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Mother's Ruin: A Tale of Gin & Drunken Women by Catherine Hokin

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Little drops of whisky, little nips of gin. Make a lady wonder, where on earth she's bin...

With only three days to go to the big day I imagine most people are now well into last minute, undoubtedly feverish, preparations - if you are only just starting, I salute your courage. In our house the Christmas countdown begins in early December with our first foraging trip. This takes place in true urban-hunter style at the BBC Good Food show where we ruthlessly track down cheese, fudge and the never-before bought spirit which will form the basis of this year's Christmas morning cocktail. As with hemlines and heel heights, alcohol goes through fashions: this year, if foodie events and bar openings are any indicator, the current spirit of fashionable choice is gin.

 Wine Making, Ancient Egypt
Marking celebrations with alcohol is nothing new and all civilisations show evidence of fermentation-based drinks. Jars dating back to 6500 BC have been discovered in neolithic villages in China with residues from a drink made from grapes, hawthorn berries, honey and rice. The wine-loving cults in Classical Greece and Rome associated with Dionysus and Bacchus are well-documented, wine jars bearing inscriptions attesting to the quality of  their contents were discovered in Tutankhamen's tomb and large-scale production of wine appears to have originated in Iran as early as 5400 BC. Whether the purpose was to honour the gods, provide medicinal relief or because the consequences of drinking water were judged more dangerous than drinking alcohol, it seems that man's desire to turn fruit into something a little livelier is almost as old as the quest for fire.


 Alchemists and Distillation
Spirits, however, require a little more science than wine or beer, in the form of distillation. There are descriptions of water being distilled by Ancient Greek alchemists but it is not until the twelfth century that there is real evidence for the
distillation of alcohol. From that point on, we didn't look back: from eaux-de-vie to akvavit to usquebaugh, the "water of life" was born.

Think of gin and you automatically think of gin and tonic, the quintessential English drink associated (at least in my mind, I live in Glasgow so I haven't actually witnessed this) with long hot summers, floaty frocks and croquet. Gin is widely known as the English drink and the world's oldest working distillery, which has been in production since 1793, can still be visited in Plymouth. The drink, however, originated in Holland where it was known as Jenever: the first mention of medical-tonics containing juniper (thought to be able to protect against a range of illnesses, including plague) is found in a Dutch manuscript dated 1269, with the first confirmed production beginning in the early 17th century, again for medicinal purposes.

Given the social ills eventually laid at gin's door, it is somewhat ironic that it was first prized for its medicinal qualities. The Dutch used it to treat gout, gall stones and stomach complaints and the Royal Navy mixed it with lime cordial to combat scurvy and angostura to combat sea-sickness; given that tonic water contains quinine which has anti-malarial properties, it really was a drink to beat all ills. Gin has also added a couple of phrases to our lexicon which are still in common use: Dutch Courage and Mothers' Ruin. The first has rather heroic connotations with its idea of soldiers stiffening themselves before battle and stems from the morale-boosting and damp-beating tots of Jenever given to British soldiers fighting in the Thirty Years War in Holland (1618-1648). Perhaps the meaning has now become rather more derogatory in the sense of turning to drink for false courage but it is still nowhere near as damning as Mothers' Ruin with its whiff of women whose collapsed morals in the face of the demon drink threaten the very fabric of society.

 Hogarth's Gin Lane
From the accession of William of Orange in 1689 anyone in England could distill gin and was encouraged to do so, to boost trade and provide capital for his ongoing wars. In 1730 there were 7000 gin shops in London alone and the quality was dreadful: the use of cheap additives such as turpentine could leave drinkers crippled, blind or dead. The regulation attempts which began in the 1730s led to the sumptuous gin palaces frequented by the rich in early Victorian England but also pushed the worst traders underground, perpetuating the abuse of unregulated alcohol by the poor. From its earliest appearance in England, gin had female connotations, going by the name of Madame Geneva (a corruption of Jenever). As its less salubrious effects took hold, more common personifications included Jenny Pisspot and Dorothy Addle-Brains and, by 1820, Mothers' Ruin. The origin of the term  is still debated. Some have linked it to the use of gin and hot baths as an abortive device but its hold on the popular imagination comes from the famous Hogarth depiction of Gin Lane whose most squalid inhabitant is the mother dropping the child, probably based on a contemporary convicted child-killer, Judith Dufour.

This depiction of a slatternly woman so lost to drink she has forgotten her most basic role is the first time we see an alcohol-reformer, which is what Hogarth was, portraying a female as a villain rather than a victim of drink. Up to this point, reformers concerned with the drinking of ale tended to paint women as the victims of their neglectful and violent drunken husbands. Gin, however, was not drunk in male-dominated ale-houses, it was made, sold and increasingly drunk by women.

 Hogarth's Beer Street
Gin Lane is full of grisly images of debauched savagery brought on by the evils of drink, specifically gin, with its anti-madonna depiction of the mother and child deliberately centre-stage. It is important to remember, however, that the drawing, although based on some of the poorest and most gin-affected areas around St Giles, was rather more than just a depiction of London life. Gin Lane was produced as part of the movement pushing for the reform of the gin laws and may well have been funded by the beer industry. Its companion piece, Beer Street, depicts a group of happy workers, surrounded by the tools of their trade to advertise the contribution they make to society. There is a woman centre-stage but she is looking down and decorously dressed: she knows her place. The availability of cheap, dangerous alcohol in the eighteenth century was a major social problem and its consequences, particularly for the poor, were terrible but it is hard not to see a very anti-female rhetoric in much of the reforming zeal. Reform, at its heart, fears change and women changing, whether that be their attitudes or their behaviour or their sense of their place in the world, carries a threat to the social order. A ban on selling spirits to women was proposed and the dangers of female drinking became a newspaper staple: "when I behold the woman...degraded into the most infamous habit of drinking...when I see deadness in her features, folly in her behaviour, her tongue faltering, her breath tainted...my concern, like her debasement, is inexpressible (Universal Spectator, 1737).

The debate about the dangers of alcohol continued into the nineteenth century and regulation brought, as it often does, a refinement in quality. Gin's image began to rise. New advances in distilling technology which refined the spirit's taste, its espousal by the Royal Navy and the increasing spread of influence through the Empire made gin (and tonic), rather ironically, a symbol of all that was good about England. With the growing popularity of cocktails after the end of prohibition, gin found itself associated with a new decadence, once that was aspirational rather than feared and Gin and It (Italian sweet vermouth) became the drink of choice for bright young things everywhere, including bright young women.

The gin industry is enjoying another boom with new flavours springing up everywhere (the oddest one I've found so far is marmalade) and the only thing to be feared in the new gin palaces is the ridiculous hipster beards. It's sad that we still haven't, as a society, learnt to manage our relationship with drink. It's sadder still that women are still subject to attacks in the media about drinking which still manages to call morality and their 'role' into question - I've seen so many articles lately about 'Prosecco Mums' but not so many about 'Budweiser Dads'. Still, that's not for this forum - if you want to know more about gin, The Much Lamented Death of Madame Geneva by Patrick Dillon is a good read. And if you want to try our Christmas cocktail, we're making our version of a Moulin Rouge: pink Cava, raspberry vodka, Chambord Black Raspberry liqueur and a good lie down. I don't like gin...

Have a good one!


Big Dolly, by Leslie Wilson

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 I got her in August, for my third birthday, but she was a Christmas present several times during my childhood, when she went to the doll's hospital and got new hair (I suspect now that during those cash-strapped days the trichologist was my mother).  

I can't remember what her hair was like when I got her, and there aren't any photos: I do remember what seems in retrospect a horrific nylon gold wig, short and curly, of course, it being the '50s.


 


Here she is, dressed in the 'ski outfit' my grandmother made for her in the late '50s, with fashionable tartan trews. She has a dirndl from that era, too: yellow with white flowers, but unfortunately the apron has got lost. All these clothes were lovingly stitched on my grandmother's treadle Singer, French-seamed, and still perfectly robust. I had to grow up and start sewing for my own small children to appreciate the quality and intricacy of the work.

But in fact, Big Dolly was much older than me; she was once my mother's doll. If my mother had her when she was three, which I think I was told, she was made in 1928. She's a celluloid doll, but more solid and robust than most of the celluloid dolls I've seen in museums and books; she's celluloid imitating porcelain. I did see a doll a little like her (a cousin, maybe?) in the toy museum at Putbus, on the north German island of Rügen.

When my elder daughter turned three, she got Big Dolly (various given names have been tried for her, but they've never stuck), but she reverted to me and now she sits in the middle of books and papers on the massive desk that was once my German grandfather's; too fragile, I feel, for my grandchildren. My elder granddaughter shall have her when I'm gone, though.


She's not a collector's item, because she hasn't got her original hair or clothing, and actually, I'm glad of that. She's gone through so many changes, in different eras. Below is a picture of my mother as a child, with the boy baby doll 'as big as a real baby' that I never got, alas, because Omi, my grandmother, gave her to my brother to play with before I was born, and he was too rough with him and broke him. I think that doll was the flimsy kind of celluloid. The way my mother is dressed on the picture is probably indicative of the kind of clothes Big Dolly wore in her youth, in the '20s and early '30s. The maid sewed her drawn-thread work dresses, apparently.


Big Dolly was there when the Nazi women came into the house and inspected it, when my grandfather was in disgrace in 1933. Seven years later she sat through air-raids in the flat in Geidorfgürtel, Graz, while my mother and grandmother sat downstairs in the cellar with colanders on their heads as improvised helmets, or while my grandmother took my mother off to a church where my mother cowered, terrified, and my grandmother prayed, certain that churches never got bombed (though they did of course). She'd have looked at the flashing marker flares the Austrians called 'Christmas trees', at incendiaries and blockbuster bombs, her serenity untroubled. Or did she permit herself, then, to whimper with fright and sob? Surely, some of the things she lived through were enough to make even a doll cry.

Later, the Russians came into the flat and took it over for a brief while, banishing my grandmother to the maid's room. If one of them had taken a fancy to Big Dolly for their children, she might have ended up in Russia. Or did my grandmother hide her?

After the war, in 1946, my mother and grandmother were deported to Germany, taking only essential possessions. Big Dolly sat in the empty flat for about a year. 


