The History Girls

‘Patna is a place of great traffic’, Jemima Kindersley noted, when she visited the ancient chief city of Bihar in 1767. ‘The English Company have one of their most considerable factories there, where they carry on a great trade in saltpetre, besides opium, salt, betelnut and tobacco.’ Patna had been of commercial importance to Britain since the middle of the 18th century – and an apt place, I found, to sow the seeds of a plot that would hang on the machinations of the East India Company. The novel I was inspired to write, The Revelations of Carey Ravine, was published last year, but it’s taken me until now to finish disposing of the box files of ephemera (print-outs, notes and general papery stuff) that I accumulated during the writing. I’m working on a new novel now and I would prefer not to have the ghosts of the old ones in the room.

However, I don't feel that I can leave the India research behind without saluting the artists whose work showed me the physical appearance of Patna in the very early 19th century. Without the views of Charles D’Oyly, Thomas Daniell, Sita Ram, Shiva Lal, Walter Sherwill, and numbers of anonymous illustrators, I couldn’t have properly described that city. When storytelling springs from a past that existed before the advent of photography, you have to ferret around for every shred of visual evidence you can get. These paintings and drawings allowed me to construct a pictorial tour of Patna. I pinned up the images next to my desk in a sequence – as if, having won a coveted contract to work in the opium trade as a factor for the East India Company, I found myself bound upriver from Calcutta for Patna for the first time, on my way to present a letter of introduction at Bankipore, a western suburb of Patna where British interests were concentrated.

Sir Charles D'Oyly, artist unknown, late 18th century.

Charles D’Oyly was an India hand through and through, a prolific amateur artist and a generous host to British visitors. He was born in India at Murshidabad, where his father was the East India Company’s resident at the court of Nawab Babar Ali, and held many senior postings in the Bengal Civil Service. He spent thirteen years in Patna and documented the city extensively. Reaching Patna from Calcutta, an upriver journey of four hundred miles, was quite an effort in those days. You were obliged to wait until the end of the monsoon season and even then the undertaking could last as long as eight or nine weeks. D’Oyly’s view of Rajmahal shows the typical mode of transport – a bulky barge known as a budgerow, with rudimentary cabins. This one has a palanquin stowed on the cabin roof for use on shore.

A view of the Rajmahal Hills, Sir Charles D'Oyly, 1820.

You would travel in a flotilla of smaller craft carrying stores, baggage and kitchen, sometimes by oar, and sometimes by haulage. Progress up the Ganges was exceedingly slow. ‘We found it extremely tedious,’ Mrs Kindersley reported. Imagine the relief and elation when, one morning, you catch sight of four great towers in the distance, their eastern faces lit by the rising sun. Here is the city of Patna, at last. And here is my first 18th century view of it, in a handcoloured aquatint by Thomas Daniell.

City of Patna, Thomas Daniell, 1795.

Fortified in the Indian manner, with a wall and a small citadel, Patna’s prospect is a romantic one, commanding the high southern bank of the Ganges. The towers, the bastions projecting into the river, the elevated terraced mansions – it all looks splendidly established and must have inspired confidence in new East India Company employees, arriving to take up their commissions.

Thomas Daniell recorded Patna on a long tour he made through British India, accompanied by his nephew, William. He was an English artist of humble origins, who arrived in Calcutta via China in 1786, with his nephew, hoping to make his fortune in the fabulous sub-continent, like so many men of his day. Daniell never found the wealthy patron that he sought, but the East India Company gave him a contract as an engraver and he spent seven years making views of ‘oriental scenery in Hindoostan’, which was to become his stock-in-trade on his return to England. His India tour provided him with an enduring livelihood.

Thomas Daniell, R.A., Sir David Wilkie, 1838.

Along with other British travelling artists such as John Zoffany and William Hodges, the Daniells found employment in India training Indian artists – many of them former Mughal court painters who had lost their patrons – to adapt their work to the naturalistic conventions appreciated by the western art market. This Indo-British school of painting is known as Company Style, or sometimes as Patna or Bazar paintings. Some commentators have been sneery about Company pictures, dismissing them as inferior art, but as a visual record of the past, especially of everyday details – domestic interiors, realistic renderings of tools and equipment, images of Indians and their costumes, often categorized by regional and ethnic type, or occupation, and so on – Company paintings are packed with information that is historically valuable and culturally fascinating. They offer a glimpse into the lives of artisans and servants, the provincial and non-privileged, which I can appreciate even as I note that inhabitants of the Company frame are defined by their functions and not by their subjectivity. Like cartes de visite later in the century, the image-making seems designed to serve collectors and to illustrate rather than express.

Harvest scene, artist unknown (Company Style), early 19th century.

Opium from Patna being tested for purity, Shiva Lal (Company Style), 1857-60.

Opium from Patna bound for China, Shiva Lal (Company Style), 1857-60.

Shiva Lal was a prominent Company artist, who sold his work from the art-shop that he ran in Patna. The painting above comes from a series of nineteen illustrating processes in the manufacture of opium at the Gulzarbagh factory in Patna. The paintings were commissioned by Dr D. R. Lyall (the personal assistant in charge of opium-making) for a series of murals in the factory. But Lyall’s death in 1857, during the Indian Mutiny, meant the scheme was abandoned.

Ox-drawn carriage, artist unknown (Company Style), early 19th century.

It was a journey of about half an hour, as the crow flies, from the eastern ghat at Patna to the opium factory at Guzulbargh, but it would inevitably take much, much longer than that. After disembarking at the ghat, where you would be met by a heaving crowd of hawkers and drivers of every description looking for custom, you might settle for an ox-carriage with some fancy drapery, rigged against the heat and the dust, as your conveyance. Off the carriage lumbers through Patna’s eastern gate and into the chowk (market), where Patna’s specialties are heaped high – opium, saltpetre, striped cotton rugs and hookahs with curiously-worked silver chillums, and piles of produce. The hookah purveyors in their doorways blow on the charcoal in the chillum and the fragrance of Persian tobacco, herbs and spices and rosewater drifts through the air.

Eastern gateway of Patna City, Sir Charles D'Oyly, 1824.

Patna market, Shiva Dayal Lal (Company Style), 1858.
The artist was the cousin of Shiva Lal.

Chased silver chillum cover in the shape of an opium poppy pod, 18th century.

The chowk and the main street of Patna, Sita Ram, 1814-15.

Main street of Patna, showing one side of the chowk, Sita Ram, 1814-15.

The painter Sita Ram, artist unknown, c.1820.

The views, above, of Patna’s chowk were painted by an accomplished Indian watercolourist named Sita Ram, whose work, with its impressionistic brushwork and architectural finesse (he had trained as a draughtsman), transcended the Company Style. The watercolours belong to a set of albums commissioned by Lord Hastings, governor-general of Bengal from 1814 until 1823. Sita Ram undertook the work as he travelled with Hastings’s retinue on a seventeen-month journey from Calcutta to Punjab to inspect British possessions. He continued to work for Hastings until the governor-general’s departure from India in 1823. After that, Sita Ram disappeared from the record and no more is known of him.

The bazaar in Patna City, Sir Charles D'Oyly

Once you’re in the thick of Patna, the city seems rather less imposing than its beguiling riverfront aspect promised. There is only one main street, with many crooked lanes leading off it, and the backs of those grand mansions fronting the river are dilapidated. The ordinary dwelling houses are built of brick or of baked mud, with roofs of thatch or crumbling tiles and screens of bamboo mats. Many of them have shops on the ground, open to the street. Traffic churns the street to mud, but now that the rains have lifted the mud will soon dry and turn to choking dust.

The real might of Patna lies beyond the fourth great bastion of the city wall. It is the compound of the English Factory at Guzulbargh, headquarters of the East India Company’s commercial activities in Patna. The compound used to be a military store, but has now been made over to opium agents. The jail is included in this compound.

The English Factory compound, Patna, Sita Ram, 1814.

