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Imbolc - Celia Rees

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This is the time of Imbolc, perhaps the least well known of the four great Sabbats or Celtic Festivals that mark the turning points of the year. Traditionally dated to the 1st of February, it falls midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox and signifies the point where winter recedes and spring begins.
Wheel of the Year, Witchcraft Museum, Boscastle by midnightblueowl 

St Brigid's Cross
I first came across Imbolc when I was researching the death of Charles Walton on 14th February, 1946. I've written about that on this blog before but one theory associated with Walton's unsolved murder was that it was a ritual killing, his blood spilt to bring new life to the land. That would imply a continuity of belief that reaches back to the Neolithic. In Ireland, certain Megalithic monuments are aligned to the Imbolc sunrise.

Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480 – 1556/57)







I guess there is more than a bit of the pagan in me. I like the idea of ancient spokes of Celtic belief on the Christianised wheel of the year. In Ireland, Imbolc is celebrated as St Brigid or St Bride's Day, the mysterious 6th Century saint, who may, or may not be, the Christian embodiment of Brigid, the great Celtic goddess of healing, poetry and smithcraft. Also known as the Mistress of the Mantle, Brigid was the sister or virgin aspect of the Great Goddess and such a powerful pagan entity that some Christians have cast doubt on her namesake's sainthood and questioned whether there ever was a St Brigid, she is so obviously the goddess in another guise. 

In the Christian calendar, the 2nd Of February is marked as Candlemas, the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Feast of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple. The Feast of the Presentation is one of the oldest Christian Holy Days, celebrated since the 4th century AD. On Candlemas, Christians from many different denominations bring candles to church to be blessed.

Purification links Candlemas to the Lupercalia, the festival observed in Rome on 15th February to avert evil spirits and purify the city. In turn, some researchers have suggested that the Lupercalia is in some way connected to our celebration of St Valentine's Day. Whether there is a connection is debatable but it is clear that all these different celebrations and festivals clustered round the beginning of February mark a significant turning in the year's cycle. 

Spring is on the way!









Celia Rees




www.celiarees.com

A Lesser-Known Blitz by Katherine Webb

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In May last year a friend of mine, and several hundred of her neighbours, were evacuated from their homes in the northern streets of Bath. The reason: the discovery of a five-hundred pound unexploded bomb beneath the playground of a school on Lansdown Road, leftover from World War II. A three-hundred metre exclusion was put in place at once, as the bomb disposal team sought to disable it. Eventually, they managed to move it safely to the Torr Works quarry, where it was blown up, 74 years after it had been dropped.

So, people who live near Bath certainly know that the city was bombed in the war, and I'd known it for some time - it was bombed as part of the Baedeker raids, so called, after the famous travel guides, because the targets were chosen for their cultural importance and beauty, rather than because of any military or strategic significance. Lately, I've been researching the Bath Blitz in more detail, for my next book, and it turns out I'd had no idea of the scale of the bombing.

Bomb-damaged Georgian houses in Bath

Across two weekend nights, from the 25th to the 27th of April, 1942, one hundred and fifty or so German bombers flew over Bath in three bombing raids, two the first night and one the second night. Hundreds of high explosives of various sizes, and incendiaries designed to start devastating fires, were dropped; the exact number will never be known - it is known that many fell into the River Avon, and were swallowed by the mud. One has to assume that they're still down there... The Baedeker Raids, which included attacks on Canterbury, Norwich, York and Exeter, were in revenge for RAF attacks on Rostock, the location of important German factories and shipyards. As well as dropping bombs and incendiaries, some planes dive-bombed to as low as fifty feet, and raked the streets with machine gun fire. The damage can still be seen today - notably in the walls of the old labour exchange on James Street:

Bullet and shrapnel damage in the walls of the old labour exchange

The idea of setting a book in the Bath blitz has been niggling the back of my mind for a long time, and as luck would have it I stumbled across this pamphlet a few years ago, at an antiquarian book fair in Bath:




Produced by the Bath & Wilts Chronicle and Herald later on in 1942, this booklet gives a great overview of the raids, and their effect on the city. It's also a wonderful snapshot of the language and attitude of the press at the time:

'Dr Goebbels may now weep his slimy crocodile tears over "the destruction of historical and art treasures in Luebeck, Bath and Canterbury... Did not Goebbels once boast, "When I hear the word culture, I push back the catch of my revolver"? 

The author, Mr Claude Wimhurst, goes on to describe the grit and spirit of the city, and, in a fine example of stiff upper lip, to declare that the purpose of the booklet is not to 'harrow feelings',  but to 'steel the hearts' of those fighting the good fight, and to serve as a warning to future generations of the horrors and modern warfare. A timely reminder, likely to be ignored, in these days of turbulent global politics. Nevertheless, the history of the raids is harrowing. Of course it is. Four hundred people lost their lives, over a thousand more were injured, and many thousands lost their homes. And whilst this is small number compared to the 32,000 or so souls who lost their lives in London, the human stories that come from those two terrible nights in Bath are every bit as heart-breaking.

Some of the dead from the first night's attacks were laid out in a temporary mortuary in the crypt of St James's church, only for the church to be hit itself on the second night, and badly burnt. In putting out the flames, the fire service inadvertently destroyed all the identification papers on the dead bodies, so that nobody knew who they were, and many had to be interred anonymously. On May 1st, 247 people were laid to rest in a mass grave.

Bath Blitz victims are laid to rest on May 1st, 1942

There are devastating personal histories, described in the Bath Chronicle booklet and in the statistics listed on the excellent Bath Blitz memorial website, bathblitz.org. At no. 3, Howells Court, William and Beatrice Rattray were killed along with their seven children: Christine, 7; Donald, 5; George, 13; Joan, 8; Pamela, 10; Shirley, 2; and William, aged 10. What an unimaginable scene. Sergeant Clifford Ford, a serving soldier, returned on leave to find that his wife, Emily, and their six children had all perished at no. 7, New King Street. A baby girl was found in the wreckage of one house, and taken to Bristol Infirmary, where she died. Of her, the Chronicle records:

'Who she was no one knows. All that can be said about this unknown child victim is contained in the following terse official description which has been preserved: "Age, about two years; hair, fair; eyes, blue-grey; division between top row of teeth; no other distinguishing features."'

One can only assume that whoever was looking after the little girl that night was also killed, and never identified. What a sad end to a tragically short life.

It's easy to spot the gaps in Bath's architecture where Georgian splendour gives way to some 1960s built block of flats or carpark. Often, buildings were not rebuilt until much later, and there is still a ruddy great bomb crater in the lawned centre of The Circus. The famous Assembly Rooms, which had been visited and written about by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, were badly damaged by an incendiary. They had only re-opened in 1938 after a £50,000 program of refurbishment, and the Chronicle laments that they probably can't or won't be rebuilt again. They were, however, and are now back to their original glory:

The tea room in Bath Assembly Rooms today

The same room shortly after the blitz

Other buildings were beyond saving. One of the oldest mansions in Bath, the Abbey Church House in Sion Hill, was destroyed. Mainly Tudor, the building had foundations dating back to 1138, when a leper hospital stood on the site. Another medieval leper hospital, attached to the Mary Magdalene Chapel on Holloway, was also damaged. Today, it's easy to see, on a walking tour of the city, where the gap left by a bombed-out building has been filled with something more recent - with varying degrees of architectural grace. It's as fascinating to me as peering behind the Georgian facades and finding the medieval, Tudor and Stuart origins of many of Bath's buildings.

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth came to visit, and stood high on Beechen Cliff, in the south of the city, to have a virtual birds' eye view of the damage that had been done. There are familiar stories of making do, of mucking in and not being dismayed. I have always wondered how far that was genuinely the case, or how far merely a statement of intent perpetuated by the media. It must have been utterly terrifying, and the effects of that terror long-reaching in the hearts and minds of the survivors. But the city did mend itself. On April 25th, 2008, Willi Schludecker, then aged 87, came to Bath to lay a wreath during the annual memorial service to the Bath raids. Willi, who died in 2010, was one of the German pilots who'd flown on the raids.


Willi Schludecker, who flew more than 120 sorties for the Luftwaffe during WWII, in Bath in 2008

Medieval Hunting - by Ann Swinfen

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Before I began to write the third book in my Oxford Medieval Mystery series, The Huntsman’s Tale, there was one area of research demanding my attention – what exactly went on at a medieval hunt? Most of us are familiar with images of medieval hunting, like the hawking scene from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry:


And I suppose that we also know that the origins of more recent forms of hunting, on horseback, with a pack of hounds, must lie somewhere back in that remote past. Modern hunts have about them an aura of wealth and privilege, and those medieval pictures show the nobility in fine clothes, so it must always have been a pastime of the rich, mustn’t it?

Well, yes and no.

As I delved into the subject, I discovered that everyone, from king down to villein, hunted as a regular part of life. At any rate, every man, and quite a few women. The nature of the hunt and the type of quarry varied, but everyone hunted for food. Pursuing something as inedible as a fox would have seemed like madness, unless it was to protect farm stock from a predator. Deer and boar were the favourite quarries of the rich, but everyone hunted hares and rabbits (usually called conies), either on horseback or on foot, and every type of edible bird either with nets or birds of prey.

Two principal and invaluable contemporary books on hunting survive from the Middle Ages. The Master of Game, by Edward, Duke of York, and Le Livre de Chasse, by Gaston Phébus, Count of Foix.


Edward Plantagenet of Norwich, Duke of York, was a grandson of King Edward III, killed at the age of 42 at the Battle of Agincourt, where he saved the life of King Henry V at the cost of his own. His book, The Master of Game, is the first book in English on the subject of hunting, and is a translation – with additions and modifications – of Le Livre de Chasse:


Edward Plantagenet had served as Master of the Hart Hounds for his cousin, King Henry IV (amongst many other more obviously distinguished posts) and wrote his book between 1406 and 1413, dedicating it to the Prince of Wales, later Henry V. Gaston Phébus was obsessed lifelong with hunting, and wrote his treatise in the 1380s. He died of a stroke at the age of sixty, after an exhausting bear hunt. (All right, bears were a slightly more exotic quarry in parts of Europe. Wolves were also hunted as dangerous predators preying on farm stock, but by the late medieval period had almost disappeared from Britain.)

The hunting of deer was the outdoor sport par excellence in England, and was originally confined to royalty and nobility, hunting on horseback, with two main types of dog – tracking dogs, often a breed called lymers (and also precursors of the greyhound breed), and killing dogs, like the alaunt (a breed now extinct, which seems to have resembled mastiffs, and could be dangerous even to their own handlers).
 
Lymers now held back, alaunts released
Although a successful deer hunt would provide food in the form of venison, participants also viewed it as both a source of ‘delite’ and as a training for young men in many of the skills they would need in mounted warfare. Deer were hunted in forests, chases, and parks.