At last someone came for her; my grandfather sent my grandmother off to cross the border illegally, bearing a lot of useful and scarce black-market items (my mother mentioned thread, hence Effi's hoard in 'Last Train from Kummersdorf'). Omi sold these in Graz and raised enough money for everything they valued to be transported from the flat, smuggled back over the mountainous border (given the sheer weight of things like the aforementioned desk and the Steinway piano, even if that's only an upright, that's pretty amazing. It must have gone in a lorry). Incidentally, my grandfather was a policeman.

Most of the things were installed in the Rhineland, but Big Dolly, with her doomed baby brother, came to England. Here she lived through the austerity of the '50s, the swinging '60s, saw me grow up, then my daughter.


In the '80s, she got a dark wig and was briefly transformed into an Irish colleen. In the '90s, I got her a real hair wig, blonde again, because I didn't think the dark hair suited her; maybe that was just because I was more used to her being blonde. I made her that blue, rather Victorian-looking dress, which she wears most of the time, but some time, when I have a sewing machine again, I might make her a '20s dress, though I can't stretch to drawn-thread work.

I like it that she's gone through all these transformations, adjusting to the times. That's what being a real doll is about, after all. Old dolls often look scary; she doesn't look scary to me, though she is rather pale nowadays. Her blue eyes are sunken. One dolls' surgeon managed to correct this, but then they sunk again. Well, she is approaching ninety, after all.

Happy Christmas to all from a pretty venerable doll, and from me!





Here's the link to view her cousin in the Putbus toy museum (second from right in top row). http://www.puppenmuseum-putbus.de/bildergalerie.html

CHRISTMAS AT WAR: A letter home in 1943

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My father-in-law, William James Hicks joined the army in his late teens soon after the start of World War II.  Born in Shoreditch and then moving to Nottingham, he was an extremely pragmatic youngster from an impoverished background. His father was a semi-illiterate butcher's delivery man and slaughter house worker. His mother was a factory worker. He had been brought up with love, but at the school of hard knocks. He knew what was real and what was pretentious.

When he volunteered for his country, he freely admitted to his family later that he was volunteering with the intention of keeping his own hide intact. His plan was to become ground crew for the RAF, because even if there were still dangerous moments, it was still safer than some of the other gigs on offer.  However, that particular idea was stymied when a physical fitness test revealed that he was severely colour blind.  

Instead he found himself assigned to the infantry. Trained as a signals officer he wound up on a troop ship bound for North Africa, where later he was to become a tank commander and find himself in the thick of heavy fighting at El Alamein. From there he was posted to Sicily and Greece.  The attrition rate at times was terrible. He saw and did things that he mostly kept to himself, but sometimes a story would emerge when he had had one over the odds to drink, or he saw a Hollywood film depicting fighting and would say 'That's rubbish.  Men don't die like that.' 
Somewhere in North Africa
He emerged from the war with the rank of serjeant major and just 23 years old. The army asked him to stay on and make a career of it, but he refused and went instead to work at Raleigh Bicycles for the rest of his life. He was not ambitious. He was a highly intelligent man, but he cared little for the trappings of society and had his own idiosyncratic views on life.  The war scarred him as it scarred many.  At first once home in civvy life, he could not believe that he was going to live to see tomorrow. He drank heavily for a time, but gradually he healed himself.  The way he coped was to always live in the moment. The past was gone and you couldn't do anything to change it.  The future would be what it would be and there was no use worrying about that either. Live now, because that's all you have.  And be joyous about it, because what's the point in being down in the dumps?  You'll never have that moment again.

And he was always joyous. He married and fathered five children of which my husband is the second, and he lived a happy, ordinary life in the moment - a sort of inner city Hobbit who knew what really mattered and what didn't and who had one of the truest life compasses I have ever seen.


Playing at lions with the first 2 of his five children. My husband is the toddler.
When going through his effects when he passed away in 2011 just short of his 89th birthday (he was still going to the gym with us 3 months before he died), we found the two letters below.  One was written by him to his family at Christmas 1943 when he was in Italy.  The other is the circular letter from General Montgomery to the troops at this time.


On Christmas Eve 2016,  I think General Montgomery's words from 1943, remain spot on.

 "A Happy Christmas To you all and to your families wherever they may be."


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CHRISTMAS LETTER FROM MY FATHER IN LAW TO HIS FAMILY.
SOMEWHERE IN ITALY, DECEMBER  1943


Hicks  5.12.1943
7942194
HQ
C.M.F

Dear Mother,

Well just for a start here's wishing you a Merry Xmas And a very happy New Year. Sorry can't be with you to celebrate it, but I'll certainly be thinking of you about dinnertime Christmas Day. What's cooking anyway? Rabbits, turkeys or chicken? No, no, don't tell me, you are going to inflict them with mince pies again. Dad'S stomach lining will never stand it. We have been very lucky with our Christmas dinner, we have amassed in the last two days, three stray ducks, one portly tame rabbit, one turkey, and two chickens, that was going to be between four of us,  but as certain people passed allusions to travelling farmyards, we cut down to 3 ducks. Not that we wouldn't rather have kept the turkeys and chickens, but common sense dictated ducks because they are the slowest runners and our livestock has a distinct tendency to take a powder at every favourable opportunity. You should have seen me and the sergeant major catching the turkey. We chased it up cliffs, through cabbage patches, round shell holes, the sergeant major nearly breaking his neck down one of the latter. Luckily there was some thick mud at the bottom to break his fall, but he didn't seem to look on it as lucky at the time. In the end I cornered it in the outhouse of a farmhouse, and the darned thing had the cheek to peck me. Still  I have avenged those pecks. I gnawed his bones all last night in revenge.
When I get some brown paper and a slack period I shall be sending another parcel. It may not be sent for a few weeks or so yet though because I have not been able to get Dad anything yet and I want to avoid if I can any remark by him about poor old Bill being the onion! I did get a brand-new trilby the other day but I had the bright idea of folding it up in a parcel flat and I'm afraid the finished effort completely convinced me that trilbies do not fold. Tell him to hurry up and start smoking again before his poor son goes grey.
Enclosed as you may have noticed one of my maiden efforts at photography, what a mess. Still now I know what all the knobs and gadgets are for I may do better next time – that is of course when the  films arrive. 
Wish all the best to the neighbours, the best for Christmas especially to that dear old lady at number 14, and Mrs Ward and Mr Redburn. 
Love to all
Bill
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CHRISTMAS MESSAGE TO THE TROOPS FROM B.L. MONTGOMERY

Personal Message from the Army commander

Christmas 1943

To be read out to all Troops

1. Once again the eighth Army spends Christmas in the field.
This time last year we were in Tripolitania having just broken through the famous Agheila position;  now, we are well north of an East and West line through Rome.
And I would say to you, soldiers of the eighth Army, that you have every right to be very proud of what you have achieved during the past year; every officer and man has done his duty in a manner that is beyond all praise.

2. And so this Christmas 1943, I send to every officer and man in the great family of the eighth Army, my best wishes and my hearty greetings. And I send greetings from us all to your loved ones and friends in your homelands;  they are, indirectly, part of this great army in that their courage and fortitude is essential to the morale of the army itself.
And I know you will wish me to send our greetings also to all the workers on the home front; without their hard work in the factories and mines, we could win no victories in the field.

3. And today we recall the Christmas message:-

GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST, AND ON
EARTH PEACE, GOODWILL TOWARD MEN

Surely this describes what we are fighting for?

Let us therefore Take it as our battlecry and our motto; and in doing so let us affirm that between us, you and I, we will see this thing through to the end.

4. And when peace has come, I like to think that the spirit of the eighth Army will be a factor for good in the unsettled and difficult days that will lie ahead.

Wherein lies the strength of this great Army?
It lies in its team spirit, in the firm determination of every man to do his duty, and in its high morale. This army is a great family with an ARMY "esprit de corps" and spirit the like of which can seldom have been seen before.
When the war is over and we all scatter to our various tasks, let us see to it that the spirit of the eighth Army lives on; may it be a great and powerful influence in the rebuilding of the nations.
The Christmas message will be our battle cry, not only now but in the years to come.

5. A Happy Christmas To you all and to your families wherever they may be.

B..L. Montgomery
General  Eighth Army



Merry Dog Day by Miranda Miller

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   I think we’re all feeling rather battered by the pace of change over the last year. How would it feel to be living through a period of really cataclysmic revolution?

“Bliss was it in that dawn was it to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven,”

as Wordsworth wrote in his Prelude. But was it? In principle I tend to be on the side of changing the world but I’m not sure how much many new ideas I could really accept. The generation of French people who managed to survive the Revolution were certainly challenged.

   They had to get used to a new social and legal system as well as a new system of weights and measures, which became the metric system. The Catholic church was of course seen as a pillar of the ancien régime and ‘dechristianisation’ aimed to excise religion from French society. Talleyrand, the bishop of Autun and one of the few clerics to support the measure, argued that all Church property rightfully belonged to the nation and that its return, by helping to bring about a better society, should therefore be viewed as a ‘religious act’. In October 1793 public worship was forbidden and over the next few months all visible signs of Christianity were removed. Churches were sold, closed or converted into Temples of Reason, warehouses, factories or stables. Church bells were melted down, ostensibly to help the war effort, crosses were taken from churches and cemeteries and religious statues, relics and works of art were seized and sometimes destroyed.

   Priests who continued to practise were arrested or deported to French Guiana. Under threat of death, imprisonment, military conscription, and loss of income, about twenty thousand constitutional priests were forced to abdicate and hand over their letters of ordination, and thousands more agreed or were coerced into marriage. Some of those who had abdicated continued to minister in secret.

   As the old Gregorian calendar was of course Christian, the Republican Calendar was adopted in 1793 by the Jacobin controlled National Convention. There is something rather magnificent about this doomed attempt to reinvent time itself. 1789 became Year I of Liberty and months were named after the seasons. Nivose, from the Latin nivosus, or snowy, started on December 21. A new ten-day week eliminated Sunday as a day of rest and worship and each day was named after a seed, tree, flower, fruit, animal, or tool and was divided into ten hours. Each hour was divided into 100 decimal minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds. Special clocks were made to display this new decimal time.




   Christmas became Le Jour du Chien and Boxing Day the Day of Lava. Carols were altered by changing the lyrics so that the names of political leaders were substituted for royal or religious characters. Hark the Constituent Assembly Sing? As traditional street nativities were banned, French families started to reproduce the scene in their own house in miniature versions with clay figurines and it seems inevitable that other Christmas traditions continued behind closed doors.