Opium warehouse, Patna, Sita Ram, 1814.

A stacking room in the opium factory, Patna, W.S. Sherwill, c.1850.

The manufacture of opium at the Patna factory was recorded in great detail by Captain Walter Sherwill, who was a revenue surveyor in the Bengal Army. He produced a compelling series of drawings that communicates the vast scale and the operational efficiency of the Company’s opium business.

Opium fleet descending the Ganges on the way to Calcutta,
W.S. Sherwill, c.1850.

Opium was carried from the factory to the ghat at Guzulbargh and floated out to the opium fleet. The ships were preceded on the river by small canoes, the crews of which sounded the depth of water and pounded drums to warn other boats out of the channel, as the government fleet claimed right-of-way. It must have been intimidating, and also impressive, to hear the beat of those drums as the opium fleet approached on its deadly business. The timber raft of Nepalese logs in the foreground of Sherwill’s image has been floated down from the mountains, and will be used to make packing-cases for the opium.

Western gateway of Patna City, Sir Charles D'Oyly, 1824.

After passing through Patna’s western gateway you reach a wooded landscape, where native mud houses are gradually being displaced by British residences.

Houses near Patri Ghat, western suburbs, Charles D'Oyly, 1824.

Farther out, there are large garden houses. Your driver enters a compound enclosed by a low wall. Across an expanse of beaten earth lies a white bungalow with a high thatched roof, an unrailed veranda and doorways hung with screens of grass. You are surprised at first by the lack of garden, at least in your conception of it. There are only a few trees near the walls, mostly palm and plantain. The paths are spread with gravel to impede the passage of snakes.

John Havell's bungalow in its garden, Sita Ram, 1810-22.

And this is it. Here you are. With a letter of introduction to hand, you descend from the carriage. The air is noisy with the cawing of the crows, the scratching of the sweepers’ brooms, smoothing the earth around the house, and the lowing of yoked bullocks plodding to the well in a corner of the compound. The steward of the house appears on the veranda and greets you with a salaam.

There is so much about this world that is corrupt and complicated – and yet, its glamour persists.

Our extra guest for March is Sophia Bennett

Sophia Bennett’s debut novel, Threads, won The Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition in 2009. She has since published several further teen novels, including The Look and Love Song. Sophia has been called “the queen of teen dreams” by journalist Amanda Craig, for her exploration of the worlds of fashion, art and music. Her books have sold internationally to over 16 countries. Following Ophelia is her first historical book.
www.sophiabennett.com

Do you play the dinner party game? And if so, do you always imagine inviting the same people?

My ideal guest list changes all the time. David Bowie and Iman are regulars, along with Shakespeare, for the laughs and theatrical anecdotes, and Jane Austen for the ‘fine eyes’ – I’m sure she was describing her own – and the wry looks. The Queen is endlessly fascinating: think who she’s met. Right now I’d add Omar Sharif. I’d want Douglas Adams, for the essential babelfish; Carrie Fisher, Peggy Guggenheim, Nora Ephron, and Lady Gaga, so I could thank her for her politically restrained but meaningful performance at the Superbowl … My ideal dining room is large, and situated in New York. There are white roses on the table. Jimi Hendrix is tuning up in a room nearby. Ella Fitzgerald or Nina Simone may be persuaded to sing. I am, needless to say, an insanely successful novelist and screenwriter. This is my tribe.

Once upon a time, there were seven sisters who grew up in India. They were rich and beautiful and when they settled in London they didn’t need to play an imaginary dinner party game. Their lives were one endless, enchanted version of it.

They were the Pattle sisters and their names were Adeline, Sarah, Maria, Julia, Louisa, Sophia and Virginia. I discovered them when I was researching my new book, Following Ophelia, set in the world of the Pre-Raphaelites. Their father James was an Anglo-Indian merchant and “"the biggest liar in India”, acccording to his great-granddaughter, Virginia Woolf*. When he died, he was shipped back to England in a barrel of rum that, according to legend, exploded on the journey. Their grandfather on their mother’s side was exiled to India from France after ‘flirting excessively with Marie Antoinette’ as her pageboy. They were never going to be boring.

The main character in Following Ophelia is a redheaded muse to a fictional acolyte of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Pre-Raphaelite girls were known as ‘stunners’ and my most treasured resource for research was Wives and Stunners, by Henrietta Garnett, who it turns out is a descendant of the brilliant Pattle girls.

My Lady Betty by Val Prinsep

Through Garnett’s account, the sister I encountered first was Sarah. She was one of the three most famous, known in London society as ‘Beauty’, ‘Dash’ and ‘Talent’. Sarah, though very attractive, was ‘Dash’. She married a director of the East India Company called Henry Prinsep and in 1850 came to live with him at Little Holland House in Kensington, where she hosted a brilliant salon for the great and good (and somewhat scandalous) in Victorian society, whose guests regularly included Alfred Lord Tennyson and William Thackeray.

In those days Kensington was on the edge of London proper and though large mansions were springing up, it still had a rural appeal, with lanes bordered by hawthorns and cherry trees. Little Holland House was the dower house to the baronial home nearby, with an expansive garden. George Watts, one of the leading Pre-Raphaelites, lived with the Prinseps there, and Sarah’s son, Val Prinsep, became a follower too, introducing her to Millais, Rossettti and Burne-Jones. Meanwhile, Henry Prinsep was now an aspiring MP, so she knew everyone in the British political establishment.

‘Dash’ described Sarah’s charm, wit and energy. Her eye for interior design was extraordinary. According to Garnett, “The walls were painted Venetian red and bottle-green, the furniture was black lacquer with gold inlay and many of the objects and curios had been brought back from India. Watts had painted murals in the great drawing room … There was about the place the aura of an enchanted kingdom”. I simply had to have Sarah in my book. There wasn’t really room for her, so I ripped out a key scene and replaced it with a costume party ruled over by the hostess, dressed as Cleopatra.

Sadly, Little Holland House was pulled down in 1871 when the Prinseps’ lease ran out, to make way for the rapid building projects that were going on. However, one of the neighbours to build a house on its border was Sir Frederick Leighton, later the President of the Royal Academy, who filled his own mansion with treasures from his travels. The Leighton House museum has strived to recreate the interiors as closely as possible to the way he had them – complete with indoor fountain, Moorish tiles, stuffed peacock and Venetian-style mosaics in the Arabic room – so if you want a whiff of the enchanted kingdom, I recommend a visit there.

I’d have put the other Pattle sisters in my story too, but it would have started to take on War and Peace proportions if I had. However, I was sorry to miss them out, so here are three of my favourites.

Beauty, Virginia Pattie, Countess Somers by GF Watts

‘Beauty’ was Virginia, the youngest girl, who outshone even her elder sister. By now I’m thinking of the Dancing Princesses. Thackeray was friends with the Pattle family from childhood and always admired Virginia the most. He even wrote an article praising her beauty in Punch. Thackeray lost his fortune so could not hope to marry her himself, but on her marriage to Viscount Eastnor in 1850, he graciously wrote, "She looked beautiful, and has taken possession of Eastnor Castle and her rank as Princess, and reigns to the delight of everybody."

She never was a princess, but became Countess Somers. A similar offer is made to my character in book two. She finds it very tempting.

‘Talent’ – reputedly the only plain sister of the seven – was Julia Margaret Pattle, who married another Indianl colonial official called Charles Cameron. For her 48th birthday her daughter gave her a camera. She soon became a pioneering photographer, with leading exhibitions in her lifetime,and a long list of important artistic and literary clients for her photographs. She would have been perfect for my series, but only got the camera in 1863, five years after my story is set. Dammit.

Four Young Women holding flowers by Julia Margaret Cameron. Wellcome Images

Once established, Julia was usually to be seen in dark dresses stained with chemicals from the developing process. Her work was used to illustrate Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and other poems, and there was recently a small exhibition of her photographs at the V&A. In 1860, she moved to Freshwater in the Isle of Wight, near Tennyson’s estate, and many of the Pattles and Prinseps are buried there, in a churchyard very much like the Cornish one where my wedding pictures were taken. This is my closest link to the Pattles, and I’m keeping it.

