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On location by Sue Purkiss

March 15, 2013, 6:00 pm
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Almost two years ago, Cheddar, that well-known metropolis and historical home of a moderately well-known cheese, was rocked with excitement. A film crew was coming to town! And this was not just any old film. I mean, we're not easily impressed round here. We've had Elizabeth the Golden Age just down the road on Brean Down, we've had Hot Fuzz and Johnny Depp's The Libertine just up the road in Wells - and in the gorge itself we've had endless heart-stopping episodes of Casualty. (Well, one or two.)

But this was an epic, really BIG film, starring Nicholas Hoult, Ewen McGregor, Bill Nighy and Ian McShane (Who I almost bumped into going into an exhibition at the Royal Academy last year. No, really. The life I lead, eh?) It came out this month. I haven't seen it yet, but when it comes to Wells, I'll be there, along with lots of other locals, cheering for the minute or so that Cheddar Gorge appears on the screen. (If we can recognise it, that is - apparently there's been a good deal of digital altering.)

The location site was just up the road from where I live, and the scene was to be shot on top of the cliffs overlooking Cheddar Gorge. The film company had rented a huge field. They put down a temporary surface, installed a new gate, and the buses, trucks and jeeps rumbled in - masses of them. My neighbour Jackie and I sauntered oh so casually past, and got chatting to the very large security man on the gate, who smiled very patiently if a little wearily at our efforts to winkle out of him whether Ewen was going to be rolling up any time soon.

Unfortunately, that week it was exceptionally windy - too windy for them to film. So they hung around for a couple of days, and then all trundled off to somewhere more sheltered. The next week, back they came. There is normally no vehicular access to where they wanted to get to; but old roads were opened, temporary ones were laid, Andrew the local farmer was employed to transport their incredibly expensive special effects camera n his tractor and trailer - and they were off. Jackie and I climbed up to watch. There was an encampment of square black tents to hold all the equipment, which, with their pyramid shaped roofs, looked rather like something from a medieval battleground.

The action for this one small scene was to take place on a built up platform, with, apparently, an imaginary giant. All we could see was the scaffolding, and a few actors in rather nattty black leather outfits trimmed with silver. It took several days before they'd got what they needed, and we began to see why films cost such an enormous amount of money to make - all this, for just a few seconds of screen time?

 I walked up there yesterday. Here's a picture of the site where the scene was filmed; the platform was just the other side of the wall from where the boys are sitting. In the background would be the cliffs of the gorge, which you can see further down. Apparently in the film, five fountains have been digitally added: I imagine these are the ones in the poster above.

I walked down afterwards through the woods to reach the bottom of the gorge. It's very hobbitty, isn't it? You can just imagine Frodo, Pippin and Sam slipping between the trees. And in fact JRR Tolkien apparently visited the gorge whilst on his honeymoon and later used it as the inspiration for Helm's Deep: On the far side of the Westfold Vale lay a green coomb, a great bay in the mountains, out of which a gorge opened in the hills. Men of that land called it Helm's Deep. 

But of course, apart from all these fictional histories, the gorge has its own very real history, stretching almost inconceivably far back in time. The limestone cliffs are riddled with caves, created by the same powerful torrents of water which created the gorge itself, and which still erupt out of the hills in times of torrential downpours - as they did after Christmas, washing away the road. People lived in these caves even in relatively recent times; thousands of years ago they were home to a community of hunter gatherers. The skeleton of one of them was found when the caves were explored at the beginning of the last century. He was buried apart, in mysterious circumstances, the victim of a violent death, and evidence of cannibalism has been found.

But that's one tiny snapshot of the life of these people, who must have lived in the caves for hundreds, if not thousands of years. What was life like for the people who lived in these caves? What did they do when they weren't out hunting and gathering? What did they talk about? How did they celebrate? What did they do for fun? What did they believe in? What did it feel like to live in a cave? In their innermost selves, how different were they from us?

Michelle Paver's are the only books I've read that deal with matters such as these, and I think she does it marvellously well. I wonder if anyone will make a film of The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness? If so, I may be able to suggest somewhere they can film it..
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Black Diamonds by Catherine Bailey. Reviewed by Penny Dolan

March 17, 2013, 12:00 am
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There’s the history you search for and the history that you find when you're looking. Or not.

I’ve just read Catherine Bailey’s Black Diamonds, a book intended to unravel a mystery about the history of Wentworth House.

Bailey, a journalist and documentary filmmaker, was fascinated by Wentworth House, a vast edifice in South Yorkshire with a room for each day of the year and a front that exceeded the length of Buckingham Palace. It had belonged to the Fitzwilliam family but Bailey heard rumours about a first son smeared with illegitimacy so a younger son could inherit.  

The book is much more than the quest for that answer.



At the start of the twentieth century, Wentworth was one of the most significant properties in the kingdom and the owners were rich. By the end of that century, Wentworth was almost a ruin and the grand parklands had been destroyed. Why? Bailey felt that was an equal mystery.

Bailey searched for the collected family archives but they no longer existed. Decades of 19th and 20th century papers, documents and correspondence were missing. not damaged by natural decay or chance but destroyed very deliberately, fed into a bonfire that lasted three days. The core of her original story was missing.

So she set to work from the"outside". She searched for clues and material about the house and its people in newpaper archives, in the retained halves of correspondence, in court circulars and local papers, as well as in industrial and local archives, She interviewed people, listened to memories of memories, studied maps and reports, Finally she constructed what some might say is a patchwork quilt of a story to cover her history.

In my opinion, Bailey’s random approach – though certainly not random in method - gives Black Diamonds a charm and interest that I’m not sure would have been there if all had been in neatly documented order. Those lost documents might have given her so much information that the byways of the Wentworth House story would not be explored.

So what is the book about? Good question, as shown in the interesting shift in the way the book was marketed.

The hardback cover showed a photo of a small boy in uniform, photographed alone on the drive of a big house, subtly suggesting military leader, as well as issues of class, inheritance and ownership. A baby princeling.



However, the paperback avoids the lone heir. It bears a photo of a lipsticked lady in a flapper cloche, dominating the partial view of Wentworth House. This cover suggests sophisticated romance, Mitfordesque flightiness and upper-class lives wrecked. Maybe, for the paperback reader, all three? 


My library copy had that cover and almost didn’t read the book. I read it because it was my reading group’s choice. 

Most people in the group enjoyed it although there was some murmuring about unevenness and hearsay rather than evidence and how “it didn’t really end” which it wouldn’t, being real life not fiction.

I did read it and am very glad of that. Himself at home is reading it with enjoyment too.On the other hand, with that cover, he wouldn't have done so if I hadn't read some of the most enticing bits out to him. 

"Did you know this?" "Did you know that?" But not too many.


So what makes Black Diamonds so interesting?

At one level, there’s the scale of the riches. The house and staff at Wentworth make Downton Abbey look like a bit of middle class posh, playing on half strength.Then there’s the problems of the idle rich - what does one do all day, darling? – as they flit from house to house and country to country, with a final flit too far.

There’s the importance of a good marriage and unimportance of romantic flings – not so unusual – but what is remarkable, given there’s enough to go round, is the intense hatred towards relatives and friends over worldly inheritance and family religion. These were times when there was unbelievable rigidity over religion. 

Despite the sunny ecumenical amity of the recent Father Brown TV series, back then was a very different religious era, a time when no Catholic could attend the service of another denomination without the guilt of sin and when anti-Catholic feeling was strong and suspicious.

This book overarching narrative is about the mysteries and eccentricities within the FitzWilliam inheritance, but its strength is in the glimpses of political and social history along the way.

There might be high society tangles later but there is also a sense of good ownership and the call of duty, of building houses for your workers, of taking  care of the men in your mines, of looking after your people when they are in trouble, albeit with food parcels. Bailey also offers a compelling view and a rational explanation of the decline and destruction of the country house.

Bailey does not forget that the people who created the wealth were working miners. 

The Wentworthestate lay across the famous Barnsley coal seam, and in the pages we hear the voices of the miners, man and boy. with both the pride they felt and the hardships they and their families faced.

Alongside, Bailey brings in glimpses of wider political changes: Lloyd George and his wily political manouvres; the rise and the fear of socialism and unionism; the damage done to British coal-mining by the Treaty of Versailles prioritising German coal, as well as the royal publicity visit to “the North” that witnessed a real-life colliery disaster, and then economic decline.

During WWII, Wentworth lay under the threat of German bombs: the Raf secretly misled German bombers over the whole city of Sheffield to keep them away from the vital steel-works.

Even when peace came, it did not bring good news. Wentworth's last bitter blow, acording to Bailey, came from the vindictive plans of Manny Shinwell, the man in charge of the newly nationalised coal industry. He decided the Wentworth estate should be developed as an open cast mine. The great parklands were stripped of their trees and flowers, despite a geological report indicating the coal beneath was of poor quality, and the beautiful building undermined by subsidence created by the mining work. Even the heaps of cleared topsol, trees and rubbish were piled up in a ridge across one fo the views from the house.

Recently, Wentworth House has recovered slightly. The house has made a few tv appearances. I remember that one programme showed an aerial photo of the ravaged surface, with Wentworth House balancing on its small patch of land. At the time I blamed the owners of the house. Now I think, right or wrong, that stretch of ugly desolation was Manny’s revenge on the rich. The sad twist is that the progamme was one of those beg-for-money competitions and the faded Wentworth did not win. 

Since then, I’ve read rumours of unsuccessful insurance claims and plans to turn Wentworth into into a luxury hotel, spa and wedding venue, with the website shows pictures of still-existing interiors. Maybe that's a happy thought.

However, I’d advise against giving any young couple a copy of Black Diamonds. Or reading it while lying in a bubbling jacussi, high above the miles of mine workings.   It wouldn't seem right, somehow.

An excellent book.

Penny Dolan.
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Silent as the Grave - Celia Rees

March 17, 2013, 5:30 pm
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Last Sunday, my daughter and I went on a pilgrimage to Kensal Green Catholic Cemetery to lay lilies on the grave of Krystyna Skarbek (nom de guerre, Christine Granville) a Polish agent of extraordinary daring and courage who served in the SOE during the Second World War and who was awarded the George Medal, an O.B.E. and the Croix de Guerre. She was a Countess, beautiful, glamorous, everything a female spy ought to be. She was rumoured to have been a friend of Ian Fleming and the inspiration for various Bond girls, notably Tatiana Romanova and Vesper Lynd, although her own life story is far more interesting than anything to be found within the covers of a James Bond novel. She served this country with bravery and loyalty but after the war she was turned away, services no longer required. She came to a sad and untimely end in 1952, murdered by a jealous lover in the foyer of an Earls Court hotel.


This might seem an odd mother and daughter activity for Mothering Sunday, but we had both read her biography, The Spy who Loved by Clare Mulley and I'd discovered http://www.findagrave.com, a site where you can find anybody's grave, famous or obscure.

I've always been a one for reading graves and epitaphs, even when I was a child. I used to walk through the churchyard to school and would often dawdle, reading gravestones, wondering about the  lives of the people buried there. Graveyards and cemeteries have gained greater significance, however, since I became a writer. They are good sources for names, for one thing. If you are setting a book in a particular place in a particular period, the local cemetery will give you a ready made selection which will be both appropriate and accurate to period and location. Just mix them up a bit.


Graveyards, or just graves have been a source of inspiration. I first saw the graves at Llanfihangel Abercowin Old Parish Church & Norman Grave-Slabs in South West Wales many years ago. Legend has it that these are the final resting places of a group of pilgrims on their way to or from St David's and who unaccountably starved to death in this place.  A friend and I became intrigued by the legend, the isolated, ruined church and the grave slabs with their mysterious human figures. There was a mystery here and one that, we felt, was not entirely explained by the antiquarians and historians.

