was asking me. Nobody was telling me I was going to marry
someone special.
Gabriela turned to Rosie, and Rosie slid her hand in hers so
easily it was like they were husband and wife.
Rosie said: You already know what it says.
didn’t know why it was so serious.
Rosie said: Now that you’ve met them, look again.
Gabriela said: They are strong these two, as you said, but
who they are will not change what will happen to you. They
love you. I don’t need to look at their palms to see that.
They’re going to be who they’re going to be.
Then she brought Rosie’s hand to her lips and kissed it. It
was a sweet vision.
She said: I still think it can happen, Rosie.
Rosie started crying and then Gabriela swept herself up into
the back room, and came back with a handful of bottles. She
smacked each bottle down in front of Rosie.
She said: I’ve asked everyone I know, and they’ve asked everyone
they know too. I went uptown, I went downtown, I
went across the river, and I gathered these for you.
She handed Rosie a piece of paper.
She said: I wrote down instructions. How much, how often.
And there’s an address on there, a Chinaman. He sticks
needles in you and they say it lights a fire within your womb.
She held Rosie’s hand again.
She said: I lit candles for you, my friend.
Now Rosie was sobbing, and then we held her. So our poor
Rosie can’t have babies. I never knew, but how could I? We
were her babies all along, I thought we were enough for her.
I didn’t know she wanted anyone but us. She watched over
us better than our own mother ever did. She’s our sister and
our mother. Oh, all this time her heart was breaking and we
didn’t even know.

George Flicker
Oh you want to know about the gypsies? What do you think
you know about the gypsies? That they’re a bunch of criminals,
probably. That’s what people always thought about
them. My mother swore they spoke the truth. My friends
from Little Italy, they wouldn’t go anywhere near them.
They’re superstitious, and they were afraid of the curses. I
have only ever been afraid of what I could see right in front of
my face. Because I have seen enough. I don’t need to imagine
anything worse.
But the gypsies were just the same as you and me. They lived
here just like everyone else. They walked the same streets. It’s
true that some of them were criminals. But you can’t judge a
whole people by the actions of just a few. But that’s what we do
here in this country. We do it in this world. I’ve lived such a long
life. I thought things would be better by now. Every day I still
watch the news. I listen to people talk. Things are not as bad as
they once were, but not as good as I had hoped they would be
someday. It’s the year 2000 already, and there’s still all kinds of
messes in this country. I had higher hopes for this world. Eh, but
what are you going to do about it anyway?


Mazie’s Diary, June 16, 1917
Rosie’s sick on the couch again. Hands on her belly. She
swings from happy to sad in a heartbeat. We wrapped her up
in blankets. I told her to stop taking whatever the gypsy gave
her. Rosie, please stop, I was begging her.
She told me I was a fool and didn’t know what I was talking
about, that things take time, life takes time. But it doesn’t
seem right, this much pain.
longer? Gypsy con or not, it doesn’t change Rosie’s dream.
I can’t blame her for having one, though. I would never
blame anyone for wishing for something more from this
life.


George Flicker
Then I was old enough to go to war, or at least I told them
I was. I was a few months shy of legal but they didn’t check
too hard. I would have said anything though to get out
of that cramped apartment! The taller I got, the smaller it
seemed. And I wanted to see the world. That I would be
fighting in a war didn’t scare me for some reason. Maybe
I wasn’t so brave, maybe I was just stupid instead. I won’t
talk about what happened though, what I saw there. You
know, we’re not like your generation where we need to talk
about every little thing. Sometimes a bad thing happens and
then you’re done with it.
But anyway I didn’t see Mazie again for five years, so I can’t
help you out during that particular time period. Because I
went to France and then I stayed there when the war was over
and lived there and worked there and had a life there. I lived
with a French girl for a year even. And she was really something,
I’ll tell you. Ooh-la-la, I know. [Laughs.] I’ve had my
fun, I’ve had my fun. Eventually I had to come back though.
My mother got sick, and of course, there was all that trouble
with Uncle Al.


Twenty years old. I’m sure I should be having more fun.
What is this pull in me that makes me want trouble? Months
I’ve been quiet and good, even though the heat on the streets
was making me feel sexy, wanting to dance and drink. To kiss
someone. Passing by alleys at night and seeing girls and boys
playing. Fingers on lips, fingers on tits, I miss it. It’s been so
long since I’ve lain down with someone. Most nights are with
Rosie now. I lost this summer to her belly.

Mazie’s Diary, December 13, 1917
Rosie lost another baby. This time it felt like she was pregnant
for only a minute.
Now she’s flat on her back again in the living room. Weeks
and weeks of it, and there’s a dent in the couch now, I can see
the mattress sagging beneath her. I swear the springs will sink
straight through the floor.
She grabs my hand but squeezes too hard and it hurts but
I try not to make a noise. She asks me to stroke her head but
shifts her head, squirms beneath my fingers. Rub my feet, she
tells me.
But then she says: No, you’re doing it wrong. No, don’t
touch me.
Watches me with her eagle eye, thinking I’ll leave her.
Louis sits in the kitchen, head down, in the food. He closed
the theater for a few days this week. Jeanie’s nowhere I can
see, smart girl.
I take nips in the bedroom. I can’t go to the whiskey, but
Something’s going to break soon. I got no control over myself
and I like it.


Mazie’s Diary, January 4, 1918
I wasn’t ready to go home yet but there was nobody left in the
bar worth talking to. Talked to a bum on the street instead,
an old fella. We split whatever was in his bottle and I gave him
a smoke. I was feeling tough. I asked him how long he’d been
on the streets.
He said: Longer than you’ve been alive, girlie. You gotta be
tough to last that long.
He beat his chest.
I said: I could survive out here.
He said: You don’t want to try.
I said: I could do it. You wanna see me?
He said: You got a home, you’re lucky.
I said: Why don’t I feel that way?
Then he got gentle with me.
He said: If someone loves you, go home to them.
A bad wind blew in and I grew suddenly, terribly cold. I
couldn’t bear the night for another minute. I handed him the
rest of my smokes and wandered home.


Mazie’s Diary, January 5, 1918
Rosie was trying to sweet-talk me early this morning. A nice
change from yelling I guess.
She said: Don’t you want a sweetheart?
I said: The whole world’s my sweetheart.

read more here:

http://e.issuu.com/embed.html#0/13763567

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1940/12/21/mazie

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/books/review/saint-mazie-by-jami-attenberg.html?_r=0

Saint Mazie is published by Serpent’s Tail, £12.99

Fighting Cocks and Showcased Skeletons, or Respect in Retrospect, by Clare Mulley

June 27, 2015, 4:30 pm

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The record of history is a living thing, not just connecting people across time but ever-evolving, reflecting the changing sensibilities of those looking back. Each generation considers the past with fresh eyes, re-selecting the people, events and themes of importance and re-evaluating the motivations, implications and lessons to be learned. Sometimes it is wonderfully surprising how controversial the past can turn out to be.

One of my favourite pubs in my old stomping ground of St Albans has recently been targeted by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, which claims to be the oldest pub in the UK, dating from the eighth century, has drawn criticism for its historic name. PETA spokesperson Dawn Carr has suggested the pub be re-named to Ye Olde Clever Cocks to reflect a change in society’s attitudes.

Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, St Albans

The St Albans pub does indeed sit on the site of an old cock-pit. The round, sunken arena was still evident in the floor when I use to drink there. But although this brutal sport is occasionally still secretly organised in England, it was made illegal here in the 1830s. Today the Fighting Cocks does not celebrate or encourage cock-fighting any more than The Flying Pig in Cambridge promotes porcine parachutists, or London’s The Hung, Drawn and Quartered advocates a return to capital punishment. In fact the landlord, Christo Tofalli, claims that the Fighting Cocks is particularly animal friendly, being near the park and welcoming dogs.

Signpost to the historic cockpit inside Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, St Albans

PETA may be a well-motivated organization, but their suggestion completely disregards the value of social history. Sanitizing our past exploitation of animals will do nothing to prevent future abuses; possibly the reverse. Beyond that, such heritage has inherent value, worthy of respect and protection, as landlord Tofalli appreciates. ‘This is an historic building with a remarkable story behind it’ he commented. It is a story that wants to share with locals and tourists and so, I am pleased to report, he is not planning a pub name-change soon.

