Something is Rotten in the Borough of Southwark – Michelle Lovric

December 9, 2015, 4:30 pm

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Look at this lovely little blue-grey building, tucked into the Thames foreshore at Clink Street in London.

Let's call it Wharf W, because it is not just a place but also a parable.

Hard by London Bridge, the site of the city's earliest settlements, this current incarnation of the wharf dates back to around 1814, with foundations from the late 17th century. Its English Heritage Listing says, ‘waterfront warehouses of this date in London are now a rarity.’

Back in 1580, when this sketch was made, an older wharf stood on the same spot.

William Smith's MS. of the Description of England, c. 1580 (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Wharf W is part of one of the 2007 Southwark Plan’s "Landmark views", being in the prospect of the Scheduled Ancient Monument of Winchester Palace, the seat of the Bishop of Winchester from 1150 to 1626. Such views, according to the Plan, should be ‘protected and enhanced’.



The Rose Window at Winchester Palace after one of the fires in the early nineteenth century

Clink Street itself is a part of the Borough High Street Conservation Area, which includes the historic market and Southwark Cathedral. Fromm 1462, the Southwark Fair was held a stone's throw away.

Southwark Fair, a renowned place of amusement, with a variety of theatrical establishments. Engraving by T. Cook after William Hogarth (courtesy of the Wellcome Library)

Shakespeare's Rose and Globe Theatres were within shouting distance. In the 18th century, when the foundations of Wharf W were laid, Clink Street was lined with the establishments of millers, lighter men, and the merchants of coal, wood and ivory.

a sketch of the street elevation of Wharf W after it was re-zoned for residential development

As Southwark Council’s 2007 Character Area Appraisal notes, ‘the Clink Street riverfront largely comprises of 5-6 storey brick warehouses, which have been sympathetically redeveloped to retain their original riverfront character … These buildings form a continuous building line and contribute to the character and appearance of the Borough High Street Conservation Area.’

It is the unspoiled austere character of these riverside warehouses that drew me to this area fifteen years ago. There was something irresistibly authentic about them. No one had been allowed to prettify them, pastiche them or make them seem like something they were not. They are hardworking industrial buildings, the kind that would tip their hat to a passing toff, saying ‘Morning, guv’nor’. And then get on with the job.

The street was largely destroyed by fire in 1812 and 1814. But Wharf W was rebuilt in its original sturdy, serviceable fashion. Business continued as it ever had. My roof still has the old pulleys used to lift bales of hops, malt, hay and fuel from ships that arrived from Kent. The hops would be wheeled across suspended walkways to what is now Victor Wharf, where a huge grindstone survived until a direct hit by a bomb in 1941.

I’ve set two of my novels, The Remedy and The Mourning Emporium, around Clink Street. Other novelist friends have used Wharf W as the settings for scenes in their books, notably Nick Green in his Cat Kin trilogy. And before us, Clink Street inspired Dickens, who set scenes from Barnaby Rudge here. Tiny cobbled Clink Street had its own tavern, The Bell, the haunt of watermen, smugglers and press-gangs ready to prey on the likes of the eponymous hero of Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random.

The austere dignity of Wharf W has survived the passing of two hundred years.

It survived the closing of the Thrale brewery that dominated the area’s commerce since the times of Samuel Johnson.

It survived the Great Depression.

It survived the Luftwaffe, unlike the grindstone next door.

It survived a period of dereliction in the mid twentieth century, followed by a long occupation by squatters.

The dignity of Wharf W next survived developers, who made sure that the sober old façade stayed simple and unaccessorized when they had the building re-zoned for residential use at the end of the last century. The best protection for antique buildings, according to English Heritage/Historic England, is to have them occupied by people who willingly undertake a caretaking role. That’s how it has worked at Wharf W. People who have come here have stayed here. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we love our building. For all its sober aspect and its expensive maintenance habits, Wharf W has for the last fifteen years remained as full of life as it is of history.

Wharf W’s dignity also survived a Famous Multinational Chain of Coffee Shops, the ground floor tenant, for more than a decade. Famous Chain was not allowed to customise the building with its usual illustrated and coloured logos but was restricted to a simple black sign in keeping with the sobriety of the industrial building.

But that dignity has not survived this terrible year of 2015, in which Southwark Council, together with Famous Chain, has allowed this poor old wharf to be subject to a brutal and cynical re-invention. Wharf W has become almost literally a cartoon, its authenticity undermined and its honest aesthetic compromised.

I was awoken one Sunday morning in January by violent drilling deep in the bowels of the building. It was so loud that I feared that our flood defences were falling. I rushed downstairs and had time to glimpse the entire premises gutted before I was rudely ordered out. Famous Chain had sub-let the space to a new tenant who didn’t think it was necessary to seek Listed Building or Building Regulations consent to gut the ground floor of a Listed building – one that is 85 percent residential – on a Sunday morning.

That was just the beginning. The same Famous Chain sub-tenant then illegally opened louvres, hung racks of merchandise in the public realm, added advertising balloons. Outsize cartoon doormats were placed in the entrances. A glass kiosk was built where the fire escape used to be, and was deployed for hanging more merchandise. Garish and illegal A frames jutted out into the narrow street.

All this was upsetting, but what was truly shocking was the lighting. Thirty-eight large and powerful floodlights were inserted in the ceiling. Six advertising neons were positioned to be visible from the apertures. Illuminated Coca Cola advertising was also angled to be seen from the wide doorways. And a multi-coloured floodlight was positioned above the doorway to send violet, orange, magenta and blue rays into the street, changing every three seconds.

Our sober old wharf looked as if an alien spaceship had landed inside it.

We had been rebranded.

But that was not enough for the Famous Chain sub-tenant. He demanded to open up more display space for his goods by removing a series of wooden louvres: he considered it his right to rupture the continuous plain surface that is the defining architectural characteristic of Clink Street. His plan was to replace that plain exterior with textural and tonal mishmash of doors, windows, merchandise and furious illuminations visible from the public realm. His proposals meant that the proportion of solid historical brick to commercial window space would be reversed at street level. There would be less of the Listed building’s quiet fabric, and more of the Famous Chain's sub-tenant’s loud merchandise and screaming lighting on view.

You would think that a Grade II listed building of this nature – and in this place – would be protected from such treatment.

You would think that the Design and Conservation team, the Planning Enforcement team, the Highways enforcement team would all be on the case to put a smart stop to such a grim transformation in one of the oldest quarters of London, especially one proposed by a trader with a year’s history of non-compliance and unauthorised works.

I suspect that, in many other boroughs, those teams would be on that case. But on December 1st, the London Borough of Southwark’s Planning Committee granted the Famous Chain's sub-tenant permission to do everything he asked to do to this building, on the recommendation of the Team Leader, Design and Conservation. This officer told the Committee that the sub-tenant's proposed changes to the building were for the benefit of the public, and that they would enhance the historic context. This was despite eloquent speeches from our Ward Councillor and from our resident representative, defending the historic fabric of Wharf W. No site visit was recommended by this officer, and the decision was made on the basis of two small black and white drawings.

The world knows about the Famous Multinational Chain of Coffee Shops and its tax affairs. Famous Chain is not so well known as a player in the U.K. retail property market. In fact, they had been reasonable neighbours until they moved out and sub-let to our new occupants. But unfortunately Famous Chain's ‘Asset Manager’ wished his sub-tenant all the best with the applications, and refused to enforce aspects of the lease that would have helped protect Wharf W, which is of course a heritage asset by all legal definitions. But for Famous Chain's Asset Manager, it is, apparently, just an asset.

With that attitude struck, the path to the destruction of Wharf W's dignity was set.

The whole episode has distressed and baffled the 118 citizens of Clink Street who fought against it on the legal grounds of Conservation, Design and Amenity. Also against the humiliation of Wharf W were the Trustees of the Borough Market and Southwark Cathedral. Our united voices counted for nothing against the commercial imperatives of a shop that employs no local people, sells nothing that we would want to buy (which would count as 'sustainable development') and sources most of its merchandise in far countries.

I could at this point cite the statutes about advertising in the Town and Country Planning Act of 1990. I might mention the City of London’s Unitary Development Plan’s insistence that careful control should be exercised over advertising by the River Thames. I could also talk about the absolute priority that should be given to Conservation over private profit, as clearly spelled out in the National Planning Policy Framework when defining public benefit. I could also quote Southwark’s own Conservation Appraisal about this very area, stressing the need to protect the heritage assets. Then there’s Southwark’s ‘Revitalise’ Core Strategy April 2011, which promised that any new development would conserve or enhance the borough’s heritage assets, their setting and wider historic environment, and that local shops should serve local residents. Not to mention the Southwark Plan’s promise that alterations to existing buildings ‘should embody a creative and high quality appropriate design solution … preserving or enhancing the historic environment.’ I could bore you at length with extracts from The National Policy Reference guide, the Communities and Local Government Outline for Advertisers, which states that planning authorities must exercise particularly strict control over advertising in conservation areas, and the Highways Act 1980 about illegal A frames being placed in roads.

And indeed we did quote all these things when we tried to fight the applications to change Wharf W. We also quoted them when we asked Southwark to deal with the many things that Famous Chain's sub-tenant had not bothered with applying for – but had done all the same. Our local Ward Councillors quoted them too, when trying to get the illegal incursions into the public realm curbed.

We might as well not have spoken. Our case was dismissed. Enforcement was promised but enforcement has not happened for a year. The message is clear: if a Grade II Listed Wharf, a heritage rarity, cannot be protected in Southwark, then Conservation is demonstrably not a priority here. If we want to live somewhere where historical building stock is respected, well, we shall have to move.

Here are some comments from residents:

‘It is ironic that the attractiveness of this historic area attracts a huge footfall – and that this footfall has attracted a trader who cares so little about history and so much about making money that he is destroying the attractiveness of the area.’

‘How can this be right? It is so depressing that no one can protect us.’

‘It is as if poor, quaint, historic Clink Street has been infested by the aesthetic equivalent of cockroaches, implacable and uncrushable. No, it’s not funny. It is very sad for this close community, which has until now managed to protect its amenity. No more. People are talking about moving out. People who have lived here for years. People who have striven to protect the heritage of this street for years. They find the situation unbearable.’

‘I love Clink Street and have lived here for many years. Now I hate coming home.’

‘This shop has turned our street into a laughing stock, demonstrating that you can break the law and get away with it. No one will stop you, if you are aggressive enough. You just give the finger to anyone who asks you to stay within the law. No problem. No one will come after you. They’re too busy, and they’re a bit scared of you too.’

I have learned a hard lesson, and have been forced to understand that the Juggernaut of Profit is not to be stopped, at least not in Southwark. So instead I would like to talk about something else that I discovered when researching planning law in an attempt to protect Wharf W from Famous Chain's indifference and its sub-tenant's uncompromising commercial imperatives.

In 2003 UNESCO undertook a Convention on 'Intangible Heritage'.

One of its assertions was this – that those charged with protecting our heritage should be ‘considering the deep-seated interdependence between the intangible cultural heritage and the tangible cultural and natural heritage.’

Further, those charged with the protection of our heritage should be ‘recognising that communities, in particular indigenous communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals, play an important role in the production, safeguarding, maintenance and re-creation of the intangible cultural heritage…’

The rest of the document may be seen here: http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/convention

I saw our street’s pain at Famous Chain's sub-tenant’s depredations as a manifestation of intangible cultural heritage. The hundred or so of us protesting the changes constitute a generation of urban regenerists, who moved here because Southwark planners originally envisaged this area as residential, sanctioning the development of our wharves, now all homes to citizens who vastly outnumber the businesses in the street. Yet these same residents work with local businesses to achieve management agreements where possible. They patronise the local cafés and restaurants; they shop at the Borough Market; they worship at Southwark Cathedral. Businesses and residents had naturally joined together to protest against the proposals for doing to Wharf W what even Disney, I suspect, would not do.