Maria Pattle (born at sea – why am I not surprised?) didn’t get a famous nickname, but she did have famous grandchildren. Her third daughter Julia, named after her eponymous aunt, I assume, married Herbert Duckworth and then Leslie Stephen. She was the mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

Julia Stephen by Julia Margaret Cameron

I visited the Vanessa Bell exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery recently, and as well as loving the obvious influence of Matisse, Dufy, Picasso and Cezanne in her work, combined with her equally compelling natural talent for line and colour, I was fascinated to look out for Pattle family characteristics in her self-portraits and family sitters. I think I found them, but perhaps I was being wistful. It’s a glorious exhibition, by the way, full of wonderful examples of her work. If you like Charleston House and that era and aesthetic at all, you should really go.

Virginia and Vanessa Stephen playing cricket

Henrietta Garnett, the author of Wives and Stunners, is Vanessa’s granddaughter, and Virginia Woolf’s great niece. Seeing her family tree brought home to me how the salons and family connections of Vanessa’s Victorian great-aunt Sarah repeated and replayed themselvses in the Bloomsbury Group. At an event at the Charleston Festival last year, I was lucky to hear Virginia and William Nicholson talk about visiting the house – Vanessa’s home – as family and friends, and what a welcoming place it was. The family were riculously well-connected, but more than that, their lives sang with energy, talent and warmth. They made friends, looked after them, played hostess and created exquisite houses where the literary and artistic talent of the day wanted to stay and play.

Vanessa even painted a bedhead for her husband’s lover. It’s a very sexy nude. As the Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition note points out, this was either extremely generous, or a sardonic comment on the woman in question. There was tragedy too. The complicated love lives created confused children. Henrietta’s mother Angelica was devastated to discover, at 18, that her beloved ‘uncle’, Duncan Grant was really her father. Virginia battled mental health problems, ending in suicide. But that’s not the lasting impression that Charleston gives you: it’s a place of retreat and acceptance, where art flourished above everything.

Going back to the Victorians, the story of the Pattle sisters is one where women are feminine and domestic, but also intelligent, productive and influential. I’m not saying it’s a model for us now, but looking back into history we can make assumptions about women being subservient and overlooked. They so often were, of course, but here are some fascinating exceptions. It helped that they were very rich, beautiful, talented and charming. It always does. But they broke rules, expressed themselves and shaped their society as much as it shaped them.

So, if my time machine buttons were set to mid-Victorian London, I would witout question choose to emerge in Little Holland House. I doubt Sarah Prinsep would turn much of a hair – she’d seen a lot since her Calcutta days, and the stories of her grandfather escaping pre-Revolutionary France. I’d look around for signs of Tennyson in the conservatory, or Thackeray and possibly Rossetti on the lawn. I’d check out Val Prinsep and George Watts’s paintings in the studio. I’d see if Julia Margaret Cameron was setting up a photo somewhere. And I’d hope, very much, that they would invite me to dinner.

"VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE CASK OF RUM"(A talk by Prof. Joan Stevens, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.)

‘Wives and Stunners: The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Muses’, by Henrietta Garnet

Competition Question:

"If you could pose for any artist who has ever lived, who would you pick and why?"

Just answer in the Comments below and then copy your answer to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk

Closing date: 11th March

Our competitions are open to UK Followers only

Stories of Inspiration

(historical fiction writers trace their journeys

from starting point to finished work)

edited by Suzanne Fox

I've been looking forward to receiving this book (whose production was a little delayed by Hurricane Matthew) enormously. Partly because I have a piece in it - who doesn't look forward to seeing a book they're in? But also to read the other essays in the collection, which introduces some writers who are new to me, and some I know well. In particular, three History Girls -

Michelle Lovric, in The Venetian Novels, writes "No matter what I think I'm going to write about, Venice always snatches the lead role in my novels." She then takes us on an informative and entertaining walk around that most seductive of cities.

Sue Purkiss tells us about a series of serendipitous encounters and discoveries that lead to her writing the story of Alfred and his daughter Aethelflaed in Warrior King.

Celia Rees writes about "the deadly spores of fear and superstition" out of which Witch Child and Sorceress grew.

And I find myself being interviewed about Silver Skin by someone who seems to know me quite well.

The back story of novels and their creation is always fascinating, and I would thoroughly recommend this anthology to readers and writers of historical fiction.

(Well, I would, wouldn't I. But it is extremely interesting!)

Stories of Inspiration is available from Amazon.co.uk here and Amazon.com here.

Joan Lennon's website.

Joan Lennon's blog.

Silver Skin.

Not everything I saw on TV was so benign

It is 1974. Or 1975. Or 1973. The television news is on. Belfast. I’m standing in my school uniform. Mummy brushes my hair and says, Don’t look. Somewhere has been blown up. Rubble fills the screen. She plaits my hair too tight. Later I hear someone say that an old lady’s legs have been blown off. I live in Belfast. I am living through history. I am aware of this, though I never speak about it. The blown-off legs follow me through dreams until I wonder if I imagined the whole thing.

It is 2017. We are living in interesting times. We wonder how history will judge us. The whole world is crazy, and here in Northern Ireland, where we are good at crazy, where our very existence, clinging to the edge of the UK, the edge of Ireland, the edge of Europe, is somehow preposterous, political scandal and the breakdown of power-sharing lead to a snap election.

I am enraged. I am bruised by years of voting and never getting what I voted for. I am saddened that every election in Northern Ireland seems to polarise us more. I want to hide until it’s over and then hide some more. I want to tell myself not to look at the screen.

SF using 1918 posters

But funnily enough I am writing a novel about the election of December 1918. When women in Britain voted for the first time in parliamentary elections, and, in Ireland, when Sinn Fein won the landslide that led – after another bloody war – to an independent Ireland and eventual partition. The novel is for teens, and it’s been hard to make the election exciting. Suffragettes are exciting, but that was an earlier story. My heroine lives in rural Ireland, and her desire to change the world is hampered by that, as well as by the fact that everyone tells her the battle has been won. I love my heroine, Stella, who is braver than I. I love her determination and fighting spirit and how she grows to understand that yes, she can change the world, but not alone, and not overnight.

It’s strange, perhaps, to be influenced by a fictional character of one’s own invention, but that’s what happened to me when it was announced that there would be NI Assembly elections on 2 March, only ten months after we had last gone to the polls. I’d recently joined the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, the progressive, non-sectarian party I’d always voted for, and had met the local association, a diverse lot of people who embodied the desire for a new, modern Northern Ireland. But was I prepared to get properly involved? To tramp the streets, knock on doors, give out leaflets, ask for their votes for our candidate? To risk doors slammed in my face? I would speak on a stage in front of a thousand people more happily than I would knock a stranger’s door.

Winifred Carney, my heroine's heroine

Stellawould do it, I thought, and I signed up. As I canvassed in the February frosts and rainstorms, I thought of the women who had fought for my right to do this. I remembered Stella’s heroine, the republic socialist and suffragist Winfred Carney, who stood in 1918, in an east Belfast ward she had no hope of winning.

Our candidate did brilliantly. There were five seats available and it was a close fight between him and a bigger party for that last seat. Turnout in our constituency was up by more points than in any other. For a few hours, there was the cruelty of hope, and even when it was dashed, we can say that we moved things forward.

Now the election is over and the result is, depending on how you look at it, a depressing reaffirmation of the status quo of division and suspicion; or the opportunity for real progress. Only time will tell. The election of 2017 might turn out to be as significant as that of 1918, or it might not.

Once again I have been aware of living through history. But this time I learned that being engaged feels much better than being merely enraged. Deeds, not words, as the suffragettes would have reminded me.