 We wrote a spooky, time shifting screenplay, incorporating other local myths and legends and moving between the Celtic past and the present day. Sadly, The White Dog of Traventy is still in a drawer somewhere (or actually in a small suitcase) . It taught me one thing, don't waste time writing a screenplay. 



Still, some graveyards have been more productive for me. In the 1990s I had an idea for a vampire novel (I want the date noted). I decided to set the story (which would become Blood Sinister) in and around Highgate Cemetery in London. Highgate has a fine vampire history. Bram Stoker located Lucy Westenra's Mausoleum here in his novel, Dracula and there have been regular reports of vampire activity, right up until in the 1970s. 



Perfect setting for a book about a vampire. Graveyards are hugely evocative and are wonderful places for creating atmosphere. When I'm writing anything, I visit the setting if I possibly can, have a wander about, notebook and camera in hand. I also collect things. With Blood Sinister, I visited the old, Victorian Western Cemetery in Highgate. Huge and genuinely spooky, a real city of the dead. Lots of famous people are buried here. You can only go round it as part of a guided tour, in case you got lost and were never seen again. Not so much snatched by vampires, more likely to fall into an old vault or crumbling underground crypt. 













I also went to the old cemetery in Coventry where I took this photograph of a mausoleum, which would be the final resting place (or not) of my vampire character. While I was there, I found a bit of the wrought ironwork that had broken off, so I picked it up and kept it. Blood Sinister was always a good book to talk about on school visits. I'd take my 'souvenir' with me as an added a bit of  authenticity.


Cemeteries and graveyards are full of stories: enigmas contained within the epitaphs, dates of birth and death, the ages of the deceased. Even the memorials themselves: the lettering, the type of stone, the weathering can tell you something of the people who lived and died in a particular place. 




Yet e'en these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Elegy Written In A Country Church-Yard
Thomas Gray (1716-71)


Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

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Memories are made of this….. by Theresa Breslin

March 18, 2013, 5:43 pm
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On a recent business trip to London (to coincide with the marvellous Manet exhibition) I had some ‘extra’ hours and decided to visit the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood. My notebook was at the ready as I was hoping for some treasure to hoard for later use or even a prompt for something new. I didn’t expect a trigger for a personal memoir on writing implements.  

This fascinating letter cabinet definitely pre-dates anything in my experience but was worth the photograph.




I continued sauntering round the exhibits in no particular order, and recognising (too?) many items that are now classed as being ‘historical’  I was doing the usual: “Yes, I remember that!” or “My brother / sister / best friend had one of those!” and beginning to feel ancient as it seemed that all my childhood toys were now museum pieces, when suddenly
wham!
There it was. In front of me in a glass case, a toy that I’d completely forgotten about owning. 
The jolt of recognition was like a physical blow – so much that I reached out and touched the glass case with the palm of my hand.  
 
And I’m about 9 years old, unwrapping a Christmas present, throat constricting with expectation and excitement. Memories crowding in now. It was in a box but the photograph on the outside showed clearly what it contained. A toy typewriter
How could I have forgotten owning this?
Memories flooding back. The delightful chaos of our big family room. The red coals of the fire. The socks hung over the black and gold fireguard. The smell of cinnamon, the sound of the radio and a bunch of noisy children with various assorted relatives. Amid the hubbub I find a quiet corner to sit down and open up this perfectly amazing gift, wondering how Santa Claus knew I wanted this when I didn’t know myself. There was paper in place and the ribbon was slotted through, ready to go. The smell of fresh ink is in the air around me, the achingly new and shiny metal cool and precise under my fingers.
Of course the keys were only pretend, painted on. And it was a complete fiddle having to find a letter by turning the central dial and then press the bar below every time to imprint each letter singly on the paper. But the result was real! Actual type appeared as I worked up a speed. I was writing stories in a proper grown-up way!

When I actually became a grown up my next typewriter wasn’t much better. Spotted on a skip, having been thrown out of a school business studies department, it had the tops of some crucial keys missing. My husband delved deeper and found another machine which we cannibalised for spare keys. These key tops (the less used x, y and z ) were not the letters I needed, but at least I could use them to cover the ones missing from the first one. Then I had a brilliant idea. I used the tiny brush from a bottle of tippex to paint on top of these duplicate lettered keys the correct letter they were now linked to – ingenious, eh? However, as I typed with the machine the tippex came off, smearing my fingers in white blobs and leaving me forever bamboozled as to the exact layout of the Qwerty Keyboard. I did type my first book on this machine. My husband claims that’s how I got it accepted, as I thought I was typing completely different words from what were actually appearing on the paper!


Things have continued in a similar vein in my writing life. I’ve had bouts of RSI and, when I inadvertently  ‘hosed’ my ergo keyboard with a cup of chamomile tea thus rendering it useless, I had trouble finding a suitable replacement. Eventually I ordered one from the USA. But my computer is wired UK style, so now when I want double speech marks I have learned to press the @ which is located above the number 2 on my US keyboard, and vice versa (sort of) The hash tag eluded me for weeks. I still haven’t found where the tilde is hiding, yet….  

But I’m set to move on again – out of history and into the present day. Helped by kindly Adèle Geras, I am about to venture into the I-World of Pods & Pads

Watch this space. !*!

 P.S. I loved Bethnal Green Museum, although I didn’t have time to see half the exhibits. Added bonuses were a café with good food and friendly staff. I’m guessing most HGs have been there, but if not, then maybe a future outing?  

More info: http://www.theresabreslin.co.uk/   http://www.facebook.com/Theresabreslinauthor
Twitter: @theresabreslin1  

The Traveller (from dyslexia friendly publisher Barrington Stoke) is out in March.
Divided CityPlayscript now available.
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Finding fortune by Pippa Goodhart

March 19, 2013, 5:01 pm
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While Louise Berridge is busy meeting a deadline, we are very pleased to have an extra guest post from Pippa Goodhart, who takes us from her mother's ring to the Klondike GoldRush

My Mum, who is no more of a glamorous dresser-up of a lady than I am, had just one extra ring which she would put on if she was going out to something very special. Here it is:


This ring intrigued me as a child because, if you look at the stone, you’ll see it has wild gold streaking through it as well as the worked gold that makes up the Victorian ring band.
The ring had been given to my mother, Christine, by her mother, Dorothy, who had been given it by her mother, Florence, who had (I was told) been given it by her mother, Polly, who had been given it by her brother, William James, when he came back from the Klondike Gold Rush. Here are Polly and daughter Florence:



William James was a traveller and entrepreneur. In about 1888 he brought back silk for Florence’s wedding dress from Yokohama in Japan, the first port opened to western merchants in the late C19th. He apparently has streets (William Street and James Street) named after him in Oxford. But of his fabled trip to the Klondike I know nothing.

So I got reading about the Klondike Gold Rush…and reading…and reading because it is so extraordinarily interesting. After a few fortunes were stumbled upon in the Klondike wilderness of very north-western Canada in 1896, the gold and the news of it came out the following spring thaw. In the two years after that over a hundred thousand people from all over the world did the terrifying journey to get to the Klondike. There are diaries of those who went, stories from characters such as Jack London who were there, and there are telling photographs of characters dressed and posed ready for the adventure, then hollow-eyed, bearded and gaunt as that adventure takes its toll.
Online I found and bought The Chicago Record’s Book For Gold Seekers, published in that Gold Rush year of 1897, and full of maps and shopping lists and information about how to travel and live and mine for gold.




Wonderfully, this contemporary book was cheap because ‘covers and spine are badly faded and heavily rubbed’. I expect that most people reading this blog would have had the same reaction to that description as I had – gosh, it’s actually GONE to the Klondike and back! And it clearly has! With someone called Freemont Russell who signed ownership inside the front cover of the book. The book’s inside pages are pristine, but the outside has been worn by being carried in luggage for thousands of miles of adventure almost into the Arctic.



My story – Finding Fortune – is about a child, Ida, whose mother has just died, and whose father has much to prove to himself and to the grand family of his late wife. He decides to go to the Klondike, which, after all, was British at that time, and Ida determines to go with him. The story is of their journey across the Atlantic, across Canada, up the western US coast, and then inland over the notorious Chilkoot Pass to the frozen lakes where the hundred thousand or so Argonauts had to make boats to take them downstream once the spring thaw let them sluice down the river to gold-mining territory. They had to carry their ton of goods each that the Canadian government sensibly stipulated for people heading to a place empty of shops.






Extraordinarily, once they’d arrived from their months of journeying, many of those who had made the journey simply gave-up. They sold what they could of their tons of goods carried all that way, then got the first ticket home available on the steamships. They saw how few were actually finding any gold, let alone fortunes, and decided to cut their losses. But Ida and Fa are too determined and too desperate to give up …

A problem which any historical fiction writer who develops a passion for their subject must meet is that of selecting from the wonderful facts they want to include in their story. There is the obvious danger that the story is wrenched from its natural story course in order to ‘happen upon’ every interesting trifle in the writer’s bag of historical goodies.

In this story I took to including letters that Ida writes home to her Grandmama – stiff dutiful letters at first, but increasingly chatty as their relationship develops through this one-sided conversation. Those letters become key to the plot, but I confess that I first thought of having them simply as places in which to casually mention the runaway trains on Big Hill, the treacle mixed into the coffee on-board ship, the fact that gold is so very malleable that it can be beaten into gold leaf four hundred times thinner than a hair, that the strictly Presbyterian Indian packers also kept their traditional habit of thanking the spirit of a dead animal before eating meat or working leather, that hundreds of windlasses drawing-up buckets of pay-dirt (soil) make a great sighing sound, that bicycles were sold as just the thing to get over those mountains and down those rivers to the Klondike, that you could buy gold magnets (not) and there were people who purported to be able to taste gold in stream water, that you can cure scurvy with spruce-bark tea, and so on and so on. In letters those things can be mentioned briefly in passing, and don’t clog or distort the main story.

What tricks have you used as ways of including those irresistible tit-bits you long to include but don’t really have the excuse for in your main storyline?

PS After writing ‘Finding Fortune’ I found out a bit more about my Great Great Granny Polly (Mary Ann Rose), who supposedly was given the ring by her brother. It turns out that she died in 1881, sixteen years before the Klondike Gold Rush occurred! Hmm. Was the ring perhaps given to her daughter Florence? Or did the ring come from a different gold rush? Or no gold rush at all? Never mind. That ring set me going to the Klondike in my imagination, even if no relative of mine has ever been there for real!



Louise Berridge (A.L. Berridge) will be back in April)
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The Paris Floods of 1910 by Imogen Robertson

March 21, 2013, 2:50 am
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When I tell people that my new novel is set against the backdrop of the Paris Floods of 1910, I tend to get blank looks. What floods? Well, these ones. 

I saw some of these images online around the time of the centenary and, as these things do, they burrowed deep into my mind when I was thinking about writing a new book.  Paris at this time was the city of the future, a place where nature had, it seemed, been firmly put in her place. The new métro was being extended; there were telephones and electric lights; hotels proudly proclaimed they had gas on all floors; there were cars on the streets and the first Paris Air Show held in 1909 proclaimed that man now had control of the skies as well as the earth. 