Now Southwark Council has effectively privileged the Famous Chain's sub-tenant’s ‘right’ to profit at the expense of the historic fabric of the street - and this has created upset in the Intangible Heritage of the street. Both intangible and tangible heritage counted as nothing on December 1st.

The themes of Smollett’s Roderick Random (above) include deceit, hypocrisy and greed – the very opposite of intangible heritage. It is about private profit joyfully triumphing over common good. Hatfuls of gold come before decency. The profiteers are not ashamed.

Illustration for Roderick Random: a Rich Privateer Brought Safe into Port, by Two First Rates, d'après Dighton (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Previously, in this place, I lamented the disappearance of a Victorian pillar from Mr Roots’s Horse Hospital just a stone’s throw from Wharf W. The pillar had got in the way of a developer, who had not been stopped. Then I railed, ‘This blog represents, therefore, a small ladylike blast of the trumpet against the anonymous wall of non-caring. Should we not celebrate our industrial past here?’

When I wrote that post, I had no idea that Southwark Council’s Design and Conservation Team would be sending something so much worse our way.

Southwark may not be a uniquely rotten case. Those of you who live in or around historic housing stock – you too may be shuddering as the rank winds of commercial privileging rustle hungrily around your fragile old buildings. History draws people to places. Footfall means cash opportunities. One person's heritage asset is another person's profit centre. Something is happening out there – something that’s not good for the fabric of our heritage.

You will notice that I’m not showing any pictures of what the Famous Chain's sub-tenant has been allowed to do to Wharf W, thanks to Famous Chain's Asset Manager and the Design and Conservation team at Southwark Council.

 I consider it kinder to allow reader of this blog to enjoy Wharf W the way it used to look.

Meanwhile, perhaps to celebrate his victory, the Famous sub-tenant last week put an extra advertising A frame out in front of Wharf W. It was as ugly as the other A frames. It was illegal as the others and it humiliated this dignified old building just a little more.



Michelle Lovric's website

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Regrets of a Failed Bell Ringer, by Laurie Graham

December 10, 2015, 5:30 pm

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I’ve always had a thing about church bells and a brief, unsuccessful career in the bell tower of an English village church forty years ago did nothing to dilute that love. Since then I’ve relished the chaotic clanging of Italian bells which announced ‘Habemus Papam’ and the strange allure of Russian monastery bells, but my heart is always drawn back to English bells. They are part of the soundtrack of my childhood. 

Holy Cross, where bell-ringing defeated me

I was doomed to failure as a bellringer chiefly because numbers mean nothing to me. On the page they jump about before my eyes. In my ears they might as well be a recitation in Togalog. PINs were invented to torment me and, cruelly, the skills of change-ringing are as beyond me as tightrope walking. And simple change-ringing is child’s play compared to method ringing with its wonderful eccentric peal names. Grandsire Caters, Erin Triples, Stedman Cinques (named after Fabian Stedman, a 17^thcentury campanologist). 

There was another reason I never took to bell-ringing: a warning tale told to all rookie ringers about what can go wrong if you don't develop a feel for the rope. You can see what I mean. But apart from the risk of getting  airborne in an undignified manner it was all very convivial. Historically bellringers have had a reputation for enjoying drink, mustering at the local pub before and after practice, and sometimes, tsk tsk, keeping a stash of ale in the ringing chamber itself.

 

Times have changed and some bell-towers now find themselves on the defensive. There are villages where blow-ins have complained about having their Sunday lie-in disturbed and and have succeeded in getting the church bells silenced.  A case of statutory noise nuisance, apparently. Have these people no sense of history? Bells were once the 24-hour rolling news service of a community.  Three strokes rung three times told (and tolled) the death of a man, rung twice it signalled the death of a woman, once, the death of a child. Bells rang with urgency to signal an invasion, half-muffled for a funeral or fully muffled for a solemn day like Good Friday. How strange that in an age when people allow their William Tell Overture ringtone to disturb the peace of the world without giving a damn, they object to church bells.

I feel in illustrious company with my love of bells. Charles Dickens (The Chimes),  Lord Tennyson (Ring Out, Wild Bells), John Betjeman  (I heard the church bells hollowing out the sky, deep beyond deep, like never-ending stars.) But it’s to an American, Henry Longfellow, that I turn for my customary December sound clip. He wrote his poem I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day in 1864. His wife was recently dead, his son had been seriously wounded fighting for the Union. Longfellow’s lines run the gamut from despair to hope, and all inspired by the sound of church bells. Here is a very lovely version of it.

This is my final post for the History Girls. You'll still be able to find me at my website but

from next month my place here will be occupied by historical novelist, Katherine Clements.  So thank you very much for having me. Welcome, Katherine. Merry Christmas. And, well, that’s all folks! 

  

The other Raleigh by Tanya Landman

December 11, 2015, 4:30 pm

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I grew up in Gravesend, where Pocahontas died and was buried in 1617.  

I’d always thought she was the first Native American to come to England, but when we moved to Bideford in 2001 I was intrigued to discover that ‘Raleigh’ had preceded Pocahontas by some years.

It was when my oldest son went to his first Carol Concert with his primary school that I noticed the small picture frame in the porch of St Mary’s church.

 The text reads:

“In 1586 when Sir Richard Grenville returned from the newly established colony at Roanoke Island (North Carolina) he brought back an Alonquin Indian to this country and named him ‘Raleigh’ after his good friend and cousin Sir Walter Raleigh.

 

The Bideford Parish Register shows that on 27^th March 1588 ‘Raleigh, a Wynganditoian’ was baptized into the Christian faith – the first Native American to do so.  Wynganditoa was the name of the island (now called Roanoke) in the native Alonquin language.

Sadly, on 7^th April 1589 the same register records the burial of ‘Rawly’ (spelt differently but phonetically similar) in this churchyard,  Above can be seen ‘Lawrence, the servant of Sir Richard Grenville’ buried 2 days later on 9^th April, presumably as the result of influenza or a similar infection in the Grenville household.”

A tragic story, I think. It’s not clear whether Raleigh came willingly or was captured. Certainly he can’t have begun to imagine what he was coming to when he boarded that ship to England.  Grenville, having named him as he might name a pet dog, intended to make use of him as a translator on his next expedition to North Carolina.  Sadly Raleigh didn’t live long enough to go home.

 

And as for the 115 settlers on Roanoke – their tale is probably no less tragic.  The Spanish Armada and the subsequent war with Spain disrupted all sea traffic. By the time ships returned to North Carolina in 1590 the settlement had been dismantled. No trace of the settlers was ever found.

I'VE GOT THAT END OF YEAR ROUND-UP FEELING – Elizabeth Fremantle

December 12, 2015, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Behind You!!! Catherine Johnson

≪ Previous: The other Raleigh by Tanya Landman

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2015 has been a year of rich historical pickings and here are some of my highlights:

FILM

Of the numerous wonderful films I've seen this year a few have truly stood out. Justin Kurzel's Macbeth with the magnetic Michael Fassbender and the utterly captivating Marion Cotillard as the wicked couple, was a pared down rendering of one of my favourite of Shakespeare's tragedies. Kurtzel conveyed the brutality of the world whilst also giving context to the monstrous acts of the protagonists.





I was completely beguiled by Carol, Todd Haynes rendering of Patricia Highsmith's novel 'The Price of Salt'. As both a Haynes and a Highsmith fan I had high hopes for this one and was not disappointed. It has all the usual exquisite Haynes lustre, with a languid pace and a phenomenal performance from Cate Blanchett in the title role.




ART 

Having spent a week this summer on a jaunt around The Netherlands looking at seventeenth century art as research into quotidian life in the period I was delighted to discover that the Queen's Gallery have put on an exhibition devoted to just that, Masters of the Everyday: Dutch artists in the age of Vermeer, so I could revisit my favourites.





The Goya Portraits exhibition at the National Gallery is simply a must-visit exhibition. The sheer intensity and intimacy of his portraits makes you feel as if you are in the room with people from the past. Truly inspiring.





THEATRE

Sally Cookson's dramatic adaptation of Jane Eyre at the Lyttleton theatre is steeped in madness, passion and atmosphere. Cookson has taken the essence of a story that is in every book-lover's DNA and pared it down into an electrifying drama.




Kenneth Branagh's theatre company will be doing a year of plays at the Garrick and the first is Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, a play I have never seen before. Often labelled as one of the 'problem plays' because it's first half is complex, psychological and carries all the potential for tragedy, yet the second half is light and comic in tone. A lasting and heartbreaking image for me was a bundle, the abandoned baby, left alone on the otherwise empty stage. Judi Dench was, as ever, masterful.







NON FICTION


Mary Beard can, in my mind, do no wrong. Her latest book SPQR is not only a brilliantly researched but also a wonderfully pragmatic and engaging take on the story of ancient Rome. She brings the quotidian to vivid life and deftly debunks many popular myths.







Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro has delivered once more with his 1606: William Shakespeare and the year of Lear. He looks at the period in detail teasing out insights from events and demonstrating ways in which they can be found in Shakespeare's work. The effect is one of exploring the mind of the playwright. Clever, witty and brilliantly argued it also covers my period of research – hooray!








FICTION


I met Rebecca Hunt at the party for the Astor Prize (an award for the best second novel) for which her Everland was shortlisted – and, in my humble opinion, should have won. I took her book home and read it in a single sitting, completely captivated. She intertwines two stories of Antarctic exploration a hundred years apart. A disastrous mission to a desolate frozen island in 1913 has lured a research group back there in 2012 and in placing her characters in such a dangerous and hostile place, Hunt is able to drill down into the dynamics of people living on the edge. A memorable book.



Black Rabbit Hall is the debut novel of Polly Chase and is another that interweaves parallel narratives from different times. Partly set in Cornwall in 1969 and otherwise thirty years later, a house becomes the site of a mystery that unravels. With echoes of old favourites, 'Rebecca' and 'I Capture the Castle' is is a delightful read and I look forward to many more from Chase.

Behind You!!! Catherine Johnson

December 13, 2015, 10:51 pm

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Imagine the scene, a small room above a pub, a circle of chairs, a sorry looking group of people, one wearing far too much glitter, another dressed as the back end of a horse. The sign on the door reads Panto lovers Anonymous.

And one of those people, perhaps debating whether it's right to do away with the romantic duet that everyone snores through in the second act and wearing what passes for regular clothes dear readers, is me.

I know, for certain that half, maybe even more than three quarters will have stopped reading, blipped across to look at pictures of kittens on robot vacuum cleaners or dogs dressed as Buzz Lightyear.

Well I'm sorry. Panto is a terrible English tradition involving cross dressing, bad jokes and worse songs, but nevertheless one that I cannot help being proud of.  I must admit to cringing at the big budget, past it TV soap star vehicles or innuendo larded ones but can I assure you the Pantomine at Stratford East is different. It's terrifically right on, we've had same sex marriage and evil property developers.

There are many things I hate about Christmas, trees being up far too early. Horrible schmaltzy tunes in what passes for Hastings very own shopping centre. Having to think about what to buy for people unless it's clearly obvious because I just left it far too late and I have failed to hand make things for everyone yet again...

And there are also many things I love, Brass bands playing carols. Children singing carols. mulled wine, mince pies. Watching rubbish telly. But most of all I love our friends and family outing to the Pantomime at the Theatre Royal in Stratford, East London.

The wonderful auditorium at Stratford

Pantomime is dafter than any roomba riding kitten. And what's more it's that whole magic of live theatre thing, it's the interaction, the on the spot come backs of the cast to the front row, it's live music and it's my families one and only unmissable Christmas tradition.

We've been going, my friend and me since our daughters first made friends in Year 3 at primary school. There were a couple of years when the theatre was closed for renovation that we went to the Hackney Empire (too big and glossy) and Hoxton Hall (too small and too unprofessional).

We will sit in the same place - front upper circle - vertiginously staring down into the chocolate box Victorian auditorium that is the Theatre Royal. Shouting 'He's behind you!!" Louder than anyone else, hissing and booing when the baddies and their henchmen (and women) do badness. And of course singing the words on the song sheet that plops down over the stage in the third act.