For some years now, the Stotts, (Philip and Anne) have been good friends of mine. The friendship began when Philip emailed my late husband, Norman Geras, on his blog (normblog). Norm very quickly discovered that Anne Stott knew a great deal about many things, not least Jane Austen, and he often asked Anne to write for the blog, which she did with great style and erudition. I'm hoping to ask her to contribute to the History Girls in the fullness of time but meanwhile, her husband, Philip Stott, is writing here about a forthcoming exhibition at Ightham Mote.

It's thanks to the Stotts that I have such a good working knowledge of National Trust Scones. I have visited NT properties mainly with them and what they don't know about almost everything isn't worth knowing. They're the best of guides and now Philip has found his true métier as a Volunteer at Ightham Mote. He's writing here about something I hope many History Girls and also many readers of this blog might find interesting.

“She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.”

The story of Elsie Palmer, and of her spirited mother, is worthy of a Henry James novel.

In April 1887, a still-young American woman, Mary Lincoln Mellen Palmer, Queen, brought her three daughters, Elsie, Dorothy (‘Dos’), and Marjory, to live at the late-Medieval moated manor house of Ightham Mote in Kent, England [https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/ightham-mote]. The family were to stay at the Mote until March 1890. Their father, William Jackson Palmer, the founder of Colorado Springs, a famous railroad engineer, Union Army General, and recipient of the Medal of Honor, would visit them from time to time, as work permitted, most notably for Christmas, 1887.

During her residence at the Mote, Queen, who had received her universally-used nickname from her maternal grandmother, entertained many distinguished people in the world of the arts. Her fascination with the Aesthetic Movement was why she had chosen to rent an English moated manor house in the first instance, and she soon began to turn it into a rural ‘salon’ visited by such luminaries as the great American writer, Henry James.

[This photo was taken in1889 and shows Queen Mellen Palmer with her eldest daughter, Elsie, and the family dog, in the north-eastern corner of the Medieval courtyard at Ightham Mote, Kent. Ightham Mote Archives.]

These notable Americans were joined by some of the leading lights of the English Aesthetic Movement, including:
the painter Edward Coley Burne-Jones; the doyen of the Arts and Craft movement, William Morris; the novelist and poet, George Meredith; the actress, Ellen Terry; and the costume designer, Alice Strettell (Mrs J. Comyns Carr).

Most important of all, however, Queen commissioned the controversial American portraitist, John Singer Sargent, to paint her eldest daughter, Elsie, against the antique linen-fold panelling of the Mote. This portrait is now regarded as one of Sargent’s masterpieces. It is known as A Young Lady in White, and it normally hangs at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in the beautiful mountain resort established by her father.
However, from March 4 until 23 December, 2017, this stunning work has returned to the old house in which it was painted, where it will be displayed on a special stage in a room close to where Elsie took up her pose, and where it forms the centre piece of a major Exhibition entitled The Queen of Ightham Mote - an American Interlude: Queen Palmer, John Singer Sargent and their Circle.

[Miss Else Palmer, aged 17, A Young Lady in White, by John Singer Sargent, 1889-90, Colorado Springs Fine Art Center]

John Singer Sargent’s powerful portrait of Elsie Palmer [oil on canvas; 190.5 x 114.3 cm] was mainly painted when she was aged 17. Over the years, it has been given a number of titles, including A Young Lady in White, Portrait of a Girl in White, and Portrait of Miss Elsie Palmer. For the portrait, Sargent made a range of pen-and-ink/oil sketches of Elsie, including an exquisite full-length oil sketch of her wearing the same dress in the late-Medieval Great Hall of Ightham Mote [exhibited in the Oriel Room]. The final portrait is inscribed, lower right, ‘John S. Sargent 1890’, and it was first shown at Joseph Comyns Carr’s New Gallery, Regent Street, London, in 1891.

The family owned the picture until the mid-1920s, when it was purchased by a family friend, Col. Charles Clifton, and presented to the Albright [-Knox] Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y. It was finally acquired in 1969 by the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center with funds collected through public subscription. In 1998/99, it formed part of the important Sargent at the Tate exhibition in London.

Richard Ormond, Sargent’s great nephew and a world authority on the artist notes that:
“.. the portrait remains one of Sargent's most compelling and original characterisations."
He observes: “Elsie appears hauntingly beautiful, dressed in a costume that is both picturesquely antique and stylishly modern.
The linen-fold panelling behind her plays up the feeling of past times and historical associations. Because she has not ‘come of age’, she wears her hair long, and her dress, as we can tell from a preliminary study, is ankle-length, another sign of her youth.” He further adds that the “... frontal and symmetrical pose is often to be found in pictures of the Madonna by Renaissance masters.”

The Exhibition also features many other items relating to the Palmer family’s stay at Ightham Mote, including replicas of Elsie’s dress and of Ellen Terry’s famous beetle- wing costume in which she played Lady Macbeth in 1888/89. But most importantly, there is a second major work by Sargent. While he was engaged on the great portrait of Elsie, he also produced a large canvas of bowls being played on the North, or ‘Bowling Green’, Lawn. This is a classic conversation piece distinguished by the portrayal of a group of people engaged in civilized conversation and genteel activity out of doors.

[A Game of Bowls, Ightham Mote, Kent by John Singer Sargent, 1889. Sotheby's New York]

Typically, the group comprises membersof the family (Queen and Elsie), with close friends (Alma Strettell; Violet, Sargent’s sister; and the Jamesons). Amusingly, it has often been taken to be a comment on English weather. The Hon. Sir Evan Charteris wrote of the scene in 1927: “Here he has caught English scenery, not at its best by any means, but in a grave and dreary mood, low in key and tone, but not lacking in truth either of colour or general effect. Moreover, the game goes forward as though the players themselves were affected by the opacity of the atmosphere.” Elsie recalled later that the ladies were all expected to wear hats. A Game of Bowls has been generously loaned to Ightham Mote for the Exhibition by Sotheby’s, New York, with the option to buy this fine work permanently for the house. An appeal has been launched to raise the necessary funds.

It would be wonderful if some of the History Girls were able to come to see Elsie and the Exhibition during the year, especially as Adèle Geras will be assisting Helen Craig, the creator of Angelina Ballerina, in an Angelina Ballerina and Henry workshop and trail. Helen is the great granddaughter of Ellen Terry, the fond friend of both Queen and Elsie, while her grandfather, Edward Gordon Craig, the famous theatre designer, was the childhood playmate of the three Palmer sisters during their stay at Ightham Mote.

[ from The Gardeners’ Chronicle, Saturday, February 2, 1889, pp.135-136]

Ightham Mote is open daily throughout the Exhibition. See here for full details: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/ightham-mote/openingtimes.

Philip Stott is Emeritus Professor in the University of London, where he taught at SOAS. Since his retirement, he has been a volunteer room guide and researcher at National Trust Ightham Mote. He has a long-term interest in early music and art. He is married to the historian and biographer, Anne Stott.

Spider's web. Photographer: Per Palmkvist Knudsen

Our village has recently seen the installation of a defibrillator, thanks to the amazing fundraising efforts of one young schoolboy. Living out in the country has its delights, but one downside is the life-threatening length of time it takes to get professional help in a medical emergency. This has always been a problem for rural communities, and farms have always been dangerous places, with many lethal implements like scythes, pitchforks, axes and ploughshares just lying in wait to cut deep into legs and hands. When faced with a bleeding wound, our medieval ancestors used a number of traditional remedies to try to staunch bleeding including cobwebs, wood ash, puffball spores, comfrey roots or a translucent, glass-like stone known as a kitkat. And many people today still advocate putting a cold iron key down the back to stop a nose bleed.