A ‘forest’ was not a synonym for a ‘wood’, it was an area usually belonging to the king which could include woodland, heath, and even marsh. A forest was reserved for royal hunting, or for those to whom the king gave a licence, and it was subject to strict forest laws. Those who lived within the boundaries of a forest had certain rights (usufruct), but could also be severely punished if they broke the forest laws. The term survives, for example, in the New Forest.

A ‘chase’ was a free liberty, and not subject to forest laws. However, as time passed, the right to hunt in a chase was granted more and more as a favour or reward to nobles, where the king then enforced forest laws. The term survives in Cannock Chase.

A ‘park’ was an enclosed area in an estate where a breeding herd of deer was kept for hunting, and belonged to the king, a noble, or an ecclesiastical body. Those in holy orders were not above enjoying the hunt, as Chaucer makes clear in The Canterbury Tales.Many deer parks survive to this day on great estates, some owned by the National Trust.

The kind of hunt which took place in a park tended to be different from the day long pursuit of quarry on horseback over often dangerous ground. The park was usually situated near a manor house or hunting lodge, where spectators could view the hunt. Often the hunters would be lined up – somewhat like the guns in a modern grouse shoot – and the deer would be driven past them by the senior huntsman and his assistants. As the deer passed, the hunters would aim their bows or crossbows and take down their quarry at far less risk to themselves.

Although a few notable women took part in the mounted hunt, it was more common for them to join one of these driven hunts. Even well into old age, Queen Elizabeth I enjoyed this form of hunting (as well as hawking).

Wild boar provided another noble quarry, although by the late Middle Ages they were becoming rarer in English woodlands. An adult male boar was a dangerous beast, which could kill a man, especially as the final kill was often by a man on foot. A boar spear had a crosspiece on the shaft, to halt the animal, for otherwise a boar was capable, even when speared, of running up the spear as it plunged into him, and killing the hunter even as it died.
 
Boar hunt. Note cross piece on spear
These noble hunts were large affairs, starting with an open-air meal, attending by ladies and other spectators as well as the hunters. For preference this was served in a grassy clearing beside a stream. The modern stirrup cup before a hunt is a vestigial survival of the original hunt breakfast.
 
Hunt "breakfast"
The hunt would be organised by the chief huntsman, a man of considerable skill, whose salary might exceed that of apparently much higher officials. Under him would be a large company of assistants and dog handlers with their animals. The hunters carried horns, which were used to sound various recognised signals (like a modern hunt). At the kill, a most complex ritual was carried out, to butcher the animal, reward the dogs, divide the venison according to established practices, and sometimes even leave an offering in the wood.

Hares were also hunted. Although they did not carry the cachet of the deer hunt, yet their speed, their cunning tactics, and elusiveness meant that they provided an exciting ride for the hunters. Nets might also be used.
 
Hunting hares with dogs & nets
Men of a lower class than those nobles granted the rights of the chase by the king did, nevertheless, sometimes manage to poach deer, for those who were unsuccessful in concealing their crime have left their names in the records of the courts. The names of those convicted occasionally include women. Famously Shakespeare was alleged to have poached a deer in the park belonging to Sir Thomas Lucy. There were also criminal gangs, not unlike modern organised crime gangs, who poached on a massive scale. Interestingly, they were often peopled by men of gentle birth, like the notorious Coterel and Folville gangs in the earlier part of the fourteenth century, and the gang led by Richard Stafford, known as ‘Frere Tuk’, a hundred years later. These were not the stuff of romantic Robin Hood legends, but thugs who terrorised whole communities.
 
Poaching. Nets were not part of a noble stag hunt
Landowners frequently held ‘rights of warren’, which meant they could build artificial warrens, in which rabbits were bred for the hunt, although this was almost more like a form of farming, rather than hunting. The conies brought in valuable income for their meat and especially their fur. They were also frequently poached by commoners, who did not need the elaborate equipment of the deer hunters. Some nets to cover the escape holes, and an agile ferret or small terrier would serve. This was a form of hunting – or poaching – often undertaken by women.
 
Women hunting conies with ferrets & nets
Commoners also used nets and traps to capture other types of game, including wolves and foxes which preyed upon farm animals, or when poaching deer.

Hawking was a sport for the rich. The birds themselves were costly, usually imported. Several dealers in birds of prey are to be found in the records, importing hawks of various types mostly from Arab countries of the eastern Mediterranean. And the expense did not stop there. Training a hawk to kill, but then return to the hawker’s hand was a long and arduous process, demanding weeks or months of constant attention and sleepless nights on the part of the falconer. The falconers themselves were skilled and highly paid specialists, so only the wealthy could afford trained birds.

There was also a very strict hierarchy as to who might fly which type of bird of prey, from gyrfalcons (only for kings) down to goshawks (for yeomen, if any could afford one). Ladies flew female merlins. The Boke of St Albans (1486) gives a comprehensive list, including some unlikely hawkers, but then medieval people did so love lists!

  • King: gyrfalcon (male or female)
  • Prince: peregrine falcon
  • Duke: rock falcon
  • Earl: tiercel peregrine (male)
  • Baron: bastarde hawk
  • Knight: saker
  • Squire: lanner
  • Lady: merlin (female)
  • Yeoman: goshawk or hobby
  • Priest: sparrowhawk (female)
  • Holy Water Clerk: sparrowhawk (male)
  • Knave: kestrel
  • Servant: kestrel
  • Child: kestrel

I think some of these may be taken with a pinch of salt. The last three probably refer to members of a noble hawking party who were allowed to join in, but probably did not own the birds. On the other hand, the clergy probably did.

Commoners also caught birds, especially water fowl like ducks and geese, for eating, but used nets or sticky lime spread on branches, which trapped the birds’ feet. They might also shoot birds with bow or crossbow, using spaniels with their soft mouths to retrieve them, again much like today.
 
Spaniels, used for retrieving game 

Medieval hunting in all its variety is an enormous subject, its rituals of the kill alone requiring much study for young noblemen. It might seem a blood-thirsty business to the modern mind, but it was not undertaken purely as an enjoyable pastime. Certainly those galloping through a forest on a beautiful day and a lively horse would have enjoyed themselves, but the primary purposes were to obtain food, to train young men in skills for warfare, or to protect flocks and herds from predators – not unworthy goals.

Ann Swinfen
http://www.annswinfen.com

Several Very Large Fat Bears by Imogen Robertson

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Study of a bear by Sawrey Gilpin
© The Trustees of the British Museum


I am, like most writers, often asked where I get my ideas from and I always say the research (which is true), but that can seem a bit vague and wafty, so I thought I’d give an example of how many great ideas one stumbles over, particularly if you have access the The Burney Collection Newspapers via the British Library. I’m looking at one newspaper, The General Advertiser published on Tuesday 21 February 1786. 1786 is when my work in progress is set by the way, but I’m not sure what will happen in it yet, hence the broad research. Annoyingly, I’m not sure any of the following will fit, but each of the following three fragments from the day deserves a novel of its own, so I hope quoting them illustrates the larger point. Finding ideas is not the problem, the work is deciding between them.

The first story is a suggestive fragment, the sort of thing I might use, but I can’t find any way to follow the real story. The second is worthy of a novel firmly based in fact and has an interesting stack of supporting documentation which can be followed via the internet but this is probably not a book for me, fascinating though the story is. The third is one of those oddities which can shed surprising light on a period, and though again, I’m not sure I’ll use it, it offers me a certain flavour of the time which is nevertheless invaluable.

So first, the fragment:



On Friday afternoon about dusk a very genteel dressed man was taken out of the Serpentine with several marks of violence  on his face, but he had no more than one farthing in his pocket. He was carried to Knightsbridge to be exposed to view. The Jury sat on his body on Saturday, and brought their verdict, Death by some unknown cause.

Definitely something to warm a crime writer’s heart there, this could be the opening paragraph to a novel. People better versed in archive delving might be able to find out more about the actual facts, I haven’t been able to do so. If anyone can find the coroner’s record or sift through the newspapers for more information, please do let me know what you find. 

On the same page is the starting gun for a novel or non-fiction work which I would love to read someday:



Friday last James Bently was charged on oath before Nicholas Foster Esq. with feloniously stopping Edward Tauplin… and feloniously taking from his person a bundle containing a large assortment of Bombazeen... 

This story, thanks to www.oldbailyonline.org I could follow up, though the changes in the names don’t give you a lot of faith in 18th century journalism. You can read the whole trial here, but the summary is as follows, and I’m certain this is the same case.
JOSEPH BUTLER, Violent Theft > highway robbery, 22nd February 1786 
JOSEPH BUTLER was indicted for feloniously assaulting Edward Poulton, on the King's highway, on the 16th day of February , and putting him in corporal fear and danger of his life, and feloniously taking from his person and against his will, one linen handkerchief, value 6 d. sixteen yards of black bombazeen, value 40 s. a black silk gown, value 40 s. a black silk petticoat, value 20 s. the property of Martha Robinson , spinster. 
GUILTY , Death.
He was humbly recommended by the Prosecutrix to his Majesty's mercy.

Neptune wikipedia


Now, it seems that mercy was granted. Joseph is recorded (again, the record is via oldbailyonline) as being sentenced to transportation  for 7 years in early 1787. Thanks to a brilliant website called http://australianroyalty.net.au/ I know he reached Australia, but he only arrived in New South Wales on 28 June 1790. Joseph was a survivor of the Neptune, one of a fleet of three ships in which the convicts were basically left to rot in the hold for the duration of the journey. Of 1000 convicts some 300 died on the trip out. The death rate led to protests in Britain and after an unsuccessful prosecution of the captain of the Neptune, the system was reformed so private contractors carrying the prisoners were only paid for the convicts who got to Australia alive. Butler married and had children and is buried in Sydney. 

Then we have the third story, an advertisement:



Bears Grease
Its ancient use, known efficacy and established reputation down to the present time for the valuable purpose of strengthening and preventing the Hair from falling off the Head, or turning Grey, proves its virtue above spurious compositions daily offered to the Public to answer the same purpose.
Lewis Hendrie
Prefumer in ordinary to the Princess Royal…. Middle Shug Lane, Golden Square; begs leave to acquaint the Nobility and Gentry, that he has several very large, fat Bears, one of which he has just killed; that such as are pleased to have any of the Grease, will either call or send their servants to see it cut off the animal.
He has just imported from Paris…. 

Well, that rather stopped me in my tracks. Via the joys of the Burney Papers text search function I can tell you that Mr Hendrie had been killing bears to stop rich Londoners going bald since at least 1778. By June 1783 he was having his shop ‘greatly enlarged and new fronted’, perhaps to match the glamour of his shop sign, ‘a prodigious large Elephant’s tooth’ at the door which he mentioned as a way to recognise his establishment in March of that year. Just in case you accidentally wandered into one of the other bear killers' shops on Shug Lane. 