And afterwards, all of us and some of the kids' (who aren't kids any more) mates eat the traditional pizza and discuss the relative merits of different perfomances, songs, costumes,and  rubbish romantic interludes. (Best ever 2013 Dick Whittington by the way written by Trish Cooke and Robert Hyman featuring a baddie Alien Cheese Queen).

We might look ridiculous. After all our children are now in their mid and late twenties. But we do make an awful lot of noise and have an awful lot of fun.

It's Robin Hood this year......

Season's Greetings!

Catherine Johnson's latest novel is The Curious Tale of The Lady Caraboo, published by Corgi.

Norse-Style Ploughing

December 14, 2015, 7:00 pm

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by Marie-Louise Jensen


I always get excited when I learn something new about one of the eras I write about. Of course there's masses I don't know, but some things reshape your view of the past more than others.
I've written three books about Vikings and am beginning a fourth for younger readers at present. I haven't researched agriculture in huge detail. I know which animals were domesticated and taken to Iceland during the era of settlement and I know which crops were grown across Scandinavia. But a chance reference of mine to a plough threw up a query from my editors and I discovered I knew very little about the agricultural methods of the Viking age.  
I discovered a wealth of rather contradictory information. Firstly, that the Vikings were known for using horses for ploughing rather than strong but slow oxen. It got the job done faster and left more time for raiding during the summer. However, the modern-style collar which enables horses to pull the plough safely had not yet been invented. So horses used for ploughing often became injured. Oxen were less prone to injury.
It appears to possibly be the case that while the Vikings used horses (and ploughs) for ploughing in the European countries they settled, they continued to use oxen in Scandinavia.
I was also fascinated to read that throughout the Norse era, the archaeological evidence points to the fact that ploughs weren't used in the Viking home countries - there they were still using a forerunner of the plough known as an ard (arðr) which scratched furrows into the soil rather than turning it as a plough does. A field near the Viking settlement of Lindholm Høje in Denmark was uncovered from a 900-year-old sand drift recently and found preserved as it had been when the sand blew over it - recently furrowed by an ard for planting.
The evidence points to the same tools and methods being used throughout Scandinavia in the Norse era, certainly in Icelamd. And an ox was used with an ard - the field worker walking beside the ox as he drew it.
So, given that my story is set in Iceland, I probably need to mention an ox, not a horse and almost certainly an ard not a plough.
I also learned two other fascinating facts. Viking-age sheep were tiny and horses were the only animals the Vikings selectively bred on Iceland.
Research really is an education.

Masters of the Everyday: Dutch Artists in the Age of Vermeer: Sue Purkiss

December 15, 2015, 6:00 pm

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Until 14th February, for £10 you can go and see two exhibitions at The Queen's Gallery in Buckingham Palace: one which includes Rembrandts, Vermeers and other Dutch artists, and the other featuring The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson (satirical cartoons of Pitt, his great political rival Fox, George 111, the Prince Regent and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire). I took a quick look round the latter, (and was interested to note that Rowlandson was quite happy to apply his satirical scalpel to either side, depending who was paying him): but it was the Dutch artists that really interested me.

Trompe l'oeil at Dyrham

According to the introduction to this exhibition, there was in the 16th and 17th centuries a close relationship between the British and Dutch royal families, and British monarchs have been enthusiastic commissioners and collectors of Dutch art. It's strange how the universe sometimes seems to decide that you need to  know more about a particular subject, and provide you with a series of little pointers; I know very little about British history post-Stuarts, but earlier this year I happened to hear an intriguing radio play about the marriage of Mary Stuart to William of Orange, and how he came to be 'invited' to take the English throne.

And then in October, friends suggested a visit to Dyrham House, near Bath. Most of it is closed off at the moment; they're re-doing the roof, and what you go to see is the process of restoration, rather than the house itself. But there were a few rooms open, including one which had this striking trompe l'oeil:
a painting which makes you think you are looking into a series of rooms extending through the doorway. It's by a Dutch painter, Samuel Van Hoogstraten, and it reminded me immediately of Vermeer's interiors. William Blathwayt, who acquired Dyrham by marriage in the 17th century, was a great enthusiast for all things Dutch, having worked there for many years, and he filled his house with Dutch paintings and blue and white Delft pottery - including some of those magnificent tall vases used to display much-prized tulips.

I'm no art expert, so I'm just going to pick out a few of the paintings which I particularly liked. The first is this one by Gerrit Dou - who at the time was apparently better known than some of the artists whose names are more familiar to us now, such as Rembrandt and Vermeer. It's called A Girl Chopping Onions, and it was painted in 1646. Apparently there's all sorts of sexual symbolism in it which would have been obvious at the time: the empty birdcage, for instance, which you can just about see at the top right, suggested lost virginity. But what draws me to the picture is the figure of the girl. She seems almost as if she is the actual source of light in the picture - there is a window to the left, but it's difficult to see how the light from it should have been so concentrated on her. She is looking out of the picture to the right; she's busy chopping the onions, but it seems as if that's not what she's thinking about. Her hair is golden, and her rosy face gleams with youth and health. She looks as if she's poised, ready to move quickly if need be: alert, serious, a little worried. She takes notice of the small boy behind her who is trying to capture her attention.

Then there is A Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman, by Johannes Vermeer, painted in the early 1660s. This, like the Dyrham trompe l'oeil, shows the Dutch mastery of perspective, with the tiled floor receding into the distance. The light seems more natural in this one; it streams in through the window on the left. No posed portrait this; the young lady has her back to us - though we can see a reflection of her face in the mirror. She isn't aware of us, and she doen't seem to be taking much notice of the man, either; he stands watching her, rather stiffly: his expression, as far as we can make it out, serious. She concentrates on her music, he concentrates on her. What is the relationship between them? It seems to me that her body is slightly angled away from him; I don't think she's interested.

And finally, there is this portrait by Rembrandt, which may be of his mother. It was presented to Charles 1 by Sir Robert Kerr.

Well, what can you say? It's stunning. He didn't paint it when he was an old man himself - it was quite an early work. Yet it contains so much wisdom; such a powerful awareness of the condition of humanity. The painting of the textures of the fabrics and of the old lady's skin, the rendering of the light - all these are masterly. But there's more to it than this: somehow, despite all the wonderful, much larger and more colourful pictures works which surround it, it's this one, with its subdued palette and its grave but unassuming subject, which draws you like an irresistible magnet.

There are many wonderful paintings in this exhibition. But for me, this one alone is absolutely worth the entrance price.

"My Era's Better Than Your Era": reported by Penny Dolan

December 16, 2015, 10:00 pm

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I’ve been writing my Christmas List, as requested by some nearest and dearest, and as ever, the list is mostly books, However, as I scan down the titles, I can see I’m not being very loyal to the Victorian setting of my work-in-progress. I am very easily lured away by the excitement and interest of a different period.

So I was intrigued when I heard four historians defending a chosen era recently.

Which era did they claim was "the best"?

Ben Kanechose the Romans for their amazing influence on the world, and for their empire which lasted two and a half thousand years. The Roman legions were bold fighters, defeating the German tribes who wouldn’t pay taxes. Their language, Latin, underpins the English, French, Spanish and Italian languages, wherever they have spread across the world. They had a good legal system, even if it was largely borrowed from the Greeks. They built aquaducts and miles of roads and impressive buildings which can still be seen today. Not only that, he said, but there are a host of great tales about the Romans from the well-known legends and histories through to interesting small stories, such as the Roman cow that ran up to the third storey of a block of flats and jumped off into the street below, or the fact that famous gladiators would sell small bottles of their sweat to rich ladies. Not only that, but the Roman era can also boast of that political & military genius, Julius Caesar.

Janina Ramirez was roused to defend the era of the Vikings. They were, she said, the roots of the British identity. She agreed that the Vikings - especially with the destruction of Lindisfarne - had had a bad press but the Viking invaders only took gold and treasures at the start. Over thirty years, they became cosmopolitan and cultured, she said, settling and trading and establishing the area known as the Danelaw, Although the Romans classifying the Vikings as Barbarians, that was because the Romans simply viewed any other culture as un-civilised. Janina felt that the Vikings were different and fascinating. They were the first to reach America, Russia and North Africa; their skills included the fine boat-building, metalwork and jewellery while their sagas and literature  show a modernity about their language and are evidence of the Vikings great love of learning. Janina spoke about the role and respect of women within the Viking culture, demonstrated in Queen Emma of Norway, whose marriage to Cnut, the King of Denmark and England created an ultimate power couple. That long and successful reign so transformed the country that in many ways, Janina claimed, the Vikings have never left but exist deep within the culture and landscape of the British Isles.

S.J.Parris said she hardly needed to suggest the importance of the Tudor era. The sexual and religious politics of that era explain why England is not now a small colony of Spain, and why we enjoy the religious freedoms of today.

It is hard now, she suggested, to understand the feeling among people back in 1580, when the Protestant faith was still seen as just a passing fad. Many went along with the new religion because of the need to keep their head on their shoulders. It was an insecure time. Many of the Catholic families believed that the whole of Protestant England hung on the “person” of the King. If only Queen Elizabeth could be removed, they felt, all would be well, especially with Mary Queen of Scots waiting in the wings.  .

Moreover, the Pope had issued a Papal Bull, declaring Elizabeth’s reign illegal and implying that killing her would not be a sin. With religious schools on continent eagerly sending their students to convert Protestants and drumming up support for the Catholics once Elizabeth had been assassinated, there was no shortage of young men glad to do the deed.

So, said S,J, Parris, the Tudor age saw the beginning of modern espionage, in the person of Sir Francis Walsingham. He was, she said, quoting the Bond franchise, “the first M”. Although his grandfather was a common vintner and tradesman, Walsingham himself became central to the safety of England.  Using a system of spies and ciphers and dead letter boxes, he set up a centralised intelligence system that led to the uncovering of treason such as the Babbington plot. This network helped the Tudor age become an era rich in exploration, science and intellectual growth.

Edwin Thomas, coming last on the list, spoke of the Ancient Greeks. Their culture, he pointed out, lay behind the grandeur of Rome. The Greeks were cosmopolitan globetrotters, valuing intellectual freedom and if we were to judge the best era as the one whose influence lasted longest, it was possible to see examples of Greek architecture, such as perfect Grecian pilasters, on many buildings around town. The Greeks, being great ship builders, invented the tri-reme. They fought many military wars of defence, including those against the Turks, a conflict that still has echoes in that area to this day. Without the Greeks, Thomas suggested, we could have been a colony of Iran. The Greek culture fed deep into the cultures of the Mediterranean and Britain, and their ferment of the Greek intellectual ideas still speaks to us today: witness the series of Greek plays running at The Almeida theatre on London. Democracy existed in Ancient Greece, he said, but did not reach England until the nineteenth century, and we have only just caught up, he claimed, with their relaxed attitude to sexuality. Besides, he added, think of the weather in Greece, a climate that allowed the establishment of open air symposiums, and to the teachings of Socrates and Plato.

I must admit that novelist Antonia Hodgson was so busy keeping the peace between these four passionate arguments that she had no time to defend “her” era - the eighteenth century - during this "contest" at Harrogate’s History Festival.Janina won the vote, mainly because she stressed the role of women in the Viking era which rather won this particular audience.

I wonder what era would be your personal favourite - or maybe it is really is impossible to choose?

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A Merry Christmas To You All! - Celia Rees

December 17, 2015, 4:30 pm

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I have a confession. I don't very often read poetry but there are certain times when only a poem will do and, for me, Christmas is one of those times. 

The approach of the Solstice takes me always to John Donne's poem, A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day.

St Lucy by Cosimo Rosselli

St Lucy's name means light. Her day in the Julian calendar was 13th December, the Solstice, 'the year's midnight'. This day is still celebrated in the northern countries of Scandinavia: Norway, Sweden and Finland with their long, dark winters. St Lucy, the light bringer, is the Christian manifestation of the age old and ancient, long pre-christian celebration to mark the day the year turns from darkness back towards the light.