But though substances like cobwebs worked by aiding the blood’s natural clotting mechanism, they weren’t effective for heavy bleeding or where a wound kept re-opening and bleeding. So, that is when our forbears might have turned to a local blood-charmer. These were men or women who had the power to stop humans and animals bleeding, even at a distance, simply by holding a blood-stained bandage and reciting a charm over it. Some blood charmers required the blood-stained cloth to be taken back to the victim and tied over the wound which would stop it. But others could seemingly stop the blood as soon as they blessed the cloth.

'The Healing of the Bleeding Woman'

Catacombs of Marcellinus & Peter,

Rome. 4th Century CE

Writing in 1899, Baring-Gould claims that one of his own tenants had just such gift and that on one occasion a young farmhand slashed his leg with a scythe. The farmer dipped a handkerchief in the lad’s blood and sent a man galloping off on horseback four miles to the blood charmer who blessed it. The farmhand immediately stopped bleeding. Since, this blood-charmer could also heal other ailments, the local postman earned a few extra pennies by carrying rags blessed by her to sufferers in other villages on his rounds, but he was always careful to hold the handkerchief at arm’s length between finger and thumb, because if it was folded or put in his pocket the power would be drawn from it.

The museum in the infamous Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor, has an account of Jack Henry Cooper, aged 3, who on 11th May 1914, fell asleep in a meadow and lost his leg to a grass cutter. The child was rushed first to the blood-charmer to stop the bleeding before being taken on the bumpy and lengthy journey to Liskeard Hospital to have the wound dressed.

Throughout the Saxon period and the Middle Ages, healers and physicians, including monks and nuns, would apply a remedy to a patient such as a poultice of herbs, but as they were doing so they would sing or recite a charm or prayer. Doing the two together was thought to be vital in effecting a cure. In some cases, the remedy would be the laying on of hands or holding a smooth black toadstone over the person in order to direct or concentrate the power of the spoken charm or prayer.

But with the blood-charmers, it was the spoken charm itself that took on the greater significance.

Common puffball or Devil's Snuff-Box

Photographer: H.Krisp

During the Anglo-Saxon period, charms initially referred to both the pagan gods such as Woden and to figures from the Christianity. The names of the old gods gradually faded from the charms as the Middle Ages progressed. But what they all had in common was a reference to some miraculous event which the healer and patient would know well and which mirrored the magical effect the charmer wanted to achieve. Saxon or Norse blood-staunching charms might refer to some event in their mythology when a mighty river dried up or froze, or there was great drought, or a hero's horse had been healed, and the charm often ended with the promise that ‘blood shall not flow again from the wound till milk flows from a stone’.

This medieval charm which was used by blood-charmers from at least the 13th century right up until the 1900’s, creates this same kind of parallel –

'Christ was born in Bethlehem
Baptised in the River Jordan
The River stood
So shall thy blood (inserting the name of the victim). In the name, of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.'
The Baptism of Jesus from Hortus deliciarum. 1167-1185

This charm is based on an early medieval legend that when Jesus was baptised, the River Jordon miraculous stopped flowing.

Another medieval blood-charm which continued to be used long after the Reformation refers to the Roman solider, who by the Middle Ages had been come to be called St Longinus.

'Our Lord hung on the cross. Longinus struck him with the lance. Blood and water issued forth. Longinus raised his eyes and saw clearly. By the power which God showed Longinus, I conjure the veins and the blood that they flow no more.'

The full charm tells the story in more detail, and it is the recounting of this miracle, together with the clearly spoken statement of intent of the blood-charmer, that produces the second miracle –the staunching of the blood in the patient. Words and stories have great power.

Susannah Avery, writing in 1688, suggested that bleeding could be stopped by writing the name Veronica on the ball of the left thumb. This was linked to a 14th century legend that St Veronica, who wiped Christ’s face with a cloth, is the same woman who Jesus had early cured of an ‘issue of blood’. If that failed, Susannah suggested another charm that could be sung over the wound.

St Veronica

'When I was going to Jordan Wood
There was the blood and there it stood
So shall thy blood stay in thy body (here the patient was named)
I do bless thee in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.'

One charm recorded in 1928 in the Scottish Highlands had to be said by a woman to a man, and then repeated by a man to a woman, alternating until the patient’s bleeding stopped. The person reciting the charm had to hold their arms out as they spoke it.

'The charm of God the Great.
The free gift of Mary.
The free gift of God.
The free gift of every priest and churchman
The free gift of Michael the strong
That would put strength in the sun.'

In this last line there is lovely echo of the old gods who might originally be invoked in the blood-charm. And given the current crisis in our health service, it looks as if we will have to hope that blood-charmers among us still retain their powers.

by Caroline Lawrence

Readers of my Roman Mysteries books for kids know that I am obsessed with Roman medicine, the four humours, and apotropaic images that keep away sickness (and other bad things).

Children at schools I’ve visited will never forget my demonstration of how the Romans used a sponge-on-a-stick: ancient Roman toilet paper!

I have also blogged about other Roman health topics including Slimming Roman Style.

So I thought I knew pretty much all there was to know about Roman health and medicine in the first century CE.

Then, just a few days ago, I discovered Professor Helen King’s free online Open University course on Health and Wellbeing in the Ancient World. I have only completed one module but it was full of fascinating facts many of them new to me. Here are a few to whet your appetite.

1. The Romans considered unrequited love to be a kind of sickness. Catullus and Martial, among others, describe some of the symptoms: blushing, sweating, shivering, loss of appetite, stuttering and a buzzing in the ears.

2. Another symptom of lovesickness was a yellow or greenish tinge to the complexion. In fact, lovesickness was sometimes called chlorosis amatoria which means something like ‘love-greenness’. The greenish pallor was a result of an imbalance of one of the four humours, i.e. lack of blood.

3. If the patient’s greenish complexion, lack of appetite and buzzing ears didn’t give away their affliction, their pulse might. There are several ancient variations on the story of a doctor taking the patient’s pulse when a certain person (or message) arrives and the pulse begins to race. This is how the doctor deduces not only the sickness but its object. Sometimes the patient is male, sometimes female, but the cure is usually the obvious one: sex with the object of desire. (Read more HERE.)

4. When ancient Greeks and Roman doctors took a patient’s pulse, the didn't just note the speed but also the size, frequency, strength, fullness, order, equality and rhythm.

5. The second century CE physician Galen was a virtuoso pulse-taker. He once diagnosed a tumour purely by anomalies in the patient’s pulse. He described various types of pulses as ‘ant-like’, ‘wave-like’, ‘worm-like’ and ‘mouse-tailed’. A ‘goat’s pulse’ was a short beat and then a stronger one.

In the comments section of module 1 of Health and Wellbeing in the Ancient World, online students were asked to take their own pulses and tell which animal it resembled. The results are fascinating. One little girl likened her pulse to a monkey. Her older sister thought hers was a worm. Others described their pulse as a mouse: timid and shy; a goat, nibbling grass; a crocodile waiting to move; a cheetah: strong and fast; an elephant: slow and plodding; a butterfly: changeable, fluttering and somewhat irregular; a dog: faithful but excitable; a plodding carthorse; a stalking tiger and a squirrel eating a nut - nibbling steadily then pausing to observe the surroundings, then speeding up when a risk may be present…

My pulse was slow and soft but also strong and steady. (No love-sickness there, thank goodness!) At first I thought of a deer but it felt stronger than a doe: more confident. So I settled on stag. Yes. My pulse is ‘stag-like’.

How about you? Why not try it out HERE.

In fact, I encourage anybody interested in Greek and Roman Medicine to do the entire course. If you feel it's too late to catch up it is repeated in June.

Brava to Helen King and all her engaging and erudite colleagues!

Caroline Lawrence has written over twenty history-mystery books for kids set in Ancient Rome and is now working on a series set in Roman Britain. Adults might like them, too.

Yes, it really is a thing.

I used to consult The George Bernard Shaw Vegetarian Cookbook in the British Library but I have just acquired a battered second-hand copy of my own.

You probably know already that Shaw was a vociferous vegetarian, providing proof that you don’t have to eat flesh to maintain a vigorous presence in the world.