Sometimes however the clash of interests and perspectives can be more difficult to negotiate. Last month the remains of a German soldier, believed to be those of Private Friedrich Brandt, were put on display in a Belgian museum. Private Brandt was not a soldier of the Second World War, nor even of the Great War before it, but of the Battle of Waterloo two hundred years ago. His skeleton, less skull but with the telling discovery of a French musket-ball between his ribs, was found, traditionally enough, under a car park near the battle-site. It was the curvature of the spine that led to his unofficial identification as Private Brandt, a twenty-three year old, known to have kyphosis, from Hanover. The skeleton was subsequently put on show at the ‘Waterloo Memorial 1815’ display in a Belgian museum.

Skeleton of the Waterloo soldier, believed to be Private Friedrich Brandt, Belgium

Within days the respected military historian, Rob Schäfer, had launched a petition, Peace for Friedrich Brandt, asking to have the bones removed from display and respectfully reburied. Schäfer is able to picture the young Brandt in the early 1800s, feeling ‘as though he were on the adventure of a lifetime’ as he left his Hanover home to make his way to the ports of the German North Sea. He would have then ventured across the channel and completed his training in the - to him very alien - environment of East Sussex, before fighting alongside his English counterparts at Waterloo. ‘Friedrich’s compatriots would have buried him with honour’, Schäfer argues compellingly, before asking whether it is no less our duty to do the same.

Yet Françoise Scheepers, director of the Belgian Tourist Office for Brussels and Wallonia, has stated that the purpose of the memorial display was ‘not to shock but to pay tribute’. The museum is non-profit making, so there is no commercial exploitation. By humanizing the story of the Battle of Waterloo, their display hopes to engage young people with their history, helping them to appreciate that the soldiers were not just statistics but the ‘people made of flesh and bones’ with whom Schäfer can already empathise so well.

The Battle of Waterloo (Image courtesy of Rob Schaefer)

Voltaire famously argued that ‘we owe respect to the living. To the dead we owe only the truth’. Do we teach disrespect to the living by displaying the bones of the dead, or do we teach history? Private Brandt signed up to fight the French under Napoleon, not to champion the teaching of history or the humanity of his fellow-fallen. However, in life he also sought adventure rather than peace. If he has no traceable descendents, who is to say whether a quiet burial would be a mark of greater respect than his redeployment to promote an understanding of the cause for which he gave his life? I would certainly prefer to be useful post-mortem, but I doubt that such a role was something Private Brandt envisaged or would have aspired to.

More broadly, what is it that makes the display of Private Brandt’s remains so much more provocative than those of the Ancient Egyptians, or other human reliquary? At what point, if ever, and under what terms, do bones become historic artifact rather than human remains? Is it the relatively young age of Private Brandt's skeleton, or is it something else that makes this display seem so disrespectful, such as the familiarity of his name? Or is it the fact that we have marked so many military anniversaries recently and honoured so many dead, and because we have developed such a culture of respect for fallen military heroes?

Both animal rights and respect for human remains are important issues that comment on people’s capacity for empathy, altruism, and the value of respect. Engagement with history demands similar qualities. While we must be careful not to impose modern sensibilities on our appreciation of the past, without a degree of respect and an attempt at empathy, any engagement loses meaning. The only thing that is absolutely clear is that sometimes it is the dialogue we have with history itself that is as important as the facts and artifacts of the past. Unless we ask the questions, unless we consider, criticise and debate not just the facts and stories, but the interpretations placed upon them and the uses made of them, history will itself become dead and meaningless.

Interview with Rebecca Mascull by Lydia Syson

June 28, 2015, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: June Competition

≪ Previous: Fighting Cocks and Showcased Skeletons, or Respect in Retrospect, by Clare Mulley

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It's a great pleasure to welcome Rebecca Mascull to the blog today. Her new novel, SONG OF THE SEA MAID, is out this month and tells the haunting story of Dawnay Price, an eighteenth-century anomaly. Dawnay is an educated foundling who overcomes her origins to become a natural philosopher, setting sail for Portugal to develop her scientific theories.  She discovers rather more than she anticipated, not least about herself. Tomorrow, if you're lucky, you can win a copy of the book. This interview should whet your appetite. 

Rebecca Mascull (photo by Lisa Warrener)

Like her heroine, Rebecca lives by the sea, but in the east of England, with her partner Simon and their daughter Poppy. She has worked in education and has a Masters in Writing. Her first novel THE VISITORS tells the story of a deaf-blind child in Victorian Kent and was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2014. She is currently working on her third novel for Hodder.

You weave into a single, compelling narrative a vast and fascinating array of different material: naval battles, foundling hospitals, scurvy, scientific voyages, religion, publishing, early theories of evolution and one huge and memorably described eighteenth-century event which I don’t want to give away here. I wonder where this all started for you.  Was there was a single image, or moment, or historical character that set you off?  And why did you choose that exact year?  (Dawnay Price is born in about 1732.)

The idea for this novel has been with me for years and in all that time I would just call it Science Novel! It all started with the What If scenario: what if someone in ages past had a brilliant scientific idea, but because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, nobody ever heard about it. As my character’s idea was linked to the theory of evolution, I thought it might be interesting to set it a good hundred years or so before Darwin, in order to explore how some groundbreaking ideas are present in the history of thought before they are brought to fruition by one seemingly isolated genius. It was just a hunch, but when I started to research the history of 17th and 18th-century science, I discovered this to be absolutely true.
Then I had to decide when in the 18th-century I wanted Dawnay to live. I knew there was going to be a naval battle, so I looked into wars in that period and it turns out that Europe were at war for almost the entire century! I also knew that the Napoleonic wars have been done quite extensively in novels, so I fancied finding an aspect of 18th-century war that was less widely known. By watching Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon, (which I sought out to experience his beautiful authentic lighting – the “huddle and glow” of the 18th-century), I stumbled across the Seven Years’ War, which I then realised was also satirised in Voltaire’s Candide, which I’d also just read for research. 

Once I’d chosen that period, and started to read about science and society at that time, the rest of the ingredients just fell into place.

Research photo: rigging from the age of sail seen on the Cutty Sark at Greenwich

The few women who did manage to engage in scientific activity during the Enlightenment – and they are hardly household names -  generally seem to have come from wealthy, privileged backgrounds, but Dawnay starts the story a nobody with nothing, entirely alone in the world.  Why was that important?

We all know money talks. It’s easier to be heard when you’ve got a bit of capital and position behind you. Being heard and recorded by history often requires a certain set of fortunate circumstances for the speaker. Those who are disenfranchised at any point in history usually don’t get heard. In Dawnay’s era, that list would include the poor and women, particularly poor women. In my 20s, it occurred to me that there were very few women in the history of great endeavours and I knew instinctively that this could not be because of their capabilities. I assumed it was because of their lack of education and that such ambitions would have been discouraged for females. What I’ve realised now is that there were women doing and thinking extraordinary things, it’s just that no one bothered to record them. Even wealthy female scientists were not taken seriously by many, were banned from attending and certainly speaking at scientific events, and some even had their work attributed to male colleagues or relations. If you were poor and had no position in society, those problems were compounded hugely. Thinking this through, I’ve come to believe that many great ideas may have been lost in the history of thought because the thinkers did not have the right credentials.

And from a narrative point of view, I like my protagonists to have something to fight against! How dull it would be if everything came easily to Dawnay…

Emilie du Châtelet (1706-1749), French mathematician & physicist

You’ve written a first person present tense narrative, which takes Dawnay from very early childhood to her mid-twenties. . .was this structure and point of view a very obvious choice for you, and how did you go about establishing Dawnay’s distinctive voice?  Did you find it a struggle to get the right balance between readability, authenticity and pastiche? (It certainly doesn’t read as a struggle, I hasten to add.)

I did experiment with different voices when I started writing the first draft. I tried third person and past tense, but I just had this image of the little girl in the street with her brother stealing pies, and it felt like an urgent situation, in which the past tense third person didn’t seem to fit. Once I changed it to first person present tense, it just took on a life of its own and then I was off.  Also, that idea of hidden histories and silenced voices being heard meant that it felt imperative that Dawnay tell her own story.