Winter Solstice Stone Henge

  

A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day

By John Donne

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all;
Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

The other poem I look to at this time of year couldn't be more different. John Betjeman's Christmas evokes a very British Christmas. A modern Christmas. It speaks to the ordinary, the everyday and is as true now as when it was written in the mid twentieth century. Although nowadays the Christmas season starts well before the coming of Advent, the rest of what Betjeman describes is very much the same: the streaking December rain, the scudding clouds of the darkening days; the shopping, gift buying and gift giving; the evergreens, lights, paper chains and banners, tinsel and silver bells decorating churches, towns, pubs and people's homes. Then he asks the question: And is it true? For behind, or beyond it all, so often forgotten and ignored, lies the simplicity of the Nativity and all the astonishing, awesome and numinous implications it carries with it. 

Christmas by John Betjeman

The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hookers Green.

The holly in the windy hedge
And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that the villagers can say
'The church looks nice' on Christmas Day.

Provincial Public Houses blaze,
Corporation tramcars clang,
On lighted tenements I gaze,
Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall

Says 'Merry Christmas to you all'.

And London shops on Christmas Eve

Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,
And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children's hearts are glad.
And Christmas-morning bells say 'Come!'
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall ?

The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me ?

And is it true ? For if it is,

No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

Adoration of the Magi after Hieronymus Bosch

To quote the bunting in the red Town Hall

 Merry Christmas To You All!

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Those Magnificent Women in Their Flying Machines - Aviatrices of the 1920s and 1930s by Christina Koning

December 19, 2015, 1:00 am

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Having just finished my latest novel, ‘Time of Flight’, which is set in 1931, and features - amongst other characters - a number of female flyers, I wanted to make my last post for the History Girls about these wonderful ‘queens of the air’, who did so much to popularise flying in its golden years. One of the most celebrated was Amelia Earhart - pronounced ‘Air-heart’ (1897-1937) - who, apart from setting numerous aviation records, including being the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic, was instrumental in setting up ‘The Ninety-Nines’, an association of women pilots.

In 1920, Amelia visited an airfield at Long Beach, paying $10 for a 10 minute flight in an aeroplane piloted by Frank Hawks. This proved a turning-point for the young enthusiast: ‘By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground,’ she said. ‘I knew I had to fly.’ Like Amy Johnson after her, she saved up for flying lessons and had her first lesson a year later, gaining her pilot’s license in 1923.

Her instructor was the delightfully named Neta Snook (1896 - 1991), who ran a commercial flying school in Virginia (the first woman to do so), and who later wrote about her friendship with Earhart in her book, I Taught Amelia to Fly.

After the enormous popular interest in Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, Amelia was selected, the following year, to take the place of aviatrix Amy Phipps Guest (1873 -1959) as the first woman to make the trip, after the latter decided to drop out. Interviewed after the flight, which was piloted by Wilmer Stultz, Amelia said, with characteristic self-deprecation: ‘Stultz did all the flying—had to. I was just baggage…’ adding, ‘maybe someday I'll try it alone.’

 In May 1932, having undertaken many lengthy flights across America, she got her wish. Setting off from Newfoundland, she arrived, 14 hours and 56 minutes later, in what she hoped was Paris. In fact, it was a field in Ireland - her Lockheed Vega 5B aeroplane having been blown off course. But she’d done it - becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Awards and acclaim followed, but Amelia refused to rest on her laurels. She was determined to fulfil her dream of flying around the world, and, after several false starts, set off in July 1937 with co-pilot Fred Noonan, in her Lockheed Electra 10E. What followed has been the subject of speculation ever since, after the aeroplane disappeared over the Pacific. Was it sabotage, engine failure, or (the most likely scenario) a breakdown of the inflight radio system which caused her to lose her way? 

Amy Johnson (1903 - 1941) was Britain’s ‘answer’ to the woman nicknamed ‘Lady Lindy’ by the American press, and became a close friend of her ‘rival’, several years before Earhart’s untimely death. Born, the daughter of a prosperous businessman, in Kingston upon Hull, Amy went first to university to read Economics, then got a job as secretary to the solicitor William Charles Crocker.

My grandfather Charles Thompson - the model for my ‘Blind Detective’, Frederick Rowlands, in the series of novels of which ‘Time of Flight’ is the latest - worked as a receptionist in the same office, and knew Amy when she was first getting interested in flying. (It’s one of the reasons I knew this book had to have an aviation theme.) This was in 1928; a year later, after saving up and paying for flying lessons at £2 an hour, she gained her pilot’s license, and later the same year became the first woman to gain a ground engineer’s ‘C’ license - a qualification that would stand her in good stead on her record-breaking flight. This was the first solo flight by a woman from England to Australia. Amy was twenty-six years old, and had had only 90 hours’ flying experience when she set out from Croydon Airport on May 5th, 1930 in her De Havilland GH60 Gipsy Moth ‘Jason’, on the first leg of her 11,000 mile journey.

During the course of this epic flight, she averaged 800 - 900 miles a day, battling through rainstorms and fog, and on one occasion was forced to land in the Egyptian desert, on account of a sand-storm. Much of the time she was ‘flying blind’, unsure of her direction - radar had yet to be discovered and the instruments she had to guide her were rudimentary. She was therefore obliged to find her way by the simple expedient of looking down from the open cockpit, and following the lines of rivers and roads. Reaching India in a record six days, she ran into the monsoon, which reduced visibility to zero, and forced her to crash-land. Her engineering skills enabled her to fix the damaged plane, and she took off again for Singapore, sometimes flying so low over the sea that she was skimming the tops of the waves. After yet more hair-raising escapades, she reached Darwin on May 24th - to an ecstatic reception.

‘Amy, Wonderful Amy’ became one the hit songs of 1930; lucrative contracts with the Daily Mail (which had sponsored the flight) followed. ‘The Flying Typist’ became an instant celebrity - a role with which she was far from comfortable. Her passion was flying, and she continued to set records throughout the 1930s, including one for a solo flight from London to Cape Town in 1932, breaking her husband Jim Mollison’s record, set the previous year. Billed as ‘The Flying Sweethearts’ - the press then being as fond of a sentimental headline as they are today - she and Mollison made several long-distance flights together, including one to New York which ended in a near-fatal crash. After the marriage ended, Amy continued to pursue her fascination with speed, taking up rally driving and gliding, and becoming a part of what was then known as the ‘Smart Set’.

I haven’t space to give more than a brief mention to a few of the other distinguished aviatrices of the 1920s and 1930s, whose exploits were no less daring and ground-breaking than those already described. Beryl Markham (1902- 1986) is one of these - the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from East to West, a journey she wrote about in her 1942 memoir, ‘West with the Night’, whose style was much admired by Ernest Hemingway (not a man given to praising other writers). Glamorous and headstrong, Beryl was renowned not only for her flying skills but also for her many love affairs - including one with Denys Finch Hatton, the husband of her friend, the writer Karen Blixen, and a member of the notorious ‘Happy Valley' set.

Other celebrated female pilots of the era include two flying aristocrats - both, rather confusingly, with the same first name. Born in County Limerick, Lady Mary Heath (1896 - 1939) began her adventurous career as a dispatch rider during the First World War. In 1928, she became the first woman to fly from London to the Cape - a journey which took her three months. Lady Heath liked to travel in her pearls and fur coat - no doubt a sensible precaution, in those days of open cockpits.

Her extraordinary feat was matched by another Irish aviatrix, Lady Mary Bailey (1890 - 1960), the daughter of the fifth Baron Rossmore, whose 18,000 mile journey across Africa was the longest solo flight ever attempted by a woman. She was modest about her difficult and dangerous achievement, saying in an interview with The Times that she’d been ‘just flying about’, and breaking her journey back to Croydon Airport with a stop-over at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, because, she said, she badly needed a bath! 

Then there was Jean Batten - called ‘The Greta Garbo of the Skies’, on account of her shy and reclusive temperament. Jean was the first woman to fly from London to New Zealand, in 1936 - just one of her record-breaking long-distance solo flights. She, too, was fond of fashion, and always packed an evening dress when flying…

I could go on - but I’ve run out of space and time. So I’d just like to say, ‘Thanks for having me,’ to all my fellow history girls. May your ‘flights’, literary and otherwise, all have safe landings. Over and out!                    

The Yelverton Affair - by Ann Swinfen

December 19, 2015, 4:30 pm

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In 1852 a young couple met for the first time by chance aboard the cross channel packet from Boulogne. Theresa Longworth, the sixth child of a wealthy Manchester silk manufacturer, was just twenty-two, and was coming home after receiving a convent education in France. Charles Yelverton, a Major in the Royal Artillery, was thirty-three, the third son of an Irish peer, Lord Avonmore. By all accounts, the Major was a dashing figure, and Theresa, if not beautiful, was vivacious and intelligent. The attraction was immediate, strengthened on Longworth’s side by Yelverton’s thoughtfulness in escorting her home, when her sister failed to meet her off the boat. In June of the following year, when Longworth was in Naples to complete her education, she learned that Yelverton was in Malta, and wrote to him asking him to forward a letter to a friend in Monastir in Turkey. So began a regular correspondence, until they met again in the Crimea, where Yelverton was on active service, and Longworth was a nurse with the French order of Soeurs de Charité.

So began an intimate relationship which was to result in a series of court cases, in Dublin, Edinburgh, and finally before the House of Lords, as Longworth strove to persuade the courts to recognise the legality of her marriage to Yelverton.

 

After they both returned to Britain, they met again in Edinburgh, where Longworth had taken lodgings in St Vincent Streetin the house of a Mrs Gemble, while Yelverton was stationed with his unit at Leith Fort.  Yelverton visited her in St Vincent Streeton an almost daily basis, where according to his testimony in court, they had sexual intercourse at every opportunity, while Theresa insisted that the meetings were innocent.  In a letter she wrote to Yelverton’s mother, Viscountess Yelverton, Longworth claimed that in Scotland, the couple had gone through a form of marriage.  ‘A secret union was thought of. We differed about the manner.  He preferred a Scotch method.  I, being a Catholic, could not consider any marriage as sacred unless performed in my own church.  Nevertheless we did go through a ceremony together which he assured me was binding.’

 

Church of the Sacred Heart, Killowen

The ceremony referred to here was neither a Catholic marriage, nor the ‘Scotch method’. Longworth claimed that on the 12th April, 1857, they had sat down together in St Vincent Street, and read the Church of England marriage service from the Book of Common Prayer. Neither of them seems to have considered this as of itself as a binding marriage contract. Yelverton later denied in court that it had ever taken place, while Longworth, so she claimed, had refused to give in to Yelverton’s demands that they sleep together until their marriage had been blessed by a Roman Catholic priest. To humour her, Yelverton eventually agreed to travel with her to Ireland, where, on the 15th of August, 1857, in the chapel of Killowen, near Rostrevor, they went through a form of service officiated by a Catholic priest, Father Benjamin Mooney. Longworth evidently regarded this as a valid marriage service, while Yelverton saw it as no more than a sop to her conscience. Anyway it had the desired effect, and for several months thereafter, the couple travelled together round Ireland and Scotland as man and wife.

In December, Longworth went to stay with friends, a Mr. and Mrs. Thelwall, in Hull, and Yelverton visited her there. Then in 1858 they set off again to travel in France, where Longworth discovered she was pregnant. Yelverton left to return to his military duties, while she struggled to cope with a miscarriage and subsequent ill-health. Before she lost the baby, however, she wrote to Father Mooney to ask for a copy of her marriage certificate so that there would be no problem over the baptism of the child. Mooney duly sent her what purported to be the certificate, but according to one account the marriage had not been entered into the parish books, and the names of the witnesses were fictitious.