The floods of late January 1910 showed how quickly that apparent control could disappear as many of Paris’s innovations were turned against her. The swelling river found ways to break through the embankments via forgotten waterways and the new sewers and métro tunnels, causing flooding in areas that were a good way away from the river. The pavements gave way leaving sink holes gaping in the middle of Hausmann’s elegant and ordered boulevards. The Chamber of Deputies was reachable only by boat and what seemed on the first days to be a mild diversion, a few streets turned into a little Venice on the outskirts of town, became a frightening and disastrous threat. The sound of wreckage hitting the Paris bridges was said to sound like artillery fire. The electricity began to fail and the municipal clocks all stopped as the water fought modernity and won. There were reports that the Eiffel Tower itself was shifting and in danger of collapse. The glories of the Louvre were saved only by the heroic actions of workers and soldiers who raced to keep building up the embankment, protecting the Palace as the waters continued to rise and rise. Paris was awed and, perhaps briefly, humbled. Saint Sulpice was thrown open to shelter refugees flooded out of their homes, the theatres held special benefits to collect contributions for those affected and in the end there was a sense of the city, so divided by inequalities in wealth, coming together for support and comfort. The waters did not care if you were rich or poor, and though as always the poor suffered most, they did not this time suffer alone.

The image of the city, so ordered and confident, being eaten away by forces it could not control or understand became the central image of my novel. The idea that just when you feel most secure the waters might be eating away at the foundations haunted me through the writing. I finished it feeling we should all be suspicious of what seems like solid ground. 


For a non-fiction account of the floods, I recommend Paris Under Water by Jeffrey H. Jackson   
My novel, The Paris Winter, is published on 11th April.




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WITHY, by Jane Borodale

March 21, 2013, 6:00 pm
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If an advertisement for the basket were ever needed – then surely this picture by Beuckelaer must be the one. This lady is strong! And her baskets! Just look at them; tough handled, sinewy, perfectly formed, smooth, and bursting with good produce. Hers is an affirmation of skilful basketry put to practical use.

Joachim Beuckelaer, (1533-1575), Woman Selling Vegetables

And (though at great risk of sounding like Prince Charles), I say bring back the basket– home grown, durable, long-lasting, as light as, well, wicker, and sustainable. In a world of rising sea-levels and reclaimed wetland returning to its natural state in the face of the cost of sea defences; wouldn’t it make perfect sense to say that dampness is in, with its accompanying willows and withy beds, and imported jute and hessian out of fashion.

Salix Purpurea, Otto Wilhelm Thome
1885
The Somerset Levels are now the only part of the UK where willow is grown commercially for basket-making, see Musgroves or Coates, but traces of previously widespread cultivation lie all over the country in place names containing ‘withy’, from Withypool, Hereford, to Withymead, Chingford. 

It’s the perfect material for everyday carrying or storage vessels, not to mention eel traps and lobster pots, cradles, hot-air balloon baskets, coffins, and fencing. Willow is also used for high grade charcoal for artists and gunpowder, and has potent medicinal qualities. It can last practically forever, (possibly why willow is associated with the dead in many cultures across the world?). For an example of wicker’s longevity, click here and then scroll down a little for an excavation image of rare Roman basket, discovered beautifully preserved in a waterlogged pit at Marcham in Oxfordshire, and accompanying description of its possible use as a ritual object. 

I was interested to read that this basket was made of extremely fine stripped willow, of a fineness not grown in this country today, because although many texts about willow talk about the coarseness of basketry in the past, due to the limitations of methods of growing, old herbals mention many different kinds of withy or osier – implying that there was growing in withy beds, as well as pollarding from the tree, in early times. (Pollarding being where the tree is cut back to the main trunk, and then the resulting supple fresh growth of shoots or withies harvested each year.)

The Basketmaker, Jan Luyken (1649-1712)
Last year I did a short basketry course because for various reasons I have an old basket maker at the heart of my novel The Knot, a blind woman called Widow Hodges, and I felt it was important to at least partially understand the process of what she does all day. It was very demanding – like maths with twigs, and very hard on the hands, both in terms of strength needed and the astringent nature of the twigs. (I produced, since you ask, a very uneven greenish basket of which I was inordinately proud, that does despite its wonkiness actually get used for tidying every day. It took months for the deliciously sharp, smoky, bitter smell of damp willow to disappear from the room where it lives.) The tools used by basket makers are very simple and haven’t changed much over the centuries; a picking knife, a bodkin, horn full of grease…

Seriously, for those of us living in damp places, withy beds must be the thing to invest in, for when oil runs out…?



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From Tyrol to Silesia; persecuted Protestants, by Leslie Wilson

March 22, 2013, 6:00 pm
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If you go to the Polish village of Mysłakowice in Silesia, you might be rather surprised to find, among the other houses, some chalet-style houses that seem to belong rather to the Alps than to Poland. There are also some nearby, on the outskirts of the village of Sosnówka.


These houses were built by a group of Protestants who were expelled from Zillertal, Austria, in 1837, (hence the German name for the village: Zillertal-Erdmannsdorf) and according to my mother, we were descended from them via her grandfather, Gustav Rösel, who lived in Giersdorf, Silesia, nowadays Podgórzyn. Rösel is not one of the names of the emigrants, so if my mother's story is true, it may have been my great-great-grandmother who was one of this group. Frustratingly, I haven't managed to find out her maiden name: it's particularly difficult, since many of the records were destroyed at the end of World War II. I contacted the organisation of the Zillertal descendants, but they weren't able to help me.

 

The Zillertal people first came into contact with Protestantism during the seventeenth century in an atmosphere that linked religious radicalism with political ferment; the German peasants' revolts of the time, the sect of the anabaptists, and general discontent at social injustice. Catholicism, in Austria, was linked to authoritarianism and absolute monarchic rule. Reading the Bible, for yourself, coming to your own conclusions about what it meant, defied that authoritarianism.

 
Monument to the Zillertal Protestants outside the museum
to them in Mysłakowice

But the Zillertal Protestants didn't at first openly challenge the authorities; they quietly read the German Bibles they had bought on their travels into Protestant lands, selling leather goods,cattle, scythes, gloves, and so on. Some Zillertalers travelled as far as Hamburg and Amsterdam, where they set up small settlements. Without clergy, sharing the tasks of ministry among themselves, they lived as they thought was right. That isn't to say that there wasn't conflict in the valley. In many cases, family members disagreed about religion; some being Protestants, some Catholics and there could be tragic disagreements among them.


When Emperor Joseph the Second (the one who is caricatured in the film 'Amadeus') issued his 'Patent of Tolerance' which made it possible for many Protestant groups to practise their religion in Austria, it did the Zillertal group no good, because they didn't qualify for tolerance. They needed five hundred members, but only had four hundred or so. As a result, they were persecuted.



In the days before the Internet, the only information I could find out about them was in a book written by a Jesuit priest in the 1950s, which I read in the British Library. This Father was an excellent advocate for the Zillertal Protestants, because he was so biased against them. They 'disrupted the last rites for the dead,' he said. Sounds bad, doesn't it? This is the example the Jesuit gave. Dying Protestants had to put up with the priest coming and disturbing their last hours by telling them they were bound straight for Hell, and trying for a deathbed conversion. On one occasion, a man seemed to be giving way, whereupon his friend, who had managed to stay with him, said 'Sei Stad.' (Be firm). For this the friend was brutally whipped. This is the Jesuit Father's story, and he thought those two words counted as 'violent disruption.'

 They were not allowed to inherit land, or to rent it, and also their marriages were regarded as invalid, nor were they allowed to be buried in any kind of religious graveyard. Savage punishments for persisting in their faith were common, though at other time the priests tried to wheedle them into conversion. 

Tyrolean house outside Sosnówka: the guesthouse where
we had a lovely stay when we
visited the Karkonosce mountains
Eventually, they were given the choice: either renounce their faith, or be expelled as 'irreligious sectarians' (an ironic description, really.) They were forced first to be subjected to six weeks of Catholic religious teaching and a four-month 'cooling-off' period, before they could go. Only seven of the group were converted. The rest decided to go. This tore some families in half, and the decision must have been agony for many. Besides, they would be leaving their beloved mountains behind, and the way of life they knew so well.


To give the Austrian government their due, the Protestants were not simply expelled into the world with nowhere to go. The Emperor's minister Prince Metternich negotiated with the Prussian King to take them in, and they received the immigration permit on the twentieth of July 1937. The spokesman of the Protestants wrote to the King, very movingly, thanking him for his generosity, and asking him to settle them somewhere like their own mountain home, used as they were to agricultural work. In fact they were settled in Lower Silesia, in the foothills of the mountains the Germans call the Riesengebirge, and which are called the Karkonosce in Polish and Krkonosce in Czech.
The writing on the balcony says: God bless King Friedrich
Wilhelm. It is a replica: the original is in the museum


 It wasn't easy for them to make the long journey, nor was it easy for them to settle, once they arrived. In the first year, they couldn't get a harvest from their new farmsteads, nor did they have, in the first years, the right knowledge of the different conditions in the north. Disease cut some of them down, and some did actually return to Austria. Protestant aristocratic ladies made a charitable cause out of them at first, which annoyed the local farmers and labourers, many of whom were heavily taxed by their overlords in a near-feudal system and were not considered worthy objects of charity by the gentry. The aristocrats were later dismayed and annoyed when the incomers, instead of remaining eternally grateful, started to agitate against inequality as they had in their homeland 'they were never satisfied' my Jesuitical friend complained. My great-grandfather was a Social Democrat incidentally, as was my grandfather up till 1933 (but more of that next month).


After World War 2, the descendants of the Zillertal Protestants were of course expelled from Silesia along with almost all the German population, so their years in Silesia numbered little more than a hundred years.

Whether or not I ever find out which of the emigrant families we are descended from, the legacy of that family tradition has been very important to me; the idea of seeking out the truth for yourself, and not being bullied into believing what the authorities tell you you must believe. When I campaigned against nuclear weapons in the 1980s, even carrying out two acts of civil disobedience, for which I was prosecuted, I think the shadow of those 'stubborn' people were there, encouraging me. I would certainly think the tradition was part of what led me into the Society of Friends. I have good reason to salute them and to be grateful to them.

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Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Brother Who Never Was

March 23, 2013, 5:30 pm
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I had long wanted to write the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine as I felt that despite numerous biographies and novels about her, there was still plenty to be said that had been overlooked. However, I had other projects to complete first and it wasn't until 2011 that I finally got the go ahead from my publisher to write three novels covering her story from her marriage at age 13, to her deathbed at the Abbey of Fontevraud in 1204 in her eightieth year.  The first one, THE SUMMER QUEEN, comes out in hardback and electronic formats this June.

As I began researching in depth, I came across the detail in two of her biographies and an academic paper that she had two half-brothers. I realised that if I was going to write her life story, I needed to know about these men, and how much of a part they had played in her life.  In particular, the half-brother named Joscelin, was mentioned frequently in the pipe rolls of King Henry II and owned extensive lands in the county of Sussex. It was obvious that he must have had some influence as a player. These are the references I found in secondary source biographical documents.

'Although William X had two illegitimate sons, William and Joscelin, he now had resolved to beget a male child to inherit his duchy.'  Marion Meade in Eleanor of Aquitaine, a biography.

'He was no ascetic and had two bastard sons.'  Professor Elizabeth Brown on Eleanor's father in her article Eleanor of Aquitaine Reconsidered in Eleanor of Aquitaine lord and lady edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John C. Parsons.

'The pipe rolls show that the Queen was supporting in her household her sister Petronella and their two bastard brothers William and Joscelin.'  Alison Weir in Eleanor of Aquitaine: By the Wrath of God Queen of England (The Petronella mention is problematic because one reliable chronicler tells us she was dead in 1151, before these pipe rolls were even written, but that's for another time).

Pipe rolls are basically the annual financial accounts for the business of the country, written down on sheets of stitched together parchment which are then rolled together so that they resemble a pipe. The exist from the 12th century and extend as far as the 19th (1833). Written in Latin, they are a mine of fascinating information for anyone equipped to trawl them.