I’m not the first writer to have noticed Mr Hendrie:

I found this advertisement in Parker's General Advertiser and Morning Intelligencer (London, England), Tuesday, April 1, 1783



This day is published… An Ode to Mr Lewis Hendrie &c… Principal Bear-Killer in the Metropolis

Rather brilliantly, ten days later the author advertises again to assure the public he means no disrespect to the other bear-killers in the capital, but regards Mr Hendrie as the original. 



The writer of the Critical Review, or Annals of Literature thought the ode ‘in some parts very laughable’.

Mr Hendrie continued killing bears until his death in 1790. The bears didn’t get their revenge, I’m afraid, his death was occasioned by the bursting of a blood vessel.

I’ve read a lot about the 18th century in the last ten years, but I admit I never knew that barbers imported bears from America and Russia to fatten and then kill in their shops. In search of a little context I came across this magnificent book, The Georgian Menagerie by Christopher Plumb, which will I am sure tell me a great deal of other things which I didn’t know I didn’t know. Plumb says around 50 bears were killed in London by barbers and hairdressers every year, and offers some of the methods customers used to make the grease smell less unpleasant. 



What will I find in the newspapers for 22 February 1786, I wonder?



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Cabinet of Curiosities - the First Dinosaur Fossils by Charlotte Wightwick

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For today’s Cabinet of Curiosities we’re heading to the Natural History Museum in London. There are many, many objects there which I could quite happily add to the Cabinet, but I have chosen two small, unprepossessing brown fossils. Both are still half-embedded in light-coloured stone (‘matrix’); one is slightly curved, the other has defined grooves. They are both pretty obviously, even to the untrained observer, teeth.

What makes these teeth special is the fact that they were among the very first fossils to be identified as belonging to a previously-unknown race of large, land-dwelling reptiles: the creatures we now know as dinosaurs.

The iguanodon teeth found by Mary-Ann and/or Gideon Mantell. 
Now in the Natural History Museum, London. (Photo: Charlotte 
Wightwick)
Like many children, I was enthralled by the idea of a race of gigantic monsters inhabiting the earth millions of years before humans existed. But I never really thought much about how we originally found out about the dinosaurs.

My curiosity as an adult was piqued when I moved to Crystal Palace in south-east London. Walking in the local park one freezing-cold January day 12 years ago, I came across a small lake with an island at its centre, and on the island were various statues of prehistoric creatures, looming out of the wintry gloom. I was at once fascinated. Many of the models were clearly meant to be dinosaurs, but they looked nothing like the reconstructions I had been brought up with, even less like the newer depictions of the feathered, bird-like lizards we’re all starting to get our heads around.

How had they come to be there? Why did they look as they did? Above all, who were the people, what were the stories, which lay behind them?


Three of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, seen from Dino Island, 
Nov 2016 (photo: Charlotte Wightwick). The differing colours
of the statues are a result of modern restoration work; the
Grade I listed statues are currently being repaired (e.g. you can 
see the damaged tail of the not-yet restored dinosaur in the 
foreground in comparison with the bright green and white 
of ‘Iggy’ the iguanodon at the back.)
These questions led me to the Natural History Museum and to the two small brown fossils with which I started this post.

The dinosaurs by the lake were created as part of the overall complex – some might say early ‘theme park’ – of the south London Crystal Palace. They were sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse in the early 1850s, but their scientific accuracy (for they were extremely accurate, reflecting cutting-edge discoveries, no matter how odd they look to us now) was overseen by Professor Richard Owen. Today, Owen is largely unknown to the public imagination, but he was one of the leading scientific figures of his day. When he is remembered, it is chiefly for three things: for coining the term ‘dinosaur’, for disagreeing with Darwin (although for more complex reasons than is often assumed: he was no purely religious sceptic) and as the first head of the Natural History Museum. So he is one thread which takes us to South Kensington.

The statue of Richard Owen in the Natural 
History Museum (photo: Charlotte Wightwick)

But there is another thing which links the Crystal Palace dinosaurs to the iguanodon teeth. Owen, despite his undoubted expertise, was not the first choice for the job of superintending the creation of the Crystal Palace models.

Instead that honour went to an obscure GP, originally from Sussex, now living in near-poverty in Pimlico. Gideon Mantell had been fascinated by geology and fossil-collecting from childhood. Like Owen, he too had studied medicine in the capital as a young man but, failing to find a position there, returned to Lewes to take up a job as a GP, where he continued to work on his passion in his spare time.

In the early 1820s Gideon, (or more likely his wife Mary-Ann; there are conflicting accounts) found two small brown fossils.

Gideon realised that the teeth were something unusual and believed they were those of a large, unknown herbivorous reptile. He determined that the teeth most closely resembled those of a modern iguana and as such decided to call his new lizard ‘Iguanodon’ (literally ‘iguana-toothed’). Mantell spent several years trying to persuade the scientific community that he had discovered something new. Initially, he was met with widespread scepticism but his tenacity eventually paid off. Gideon went on to discover several more species of dinosaur and was recognised as one of the leading experts in this new and exciting field.

But Mantell’s life work came with a price. His obsession with fossils led to the disintegration of his marriage and financial ruin; a carriage accident followed by years of acrimonious dispute with a certain Professor Richard Owen took their toll on his health. As such he was too ill to oversee the creation of the Crystal Palace models. He died shortly before they – including his very own Iguanodon – were completed.

Portraits of Gideon and Mary-Ann Mantell reflected in the case 
of another of Gideon’s discoveries (the ‘Mantellisaurus’) at the 
Natural History Museum London. (Photo: Charlotte Wightwick)
Some years before his death, Mantell was forced through poverty to sell his extensive collection of fossils to the British Museum. When, more than forty years later, Richard Owen succeeded in splitting off the Natural History Museum, Mantell’s collection, including the teeth, went with him. There they remain on display still – two tiny, unremarkable-seeming fossils.

These iguanodon teeth are anything but insignificant, however. They are the objects which originally sparked our collective fascination with the dinosaurs and symbols of a world which had been lost and now could be uncovered by science. As importantly for me, they stand also for two complex and difficult men, Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen, who made it possible for me, and you, and all of us to wonder, in museums and in parks, about that long-lost world.

Scents and Sensibilities: The Not So Smelly Middle Ages? By Catherine Hokin

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Setting: one of the most important things for an author to get right. That might be the most obvious statement you read all day and no, you haven't stumbled into a 'how to write' blog but this balancing act of anchoring the reader fully in a time period very different from our own while not bludgeoning them to death under a tsunami of description is occupying a lot of my time with the current WIP.

One of the best ways to communicate a sense of place is through smell. The modern world is obsessed with fragrance: from beauty and cleaning products to the artificial bread that wafts through every supermarket, we walk through such a vanillery-bakery-flowery world that any slightly unpleasant scent feels like an assault. I am beginning to think that most of our Proustian moments will shortly be controlled by Airwick. The challenge for the writer, however, is that this most crucial sensory experience is the hardest to research and to replicate.

That the Middle Ages was a morass of stinking towns and villages filled with people whose body odours would have made a skunk weep is one of those history myths that gets peddled at school and repeated incessantly until it ends up on QI. Scrape under the mucky surface and things are rather different.

There are admittedly plenty of stories of medieval people who did not regard hygiene as a priority. Isabella of Castile (1451-1504) reputedly only bathed twice in her lifetime, once when she was born and once when she married. King Louis IX (1214-1270) was described by the Russian ambassador to his court as stinking like a wild animal. They, however, were not the norm for their class: foul odours were associated with disease, low standing in the social order and moral corruption (based on the idea of miasma). Those who could avoid smelling revolting did.

At the height of the Middle Ages, bathing was a serious business. For the wealthy this would take place in tented wooden tubs lined with cloth; the better-off town-dwellers had communal bathhouses; the peasants made do with rivers in the summer and fire-warmed water in the winter. Whatever rank you were, de-lousing with salty water would probably feature somewhere in your life. Health manuals such as the Regimen Sanitatis (c.1308) contained dozens of rules for bathing at specific times such as pregnanacy and noted the importance of bathing for getting rid of dirt and grime beyond that which was visible: “if any of the waste products of third digestion are left under the skin that were not resolved by exercise and massage, these will be resolved by the bath.” As with medicine, herbs and plants were central to the process of sweetening the body for those who had access to them. Thyme and rose petals were widely used to perfume bath water, the body could be dried using sheets sprinkled with rosewater and then dusted (men and women) with a powder made from ground rice, ground orris root  (a violet smell favoured by King Edward IV) and fragranced with cloves or lavender. Bay leaves, hyssop and sage were used to make deodorants and sachets of lemon balm and dried rose petals could be slipped into clothes already boiled in water scented with orris root and stored in chests containing 'sweet bags' which held a mix of ingredients such as musk, citrus peel and marjoram. Finally a 'pomme d'ambre' (an apple of ambergris) filled with a fragrant paste could be attached to a waist belt and, once Arabic gums and essential oil distillation methods could be combined with the discovery of alcohol distillation in the early 1300s, a perfume with notes of mint and rosemary could be added to the mix. The notion of a court filled with walking pot-pourri bowls is rather hard to escape.

 Woodcut 1489
So, if the people battled the negative associations of fetid smells rising from their bodies, where does the notion of the smelly medievals come from? For that we have to turn to place. I have always been an urbanite but I think medieval England may have forced a love of the country on me. Wood smoke, days old pottage and damp over-close animals still seem preferable to the alternative. Medieval towns stank. Clearly sanitation was an issue: towns were cramped, pavements were rare and Roman drains were long forgotten although muckrackers were well-paid. Houndsditch, which runs through London's glossy financial district, gets its name from the amount of dead dogs deposited in it when it was a great open ditch running through one of the medieval  city's main thoroughfares. In the 14th century, Sherborne Lane in the east of the capital was officially known as Shiteburn Lane and every town had its equivalent, Pissing Alley apparently being quite a favourite.

 
 Fes Medieval Tanneries
The main problem, however, was not the disposal of human waste,  it was the industries and commerce that multiplied as the towns grew. Anyone who has battled down the narrow Shambles in York can imagine how disgusting this road must have been when it was the open air Great Flesh Shambles with a drain filled with blood and offal running down its centre. Even more noxious were the great tanneries which used copious amounts of urine, dog excrement and stale beer in their processes. The smell of the tanneries in Nottingham was said to be so terrible it even repelled rats although, on the plus side, this is credited for reducing the incidents of plague in the area.