He converted to vegetarianism at the age of twenty-five, attributing the change to a line from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam:

‘Never again may blood of bird or beast
Stain with its venomous stream a human feast!’

Shaw claimed that these lines ‘opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet.’

He was the author of such memorable quotes as

‘A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows.’

‘Animals are my friends ... and I don't eat my friends.’
‘While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?’

He also pointed out the health benefits of a vegetarian diet, insisting that ‘the strongest animals, such as the bull, are vegetarians.’

He asked his readers to ‘Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground and it explodes into a giant oak! Bury a sheep and nothing happens but decay.’
He regularly argued that his own longevity and good looks could be put down to his eating habits. At sixty-eight, Shaw is said to have told his biographer Archibald Henderson: ‘I look my age; and I am my age. It is the other people who look older than they are. What can you expect from people who eat corpses and drink spirits?’

‘The average age,’ Shaw argued, ‘of a meat eater is 63. I am on the verge of 85 and still work as hard as ever. I have lived quite long enough and am trying to die; but I simply cannot do it. A single beef-steak would finish me; but I cannot bring myself to swallow it. I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism.’

And indeed Shaw himself lived to nearly ninety-five. He imagined that his funeral hearse would be drawn by herds of oxen, sheep, pigs, chickens ‘and a small travelling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honour of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures.’

Despite all this, it has been suggested that Shaw’s initial move away from meat might have simply been because he could not afford it as a jobless young man living with (and on an allowance from) a poor mother who supported them both by giving singing lessons. While spending his days at the British Library writing books that no-one initially wanted, Shaw found his pocket would stretch only to meals in a few Bloomsbury establishments that served vegetarian food.

Also, unfortunately, Shaw did not love vegetarianism enough to actual go into the kitchen and deal with vegetables. For the first seventeen years of his regime, it was his mother’s maid who prepared all his specialist meals.

Then, from 1898, his wife Charlotte supervised the kitchen that provided his food. Also a teetotaller, Shaw insisted that his no meat fat or wine were used in the making of his food. For forty-five years Charlotte made sure this was so in spite of the regular lavish entertaining of carnivores at their home. She also indulged his obsessive calorie-counting, for Shaw was always keen to preserve his lean figure.

But when Charlotte died, Shaw – then 87 – persuaded his wife’s nurse to stay on as his cook-housekeeper. Alice Laden, a widow from Aberdeen, had been married to a strict vegetarian. She had trained in the art of vegetarian cooking under the celebrated German chef Mrs Gompertz. Mrs Laden took some persuading to settle in the rather isolated Shaw residence at Ayot St Lawrence, but eventually the writer succeeded.

In times of rationing, it was difficult to track down the provender he required, so his Rolls Royce and his chauffeur were put at her disposal. She even went as far as London to find good fruit and vegetables for her employer, for diet was far from plain. Among the recipes in the book are Sweetcorn soufflé, Cheese and celery pie, Tomatoes à la Bengal.

Shaw had a greedy sweet tooth. His cook reported finding him many evenings with a jar of sugar, which he ate greedily by the spoonful. If it wasn’t sugar, it was honey. He also loved cake and chocolate biscuits.

Mrs Laden’s menus and recipes were gathered together and published in 1972 by R.J. Minney at the Garnstone Press. It is the Pan Books paperback edition that I own now, which is illustrated with charming cartoons of Shaw and his housekeeper.

The artist is not credited, sadly, as his work is fine and witty. My favourite shows Shaw sitting on a large mushroom writing in a notebook. In another, the writer absent-mindedly dips his pen in his glass of water, to the disgust of his housekeeper. He and Mrs Laden compete in a crawled egg and spoon race. Shaw monocycles on top of a giant whisk, takes a brisk country walk past a colony of garden gnomes that look very much like himself, dashes for an ice-cream van, shaves himself with a cheese grater – and helps himself to the whole cake, leaving Mrs Laden with only the slice she has offered him.

Michelle Lovric

Michelle Lovric's website

When you picture a highwaywoman, you probably think of something like this…

Margaret Lockwood as The Wicked Lady, 1945.

Or this…

Illustration by Eric Fraser from Folklore Myths and Legends, 1973.

We’re all familiar with the romantic folklore figure of the dashing highwayman – from Dick Turpin to Adam Ant, it’s an image that has excited the popular imagination for generations. It was certainly part of the attraction when I first started researching the legend of an infamous female highway robber, the Wicked Lady, for my novel, The Silvered Heart.

The story of Lady Katherine Ferrers is brimming with classic romance: the young, orphaned heiress, forced into a marriage of convenience, turns to a scandalous life of crime with her handsome lover. You can read about the legend and my take on it here. The myth is entertaining enough, but I wanted to explore the reality behind the romance, and I had to answer one question first: Were there really women working as highway robbers in the 17th century?

The concept of the gentlemen thief has been around for centuries, but the famous examples are all men, with swooning female accomplices – or victims – falling under their charismatic spell. I was convinced the reality could not be so neat. But is there any evidence?

As early as the 13th century, there are records of female robbers working the highways, usually as part of a gang or with their husbands. Whole families might make a living this way, with wives and children acting as lookouts or decoys. Sometimes women were more than just convenient bait. The Middlesex Session records, covering 1549-1688, contain several cases of women accused of ‘robbery with violence’. In one case of 1564, one woman was hanged for robbing another at Hammersmith, then no more than a village on the road out of London. But in most cases, the nature of these crimes is not elaborated.

Famous female criminals could certainly make a name for themselves. Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse, became a notorious, celebrated figure of the London underworld in the 17th century. She made a living through thievery, and other dubious activites, but stories of her career as a highwaywoman during the Civil Wars are almost certainly invention. The Newgate Calendar (a compilation of accounts of criminals and their crimes, published in the 18th century) claimed that Moll, a passionate Royalist...

‘went on the highway, committing many great robberies, but all of them on the Roundheads, or rebels, that fomented the Civil War against King Charles I … A long time had Moll Cutpurse robbed on the road; but at last, robbing General Fairfax of two hundred and fifty jacobuses on Hounslow Heath, shooting him through the arm for opposing her, and killing two horses on which a couple of his servants rode, a close pursuit was made after her by some Parliamentarian officers quartering in the town of Hounslow, to whom Fairfax had told his misfortune. Her horse failed her at Turnham Green, where they apprehended her, and carried her to Newgate.'

Moll would have been in her fifties by this time; an unlikely age to have taken up a such a risky and physically demanding enterprise, and there is no documentary evidence to support these flights of fancy, reported long after her death.

But there is evidence of women working as accomplices in highway robbery if we look hard enough. Susan, Lady Sandys, wife of infamous gentleman robber Sir George Sandys, was implicated in his crimes several times and charged twice, though she escaped her husband's eventual comeuppance. After his execution in 1618 it’s believed she continued to act as accomplice to her son and even, possibly, in her own right. A broadside ballad of 1626 describes her as the ‘wicked Lady wife’. Is this our first Wicked Lady of legend?

Indeed, the transgressive figure of the cross-dressing, lawless woman became a feature of sensationalist literature and broadside ballads of the Restoration period (perhaps explaining the exaggeration of Moll Cutpurse’s exploits). Richard Head’s novel of 1665, The English Rogue, tells the story of the fabulously monikered Meriton Latroon, and includes encounters with several such female robbers, all loose-moraled and sexually voracious. The book was a huge success, proving that the appeal of the gentleman thief was well established, but telling us more about the public appetite for scandalous, titillating content than it does about any real woman committing such crimes.

If we look to a later but more reliable source, the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1681 – 1800, there are around 300 transcripts reporting female highway robbers. Only one case, in 1744, involves a woman, heavily disguised, acting alone and on horseback, displaying all the expected attributes of the gentleman highwayman.