I read a lot of fiction and non-fiction written in the C18th and made notes on the conventions of prose in that era. I decided that to include them all would probably alienate a modern reader; for example, some of them are very distracting, such as the use of capitalising the initial letter e.g. Thus my Pride, not my Principle, my Money, not my Virtue, kept me Honest. In the end, I chose to give a flavour of 18th-century prose through Dawnay’s choice of vocabulary and sentence structure, rather than bash the reader over the head too much authenticity.

Why the title?  Was it your first choice?  (I wondered afterwards if you’d considered calling it ‘The Orphan Myth’, the title of Dawnay’s unpublishable paper on her theories of the origins of humankind, an idea before its time.)

The history of this novel’s title is quite a chequered one! Whilst writing, it was called The Edge of the Map and was submitted to the publisher with that title. It’s mentioned in the novel a couple of times and sums up many of the themes. But it was felt that it didn’t have the right appeal for the audience, so then we had to think up another. The Orphan Myth was indeed an early possibility – well spotted! But again it was generally felt that it had a mournful sound to it and therefore didn’t really suit the narrative – and had those awkward ph/th sounds! We went through many ideas, with just about everyone in the know chipping in different suggestions, mostly revolving around mermaids and caves. Then I corresponded with Dr Jane McKay – who lectured on mermaids – and she suggested I look at T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, which includes ‘”sea-girls” and the “mermaids singing each to each”. I also consulted my trusty Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs and found a line from Shakespeare: the “sea-maid’s music” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). It was such an evocative and archaic word for mermaids and avoided, I felt, the negative connotations of them i.e. luring men to their death, yet also being rather girly and, of course, fairy tale-like. So, sea maid it was – and then I realized that it would fit rather beautifully if the cave painting could be seen as a song about our past, and that Dawnay too was a kind of sea maid (swimming and discovering) and that the whole novel was her song. Lastly, I think it just sounds lovely too!

How did the process of writing and research affect your understanding of the role played by imagination in scientific discovery?

That’s a tremendously interesting question! I don’t have a scientific mind myself, though I have always been fascinated by science and wished I had the brain to understand it! Yes, I do wonder if scientists and artists have that one thing in common - that they have to imagine truths before they necessarily find the evidence to support them. My brother David (who has that scientific brain I lack) has always told me a lot about theoretical physics and such things, and it’s caught my imagination many times, with the part played by theories and ideas, for which the finding of evidence is incredibly difficult. So, I do think some areas of science require a creative way of thinking to come up with the ideas in the first place.

The same is true of palaeontology - the evidence is so scant and hard to find, that many theories have come into being over the years based on little evidence other than our own imagination of what these bones may represent. What I discovered in my research, is that this reliance on imagination can sometimes lead to a terrible bias towards the discoverer e.g. in researching early humans and, in particular, cave paintings, I found a distinct bias towards males as artists, and males in general as the leaders of evolution. This really pissed me off!!

 Very recent studies have suggested that females may have been responsible for much cave art that we see – one very sensible suggestionis that, even if males may have been responsible for much of the animal hunting, it is likely that females may have been responsible for butchery, and therefore had an intimate knowledge of animal physiology that would make them the ideal artists of the animals we see in cave paintings. This is all theoretical, of course, but then much of what we know about early humans is based on assumptions and theory, rather than hard fact. I just think we need to redress the bias a little bit… For example, you may have noticed I don’t use the term early Man and instead refer to early humans – don’t even get me started on THAT one…

Hand print at Pech Merle

Were you able to travel to the settings of the book yourself, and how did you come up with the idea of Dawnay’s cave (which has intriguing echoes of King Solomon’s Mines…)?

In terms of London, I did visit the Coram orphanage Museum and also Dr Johnson’s house, to get a feel for 18th-century London. Further afield, I have spent time in both Spain and Portugal - I travelled to both countries as an 18-year-old and again spent time in Spain when I studied Spanish as part of my degree. I am a total Hispanophile - I love Spanish literature, film, music and art, as well as its history (and I know we share a love of the Spanish Civil War, Lydia!), so it was a delight to set parts of the novel in this region.
Dawnay’s cave itself is a product of my imagination. However, I did visit ancient cave art in northern Spain as a student and saw the handprints of early humans in red paint on the cave walls and was so moved. It has always stayed with me. I researched the many forms of cave art and found examples of mermaids from different cultures on the walls of caves, as well as examples of seals and fish from cultures living close to the sea. So, it is my own invention but it is grounded in existing cave art. And new caves are being discovered, so who knows what else is out there waiting for us to find…?

Berlenga Island

Your debut novel was set in the late nineteenth century, this a century earlier.  Can we expect a seventeenth-century setting for your next book?

Ah, well, I have to say I’m not as organised as that! My brain doesn’t work very chronologically - I’d say I have a butterfly mind that flits from subject to subject. I’m currently working on Book 3 and it’s actually set in the early 20th century, beginning in 1909 and I plan to end it in 1919. I have a title, setting and an idea in mind for Book 4, but I’m really not sure when that one is going to be set - possibly 19th-century, possibly World War II… who knows! It’ll all come out in the wash.

Don't forget the competition tomorrow.  You can find out more about Rebecca and her work, and read interviews with other authors about the craft of novel writing, at her website: http://rebeccamascull.tumblr.com/ 

June Competition

June 29, 2015, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: It's Wolf hall - again!

≪ Previous: Interview with Rebecca Mascull by Lydia Syson

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We have five copies of Rebecca Mascull's new novel, Song of the Sea Maid, to give away to five UK residents with the most interesting and persuasive answers to this question: 

"What is the best novel you've ever read about science or scientists and why was it so good?"

Please leave your answers in the comments below, but also send them to readers@maryhoffman.co.uk so that winners can be contacted. 

Closing date 7th July. Sorry, but our competitions are open to UK residents only.  

It's Wolf hall - again!

June 30, 2015, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: The Problem with Medieval Medicine - Gillian Polack

≪ Previous: June Competition

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I know it's been over for some time and we've probably all watched Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell since then. But I wanted to consider what a TV series does differently from a play, from a book. It doesn't have to be historical fiction but perhaps it illustrates the point best when it comes to visualising the scene.

I've read both Hilary Mantel's books about Thomas Cromwell twice, seen both the plays twice and seen the TV series twice (the last two episodes three times). I can't get enough of Hilary Mantel's creation but it does make me ponder on what the different media do for it.

First on TV the setting, costumes and props - these were all utterly convincing: the interior lighting by candles or fires, mullioned windows, all goods in chests, an illuminated prayer book dazzling in its colours because new. There was great attention to detail. (But see Liz Fremantle's February post for more on that and some reservations).

It's obvious that TV can do some things the stage plays couldn't do, giving us flashbacks to the boy Thomas Cromwell's brutal beating  by his thug of a blacksmith father - the motive to run away to the continent, with which the first book opens.

The TV series opened with the splendidly cast Bernard Hill as the Duke of Norfolk telling Cardinal Wolsey he is done for. The trouble with this excellent start was that we then had to go back to a period when Wolsey was still in the ascendant and could order Harry Percy and Thomas Boleyn around and tell them that Anne Boleyn had to go and marry someone in Ireland.

There was a bit too much of this "non-linear" narrative going on: the captions would have been more useful if they'd had actual dates rather than 'Four years before Wolsey's fall" and suchlike. No such problems with the books or the stage plays.

Wolsey himself was superb. Jonathan Pryce was not an obvious piece of casting: one thinks of him as tall and cadaverous rather than fat and jowly like a cleric who indulged too much in earthly pleasures. But he was very good indeed.

Then so was Paul Jesson on stage. But this is not an argument about who gives the better representation, pitting Mark Rylance against Ben Miles or Damien Lewis against Nathaniel Parker (the last another example of successful casting against type).

What interests me is what the different media can do with the same story. To take just one example - the masque pillorying Wolsey after his death. Hilary Mantel has taken "Cardinal Wolsey Going down to Hell," performed at the house of Thomas Boleyn (Anne's father) and transposed it to Hampton Court. The farce, presumably commissioned by Boleyn, was put on as an entertainment in January 1531, for the new French Ambassador, Claude de la Guiche. "The Duke," whom Mantel reasonably takes to be Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, called for it to be printed.