Awareness of the links between filth and disease can be seen in the regulations that were constantly passed in medieval towns. Fines were imposed for throwing waste from high windows and dumping it in clean water sources and on butchers for failing to clear waste which attracted dogs and wild pigs. But, as town populations continued to rise, the battle became increasingly hard and raw sewage continued to flow into the Thames until the nineteenth century. The towns smelled bad and, by the end of the Middle Ages, it is likely that the majority of people smelled pretty bad too. The public bath houses had long been associated with sexual activity, the Stews in Southwark for example were largely regarded as a front for brothels. The Church railed against them in vain but attitudes to communal bathing began to change after successive outbreaks of plague and the new disease syphillis, which began to make its presence felt in the late 1400s. Taking a bath became a rather risky adventure.

So back to the balancing act. No one wants to read a seduction scene where the protagonists' body odour acts like extra characters but drowning everything in herbs seems like a recipe for a cliched dish. I'm off to Glasgow's West End streets to breathe in petrol fumes and ponder.

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'THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE', SO DARE WE PROTEST? by Leslie Wilson

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Minnesota women's march against Donald Trump. Fibonacci Blue, wikimedia
In 1987, I cut a single strand of the wire fence at Burghfield Royal Ordnance Factory, and was arrested and charged with criminal damage. I defended myself on the grounds that Burghfield was manufacturing nuclear weapons and that I was acting to prevent a crime (the defence of necessity, the crime being the possible annihilation of millions of people). This was at a time when the stationing of Cruise missiles on British soil was seen by many as a threat to our survival, escalating the risk of nuclear war (and indeed, accidental nuclear war did once happen.) I was convicted, of course, though Reading magistrates were both respectful and sympathetic.

I wrote about this action in the newsletter of a Christian community we were then part of, the Othona Community, and one member took strong exception to my action, writing a letter attacking me and comparing me to Hitler and Mussolini. I've often wondered what he based that on (he didn't explain) but I think he meant that I was trying to undermine the democratic process by using direct action. I should have been content with the ballot box, and my pointless vote in a safe Tory seat.
I'm on the left, in a paper 'radiation suit.'

I don't feel I was trying to overturn the democratic process, but only to use the law to argue that nuclear weapons were contrary to international law, a belief I still hold. Unlike Hitler or Mussolini, I did not mobilise thousands of thugs to beat up political opponents, or abolish democratic institutions, murder people, or sack them en masse or herd them into concentration camps.

However, I've been thinking about this, because I keep reading on Facebook threads, and hearing from US Presidents on Twitter, the idea that one shouldn't protest at all in a democracy, but should accept that 'we won.' Also that 'you lost.' Of course, a majority of US voters did not choose Trump, but a narrow majority of voters did cast their votes to leave the EU (one of the contexts in which I encounter this assertion). 'The people have chosen,' we're told, though in the case of the EU it doesn't seem to me as clear as it does to the Daily Mail or Theresa May exactly what they chose.


Consider this idea, though, that if the majority have chosen a particular course of action (or President, though that's the electoral college), the others should pipe down and abandon their principles.Should they?
Democracy is the will of the people, this theory states, and opposition is treachery towards the people (which is why the Mail was baying for the High Court judges' blood on the issue of Parliament deciding whether to Brexit or not).

However, democracy means that there is an opposition. In our own country, it's even deemed to be Her Majesty's Opposition. Jeremy Corbyn is not thrown into the Tower, but invited to the Palace and made a Right Honourable. A victory in an election does not give the winning party the right to occupy all the seats in Parliament. Even in autocratic times, monarchs had to get their policies through Parliament, though sometimes they locked the members in till they'd done what was required of them, and of course Parliament was far less representative than it is now.

Radical Whig Charles James Fox; plenty of people wanted to shut him up.
The British constitution (and this IS a historical issue, for it goes back a long way), is based on the idea that whatever choices are made at any one election can be reversed at the next one. Does one therefore abandon one's ideas till there is a chance of another election? Of course not. What we're being told about Brexit is that it's a once for all decision, done and dusted. But that completely contradicts the nature of democracy. Even in the era when the vote was restricted to property-owners, so we really had an oligarchy rather than a democracy, Whigs alternated with Tories, and when one side was in Government, the other side were on the cross-benches, putting their point of view.

Another aspect of democracy is lobbying. Not pure, maybe, but it happens. Interest groups make representations to government. These may be business groups, they may be charities, or professional associations, or campaigning groups. My husband, who is an environmental consultant and Vice President of the Chartered Institute of Wastes Management, regularly goes to Parliament to address a special interest group, which is attended by many MPs across party lines. This is another practice which goes back a long way; and I see mass demonstrations as another form of lobbying, particularly since they are seldom events all of their own, but are usually underpinned by hours of hard work, writing to MPs, leafletting, petitioning (even back in the '80s), programmes of public information through Press and nowadays social media. This was the case with women's suffrage, with the campaign against child prostitution or the compulsory and abusive medical examination of any woman deemed to look like a prostitute, which Josephine Butler campaigned against.

photo: Women's Library
There is nothing about traditional democracy that suggests it's a crime to inform the electorate. Some might think it's necessary for democracy to work properly, particularly when there is a vocal and often misleading tabloid press, funded by big money and, many would argue, dedicated to spread propaganda that suggests the tyranny of the market is the only way to organise society.

Where this rhetoric of 'You are in a minority, so you should shut up,' comes from, is somewhere else, and there are sinister antecedents. Hitler, indeed, and Mussolini, and Stalin, all three of whom would have had me in a camp licketty-split for my mild act of civil disobedience. In Nazi Germany, everyone was told that the people 'das Volk', agreed with Hitler, and anyone who didn't was isolated, made to feel they were mad, demoralised. It's because of this that only those who had established existing networks (Communists, members of the Confessing Church, some Catholics, Quakers ) could achieve any act of resistance. I remember being driven along the motorway towards Berlin, going through the German 'Democratic' Republic, in 1972, and seeing a poster: REFERENDUM ABOUT (I forget what). ALLE SAGEN JA. (Everyone says yes). This was not a simple piece of campaigning or exhortation. It meant: You will say yes, if you know what's good for you. And these referendums were used to silence people, to validate the regime. You are alone, was the message, no-one else will think of dissenting.
LONG LIVE THE NATIONAL FRONT OF DEMOCRATIC GERMANY! photo, German Federal Archive.

Does majoritarianism trump (sorry, definitely a pun, alas) ethics and human rights? If a majority want us to murder people, to exploit other countries and steal their wealth, to lock dissenters up in prison, torture people the security services suspect of terrorism (partly because someone else has given them their name under torture), in the worst case, to annihilate an ethnic group because you hate them, should everyone go along with that? You alone have these crazy humanitarian views, the majority says, everyone else agrees that the Jews should be destroyed. Or the Armenians, or the Tutsis, or the professional classes (in the Cultural Revolution). Or that black kids should be shot down with impunity by whoever wants to, like Trayvon Martin, whose parents, protesting his murder, are pictured here.
Or civilians drenched in napalm and Agent Orange in the Vietnam war. It was Nixon, I think, who coined the term 'the silent majority' to silence protest about THAT.

Shall we follow Hitler and demonise those who stand out and follow their conscience? Do you prefer Adolf Eichmann to Bonhoeffer, the Scholl siblings, Oskar Schindler, Pastor Gruber who helped many Jews get out of Germany, Elisabeth Abegg who hid them in her homes; Maria von Maltzan who did everything she could to save lives, even those of animals who she certified unfit for combat? These people were, officially, criminals.


When I was one of the million plus who marched against the second Iraq war, Tony Blair told us that we shouldn't march because in Iraq there was no right to protest. If you take that statement apart, it says: We are going to war to implement regime change in Iraq. The current regime is wrong, because people aren't allowed to protest there. Nevertheless, it is wrong to protest here. WHAT??

photo: William M. Connolley: Wikimedia
But we don't go to war over human rights, or hardly ever. Instead, in the name of pragmatism and trade, we welcome mass murderers and heads of terror states to our country and the monarch entertains them at Buckingham Palace. Saddam Hussein was put into Iraq by the British and for years he was 'our bastard', so his despotism was OK.

I marched against the Iraq war because I believed the UN inspectors who said there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction (the ostensible reason for fighting), because I thought it would destabilise the region and encourage Islamic fundamentalism (it has), because I thought it was about giving the US and the West access to a lot of oil.

Critical though I am of our first-past-the-post electoral system, we have in this country an admirable tradition of free speech and freedom to express our opinions and find out like-minded people and allies. It isn't perfect, of course: we've had the Peterloo Massacre, the despicable clampdown on reformist organisations in the aftermath of the French Revolution and still more disgracefully, we failed to allow our colonies that freedom. Still, imperfect as it is, it has remained a vital thread of British political life up till the present day.


Democracy needs protest, as long as it is peaceful. To shut up if you haven't got what you wanted is the last thing anyone should do in a democracy, unless what you want is to abolish democracy itself.

January competition

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To win a copy of Stef Penney's new novel, answer the following question in the Comments section below. Then copy your answer to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk so that I can contact you for your land address.

"Flora’s sexual awakening is an important theme of the book. Which characters in other literary works have been changed by their sexual experience?"

Closing date 7th February

We are sorry that our competitions are open only to UK Followers.

Good luck!

RED ALL ABOUT IT: A Bit of a History of Scarlet Cloth by Elizabeth Chadwick

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Bellini - portrait of a young man in red, circa 1480 
 Scarlet cloth has been on my radar for a while.  I learned several years ago that it was a fabric name rather than a colour, but that since it was often dyed red, the two became associated.   I think I was writing The Marsh King's Daughter at the time.
When writing my Eleanor of Aquitaine novels The Summer Queen, The Winter Crown and The Autumn Throne, I read (in secondary sources - I have not yet found the primary one) that Eleanor was married in a scarlet gown.  This again led me to a spot of trawling.  Wikipedia (without references) described it as "a type of fine and expensive woollen cloth common in Medieval Europe.  The world "scarlet" is derived from Old French 'escarlate' (itself derived from low Latin and Persian).  Scarlet cloth was produced in red, white, blue, green, and brown colours, among others.  The most common colour was carmine-red though, which resulted in the double meaning                                                                            of the  word as a colour designation.'                                                                                                              
That was all I needed to know at the time, but I was still curious and even when I move on from a subject I am always keen to add to my knowledge base.  Having recently acquired The  Enclyopedia of  Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles circa 450-1450, edited by Gale Owen-Crocker,  Elizabeth Coatsworth and Maria Hayward, I was delighted to find a highly detailed entry on the subject of scarlet.