The accused, Ann Hecks, was eventually acquitted on insufficient evidence, but the sheer volume of other records suggests that this was probably not a one off. If this is the case in the 18th century, it follows that the same likely applies to earlier decades, especially during the anarchic years of the English Civil Wars, when people sometimes turned to a life of crime to make ends meet. The threads of evidence, though tenuous, stretch back through the centuries, suggest that highway robbery was not the realm of men alone.

But what of my Wicked Lady? What of Katherine Ferrers? Is it possible that a woman of aristocratic birth, finding herself poverty stricken and abandoned, with very little left to loose, might take matters into her own hands? On balance, I’d say yes. Is it likely? I’ll leave that to my readers to decide.

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Who do you think you are?

By Antonia Senior

Despite my profound and enduring love for history, I have never been particularly interested in genealogy. But a recent email from my American cousin uncovered a story so interesting that I want to share it. It has been haunting me. Forgive the self-indulgence.

The email from Neal, my mother’s sister’s boy told me that an amateur genealogist in Massachusetts has completed a wide and arching family tree, and added Neal and I at the bottom of it. Our mothers were O’Donovans, and grew up in rural Cork. The line on that side of my tree is a mingling of O’Donovans and O’Briens going back generations, as cousins married cousins to keep what land there was in the family.

I knew of the two famous branches. My Grandfather’s cousin was Tom Barry, who was a famous guerrilla commander in the Irish War of Independence. Another claimed cousin was Frank O’Connor, the short story writer, whose real name was Michael O’Donovan. On reading his autobiography, I discovered he loathed the boozy, brawly O’Donovans, but I shall continue to claim him. On those black doubtful nights when I question my path, knowing that there is a renowned and brilliant author on my tree is a solace.

Frank O'Connor: a reluctant relative

Tom Barry: Taken from his book, Guerrilla Days in Island

But reading through the email from Massachusetts, a nugget leapt out of the pages. On an O’Brien line, there were the sons of my O’Brien great-grandmother’s sister. On one of them, there was one line and no lower branches: Donal O’Brien. Executed in Cork gaol in 1921.

There were no dates. Just this one, bald line. I asked my mother. She recognised lots of names from that side of the family, including Donal’s siblings. She knew of Donal’s brother, Paddy O’Brien, who commanded the IRA volunteers from Liscarrol, their village. But she had never heard of Donal.

I went looking for him.

Donal and his brother Paddy were on the run in 1921, and staying with other republicans in a safe house in County Cork. The Black and Tans discovered their location and surrounded the house. Paddy shot his way out, but Donal and another man from Liscarrol, Jack Reagan, were wounded and captured by the British.

After a military trial, Donal and Jack were sentenced to death. From rootling about in newspaper clippings and the archives, it seems that execution of that sentence was delayed until their wounds healed. Clearly, Donal’s wounds healed first, and he was shot by a British firing squad. Jack Reagan was luckier. Indeed, my Mum remembers him and his wife living in Liscarrol when she was growing up. Perhaps his wounds festered on until after the ceasefire in July 1921.

I found a report, and picture from the 1948 commemoration book for the executed volunteers, which is kept at Cork gaol – now part of the University.

Despite the disconnect on the names – I am pretty sure this his him, as his birthplace and timing of death fit. He was only 19 when he was executed. Do you get the impression that the big moustache was an attempt to look older? The face behind it looks so young, and so serious of intent. How did his older brother Paddy feel, after escaping the ambush and leaving his wounded younger brother behind? What about their Mother, my Great-Aunt?

My novelists’ instincts, such as they are, are abuzz with all the unanswerable questions from which plots spring.

So tell me, fellow History Girls, who is in your tree?

The heroine of The Girl in the Glass Tower, Arbella Stuart, spent a number of years until her death in captivity at the Tower of London. The Tower of my title refers in part to this but also to her virtual imprisonment during her youth at Hardwick Hall, famously dubbed 'more glass than wall', by a contemporary wag. Poor Arbella was fated to live a life of almost permanent detainment, punctuated only by her increasingly dramatic attempts at escape, because she had the misfortune to be born with a claim to the English throne Alas, there would be no escape from her final detention and the Tower of London casts a long shadow over my novel.

I was invited recently to give a talk at the Tower and rather than just discuss my most recent heroine I thought it would be apt to highlight some of the many women for whom the Tower was the defining site in their lives, either as their place of execution or imprisonment. It was the advent of the Tudors, an upstart family who had to keep a tight reign on any potential usurpers, that saw a spate of women meeting their brutal ends on Tower Green.

The stories of Henry VIII's wives have proved endlessly fascinating, inspiring an apparently endless stream of novels and films. This is probably because the sheer barbarity of their treatment at the hands of a despotic husband horrifies us but also resembles the kind of dark fairy tales we were raised on. However there were few happy endings if you were inconvenient to Henry. We all know of Anne Boleyn, committed to death on trumped up charges of adultery and incest, waiting interminable days for the arrival of the French executioner who would dispatch her with a sword rather than the more traditional axe. This was considered a merciful concession from her husband as a sword was meant to be a painless way to go.

On my way to give the talk I wandered though the cobbled lanes of the Tower after dark, the grey stone buildings looming, an air of intimidation hanging over the place, and it was brought home to me just how that young woman might have felt facing a death so sudden and unjust: one moment the feted Queen, the next a head rolling into a bucket. How might little Catherine Howard, the other of Henry's queens executed for adultery, have felt, still a teenager, when she asked for the block to be brought to her on the eve of her execution, so she could practice placing her head correctly?

It is the stuff of horror stories and we feel that kind of barbarity is far, far removed from our lives now but it is deeply shocking to remember that there are still parts of the world in which adultery is punishable by execution, or more specifically, death by stoning. When we remember a woman like Margaret Pole, one of the last true Plantagenets and deemed a threat to Tudor supremacy, it forces us to confront the reality of past practices to which we must never return, the like of which still persist in in some cultures. Margaret Pole was condemned aged sixty eight, by Henry VIII, and dispatched on Tower Green in a botch job of monstrous proportions. A horrified eye witness described her execution as being performed by ‘a wretched and blundering youth who literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in the most pitiful manner.’

And there is Jane Grey, the seventeen-year-old who died, becoming a poster girl for the Protestant cause. It is deeply shocking to think of her age – were she alive now she'd have been studying for her A Levels – still a child really. Reading accounts of her execution affected me profoundly, partly because my own daughter was of a similar age at the time, and provided the inspiration for the opening scenes of my 2014 novel Sisters of Treason. Jane went to the block with extraordinary poise, buoyed up by her faith, no sense of the fear that must have roiled beneath her surface. She had been the victim of her Tudor blood, pushed onto the throne in the name of scheming ambition on the part of the men around her. Her reign lasted only a few days before her cousin, Mary Tudor, raised an army, pushed her out, locked her up and executed the men behind her. But in the end she too was deemed too great a threat to be allowed to live.

Jane was not alone in discovering that Tudor blood could be more curse than blessing. She had two younger sisters, who lived in the dark shadow of her fate. The older, Katherine Grey, was to also experience incarceration in the Tower. Katherine had committed the crime of marrying without Queen Elizabeth's permission – with royal blood this was treason. She was twenty-one years old and heavily pregnant with the child that came out of that secret marriage, when she was thrown in the Tower. Elizabeth, whose position was by no means stable at that point, moved quickly to have the marriage deemed illegal, making the son who was born soon after, illegitimate. Elizabeth was right to be paranoid as that boy would have had a strong claim to the throne, and being male, might well have proved to be an insurmountable threat to her position.

Katherine Grey ended up, not under the flash of the executioners axe, but bringing on her own grim and painful end through self-starvation. To die through the refusal of food was not considered suicide, which perhaps explains such an action in the context of a culture bound by religious codes. It might also explain why, in a strange and morbid repetition, this was also the means by which Arbella Stuart finally brought about her own death. It was ultimately for her, in a life of attempted escapes and with her sanity wearing thin, the only possible means of escape from the Tower's menacing walls.