The Ambassador was evidently not amused and according to Eustache Chapuys, the Imperial Ambassador, "much blamed the earl, and still more the Duke for ordering this fare to be printed." (quoted in Greg Walker's Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry Vlll (Cambridge University Press 1991)). Not surprisingly, since it portrayed a Cardinal tormented by devils and burning in hell.

Hilary Mantel takes this reasonably well known fact and makes of it something crucial to the plot of both her novels and one that offers an explanation for Cromwell's implacable persecution of the five men executed with Anne Boleyn. Each of the four "devils" is a nobleman (somewhat unlikely as actors in a farce, perhaps, but no matter). Cromwell watches them unmask and reveal themselves to be George Boleyn (Anne's brother), Henry Norris, Francis Weston and William Brereton.

In the novel of Wolf Hall this scene comes less than halfway through and the person taking the part of Wolsey himself is Master Patch, the jester whom the Cardinal gave to the king. In the play it's Mark Smeaton, neatly linking all five executed men to the farce.  Here in the novel  Mantel describes the reactions of the audience to the farce:

"Anne sits laughing, pointing, applauding. He has never seen her like this before: lit up, glowing. Henry sits frozen by her side. Sometimes he laughs, but he thinks if you could get close you would see that his eyes are afraid."

Crucially there is one dissenting voice at the "entertainment" - "Someone calls out 'Shame on you, Thomas Howard, you'd have sold your own soul to see Wolsey down.' Heads turn, and his head turns, and nobody knows who had spoken; but he thinks it might be, could it be, Thomas Wyatt?"

In Mike Poulton's playscript it is definitively Wyatt, who cries, "Shame! Shame on you, Norfolk! Shame!" But Wyatt is a major linking character in the plays and gets a more prominent role than in the books.

In the TV version, no-one cries "Shame!" at all. And that's a shame. It seems no-one at court is brave enough to stand up for the Cardinal, to whom Cromwell's intense loyalty is a constant motif, explanation and motive. In fact it turns into a bit of a Revenge drama, with Cromwell avenging his father-figure Wolsey, who was more benevolent to him than his own flesh and blood parent.

There is a scene where Cromwell watches the four "devils" take off their masks but it is somewhat wasted because of the casting. George Boleyn looks too like Brereton - or is it Weston? The point gets lost and has to be brought out in a later episode where Cromwell is interrogating the accused men in the Tower. If you hadn't read the books, I don't know if you would have "got" it. The whole scene is very brief on TV and there is no sign of Mark Smeaton.

But now we have three ways of "knowing" that at least four of the five men executed before Anne Boleyn took part in the Wolsey farce, does it matter that Hilary Mantel made this up? Surely, only if we come to believe this really is what happened?

Which brings us to the question of how we know our history; is it thorough reading historians or historical fiction. Do we believe that Elizabeth Woodville saved her son from Richard the Third, as Philippa Gregory tells us she did?

As Hilary Mantel says in the Author's Note to Bring up the Bodies, " I am not claiming authority for my version; I am making the reader a proposal, an offer."

As you may have gathered, although I enjoyed it, I liked the TV version less than the other two manifestations of Hilary Mantel's Cromwell stories. It may not be surprising that for me the books come first. There were a couple of show-offy moments on Tv which I positively disliked: Thomas stroking Anne Boleyn's breasts in a scene it took a moment or two to realise was in his imagination and the ridiculous dragging of her body along his dining-table with him about to stick the knife in. It was evidently too much of a temptation to make a metaphor literal.

And it lost a lot of the humour of the books and the plays; in the theatre everyone laughed when Leah Brotherhead said, "Oh, I'm nobody. I'm only Jane Seymour." There were many such touches, replaced on TV by Cromwell's sardonic remarks and occasional swearing.

Still, there was much to enjoy in the minor performances, such as Charity Wakefield's spirited and saucy Mary Boleyn - though it was hard to believe this one would have let Henry walk over her so. And one of my favourite characters, Eustache Chapuys was perfectly rendered by Matthieu Almaric. There was even an effort at his "startling hat" with which Hilary Mantel had such fun in Bring up the Bodies. Sadly, I could not find a picture of him wearing it.

I can't wait for the third book, The Mirror and the Light; the third play, with, please, Ben Miles and Nathaniel Parker, the third TV series, with Mark Rylance and Damien Lewis. I like Hilary Mantel's "offer" very much, in whatever form it comes. But best of all in the books.

What do you all think?

The Problem with Medieval Medicine - Gillian Polack

July 1, 2015, 7:07 pm

≫ Next: Review: Paul Scott's The Chinese Love Pavilion, by Y S Lee

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This last month I’ve been ill. Not seriously ill. Just a virus that goes on and on and on. A debilitating virus with nasty symptoms, but just a virus. The reason I can say this with such resigned aplomb is because of the wonder that is antibiotics. Without them, I wouldn’t be breathing now. This is the side of medicine we hear about a lot. The glory side.

We also hear (we the general public) quite a bit about the evil that is Medicine Past. I seem to spend a portion of my classes each year explaining that just because a system of medicine is not the one we’re used to, doesn’t mean it’s automatically just a series of placebos. 

Scientific method is a wonderful thing. It allows us to take an idea and test it. Does this medical compound reduce the symptoms of a disease? Yes! Does it harm humans? Not in a worrying way. Good! We have a potential medicine. If the answers are not so good, then we count it as a dead end, learn from it (“We don’t need to try this again.”) and move on. 

Modern medicines have mostly been created using scientific method. I have some problems with the assumptions of how medicine should be tested and used and how we perceive illness, but that doesn’t detract from lab testing and field testing and the wonder of the double-blind study. Modern medicine may not be everything we mostly think it is, but it’s not half bad. My vile chest infection is cured, after all, and without antibiotics I would not be breathing right now. Prior to clever scientists sorting them out, many people did die. The common cold was potentially fatal.

We don’t know about medieval medicine. Really, we don’t. It hasn’t been tested in the same way.

Every now and again I find medical people (often quite senior in their profession) who have an interest in the Middle Ages who do my workshops and attend my lectures. Every time, we discover something new. My favourite discoveries all came from the one course: the Western European test for leprosy in the Middle Ages would work (it entails blood and a silver bowl) and so does the test for diabetes (the scent of someone’s urine) and so does the treatment for kidney stones (sequential warm baths filled with relaxing herbs).

What this alerted me to was that we don’t know the whole of medieval medicine. We don’t even know the half of it. We haven’t tested it. We’ve just assumed that it wasn’t modern, therefore it was garbage.

Some medieval medicine certainly doesn’t meet modern medical needs. In daily life in countries such as Australia and the UK, for instance, we tend to separate religion from medicine in a way that was inconceivable in the Middle Ages. Our whole world view is different. The spheres move in both universes, but they don’t move in the same way nor, indeed, do they have they same forces propelling their movement. This means that the prayer element and what we see as the magic element of medieval medicine simply do not work for us.

Until very recently, this meant that scientists didn’t even bother checking medieval cures. “They won’t be useful,” was the vague consensus, “because they’re medieval and wrong.” 

This was a failure of scientific method. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater because of preconceived assumptions. No-one took a statistically significant selection of cures and tested them. And yet, in my classes, doctors were still pointing out that some of the principles for balancing the humours would work as modern recommendations for leading a healthy life. Balanced intake of food (not too much, not too little, the right types of food) and gentle exercise are really not that alien to modern thought.

The interesting thing is why our wonderful scientific method failed us in not being applied earlier to medieval medicine. Pharmaceutical firms look for more medicines and more ways of turning those medicines into money. Scientists question the universe and discover fabulous new things about our world every day. Why was it – until very recently- just assumed that the Middle Ages were an area where nothing good was to be found, medically? 