   For many the Revolution itself had become a religious cult; they commemorated revolutionary martyrs as saints and regarded the tricolour cockade and red liberty cap as sacred symbols. A new state religion. the Cult of the Supreme Being, was introduced. The Festival of the Supreme Being was held on 8 June 1794 throughout France and presided over by Robespierre in Paris, where Notre Dame was “de-baptized” for the occasion.

   “The first festival of reason, which took place in Notre Dame, featured a fabricated mountain, with a temple of philosophy at its summit and a script borrowed from an opera libretto. At the sound of the Hymne à la Liberté, two rows of young women, dressed in white, descended the mountain, crossing each other before the ‘altar of reason’ before ascending once more to greet the goddess of Liberty.”




   The Republican Calendar was abolished on 1 January 1806 by the Emperor Napoleon I. However, it was revived during the brief Paris Commune, which lasted from 6–23 May 1871 (or from  16 Floréal–3 Prairial An LXXIX).

Peace on Earth, by Carol Drinkwater

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This month my blog is very short. Apologies for that. I am a little unwell. On top of that, due to the loss of my mother earlier this year, my husband and I are having a very low-key Christmas.




Today, 26th December, is Boxing Day. It is also St Stephen’s Day, which is celebrated in the Republic of Ireland as Lá Fhéile Stiofán. It is a public holiday also known as  Day of the Wren, or Lá an Dreolin. In certain parts of the country such as Dingle and Galway locals dress themselves in straw hats and parade through the streets. This tradition is less common now but occasionally you might see such a parade if you are lucky. What I appreciate about most about this tradition is that those who participate are free to parade and dress as they please. Nobody stops them.

St Stephen was the first Christian martyr. He was taken outside the city of Jerusalem beyond either the eastern or northern gate - archeologists are divided on the precise location - and was stoned to death for blasphemy. In the Acts of the Apostles he is spoken of as one of the Christian Deacons of Jerusalem. Here, below, is a remarkable painting by Jacopo and Domenico Tintoretto of the stoning of Stephen. It is the altarpiece of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.





and here the stoning of Stephen by Paolo Uccello



I have been gazing at these two paintings while sipping my morning coffee. I have been pondering a society that allows a man to be stoned to death because he speaks up for what he believes, because his philosophy is different. 2016 has been a wretched year for barbaric acts justified by righteousness.   I am as impotent as the next when I read of or watch recordings of massacres such as we have witnessed this year in Nice, or a few days ago in Berlin to name but two.

Boxing Day has become a commercial affair - the first day of the sales in certain countries. Important though, I think, to remember its earlier meaning. 
A new year approaches. One that will trigger many changes: Brexit in Britain which might cause the reinstatement of border control between Northern Ireland and the Republic, the presidency of Donald Trump, an election in France where the extreme right is hoping to gain a majority control along with many other events that threaten to override tolerance. What I wish for tomorrow, for 2017, is that we can as a universe, as a species open our hearts to one another. If, every day, one tiny act of tolerance, a gesture for peace, is expressed we might begin to turn the tide of hate and intolerance that is threatening to engulf us.

Happy holidays. Peace on Earth.

Regent's Park Catastrophe 1867, by Janie Hampton

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When I was a small child my grandmother told me of a terrible event that she had witnessed. ‘My father took me to Regent’s Park,’ she told me. ‘We walked across the frozen lake. As we stepped off onto the bank, the whole lake tipped up, and all the people skating slipped into the water. Then the ice tilted back, with the people underneath. There was nothing anyone could do. Father and I were so lucky. We got off just in time.’ Her words stuck with me but it was another 50 years before I found an eye-witness account of this disaster which occurred 150 years ago next month. It was by Francis Henry Skrine, the 19 year old son of the Rev. Clarmont Skrine of Wimbledon, and went as follows:
‘Regent’s Park is, indeed, the chief glory of north-western London, and it owes much of its beauty to an artificial lake of vast extent, studded with islets, and the chosen home of a variety of wild fowl. On the 15th January 1867, the Regent’s Park water, as this lake is termed, presented an animated scene. Three days of sharp frost had covered its ample bosom with a sheet of ice, apparently firm enough to support the crowd of skaters and sliders with which it was thronged. The spectators on shore numbered thousands, and a roaring trade was being done by lenders of skates; and vendors of hot chestnuts, “brandy balls” and oranges. The great interest, however, centred round the “hockey on ice” – a game of which I was then an enthusiastic votary. It is played as hockey on dry land, with the exception that the rubber ball is replaced by a disc of cork: and when the pace is hard and the players numerous, it is a highly exhilarating if somewhat risky form of sport. So exciting was the game that I entirely failed to notice the dangerous condition of the ice, and the fact that it was gradually being deserted by all but the most adventurous skaters. 
'It was not till 1.30 p.m. that I paused for an instant to rest. I glanced round me, and saw at once that I was lost. I was exactly in the centre of the lake, 200 yards distant from the islets, or the shore; on a spot too, where I knew the water to be at least 12 feet in depth. The treacherous ice was everywhere a perfect maze of cracks, through which the water was oozing, as the surface bent and undulated under the skaters. I looked for a means of escape and saw close by an employee of the Royal Humane Society with cork life-belt and ladder, making his way gingerly towards the shore; but my entreaties to be allowed a share of his life-belt in case of a break-up, were answered by imprecation [cursing], and the remark that “he would have enough to do to save himself”. To strike out for safety would have endured instant immersion; I therefore lay down on the ice, and awaited the inevitable catastrophe. It was not long in coming. A party of 15 strong men were engaged, a few yards off, in a fierce struggle for the hockey ball. Their weight proved too much for the rotten ice, which gave way, engulphing the entire group. A wave swept over the surface of the lake from the scene of this catastrophe; the ice broke up in all directions and I found myself struggling in the water. I managed to grasp a floe about four feet in diameter, and, clinging desperately to it, shouted “help” with the full force of my lungs: but my despairing appeal was drowned by those of scores of other victims around me. My hands grew number from contact with the slippery ice, and I was burdened with my saturated overcoat, and dragged down by my heavy skates. I felt my grasp slowly relaxing, and knew that I must soon lose hold, slip between the miniature icebergs around me, and sink to rise no more.
‘At this critical moment, I observed, floating a few feet from me, the ladder of my friend the ice man, abandoned in his hasty retreat, and without hesitation, I left my floe, and struck out for the surer support. It was a terrible and almost hopeless effort. Twice I was engulphed amid the floating ice, and twice I emerged breathless from the dark water. But at length utterly exhausted, I reached the ladder, and clung to it with all the strength of despair. I was now in a position of comparative safety and able to glance at my surroundings. The entire surface of the lake was covered in human heads, their owners clinging desperately to ice-floes and rending the air with their entreaties for help. The shores were fringed by a yelling mob of spectators, intensely excited, but utterly unable to assist their perishing fellow-creatures close by. A stalwart fellow who had been one of the most eager and profane of our hockey-players, was praying fervently for mercy. Seeing my ladder, he implored me to push it within his reach, and after great exertion, I managed to do so. The groaning wretch abandoned his temporary support and clutched at my ladder; but the effort was beyond his powers. He went under, and the last I saw of him was two clenched fists slowly sinking between two adjacent floes.
‘A stout individual was lying at full length on an island of ice barely large enough to support his weight and shouting “A thousand pounds to the man who’ll get me out.” This appeal to their cupidity was too much for the “roughs” of whom the most ashore was largely composed. A chain was speedily found, and a score or two, hand in hand, darted into the icy water. After several fruitless efforts, the capitalist was rescued from his perilous position. (I afterwards learnt that he decided not to “execute”, and offered his salvors the paltry sum of £10; that they sued him for the entire amount but they lost, the judges holding the non-existence of a contract!)
‘One after another, the heads around me slowly disappeared, the shouts of the mob grew fainter, I felt a delicious dreaminess invading my sense, and sunk into a profound slumber, the result, doubtless, of the flow of blood from the head.
‘On awaking, I found myself in a comfortable bed, surrounded by kind and solicitous attendants. Collecting with a great effort my scattered senses, I ascertained that it was past 11 p.m. and that I was the guest of a resident in one of the splendid terraces overlooking the park. I learned that, after a prolonged delay, boats had been launched, and the survivors picked up and taken, for the most part, to the infirmary of the Marylebone workhouse. I had been actually the last to be rescued, after an immersion which had lasted towards of four hours, and had been conveyed to my kind hosts, at the suggestion of a friendly park-keeper. I had clutched the ladder to which I owed my life too firmly to allow of its being taken from me, and I was carried to my temporary quarters still holding it in my grasp.
'Medical men were in prompt attendance, and after unremitting exertion on their part for upwards of five hours, I was restored to consciousness. Beyond the loss of my finger-nails, I suffered no ill-effects from my terrible experiences and two days later was able to assist in the mournful task of dragging the lake for victims.
‘Forty-two bodies, mostly youths in the heyday of life, were recovered from the oozy depths, their hands full of weeds and mud grasped in their death agonies. The catastrophe was undoubtedly due to the incompetence of park officials and the police, who should have cleared the lake as soon as the dangerous condition of the ice became manifest. Its repetition has been rendered impossible by a reduction in the depth of the lake to a maximum of four feet. But the 15th January is still a sad anniversary in many an English home. F.H.S. Calcutta, December 1884.’
Maybe my granny saw this and believed it was her?
A year after this event, Francis Skrine joined the Bengal Civil Service and eventually rose to become British Commissioner of the Chittagong Division. The Regent’s Park catastrophe seems to have affected his entire outlook on life. During his 27 years in India, his colleagues were impressed by three water-related achievements: he designed a new system of embankments in the Nadiya District; excavated a great drainage canal at Rangpur; and constructed water-works at Arrah. He was noted for his efforts during three major famines and for his ‘energy and devoted efforts to save life during a very serious cholera epidemic’. Even though this was written 17 years after the catastrophe, the details were still vividly remembered. Maybe that is why my granny recalled being there – after reading this she was convinced she saw it all. I say this because, when I found Skrine’s account among her papers, I realized she was not born until 20 years after it had taken place. So much for oral history!

To Resolve or Not, that is the New Year's Question by Julie Summers

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A few years ago a husband of a friend of mine announced at midnight on 31 December that his New Year's Resolution was to make love to his wife three times a week. We all stood around feeling suitably impressed, depressed, optimistic - take your pick - and somewhat inferior. After all, we were none of us less than 50 years old. He kept his promise and did make love three times a week but more often than not to someone else's wife. Was that a good resolution? I leave you to judge for yourselves.