To check what the pipe rolls actually said, I set out to track down the references.  I have a pipe roll copy in my own research library for the dates 1176-1177, and here is what I found in the entry for Sussex:
'Ioscelinus, frater regine debet.ccm. pro fine facto cum uxore Willelmi de Perci.
Now my Latin is terrible, but I think I understand that 'Josecelin, the brother of the queen owes 200 marks for a fine made with his wife to William de Percy.' Whether my execrable Latin is right or wrong, it does not alter the salient points of Joscelin's name, the county in which the fine was made, and the Percy connection.  These are important.
click to enlarge

According to Alison Weir, Eleanor's brother Joscelin was mentioned in the pipe rolls from 1154 to 1158, so they were my next port of call.  Sure enough there he was in Sussex, listed as 'Josc, fri Regine'  or 'Joscel fri Regine'.  There was also a later pipe roll reference (1180's) to his lands of Petworth in Sussex where he is referenced as  'Goscelini fratris Regine.'

So, the queen had a brother named Joscelin, and the references are proof beyond doubt.  He had an active power base in Sussex centred around Petworth and he married into the influential Percy family.  This was all very useful to know when it came to planning out my novel and his character arc.  But here's the kicker, which seems to have been overlooked along the way by historians and Eleanor's biographers.  The pipe rolls don't actually say which queen; they just say 'Regine' and up until now, no one appears to have bothered to check that detail.

Adeliza of Louvain was the second queen of king Henry I, married to him in January 1121 following the disaster of the White Ship when his only son and heir was drowned setting out to return form Normandy to England. After Henry's death in 1135, Adeliza retired briefly to the nunnery at Wilton, emerging in 1138 to marry royal steward William D'Albini who built Castle Rising in Norfolk to honour her and as a symbol of his  pride and new power. It was a royal palace in miniature.
Castle Rising Castle Norfolk.
Adeliza is known in the civil war following Henry I's death, for supporting the Empress Matilda (her stepdaughter) by permitting her to land at her Sussex castle in Arundel to begin her campaign to take back the crown usurped by her cousin, Stephen of Blois.

Adeliza possessed extensive lands in Sussex.  Some time during her second marriage, her young, illegitimate half-brother Joscelin arrived in England and came to her, seeking a position in her household. Adeliza and her husband appointed him constable of Arundel castle and Adeliza gave him a hoist up the rankings ladder by granting him lands and benefits including the honour of Petworth in Sussex. She also sorted him out a rather lucrative marriage with Agnes, heiress of Northumberland baron William de Percy.

Seeking further evidence, I poked among the books in my study and came across references that nail the point of Josecelin's identity to the mast. The Reading Abbey Cartularies, published by the Royal Historical Society in 1986 list several charters referring to him in connection with Petworth and the de Percy family.  Here's one of them in translation:

Notification by Jocelin (of Louvain), brother of Queen Adeliza to Hilary bishop of Chichester, that he gave to Reading Abbey the lands of Robert of Diddlesfold, Theodric and Edwin Hunte in the vill of Petworth with a piggery of 10 sows and 1 boar and free pannage and further that, when he was at Reading for the burial of his sister Queen Adeliza, he gave to the abbey the assarts which these three men had occupied on his demesne, whence they were doing no service to him or to the monks, and 1 virgate of land and the right to have 40 pigs with his own pigs in his parks and enclosures between the feasts of St Martin and St. Thomas (11Nov-21Dec).

 All of this is rock solid evidence that the Joscelin in question, far from being the half brother of Eleanor of Aquitaine as suggested by her biographers and sundry historians, is actually the half brother of Adeliza of Louvain.

Did Eleanor have another half-brother named William?  The jury is out on that one. I am still doing the detective work. I cannot tie him to Adeliza and I can find only one reference to him in the pipe rolls, but it is ambiguous and he does not appear anywhere but this single entry. Et fri Regine. Will de Pciters. (I assume Poitiers).  William was the name of Eleanor's father and grandfather (but a very popular name in general at that time. Eleanor's son Henry the Young King once held a banquet where only men named William were invited), so that and the mention of Poitiers is very wishy-washy circumstantial evidence when set beside the far more solid evidence for Joscelin's identity. Having been once bitten, I intend leaving him out of my trilogy, although I will continue to keep an eye on primary sources as a matter of general interest to see if he turns up.

It is definitely a lesson in never taking anything you read at face value, even in non fiction.  It is also interesting that the more you delve, the more you uncover and then the more choices you have when it comes to your writing.  Is that always a good thing?  In this case, without my digging and curiousity, I might have written Joscelin as a son of William X of Aquitaine and given him a whole comfortable existence in Sussex, living out  his days usurping another Joscelin's shoes!

Elizabeth Chadwick
www.elizabethchadwick.com




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SEX, POWER, and LADY DAY by Eleanor Updale

March 24, 2013, 6:00 pm
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Here we are, March 25th already.  It's Lady Day: the Feast of the Annunciation, and the source of all sorts of traps and trouble for generations of historians.  


Until the mid 18th century, this was - for official purposes - New Year's Day.  For long after that, it was the traditional date on which deeds were signed, rent paid, and indentures activated.  It is the reason our tax year starts on April 6th (allowance having been made for the transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, when Britain 'lost' 11 days). 
Anyone studying letters and diaries from the Early Modern period will be familiar with the problem of dating documents written between January and March. Some scribes helpfully straddle the social and administrative years: changing the date on January 1st, but writing (say) 1697/8 in the months before Lady Day. But when only one year is given, we can't know whether the writer is sticking with the 'old' year, or anticipating the 'new’. It could be either. Only context can help us establish exactly when something was written.

If you look at the top of this diary entry, you will see that both years are given.


With Lady Day gone by, the entries for April are firmly set in 1698

 Even secondary sources can be a problem. Some historians adjust to start all years in January, and/or to match British dates from before the calendar change with those on the continent (where the Gregorian calendar was already in use). Some don't. Until recently, it was not usual for authors to state their policy.
I was going to say more about all this, but while I was cruising the Internet for Lady Day facts, I came across the news (to me) that March 25th 1782 was the birth date of Caroline Bonaparte, Queen of Naples. 

 I had never heard of her, but after a quick trawl of the Web, and a skim through her granddaughter's memoir, I would like to know more.  It's quite a story - and it ends with an unexpected Scottish link.
Caroline was Napoleon's youngest sister.  At first a friend, but then an enemy of the Empress Josephine, she married one of Bonaparte's most flamboyant and successful generals.  Caroline was 17, and awash with love and lust, when she wed Joachim Murat in 1800.

Napoleon described Murat as the bravest man in the world, and rewarded his many military successes with a shower of titles, culminating in the crown of Naples in 1808.
Whether Caroline or Murat was the more dynamic political operator is a matter for debate.  Their relationships with each other, and with with Napoleon and his enemies, fluctuated - with passionate entanglements and rifts in all departments.  Murat came to a sticky end as Napoleon's authority crumbled, and he posthumously became a hero of the Risorgimento. He features in Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Napoleon is said to have blamed the defeat at Waterloo on his rejection of Murat's help. The memoir written by Caroline's namesake and granddaughter tells of a life of extravagance and intrigue. Murat's wealth was immense.  Among his possessions was the Elysee Palace in Paris.


Defeated by the Austrians, and sentenced to death by firing squad in 1815, Murat is said to have faced execution courageously, but with enduring concern for his good looks. Tradition has it that his last words, as he refused a blindfold, were, "Soldiers! Do your duty! Straight to the heart but spare the face. Fire!"


Having fled to Trieste, where she called herself the Comtesse de Lipona (an anagram of Napoli), Caroline survived, and remarried.  Her second husband was the intriguingly named Francesco MacDonald, another character of whom I knew nothing until this week. As far as I can make out, he belonged to the same Jacobite family that produced Flora of 'over the sea to Skye' fame.
Caroline and Francesco ended their days in Florence.  When Caroline, now widowed for a second time, died in 1839, her servants organised the systematic looting of her fabulous possessions. Her children had by then dispersed; some to exile in America, where Caroline has descendants today. I wonder whether they know that this is the 231st anniversary of her birth. 
Anyway, Happy Birthday, Queen Caroline, and Happy Lady Day to you all.

www.eleanorupdale.com
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DAVID BOWIE IS Exhibition – Dianne Hofmeyr

March 26, 2013, 1:00 am
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DAVID BOWIE IS © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 
For the first time in history a Museum has been given access to the David Bowie Archive. On Preview Day of DAVID BOWIE IS, the V&A was abuzz. The queue stretched from the exhibition entry right the way along the long marble hall all the way back to the Kensington Gore entrance. The wait was an hour and a half and that was only if you were a Member and clutched an invite. The response was unprecedented even surprising the V&A organizers and staff. I must admit to giving up and returning at 10 am the next morning when admittance was by ticketed time with far fewer Members weaving their way in. 

Why Bowie on a History blog? Well apart from the fact that the numbers last Friday made history, the exhibition in itself is surprising in that David Bowie has been out of the limelight for almost a decade. It's a very timely exhibition for the V&A as Bowie released a new surprise Album on his 66th birthday in January. And for those of you also born in the year 1947 and for anyone fascinated by this period of the 60’s 70’s and 80’s, DAVID BOWIE IS will be a marvellous step back into the cultural and social influences of the past.

Bowie, born David Jones in 1947, was brought up in a bedsit in Chelsea with no heating when ration cards were still in existence. Relics of his youth… a pendant of pop idols of the time, a model of the Queen’s coronation carriage, Beano comics, books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, early 60's photographs of a blonde teenager with slicked back hair are all there to see...
Promotional shoot for The Kon-rads 
Photograph by Roy Ainsworth, 1963 
 Courtesy of The David Bowie Archive 2012.
Image © V&A Images 
... and finally the photograph of that sapphire sphere emerging from the darkness, viewed by astronauts from outer space. Who remembers seeing that first unearthly shot of the place we inhabit? 

The moon landing inspired his fictitious character Major Tom and his single, A Space Oddity, which coincided with the landing, was Bowie’s breakthrough moment. His handwritten lyrics in the exhibition from this time with their many scratched changes and scribbles, for songs like Oh You Pretty Things, Starman, and Five Years will endear him to any writer who takes to pen and paper to work through tricky dialogue and narrative.

The exhibition explores Bowie’s innovative approach to putting together albums and tours by creating them around fictionalised stage personas and narratives. 1972 marked the birth of his most famous creation – Ziggy Stardust, a human manifestation of an alien. Ziggy was daringly androgynous and had an otherworldly appearance that still has a powerful influence on pop culture.

Not only has Bowie’s music and individualism influenced others, but has itself been influenced by wider movements in art, design and contemporary culture. His spacesuit for Starman designed by Freddie Burretti, was inspired by Kubrick’s film, Clockwork Orange. And the designs for the Ziggy Stardust tour were inspired by Kansai Yamamoto, whose first international showing took place in Britain in 1971. Yamamoto went on to design the flamboyant creations for the Aladdin Sane tour in 1973.
Striped bodysuit for Aladdin Sane tour 
 Design by Kansai Yamamoto. Photograph by Masayoshi Sukita, 1973 
© Sukita / The David Bowie Archive 2012 
The shiny patent boots with green satin platforms, the many cloaks, suits and costumes are all on display. We see a designer’s notebook with Bowie’s measurements, the culottes designed by Issey Miyake only shortly after he graduated in 1971 and the iconic Union Jack coat designed by Alexander McQueen for the Earthling album cover.