Although it's a similar name, the scarlet cloth mentioned in European inventories of the high middle ages does not get its name from low Latin or Persian as I had been led to believe, although that appellation  does remain in the mainstream and I can understand why.  The Persian term comes from a 9th century red silk cloth, widely traded in the Middle East and known as siklat, more commonly siklatun and the Persian Farsi word sakirlat.  Sounds feasible doesn't it?  And indeed it is recorded in the charter for the Abbey of Cluny in 1100 as 'de scarlata rubea tunicam.' The Persian version was a luxury silk textile dyed red with
Kermes dyed silk coronation cope of Roger II
of Sicily. So of the Persian etymology, not European
kermes. (produced from crushed insects). Almeria in Muslim Spain was a centre of this cloth production because they had good access to kermes, the most expensive dyestuff of the European Middle Ages and accounting for half the production cost of making a length of cloth.

The European origin of the name 'scarlet' seems to have originated in high German from 'Scarlachen' in the early 11th century, meaning 'scraped''smoothed' or 'shaved' cloth. In other words the cloth was napped with shears. The best wool for this shearing process was English wool and it was in high demand among the Flemish weaving towns who specialised in making this kind of cloth.  Around the middle of the 10th century that the new horizontal treadle looms began to emerge and it became possible to weave heavy weight woollens that could be teaselled and shorn to produced a high quality cloth that had a texture as fine as silk but was in fact wool.  If you trawl through the Renaissance paintings of men of status in their winter best, they're all clad in in their scarlet robes!


 The European version of Scarlet with the name from German origins was also dyed with kermes. The cost of the dye and the fineness of the wool made scarlet cloth the textile of the rich.  In the early 15th century, a length of scarlet would have cost a purchaser in London £28, 10s 0d.   A master mason in London at that time earned 8d a day, so it would take him more than two years to afford just one length of that cloth, and that was without having to keep body and soul together!  It was a textile beyond the reach of Joe Public. 

Scarlet was always dyed with kermes, but it wasn't always red because it might be mixed with other dyestuffs.  Woollens were often dyed with woad because woad did not require a mordant and was easier to work with than mordant based dyes.  Once the base blue from the first dyeing with woad was in situ, the cloth was redyed with a mordant and kermes was added in the case of scarlet.  Depending on additions and mordants, the scarlet cloth could end up as brown, perse (ashy purple), murrey (mulberry) and sanguine - a bluish red.  Some cloths had differently dyed warps and wefts to form a stripe and were redyed once woven with the kermes and were known in Flanders as striptje scaerlakenen. 

So, 'scarlet' was a high status cloth, woven from English wool and always dyed with kermes, but not always red in colour.  Its main centre of production was Flanders, spilling over into Northern Italy, specifically Florence. England, although the producer of the wool, only had a small scarlet industry. 




Bibliography: 
Encyclopedia of Medieval dress and
textiles of the British Isles circ 450-1450
Edited by Gale Owen-Crocker, Elizabeth
Coatsworth and Maria Hayward.
Published by Brill 2012

.
Medieval Clothing and Textiles 10
Article Some Medieval Colour Terms
For Textiles by Lisa Monnas.

Pictures - Bellini - Web Gallery of Art
Cloak of Roger II of Palermo - Wikipedia





Womens’ Protests in the UK before 1945 by Miranda Miller

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     Like many of you reading this, I went on the Womens’ March last month. I’m something of a veteran marcher and was reminded of all the other marches I’ve been on; against Vietnam, against Trident and against the invasion of Iraq. Although my protest has always been heartfelt it has never been in the least dangerous or heroic. 

   I’ve been reading about the courage of earlier generations of women. In the late eighteenth century women in this country began to be involved in the movement to abolish slavery (if any of you know of examples of earlier generations of women’s organised protest do please let me know).


   In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she repeatedly likened men's domination of women to the planters' domination of slaves: “Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalise them...only to sweeten the cup of men.”


   The first women only anti-slavery society was formed in Birmingham in 1825. William Wilberforce commented: “I fear its tendency would be to mix them in all the multiform warfare of political life.” By the 1850s there were more women's anti-slavery societies than men's. John Stuart Mill, philosopher, MP and prominent abolitionist, moved an amendment to the 1866 Reform Bill calling for women to be allowed to vote on the same terms as men. Although he was unsuccessful, women started to set up societies to campaign for female enfranchisement.

   Most of these women were middle class but in 1888 the young women who worked at the Bryant and May match factory at Bow went on strike. When I was a child Hans Christian Andersen’s story, TheLittle Match Girl (1846), used to have me in floods of tears but these young women were real and very brave. The passionate reformer and journalist Annie Besant wrote an article about their terrible working conditions in a radical newspaper called The Link: White Slavery in London. Her writing was powerful and effective: “Who cares if they die or go on to the streets provided only that Bryant & May shareholders get their 23 per cent.” About two hundred matchgirls, most of them aged between 12 and 15, arrived outside the office of The Link to ask Besant for help because three of their colleagues had been sacked for ‘telling lies’ about their working conditions.

   In fact these girls had to work sixteen hours a day in return for between 4 and 8 shillings a week. Many of them suffered from “Phossy Jaw” (Phosphorous jaw), caused by inhaling the fumes of the phosphorous. The girl would first suffer toothache, then her jaw would swell and turn green before breaking out in abscesses and turning black. Her jaw bone would then rot away. The only medical treatment was amputation of her jaw bone, which, of course, left her disfigured. The matchgirls were fined for talking, dropping matches or taking a toilet break without permission and if they were late they lost half a day’s pay.

   Fifty matchgirls, led by Besant, entered parliament and told MPs about their terrible working conditions. Then they marched down the embankment and attracted a huge amount of support and attention. Bryant and May, in a move reminiscent of the bullying tactics of some modern multinational companies, threatened to import matches from Scotland or move the factory to Norway where labour was cheaper but the girls stood their ground and their strike lasted for three weeks. Their heroism eventually resulted in the formation of the Matchmakers’ Union.

   The first large procession organised by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), whose leader was Millicent Fawcett, in February 1907, was known as The Mud March. About three thousand women marched through the cold wet streets of of London to demand votes for women. The marchers were “titled women, university women, artists, members of women’s temperance clubs and women textile workers gathered from all parts of the country."

   "Nobody can suppose that most of the women who took part …can have done so for sport or for the pleasure of the thing…it requires some courage for a woman to step out of her drawing room into the street to take her place in a mixed throng for a cause probably distasteful to many or most of her acquaintances, and to see herself pilloried in the newspaper the next morning by name as one of the '”Suffragists.'" This report in The Manchester Guardian from 1907 reminds us how brave these women were.


   Over the next few years thousands of women marched, drawing vast crowds and acres of mainly negative press coverage. During the First World War the WSPU (The Women's Social and Political Union, led by the Pankhursts), suspended campaigning because they felt that they should support the war effort and also in the hope that their patriotiism might benefit the suffrage cause. Some suffragettes courageously opposed the war and became known as 'peacettes'. Sylvia Pankhurst left the WSPU to set up an alternative movement and founded an anti-war newspaper, Women's Dreadnought.

   In 1918 the Representation of the People Act act abolished almost all property qualifications for men over the age of 21 and gave the vote to women over 30 – but only if they met minimum property qualifications or were married to a man who did. The age differential was to ensure that, following the deaths of millions of men in the war, women did not become the majority voters. After the act was passed women made up 43 per cent of the electorate. Women were not given the vote on the same terms as men until 1928, when the Second Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act was passed. Emmeline Pankhurst died 18 days before the cause she had thrown her life at was won.

   After the First World War women were at the forefront of the peace movement. In 1926 the Women’s Peacemakers’ Pilgrimage ended with a gathering of 10,000 people in Hyde Park; In 1932 the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom collected 6 million signatures on a petition to the World Disarmament Conference. Women were also active in The Peace Pledge Union, which by 1937 had over 100,000 members, including Siegfried Sassoon and Aldous Huxley. Vera Brittain, seen here wearing her nurse’s uniform during the First World War, was also active. She continued to be a pacifist during the Second World War and criticised the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Germany. Brittain's critics accused her of collaborating with the Nazis because of her anti-war stance although it later emerged that she was listed in the notorious Nazi "black book", which gave the names and addresses of three thousand people who were to be arrested if Hitler invaded this country.











A Few Facts and Gems from the Earliest Days of Cinema, by Carol Drinkwater

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                       A page from the original manuscript copy of Alice's Adventures Underground 1864


When I was a child, one of the treats of the week was our family outing to the cinema. The programme back in the mid-fifties, early sixties usually included two films. A 'B' movie followed by the main attraction. Today, before the main attraction, spectators are shown endless expensively-shot commercials followed by a series of trailers for upcoming films. I would like to propose an idea: how about the projection of early cinema material such as this extraordinary footage below shot in 1903?  Produced and directed by Cecil Hepworth, it is the very first cinema adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. The film runs eight minutes and is held at the National Archives of the British Film Institute. It is damaged, looks blistered, but, my, is it worthy of still being screened. The link is here. Do take the time to watch it.

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

We can walk into a bookshop and pick up a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland without any difficulty at all. We can follow the development of authors, their influence on others, their influence on children's literature, adult or fantasy literature ... But to discover the birth of cinema, to have access to the material of those century-and-more bygone days is not so easy. Of course, there are some excellent books on the subject but that is not the same as access to the material. I have been searching the internet to see whether anywhere in the world there is a festival that celebrates the birth of cinema, and I cannot find one. Do any of you know of one?



Some years ago when I wrote Twentieth-Century Girl, (now in a two-book compendium entitled Cadogan Square) as part of the My Story series for Scholastic, I researched the very earliest days of 'Pictures in Motion'. The films were black and white, of course, and there was no sound. Text was written on the screen, as you see in the eight-minute Alice film posted above. Most of the very earliest attempts were extremely short. If you went to the Moving Picture House, the likelihood was that a musician, usually a pianist, accompanied the sequences to add to the dramatic or comical effect. Most films were about a minute in length so the entertainment would consist of perhaps ten different very short films. I am talking of 1899 in London, for example, where the UK's very first cinemas were being opened and where cinema was being hailed as the entertainment for the upcoming century. 1900 was around the corner.




                             Phoenix Picture House, Oxford first opened on 15th March 1913



L'Idéal Cinéma is in northern France, in Aniche, and claims to be the oldest still-active cinema in the world. It first opened its doors on 23 November 1905.

Magic Lantern shows predated moving pictures. I saw a remarkable collection of these machines at the very small but fascinating museum of cinema in Paris at La Cinémathèque Française.  La Cinémathèque Française (51, Rue de Bercy,75012, Paris) is the French equivalent of the BFI. If you have any interest in cinema and its history, this is the place for  you. It holds one of the largest collections of cinema-related objects, archival material and cinema documents in the world. The place is a treasure trove and its own history is equally fascinating. Thanks mainly due to one man, Henri Langlois, who had accrued a huge personal collection of films up to the 1930s. These came under threat of destruction when the Nazis marched into Paris and ordered all films pre-1937 to be destroyed. Langlois, along with the help of his colleague Georges Franju, smuggled his films and documents to safety. After the war, the French government offered funds for a screening room and from there this fabulous organisation has grown. But I digress ...