Then the whole situation began to fall apart. Yelverton’s departure from France was abrupt and acrimonious. He now found himself in financial difficulties, for which he blamed his ‘wife’. But worse was to follow. On the 26th June, 1858, Yelverton married the widow of an Edinburgh professor, one Emily Marianne Ashworth Forbes, who was reputed to have inherited £50,000 from her husband. Longworth learned of the marriage on the 29th. She also received a letter, probably written by Yelverton’s older brother, making it clear that ‘all connection between Major Yelverton and Miss L. should now cease’, and offering Theresa a passage to New Zealand, ‘or to anywhere else she should wish'.

It was time to fight back. Longworth succeeded in having Yelverton arrested and lodged temporarily in the Calton jail in Edinburgh on a charge of bigamy, though the case collapsed for lack of evidence. Then she sought the restitution of her conjugal rights through the newly created Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, only for the Court to disclaim jurisdiction. Staying for a time with her friends in Hull, she and John Thelwall devised an ingenious scheme, whereby he was to claim in court that Yelverton, as Theresa’s husband, owed Thelwall £259:17:3, for board and lodging costs incurred by his ‘wife’. The real purpose of the action, of course, was to force recognition of their marital status, and it was this claim which Longworth took the court in Dublin in 1861. In this she was initially successful. After no more than an hour of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict in her favour, declaring that there was both a Scottish and an Irish marriage. Theresa was the heroine of the hour, and delivered a victory speech, in which she declared that the verdict had made her an Irishwoman.

Her triumph was premature. All that had really been decided in law was that Yelverton owed Thelwall £259:17:3. So it was the turn of the Scottish courts to rule on the marriage. Here Longworth was supported by Lord Advocate Moncreiff and Solicitor-General Maitland, who argued successfully on her behalf that under Scots law obtaining at the time (and which continued so to do until 1939) she was indeed married, on two grounds of what was described as an ‘irregular marriage’, but no less valid for that. First was the marriage by ‘consent de praesenti’, which simply meant that the two had agreed to be married by mutual consent, and secondly a marriage 'subsequente copula', which meant that a promise to marry had been made, then followed by sexual intercourse. It is satisfying to note that Longworth’s first action on the conclusion of the case was to proceed ‘direct to the residence of the Lord Advocate, who had so ably and effectively fought her case, and while tendering her cordial thanks, presented his Lordship a very handsome bouquet.’

It couldn’t last.  Yelverton now took an appeal to the House of Lords.  Despite once again having the professional support of Lord Advocate Moncreiff, Theresa lost the case.  In the next few years she tried by other legal means to achieve her objective, but without success. In 1865, again with Moncreiff as her champion, she sued the Saturday Review for libel, to the tune of £3,000, for an article which had portrayed her as little better than a common prostitute.  She lost again.  But it was by no means the end of her story. In later years she travelled widely, and wrote two books describing her experiences.  Having been rejected by Yelverton, and had her claim to be his wife dismissed by the highest court in the land, she simply ignored the lot of them, and called herself Mrs. Yelverton, or, after the gallant major succeeded to his father’s title, Viscountess Avonmore.

 

Theresa Longworth, Yosemite 1870, Carte de Visite

Read more about this case and other notable cases of the nineteenth century in David Swinfen’s biography of Theresa Longworth’s counsel, James Wellwood Moncrieff:

 

Ann Swinfen
www.annswinfen.com

The Cultural Resolutions by Imogen Robertson

December 20, 2015, 4:30 pm

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I know, I know we haven’t got through Christmas yet, but I think it’s a good idea to consider some New Year’s resolutions a bit ahead of time. Once I’ve decided on them I can plunge into the festive season with my usual hedonistic flair, knowing they are waiting for me when the hangover clears.

I’ll make health resolutions of course, continuing the battle to keep mobile and sane despite having chosen a career that means spending the majority of my time at a desk talking to imaginary people. I’m keeping my coffee, but there will be more running and fewer cigarettes in 2016. That’s the plan, anyway. The rest of my resolutions are more fun.

There is a tendency to narrow our horizons as we age, to stick with what we find comfortable and comforting. Added to that, working in a challenging professional landscape (yes, that was a wry drawl you heard in my voice there), can make one cautious with one’s mental resources. My reading has become focussed on research, books by people I know and the the acclaimed successes of the season, and has, as a result, rather narrowed. That’s not good. Most of my energy goes into my work, I'm pretty drained at the end of most days, so it feels like there isn’t much left of me for a social life. By that I mean I don’t like leaving the house much. Not good either. I have a nasty feeling I've started relying on my husband to go out into the world for me. So, having acknowledged there’s a problem, the cultural resolutions are designed to get me out of my head and my house in 2016. 

Out of my own head first:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org

1 - Poetry. I’m going to read a new book of poetry every month. And I mean read - not just buy, browse and stick on the bookshelf. Poets are the shock-troops of language and we need to keep an eye on what they are doing. This is an amazingly rich period in British and American poetry we’re living through, and I want to savour it. I’m going to subscribe to Poetry Magazine again and use that as a way to find my monthly choices. Anytime I have to take the tube into town, that’s what I’ll be reading and the free papers can keep their celebrity baking / dancing / eating things in the jungle revelations to themselves.

2 - Short Stories. I have a beautiful Everyman edition of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories on the shelves. I would like to read it rather than just admire the cover. There are some great new writers experimenting with short form fiction too. An hour or so of that a week, carved out from my wandering round listlessly on the internet schedule, should be doable.

Recommendations

3 - Music. Time to find some new stuff and maybe, a crazy idea I know, not just listen to baroque all the time. If that feels too wild, at least some new baroque. Again, at least an album a month and I will listen properly while I’m doing the housework. (This has the added benefit of meaning the flat will be cleaner). 

4 - Novels from new (to me) writers. This year I’m going to stop trying to keep up with the Booker short list or the Costas and look for new voices outside the mainstream. Again, once a month shouldn’t be a strain, and I can start with a subscription to Peirene Press. 

http://www.peirenepress.com/home

And out of the house:

1 - Time to start going to the theatre again. I miss it and the husband is keen. This might mean facing the tube during rush hour and some cash outlay, but I’ll have Poetry Magazine to get me through the traffic, and there is, I am told, quite a lot of theatre going on in smaller venues. Once a month for that too.  

2 - Concerts and gigs. Same as above. 

http://www.timeout.com/london

3 - People. I’ve heard some of them can be quite nice so perhaps instead of relying on book launches and events to get me out, I might actually start making arrangements with my non-writer friends. At the moment I tend rather to greet any suggestion they make with ‘You want me to leave the house and pay for my own drinks?’ Well, I shall try and manage it at least once a month in 2016.

4 - Get out of London. Just, you know, occasionally, for some free and easy wandering. 

It’s strange, even though I know everything above will be both fun and good for me and my writing, it looks a bit frightening written down. That almost certainly means I should actually do it. Every human imagination needs to be fed and watered with new sights and sounds, and we all need to lift our eyes to the horizon from time to time before looking down becomes a habit, then a comfort, then a cage. 

Wish me luck out there, and all recommendations gratefully received!

www.imogenrobertson.com

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A Woman's Heart by Kate Lord Brown

December 21, 2015, 4:30 pm

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Seeing the river of Novel Reading flowing through the Land of Sentimentality is enough to warm the heart of any writer to boiling point. This Victorian document, purporting to 'Map the Open Country of Woman's Heart' including the 'facilities and dangers to Travellers therein' was - apparently - by 'A Lady'. Though interestingly it was printed by D W Kellogg of Connecticut - I wonder if there's any relation to the founder of the cereal company who was obsessed with regular bowel movements.

Squeezed in at the base of the heart between the Lands of Selfishness and Sentiment, are - almost as an afterthought - some positive attributes. Hope, enthusiasm, discrimination, Good Sense and Prudence. But where is bravery? Or honour? Or sheer sass? In the undulating timeline of history, why have women been sidelined in the Land of Oblivion.

A couple of weeks ago, I taught a hist fic workshop at the Taunton Literary Festival in the wonderful Victorian school room of the Castle Museum. When we were discussing character, I talked about the joy of finding forgotten bits of history - the stories of women Spitfire pilots, women war photographers and women soldiers. One of the students asked 'Are you a feminist'? 

Growing up, it never occurred to me that women were anything but equal with men. We went to career days where we were handed badges with fist punching gender signs and encouraged to sign up as engineers. We were taught to be capable - both to run a home and a business. Did that make us feminists? I don't remember us using the term - feminism seemed to belong to previous generations who had fought for equality. We were told there was no glass ceiling, nothing we could not do or be.

Now, with a teenage daughter of my own, I wonder it that is true. If we redrew the map of a woman's heart today, what would it show? With the film Sufragette, with a fourth wave of New Feminism, what it means to be a woman is once again in the news and a younger generation of women are claiming the word 'feminist'. It feels like there is still a lot to work for.

I was delighted to be asked to contribute a chapter to 'More Passion for Science', a publication about remarkable women in aid of Ada Lovelace Day. Ada was the daughter of Byron, a visionary scientist. I wrote about the women of the Air Transport Auxiliary who inspired my first novel, 'The Beauty Chorus'. It was a moment in history when men and women flew side by side, on equal salary, with equal risks. The more I learnt about them, the greater my admiration became. The women had hearts full of qualities I admire - courage, intelligence, loyalty, passion, bravery, liberty, equality. If that makes me a feminist, then yes I am. How about you? Perhaps in a week when the 'first' British astronaut headed to space according to the press, there is still work to be done. Dr Sharman was the first British astronaut in space, in 1991. But perhaps that doesn't count, or has been overlooked, because Dr Sharman was a woman.

Find out more about Ada Lovelace and the new anthology here.

This is an interesting collection of essays on the subject - I Call Myself A Feminist: The View from Twenty-Five Women Under Thirty

Did they really have platform soles in the 1940s? And other Recency Illusions by Leslie Wilson

December 22, 2015, 4:30 pm

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French fashion, 1941

My lovely editor for Saving Rafael at one stage asked me: 'Did they have platform soles in the Forties? Well, yes, they did, and here's a picture of them. In fact, I can remember my mother groaning: 'Oh, not again!' when they came in thirty years later.

This is a nice example of what I saw described in the New Scientist as 'the Recency Illusion,. ie, the idea that certain innovations, technology, slang, fashion, language etc are far more recent than they in fact are. I find myself caught up in it myself, quite often. For example,would you believe that in 1880s Hong Kong, there was a telephone installed at Government House? There was, though (I was startled to learn, when writing The Mountain of Immoderate Desires), and it communicated with the second Government House on the Peak, demolished later by a typhoon, and, when we were in Hong Kong, nothing but a cement platform overgrown by morning glories.

I remember the late and lovely PD James falling prey to it when she told an interviewer that thank heavens, when she was a child, the word 'kid' was only applied to baby goats. However, I have to respectfully contradict her here: E. Nesbit uses the word 'kids' (See: 'The Wouldbegoods' (published 1901, nine years before PD James was born), and also I have an obscure novel called 'The Quaker Bonnet', published in 1913, where a maidservant describes the heroine as 'the weirdest kid that ever I had to do with.' Once again, I suspect that if I put that in a book set at that period, several people would object to my use of 'modern' language.

A copy-editor objected to my use of the word 'cool' in Last Train from Kummersdorf, saying that the word in its current meaning dated from the 1990s. It was, of course, used in my youth, quite a bit before the 1990s, but I had also (being that kind of author) double-checked that the word was used in the sense I was using it in the 40s, using a Louis Armstrong lyric for validation. I suppose it's not surprising that a younger person should find it hard to believe their 'own' slang has such a long white beard on.

One of the oddest ideas I have often encountered is that people didn't use contractions in speech in the past. I mean, don't, shan't, she's, etc. A student on a creative writing course I tutored told me in all seriousness that in the past (in this case the early 20th century) people never used these forms, even in speech. I referred him to Jane Austen, but he was still sceptical. But here is Squire Bramble, in Smollett's Humphrey Clinker, first published in 1771. 'I an't married to Tabby, thank Heaven' and: 'Not that she's a fool.' Or: 'I dare say you won't wonder at the progress the writer had made in the heart of a simple girl.' People also abbreviated names, such as Tom, Tab, etc.You, gentle readers, all know this, but this person didn't, and doubtless he's not alone.