Artists like Andy Warhol, with his experimental film and performance work and manipulation of images of famous people like Marilyn Monroe, and writers like George Orwell, with his book Nineteen Eighty Four, all made an impact and influenced Bowie's approach to music, tours and videos. He is quoted as saying: 'It has to be three dimensional. I’m not just content with writing songs.' He saw the videos as an extension of his art rather than a marketing device.

Most bizarre of the objects exhibited is a puppet with David Bowie’s face projected onto the co-joined cloth head-shapes so that they rest cheek to cheek in conversation with each other.

The penultimate room celebrates Bowie as a pioneering performer both on stage and in film in a gigantic immersive audio-visual, where fortunately there is a chance to sit down. I should have mentioned before that everyone is provided with a headset but you can view the rooms out of sequence as they are synced to wireless and pick up the narrative at certain hotspots in each room.

Bowie is described by Dylan Jones author of the book, When Ziggy Played Guitar, as being: ‘the quintessential rock chameleon, the archetypal pop changeling'. A sense of this comes across in the words printed on the walls in the various exhibition rooms… David Bowie is making himself up... David Bowie is surprising himself... David Bowie is moving like a tiger on Vaseline... and in the room with huge audio-visual of his concerts... David Bowie is someone else.

In the final room against a background of photographs, are the words:
The exhibition tells part of the story but the rest lies with us, the audience, and the connection we make to the man and the myth. Bowie offers no ‘authoritative voice’ but a rich body of work for us to admire, appropriate, re-imagine, and make our own. 

See DAVID BOWIE IS for yourself and make up your own mind…
Timed tickets cost £14, or there's free admittance if you are a Member of the V&A (but go early in the day to avoid the crush). Allow yourself about two hours.

Currently a free exhibition of photographs of David Bowie by Sukita is showing at Snap Galleries in the Piccadilly Arcade to coincide with the exhibition.
www.snapgalleries.com

Please note: The images used in this blog are by special permission from the V&A for the period of this exhibition only and may not be reproduced.
www.diannehofmeyr.com 
Dianne Hofmeyr's picture book, THE MAGIC BOJABI TREE, published by Frances Lincoln and illustrated by Piet Grobler, is out on 4th April.









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The Ladies of the Rose, no 2: Fanny Elssler, by Louisa Young

March 26, 2013, 5:13 pm
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The Rose

Gallica; Origin: Vibert, France 1835

Medium pink and double, perhaps spotted with white; very fragrant according to some but light-scented according to others; it flowered in late spring and summer, and no-one knows much about it.

Where is it now? It is rarely in catalogues, not in encyclopaedias and not on the internet - but that could just mean that it is not in fashion. The latest reference I could find had it growing at Roserie la Hay in southern France 1902. I thought it might have disappeared, or been renamed, or was perhaps lingering on, its name forgotten, just another lovely pink rose in neglected gardens across the world. 

But I think I have found it it - a nursery in California is selling what it calls Fanny Essler and dates to 1848, grower unknown. I have found a picture, which is not too different to the roses in the background of this portrait of Fanny. 





The Lady


Franziska Elssler was a ballerina, and was indeed, in Vita Sackville West's phrase, 'a member of the haute coccotterie of Paris'. She was beautiful and clever, and the Romantic writer Theophile Gautier described her as 'the most spirited, precise and intelligent dancer who ever skimmed the boards with the tip of her steely toe'.

She was born in Vienna June 23 1810, to a large and poor family of remarkable and various talents. Her father was Hayden's copyist and valet, her mother a seamstress, her grandfather a fiddler and maker of plaster figurines, her brother a tenor and chorus master at the Berlin Opera House, her sister a mime at the Vienna Opera. Fanny started dancing as a child. By five she was on stage, and by 11 she was in the Corps de Ballet at the Kartnertortheater. When she was 14 she and her sisters Therese (with whom for years she performed a double act) and Anna were taken to Italy to further their careers. 

This was an age given to grand romantic enthusiasm, as you can see from how Gautier describes Fanny in her prime. 'Her legs are fashioned like Diana the Huntress, their strength in no way depriving them of grace. Her head, small like that of an antique statue, sits with pure and noble lines on satiny shoulders which need no rice powder to give them their white complexion. Her eyes have a most poignant expression of mischievous voluptuousness…. Half ironical smile…. Finely curved lips….features as regular as if they were made of marble… Very soft, silky, glossy brown hair…. as suited to bear the goddess's gold circlet as the courtesan's coronet of flowers. Although she is a woman in the full acceptance of the term, the slender elegance of her figure allows her to wear male attire with great success… she is Hermaphrodite…' Therese, considered unnaturally tall at five foot six, often danced men's roles. One who saw her, the dramatist Franz Grillparzer, said she looked like 'a dancing Strasbourg Cathedral.'


In Naples, when Fanny was 16, her dancing and her person particularly delighted Leopold, the Prince of Salerno, who was the King's brother and had a reputation as a practiced reprobate. Many years later Fanny told to a friend in London, Harriet Grote, that the Prince had forced her mother to sell her to him, and that they were unable to resist his wealth and unscrupulous influence. Buying girls was not that unusual. Desperate or greedy mothers used to line their young daughters up on the steps of the palace of one old prince in Vienna, Alois Kaunitz-Rittberg. Children working on the stage were especially vulnerable, and the Horschelt Kinderballett, a children's company to which Fanny may well have belonged, was closed down after that particular scandal. 

Count Prokesch, a friend of Fanny's next protector, described the Prince of Salerno as 'Fanny's first purchaser, who had her body without touching her soul'.  Purchase or not, when the affair became common knowledge the King sent his brother to Rome, to join the Papal Guard of Honour (whether he considered the irony of his brother's new post history does not relate). Fanny was returned to Vienna pregnant, with 3000 ducats a year. She  gave birth to her son Franz Robert in June 1827, the day after her 17th birthday. He was left with relatives, while she returned to work and the audiences who loved her from a distance.


Among the audience in Vienna was Baron Freidrich von Gentz. He was the best-known political writer of his time, an adviser and friend to the Chancellor, Prince Metternich, handsome though worn by a naughty life, intelligent and 45 years older than Fanny. He sent her camellias and wondered if she had a soul; she cast him friendly looks from the stage. Fanny's mother approved the liaison, thinking it unlikely to produce any more children to interrupt Fanny's money-making, which was supporting the family. Fanny herself said later that she was flattered by von Gentz's attentions, grateful to him, fond of him and, she said, after him she could never put up with a stupid man. At the time, though, he 'never knew such bliss on earth' and she proposed kissing him 'so as to drink in your soul', so perhaps the fondness etc was with hindsight and discretion. Metternich warned von Gentz against the liaison - as well he might, for within three years von Gentz was dead - exhausted, some said, by such a romantic and improper connection.

Her next romance was with Anton Stuhlmuller, her dancing partner, but his engagement with her company and their affair were both temporary. Gossip linked her with the interesting Count Alfred d'Orsay, a man of enigmatic sexuality, but in fact she was pregnant again, by Stuhlmuller. Her daughter Theresa Anna Catherine Jane was born with maximum discretion in London in October 1833, and baptised under false parental names at Spanish Place. By 1834 she was off to Berlin, dancing with her sister again, and thence to Paris, where Dr Veron, director of the Paris Opera, launched her debut in La Tempete, offering - he claimed - 40,000 francs a year (in fact it was 8000, plus bonuses). At the dinner laid on try to seal the deal, he had jewels and diamonds brought round on a silver salver, with the pudding, and after the opening night her battements were compared to Paganini's violin-playing. Even the star ballerina Marie Taglioni applauded, 'with several of her fingers', and new pun was heard: 'est-ce une femme ou est-ce l'air?' - Is it a woman or is it air? (She and Taglioni were seen as great rivals - Theophile Gautier said Fanny was the pagan ballerina to Taglioni's Christian: bold, voluptuous, powerful and dramatic.) 

Veron was not above allowing a rumoured scandalous romance from the past to be believed. The Duke of Reichstadt, Napoleon's golden-haired son, had been taken to Vienne after his father's death, and brought up there as an Austrian prince. He was a great fan of the ballet. He had come frequently to see Fanny dance - 'voila mon petit prince, toujours a son poste!' (There's my little Prince, always in his place) was her comment, and von Gentz had been jealous. Tongues had wagged. Some said she had been employed to seduce him and spy on him; and when he died, of consumption, some said he died of the shock of her treachery. (There was another performer, Therese Peche, with whom an entanglement for political purposes had been attempted.) That was why she had left Vienna, they said… 

Anyway, Fanny told Harriet Grote: 'I might perhaps have liked to have a Napoleon for my lover, but … it would have been the death of Gentz.'

Still, as the theatrical journalist Charles Maurice put it, this 'prince who was very dear to the French nation and who died in the flower of youth to the sorrow of our age' was 'something which has no bearing on the question but which will nevertheless do her much good, will add to the anticipated success of the Paris debut…  whether this rumour is well-founded or not, it is certainly one that will stimulate interest and curiosity in Mlle Essler.'  Publicly, Fanny never denied the affair. Privately, she always did.

Fanny's rose was dedicated by the enterprising Vibert in 1835. It was not her only dedication -  the Grands Magasins du Temple du Gout (The Big Shops of the Temple of Taste!) in rue Sainte-Anne launched a cloth named after her - Elsslerine - 'A transparent material with a light lining for ball and evening gowns, made by a new process.' This was around the time of  the height of Fanny's Parisian fame, in 1836, when her dance the cachuca in Le Diable Boiteux took, as they say, Paris by Storm. 

Gautier saw it: 'She comes forward in a basque in pink satin trimmed with wide flounces of black lace; her skirt, weighted at the hem, fits tightly on the hips; her wasplike figure is boldly arched back, making the diamond brooch on her bodice sparkle; her leg, smooth as marble, gleams thorugh the fine mesh of her silk stocking; and her small foot, now still, awaits only the signal of the orchestra to burst into action. How charming she is, with her high comb, the rose at her ear, the fire in her eye and her sparkling smile. At the tips of her rosy fingers the ebony castanets are a-quiver. Now she springs forward and the resonant clatter of her castanets breaks out; she seems to shake down clusters of rhythm with her hands. How she twists! How she bends! What fire! What voluptuousness! What ardour! Her swooning arms flutter about her drooping head, her body curves back, her white shoulders almost brush the floor. What a charming moment! Would you not say that in that hand, as it skims over the dazzling barrier of the footlights, she is gathering up all the desires and all the enthusiasm of the audience?' 



Evidently it did - others spoke of provocative gestures, lascivious abandon, sensual grace, the 'thrilling, quivering, twisting body'. After the initial shock, audiences required her to repeat the dance during the show. Within weeks she was summoned to dance it for Louis Phillipe and King Ferdinand of Naples, who liked it so much they sent her a porcelain luncheon service.  A new dance hall, Salle Musard in Rue Vivienne, used scenes from the dance in the décor, and the dance escaped the stage as people began to try it on the dance floor.

Fanny had strong professional opinions on the scenarios of ballets presented, and would make notes in the margins. 'If the strangely fashioned and ill-constructed things the authors bring you for acceptance were put  on the stage with all their imperfections on their head,' she wrote, 'many a name's bright reknown would be damned by failure.' Her opinions on theatres were no less stringent: the King's Theatre in London was 'the vilest of all stages, it runs half way across the pit as if it had escaped the hands of the carpenter and gone off on a voyage of discovery for itself.' She was always terrified of cats, but for her role in La chatte Metmorphosée  en Femme she brought in a white kitten to study: an early example of method acting?