I, personally, find New Year's resolutions more of a burden than anything else, something to beat myself up about in the dark, cold days of February but quickly forgotten when the spring flowers come of life and my garden is alive with proliferating flora and fauna. However, so many people make resolutions that I thought I would look up their ancestry.


New Year's resolutions seem to have begun with the ancient Babylonians who made promises to their gods at the start of each year that they would return borrowed objects and pay their debts. That tradition developed and evolved under the Romans into a series of promises to Janus, the god of beginnings after whom the month January is named. He is also the god of gates, transitions, time, doorways, passages and endings. Usually depicted with two faces, he also presided over the beginning and ending of conflict: the doors of his temple were open in time of war and closed to mark peace.


Over the next millenia various ages adopted variations on the theme of reaffirmation of promises, while the world religions used it to urge us to reflect upon our wrongdoings in order to seek and offer forgiveness. That seems to me to have moved on a little from the original simple message and introduced a level of guilt which, to me at least, seems unhelpful.

Liverpool Central Library - one of my favourite places to work



Being a book person the message I take from the Babylonians is that I must check I have returned all the books I borrowed in 2016 whether from libraries or friends. But, flippancy aside, I'm beginning to like the idea of returning borrowed objects and paying debts. It seems to me so much more positive and interactive than promising myself I will go to the gym once a week or always wash socks in pairs or, heaven forbid, promise to make love to my husband three times a week. No, I think I shall take away the positive message and return affection that I have been given over the last year and pay my respect to friendships that have held me up in difficult times as well as celebrating good things. So my New Year's Resolution is made.

I wish you all a very happy 2017.

Amy Johnson by Christina Koning

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Our guest for November is Christina Koning, formerly of this parish.

Christina left the History Girls when she became a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has clearly also been busy writing her latest novel, about Amy Johnson.

Christina Koning was born in Kuala Belait, Borneo and grew up in Venezuela and Jamaica. She has worked as a travel writer and journalist – most recently for the Times. Her novels include A Mild Suicide, which was short-listed for the David Higham Prize for Fiction; Undiscovered Country, which won the Encore Prize and was long-listed for the Orange Prize, and Fabulous Time, which was awarded a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship. The Dark Tower, her first novel for Arbuthnot Books was published in 2010. It was followed by Variable Stars in 2011 and Line Of Sight in 2014. A Mild Suicide was re-issued by Arbuthnot in 2012. Game Of Chance, the second book in the Blind Detective series, was published by Arbuthnot in 2015.

www.christinakoning.com

Why I became fascinated by Amy Johnson and the women fliers of the Golden Age of Air

When I started writing my latest novel, Time of Flight, which is set in 1931, I knew one thing: that it would be about flying - then reaching its zenith as a popular craze - and that it would feature a character inspired by those magnificent ‘queens of the air’, who did so much to popularise flying in its golden years. One of the most celebrated was the American aviatrix, Amelia Earhart (1897-1937), the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic - but Britain wasn’t slow in fielding a candidate of its own.


Amy Johnson (1903-1941) was, at first sight, an unlikely celebrity. The daughter of a Hull businessman, she first became interested in flying while working as a secretary to the solicitor, William Charles Crocker. His offices were on the far side of London Bridge, and it was there that my grandfather, Charles Thompson, worked as a telephonist and receptionist. This, incidentally, was one of the jobs the blind were trained to do, in the years following the Great War. My grandfather had learned typing and telephony at St Dunstan’s, the rehabilitation centre for the war-blinded, then located in Regent’s Park, where he was referred after being invalided out of the army in 1917. Charles was of course the model for my ‘Blind Detective’, Frederick Rowlands, in the series of detective stories of which Time of Flight is the latest.

It fascinated me that Charles must have known Amy when she was first getting interested in flying - although, sadly, he died long before I was able to ask him what he thought of her! But of course, this curious fact - that my First World War hero grandfather had once worked in the same office as one of the greatest ‘heroines’ of modern times - was one of the reasons I chose an aviation theme for the novel. It had been at the back of my mind when I started the Blind Detective series, and I knew that ‘Miss Johnson’ (as she is referred to in the first book, Line of Sight) would have to have more than just a walk-on part.

And so I got more and more interested in Amy, who in 1927, the year in which Line of Sight is set, was still unknown. But her anonymity wasn’t to last very long: in 1929, after saving up for flying lessons at the Stag Lane airfield, she was awarded her pilot’s license. She also gained her ground engineer’s ‘C’ license - a qualification that would stand her in good stead on her famous solo flight from England to Australia, when her engineering skills came into play on numerous occasions. Amy was twenty-six years old, and had had only 90 hours’ flying experience when she set out from Croydon Airport on May 5th, 1930 in her De Havilland GH60 Gipsy Moth ‘Jason’, on the first leg of this epic 11,000 mile journey.


Averaging 800-900 miles a day, she was confronted by all kinds of extreme weather - from rainstorms, which reduced visibility to zero, to sandstorms that caused her to crash-land. Much of the time she was ‘flying blind’ - radar hadn’t yet been discovered, and the instruments she had to guide her were basic, to say the least. She found her way by looking down from the open cockpit, and following the lines of rivers and roads. After many terrifying escapades, she reached Darwin on May 24th - and was hailed as a heroine of the Modern Age: ‘Amy, Wonderful Amy’ in the words of the 1930 hit song. Overnight, this unassuming young woman became an instant celebrity - a role with which she was far from comfortable.

Because, in spite of having gained international renown, at a time when few women achieved fame for anything other than their looks, Amy Johnson was shy and reclusive by temperament. Her passion was flying, and she continued to set records throughout the 1930s, including one for a solo flight from London to Cape Town in 1932, breaking her husband Jim Mollison’s record. The marriage to Mollison, who seems to have been a bit of a playboy, didn’t last, but Amy continued to pursue her fascination with speed - learning to drive racing cars (another of the era’s dangerous hobbies) and taking up gliding.
Jim Mollison and Amy Johnson

With such rich material to draw on (and Amy’s story was only one of many - for a fuller account of the lives of ‘Those Magnificent Women in Their Flying Machines’ see my HG post of the same name), I found the writing of Time of Flight an enjoyable - if not always uncomplicated - experience. Since it is, obviously, a murder mystery, I had to find solutions to the crime writer’s perennial problem of how to kill people without making the killer too obvious from the start. Fortunately, I had expert assistance from a friend who is also something of a Flying Ace. He not only took me up in his plane, but let me fly the thing, in order to get an idea of what those early aviators had to deal with. More usefully still, he came up with a fiendishly clever idea for making a murder ‘work’ within the context of a story about flying.

So I’m grateful to Amy Johnson - not only for being such an inspirational figure, for me and for millions of women, in the years since she took the controls of her Gipsy Moth, but for providing me with such a great theme for my detective story. I live not very far from Duxford Airfield, and so I quite often see light aircraft - some of them the sort Amy herself might have flown - flying over my garden. Whenever I do, I can’t help feeling a thrill of excitement, and a glow of admiration for all those amazing aviatrixes of the past.





(All photos from Wikimedia Commons)






Cabinet of Curiosities – Christmas Family Trees

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As most people know, Christmas trees were first introduced into the UK in the nineteenth century, influenced by the habits of the royal family, although using greenery to decorate our houses at winter festivals has been a tradition for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

But, fascinating though a general history of Christmas traditions would be, that’s not why I’ve chosen my Christmas tree as my first entry into the History Girls’ bulging Cabinet of Curiosities. No, I’ve chosen it because, visiting friends and family, seeing all of their trees and putting up my own has reminded me that every home and every family has its own history – and these can often be traced through the branches of its Christmas tree.

So I thought I’d take you on a quick journey around my own family tree, sparkly nuts and all.

Christmas in my parents’ home has always been about our family and our traditions, built up over the years – and still is. That’s why my mum still hangs out the sequin-encrusted stockings that were first my dad and uncle’s, 60 years ago, and were then mine and my brother’s a mere 30 years’ back.


The tree at my mum and dad’s also always has certain things on it, no matter what. This year, my mum’s tree was decorated entirely in red: except, that is, my Yellow Glitter Bell (created age 7ish, maybe?) and My Brother’s Sparkly Nuts (made when he was about 2). I never did understand why the adults sniggered when we cried ‘its Matthew’s nuts!’ as they came out of the box each year...



As an adult, my own tree can’t compete with such precious and time-honoured relics, but I have developed some traditions of my own. There are the baubles two of my closest friends gave as wedding favours from their December marriage, having brought back 160 of them from China; the 7 or 8 freebie ‘fat Robins’ that my local independent garden centre gives away each year when you buy your tree from them rather than the big chain store just down the road; or the cheapo Woollies angel who is a remnant from my first student house.



There are other memories on my Christmas tree, too, of places I have been, with people I love: the wooden reindeer from an amazing holiday in the Arctic Circle; a tiny nativity scene inside a bell, brought back from the moving pilgrimage route of the Camino de Santiago, or the bauble painted with scenes from the Tuscan countryside, reminding me of wine-tasting and walking with my mum this summer, fulfilling one of her ‘bucket list’ dreams.


To me, that’s what a Christmas tree should be about: not just a sparkly, oversized ornament which drops bits of itself all over your carpet, but a series of reminders of the people, places and things you love, evolving year by year, each new decoration a precious memory as well as a thing of beauty in its own right. 

I hope you all had a very merry Christmas and have a happy, healthy and prosperous new year. But do me a favour: when it comes to take the decorations down, be sure to pack them away carefully. They aren’t just baubles, but celebrations.

December competition

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To win one of five copies of Christina Koning's Time of Flight, just answer the following question in the Comments section below:

"What other woman do you admire who was a pioneer in a traditionally male field?"

Then email your answer to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk so that I can contact you if you win

Closing date 14th January

We regret that our competitions are open to UK Followers only

A new year by Mary Hoffman

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Reading Julie Summers' post a few days ago about New Year's Resolutions gave me pause for thought. I'm not a great maker of resolutions myself, though I remember making comprehensive lists of potential improvements as a child and young teenager. Perhaps I was a bit like Jane Austen's Emma, of whom Mr Knightley says:

"Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawing-up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through--and very good lists they were--very well chosen, and very neatly arranged--sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen--I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time; and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding."

In other words, the making of a list is nothing if the tasks on the list are not carried out.

But today I want to think about the New Year rather than the resolutions.