The balloon races

Also, I was reading about the balloon races from the Vincennes site of the 1900 Paris Exhibition in a book I picked up in Paris once, and came across the expression 'le recordman.' It being self-explanatory, I had no need for any translation, but this was a 1900 account. If I were to write a novel about the period and put that very modern-sounding expression in, I'd bet a huge amount of people would regard it as an anachronism (and pick me up on it.)

Then there was the person who wrote to me and complained that I had a character called Marlene in between-the-wars Weimar Germany (in my first, not very wonderful novel). This lady seemed to have a kind of proprietorial passion for Marlene Dietrich, and she had been led astray by the story (presumably related by the lovely Marlene to her daughter and recorded in said daughter's biography of her mother) that Dietrich had run Maria Magdalene together to invent the name of Marlene. In fact there was a character called Marlene in one of my mother's German children's books, first published in 1913, which was why I chose the name. Dietrich was admittedly twelve in 1913, but it's unlikely that she had both invented the name for the first time and got it into universal currency by that time. In fact German names are often telescoped like this 'Annelie' for 'Anne Liese' for example, or 'Annegret' for 'Anna Margarethe'.

Another lady recently wrote to the Guardian style editor objecting to the use of the word 'freighted'. It was not a verb, she said, and she couldn't find it in her Oxford dictionary. However, the Guardian found it, as an archaic usage, in their Collins dictionary (it’s in my Chambers, too). I am quite certain I have read 'freighted' in some poem or book, but the source escapes my mind. Anyone know? Incidentally, 'miffed' was a word I only knew through the pages of Georgette Heyer, till it returned to common usage in the latter part of the 20th century.

Something that fascinated me was finding, in the diaries of Thomas Creevey, a noted Regency Whig, 11th May: 'A telegraphic dispatch announces that Lord Whitworth (Ambassador to France) has left Paris.' This was the ending of the Peace of Amiens, and the telegraphic message was in fact sent by semaphore, the real-life source of Terry Pratchett's Clacks Towers (or is it Clax?). However, when, in 'Our Mutual Friend', (1865), telegrams are sent by Mr Veneering's supporters, when he's purchasing his seat in Parliament, they really were sending electrical telegrams as I remember them before the invention of the fax, the email, and the SMS text. The first commercial telegraphy service in Britain, according to Wikipedia, was installed on the Great Western Railway system, between Paddington and West Drayton in 1838.

Diagram of a Prussian semaphore tower.

Any other contributions to this litany of things more ancient than we think they are?

Meanwhile:  
A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OUR READERS!!

KING JOHN'S CHRISTMAS EVE by Elizabeth Chadwick

December 23, 2015, 4:30 pm

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The first Christmas I joined The History Girls, I posted a piece about where King Henry II spent every Christmas of his reign.  IF IT'S CHRISTMAS IT MUST BE CHINON

My monthly spot always falls on the 24th, so I thought I'd write a variation on the above and post, in this year of Magna Carta commemorations,  the whereabouts of King John on December 24th for each year of his reign between 1199 and 1215 - where it is known.   Where it isn't, I have plumped for the closest date.
John's reign ended in October 1216 at Newark Castle.


1199.  In 1199, John was off the map on December 24th, but there is a chance he was at Bures in Normandy, because he was certainly there on the 26th, and Bures had a tradition of hosting Angevin family Christmases.  It was from Bures in 1170 that the four knights of Henry II's household set out on their journey that would culminate in the murder of Thomas Becket.

1200.  In this year John was in transit on the way to the Angevin hunting lodge and palace at  Woodstock which had been a favourite of his family for several generations.  His great grandfather King Henry I had kept a menagerie of exotic animals - and mistresses here!  Possibly he was starting out from Farnham or Guildford.

1201  John was across The Channel at Argentan where he spent 6 days of the Christmas period. During this time he paid 25 shillings to the clerks who chanted 'Christus Vincit' for him.  Christus Vincit

1202  Caen in Normandy was the venue this year.  He had spent the 6 days Prior to this at Bures - see  the entry for 1199.

1203  There's a blank in the itinerary for 1203, but Christmas Day was spent at Canterbury, so it's safe to assume he was either travelling or had arrived in Canterbury on the 24th.  John was a highly itinerant monarch who spent much of his reign in the saddle travelling from castle to castle, manor to manor, lodge to lodge, typically covering anything from 15 to 35 miles in a day.  He stayed at 13 different places throughout December 1203, including a Channel crossing in early December.

1204  John was at Marlborough in 1204 and Christmas Eve  his 3rd day there. He would spend Christmas Day at Tewekesbury, for which he had  ordered in four thousand plates and five hundred cups as well as four hundred yards of linen for napkins and table cloths.

1205  Woodstock was the Christmas Eve venue for 1205, on the way to Oxford for Christmas Day.  See the entry for 1200 for more on Woodstock. Here's a black and whie illustration of the palace in its grandeur, but post the Angevin monarchy. It was knocked down in the 18th century and now lies under the environs of Blenheim Palace.

1206  saw John at Winchester on Christmas Eve for the first of 3 days. At one time Winchester had been England's major city but by now had been overtaken by London.

1207   On December 24th, John was in transit and heading for Windsor, another favourite royal castle.

1208  Bristol was the venue for Christmas this year.  John arrived on the 24th and spent three days in the port city.  He may have been waiting for news from Ireland concerned with political difficulties there involving his great magnate William Marshal.  The latter was at court during this period but not in favour.  As it happened the seas were so rough that no news was forthcoming, for no vessels would dare the crossing.

1209 Windsor was the venue again in 1209 for two days.  Again, John had been on the move all month and had made 13 different overnight stops altogether.

1210  John spent 5 days in York in this year.

1211  John was at Windsor again on this date. For the Christmas feast, the constable ordered in 60 pounds of pepper, 18 pounds of cumin, half a pound of galingale, 3 pounds of cinnamon, 1 pound of cloves, half a pound of nutmeg, 2 pounds of ginger. Also bought in were 24 towels, 103 yards of canvas, 1500 cups, 1200 pitchers, 10,000 herrings, 1800 whiting, 900 haddock and 3,000 lampreys (despite their deadly reputation for causing digestive upset!).

Lampreys

1212  saw John at the royal palace of Westminster for 3 days.  His father Henry II had had the buildings refurbished when he came to the throne and later, John's son Henry III would remodel and upgrade it extensively, building the famous 'painted chamber.'

1213  John was back at Windsor

1214  John was  riding between Hereford and Worcester on Christmas Eve,  a distance of about 26 miles.

1215  In this, the final time in his life when he would celebrate Christmas,  John was travelling on Christmas Eve between Melton Mowbray and Nottingham, a shortish distance of around 20 miles.  He would stay in Nottingham for one night before moving on to his hunting lodge at Langar, and then onto Newark, the place where he was to die 10 months later of an unspecified but perhaps gastric illness while fighting a war to prevent the son of the French King and the rebellious barons backing him, from taking the crown over which John had schemed and fought all of his life, almost from the day of his birth.

Newark Castle

Elizabeth Chadwick is an award winning historical novelist.  Her latest book, THE WINTER CROWN, tells the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II and their children between the years 1154-1174. 

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Happy Christmas by Miranda Miller

December 24, 2015, 11:30 pm

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I’m sure you’ve all got better things to do than read my blog today but as it IS Christmas I started to think about the cosy traditions Prince Albert and Dickens are said to have invented between them. When I went to live in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s I didn’t expect to miss them, as I’m not religious and don’t like turkey or tacky decorations. However, I was furious when the morality policemen, or mutaween, confiscated the Christmas tree at my daughter’s playgroup. Remembering this reminded me that Cromwell also banned Christmas, in 1652, and for eight years there were no public festivities in England.

One of the customs the Puritans banned was the appointment of the Lord of Misrule, also known as the Christmas King, a tradition which can be traced back to the Roman Saturnalia. From New Year’s Eve until Twelfth Night he was to entertain the community and turn things upside down.

In 1595 the Puritan Philip Stubs or Stubbes wrote, in his Anatomie of Abuses:

The wildheads of the parish, conventing together, choose them a Grand-captain (of all mischief) whom they ennoble with the title of my Lord of Misrule, and him they crown with great solemnity and adopt their king. This king annointed, chooseth forth twenty, forty, threescore or a hundred lustyguts, like to himself, to wait upon his lordly majesty, and to guard his noble person...Then march this heathen company towards the church and churchyard, their pipers piping,their drummers thundering,their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, their hobbyhorses and other monsters skirmishing among the throng; and in this sort they go to church...like devils incarnate with such a confused noise, that no man can hear his own voice. Then the foolish people they look, they stare, they laugh, they fleer, and mount upon the forms and pews to see their goodly pageants solemnised in this sort.

The Lords of Misrule gave themselves preposterous alliterative titles, such as Sir Morgan Mumchance of much Monkery in the county of Mad Mopery.

Mince pies were also considered offensive. They used to be filled with minced meat, including pheasants, hares, rabbits, pigeons and capons. They were large, oblong ( to represent Christ’s crib) and sometimes topped by a baby Jesus made of pastry. The puritans considered this idolatry, a popish superstition.

There was a war of pamphlets over the pros and cons of celebrating Christmas. One Puritan pamphlet had the catchy title: Christmas Day, the old Heathens’ Fasting Day in honour to Saturn their Idol-God, the Papists’ Massing Day, taking to hearth the Heathenish customs, Popish superstitions, ranting fashions, fearful provocations, horrible abominations committed against the Lord and his Christ on that day and the days following.

Another pamphleteer, protected by anonymity, dragged class into the argument and retorted: A Ha! Christmas, This Book is a sound and good persuasion for Gentlemen, and all wealthy men, to keepe a good Christmas. Here is proved the cause of Free-Will Offerings, and to be liberall to the poore, here is sound and good arguments for it, taken and proven out of Scripture, as hath been written a long time.



John Evelyn, a Royalist and Anglican, defied the government when he attended illegal Prayer Book services in London.

Then as now, politics and religion were inextricably mixed. In 1657 he was arrested:

Sermon Ended, as he was giving us the holy sacrament, the Chapell was surrounded with Soldiers: All the Communicants and Assembly surpriz’d and kept Prisoners by them, some in the house, others carried away...When I came before them they tooke my name and aboad, examined me, why contrarie to an Ordnance made that none should any longer observe the superstitious time of the Nativity (so esteem’d by them) I durst offend, & particularly to be a common prayers, which they told me was but the Masse in English, & particularly pray for Charles Stuard, for which we had no scripture.

After the Restoration people soon reverted. On Christmas day 1662 Pepys records that he went to a Christmas service in the chapel at Whitehall Palace:

Methought he (Bishop Morley) made but a poor sermon, but long, and reprehending the common jollity of the Court for the true joy that shall and ought to be on these days. Particularized concerning their excess in playes and gaming...Upon which it was worth observing how far they are come from taking the reprehensions of a bishop seriously, that they all laugh in the chapel when he reflected on their ill actions and courses. He did much press us to joy in these publick days of joy, and to hospitality. But one that stood by whispered in my eare that the Bishop do not spend one groate to the poor himself.

Rome at Christmas, by Carol Drinkwater

December 25, 2015, 4:01 pm

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I am in Rome. I usually make the ‘pilgrimage’ at some point during the run-up to Christmas. The street illuminations are magnificent, the shopping is deliciously decadent and hectic and the Irish Catholic child in me thrills at St Peter’s Church and Square decked out in all its Nativity glory. Except that this year the crib is not ready. It looks like a building site. When I asked one of the volunteers keeping the flow of tourists moving when they expect it to be on display, she said they had high hopes it will be completed by the end of this week, which will be past Christmas Day. It rather confirms the cliché image of Italian punctuality.