Gautier remained obsessed with her. 'Venus must have been dancing at the Opera under the form and the name of Fanny Elssler, a wholly appropriate activity for a fallen divinity of ancient Olympus,' he wrote. He demonstrates admirably how there is nothing modern in obsessive attention to the physical attributes of female stars. 'Her kneecaps are neat and well-defined,' he wrote, 'and the whole knee beyond reproach …. Also her arms are well-rounded, not like others whose frightful thinness makes them look like lobster claws dabbed with white paint….In certain bending positions, the lines of her features are badly presented, the eyebrows become tapered, her mouth turns up at the corners, her nose becomes pointed giving her an unpleasant sly expression. Also, Mlle Elssler should not wear her hair so high on her head.' He felt it was not the right hair for her head, or indeed her body - too Mediterranean for her overall Germanic effect. And: 'We also counsel her to paint her pretty fingernails a paler pink.'

Queen Victoria requested that Fanny dance not the Cachuca but a more respectable pas de deux with Fanny Cerrito for a Royal Command Performance, and in 1840 she toured the United States - the first leading Ballerina to do so. Acceptance in the US was by no means guaranteed: 'anything like an abbreviated garment would be visited with national wrath,' wrote one critic. 'Aught approaching a free use of her limbs would be a signal for the horrorstricken burghers to … pass an ordinance requiring that she quit the country.' Pursued by scandal and acclaim in equal measure, she travelled the US for a  year and half longer than she had planned. As she had taken only six months leave she was sued for breach of contract by the Paris Opera when she returned. Still, London, St Petersburg Moscow and Milan were there for her.  

In some ways her story is an invert of Isadora Duncan - the dancer travelling the great cities, bearing children to different men, crossing the Atlantic and causing outrage and delight with her physicality and her outfits. But Isadora was a woman of passion above all, whereas Fanny's 'was not a passionate nature,' said her friend Betty Poli 'Not only her physical life, but also her soul, was ruled by the law of measured beauty…. She seemed to dance not only with her feet but with her soul.'

Fanny inspired enormous affection and attention - her followers were known as Fannytics, and bought souvenirs ranging from the usual figurines and lithographs of her dances (La Cachuca, La Cracovienne, in a unifrom with frogging; as La Sylphide, with sweet little wings, as Flora, entwined in roses) to souvenir prints commemorating famous moments in her life: her purchase and freeing of a negro slave family during her visit to North America, 1840-42, for example, or her devoted fans fighting in a barrel of eggs to get a bouquet which she had thrown from her window in Vienna (1842). There were useful items too: a cup and saucer for hot chocolate, with her picture on, a porcelain desk set incorporating inkwell, sander, penholder and a small statue of Fanny in her Cachuca stance, and a rather risqué cigarette holder in the shape of her leg, made of meerschaum and amber, and wearing a garter and a little black boot. The court confectioner, Coutar, made little sugar statuettes of her.

Johann Strauss, rather more stylishly, wrote a three-act operetta about her, Die Tanzerin Fanny Elssler (1935); there were also three ballets about her, a handful of novels, a play and a film in 1937, in which she was played by Lilian Harvey.

She also inspired a lot of very bad poetry. One, La Deesse, an 'Elssleratic' Romance, published in New York in 1841, starts: 'Give me a lyre with golden wings, That with the tone of Eden rings, that lends the raised spirit wings, To soar among celestial things!' and goes on for 44 pages. Another, 'No Slur, Else-Slur, a Dancing Poem or Satyr' was advertised as being 'by Nobody, published by Anybody, sold by Everybody and and for sale anywhere but especially in Wall Street and before St Paul's, Broadway.' 'Nobody' is believed to have been an inmate of the McClean Asylum in Massachusetts.

Ah, there were so many stories . . . . 


 


Fanny's tragedy was that both her children predeceased her. Theresa died in 1870, of an inflammation of the lungs, leaving a heartbroken husband and daughter of 14; and in 1873 Fanny's son killed himself after a dreadful stock market failure. Fanny had frequently sent him money and he had had no great success in life, but he had a wife and family. Fanny wrote to Betty Poli: 'What I have suffered these last days you cannot imagine….. My heart has now lost everything.'

Fanny died in 1884.
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Fiercely faithful, by K. M. Grant

March 27, 2013, 5:30 pm
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After the recent conclave, a commentator said of Cardinal Bergoglio, the new pope, 'he's chosen the name Francis, the gentle saint' or words to that effect.  He certainly used the word 'gentle'.  It's an odd word to use in connection with a saint, since saints are only gentle in Ladybird books and hagiographies.  'Gentle' implies sympathy and the gift of self-effacement. Beth in Little Women is gentle.  Though he may have said pretty things - make me the channel of your peace, etc. -  and, so we're told, been able to silence swallows, St. Francis of Assisi was not gentle.  Like all saints before and after, he was something much more uncomfortable:  singleminded.

Francis determined to take Christ's teachings literally and to their bitterest degree.  'Go and sell all thou hast and give to the poor' left him naked.  'Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money, neither have two coats apiece' left him and his followers dependent on the charity of others.  Francis revered poverty.  One follower's remark that it's all very well to be born rich and choose to be poor, but that being born poor is a different matter entirely, may not have raised even a smile.

Single-mindedness was combined with literal-mindedness.  When Christ, through an icon, said 'go and repair my house' Francis began rebuilding a church with his bare hands. When Pope Innocent III told him, on first introduction, to 'go and play with the pigs', Francis did just that.  This last turned out pretty well.  In his delightfully unsaintly style, Matthew Paris, the 13th century chronicler, tells us that the following day Francis smelled so bad the pope hurriedly granted all his requests.

Nor was gentleness a consideration when it came to endorsing, or not, Francis's fledgling order.  Whilst tossing up the options - Francis as holy man or Francis as heretic - Pope Innocent had a dream.  In this dream he saw this rough, smelly and slightly unnerving derelict holding up the Basilica of St. John Lateran.  Holy man, then.  Had the papal dream been otherwise, Francis might have been cast out of the church altogether.  Serendipity.  That's the way it went in the medieval church - may still go.

Yet how we long for our saints to be gentle.  If they're not, it's hard to like them.  But the truth is, saints don't want to be liked.  They want to pursue the path of holiness if it kills them, and it often does.  Take the Forty Martyrs, executed for refusing to recognise any faith but Roman Catholicism.  It's not gentleness that helps you face the crushing door (St. Margaret Clitherow), the lonely death in the Tower (St. Philip Howard) or hanging, drawing and quartering (St. Edmund Arrowsmith - a Jesuit like the new pope).  It's a steely faith and a will of iron, neither of them gentle qualities.

Sometimes, we mistake humility for gentleness.  Certainly Francis of Assisi was humble, although by refusing all comforts, getting a follower to drag him through the streets and leaping into ditches of ice and snow if his flesh 'itched' (erring priests, bishops and cardinals take note), you might say that he took public mortification almost to the point of pride.  Indeed, it was he who told Cardinal Ugolino (later Pope Gregory IX) that the Franciscans' calling was to 'follow in the footsteps of Christ's humility' so that in the end they could be 'exalted above the rest of the saints'.   This is not a gentle message and it wasn't meant to be.

I don't think Francis would have recognised himself in the commentator's remark about the new pope's choice of name.   'Gentle's all very well,' he might have said, 'but if you want to be a real saint, forget it.'

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When to stop researching and start writing by Tracy Chevalier

March 28, 2013, 5:01 pm
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It's a big treat to welcome to The History Girls today someone who has helped to make historical fiction mainstream once more - Tracy Chevalier.  She has written on subjects as diverse as Vermeer, Blake and Mary Anning and may one day write about cathedrals and/or prime numbers.


Tracy Chevalier is the author of seven novels, including the recent The Last Runaway, as well the international bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, which has sold over 4 million copies, been translated into 39 languages, and made into a film with Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson. She grew up in Washington, DC and has a BA in English from Oberlin College (Ohio). In 1984 she moved to London, where she lives with her husband and son. She worked in publishing for several years before doing an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She has been Chair of the Society of Authors, and judge of the Jewish Quarterly Prize, the Royal Society Science Book Prize, and the Orange Prize. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature.





Over to Tracy:

When have I done enough research to start writing an historical novel?

When have I read all the studies relevant to my subject; sought out diaries, notebooks, letters, ephemera; visited locations and soaked up their atmosphere; talked to experts and taken classes; read books and newspapers and magazines contemporary to the period; found information on the internet from passionate lovers of the subject; looked at paintings, drawings, etchings from the period; visited museums; watched people weave, or quilt, or make hats, or paint.

The short answer? Never. There are still books about Vermeer on my bookshelves that I feel I should read – yet I wrote Girl with a Pearl Earring in 1998!



In fact, as I look over my books I spot one or two for each novel I’ve written that I really should have read, and probably never will – though I keep them, just in case. They are my dirty little secret.


There are always more sources that might help me. I could seek out that expert who can explain all about the best straw to use when making a bonnet or how to take apart a Victorian grave:

Photo credit: Panhard

or how to milk a cow or make cheese. I could read more attentively, take more notes, review those notes more often. It is never enough.


In general my research for a book takes place in four stages:
• the specific subject I’ve been inspired by: a Vermeer painting, the fossil hunter Mary Anning, the Underground Railroad in pre-Civil War America
• the general feel of the place and time: 17th-century Holland, 15th-century Paris, 18th-century London, Ohio in 1850
• the very specific details that arise from plot demands: How do you make a hat? What flowers are blooming in Ohio in September 1850? What do you see when you walk from Soho to Bedlam in 1793 London?
• the hands-on stuff, where I do what my characters do: make a quilt:

Tracy's first quilt Photo by: Jacob Chevalier Drori:


find a fossil:
Photo by: Jacob Chevalier Drori:

or weave on a mediaeval-style loom.


The reality is that there is never enough time, or space in my brain, to do absolutely thorough research. There is the efficient use of time to consider, for one thing. Annie Proulx once gave an account of going to see a knife maker while researching her novel That Old Ace in the Hole. She drove eight hours to see him – twice – and got really interested in knives. The result? Two sentences in the book. I could not do that: I don’t have Annie’s strength of character.

Instead I am always hoping for the perfect research day where I get exactly what I need in a condensed amount of time. It happens rarely: most of the time I get bogged down in the wrong book, or look through an archive and am uninspired. But just occasionally I have a charmed day, and think, “This is what it’s all about.”

Two examples:
In Burning Bright, my novel about William Blake’s neighbours, one of the families is from Dorset, where women make buttons in their spare time. At the Dorset History Centre in Dorchester I found a 1971 pamphlet on the 18th-century Dorset button cottage industry. It told me a lot, but I really needed to see some of those buttons. At the end of the pamphlet the author mentioned an antique dealer in Lytchett Minster who sold Dorset buttons. 35 years later, would she still be around? I went outside, rang Directory Enquiries, then her. Indeed, she still had Dorset buttons; she even gave talks on them. I drove over to see her, heard the talk, and bought a couple of buttons, as well as a button-making kit so I could make one myself. A good day’s research. More like that, please.



More recently, I was in Ohio to research The Last Runaway, my new novel about an English Quaker who moves to America and gets involved with runaway slaves. Since she ends up living on a farm, I wanted to visit one run along 19th-century lines. Luckily there is a substantial Amish population in Ohio. They don’t use electricity or engines (also no buttons, and no contraception). Their farms are distinctive for the endless laundry hung out, the buggies parked in the yard, the fields full of horses needed to make up for lack of engines, and the kids running around in bonnets and wide-brimmed hats. A perfect example of a 19th-century farm.