Magic lanterns projected rudimentary images using glass slides. I am not sufficiently technically-minded to explain precisely how they work but know that there is one static slide and the other is mobile. The moving slide was usually hand-operated. The Magic Lantern projections were shown at fairs and public gatherings; they pre-dated moving picture houses. A Magic Lantern show at the 1851 World's Fair caused such excitement amongst it audience it was considered a sensation. And the development of the art, of storytelling through moving pictures, had made its first major international outing.


At the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Gaumont staged a moving-picture exhibit where visitors to the Exposition stood, entranced, watching the flickering images.

There are several who claim to have been the first to 'create' moving pictures. In fact it was an evolutionary process to which several contributed greatly. Not least among those pioneer filmmakers were the Lumière Brothers, Auguste and Louis.



Auguste and Louis were the sons of Antoine, a portrait painter who abandoned his painting to make a business out of photography. With the assistance of his technically bright sons, Antoine created a new form of photographic plate. This brought him both renown and income and, by 1894, in their factory south of Lyon, they were producing 15,000,000 plates a year. It was at that time that Lumière senior  was invited to Paris to a demonstration of Edison's Peephole Kinetoscope. Impressed and with an eye for opportunity, he took the idea home with him to Lyon and instructed his sons to better it. They worked all winter. One of their main aims was to create a Kinetoscope - an early and rudimentary version of a cinema camera - that was less bulky and more manageable. Also, the peephole meant that only one person could enjoy the moving images at any one time. It was not a group spectator experience. By 1895, the brothers had invented their own camera with a printer and projector combined within it. They patented it and named it the Cinématographe. The film speed was 16 frames per second. Imagine, compared to cinema today, how slow that is! In the early months, they held only private screenings wanting to guard their invention. They gave their first public screening on 28th December 1895 at the Grand Cafe, Boulevard des Capuchines in Paris. Eight short - fifty seconds to a minute in length - films were screened and the occasion was an immense success. Within the early months of 1896,  they opened Cinématographe theatres in Brussels, London and New York. By 1903, their catalogue of films - no longer shot exclusively by their own hands - boasted over two thousand titles.

Then there was Georges Méliès, a magician and illusionist who turned his hand to film directing. He was the first film director to use storyboards. On the evening before the Lumière brothers gave that first public screening in Paris they presented their material to owners of houses of illusion. Méliès was present. So excited was he by this new art form that he offered the Lumières 10,000 francs for one of their Cinématographes. They refused. They also refused an offer of 50,000 francs on the same evening from the cabaret-music hall, Folies Bergère. Méliès, determined to include moving pictures in his shows at his Théâtre Robert-Houdin travelled to London, struck a deal for a projector known as an Animatograph, bought several films from Edison and from 1896 included them in his Paris programme. He soon patented his own Kinètographe Robert-Houdin, founded the Star Film Company and went on to direct over 500 films.
Cameras were coming on to the market. Gaumont, Lumière and Pathé were the leading producers. On both sides of the Atlantic, innovators were working to make a mark in this new industry.
Cinema was well and truly born.

To my mind, it is a vast and fascinating subject and I would love to see some of this early material distributed again. Even ten minutes worth of footage at certain specified screenings in cinemas everywhere would, I think, widen our understanding of the birth of the seventh art. One hundred and twenty years of cinema - there are vast libraries to choose from.

My new novel, THE LOST GIRL, to be published on 29th June is partially set at the Victorine Studios in Nice post Second World War. The Victorine in its heyday produced several French masterpieces ... But I will leave that blog till a little later in the year.

In the meantime, as I have not talked about contributions from the USA, I hope you enjoy these glorious silent shorts from 1896 onwards, including the genius of a young Stan Laurel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otaFjn7oc3k

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



www.caroldrinkwater.com







London History with Grandchildren by Janie Hampton

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Isambard Kingdom Brunel 
Last week I was tasked with grand-child care during the half-term holiday. Ben, 9, Desdemona, 7, my co-grandparent and I decided to go on a history outing to London. We began at Paddington station to admire the work of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 –1859) and discusshis extraordinary ability to design not only innovative railway stations but also bridges, canals, viaducts, docks, steam ships and trains.
Then by double-decker bus via Marble Arch, formerly the royal entrance to Buckingham Palace, and then after it was moved next to Hyde Park, a police station until 1968. This was also the site of the Tyburn gallows where from the 12th century, public executions took place, the last one a highwayman called John Austin in 1783. Swerving round behind Buckingham Palace we peered over the wall and wondered why the Queen needed such a big garden.
Ben and Desdemona wanted to see their great x 5 grandfather, immortalized in Westminster Abbey. But entry to the 13th century abbey is expensive unless you attend a service. So during Holy Communion we admired the extraordinary Gothic architecture (‘All built without machines!’ said Ben), and whispered about the many coronations held here ever since William I on Christmas Day in 1066. We found our ancestor beside his friend the slave abolitionist, William Wilberforce (1759 –1833), watching over the audio-guide stall. Thomas Fowell Buxton MP (1786-1845) fought to abolish capital punishment (unsuccessful), reform prisons (some improvement), and founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (now the RSPCA). I hope his several hundred living descendants are still inspired by the inscription: ‘Endued with a vigorous and capacious mind, of dauntless courage and untiring energy.. he devoted his powers to the good of Man. In Parliament he laboured for the liberation of the Hottentots in southern Africa, and above all, for the emancipation of eight hundred thousand slaves in the British Dominions. The energies of his mind were afterwards concentrated on a great attempt to extinguish the slave trade in Africa…’ The white marble monument was paid for by friends, colleagues and ‘many thousands of the African race’. (see Your last paper five pound note  History Girl)
Thomas Fowell Buxton meets one of his many
great great great great great grandsons in
Westminster Abbey
Walking through Parliament Square we saw the statue of Winston Churchill (1874 –1965), recently adorned with a Mohican hair cut made from green turf. ‘Why?’ asked Ben, which prompted a discussion on dissension, demonstrations and the right to protest. The statue of Oliver Cromwell guarding the Palace of Westminster led on to republicanism, and why Britain reverted to a monarchy after his rule. Once in the Houses of Parliament, we entered the huge 11th century Westminster Hall. Here we met Andrea our tour guide who told us the hall had been improved with a timber hammer-beam roof back in 1393, and is still the largest in Northern Europe. She led us on the route that the Queen takes once a year for the State Opening of Parliament. From the Sovereign’s Entrance at the base of the Victoria Tower, we saw the scratches on the Royal Staircase where the swords and spurs of troopers of the Household Cavalry have worn holes in the stone; and the tiny lift that, now she is 90, the Queen uses (though the stairs are still freshly carpeted each time.)
Andrea and history students in Westminster Hall
Andrea kept the tone and content just right for children. Between the Queen’s Robing Room and the House of Lords, we stood on the spot under which Guy Fawkes had hidden 36 barrels of gunpowder in 1605, and almost blew up King James I, all the peers and members of parliament. We saw where Guy Fawkes was tried (roughly where Nelson Mandela, a more peaceful political opponent, gave a speech three hundred years later) but Andrea didn’t give the gory details of his execution (hanged, drawn and then quartered.) In the Members Lobby we saw the doorway damaged by a bomb during World War Two; the statues of six previous prime ministers; and the pigeon hole of Prime Minister Teresa May, arranged democratically in alphabetical order and no larger than those of the other 650 Members of Parliament. Neither the House of Commons nor Lords were sitting, so we could go inside and stand beside (but not sit on) the MPs’ and peers’ leather benches.

After lunch in the vaulted Jubilee café, we crossed over Westminster Bridge (1862) and embarked on a Thames Clipper for a 45-minute history of river-side London. As it zig-zagged back and forth across the river, the twin-hulled catamaran cut through the incoming tide. After the Tate Modern, we shot under Waterloo Bridge (1945 - mainly built by women), London Bridge (first built by the Romans), and spotted the 13th century “Entry to the Traitor’s Gate” below the 11th C Tower of London. Passing under 19th C Tower Bridge we could see the underside of people walking across the glass walkway. Desdemona watched the skyline carefully, ‘Look there’s St Paul’s Cathedral! And do you see how the old and the new buildings are all muddled up?’ We talked about the 1941 blitz, dockers and shipping. We passed wharfs and warehouses now converted into apartments, including the fascinating home of History Girl Michelle Lovric. But as the waves grew and clouds descended, I feared the next stage of our journey would be a foggy white-out.
Entrance to the Tower of London 
Crossing the Greenwich Meridian Line prompted an unscientific explanation of the difference between that imaginary vertical line, and the horizontal equator. As we disembarked on the south side of the Thames, the storm departed and the skies cleared. We clambered into a glass-sided Emirates cable car which shot up from Greenwich Peninsula and crossed high above the river to the Royal Docks. The view was amazing, with a golden sunset behind Hampton Court, and opposite, a rainbow landing somewhere in the Anglo-Saxon wool depot of Woolwich. ‘Look, there’s the Thames Barrier,’ said Ben. ‘And there’s an airport,’ said Desdemona as a small plane flew over us. Grandfather pointed out the Isle of Dogs and Canary Wharf far below us. The cable car too, was historical, as it was paid for by the European Union in 2013 – and they won’t be doing that again in Britain any time soon. We returned from Royal Victoria on the Docklands Light Railway, which gave us a high level view of Billingsgate Market and East India docks. A walk over Tower Hill took us to the underground and back to Paddington.
Paddington Bear from Peru reminds young travellers about migrants
This grandmother was delighted when Ben told his parents it was his ‘Best ever day out in London.’ I don’t think they even noticed how much history they’d learned along the way.

Our Route:
Number 36 bus from Paddington to Buckingham Palace
Number 148 bus to Parliament Square
WestminsterAbbey
Houseof Parliament tour
ThamesClipper
Emirate Thames CableCar
DocklandsLight Railway
London Underground- Tower Hill to Charing Cross.
No 15 bus Trafalgar Square via Piccadilly and Oxford Circus, to Paddington.

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Beneath the Divan: A Family Album by Debra Daley

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The oldest, the most historical item that I own is a photograph album that was probably made sometime between 1865 and the 1880s. It’s an object that is significant to me, not only as a family keepsake, but because it has served in a way as an ongoing history lesson ever since it came into my hands when I was a child. It has prompted me to ask questions about provenance and image-making and to undertake research to answer those questions. It represents my first conscious encounter with the past.