I brought my 91-year-old mother this year, a dyed-in-the-wool Irish Catholic who never misses Mass and believes firmly in the infallibility of the Pope. As we stepped outside the great church, the largest religious building in the world, erected over the tomb of the Apostle Peter who was the first of an unbroken line of Popes, into the December sunshine, we stood gazing out across St Peter’s circular piazza with its towering Christmas tree and obelisk (taken by Caligula from Heliopolis in Egypt).

The Vatican City is an independent state, a walled enclave of 44 hectares, situated within the city of Rome. It counts approximately 840 inhabitants, including thirty female Vatican passport holders, which makes it the smallest internationally recognised independent state, both in size and population, in the world. Its monarch is the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. It is an independent economy, a free city in its own right with its own armed guards. Since the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, security has been more vigilant. As well as the traditional halberd and sword, these men now carry guns.

                                                               Papal  Swiss Guard at Vatican

There is no charge to enter St Peter’s Basilica but one does pay to visit the Vatican museums and the Sistine Chapel. There is at least one bookshop – very well stocked with history and religious material, tourist mementos, postcards and Vatican stamps. The funds accrued from the sale of ticket entries and publications are, apparently, what keep Vatican City solvent. Its currency is the euro.

What surprised me was to learn that the Vatican City State only came into existence in 1929. I had assumed it would have been created during the period of Risorgimento or the Unification of Italy, which began in 1815 and was completed in 1871 when Rome was declared the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. However, the role of the Catholic Church including the Pope’s status within Italy was disputed for 58 years until an agreement was finally reached and signed in February 1929 becoming effective in June of that same year. The signatories were the Prime Minister, Benito Mussolini, representing the King and the Cardinal Secretary of State on behalf of Pope Pius XI. According to the signed treaty, the Holy See has “full ownership, exclusive dominion, sovereign authority and jurisdiction over its city-state”.

In 1984, UNESCO declared the Vatican City State a World Heritage Site.

Its genius and beauty were created by Michelangelo, Bernini, Raphael to name but three amongst many including the greatest Renaissance architects. It is considered to be a continuous artistic creation as well as the seat of Christendom. This is why I return again and again. To Rome, the Eternal City, yes, and to the Vatican City because there is always something to discover, to celebrate, to marvel at. The long queues to reach the Sistine Chapel, a Holy Grail of a journey, rewarded at its end by that ceiling which never fails to astound, to leave me silenced with wonder. I will never forget the first time I lifted my gaze upwards and saw that reach, those fingers, that look between the two figures and a frisson ran through me which never lessens no matter how many visits I make.

Or St Peter’s Baldachin, the sculpted bronze canopy that stands 95 feet tall beneath the basilica’s dome and over the spot where St Peter is buried. Yesterday, there was almost no one in front of the baldachin when I reached it. I had the view of its dark towering presence all to myself – my mother was resting, perched on a great marble plinth nearby because all the seats in the church had been removed.

I took a breath and momentarily closed my eyes. Somewhere in a remote corner of the building a Gregorian chant was being sung, possibly a recording   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlr90NLDp-0 and then I glanced upwards at the dome. Michelangelo's work, his vision, but he died before it was completed. Still, he dedicated seventeen years of his life to this building. It humbles me to reflect on this fact.

Yesterday was the first time I have ever been in the basilica when no mass was taking place. Usually there are several going on all at once with priests crossing the marble floors in twos – one to say mass and one to serve – intent on one of many altars. My habit is usually to walk from my hotel in Prati, attend the first mass of the day which is performed at 7am. At this time of day, particularly in winter, there is rarely more than a handful of attendees. After mass, when I leave the church, day is breaking. I always take a moment outside to watch the sun rising up beyond the hills of Rome, breaking in golden streams across the colonnades and ruins of this immortal place.
The surrounding beauty, a combination of man-made and natural, swells up within me like an injection of warm liquid, leaving me drunk with joy and the knowledge that, in spite of everything, life is blessed, magnificent.

Beyond this, I rush about the city, seeing friends, choosing new leather shoes and handbag, eating plateloads of pasta, drinking Prosecco, buying panettone, huge chunks of fresh crumbly Parmesan before making one last stop at the Trevi Fountain. One euro tossed in the gushing water to guarantee my return, although it has been out of action for a while due to renovations. Next time, I might make the climb up to St Peter's cupola and see the city from this aerial viewpoint, which in over forty years' of visits, I have never done.


Happy holidays one and all. May 2016 bring some peace and sanity to our troubled, angry world. 

www.caroldrinkwater.com

Fifi Skene by Janie Hampton

December 26, 2015, 4:30 pm

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When I moved to Oxford I rather disapproved of the hostel next door, with its Victorian attitude to young, single mothers. I was not surprised when our local vicar told me that it was run by the ‘Skene Moral Welfare Association’.  I then learned that the Skene in question was Felicia Mary Frances Skene, one of the most radical women in nineteenth century Oxford. I was even more amazed to discover that she was my grandfather’s great aunt, known in the family as ‘Fifi’. I decided to find out more.

Felicia Mary Frances Skene as a young woman

Her father James, was a wealthy Scottish lawyer and amateur artist whose engravings illustrated Walter Scott’s novels. Born in 1821, Fifi comforted Scott with fairy stories the night in 1825 when he lost everything. Roused by her cheerful spirit, he decided to fight bankruptcy and work through his debts. Scott wrote that Fifi’s parents ‘bring so much old-fashioned kindness and good humour with them that they must be always welcome guests.’ They were also enterprising and resourceful. 

Fifi’s father James Skene of Rubsilaw, 1775–1864,  with two of his grandchildren.

James Skene believed that travel was the best form of education and led his family  on a grand tour around Europe. Fifi was taught the piano in France by Liszt, whom she described as ‘a wild-looking, long-haired excitable man’. Between 1838 and 1845 the family lived in Athens where Fifi sang with the Greek royal family. During an expedition on  horseback across the Marathon plain, she spent the night in a shack with Albanian peasants and their pigs. At the age of twenty-four she brought her young nieces aged ten and eleven (one of them my great grandmother Janie) home from Athens by ship and train via Constantinople. Arriving in England she wrote her first book Wayfaring Sketches among the Turks and Christians, first in French and then in English.  Her observations of conditions in slave markets, galley- ships and an Ottoman Pasha’s harem made it a bestseller.

The Skene method of education obviously worked. Her older brother James Henry married a Greek aristocrat and became a British Consul to Aleppo.  Fifi’s brother George was Professor of Law at the University of  Edinburgh and Sheriff of Glasgow, and another brother William became the Historiographer Royal of Scotland, writing the first academic history from Scotland’s point of view. One of her sisters married the Swedish ambassador to Washington, Berlin and Paris, and the other married a Greek aristocrat – the brother of her sister-in-law.

Fifi, left, with her niece Zoe Thomson, wife of the Archbishop of York, and her brother William Forbes Skene, Historiographer Royal of Scotland 1892.

 Her 1866 novelHidden Depthswas an exposure of prostitution in Oxford inspired by the injustices she had witnessed in the prison and women’s reformatories. The Athenaeum criticised her writing as ‘unrepresentative of society’, The London Review disapproved of the message and Mudie’s Library considered the subject-matter altogether too provocative. The Lesters: A Family Record warned readers of the dangers of alcohol but was denounced by Saturday Review as being ‘cheap melodramatic horror’ and ‘almost beneath criticism’ while Academy dismissed the novel  as dull and destined for failure.  Fifi’s social views were just too progressive for 19^th century male critics. Attracted by intellectual life, Fifi persuaded her parents to move to Oxford where she settled down as a writer and philanthropist. Despite countless offers, the auburn-haired and boisterous Fifi was far too busy to bother with marriage. She didn’t want to belong to a man and much preferred to carve out her own life. Fluent in both French and Greek, and possessing a photographic memory, she published more than twenty books under the pseudonyms of Oxonesis, Francis Scougal and Erskine Moir.  Her interest in the high-church ‘Oxford Movement’, inspired a theological work The Divine Master, which ran to eleven editions.  She wrote for Blackwood’s,  Cornhilland Macmillan's Magazines, Quiver, Temple Bar and Good Words,  which had  a circulation of 100,000 and featured contributions by Thomas Hardy and Anthony Trollope. 

Fifi’s 1865 anonymous pamphlet, ‘Penitentiaries and Reformatories’ on the humiliation of ‘fallen women’ whom society ‘sought to hide its blackest curse under a veil of mock prudery. . . because their sin was unfit to be named in the polite society that received with open arms the very men on whom they sinned’. ( University of Indiana's Victorian Women Writers Project)

Published under the the pseudonym Erskine Moir, her novel Through the Shadows had more success and The Spectator stated it to be ‘the outcome of a most refined, religious, and poetical mind’.

They were right. Fifi was a deeply religious and principled woman and used the income from her books and articles to finance her philanthropic work.Her biographer Ellen Rickards wrote that ‘it was her rule throughout her long life never to spend on herself what she gained from her writings, partly from her natural love of giving, partly from an old-fashioned idea that it was an undignified thing for a lady to earn money for her own personal advantage.’

The Skene Arms, left, in St Michael’s Street, Oxford.

For most of her life Fifi lived in St Michael’s Street in the centre of Oxford. It’s nickname was ‘The Street of Seven Deadly Sins’.  Her home was known as ‘The Skene Arms’, because it was always open to beggars, clergymen, prostitutes, politicians and students.   In her Cornhill Magazine article ‘Ethics of the Tramp’ she wrote that like her parrots, men of the road should roam free and never be incarcerated. She braved the wrath of local pimps and drunken husbands by finding refuge for women fleeing prostitution and domestic violence.

Fifi, Tatters and Rev. Algernon Barrington Simeon, the first Warden of St Edward’s School, whom she nursed though diphtheria, 1875.

After years of impromptu visits to Oxford Prison accompanied by Tatters, her Skye terrier, Fifi became England’s first official female Prison Visitor. She insisted on complete confidentiality and demanded that male and female prisoners be housed separately, for the protection of the women. On their release, she gave prisoners a hearty breakfast and a reference for employment. She even organised marriages to legitimatize the children of ‘fallen women’. Independently of any political movement, she fought for prisons to be used for rehabilitation; for the abolition of capital punishment; and for the decriminalization of suicide. She also campaigned against female inequality, animal vivisection and religious intolerance. When the Prime Minister, W.E. Gladstone, asked her advice on the new theory of evolution, she told him that Darwin’s discovery was true, and compatible with Christianity.

Fifi helped found St Edward’s School for the sons of poor clergymen and dug the first sod of earth for its new buildings in North Oxford. With Dr Henry Acland, Fifi trained nurses to deal with the regular cholera and smallpox outbreaks in Oxford. But when she offered her nurses to Florence Nightingale for the war in the  Crimea, all but three were turned down for being ‘too working class.’

Fifi, 1821-1899, in old age.

Fifi died of bronchitis in 1899 and was buried in St Thomas church, near Oxford railway station.  A century later the assets of the Skene Moral Welfare Association were redistributed among Oxford’s social housing associations. In old age, Fifi had said of herself, ‘I am like the Martyr’s Memorial – everybody knows me and no-one is interested me.’  Beyond Oxford, she has largely been forgotten, but in 2002 a blue plaque was erected outside her home, now a hostel for single men.  The plaque describes Fifi as ‘Prison reformer and friend of the poor’ but there is no mention of her literary achievements.

At times I have felt that my own career, which is split between writing popular history books and  international development, confuses people. Great Aunt Fifi demonstrated that a woman can have as many different careers as she likes.

 Some of her titles: Wayfaring sketches among the Greeks and Turks, and on the shores of the Danube by a seven years resident in Greece, 1849. The Isles of Greece, and other poems, 1843. Use and Abuse,  a tale, 1849. The Inheritance of Evil or, The Consequence of marrying a deceased wife’s sister, 1849. The Tutor's Ward, 1851.  The Divine Master, 1852. S. Alban’s, or, the Prisoners of Hope, 1853. Hidden Depths ,1866. Still and Deep, 1875. Memoir of Alexander, Bishop of Brechin, 1876. Raymond, 1876.  Life of Alexander Lycurgus: archbishop of the Cyclades, 1877. 