We carry around deep inside us cultural pictures of various periods. Every time someone says “Don’t get all Medieval on me” or “Go back to the Middle Ages!” they’re drawing on a set of pictures, and those pictures say “A time of filth and superstition.” They say a lot more, too. Romance. Adventure. Early deaths. Crusades. It all adds up. It adds up to a sense of period so very strong that when scientists were looking for ways of expanding their understanding of medicine, they turned to Ancient Egypt rather than to Medieval Europe. They often assume that medieval doctors were simply fakes, and that medieval diagnosis and treatment wasn’t worth investigating.

We live with assumptions. We create them in order to live, really. If we didn’t assume that there was air to breathe, we’d be in a spot of bother, so we don’t test air and gravity every single day just to feel safe about them. Some assumptions (like there being air) are very sensible. Science fiction writers test these things and explore what it would be like if… and this is why all fiction is important. It allows us to test assumptions safely and to explore the universe, with or without gravity and air.

Historical fiction enables us to explore history safely. It tells us stories of the past couched within safe parameters. It can also (unintentionally, for the most part) reinforce some of the less sensible assumptions. We know that people breathed in the Middle Ages. This is a sensible assumption. We do not know that people died from the prescriptions of their regular doctors. We certainly don’t know that all doctors were quacks. And no-one has yet tested a complete set of medieval medical cures to find out just what the standards were for the doctors who used them. I know from my students that some diagnoses were accurate and some cures useful and that others were less so. That’s not a proper inquiry, however, it’s random sampling by a non-scientist. 

My answer to general questions about medieval medicine right now is “I need more parameters for your question. What types of practitioners are you talking about? University-educated doctors or apprenticed doctors, apothecaries, midwives, something else entirely? What sort of illnesses? What region?”

 Even then, my answer will be a bit hazy, for I need to read more studies by modern scientists, analysing the usefulness of the work of all these people, cure by cure. Until I get those answers, I don’t know. None of us do. 

The one thing we do know is the assumptions about bad medicine in the Middle Ages are just that. 

I usually offer a pacifier, however. I point out that just after the Middle Ages, Nostradamus was very famous for his medicine (despite not being licensed to practise as a doctor) and that I have his recipe book and I offer his recipe for quince jelly. My mother made it recently, in the spirit of scientific inquiry. She says it’s very nice, but that she should have cooked it a bit longer.

Review: Paul Scott's The Chinese Love Pavilion, by Y S Lee

July 2, 2015, 4:00 pm

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Hello, friends. This month, I’d like to talk about a novel by Paul Scott called The Chinese Love Pavilion. I know, I know: SKETCHY TITLE ALERT! Don't worry: I understand that this is a PG-rated blog.

I picked up the novel as part of the research for my work-in-progress (which is set in Malaya during the Second World War). Since The Chinese Love Pavilion takes place largely in Malaya just after the war, I was eager to experience another writer's vision of the place. Also, while I’ve never read Scott's best-known work, the Raj Quartet, his reputation goes before him. However, I’m going to warn you now: if you’re a rabid fan of The Jewel in the Crown, brace yourself. This will get ugly.

Cover of the 2013 edition, published by the University of Chicago Press. The building pictured looks slightly like the pavilion described in the novel.

The Chinese Love Pavilion, published in 1960, is about a friendship between two Englishmen in the colonies. The narrator, Tom Brent, is young and in search of a shape for his life. He meets the unconventional, charismatic Brian Saxby in 1930s Bombay and, over the course of a whiskey-soaked evening, falls under his spell. This sets up the men for long conversations about the soul, fate, and the meaning of life. I have a limited tolerance for cod philosophy at the best of times, and that limit plummets when the "exotic" East is used as a picturesque backdrop for these kinds of musings. However, I stuck with it.

The story then skips over the Second World War and picks up in 1946 or so, when a war-injured Brent is brought to Malaya and instructed to find Saxby. Apparently, Saxby is hiding out the Malayan jungle and might be responsible for the revenge-slayings of some Chinese civilians. The metaphysical novel morphs into a kind of homage to Heart of Darkness, with Brent travelling deeper into jungle-dark territory to find his legendary but tortured friend. Promising, right?

An early edition

Actually, I can't remember the last time I was this appalled by a well-reviewed novel. The self-indulgent metaphysical musings drove me berserk, but I understand that this is a question of taste and personal bias. I am happy to report that the pacing of the novel's second half is excellent. Also, Scott is gifted with an extraordinary sense of place. His descriptions of the Malayan landscape are vivid and entirely convincing, and his eye for natural detail is impeccable.

However, there's one massive problem with the novel that taints everything else it attempts: the way it uses prostitution. Women - specifically, the sexual services of young Indian and Chinese girls - are the common currency of this novel. I'm not exaggerating in the least. Here are three conversations from the novel, in the order they occur:

At a restaurant in Bombay, where Brent and Saxby have just dined:

"[The girls are] clean. Clean now, you understand, not later. Later the bloom goes. Disease enters."

"Does he sell them too?"

"To us first. Honoured guests. Then to others.

When Brent visits Saxby after a three-year gap:

"The little one holding the curtain so patiently, is for you. She is an untouchable, and, I am told, a virgin."

I looked from Saxby to the girl and back to Saxby. "That was very thoughtful of you."

He smiled. He said, "I have always been accommodating to my friends."

In small-town Malaya, where the officer-in-charge offers Brent the use of "his" designated prostitute:

"Did you like her?"

"Yes, I liked her."

..."Well while you're here she's yours. It all comes under the contract but you'll probably like to give her the occasional present."

"It's very hospitable of you. What about you?"

"I'll manage, I expect."

Do you see the progression here? Prostitution is first an economic fact, and then a gesture of welcome between friends, and finally a common courtesy, like a cigarette or a cup of tea. I wondered, at first, if Scott’s obsessive attention to prostitution could be read as a kind of critique of colonialism, or a comment on the moral effects of the British imperial project. I also considered the possibility that Scott’s irony was so subtle as to be undetected by this reader. Sadly, no.

In a still-later scene, Brent describes a British soldier cuddling a prostitute named Suki "who by European standards was no more than a child and looked absurdly fragile in his beefy arms". This is an isolated moment of light-hearted physical contrast in a novel that otherwise takes itself extremely seriously. Significantly, it features a young woman who, if she was "European" - that is, worthy of civilized treatment - would be "no more than a child". I don't think the word "beefy" is an accident, here. It's an evocation of what's familiarly, essentially English. And the "beefy" Englishman who holds Suki - a loud-mouthed but fundamentally loyal and reliable soldier - has the approval of all characters. Could the subtext be any clearer? Child prostitution is a harmless joke, so long as the women are brown and the men are white.

Could it get any worse? Why, yes, it can!

The second, thriller-esque half of the novel turns on the fate of Teena, an enigmatic prostitute of Eurasian descent with whom Brent falls in love. Of course, a “woman of the world” (Scott’s euphemism) cannot be rewarded with a fairy-tale ending. She was always going to be punished for her sins. Teena’s clumsily foreshadowed death is never fully resolved: she might have been murdered, or she might have committed suicide. Brent can’t decide, and nobody else cares. And ultimately, in the schema of The Chinese Love Pavilion, the question matters not. Brent concludes, “Sometimes, I think she was doomed in that few seconds it took me to unbolt and open the door of the hostel in Bombay to which Saxby had come to find shelter…” That is, Teena’s fate was decided by the initial meeting between Brent and Saxby some ten years earlier, in a different country, when Teena herself was a small child. This is perhaps more illogical to a person who’s read the novel even than to somebody who’s never heard of Paul Scott.

The primary relationship of the novel isn’t that between Brent and Teena, or Brent and the Far East, or spirituality and war; it’s the bond holding together Brent and Saxby, and their fumbling attempts to understand their own importance in the world. India and Malaya are only picturesque backdrops, Teena merely a useful symbol, the Second World War but a minor interruption.

When I mentioned these criticisms to a friend (who is a huge fan of the Raj Quartet), she half-heartedly defended the novel as “an accurate representation of how white men viewed native women at that time, as much as it repulsive to us now”. I believe that it’s certainly an accurate representation of how Paul Scott viewed women of colour, both in 1946 when the story takes place, and in 1960 when it was published. But is that sufficient to excuse the novel? I think not.

A metaphysical novel about homosocial friendship and spiritual destiny could happen at any time, in any setting. Using the “exotic” East to lend sexual intrigue and distract credulous readers is a lazy narrative trick. Those who love Scott’s other work deserve better. We all do.