I was recently writing about the moment when 1299 became 1300 and trying to think of what it might mean to a young girl in medieval Italy. She was the heroine of my new novel for Barrington Stoke, due out later this month and called Tilt:


I was blithely putting myself in Netta's shoes, as the daughter of an architect and stonemason working on the bell tower for Pisa's cathedral, when I suddenly had to smack myself on the head and say "Doh!" Because of course Netta's new year did NOT begin on 1st January but on 25th March.

That is of course the date of the Annunciation of the angel Gabriel to Mary and in Italy THAT was when the year 1300 began, as it did for much of mainland Europe. It wasn't until 1521 that the new year in Tuscany began on the first day of January. And in England that change was not made until 1752.

(Yet Scotland adopted the new date in 1600 - could this be why the Scots are so attached to Hogmanay, since they've been celebrating it on the night before 1st January for over four hundred years?)

The Romans began their year in March too, without reference to the BVM. Hence September, October, November and December, named as the seventh, eighth, nine and tenth months respectively.*

Before it got its status as the year opener, 1st January was celebrated in the Gregorian calendar as the Circumcision and Naming of Christ, a minor festival which is still technically acknowledged on that date in the Anglican Church.

Bartolomeo Veneto Circumcision of Christ 1506  Louvre
The tradition of showing the new year as a baby goes back a long way. This 16th century woodcut carries the Latin couplet:

"sum novus ut pura puer ortus virgine Christus.
Sic tibi sit foelix hic novus annus. homo."

(I am as new as Christ child born of a virgin pure,
Mortal, may your new year be just as happy and sure.)

The child ages throughout the year, becoming as old as Father Time by the last day of December, ready to hand over to another new baby. Many images seem to equate Old Father Time with Death himself, since he comes with a scythe.

And you could be forgiven for thinking that 2016 has certainly reaped a rich harvest of souls, though statisticians tell us we are wrong about that. From David Bowie's unexpected death on January 10th to the passing of Debbie Reynolds on December 29th, the infant 2016 had to age very quickly.

January used to be called Lautomaand by the Dutch, meaning "frosty month" and was dubbed Nivose or "snow month" in the French Revolutionary calendar. Unless the weather changes quickly in my neck of the woods, I shall think of it as "fog month."

"Mist monath" might make the month seem a little more attractive; I gather many people hate January and regard it as 31 days to be endured.

I'm not one of them. I love new beginnings: first of the month, first month of the year, first day of term, first page of a new novel - to read or to write -  first birthdays of babies. And the turn of the year, which started with the winter solstice on 21st December, really gets going today.

The sol is invictus, even by the Oxfordshire fog.

A very happy New Year to all our readers and Followers around the world.

* History Girl Caroline Lawrence disagrees here.

Mary Hoffman's 2017 books are:

January Tilt (Barrington Stoke)
February Walking on Water and Lost and Found (Otter-Barry Books)
April The Ravenmaster's Boy (Greystones Press) and When she was Bad (as Amy Lovell, Greystones Press)
September Pirate Baby (Otter-Barry Books)



The Quiet Achievers of History, by Gillian Polack

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The silent partner of most of the political discussions rampaging around the interweb is the public sector. The public service is a strong part of any country’s work. It’s not as colourful as the politics and people who make the history books, but it’s what keeps everything together. I’m thinking about it in this new year of ours, for one of the main reasons we got through 2016 in as good condition as we did was many people working hard behind the scenes, to turn grand declarations into achievable goals and to keep the wheels of government rolling.



I love telling my students that a country without an effective public sector is a country in George RR Martin’s universe. It’s impossible. It falls apart.

When we think of falling apart in the Middle Ages, we think of the epic arguments between Stephen and Matilda. We think of Sharon Penman’s story of the period that was so very nasty for ordinary people that it was described as “When Christ and his Saints slept.” Yet... the public sector was active throughout that time. Not as active as it had been. Not as active as it would be. Justice was limited. Taxation was complicated. But the workers were still there, holding the country together so that when Henry came to the throne, there was still a throne to come to. 

It’s much harder to pull together a country that doesn’t have a viable public sector. By ‘much harder’, of course, I mean ‘next to impossible’.

It’s the quiet dudes who work behind the scenes to keep the correspondence flowing and the paperwork done who make our historical happy endings possible. We don’t often see them in our fiction, but they’re there, working. 

An occasional person appears in detective fiction, because the shape of the detective story lends itself to regular workers just doing their job. It doesn’t lend itself so well to fiction that describe bloody battles and cries of hate and love and challenge. That would be like a waiter butting into the last moments of a marriage by asking “And would you like to order dessert?”



The thing about the quiet work that keeps a country running is, history-wise, it’s only boring if you don’t know where to look. Or maybe if you don’t know how to look. 

So many of the really colourful stories novelists tell have just a bit of the public service in them, for instance. “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” is not nearly as interesting if we don’t know what happened next. Henry’s sublimely dramatic penitence isn’t just an exercise in self-abnegation: it links the murderous actions of four wayward knights back to the normal world, making sure that there is responsibility and that it is taken.

It’s a different kind of story, though. It’s the story of the quiet drama involved in getting the meal to the table, rather than the glamorous drama of the couple arguing their marriage into oblivion over a fine meal. It’s the story of the woman creating a beautiful dessert doing it through the veil of a migraine because she’s worked too long without a break and her life, too, is falling to pieces. Her life isn’t public, so no-one knows that it’s the reason the line of strawberry sauce is wobbly.



That strawberry sauce...

What happens if we translate that anecdote to the Middle Ages?

The historical novel might be about the amazing team of scribes that got out all the copies of the Magna Carta to everyone who needed one. It might be about how their private lives suffered while the barons announced “Look how clever we are.”

The historical novel might be about making sure that horses were shod for royal use during a major campaign. A loose shoe in battle could kill a king.

The historical novel might follow the public servants who handles the paperwork for London imports. Sounds boring? It wasn’t. Think of smugglers and international intrigue. But there are no important people involved? There are. The public service mixed with the good and great all the time. Name-dropping is easy. Chaucer, for instance, was heavily involved in that kind of activity, and from Chaucer, it was one step to royalty. A sexy step, too, given who he married.

 

I’m talking about the many people who keep countries going today. These quiet and industrious souls have always been with us. They’ve always had stories to tell, too. It’s a matter of cultural preference that we seldom tell these stories. The stories themselves are amazing.

High Times in the 18th Century by Debra Daley

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If you happened to be an inhabitant of the demi-monde in late-Georgian London, or just a common or garden thrill-seeker tired of booze and tobacco, there were certainly opportunities to achieve an altered state by engaging in a special kind of ‘frolic’, to use the parlance of the times. It was the Victorian age that really experienced a rush of new chemical syntheses and psychotropic plant discoveries, but if you were in search of assisted merriment in the 18th century, that pleasure-seeking  age could oblige.

Everyday Euphoriants

There was always good old reliable laundanum, of course, which had been around since the late 17th century, when the physician Thomas Sydenham had praised the utility of opium. (Sydenham had also experimented with its injection by means of a hollow quill.) If you asked a physician for a dose to ease melancholy, insomnia or chronic pain, opium dissolved in alcohol was the usual prescription. The addictive nature of ‘cordials’ heavily laced with opiates was well known, but that knowledge caused no harm to their popularity. One such casualty was the Honourable Topham Beauclerk, friend of Dr Johnson and Horace Walpole, who died a wreck in 1780. Once considered the most brilliant conversationalist of his time, Beauclerk had ‘his temper destroyed’ by laudanum. His drug problem made his life ‘a torment to himself and all about him’, according to an observer, Major John Floyd. 
Addict and former wit Topham Beauclerk drank
 400 drops of laudanum in solution each day. He died at the age of 41.

But even as Beauclerk was unravelling in the late 1770s – taking laudanum ‘in vast quantities’, Walpole remarked, and becoming ‘filthy’ in appearance – the popularity of opiates spread among the middling class. In 1770, Dr John Jones had published a bestseller titled The Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d, asserting that the drug could cure symptoms of many disorders. That same year a painkiller compound of opium and ipecacuanha called Dover’s Powder came on the market and proved such a runaway success it was still on sale 150 years later. 

Dover's Powder, named after the physician and buccaneer, Thomas Dover
(also known as Dr Quicksilver, because of his liberal use of mercury).

The recipe had been patented in 1732 by a pupil of Sydenham’s called Thomas Dover. A dose of the light-brown, bitter-tasting powder was best taken in a glass of white wine posset or some other sweet syrup. It induced in the frazzled imbiber a sensation of wellbeing and a feeling of warmth that flooded through the veins. As a defence against insomnia it was much preferred to a sleeping draught of belladonna, but as John Mann reports in Turn On and Tune In, a history of drugs, ‘even the popularity of Dover’s Powder paled in contrast to Godfrey’s cordial (a mixture of opium, spices and treacle in water).' Godfrey's cordial ‘sold at the rate of several gallons per week … in Manchester and Nottingham during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.’ The popularity and continued use of these cordials was hardly to be wondered at. They had the same side-effects and withdrawal symptoms as heroin – Dover's and Godfrey's customers were hooked. Only after the 1860s did the medical profession begin to inquire into the risk of dependency of such opiates. 

Etheromania

But it wasn’t only opiates that snared users in the 1700s. They were nuts for liquid diethyl ether too. Marketed as a medicinal tonic named Anodyne, diethyl ether became a popular recreational drug in Britain. It was cheaper than heavily-taxed alcohol and produced short-lived dissociative effects and sensations of happiness without a hangover. The effects came on more quickly if the vapours from the liquid were inhaled rather than swallowed, but if you were a respectable lady who liked to take her drugs with an air of discretion, you might carry a small phial of ether and consume the contents with some daintiness by dripping a dose onto a spoonful of sugar – as the pharmacologist Louis Lewin reports in Phantastica, a groundbreaking survey of narcotic and stimulating drugs published in 1924. Accidental overdoses of Anodyne were not uncommon and so were deaths from the burns that occurred when etheromaniacs combined sniffing and smoking the drug – ether is highly flammable. However, the craze for the gas lasted well into the 19th century. It was not until the 1840s that ether's efficacy as an anaesthetic in surgical procedures began to overtake its reputation as a vice. 