More than Conqueror , 1878. The Shadow of the Holy Week, 1883. A Strange Inheritance,1886. The Lesters: a Family Record, 1887. Through the Shadows: a Test of the Truth, 1888. Awakened. A tale in nine chapters, 1888. Dewdrops: selections from writings of the saints,1888. Scenes from a Silent World, or, Prisons and their Inmates, 1889.

www.janiehampton.co.uk 

Out with the Old . . .

December 27, 2015, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: Drawing the Future, Dreaming the Past by Rhian Ivory

≪ Previous: Fifi Skene by Janie Hampton

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Hang on, hang on. It is all too easy at the back end of the year to get over enthusiastic about throwing things out. I love having a good sort through my shelves and cupboards but I do wonder if I get carried away and throw out something precious. Or more to the point, something that might be precious to others in the future. At the beginning of this month I had the great good fortune to have a behind the scenes visit to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The curator of Early Modern Manuscripts, Mike Webb, produced a small number of treasures to illustrate various stories about life during the seventeenth century. One of the objects he showed us was an accounts book kept by Mary Gofton, previously Lady Sandys, between 1645 and 1649. In this little volume she listed every item of expenditure she made. They range from £2 11s 6d for ‘16 yards of selver and gold lace for my morning cotte’ (mourning coat) to 2s 6d for a ‘play thinge for nick and miles’ (her grandsons), while on other occasions she made huge donations to her children, such as £2,000 to her son stuard in March 1647, the equivalent of £250,000 or $375,000 in 2015. 

Account book of Mary Gofton (née Hanbury, afterwards Lady Sandys, afterwards Richardson), 1645-1649 Shelfmark: MS. Eng. e. 3651

Several things struck us powerfully about this book. First, the cover was utterly unprepossessing.If one had seen it in a junk shop it would have been easy to overlook it. Secondly, it was written in the vernacular rather than ‘secretary script’ which is how men of letters were taught to write. Women did not need that skill.

Page beginning 16 March 1647

The result is that her spelling is wonderfully arbitrary but the voice is entirely hers. Reading the descriptions of her expenditure, Mike Webb was able to reconstruct her speech through her spellings and we were amazed but thrilled to hear the gentle ‘burred’ accent of a seventeenth century gentlewoman from Gloucestershire. How Mary Gofton’s book has survived is a mystery and it is nothing short of a minor miracle that it was not thrown out in a New Year spring clean in any one of the intervening 367 Januarys.

When I was working on my first book Fearless on Everest, about the disappearance of Sandy Irvine with George Mallory on Mount Everest in 1924, I had a stroke of luck with a find of material that too might have ended up in the bin. Sandy was my great uncle, though of course I never knew him. 

Willie Irvine, 1877

I did however once meet his father, my great-grandfather, Willie Irvine, when I was a baby. There is a photograph of me aged about 9 months with legs like sausages sitting on the old man’s knee. He was 93 and died not long after the photograph was taken.  Fast forward 38 years and I was living in California with my young family. Our third son had been born in Stanford and we called him Sandy after his namesake because, like him, he was blonde haired and blue-eyed. A few weeks after he was born I was walking down the high street in Palo Alto when I saw a photograph in a bookshop window. It was the last photograph of Mallory and Irvine taken the morning they left camp IV to head for camps V and VI before launching their bid on the summit on 8 June 1924. They disappeared in a blanket of cloud at about midday, last seen by Noel Odell in what is probably the most famous sighting in mountaineering history. They were, in his words, ‘going strong for the top.’ We came back to Britain in 1998 and the following year George Mallory’s frozen remains were found by an Anglo-American team and interest in the mystery of Mallory and Irvine soared.

Sandy Irvine, Spitsbergen 1923

There are more than one thousand books written about Everest and almost every single one of them alludes to their story. However, Sandy was merely the historical cipher to the great George Mallory and little was known about him. So little, in fact, that almost nothing existed in the public domain other than his sparse Everest diary and a few notes in the Royal Geographical Society archives. When I asked various family members whether anything else existed I was shown a handful of lovely family photographs and a dozen or so letters from Sandy to his family. He wrote to his mother telling her about his rowing triumphs and to his aunt, who was about to go into hospital to have an operation: ‘Dear Aunt Ankie, I’m dreadfully sorry to hear you are going to be cut up tomorrow.’ But nothing from Everest. The story went that Willie Irvine had thrown everything away, so sad was he after Sandy was killed on the mountain.

Sandy Irvine (left) with Willie, Evelyn (my grandmother) and older brother Hugh, 1904

Willie Irvine was an amateur historian and I know that historians of any shape or size hate throwing things away. So I persisted in my questioning and eventually my cousin went to the family home in North Wales and there, in the attic, she found a black trunk and in this trunk was a slim foolscap folder. It was fastened with a blue ribbon and on the front it said, in Willie’s tidy handwriting, ‘ACI Everest 1924’. Andrew Comyn Irvine, Sandy’s full name. It was one of the most exciting discoveries of my life. In this file were 11 long letters from Tibet and the mountain; photographs taken en route and developed in a dark-room tent at base camp; notes about the capricious oxygen apparatus which Sandy was responsible for and bills for his Everest clothing.

The trunk, found 75 years after Sandy's death

The fact that this trunk had not been thrown out is almost unbelievable. The house had been sold after Willie’s death and run as an old people’s home. Then Alec Irvine, Sandy’s younger brother, bought the house back in the late 1970s and by the luck of the stars no one had bothered to clear out the attic. The letters, in particular, gave me Sandy’s voice. He wrote as he spoke, in a breathless and impatient way. When he couldn’t find the words to describe something he would draw it. The letters were literally priceless to me for my book. And for posterity?

Sandy's letter to his mother from Sikkim, en route to Everest

Well, they now reside in the archives at Merton College Oxford and I can only hope that in 300 odd years they will still be there, as Mary Gofton’s accounts book is in the Bodleian, to help someone to hear a voice from the past.

So, when you are throwing out the old to make space for the new, just ask yourself if in doing so you are condemning something not only to the bin but to silence…

Drawing the Future, Dreaming the Past by Rhian Ivory

December 28, 2015, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: My Cabinet of Curiosities; Henrietta Barnett, John Lennon and the Grey Cat of feeling Blue Catherine Johnson

≪ Previous: Out with the Old . . .

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Photo credit: Jo Cotterill

Our December guest is Rhian Ivory and we welcome her warmly to The History Girls.

The Boy who drew the Future is Rhian Ivory’s fifth novel, she’s recently finished writing her sixth and is about to start editing her seventh. Rhian is a WoMentoring mentor, a Patron of Reading and a National Trust writer in residence. Tweet her on @Rhian_Ivory and find her on Facebook. 

The Boy who Drew the Future did not start off as historical fiction in fact it started off as just a dream, or rather the end of a dream which involved a boy called Noah who drew someone’s very dark future. I remember telling myself in my dream to remember the idea. I didn’t remember it but someone broke my dream later that day and I raced upstairs and wrote out the end scene in detail. However I didn’t know how to move from the end to the start of the story.

And then I started dreaming about a hand which led to a river which flowed all the way to the Workhouse. However the original the story was Noah’s alone. I wrote the whole book just about him but I kept seeing a ghost walking behind Noah, accompanied by a black dog. Blaze’s voice came to me one morning, so easily and vividly as if he were sitting next to me telling me his story. I went on a writer’s retreat and his whole history came tumbling out and suddenly I was writing a book set in the past as well as in the present about the future.

I had never heard of Sible Hedingham when I chose it as the setting for my novel. I was roaming the UK on Google maps looking for a quirky sounding village name to suit my quirky story and Sible Hedingham jumped out at me. I wrote several drafts of the novel before researching the village to make sure it did have a church, a river and a school. As I researched house prices in Sible Hedingham, primary and secondary schools and where the local supermarket would be I stumbled across parish records, workhouse inventories and The Sible Hedingham Witchcase Trial.

The last witch in England was swum in the river Colne in Sible Hedingham. Unusually this witch was not female but male. Dummy was accused of being a witch and swum in the river in front of The Swan Inn. Dummy later died in the Workhouse and I discovered that he was believed to be from Europe, possibly France and was deaf and mute, hence his cruel nickname.

Many shivers ran down my spine as I read on and realised that I had dreamt up a character quite similar to a real person who had drawn pictures on scraps of paper for his living, telling fortunes of girls in the village until he told someone a fortune they didn’t want to hear. I do believe in fate and serendipity but these circumstances were almost too much and I did wonder at one point whether I should simply return to Noah’s story. I did a lot of historical research for Blaze’s chapters, reading court reports about the real Sible Hedingham Witchcraft Case which is fascinating. I also uncovered many stories about immigrants from France and other countries coming to England for work, as Blaze’s mother does.

I told myself the novel would be much easier to write without Blaze’s complicated storyline but I’ve always wanted to write historical fiction; it is my favourite genre and I’ve read a lot of it but have been incredibly nervous about approaching it. I told myself the competition in this field is just too fierce and one storyline will be so much easier to edit but I kept dreaming about a hand.

Artwork by Guy Manning

This hand in the river trying to warn Noah about something and I knew that I couldn’t ignore Blaze’s story, so I visited the Workhouse.

In Victorian England there were over 750 workhouses open to the poor and the destitute offering a roof over their heads, clothes on their back and food in their bellies. What shocked me as I plunged further into my research was that you had to ask to enter the Workhouse. You weren’t dragged there kicking and screaming, you had to ask the Guardians to accept you, to let you in. I can imagine nothing more humbling than having to utter those words.

I discovered a series of interviews with people whose ancestors had experienced the Workhouse and it was whilst reading these documents that I found out about corpse tunnels.

The practice of taking the bodies of the Workhouse dead out through an underground tunnel and then selling them on to Universities and other medical institutions to learn about the human anatomy made for gruesome reading. The Anatomy Act of 1832 stipulated that paupers could be charged with the crime of poverty. Before this the Murder Act of 1752 stated that only the corpses of executed murderers could be used for dissection. After 1832 everything changed and the bodies of the poor could be dissected as a way to repay the welfare debt unless family members could pay to reclaim the body. Most workhouse inmates didn’t have the means to buy the bodies back and so the corpse tunnels were put to use.

I knew that the Workhouse had tunnels underneath it leading off from the kitchen but when I came to write the novel I wanted something bigger and more dramatic for my scenes in the tunnels in both Blaze’s timeline in 1865 and also Noah’s timeline in the present day when he visits the Workhouse on a school trip. So I turned back to my National Trust and found Calke Abbey which has beer tunnels open to the public.

The beer tunnels at Calke are long, dark and very atmospheric. I walked down the tunnel with my two older children, my husband having decided that they might be too scary for the youngest. When my 11 and 8 year old ran off down the tunnel ahead of me whooping and testing out the acoustics I felt a sense of panic. I wanted them back, holding my hands, not for their sake but for mine.
The dripping sound of the rain water seeping in through the bricks above me felt louder and louder as I tried to walk quickly towards the end of the tunnel and reach my children. My son turned the corner first and ran up the steep steps back into the light.

I took my daughter’s hand, ready to help her in case she should lose her footing on the first step when we heard an almighty THUD behind us. I squeezed her hand so tightly that she squealed. My son paused and shouted “What was that?” and I could hear the fear in his voice. We turned around and went back into the tunnel but it was empty. No one in there. No sign of damage or accident. I was expecting to see bricks on the floor, the ceiling caved in, something but there was nothing, just silence and the drip, drip, drip of the rain. The three of us ran up the steps together, never mind that they were steep and slippy and back into the light.

Historical details and accuracy are so important when trying to bring scenes from the past to life and I find that once I’ve visited a physical place like the Workhouse and Calke Abbey I can then go home and picture my characters walking around those gardens, or sleeping in those dormitories and imagine what it would have felt like to run along those corpse tunnels or in some cases I don’t need to imagine because I’ve already done it myself.

Find out more about Rhian here and look out for a chance to win her book on December 21st.