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Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn mysteries (Walker Books). She blogs every Wednesday at www.yslee.com. 

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Vik and The Night Raider

June 14, 2015, 5:00 pm

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by Marie-Louise Jensen

One of the first questions I tend to ask myself, once a story has formed in my mind, is where is it set? I need to be able to see it. I've mentioned this in connection with Runaway in my last post, but it's true of everything I write. Sometimes it's a wonderful excuse to revisit a place I love.
When I wrote The Night Raider for the Fiction Express website last year, I wanted to choose a different location in Iceland to my two teen novels. There, I fictionalised the settlement of Husavik on the north coast. For this story for younger readers, I chose another place in Iceland that made a big impression on me.
I don't know whether it was the incredible weather we had the first time I visited Vik on the south coast, the sky cloudless and the deepest blue I've ever seen, or whether it was the incredible black volcanic-shingle beach:

"Reynisfjara, Suðurland, Islandia, 2014-08-17, DD 163" by Diego Delso. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reynisfjara,_Su%C3%B0urland,_Islandia,_2014-08- 17,_DD_163.JPG#/media/File:Reynisfjara,_Su%C3%B0urland,_Islandia,_2014-08-17,_DD_163.JPG This is a beautiful picture, but it doesn't fully depict how black the shingle is to stand on, and no picture can communicate the sound of the beach - the roar and rattle of the stones as the wild North Atlantic ocean surges against it.  Another thing I loved about Vik, was that it was the first place I saw puffins flying from the cliffs. I saw plenty later, but this was my first sighting of the funny, charming, awkward fliers:

"Puffin002" by T.Müller - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puffin002.jpg#/media/File:Puffin002.jpg A third thing I loved about Vik was the campsite was right below bird cliffs, so the second time I visited, and camped, we had kitiwakes and other gulls nesting right around us. Of course Vik also lies close to one of Iceland's big volcanoes, Katla. It is due an eruption soon  and the town is on permanent alert.  The Vikings settlers in my story don't know about the volcano; it's lurking beneath the glaciers. They are more concerned with a mysterious thief who is stealing livestock in the night... The Night Raider is print-publishing at the end of June and is suitable for ages 9-11.  Follow me on twitter: @jensen_ml

Hardknott and the Dalmatians - by Katherine Langrish

July 3, 2015, 9:30 pm

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Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.

The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone... 

From Roman Wall Blues by WH Auden

On holiday in the Lakes last year, we decided to take our car up and over first the Wrynose Pass and then the frankly terrifying Hardknott Pass, one of the two steepest roads in England - I mean, look at it - and stop at Hardknott Roman Fort, which is over the other side. 

I was glad I wasn't driving. And I'm a Yorkshire girl who learned to drive on the steep and twisting roads of the Dales - but at least with those you've got nice solid drystone walls between you and any drop. This is nothing but hairpin bends, most of it single track, and nothing but rock and air on either side. And lonely... oh, so lonely!

Not even the Romans could have made a straight road up here.  There's every chance that, way back in the first century,  the cohort of unfortunate soldiers who had to construct and then live in the fort on the other side of the pass, trudged up this very series of bends. At last they had their feet on the ground. I shut my eyes for most of the journey.

Diving down the other side it was a relief to spot the Roman fort below (you can see the walls snaking over the contours at the top of the picture above). We pulled over on to a narrow gravel shoulder and got out. Our dog jumped happily out of the back.

And we had brought her to the right spot. The fort was built in the early second century on a road (Roman or earlier) which runs all the way from the inland forts at Kendal and Ambleside and down Eskdale to the coast at Ravenglass, where there's another fort with a sumptuous bathhouse.  'Recalling [William] Camden's remark that there were some who thought the old bathhouse at Ravenglass to be the court of the legendary King Eveling, [RG] Collingwood expanded in his guidebook: "...people thought it was the Lyons Garde of the Arthurian romances... or they said it was the castle of King Eveling or Avaloc, the husband of the sea-fairy Morgan le Fay, who was king over the island where the blessed dead dwelt."'  Under Another Sky, Journeys In Roman Britain, by Charlotte Higgins, 2013.

The Roman name for the fort was Mediobogdum. It was built under the Emperor Hadrian and would have formed a base for troops patrolling the potentially hostile native population in the valleys and on the lower fells. It was abandoned during the Antonine advance into Scotland, but then re-occupied:  according to an inscription now preserved in the Tullie House Museum in Carlisle, the garrison here in the mid fourth century was a detachment of 500 cavalry of the 6th Cohort of Dalmatians from, of course, the Roman province of Dalmatia on the eastern Adriatic.

Fortunately we had a Dalmatian with us, and she wasted no time in exploring all over her ancestral home.

Here she goes, running past the beautifully preserved outer wall...

 
 ... and in through the main gate...

 
... to explore inside the fort, where the outline of three buildings are still clearly visible above ground: a granary, a garrison headquarters building and a house for the commander.

The fort has the most stunning views. It's at an altitude of 800 feet, perched on a rocky prominence above Eskdale.  This is the view from the rear of the fort, and my photo really hardly does justice to the precipitous drop.

Did the soldiers of the Fourth Cohort of Dalmatians appreciate the view, though?  It's hard to imagine that they did. Unusually for a Roman fort, no trace of any vicus has ever been found around it; either the site was too remote or the population too unfriendly for a civilian village to spring up around the walls. It must have been a severe, lonely, isolated posting.There is supposed to be a rare example of a parade ground built higher up the slope, a levelled area enclosed with a raised bank; we went looking for it but honestly we couldn't find it. To my eyes the ground was either lumpy with rock and bracken, or else reedy, spongy turf running with water.  I couldn't imagine the soldiers having much fun carrying out their manouevres under the eye of their commander, with the wind taking their ears off and their hobnailed leather boots soaking up the wet. Incidentally, several preserved leather shoes or boots were discovered at this site at a dig in 1968.

It was probably a necessity rather than a luxury that this fort has a fine bath house with a vaulted circular sweatroom, a suditorium, in which the cold and clammy soldiers could bask in the only real heat for miles and miles.

But I do I wonder if any of them ever got home to sunny Dalmatia?



Picture credits.

All photos copyright Katherine Langrish except for the photo of Hardknott Pass, which is a personal photograph taken by Christopher Kennett on 18th June 2004, Wikimedia Commons

26 Pairs of Eyes by Joan Lennon

July 4, 2015, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: Anarchy in Fitzrovia by Lydia Syson

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Back in February I posted about My Foundling Girl - the object I'd been assigned as part of 26 Pairs of Eyes: Looking at the Overlooked.  This project was a collaboration between the writers' collective 26 and The Foundling Museum in London.  The curators chose 26 objects which were then assigned at random to 26 writers for their response.  The resulting exhibition runs all summer.*  If you possibly can, go and visit - the museum is fascinating - humbling, heartbreaking and hopeful in equal measures - and the sestudes (62 word pieces - 62 being 26 backwards) offer new insights into the chosen artefacts.

If you can't visit, though, there's an online alternative here, where you can browse through the objects the curators chose, the authors' responses and background pieces on the process as well.  

My object was a marble bust called "The Foundling Girl" made by David Watson Stevenson in 1871 - 

and my response to her is here.  Is she my favourite object in the whole museum?  Absolutely. 


* The exhibition runs from 4 June to 6 September 2015 at The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London.


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

Anarchy in Fitzrovia by Lydia Syson

July 5, 2015, 4:02 pm

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Nervous eyes on cloudy skies, last month I slid a garden cane into a homemade red flag and set off to Fitzrovia lead my first ever historical walk.

Liberty’s Fire is a novel that could hardly be more firmly set in Paris, but in a sense, Fitzrovia is both where it began and where it ends.  I had found my way to the Paris Commune through the chance discovery that my great-great grandmother, Nannie Dryhurst, had worked as a volunteer teacher in the early 1890s at the anarchist International School set up by the legendary Communarde, Louise Michel – more about whom here.  And since this part of London was home to several generations of French revolutionaries during the nineteenth century, I don’t think I’m giving too much away to say that it made sense to gather my surviving characters here at the close of the novel. When the Fitzrovia Festivalinvited me to design a walk exploring the fates of Communard exiles in London, I happily agreed – and began to investigate.  Here's just a little of what I discovered and the route we took, and since I’m not now extemporising on the move, I can include some references word-for-word rather than summarised from memory…

Outside the Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Centre, Tottenham Street,  with some of the walkers before we set off.