Cannabis

According to Dan Cruickshank’s The Secret History of Georgian London, marijuana was used by a notorious, and possibly apocryphal, gang of upper-class hooligans who called themselves Mohocks. Cruikshank speculates that prostitutes consumed the drug, too. But where did these stoners obtain cannabis preparations in 18th-century England? It wasn't available as a medicine. The active ingredient of cannabis had not yet been established and, unlike opiates, it had no commercial presence. Hemp had been grown in Britain for hundreds of years as fibre for sacking and cordage, but it certainly wasn’t the psychoactive kind. The climate was all wrong for a homegrown high. The 15th-century herbalist Nicholas Culpepper listed a variety of medical uses of cannabis sativa, but he made no mention of psychotropic activity. But if you were after an exotic substance in London, the one place you or your intermediary were mostly likely to procure it was from the dark shops in the warrens around Limehouse Causeway, where anything could be bought and sold. There, Chinese and Japanese sailors congregated along with Lascars – ganja-smoking South Asian sailors who crewed East India Company ships. Even the humblest of sailors tried to bring with him personal trade goods from exotic parts to sell at home as a way of augmenting his poor wages. If aristocratic louts and jaundiced courtesans in London fancied a cannabis intoxicant, they were most likely to find it in the form of blocks of resin – as majoun or charas – brought to Britain from India and the Middle East by adventurers or mariners.   

View near Limehouse Bridge, John Boydell, 1751.

I will mention here that the favourite intoxicant of Covent Garden courtesans was ratafia, a sweet liqueur flavoured with peach or cherry kernels. They liked to relax with a slug of it in their tea after an evening’s labours – in all ignorance of the cyanogenic glycosides that lurked in the kernels. Once ingested, these glycosides broke down into prussic acid, also known as hydrogen cyanide. If you knocked back enough of it, ratafia would drive you mad before it killed you.

Sexual Stimulants

Spanish fly – the Viagra of its day – was an aphrodisiac more properly called cantharides, made from blister-beetles. It created a rush of blood to the sexual organs and a range of unpleasant after-effects. Nocturnal Revels, an account of prostitution in London, published in 1779 by an anonymous member of the Hellfire Club, notes that many gentlemen on the town, who were not in the first vigour of youth, depended on Spanish fly. The substance was usually administered in flavoured pastilles to disguise its horrible taste. It was highly toxic and could cause convulsions and coma. 

The blister beetle was dried and powdered
to make the aphrodisiac known as Spanish fly.

During the 1780s another preparation came on the market that caught the attention of nocturnal revellers. Fowler's Solution, or Liquor Arsenicalis, was a compound of arsenic trioxide designed to treat infectious diseases. It was also consumed as a tonic, according to a longstanding belief in arsenic's healthful properties and began to gain a reputation as a sexual stimulant. It was said to cause an unusual excitement of the reproductive system. Overly enthusiastic consumption of Fowler’s Solution could result in cirrhosis of the liver or cancer, but that didn't stop people using it well into the 19th century, when it also became popular with women who consumed it, or employed it as a skin wash, in the belief that a hint of arsenic might freshen their complexions. From 1845 Fowler's Solution was used as a treatment for leukaemia. 

Dr Thomas Fowler proposed the solution in 1786
as a treatment for agues.


Laughing Parties
The summer of 1799 saw a new fixation in British society – the inhalation of laughing gas. Nitrous oxide had been discovered by chemist Joseph Priestley in 1772 after introducing iron filings to nitric acid – the resulting gas gave Priestley a painless and giddy feeling – and was synthesised later that year by his pupil Humphry Davy. Davy was delighted by the euphoric effects of the gas, which he had tested on himself at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol. It induced an elated state which motivated Davy to set about supervising the construction of a machine that could reliably produce large quantities of the gas with a property that he described as ‘the thrilling’.

Nitrous Oxide Party. In the late 18th century and early 19th century, nitrous oxide
was inhaled for entertainment and amusement.
Davy soon issued invitations to people in his circle to sample the wondrous gas and experienced 'the thrilling' for themselves. They met at an upstairs drawing room at the Pneumatic Institution in a series of gatherings over the summer. The guests inhaled nitrous oxide from portable bags made of oiled green silk and happily stumbled about in wild merriment, before drifting into a dreamy sedated state. News of the nitrous oxide capers travelled and came to be repeated at ‘laughing parties’ held all over the country. Davy held nitrous sessions with poets Coleridge and Southey, the potter Josiah Wedgwood and the thesaurist Peter Roget. 

Dr Syntax and his wife making an experiment in Pneumatics.

People could not get enough of a gas that allowed “uneasiness [to be]”, as Davy put it, “for a few minutes swallowed up in pleasure.” He proposed in 1799 that nitrous oxide might be used in surgical operations to deaden pain; but his suggestion went unheeded for another forty-five years. It’s a theme that recurs with any account of the history of mind-altering substances: that they can do medical good is overshadowed by their good-time nature.

The Bitter Withy: Legends of the Childhood of Jesus - by Katherine Langrish

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The apocryphal Miracle of the Clay Birds - Southampton Church, Oxfordshire

Was Jesus really born in a manger? And does it matter?  Whether he was or not, the message of the story is clear: here is a deity who cares about the common people, who was born one of them and shares humanity’s poverty and pain. Outside of the Bible, many old stories of the childhood of Jesus which now count as folklore deliver similar messages. Derived from various accounts in the apocryphal gospels, and current in medieval times, they found their way into old songs and carols and even on to the walls of churches. 
Charming as these tales are with their vibrant images of children’s play, of tell-tales and rivalry, they also have a shocking impact.  They show childhood’s ruthlessness as well as its innocence. 

The extracts I give below come from the Apocryphal Gospels of Thomas, and the Gospel of the Pseudo-Matthew: the translation is by MR James (best known for his classic ghost stories) and was first published by Oxford University Press, 1924. James explains that these stories come from a variety of manuscripts of different ages and different languages: “The few Greek manuscripts are all late.  The earliest authorities are a much-abbreviated Syriac version of which the manuscript is of the sixth century; and a Latin palimpsest at Vienna of the fifth or sixth century.  The Latin version… is found in more manuscripts than the Greek; none of them, I think, is earlier than the thirteenth century.”

Here are two of the stories from the Greek Text B:

II
1 On a certain day when there had fallen a shower of rain [Jesus] went forth of the house where his mother was and played upon the ground where the waters were running: and he made pools, and the waters flowed down, and the pools were filled with water. Then saith he: I will that ye become clean and wholesome. And straightway they did so.

2 But a certain son of Annas the scribe passed by bearing a branch of willow, and he overthrew the pools with the branch, and the waters were poured out. And Jesus turned about and said unto him: O ungodly and disobedient one, what have the pools done to thee that thou hast emptied them? Thou shalt… be withered up even as the branch which thou hast in hand.  

3 And [the son of Annas] went on, and after a little he fell and gave up the ghost. And when the young children that played with [Jesus] saw it, they marvelled and departed and told the father of him that he was dead. And he ran and found the child dead, and went and accused Joseph.

III
1 Now Jesus made of that clay twelve sparrows: and it was the Sabbath day.  And a child ran and told Joseph, saying: Behold, thy child playeth about the brook, and hath made sparrows of the clay, which is not lawful.

2 And he when he heard it went and said to the child: Wherefore doest thou so and profaneth the Sabbath?  But Jesus answered him not, but looked upon the sparrows and said: Go ye, take your flight, and remember me in your life.  And at the word they took flight and went up into the air.  And when Joseph saw it he was astonished.


In an understated way both stories focus on the poverty of Jesus: he has no fine toys to play with, but only mud and water, the playthings of poor children – yet we are intended to remember the lines from Genesis 2:7, in which ‘the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.’  The child Jesus, playing in the mud with his friends, has the power of God the Father to create, to purify the water, and to destroy. Though the first tale is one of shockingly over-the-top retribution, it realistically depicts the anger a child feels towards another who has destroyed his game. The second story was embellished by Hilaire Belloc in a very sweet poem, published 1910:

When Jesus Christ was four years old
The angels brought Him toys of gold,
Which no man ever had bought or sold.

And yet with these He would not play,
He made Him small fowl out of clay
And blessed them till they flew away:
Tu creasti Domini

Jesus Christ, thou child so wise,
Bless mine hands and fill mine eyes,
And bring my soul to Paradise.
Closer to the apocryphal gospels is the old ballad ‘The Bitter Withy’, collected by Vaughan Williams in Shropshire and Herefordshire in 1908/9.  It is based both on tales from the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and from a 13th century poem about the childhood of Jesus known as the Vita Rhythmica.  In the ballad, Jesus asks his mother if he may go and play ball:

So up the hill and down the hill
Our sweet young Saviour ran
Until he met three rich young lords
All playing in the sun.

“Good morn, good morn, good morn,” said they,
“Good morning then,” cried he,
“And which of you three rich young lords
Will play at ball with me?”

But the rich young lords despise him:

“We are all lords’ and ladies’ sons
Born in a bower and hall,
And you are nothing but a poor maid’s child
Born in an ox’s stall.”

Alas, you don’t meddle with divinity.

“Well though you’re lords’ and ladies’ sons
All born in your bower and hall,
I’ll prove to you at your latter end
I’m an angel above you all.”

So he built him a bridge from the beams of the sun
And over the water ran he,
The rich young lords chased after him
And drowned they were all three.

So up the hill and down the hill
Three rich young mothers ran
Saying, “Mary mild, fetch home your child,
For ours he’s drowned each one.”

Then Mary mild, she took her child
And laid him across her knee,
And with a handful of withy twigs
She gave him slashes three.

“Oh bitter withy, oh bitter withy,
You’ve causèd me to smart,
And the withy shall be the very first tree
To perish at the heart.”


Far from being sorry for what he’s done, the little Christ Child curses the withy itself – the willow wands with which his mother has whipped him. There’s a wry, very conscious humour in this ballad.  It’s been made and sung by people who were used to being the underdogs, who could only console themselves that, ultimately, God was on the side of the poor and the humble, not the lords and ladies.  They knew they would never find equality this side of heaven, however: so the ballad is a joke – a knowing, tender, deliberate joke – about children, and the way they play and quarrel, and the topsy-turvy chaos that is caused when the innocent but all-powerful Christ Child lashes out against those who jeer at him… and how even HE has to be taught a lesson when he goes too far. 