My maternal grandparents lived in a small, two-bedroom house in a suburb of Auckland, where they had managed to raise five children on a factory-worker’s wages. A dark mood tended to prevail in my own home, where scarcity and trouble ruled the roost, but my grandparents were social and talkative and encouraging. I loved coming to stay with them in the school holidays. Even the situation of their house, at the top of a rise – and the name of the street itself, Jubilee Avenue – struck me as cheerful. In their sitting room (flowered carpet, three chairs shoved together pretending to be a sofa, industrial-sized heater, bookcase bursting with Dennis Wheatley and Hammond Innes, and a mighty votive TV set overlooking all) there was a built-in divan, on which I slept.


One day, my grandfather opened up a storage well beneath the divan to unearth an encyclopedia that might answer some inquiry I had for a school project. To my surprise, a trove of handsome old-timey volumes lay within, their brittle, spotted pages infested by silverfish. They were Fancy Books. I recall there was a volume of poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Actual poems. In a book. By a lord. And, oddly, Proceedings of the New Zealand Legislative Council. Then, I caught a lovely shimmer of mother of pearl and iridescent pāua shell. They formed the cover, it turned out, of a handsome photograph album comprising twenty, thick gilt-edged pages. I was captivated by it at once.


Photograph album bound in brown leather, with part of a metal clasp
and covers inlaid with pāua (abalone) shell, tortoise shell and mother of pearl.

The attraction lay not only in my curiosity about family photographs, but the sense of culture that emanated from this showy object. Culture, in the form of books and art and creativity in general (as opposed to living in a state of ongoing economic emergency), was something that I yearned for, although I couldn’t name the impulse until I was much older.

My grandfather mentioned that the contents of the divan had belonged to his grandfather, but seemed disinclined to offer any more about the man. (William Kelly, I found out later, who emigrated to New Zealand from Ireland with his bride, Frances, in 1863.) I gathered from my grandfather’s reticence about his antecedents that there had been a falling-out somewhere down the line, which perhaps accounted for the careless way the patriarch’s books and other objects had been stored.


By the time I was old enough to realise the historical worth of the divan’s hoard of books, it had disappeared, except for a copy of Hogarth’s Works in folio format, circa 1870. The Hogarth volume was worn through at the extremities and torn at the spine joints, but as I pored over it, turning the pages gingerly, I marvelled at the world within. Rakes and harlots – whatever they were. Marriage à la Mode (The Boudoir of the Countess). Gin Lane. The Midnight Conversation. This book was to prove the entrée ­– when my understanding of its contents improved – to the amazing new land of 18th-century London and, as it turned out, influenced my choice of study at university as well as much of my writing life.



But, that was later. On a first look through the Kellys’ album, I was excited by the subjects. Among them, tattooed Māori women in flounced gowns, a grizzly militia man playing a banjo and two contortionists. And three darkish photographs of Māori that seemed to be printed on metal. 

Contortionist, Wheeler & Son, Christchurch (active 1864-80)

Photograph albums, as far as I knew, were repositories of family experiences. Did I come from people who could count contortionists among their acquaintance? For a very ordinary suburban girl like me, living on the edge of the world, this was a dizzying possibility.


Unidentified Māori women (left), Hemus & Hanna, Auckland (active 1875-85)
and (right), wearing a korowai in cameo vignette, Batt & Richards,
Wellington (active 1867-1874).

Who were these Māori – most in European dress, but others wearing korowai (tag cloaks)? My grandparents could offer no clue. Only one of the photographs was captioned. A soldier wearing an ill-made uniform with sergeant’s stripes was identified as ‘T. Palethorpe 1 WR’. But, who Sergeant Palethorpe was no one could say. Each time I visited my grandparents, I would sit down with the album and stare at the faces it contained, and the detail of their dress, trying to imagine their lives and their state of mind. I attempted to date the photographs according to the style of the women’s gowns, until I worked out how pointless that was given how far fashions in colonial New Zealand lagged behind the times. But I see now that this exercise of looking for clues in the historical record was a sort of primitive early training that I came to put to use researching fiction.

Eventually, when I was in high school, my grandparents gave me the photograph album to keep. As I grew older, I gained new insights into the meaning of its images. That obscure ‘1 WR’, for instance, written on the photograph of T. Palethorpe – it had bothered me for years. Then a school librarian revealed that it stood for ‘1st Waikato Regiment of Militia’ and that led me to read about the New Zealand Wars (or the Māori Wars, as they were known, one-sidedly, when I was in school), a subject that was not included in our history syllabus at that time. I knew more about the battle of Culloden than I did about the battle of Gate Pā. 

Thomas Palethorpe, colour sergeant, 1st Waikato Regiment,
c1864-1870. Photographer unknown.


As I scrutinised these images for clues, I began to wonder about the studios and these early New Zealand photographers.






These two photographs of Māori women with moko [tattooes] were taken by Samuel Carnell (active 1870-1905) in his Napier studio and those below in the Wellington studio of Batt & Richards (active 1867-1874). 






I was amazed to find how numerous photographers were in colonial New Zealand. In 1857 the Lyttleton Times in Christchurch reported the following: 





But it wasn't easy to find out about these things in the days before search engines. I need a bigger library – and when I went to university, I found one. That’s when I discovered that this was not a family album at all – at least, not in my conception of one. It was a collection of cartes de visite – which meant that all these people were strangers.

I knew about calling cards, because people in Victorian novels were always leaving them with butlers, but I had not known that they had played a part in a photography revolution. Technological advances – cameras with multiple lenses, glass negatives – made it possible for images to be mass-produced in the format of a carte de visite. The carte de visite photograph was usually a portrait, printed on paper stuck to uniformly-sized card. It was perfect for mailing off to family and friends in far away places or slipped into a cartouche, a cut-out oval window, in an album. They were made by the millions worldwide until the cabinet format eclipsed them at the end of the century.  


But what about those shiny metallic photographs in the middle of the Kelly album? They were tintypes, or ferrotypes, I discovered, an image exposed on a thin sheet of iron. I also found that in the late 1860s they had largely fallen out of use, which meant I could approximately date the three tintypes in the album.


Māori girl wearing korowai (tag cloak) c. 1865. Unsigned tintype. 

Paperprints had a more natural appearance than the black-base of the tintype and their relative cheapness made them available to a wider range of people. Exchanging cartes de visite with friends and relatives and collecting images of celebrities, notables and curious personages in albums became wildly popular from the 1860s until the last decade of the century.

A New Zealand newspaper columnist observed in 1862, ‘Wherever in our fashionable streets we see a crowd congregated before a shop window, there for certain a number of notabilities are staring back at the crowd in the shape of cartes de visite … A wholesale trade has sprung up with amazing rapidity, and to obtain a good sitter and his permission to sell his carte de visite is in itself an annuity to a man…’


Cartes de visite were a lucrative business opportunity for enterprising photographers, but a small country like New Zealand lacked a deep pool of celebrity subjects. It did have, however, a picturesque indigenous population, an attractive ‘other’ culture of Māori whose tattooes, native dress and proud demeanour made them ideal examples of the kind of exotica that was sought after by CDV collectors. After their defeat in the New Zealand Wars of 1845 to 1872, Māori, like Native Americans, came to be considered a ‘vanishing race’. Documenting a culture that was believed to be on the verge of extinction provided a source of income for photographers trying to make a living in New Zealand. Portraits of Māori became highly marketable, not only to individual consumers, but also as an element of the government's burgeoning tourism strategy. George Pullman, who had opened a studio in Auckland in 1867 specialising in ‘Māori Heads’, sold his negatives to the government in the 1870s. Prints were made from them for display at the New Zealand exhibition at the first official world’s fair at Philadelphia in 1876, and continued to be copied over and again in the twentieth century.

Over the years I have discovered that there is more lodged in the photographs in my great-great-grandparents’ album than at first meets the eye. Now when I look at them, I see other things ­– not least being the irony that William Kelly, who eventually became chair of the New Zealand government’s Native Affairs Committee, because he ‘knew natives well’, and my school-teacher great-great-aunt, who encouraged Māori children to learn English, flourished by farming on confiscated land. Of course they too were links in a chain of dispossession that began in Ireland. Life goes up and down like the grass, and sure enough, all the Kellys’ holdings came to be lost, too, one way or another as the twentieth century staggered from war into a depression. Now, there seems to be nothing left of William Kelly and his achievements but this album, and that battered Hogarth. And his descendants.

Voices in my Head by Julie Summers

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Years ago a friend who teaches creative writing talked to me about voices in books. He reminded me that although I might write my non-fiction in my 'own' voice, it would be read by someone from Scotland with a different accent, or indeed by somebody from Somerset or Gwynedd. That was one thing, but another whole area of fascination is the question of voices in a novel. I am a consumer rather than writer of novels and I have the greatest possible respect for the author who can create and maintain more than one voice in a work of fiction. This month I have read two books that succeed and here is my appreciation of what I consider to be a high art form.


Anthony Horowitz's best-selling 2016 novel Magpie Murders is a masterpiece in the murder mystery genre. It is a detective story about a detective story and it works brilliantly. The basic premise is that an editor at a small London publisher is handed the latest detective story by the house's best-selling crime writer, Alan Conway. The fictional detective series is set in the 1950s and the hero is a private sleuth called Atticus Pund, who has comes from the same stable as Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Inspector Rebus and many others. The first half of the book, set in courier, is the draft of Alan Conway's book. Horowitz conjures up a Somerset village of the 1950s beautifully. The descriptions of everything from the attitudes to the anti-macassars, the rogue antiques-trader to the adulterous lady of the manor are perfect. The dialogue is clipped and its cadence of its time. The story ends abruptly when the editor discovers that the last two chapters are missing. Immediately the voice changes and becomes contemporary. Suddenly you as the reader know that you are back in the early 21st century where everyone has mobile phones and petrol costs £1.20 a litre. As the story continues there are in-jokes about the world of publishing which are delightful to those who have worked with editors, publicists and the all-powerful marketing team. One of the scenes even takes place at Totleigh Barton on a fictional Arvon writing course. Another is a conversation between a writer and a publisher when the writer is forced to accept that great though his other literature may be, the commercial success of his detective novels is what interests the publisher, not his desire to emulate Will Self. This is a superb book, full of clever twists and turns and written unselfconsciously not only in two voices but in two voices from different eras.