First stop: Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Centre, Tottenham Street

A little background before I introduce my main characters….French political exiles came to London in several waves.  The first were known as the quarante-huitards, who took flight in the wake of the 1848 uprising (vividly – if partially – described in Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education) and a few years later in ’51 after Louis-Napoleon’s coup, when the Second Republic was overthrown and the Second Empire set up.  (Sticking with fiction, Zola’s The Belly of Paris/The Fat and the Thinopens with the return of his hero from a penal colony seven years later.)  Following the dramatic fall of the Paris Commune in May 1871, and the horrors of ‘Bloody Week’, over three 3,000 took refuge here, and were welcomed and looked after by the rump of the quarante-huitards who remained.  Some of course were involved in both revolutions, having returned to Paris in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war after the defeat of the Emperor and the declaration of the Third Republic.  They fled to escape firing squads, prison and transportation to New Caledonia.  Most were ordinary working-class Communards in their 20s and 30s, 1200 were children, and some were prominent political leaders like Lissagaray. Wondering why London’s oldest patisserie, Maison Bertaux, was founded in 1871? Wonder no longer. And then followed yet another wave, arriving in dribs and drabs in the decade after the amnesty of 1880.  Some, like Louise Michel, had tried going back to France to take up the revolutionary cudgels once more after eight years in the Pacific, and were fed up with constant arrests and imprisonment.  They were not necessarily anarchists before the Commune, but many embraced the movement in one form or another afterwards. 

Second stop: Newman Passage

Old Fitzrovia lives on in this atmospheric alleyway, pictured here in the illustrated newspaper, The Graphic, (2 February 1972).  

©The Museum of London

Most Communards arrived here with absolutely nothing, lucky to have kept their lives.  Many had had nothing to start with, which was why they were prepared to risk everything for the progressive Commune. As Constance Bantman puts it, ‘the comrades tended to the most basic needs of one another’, and as you can see here, this meant feeding minds as well as bodies.  This co-operative ‘soup kitchen’ allowed exiles to talk as well as eat, and carried on the principles of collective action and social reform established by Communards like Nathalie Lemel and her fellow Internationalist Eugene Varlin in Paris in 1868 when the Emperor’s restrictions on freedom of association first began to lift a little.  Both were bookbinders and trade unionists, and Varlin, one of the most popular delegates on the Commune’s Council, who had opposed the anti-democratic Committee of Public Safety with its echoes of the Terror, fought on the barricades in the 6^thand 10^th arrondisements during Bloody Week, and tried to stop the controversial execution of the Commune’s hostages.  However he was arrested after being recognised by a priest, tortured, and shot, and died with ‘Vive la Commune’ on his lips.  In 2007 a small (triangular) square in the Marais, very near the French headquarters of the International Workingmen’s Association was named after Lemel, who is credited with having converted Louise Michel to anarchism while they were both deportees. 

Newman Passage

Third stop: the Autonomie Club, 32 Charlotte Street. 

Later exiles found soup and comradeship just round the corner at the Autonomie Club, a forum for international anarchism in London founded by German comrades in 1886. In November that year it held a fundraising evening featuring speeches, song, dancing and a tombola to support a radical newsletter in Bohemia.  Later the club moved a few streets away to Windmill Street, and it may have been here that ‘chemistry lessons’ were held…a.k.a. instruction in the making of explosives.  The principle of ‘propaganda of the deed’ was beginning to divide the movement.  The police continued to raid the premises.

I imagine my great-great grandmother introducing her lover Henry Nevinson to the enticing world of the Autonomie club, as they both escaped unhappy marriages for the combined excitement of politics and romance.  In a crowded cellar, full of foreign refugees  and English ‘enthusiasts for anarchism’ Nevinson met for the first time the Russian anarchist, Pierre Kropotkin. 

“Anarchists do not have a chairman, but when enough of us had assembled a man stood up and began to speak.  His pronunciation was queer until one grew accustomed to it (‘own’ rhyed with ‘town’, ‘law’ with ‘low’, and the ‘sluffter field of Urope’ became a kindly joke among us).  He began with the sentence, ‘Our first step must be the abolition of all low’.  I was a little started. I had no exaggerated devotion to the law, but, as a first step, its abolition seemed rather a bound.  Without a pause the speaker continued speaking, with rapidity, but with the difficulties of a foreigner who has to translate rushing thoughts as he goes along…Comrade Kropotkin was then about fifty, but he looked more.  He was already bald.  His face was battered and crinkled into a kind of softness, perhaps owing to loss of teeth through prison scurvy.  His unrestrained and bushy beard was already touched with the white that soon overcame its reddish brown.  But eternal youth diffused his speech and stature.  His mind was always full gallop, like a horse that sometimes stumbles in its eagerness.  Behind his spectacles his grey eyes gleamed with invincible benevolence….He seemed longing to take all mankind to his bosom and keep it warm…” (Fire of Life, page 53)

The 'Anarchist Prince', Kropotkin

Dryhurst was already a close friend of Kropotkin through the English Anarchist group centred around Charlotte Wilson, founder of the only recently defunct Freedom newspaper; later Dryhurst would translate his book The Great French Revolution, 1789-1793.  Nick Heath’s short biography of Dryhurst includes a description of her own first meeting with Kropotkin at a party given by William Morris.  Many readers of this blog will already know that Kropotkin – along with Stepniak – was the model for E. Nesbit’s Russian dissident in The Railway Children. A little later I waved my red flag and reminded my fellow-walkers of Bobbie's red petticoats.

Fourth stop: Conville Place

Surely the prettiest street in Fitzrovia?  I couldn’t resist this setting for the final chapter of Liberty’s Fire, although you have to imagine it without the window boxes and birdsong.  Not wishing to give too much away about my book’s ending, A wide, quiet empty pavement and refreshingly flowery backdrop gave us a moment away from passing traffic and pedestrians to discuss why London was such a magnet for revolutionary exiles, and how we know about what they got up to when they got here.

London was an obvious destination for escaping communards: its size and publishing industry offered the best chance of work, not to mention political sympathy and French speakers.  Within the capital, Fitzrovia had plenty of cheap accommodation, and was already well established as a home of freethinkers. Cleveland Hall, for example, was a centre of secularism, where Harriet Law, the first woman in the First International and a salaried public speaker had been lecturing since the 1860s. 

Patriotic libertarianism was a defining characteristic of Victorian Britain, a nation which utterly refused to kow-tow to despotic foreign governments.  This made it one of the few countries in Europe where you couldn’t be extradited for political crimes.  Communard, journalist and novelist Jules Vallès (another great source for Liberty’s Fire) was deeply critical of London, not least the lack of places the city offered for illicit sex, and the canoodling on park benches that resulted, but said London taught him ‘what Liberty is.’  Kropotkin became cynical about the joys of free speech, press and assembly, arguing to Emma Goldman that political liberties here were actually the best security against the spread of discontent: ‘The average Britisher loves to think he is free; it helps him to forget his misery.  That is the irony and pathos of the English working class.’ 

And the most fruitful source for academics researching French exiles in London? The police records.  Spies and informers flocked to Fitzrovia too, and anonymous agent reports found their way back to Paris.  You couldn’t step out onto Charlotte Street without bumping into a ‘mouchard’.  Not that their reports were necessarily reliable.  Denunciations and counter-claims were frequent. (Nick Heath paints a lively picture of the espionage scene here.)