Here's Maddy Prior singing 'The Bitter Withy' at Cecil Sharp House, 23rd October 2008


Picture Credits

The Miracle of the Clay Birds:  The Infant Jesus shows the Virgin Mary a clay bird which he has made. 15th century wall painting: Wikimedia Commons 

Six and a Half Magic Hours - Joan Lennon

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It's astonishing to think how short a time it's been since the beginning of commercial jet travel. This video extolling the wonder that is the Boeing 707, aka "the magnificent new jet", was made in 1958.  I love the purple prose - the sky is "the vast air ocean" - the plane has "a wing spread that's bigger than the entire distance of the Wright brothers' first flight" and now, we are told, "the travail has been taken out of travel".  We are shown "scenes of living room quiet and relaxation, the mood enhanced by lighting that can be changed from the pale pink of dawn through all the variations to the dark blue of night." I love the optimism of "Jet speeds will help to accomplish one of man's long-sought goals - an easy interchange of peoples throughout the world." Would I also love having that kind of space and food and general pampering on my next jet flight?  Yes.  Oh my oh my, yes.

Have a watch.  It's historical - and another world ...





Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin.

'This useful little book' - by Sheena Wilkinson

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Second in my occasional series about charming little books from the past.

This one is a tiny waistcoat diary from 1919, found many years ago in a junk shop; I no longer remember when or where.  It was a free gift, given away by Hargreaves Brothers and Co, of Gipsyville, Hull, makers of black lead and metal polish. I often wondered about who had owned it in 1919, and what their life was like. I’ve always been interested in WW1 but especially in the immediate post-war years, when people tried to adjust to the huge upheaval of the war. 


I’ve always kept the little book in my desk; in my mind it was associated with inspiration, especially when I began to write stories about the period. I also used it as a good luck charm – I had it with me for my first proper job interview in 1994, and when I went to meet my agent for the first time in 2009. A four-leaved clover is pressed between two of its pages, and I no longer know if I put it there, or if it was there when I bought it. (Romance inclines me towards the latter, but truth compels me to say that pressing four-leaved clovers in old books is exactly the sort of thing I do.)



As with any artefact, it tells us so much more than it was ever meant to. In some ways it’s disappointing – the really interesting thing would be to find a diary that someone had written in. Only a few pages have anything hand-written and it’s of a dull listish nature and sadly illegible. But perhaps whoever owned it didn’t need it because they already had a diary. You see, this little free gift didn’t appear in time for the 1919 new year – because of paper shortages, ‘it became necessary at the end of 1917 to discontinue the issue of this useful little book… in order to comply with the instructions of the ‘Paper Commission.’


The end of hostilities in November 1918 led to the unexpected publication of the ‘useful little book’, but it starts in February. It’s as if January 1919 had been missed out. Which made me think about January 1919: a turn of year that should have been very hopeful  – the ‘war to end war’ was over, after all. But January 1919 was a time of tremendous upheaval, uncertainty and grief. There was bitter labour unrest, with cities like Glasgow and my own Belfast plunged into darkness by strikes. Demobilisation was slow and inefficient, with the first to enlist often the last to be released, leading to near mutiny. The papers thrummed with anxiety about what sort of a peace settlement would be reached. And the third wave of the great flu pandemic was rearing its head – the pandemic lasted about a year and did not really die down until summer 1919, killing upwards of 50 million people worldwide. All in all, a month many would be glad to see removed from memory, rather in the way that people at the turn of 2017, are lamenting the horrors of 2016.


Forgetting is not of course the way to make sense of painful pasts. We in Northern Ireland know that better than many. The printers of this little diary, with its pages devoted to the decorations awarded in the ‘Great European and other wars of recent years’ know that.




Now that I am writing two books set in this period – one in late 1918, one in spring 1919, this old diary has acquired yet another significance for me, as a great way to check days and dates, sunrise and sunset, etc. I can of course find the same information online, but how much nicer to use this tiny little leather-bound book, hoping that, unreadable though the ink might be, something of its essence might come through the pages, through the years, and help me and my characters on our way.



BLASTS FROM THE PAST by Adèle Geras

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When I typed  the names of everything I was going to write about  in this piece into the Labels section of the blog, I was warned that I had far too many letters. So I have cut it down by saying: evenings in the theatre. Which is what this post is about.

I had reason last year to realize that what was 'news' in my life was  'history' in the lives of my children and grandchildren. As my daughter and her family watched the wonderful series THECROWN on Netflix, they were constantly amazed to learn that all this stuff was what was in my daily paper as I was growing up. I recall the Coronation vividly. I took sides over the Townsend /Margaret romance. I remember Churchill dying, George VI dying, and even though I don't go back as far as the Abdication, I do remember the whole of Elizabeth II's reign and have followed all the Royal doings as if they were a drama  I was both watching and participating in.

Then, I watched maybe the best programme on tv over Christmas, which was called WEST SIDE STORIES: the making of a classic.  This led me to remember all the amazing evenings I've had in the theatre, most of them a very long time ago, so I thought I would try and fix some of them here.

In 1955, I was 11  years old. Shortly after starting at my boarding school, my parents took me to see Valerie Hobson on stage as Anna in THE KING AND I with Herbert Lom as the King of Siam and my life-long love of musicals began.  I'd loved them before 1955, because I'd watched dozens of Hollywood musicals on film and many of the games I played with my friends involved reproducing  these in the bedrooms and living rooms of our non-Hollywood houses.  Still, to see a show live, to feel the unmatchable magic of the dimmed lights, the live orchestra, the shining satin of Anna's huge crinoline skirts, the children in their costumes, the sheer lavishness of everything in a London which was still mainly grey and austere, dazzled and entranced me.




In 1958, WEST SIDE STORY and MY FAIR LADY were playing in the West End at the same time.  Julie Andrews was Eliza in the latter and I saw her. 



Now, I love Audrey Hepburn, (voiced by Marni Nixon,)  in the movie as much as anyone else,  but I can promise you that no one, ever, has been a better Eliza than Julie. She was passed over for the movie because her box office appeal (this is before The Sound of Music) was considered not hefty enough.

WEST SIDE STORY changed entirely what everyone thought of when they thought about musicals. Suddenly, there was drama and tragedy, and music as complex  as that of any opera on a stage that throbbed and vibrated with dancing of a kind that had never been seen on a stage before. This musical changed everything. I don't remember ever being as thrilled by something as I was by watching this, live from the second row of the stalls. It was tragic and funny. It was romantic. It was daring...they mentioned 'social diseases' and drugs and teenage misfits. Juvenile delinquents were suddenly the stars of a show. Also,  it was a version of  Shakespeare's ROMEOAND JULIET.   I fell in love then and I haven't fallen out of love, though perhaps (I've now seen it more times on  stage than I can count) it's time to allow directors to change something about the staging if they want to. I believe (and please put me right if you know different) that the staging is copyrighted and can't be changed. This is a mistake. I think WSS is now so firmly established, so much part of the canon that you can tinker with it a bit and it won't suffer.  The movie is great too, (though I have deep problems with Richard Beymer as Tony) but to see a red plush London theatre shaken to the foundations as those dances and songs erupted live...well, that was something I will treasure forever.  I have known every word of the lyrics since I was fourteen and sing them still in the privacy of my bathroom. I feel it's my show.

And now for something completely different. TROILUS and CRESSIDA  was a set play for my A-level. In 1961 Peter Hall directed a production set in a hexagonal sand pit. I've never forgotten that set, though details of the rest of the production have disappeared in the mists of time.  I can remember being very impressed with the way the sandpit resembled a kind of bullring and the Greeks and Romans fighting in the enclosed space was something that's affected how I think about war in general. I imagine them  taking place in just such a setting and the sand fits in neatly with the Middle East, which has been where recent wars have  been waged. 

Shakespeare.  My most memorable experiences of seeing his plays on stage came over one single weekend in 1994. I took my younger daughter, who was 17,  to Stratford and we saw five plays while we were there. It may have been too much, but I loved every minute and we were very lucky indeed with our productions. My daughter didn't enjoy Alex Jennings in PEER GYNT at all but I adored it. We'd done the play at school (a shortened version as it turned out!) and Jennings was superb.  We were both overwhelmed by CORIOLANUS at the Swan and not just because Toby Stephens was completely beautiful. 




It began with an avalanche of grain falling from a grain store on to the stage and we were right at the front - a moment of pure theatrical magic.  A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM was heavenly. Titania lay about in an upside down umbrella piled high with satin and velvet cushions in shades of plum and lilac and pink.



HENRY V, I'm ashamed to say, I don't remember nearly as well, but I can remember we both loved it. 

Other highlights of my theatregoing: THE CHERRY ORCHARD at Stratford in 1995 with Penelope Wilton;  THE ASPERN PAPERS in about 1960 or so, 



with Beatrix Lehmann in the lead; LEMISANTHROPE in Frenchon tour from the Comédie Française which had the whole cast in evening dress, designed by Pierre Cardin. I remember the ladies' dresses as looking something like this:  




 

Nowadays, they film performances and on January 17th I'm going to see Simon Russell Beale as Prospero again. I saw him live at  Stratford in November and am going in order to be entranced all over again.  That's  what good theatre does: cast a spell that lasts a whole lifetime.  



'Take a Peck of Pickled Ploughmen' by Karen Maitland

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Today, the 8th January, is Plough Sunday, which is always the first Sunday after the 6th January. The 6th was the Twelfth Night of the Christmas and the end of the holiday. From Medieval times, right up until the introduction of farm machinery and tractors, Plough Sunday was an important religious feast day in the countryside, taking place before the bawdy and riotous Plough Monday which celebrated the return to work on the farm. 

On Plough Sunday, decorated ploughs would be dragged up to the altars of the churches and even cathedrals to be blessed, and the names of every farm in the parish would be read aloud by the priest, so that they too would be blessed and produce a good harvest in the coming year, for everyone’s life depended on that. The plough was the symbol of life, peace and prosperity. As the old verse says –
"The king he govern all, the parson pray for all, the lawyer plead for all, but the ploughman pay for all and feed all."
Some churches, such as this one in Tickhill, Yorkshire 
have revived the Plough Sunday Services.
Photographer: John Cowie

Although Plough Sunday marked the men’s return to work on the farm and the craftsmen to their workshops, it did not mark the beginning of the ploughing season, but rather the end of it. In the Middle Ages, farmers knew that all the plough work on the farm should be completed before Christmas for the weather usually worsened in January. So, when the last furrow was ploughed before the Twelve Days of Christmas, the plough brist , (the breast or mould-board) would be polished and the shares cleaned and oiled ready for the plough to be stored in a barn. 