But the Amish are a closed community – I couldn’t just wander up and poke around. However, if you find the right connected person, the world opens. A local historian introduced me to a local farmer, and soon we were pulling in to the farm of an Amish family he knew. The farmer’s wife happily showed me around and answered my many city-girl questions. I was shocked by how huge the barn was, and how much hay was stored. I squelched through the pig sty, holding my breath (the farmer’s wife went through it barefoot). I admired the horses, the cows, the chickens, the pantry lined with preserved fruit and veg; noted the bare walls of the house, and the girl at the sewing machine with a huge pile of clothes to mend. Mostly, though, I simply looked, and smelled, and drank in the truly strange surroundings, trying to preserve the feeling so that I could place my character in it and make her feel it too – that profound sense of alienation. I could never have thought it up. My book and my heroine took a great leap forward that day.

Photo credit: Ian Lamont

Research only takes me so far, however. It is wonderful, the best part of the process of writing a book, I think. And yet, it never quite reaches the mark. After a while, when I’ve read a lot of books, taken a lot of notes, been places and talked to people and gotten my hands dirty with quilts or fossils or cemeteries, I find I am still searching for something – that imprecise something. The thing moving out of the corner of my eye. The paragraph I read over and over and don’t quite understand. The bibliography listing primary sources I just can’t get to. The article in an obscure journal I manage to track down and discover doesn’t tell me anything. I look and read and sew and breath in pig shit, yet the itch is not scratched. “If only I could find just the right book to fill this gap,” I think. “The article that explains exactly what I need to know.”

Research notebooks Photo by: Jacob Chevalier Drori:

When that thought grows loud enough to overwhelm what I’m researching, I know it is time to set aside my notes and start writing. For the book that will explain exactly what I want to know? That is the book I must write.





http://www.tchevalier.com/

PS. A traffic accident meant that I missed the launch of The Last Runaway but Tracy kindly sent a photo so that we could feel we'd been there:

Tracy and a quilt. Photo by Jenni Buhr.













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Cabinet of Curiosities by Laurie Graham

March 29, 2013, 6:30 pm
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Here at The History Girls we are creating our own Cabinet of Curiosities; we will each write about, and place in said cabinet, an item which we consider to be precious or beautiful or significant or fascinating or inspirational, or just plain weird! Watch out for the 30th of the month when that is not the last day of the month and you will see what one of us has chosen.

One day we might draw all our objects together into a virtual museum.



Laurie Graham is going to start us off:


You can buy a perfectly nice working samovar these days, if you have a thousand pounds going spare, but the ones I covet are those owned by my Russian friends, passed down through generations of their families. Exiled samovars had a better survival rate than the ones that remained in Russia. Many of those were melted down for bullets.

A samovar is far more than a way of making tea. It's a gathering place, a symbol of hospitality and comfort, the Russian equivalent of our open hearth. Its imagery and its pull are powerful. This is no mere teapot.

Actually a samovar isn't a teapot at all, although a teapot can and often does nestle on top of it, keeping warm. The samovar is a water heater. The fuel may be wood chips or charcoal or dried pine cones. I did once own a small spirit-burning samovar and highly unsatisfactory it was too. I managed to singe my eyebrows several times but never produced a cup of tea that didn't smell of meths.
                                                                      
If the Samovar Fairy ever deposits the genuine article on your doorstep, here's how to use it. First you must make a pot of very strong tea  -  2 teaspoons of tea leaves to each cup of water  -  and leave it to steep. A mixture of leaves can work well, perhaps black tea mixed with something fruit or flower scented. A little of this concentrated tea or zavarka is what you put into your cup. Then, when the water has boiled, you open the samovar spigot and dilute the zavarka to your taste.

Russians can make quite a meal of a cuppa. Sometimes they sweeten it with jam. But their funniest trick is to hold a sugar lump between their teeth and allow the tea to percolate through it. Personally I take mine black but weak, hold the jam.

A friend said to me, 'But you can buy an affordable samovar in any Russian souvenir shop.'  True. But that would be a purely decorative samovar, a useless dust-gathering apology for something that should be handsome and functional. I want a samovar that has dents and stains and history. Please.


Photo credit: Wiki Commons
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March Competition

March 30, 2013, 5:01 pm
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We have five copies of Tracy Chevalier's latest novel - The Last Runaway - which the best answers to the following question can win:


"What is the most interesting piece of research you have done, whether for a book or for your own pleasure?"

Answers in the Comments below.

Closing date 7th April

We are afraid all our competitions are open only to UK residents.
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April is the coolest month by Mary Hoffman

March 31, 2013, 4:01 pm
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April, from a 15th century Book of Hours (Public Domain)  


So, T. S. Eliot might have got it wrong. The month we are just beginning, as well as hosting my birthday, has all sorts of literary and social associations.

It begins with April Fool's Day, when tricks can be played on people - at least till noon, after which they rebound on the trickster. Particularly rewarding is spotting the jokes in the morning's newspaper. I well remember the Guardian's excellent 1977 Report on the Island State of San Serriffe (actually two islands in the shape of a semi-colon): "terrorism has been almost eliminated from the beaches." But this kind of joke has been played for far longer:

  
1857 Public Domain
I wonder how many people turned up?

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (2nd Revised Edition 1981) suggests that the custom might derive from the Roman Festival of Cerealia, held in April. Ceres sought in vain for her abducted daughter Proserpina, responding to "the echo of a scream" - or being on a fool's errand.

I'm not sure I entirely believe in this theory - since the Cerealia was held in mid to late April and lasted a week.

Maybe it was Geoffrey Chaucer who drew attention to the specialness of my birth month by pointing out that it was then that people began to long to go on pilgrimages. That might not be experienced by many these days but there is still perhaps a sense of beginning and fresh starts in April, and not just because a new tax year begins on the 6th. (1st in Japan).

Chaucer at the Court of Edward lll, Ford Madox Ford, Public Domain


And of course it's the month of Aries, the first sign of the Zodiac so another beginning association. I've always really enjoyed being an Aries, even though some would like to deprive me of that designation and tip me into the Sign of the Bull. Nothing wrong with Taureans but I'm absolutely not one of them, lovely phlegmatic souls that they are.

Aries is a Fire sign, like Leo and Sagittarius, and this is typical of the sort of star-sign descriptions you find: "one of the most highly charged masculine energy signs in astrology. No wonder women born under Aries are forceful, dynamic and aggressive, and as a result these Aries women frequently find themselves with dilemmas surrounding their romantic relationships."

I count myself fairly dilemma-free in that department but really identify with the ambitious and dynamic associations.

I used to wish that my mother had hung on for a bit so that I could have been born on the 23rd, April's noblest association, definitely the death and by convention also the birthdate of William Shakespeare. But then I wouldn't have been an Aries. I wonder if Shakespeare was postmature? He doesn't seem very Taurean to me.

The Chandos portrait. Public Domain
In the United States, April is:
I'm not aware that any of these is celebrated in the UK  but someone will tell me, I'm sure.

April, from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Public Domain
Easter usually falls in April but not this year. One year my birthday fell on Good Friday, which felt very odd and we postponed the celebrations. Next year it's on Easter Sunday - I imagine chocolate eggs will feature.

Tell us your favourite month and whether you live up to your star-sign description.
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The White Swan, The Gay Brothel in Vere Street - Lucy Inglis

April 2, 2013, 2:42 am
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This weekend, the new Archbishop of Canterbury invoked the Easter spirit of tolerance and forgiveness into the debate over gay marriage and female bishops. As a state (if not a nation), we are still struggling to come to terms with the idea that gay people exist throughout society and may wish to avail themselves of the same legal rights and social status as their straight counterparts. I spend much of my working life researching and writing about the people on the margins of society in eighteenth century London, and in that work come across many ordinary gay men and women, trying to make their own way regardless of the strictures of their society. Gay men are usually more visible as their relationships were deemed criminal at the time and so it is court cases that illuminate their world. Two of the most famous are Mother Margaret Clapp's Molly House (details of which can be found in the Old Bailey Online records) and The White Swan in Vere Street. Margaret Clapp's was more of a coffee-house primarily for homosexual clientele, rather than a place where gay sex was traded for money and The White Swan was one of the first and most accurately recorded establishments had been set up with the aim of making money. It stood in a medieval street just to the west of Lincoln's Inn and was part of the area of London obliterated by Kingsway.

On the 8th of July, 1810 the Bow Street Police raided The White Swan, a tumbledown pub of Tudor origin near Drury Lane. Twenty-seven men were arrested on suspicion of sodomy and attempted sodomy. The Swan had been going for less than six months, established by two men, Cook and Yardley, but already had a considerable following. Cook, whose wife ran an ordinary pub nearby called the White Horse, was proud of his amenities, and his clientele. 'Cook states that a person in a respectable house in the city, frequently came to his pub, and stayed several days and nights together; during which time he generally amused himself with eight, ten, and sometimes a dozen different boys and men!'

Cook and Yardley had furnished their establishment for its purpose. 'Four beds were provided in one room - another was fitted up for the ladies' dressing-room, with a toilette, and every appendage of rouge, &c. &c....The upper part of the house was appropriated to youths who were constantly in waiting for casual customers; who practised all the allurements that are found in a brothel, by the more natural description of prostitutes. Men of rank, and respectable situations in life, might be seen wallowing either in or on beds with wretches of the lowest description'.

The account of The White Swan raid and the subsequent trials was told in 1813 by Robert Holloway, later Cook's lawyer, who sold many copies of his account. In it there are some excellent observations of the behaviour within the house, where faux marriages were conducted to 'bless' the coming union. The descriptions of these weddings make them appear parodies of the traditional service, but they were common enough that on some level they must have had meaning for those performing in them.

Many of the clientele assumed feigned names, though often not very appropriate to their calling in life. 'Kitty Cambric is a Coal Merchant; Miss Selina a Runner at a Police Office; Blackeyed Leonora, a Drummer; Pretty Harriet, a Butcher; Lady Godiva, a Waiter; the Duchess of Gloucester, a gentleman's servant; Duchess of Devonshire, a Blacksmith; and Miss Sweet Lips, a Country Grocer. It is a generally received opinion, and a very natural one, that the prevalency of this passion has for its object effeminate delicate beings only: but this seems to be, by Cook's account, a mistaken notion; and the reverse is so palpable in many instances, that Fanny Murry, Lucy Cooper, and Kitty Fisher, are now personified by an athletic bargeman, an Herculean Coal-heaver, and a deaf Tyre-Smith.'

It is Blackeyed Leonora, the drummer who stands out amongst this motley crowd, for Leonora was in fact most likely Thomas White, a 16 year old drummer in the Guards. Thomas was one of the 'youths' who stood and waited in the upper part of the house. He was a great favourite amongst the 'more exalted' visitors to the house, according to Holloway. Almost every single one of the people at The White Swan had an mainstream occupation. Of course, some were visitors, but White worked there. No doubt it was his youth, and probably his looks that drew attention from the richer customers. 'White, being an universal favourite, was very deep in the secrets of the fashionable part of the coterie.'

Poor Thomas, who wasn't even at The Swan on the night of the raid, was too quick to confess, and was executed for his 'crime' after almost a year in prison, although there was no doubt he was guilty of the charge. With him died a man called John Hepburn, aged 46, who had procured White's services with the help of a witness who testified against him. White was prosecuted as the giver, rather than the receiver which made it almost impossible for the court to avoid the death sentence when the jury convicted him of 'buggery'. At White's execution, various people of note were recorded. 'A vast concourse of people attended to witness the awful scene. The Duke of Cumberland, Lord Sefton, Lord Yarmouth, and several other noblemen were in the press-yard.' The Duke of Cumberland had avoided a homosexual scandal by a razor thin margin in June 1810 when his servant was found with a cut throat after threatening to out his master after catching the Duke and his valet 'in an improper and unnatural situation'. Perhaps Cumberland was one of White's 'fashionable' guests.