The second book is The Invention of Wings by the American author, Sue Monk Kidd. I had not come across her work before and was not sure whether I would find a novel about South Carolina in the early nineteenth century of interest. I'm glad to say I was wrong to be sceptical. This is another outstanding book, also written in two voices and unlike the Magpie Murders, it is based on a true story. The two main protagonists are girls of the same age - one born into wealth and the other into slavery. Their stories are told in their own voices and the chapters alternate. The first voice is of an African slave girl called Hetty, though her real name is Handful. She speaks in the lyrical, rhythmical voice of the deep south. The idioms she uses are colourful and naive but they sit perfectly with the era and as a reader I was cast into the shady, brutal world of what the white population referred to as 'the peculiar institution'. Despite the fact I initially felt uncomfortable reading about this era, I found myself delighting in Sue Monk Kidd's glorious writing and her evocation of a world that is no longer with us. Well, at least not officially. The second voice is Sarah, the sixth child and second daughter of a wealthy plantation owner and his over-fecund, over-zealous wife who treats her slaves harshly. Sarah is a rebel and, like Hetty, in her own but different way is trapped by her society which expects her to conform to its traditions and accept its norms. Sarah  yearns for education and has an ambition to become a lawyer, something her parents drum out of her by forbidding her to read, removing all her books but poetry and forcing her to conform in Charleston's society. Her voice is equally strong as Handful's but quite different and throughout the novel the reader is flipped from one view point to the other, with the result that the two voices meld and the picture that emerges is not of white against black or master versus slave but of the nature of evil and injustice. Each girl in her own way has to summon up the courage to dare to reach for what is unobtainable.

If you enjoy hearing voices in your head when you are immersed in a novel, then these are two I can warmly recommend for you.


Aztecs, Vikings, Graves and Mammoths by Mary Hoffman

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March can't seem to decide if it's coming in like a lion or a lamb. While it makes up its mind, I want to fill you in a bit on what's happening on The History Girls in the next 31 days.

Unusually we have not one but TWO competition, to make up for the fact that February had its usual 28 days and no scope for a guest.

On March 4th, Sophia Bennett will be talking about her YA novel featuring the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Following Ophelia. Then, on 29th we will be having a guest post and competition from Georgia Hunter.

On 18th March, I am swapping my usual first of the month post with Celia Rees and she will post on 1st April. The reason for this is a meeting at the Society of Authors on 16th March, Past Imperfect, called by Histeria, a group to which I also belong. The meeting is specifically to talk about historical fiction for children and Young Adults and will be Chaired by Kevin Crossley-Holland, who was our first ever History Boy (our first male guest).

So lots for you to look out for.

In the meantime, I'm giving you a round up of history-related stories I've read about this month.

First up, the search for the grave of James the First of Scotland:
National Gallery of Scotland
Ever since the skeleton of Richard the Third was excavated from a Leicestershire car park, the quest to find the resting place of other dead monarchs has become the new metal-detecting. You can read the full story here. A hostage, a victim of assassination and father of eight, he was married to Joan Beaufort (granddaughter of John of Gaunt), whose grave is also being sought.

The last resting-place of Margaret Tudor, Henry the Eighth's sister and another Queen of Scots, might also be discovered.

Next, two great English 16th century names together: Thomas Tallis and Katherine Parr. This fascinating story begins in 1976 when some papers were discovered in a wall at Corpus Christi College Oxford and identified as music by the Tudor composer.

Only recently were the words confirmed to be by Henry the Eighth's last queen, who had translated the Psalms into English in 1544 and published them anonymously.

The shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction will be announced this month. Here is the longlist:

Jo Baker A Country Road, A Tree (Doubleday)
Julian Barnes The Noise of Time (Jonathan Cape)
Sebastian Barry Days Without End (Faber)
Richard Francis Crane Pond (Europa)
Linda Grant The Dark Circle (Virago)
Charlotte Hobson The Vanishing Futurist (Faber)
Hannah Kent The Good People (Picador Australia)
Ed O’Loughlin Minds of Winter (riverrun)
Sarah Perry The Essex Serpent (Profile)
Dominic Smith The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (Allen & Unwin Australia)
Francis Spufford Golden Hill (Faber)
Graham Swift Mothering Sunday (Scribner)
Rose Tremain The Gustav Sonata (Chatto & Windus)

A Harvard team of scientists has claimed to be able to make woolly mammoths"de-extinct" within two years. The boast created some scepticism.

Mammoth at Ecomuseum in Rousse, Bulgaria. Photo by Tiia Monto
Could the Aztecs have died out because of Salmonella? We are all familiar with the idea that colonists bring weapons with them that are more deadly than guns and swords but this is a new theory. It's not yet confirmed but interesting.

In 2011 a Viking Boat Burial was unearthed in the appropriately named Swordle Bay in Scotland. A first report has just been issued describing the process of such a burial, the status of the corpse and the type of grave goods that were burial with him (they were rarely female).

Photograph of the Ardnamurchan Viking boat grave site, near Ockle in Scotland, taken by Jon Haylett.

(I acknowledge History's Headlines in History as the source for some of the above)

What would Jane Austen do? - by Gillian Polack

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I have had no telephone for a fortnight. It’s probably a crossed line at an interchange and will take two seconds to fix, but changes in how they do things and how the overarching telecommunications people do things in Australia mean that I have no landline. There are reasons why the landline is there, and they’re important ones and so I’m irate. It’s easy to be irate. We’re used to being able to call for help or be called by others when they need us. Being alone in a time of need isn’t as accepted as it was historically. 

I’m going to unwind my stress by considering things historically. Let’s look at equivalencies and find out what some of the historical situations are that might equate with mine. 

The moment I do this I calm down and think “Thank goodness I live now and not then” for now I have options, with just one phone down. I have another phone and I have a computer and I have a neighbour who watches out for me. Except for the two days when my internet went down, too. I still had options.

Let me try this in Jane Austen’s day. In fact, let me try it with Jane Austen. She too, was single and dealt with health issues, after all. If she were modern, she’d be in a similar position to me.
I use the landline for:

1) Medical emergencies – it’s my reliable number for ambulance and the after hours doctor. Even if I have trouble holding things or can’t see straight (if I have a migraine, for instance) I can hold that phone. It’s not something I will need often at all but it’s the thing that could save my life.

2)  A number that doesn’t give away my privacy. Being semi-public can be an issue, especially at this time, for I am Jewish. I’ve been through the being targeted thing and do not want it again.

3)  A stable number over a long time and one that is in the phone book so that people can contact me even when they’ve lost touch.

Picture from: https://janeaustenshousemuseumblog.wordpress.com




 So what would Jane Austen have done under each of these circumstances?


1) There were no telephones in Austen’s day. Even as a single woman, however, she was not alone in the way I am as a modern single. Servants didn’t create an extended family the way they had 150 years earlier – this was one of the strongest moments of the English class system – but they were there. So, where someone these days would ring my number to invite me out or to make sure I’m OK or to sort out a medical issue, Austen’s household would have carried messages for her. Most often, someone’s servant would knock on the door, give a message to someone in Jane’s household (posh households had more hierarchy, but Jane’s wasn’t that posh) and Jane would receive it.

What about the medical emergency? There were hospitals, but they were not like ours (and there were certainly no ambulances) and were not used in the same way. Even if there had been our kind of modern hospital in Jane’s time, she wouldn’t have had access to it everyday, for she lived in a small town. 

Horses were everything. Engines were new and amazing, for this was the time of the industrial revolution, but Jane lived a fair while before cars. Horses are wonderful animals a a gift to civilisation, but it takes time to get one out of the stable and to get it ready to go and to go someone where on the horse and… If the doctor was around the corner, it was probably faster to go on foot. Then the doctor would have come (unless he was out seeing someone else, in which case getting a message to him saying how life-threatening the problem was at Jane’s end  took time) for home visits were far, far more normal than they are in current Australia. They were more normal in my childhood than they are now, but that’s another story.

If Jane was urgently, dangerously ill, she could have died while the message was getting to the doctor that she needed help.


2) What about the privacy issue? We know what Jane actually did, and Jane handled it differently to me. 

I’m public. Or semi-public, at least. Writers these days are expected to be. Keeping that part of myself private for my own emotional well-being and safety is quite tricky.

It was tricky for Jane, too. She had an equivalent to my Jewishness and that was being female. No bomb threats, but she wouldn’t have known if she’d be acceptable in her social circles or town if she’d come out as a writer. How many of the people around her actually knew that she was the amazing author of several exceptionally popular volumes is an interesting question, but, alas, the answer doesn’t belong in this essay.

This means she had as much need to protect herself as I do. Some in some directions and none in others. It was a set of difficult choices and a tricky balancing act, just like it is for me.

How she handled it was severalfold. First of all, she published anonymously. Her name was attached to her work after she died, but not, as far as I know, during her lifetime. This meant she and those close to her had control over how far it was known that she was the writer.  This is exactly like my control over my home address.

The sort of publicity we do now wasn’t a thing then. Some authors were lionised (and Harriet Martineau has a wonderful description of this in her somewhat later Autobiography) but many authors did as Jane did, and their author selves were not visible. In fact, there were enough authors called “Anonymous” or “A Lady” that their bylines also often mentioned other work that they had written.

How far did Jane control her anonymity? I suspect quite far. I visited her house at Chawton and saw her writing desk, many years ago. Her current work was hidden under letters she was writing or under a blotter. She’d quietly put her work out of sight when visitors came.

This may not be just anonymity. There are other reasons for privacy. 

I work from home and visitors love picking up my papers and exclaiming over them or putting them in better order or making everything more tidy. There’s something really uncomfortable about a friend or family member reading through half-finished work and reacting to it in the same way they’d react to finished work. It’s like my work is a part of a museum: they know how to react to work at museums. If I were Jane and could simply slide my latest work into hiding, I would do this. Whether Jane hid her work to keep it private until it was in print or she hid it for other reasons, she was still controlling her privacy.

Jane would probably have set up her landline similarly to the way I have. That’s a comforting feeling. I shall eat fresh summer raspberries in honour of this.

Alas, the berries are all inside me and, in fact, it’s several days later and I’m finishing this essay in Armidale, an exceptionally pretty town in regional NSW. I’m at the desk of an Italian lecturer, and that’s yet another story for yet another time.

Picture from: https://janeaustenshousemuseumblog.wordpress.com


We’re up to number three: how did Jane get in touch with people and keep in touch with people?

That’s more complicated.

She didn’t need a stable phone number, of course, for phones didn’t exist. She did, however, need a stable address. Her friends and family needed to know where to write and when she was usually available for them to call. At the heart of this lies a secure and long term address. Every time Jane moved, there was the danger of losing some friends from her life forever.

The upside of this is the upside of her hiding the novel-in-progress on her letter-writing table when someone dropped in. She probably had regular times when friends and family knew they could visit. As long as she stayed in a given place, or had family in another given place who could then tell other family and mutual friends “Jane moved, just last year. Here, let me write it down for you,” She was fine.

She would have moved in far more fixed circles than I do, and known those people exceedingly well. So what Jane would have done without a telephone helped her become the woman who could write those closely-observed novels about people who moved in a small, stable society and who had been observed particularly acutely.  

Jane Austen, with landline, would not have been our Jane at all. I have no idea what I’ll become when I get mine back.
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