Charles Malato’s satirical memoir of his time in the ‘small anarchist republic’, The Joys of Exile, (Les Joyeusetés de l’Exil)is extremely entertaining but also needs to be read with a small pinch of salt.  I would dearly love to find out more about Malato, a fascinating character who was exiled to New Caledonia with his father in his teens and ended up in London as a journalist, Henry Rochefort’s secretary, and also the French correspondent for Freedom, who provides very lively descriptions of our next characters, and was also the author of a vaudeville play staged at the Autonomie Club called ‘Dynamite Wedding’, which mocked clueless spies and Parisian police agents.  The final chapter of his book, a guide to new exiles, includes a hilarious phrasebook, giving first the French, then the written English, then 'Anglais parlé' in a heavy French accent, with useful expressions like Bladé forégneur!, Oh! maille pôr belli and Ite iz improper you nême de mêlée of de henna, ouse nême iz olso given tou enne odeur tin'gue ('It is improper to name the male of the hen, whose name is also given to an other thing.')

Fifth stop…via Goodge Street…59 and 67 Charlotte Street

67 Charlotte Street

59 Charlotte Street

As we left Conville Place, I had to announce an on-the-hoof change of plan…a hasty discussion with Linus of the Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Centre about changes in street names – presumably the bane of all city guides’ lives – had just revealed that our next stop was not where we thought it was.  The Librairie Internationale, the bookshop and newsagentrun by Armand Lapie, and probably the most heavily policed and spied-upon spot in Fitzrovia in the 1890s was not at 30 Goodge Street but at 30 Little Goodge Street – now renamed Goodge Place, and precisely where we had begun our walk.  Actually, a much more atmospheric spot too – the street bends nicely, so you can imagine people hiding round corners – and it's one that’s changed less since then than many.  I’ve not yet been able to establish the numbering in the 1890s, so I’m still working on the precise location of the shop, which was a crucial crossnational hub for continental anarchists, while Lapie has been revealed as by far the most densely connected individual in those circles.  Later, in Geneva,  Lapie later published the memoirs of Victorine B. – Souvenir d’une morte vivante– another of my key sources. Madam Brocher  – as I later discovered – was also involved in Michel’s school.  More and more links kept emerging….

So we hurried back to Charlotte Street, where Louise Michel lived at one point, at no. 59.  She had quite a few London addresses over the years, including one just round the corner from where I live now in South London, and seems to have shared most of them with one or more cats…she even came back from New Caledonia with several stray felines in her pockets, and was as incapable of passing an animal in distress as she was of walking by a suffering human being.  (Did you notice the cat - and the policeman - in the picture of the Newman Passage co-operative kitchen?)

A few doors up was another landmark to which newcomers were always directed, Victor Richard’s épicerie.  Malato paints the grocer in Rabelaisian terms – rotund in figure and character, bald, pink and charming – and joked that he’d been radicalised by prolonged contact with red beans and believed white ones to be reactionary.  He also said that before his flight to England, Richard had contributed to the defeat of the Prussians by supplying the French army with beans that made them fart and that he advocated pickling the deputies of the Versailles government and feeding them to the hungry of Paris.  A great friend of Vallès, for years Richard provided exiles with a poste restante and staging post.

Sixth stop: 19 Fitzroy Street

And finally we came to the site of the International School where educationalist Margaret McMillan - named as a teacher on the prospectus - was shocked to find children gazing at pictures of Communards lined up against the wall to be shot and the hanged Haymarket anarchists of Chicago.  I had been confused about exactly where the school was, as so many accounts put it in Fitzroy Square - where a suitable corner building still stands - and my hopes were further raised by finding a painting in the Tate of that building by Henry Nevinson’s son Christopher (think Kit Neville in Pat Barker’s Life Class). But Fitzroy Square was actually the name given to the whole area in those days – ‘Fitzrovia’ wasn’t coined until the 1940s – and both the prospectus itself, and the two leading historians of the school, Constance Bantman and Martyn Everett, confirmed that the school really was in Fitzroy Street.  

The school itself definitely deserves a blogpost of its own, on which I will hold off until Everett publishes his research later this year.  All will then become clear, I hope, about the role played by Michel's colleague and school secretary, agent provocateur Auguste Coulon, the 'vile' spymaster Melville, and the bomb-making equipment found in the basement that seems to have got the school closed down.  Today I will leave you to admire the beautiful cover of the school's 1890 prospectus  designed by no other than Walter Crane. I first encountered Crane on my mother's knee at the piano, and introduced him to my own children the same way, singing nursery rhymes like 'Lavender's Blue' from the exquisitely illustrated pages of The Baby's Opera and The Baby's Bouquet.  Of course my mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother must all have sung from those pages too. I didn't even think about his politics.

©The British Library

I love the fact that this teacher plucks apples for her pupils from the Tree of Enlightenment rather than the Tree of Knowledge.  She wears a liberty cap while filling her lamp with the oil of Truth.  No surprise, looking at this, to find the name W. Morris among the Honorary Members of the school's committee.  'From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs', a slogan popularised by Marx, was actually first used by the French socialist Louis Blanc - not a Communard, but in the provisional government set up after the 1848 revolution - who lived in exile in London (though in St John's Wood rather than Fitzrovia) until the Third Republic was declared in September 1870 when he rushed back to Paris.  

Turn the page, and the prospectus announces its principles to be those of Mikhail Bakunin, founder of collectivist anarchism, who believed 'the whole education of children must be founded on the scientific development of reason, not on that of faith; on the development of personal dignity and independence, not on that of piety and obedience. . . the final object of education necessarily being the formation of free men full of respect and love for the liberty of others.' Louise Michel naturally does not forget her girls, and adds beneath: 'In a word, therefore, the object of the School is to make free and noble-minded men and women, not commercial machines.'

Tramping the streets looking for clues while you're researching a historical novel is a wonderful thing…tramping them after you've written it, in the company of curious and like-minded strangers and new acquaintances, even more so. Long may the Fitzrovia Festival and the Neighbourhood Centre continue to flourish.

www.lydiasyson.com 

                                   

THE AMERICAN CEMETERY in CAMBRIDGE by Adèle Geras

July 6, 2015, 11:00 pm

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Back in 1962, when I was 18 years old, I was madly in love with an undergraduate at Pembroke College, Cambridge. On a couple of occasions, we went to the Eagle pub and the tales of young American airmen, stationed round Cambridge during World War 2, made a huge impression on me. Their names are there, and the pub nowadays makes a big deal, quite rightly, of the historical connection.

In 2010, when we moved to Cambridge after many years in Manchester, the American Cemetery was high on the list of places that my husband and I wanted to visit. His last illness and his death meant that he never saw this place, but the other day our friends Bob Borsley and Ewa Jaworska took me there and I wanted to write about it on this blog as a kind of tribute, both to those who are buried there and also as a kind of stand-in for my husband, Norman Geras, who would definitely have written about the visit on his blog, normblog  if he could have done.

The sun was shining on the day we were there. There are nearly 4000 individual markers,  each with a name, a rank and home state cut into the stone. The date of each death is there, but the dates of birth have been omitted. Most of the dead were in their twenties. 

On a long wall that stretches for yards, the names of the missing are inscribed. These are the people whose bodies were never recovered. 



There is a very interesting and well-organised exhibition in the visitors' centre, and I'm sure Cambridge schools visit it regularly. Around the Centre, a small area of the garden has been left to grow wild. The man we spoke to behind the desk told us that the gardeners in charge of the rest of the cemetery were a bit sniffy about this exception to the apple - pie order which prevails in the rest of this place 

Because that's the overriding impression. The lawns are beautiful: mown to absolute perfection. Every single memorial, every one that we saw, looks as though it went up yesterday: gleaming stone in a pristine state of shining whiteness. Not one single piece of litter, not one bird dropping, not one cigarette stub mars the landscape. We saw a man travelling between the graves on a motorised mower, but it must take many people all their time to keep the cemetery in this remarkable state.



It seemed to me that this clean and tidy and beautiful way of remembering the fallen was a loud and vigorous "ya boo sucks"to Death; a contrast to the blood and dirt and darkness of war. The tidiness of the cemetery is a counterbalance to the chaos of those years and it's clear that today's custodians feel a duty to maintain this and that's admirable. It's very hard to walk round without tears coming into your eyes. It's also worth remembering, alongside thinking about the dead, that many wars are still being waged. Sacrifices are still being made, and there are still freedoms that are worth fighting for.  This post goes up on the 10th  anniversary of the July 7th, 2005 terrorist atrocity in London and our thoughts should also be with those who died  that day and  those who mourn them.