Of the other 25 or so, only six were found guilty and they were pilloried and imprisoned, including Cook the landlord. Yardley seems to have got away with the whole thing. The White Swan affair raised the public ire, and the convicted men suffered at the hands of a mob. 'The disgust felt by all ranks in Society at the detestable conduct of these wretches occasioned many thousands to become spectators of their punishment. At an early hour the Old Bailey was completely blockaded, and the increase of the mob about 12 o'clock, put a stop to the business of the sessions. The shops from Ludgate Hill to the Haymarket were shut up, and the streets lined with people, waiting to see the offenders pass....A number of fishwomen attended with stinking flounders and entrails of other fish which had been in preparation for several days.'

Cook refused to implicate any more clients, but on his release he began to blackmail two members of the clergy who had escaped prosecution during the raid and investigation. In what was probably a set-up, he ended up in prison for assault and debt and his whole family were systematically ruined in a series of evictions and persecutions that Holloway attributed to 'influential persons'. Just how influential, we will never know.

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History is pointless - by Eve Edwards

April 2, 2013, 9:59 pm
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Building on my last blog post in March - history is annoying - I have decided to tackle the even more contentious issue of history being pointless.

'What?!'  I hear you cry.  'Run this woman out of the History Girls for heresy.'

*Sounds of gathered History Girls organising a posse to chase me out of town* (I would respectfully suggest you pin the sheriff star on Caroline Lawrence as she knows all there is to know about cowboys...)

But hold your horses, my friends, this is not a Michael Gove type argument to strike the subject from the school curriculum.  It's really a cheeky way of getting you to read a more serious argument about the mistreatment of history as a means of point scoring, the claim 'we won' or 'it was your fault'.

HMS Monarch
I was thinking about this theme in connection with some research I am doing into the Battle of Jutland for something I am writing on World War 1.  I was particularly drawn to this encounter because my great-grandfather fought in it as a Chief Petty Officer - Gunner on board HMS Monarch.  That made each shell burst so much closer as had he been standing in the wrong place, I would not be here.  I had only vague impressions of this battle before I began reading up on it.  I knew it was the major sea encounter of the war and that British sea supremacy was confirmed in that the German fleet did not make another serious attempt to get out of its home waters afterwards.  I was therefore surprised to discover that the German High Command claimed it as a victory.  And here we come to the point scoring.  On a strict tally of lives and ships lost, the Germans did indeed 'win'.  If you choose to score it on another scale - that of who left the encounter with the most ships, heavier fire power, freedom of movement - then the British navy carried the day.  As one commentator put it: it was like the German navy was a prisoner who escaped his cell, roughed up his guard, but then returned to sit behind a locked door.

So both sides won - or lost - depending on your perspective.

It reminded me of how unreliable history becomes when turned into a point scoring exercise.  (Let's not even start on the 'who was to blame for WW 1?' discussion).  Looking round the world there are so many present day conflicts where a historical tally of grievances is used as justification for current atrocities.  Clearly it would be reprehensible to forget, or sweep under the carpet, injustices committed, especially when those affected are still alive, yet there are many cases where the wrongs seem to a third party about equal and still the two sides are only interested in their own points.  Would it not be better to use history to understand, rather than score?

Moving away from the academic discipline of history to fiction writing, I suppose that is what a good historical novel does: it equips you to understand the perspective of someone on the other side.  I really valued reading last year, Alone In Berlin by Hans Fallada, which is based on the true story of an ordinary man trying to stand up to the Nazi regime.  Written in the years immediately after the war, this book helped me see a possible answer one of those great historical questions: how on earth did a civilised nation like Germany let Hitler do what he did?  I can now imagine just what it was like to be a civilian in Berlin and can grasp why the population as a whole 'allowed' the holocaust to happen and how difficult it was to resist.  I highly recommend this book if you haven't yet read it.

So to recast my title in a more honest fashion now I've got you to read to the end: history should not be about point scoring; the best use for it is understanding.

Eve Edwards
www.eve-edwards.co.uk


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The Fall of the Red Cross Knights - Katherine Langrish

April 3, 2013, 10:30 pm
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Two worlds collide.


Everyone’s mental picture of a Medieval Knight must owe something to the Knights Templar.  Here’s a picture of one.  With his distinctive white mantle and red cross, he seems the epitome of the gallant Red Cross Knight himself, or many another knight who lumbers into the joust in films of Ivanhoe or Robin Hood.

When I was a child I read and greatly enjoyed the historical novels of Ronald Welch, whose books followed the fortunes of the Careys, an imaginary branch of the D’Aubigny family, whom he placed in Llanstephan Castle on the Welsh Borders, and whose sons (always brilliant swordsmen or crack shots) manage to be present at nearly every moment of interest in English history, from the Crusades to the First World War. The first of the series, Knight Crusader (Oxford, 1979) won the Carnegie Medal: it is a well researched, exciting, and remarkably well-balanced story about Philip, a young knight born in Outremer (as the crusaders called their heavily defended eastern kingdom). He fights in the Battle of Hattin against Saladin, is taken prisoner by a Turkish knight, Usamah, who treats him well, and eventually escapes to fight for Richard Lionheart, and to make his way to England for the very first time.

Krak des Chevaliers, Syria

One of the things that struck me about the book, reading it for the first time, was the contrast Welch draws between the Muslim-influenced luxury and cleanliness of the Outremer castles, opposed to the squalor of a smoky, draughty Borders castle of the same date.  Annoyingly, I seem to have mislaid my copy, but I recall Philip wondering why a recently-arrived comrade is so smelly (because he baths only once a year) – and so uncouth.

I now suspect Ronald Welch may have been indebted to a book I’ve discovered entitled ‘Memoirs of an Arab-Syrian Gentleman’, originally written by one Usamah ibn-Munqidh, who died November 16, 1188 (or the 23rd of Ramadan, 584) at the grand age of  96. Usamah’s reminiscences include fascinating stories of the clashes, not only military but cultural, between the invading and occupying Frankish forces and the Islamic armies.

Usamah regards the Franks with bemused wonder as ‘animals possessing the virtues of courage and fighting, but nothing else.’ Here are some of his accounts. Circa 1140, Usamah befriended an elderly Frankish knight who had come to the Holy Land on pilgrimage.  When it was time for him to return home, he asked Usamah to send his son with him to Europe.  It was the Western custom for noble boys to leave home and become squires, but a custom unfamiliar and unwelcome to Usamah, who needed a get-out:  
    
When he resolved to return by sea to his homeland, he said to me, "My brother, I am leaving for my country and I want thee to send with me thy son” (my son, who was then fourteen years old, was at that time in my company) “to our country, where he can see the knights and learn wisdom and chivalry.  When he returns, he will be like a wise man.”

Thus there fell upon my ears words which would never come out of the head of a sensible man; for even if my son were to be taken captive, his captivity could not bring him a worse misfortune than carrying him into the lands of the Franks.  However, I said to the man:

“By thy life, this has been exactly my idea.  But the only thing that prevented me from carrying it was the fact that his grandmother, my mother, is so fond of him, and … did not let him come out with me until she exacted an oath from me to the effect that I would return him to her.”

Thereupon he asked, “Is thy mother still alive?”  “Yes,” I replied.  “Well,” said he, “disobey her not.”

11th century Frankish medicine
Usamah provides examples of  the Franks'curious medication, both bad and good in effect: a knight with an abscess in his leg was being successfully treated with a poultice, until a Frankish physician arrived and asked the knight:  “Which wouldst thou prefer, living with one leg or dying with two?”  and proceeded to cut off the leg with an axe: gruesomely,“the marrow of the leg flowed out and the patient died on the spot.”  A happier outcome was that for a knight called Bernard, who…

was one of the most accursed and wicked among the Franks.  A horse kicked him on the leg, which was subsequently infected and which opened in fourteen different place.  Every time one of these cuts would close in one place, another would open in another place. All this happened while I was praying for his perdition.  Then came to him a Frankish physician and removed from the leg all the ointments which were on it, and began to wash it with very strong vinegar.  By this treatment all the cuts were healed and the man became well again.  He was up again like the devil.

Medieval amputation

The Knights Templar were so called because their headquarters were on Temple Mount in Jerusalem, in a wing of the royal palace close to the Al Aqsa Mosque. They became second and third generation expats, who as expats often do, adopted a number of foreign ways and, paradoxically, acquired some respect and tolerance for the Islamic culture which surrounded them, even though they were officially its enemies. Usamah has an interesting story to relate of different attitudes to prayer:

Everyone who is a fresh emigrant from the Frankish lands is ruder in character than those who have become acclimatized and have held long association with the Moslems.  Here is an illustration of their rude character.

Whenever I visited Jerusalem I always entered the Aqsa Mosque, beside which stood a small mosque which the Franks had converted into a church.  When I used to enter the Aqsa Mosque, which was occupied by the Templars, who were my friends, the Templars would evacuate the little adjoining mosque so that I might pray in it.  One day I entered this mosque, repeated the first formula “Allah is great,” and stood up in the act of praying, upon which one of the Franks rushed on me, got hold of me and turned my face eastward saying, “This is the way thou shouldst pray!” A group of Templars hastened to him, seized him, and repelled him from me.  I resumed my prayer. The same man, while the others were busy, rushed once more upon me and turned my face eastward, saying, “This is the way thou shouldst pray!”  The Templars again came in to him and expelled him.  They apologised to me, saying, “This is a stranger who has only recently arrived from the land of the Franks, and he has never before seen anyone praying except eastward.”  Thereupon I said to myself, “I have had enough prayer.”  So I went out and have ever been surprised at the conduct of this devil of a man, at the change in the colour of his face, his trembling, and his sentiment at the sight of one praying towards the qiblah [the direction of Mecca].

The Al Aqsa Mosque

The Templars’ full name was The Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon. Originally they relied upon donations to survive, but on acquiring St Bernard of Clairvaux as a sponsor (and paying no taxes) they rapidly became rich, with financial networks stretching across Christendom. There’s an irresistable comment in the wikipedia entry on them, suggesting they represent the world’s first multinational corporation.  And we know how popular large multinationals are. 

That wealth and power, coupled with the xenophobic suspicion ‘back home’ that the Templars had become the degenerate and luxurious sympathisers of a foreign creed, led to their downfall. In 1307, Philip of France ordered the arrest of the Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, along with many of his order.  The warrant opens with the words, “God is not pleased.  We have enemies of the Faith in the Kingdom.”  Charged with multiple offences from idolatry, homosexuality and obscene rituals, to fraud and financial corruption, the Templars were accused, tortured, convicted, and eventually many of them burned.  The order was broken up.  One of the saddest ‘confessions’ is this:

‘I, Raymond de la Fère, 21 years old, admit that I have spat three times on the Cross, but with my mouth and not from my heart.’



One wonders what young Raymond made of a world in which he could be tortured into making such a statement (is the ambiguity deliberate? - is he implying that not the act, but the admission of the act comes from his mouth, not from his heart?) when he came from a world in which Christian Templar Knights could rush to protect the sanctity of a Moslem gentleman at prayer. 



Picture credits: 

Knight Templar, image from Wikimedia Commons, author Vahakn
Krak des Chevaliers, Syria from Wikimedia Commons  posted to Flickr by james_gordon_losangeles at http://flickr.com/photos/79139277@N08/7435880868
11th century medicine Wikimedia commons
Medieval amputation (Kaiser Friedrich III, 1493) Wikimedia Commons
Al Aqsa Mosque: author Barbara Kabel Wikimedia Commons
Burning of Templars. (British Library, Royal 14 E V f. 492v) (wikimedia commons)
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