There would always be a piece of land left unploughed in the community known as Jack’s Land or Jack’s Green or in Scotland Gudeman’s Fauld (Goodman’s fold). It was left as kind of sop to the Devil or the spirits, so that they had a piece of land which they could inhabit. If greedy humans took all the land, then the spirits would have no abode and would wander across the farms, wreaking havoc on all the ploughed land and making the ground barren. The corpses of those who had been refused burial in consecrated ground, such as suicides or those who'd been excommunicated, were often buried on this land.

Things became a little more rowdy on Plough Monday when the plough men and boys would pin ribbons and trailing rags to their clothes to make a shaggy coat. In some villages, particularly if the ceremony took place at dusk, the lads would blacken their faces and turn their coats inside out. (Wearing clothes turned inside out was an ancient charm to ward off evil and malicious spirits and also to reverse a run of bad luck.) Then the plough men and boys would drag a plough around the village, demanding money or food such as chickens and hams, and ale or cider from each householder, which they would consume in a great feast later that night.

A plough is dragged round the streets in Whittlesey,
Cambridgeshire, as part of Whittlesey Straw Bear Festival
Photographer: Simon Garbutt
If payment was not forthcoming, the householder's front garden would be ‘jagged’, that is ploughed up and ruined, especially the part in front of the cottage door, so that for weeks afterwards the stingy householder would be wading through deep mud to get in or out of their house. It would also be a very visible sign to all their neighbours of their lack of community spirit. 

The leader of the plough men wore a costume which varied from village to village, but usually incorporated an ox tail because oxen generally pulled the plough. Often, the man would dress in drag as a comic woman known as a Bessie. As they processed the men danced and leaped as high as they could, the idea being that the grain would grow as high and as vigorously as they had leaped that year. So, it was in everyone’s interest to encourage the dancers. This tradition is known at least as far back as Saxon times and versions of it are probably as old as the invention of the plough itself.

Christmas Mummers in Haddon Hall
The mummers in the village often performed Plough Plays on Plough Monday, which had nothing to do with farming, but were merely an excuse for mock battles which often degenerated into real and bloody fights egged on by an audience who had already drunk a great deal. The plays had no plots but were simply an array of bizarre characters who introduced themselves to the audience and fought each other. Probably, the mummers would have made mocking references to well-known people in the community or authority figures. The culmination of the play came when characters such as Pickled Herring and Pepper Breeches gathered around the man playing the fool. They’d make an interlocking circle of blades around his neck with six mock swords and pretend to kill him. He’d feign death and then immediately jump up and leap about, showing he was alive. This had echoes of the ancient pre-Christian fertility ceremonies performed during winter months in which the green god was ritually slain and then resurrected to bring about the return of spring and new growth. 

In some villages, it was the tradition to force the man playing fool onto a bonfire of green or wet wood, setting fire to it and to the fool’s trailing rags on his costume in a mock burning. The idea was to produce lots of smoke on the bonfire so that the fool would appear to be consumed on the pyre, but could leap off ‘unharmed.’ But I can’t help thinking that quite a few fools over centuries probably were harmed in the making of these plays, even if it was just from smoke inhalation.

But since this is the end of the Christmas feasting and all your crackers have now been pulled, perhaps I should sign off with a very traditional medieval riddle –
Riddle - "How many hoof prints does an ox leave in the last furrow when it has ploughed all day?" 
Answer – "None, because the plough is dragged behind the ox and so all hoof prints are obliterated."

Ancient Roman Pen and Ink by Caroline Lawrence

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This is the time of year when parents encourage their children to write thank you notes for all the Christmas presents they received. That is until recently. Sadly, the art of letter writing seems to be dying. These days Uncle Frank or Granny is lucky to get an email or text message. I am personally still waiting for mine! 


Romans however, were good at writing. One of the most literate ancient societies, some experts reckon about 15% of the population of the Roman Empire could read or write to some extent, but this figure was probably much higher in towns and fortresses. And the literacy rate would also have varied according to place and time. (photo of the famous ‘Sappho fresco from Pompeii courtesy of Carole Raddato.)


Romans wrote on a wide variety of materials including marble & granite (for permanent inscriptions); wax tablets (beeswax in shallow troughs on a thin, flat rectangle of wood)precious stones (to identify owner or maker) and even sheets of metal (e.g. thin sheets of lead for curse tablets). To write on any of these materials you would need to inscribe or incise the letters with a chisel, stylus or other pointed tool.


But for letter writing, Romans mostly used pen and ink. You could write on papyrus (pounded reed paper); wooden tablets (thin sheets of wood such as birch, alder, oak and lime); ivory tablets (known to us via the poet Martial); parchment (animal skin) and even pieces of broken pottery (sometimes called ‘ostraka’ in Ancient Greece). 

Pens were usually made of reeds or metal. Quill pens (made from bird feathers) did not appear until medieval times. Black was the most common colour of ink. Called atramentum from the root ater (Latin for ‘black) ink was made from ingredients such as soot or lampblack suspended in a solution of gum arabic or glue. Scribes also used ink made from iron vitriol, the same thing used by shoemakers to dye leather black. In the late antique period scribes used oak gall. Cicero and Galen mention the black ink of a cuttlefish (Latin sepia) though it is not certain if this was used for letter writing or not. 

Roman inkwell courtesy of Hella Eckardt & Cambridge University Press
Red ink (purpura), made from cinnabar, red lead or red ochre (Latin rubric), was used sparingly in some manuscripts for important or holy words. One bronze ink pot has Latin words punched around its base: CAV(E) MAL(AM) PUR(PURAM) ‘beware the bad red [ink]. This might indicate that the colour red was apotropaic (i.e. kept away evil) or perhaps it was simply a warning not to suck your pen thoughtfully. 

There are even a few rare references to invisible inks. These were used for magic, love letters and possibly also espionage. For example, words written in milk could be made visible by scattering ash on the text. Some Greek magical papyri even mention an invisible ink made with myrrh. 

Ink was kept in inkwells. These were usually made of metal or pottery, small enough to fit in the palm of the hand. Some had complicated lids to make sure the ink did not spill. Some had chains so a scribe could carry them around. The replica inkwell shown here is based on an ancient original. 

Papyrus was the most common writing material in the Mediterranean area of the Roman Empire. Made of pounded reeds, it was mainly used for scrolls which were unrolled and read horizontally, left to right. The first square of papyrus usually contained the contents of the rest of the scroll. We get the word protocol from the Latin version of the Greek word protokollon ‘first-glued.

Literate people and scribes often had writing sets. These consisted of an inkwell and a pen-holder, usually leather but sometimes wooden. The leather pouch or wooden box would also have space for knives to trim the pens. Sometimes a writing set had two inkwells: one for black ink and one for red ink. 

Visual evidence from antiquity suggests that scribes wrote on their knees. They would spread the scroll across their thighs with one knee slightly higher than the other and find the right amount of tension in the papyrus or parchment. The source text might lie open on a table before them. But common sense suggests that the table or desk in the tablinum (study) was also used for writing. 

In the past, tombs containing writing sets were assumed to be those of men, but now that forensic archaeology is so accurate, we know that a surprising number of women and even children had writing sets buried with them. We don’t know all the implications of this but at the very least it shows that Romans who could read and write were very proud of that ability. 

If only kids today were as proud!

My friend Dr Hella Eckardt at the University of Reading has just finished writing a book about inkwells from the Roman world. It will be called Writing Power in the Roman World: literacies and material culture and it will be available in early 2018, published by Cambridge University Press. A free access catalogue of all Roman inkwells found by Hella will soon be online HERE

P.S. Thanks to all my re-enactor friends, especially Zane Green, for allowing me to snap them and their artefacts. 

Grandeur and curiosity - Michelle Lovric

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A little while back, I was invited to a book launch. The book sounded interesting, concerning a piece of London social history. It’s always nice to support a fellow writer.

So, to a private room above a pub. Publisher, agent, publicist, wine, interesting people all chatting unselfconsciously. It being the misty start of Autumn, much corduroy and velvet. Stacks of said book. All pleasantly normal. The first thing that surprised me was, among the various speeches, the author thanked his researcher.



A researcher? But isn’t research the best bit? Isn’t that how you form your bond with your subject? Isn’t research where you find the surprising, illuminating, fascinating crumb-trail that leads to the discovery of genuine humanity? Isn’t that where you personally experience the connection between past and present, which facilitates transmitting it with empathy to your readers?



Still, on reading a few pages, the book seemed marvellous, as well as handsome. Being a devoted History Girl, I sought out the author after the event. Introducing myself, I asked him if he would like to do a guest post for this site.

The answer was an immediate and curt ‘No.’



That’s never happened to me before, and I was too surprised to be embarrassed. So, I asked, ‘Why not?’

‘Too much bother.’



He wasn’t curious about this site or about me. (In fact, I’m a publishing stablemate of his). His disdain was such that I felt he might see me as some kind of history groupie. (Are there such women? Do they hang out at book launches?) As far as he was concerned, it was clear, this site couldn’t possibly be important enough to merit his interest. He did that looking-over-your-shoulder thing.  

I shook myself off and walked away, rebuilding my confidence by reminding myself that I too am a published author, and that I too earn a living from my writing. I know that I would never dismiss another writer like that. Also, I realized, were not a History Girl, and heard about a site like this one, I’d want to know more.



That’s because I have proper, scalding, twitching, frank curiosity, which means you never dismiss something out of hand. You never think you are too grand or too well stuffed with information to ask a question. There is always something to learn about an archive, about a research facility, about another human being. Research is where you find the juicy seam, the light in darkness, the darkness hiding in plain light.

How many writers are so grand that they can afford to be without curiosity?



The one time I sent out for research – my feeble excuse being that I was working on six things simultaneously – was for the only book of mine in which an erratum slip, that deep shame of writerdom, was printed. I hasten to add that I believe most researchers are excellent. I was just unlucky that time.

A mention was made of Dickens at this book launch. Dickens was endlessly curious, and not just in the sense of Curiosity Shop.  As a child, his curiosity manifested in voracious reading. As an adult, he shopped for curiosities in his endless walks around London. Having learned shorthand, he could write down his observations as fast as they came to him.



Because he was curious, Dickens saw what was wrong with the way London treated its poor, and became a vigorous campaigner for their rights and dignity.


But he started by finding out things he didn’t know. He started with curiosity. Even when he grew exceedingly grand, Dickens stayed curious.


It was his curiosity that unearthed the tiny pieces of delightful information that Orwell called Dickens’s ‘squiggles’, the details that made his writing irresistible.


 



 


 


 

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