Elizabeth Fremantle's novels The Girl in the Glass Tower, about Arbella Stuart, and Sisters of Treason, about Jane Grey and her sisters, are published by Penguin.

On Tuesday May 8th 1900 a group of Japanese travellers sailed into Liverpool and that afternoon stepped through the great Doric arch out of Euston Station in London. They’d been on the road for over a year and had performed in theatres across America, from San Francisco to New York.

Otojiro (left) and Sadayakko (centre) Kawakami

They were the first professional Japanese theatre troupe ever to visit the west and the first to visit England. The Japanese actors whom W S Gilbert had seen in the Knightsbridge Village, who famously inspired The Mikado, had been travelling players, not professional actors.

This was the era of the great actresses - ‘The Divine Sarah’ (Sarah Bernhardt), Ellen Terry, Gabrielle Réjane and Eleanora Duse. But the Japanese troupe had a diva of their own, who had already thrilled audiences across the United States: the beautiful Sadayakko, an exquisite dancer, actress and musician and until recently the most celebrated geisha in Japan.

London was the capital of the richest, most powerful nation on earth and the hub of its vast empire. The real test was to make their mark there. Despite their success they were hovering on the verge of bankruptcy. In Boston they had met the great actor Henry Irving and he had given them letters of introduction but it was still two weeks before they could put on their first performance, during which time they had no income. To make matters worse they had to keep up the illusion of being rich celebrities and ran up debts at an alarming rate.

They finally opened at the Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill, a distant rather slummy suburb of London, on May 22 1900. Londoners had never seen anything like the colourful, almost wordless dramas they showed, with athletic swordplay, jujitsu-like fights, humour, split second costume changes, gorgeous scenery and above all Sadayakko’s ethereal beauty, mesmerising dancing and shattering death scene. To put together their plays, they had taken sections of kabuki dramas which in Japan began at dawn and went on till nightfall and cut them to thirty minutes and cut out nearly all the Japanese dialogue which was incomprehensible to their audience. They issued an English language synopsis so the audience would know what was going on.

The Geisha and the Knight Act II

At first the plays were just too outlandish for the supercilious London critics. Of the Japanese music - the plink plink of the shamisen, a kind of banjo, and the wailing singing - one critic wrote, ‘No words could do justice to its horrors, besides which the efforts at cacophony of the domestic pussy cat on the roof are paltry.’

At the time Japonisme was at its height. The rich and fashionable collected woodblock prints, blue and white porcelain and netsuke, so they were prepared to appreciate the aesthetic nature of Japanese culture. ‘In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention,’ Oscar Wilde had written in 1889. ‘There is no such country, there is no such people. The Japanese people are simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.’

'The Henry Irving of Japan' and 'The Ellen Terry of Japan'
'This famous couple are appearing at the Coronet Theatre.'
The Sketch May 23 1900

Soon Sadayakko’s beauty, exquisite dancing and heart-felt acting had captured their imaginations. ‘Sada Yacco is certainly one of the most enchanting ladies at present appearing on the London stage,’ The Morning Post enthused.

The Welsh symbolist poet and theatre critic, Arthur Symons, was stunned by her death scene in The Geisha and the Knight. It was unthinkable even to compare the new Japanese arrival with the all-conquering Sarah Bernhardt. But Symons went further. ‘It is death as not even Sarah Bernhardt has shown us death,’ he wrote.

The troupe was so successful and so celebrated that they were invited to perform before Edward, Prince of Wales, at the home of the Bischoffsheim banking dynasty in Mayfair on Wednesday June 27th.

Cast list for the Kawakami
troupe's performance in Germany

Sadayakko remembered that the Prince of Wales greeted her and said to her through an interpreter, ‘I’m very happy to have been able to see this oriental art from such a distant land. This is thanks to you. What a long journey you have had!’ - a comment irresistibly reminiscent of our own dear monarch’s enquiries as to whether one has come far. Maybe it’s in the instruction book for royalty to mention the distance one’s petitioners have come.

Sadayakko later recorded her opinion of the British. Having enjoyed the company of the outgoing Americans, she found the British in contrast ‘haughty and unsociable.’ On the positive side there was plenty of whisky and even ladies drank and smoked quite openly in public. She also noticed - as an excellent horsewoman herself - that British women were ‘very good at horse riding.’

The day after performing for the Prince of Wales the troupe left for Paris, where the 1900 Paris Expo was in full swing. Under a new manageress, the American dancer Loie Fuller, their performances proved a sensation. Rodin begged to sculpt her (she was too busy) and André Gide declared her ‘as great as Aeschylus.’

When they returned to London for a second visit in 1901, it was as superstars. This time they performed at the magnificent Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus, right in the heart of the city.

The wit, essayist and parodist Max Beerbohm mused, ‘What is the secret of Sarah’s appeal to us? Why do our hearts go out to Sada Yacco? Why is Réjane enchanting? If I, Paris-like, were called on to decide which of these three goddesses was most admirable, the apple would (I think) be adjudicated to Sada Yacco.’

More - far more - was to come, including a meeting in Paris with a young artist called Pablo Picasso, who did four paintings of her, dinner with the ill-fated Tsar Nikolai II in St Petersburg, and an encounter in Milan with the composer Giacomo Puccini, who modelled his Madama Butterfly on her. And thus she found immortality of sorts.

Lesley Downer's new novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is published by Bantam. Find more information on her website, http://www.lesleydowner.com/

by Marie-Louise Jensen

The German phrase Lügenpresse has come into use again in the last few years with the renewed rise of the far right across the world. This is a term that can be easily searched for and found online, but I thought it was worth bringing up here to highlight how insidious and loaded a term it really is.

The term first surfaced in Germany in the 19th Century and first became widely used around1848, by Catholics as a response to an increasingly liberal and hostile press. It was used again to describe the enemy propoganda in WW1. And, most infamously, it was an anti-democracy cry used by the Nazis during their rise to power in the 1930s.
It fitted with the Nazi conspiracy theory that the Jews secretly ran the country and press and were lying to the German people for their own ends. The effects of this propoganda and stirring up of hatred are too well known to be repeated here - millions died horribly as a result.
Naturally, once Hilter and his party had seized power, they no longer used this term. Ironic, given that the Nazis' entire news and education network was one big barage of propoganda and lies.

By Opposition24.de [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

It is disturbing to see the term on the rise again. With the loss of faith in the establishment in the Western world - some would say as a consequence of the rise in inequality and the resentment that brings - the press has also come under attack. In Germany, the term Lügenpresse has come into use again in connection with the rise of Pegida, the anti-islamic movement in Germany. Pegida has mainly gained traction in the former East Germany, where there has been lower immigration and historically less positive engagement with coming to terms with Germany's fascist past than in the West. Althought Pegida claims to be a peaceful movement, there is little doubt the agenda is far right, and it is also a fact that journalist covering the marches have had to take security with them after a number of their colleagues were physically attacked.
Germany declared the term taboo in 2015. In a country still troubled by its past, the rise in a Nazi slogan was disturbing.
The word's connection to its historical past becomes all the clearer when it is observed in the rise of Trump in the USA. In the final weeks of the campaign, the term Lügenpresse was shouted at rallies and meetings by the alt-right. It was even accompanied in places by the Nazi salute and shouts of 'Hail Trump'. The fact that these groups can knowingly adopt a Nazi term that has inherent anti-semitic assosciations is deeply troubling. Considering the realaxed relationship the American alt-right and indeed to a lesser extent parts of the British right-wing press have with truthful reporting, it is pretty steep that they level this accusation. But whatever your political views, it's generally accepted that a free press is an essential ingredient for a democracy.
Words have power. It is so important to know their history so we can combat them.

Well, I have to admit it - this month I've been caught on the hop. My day for posting is next week, when I'm going to be away; and various projects are at that stage where they've needed my attention, and I've no spare time before we go, so - what to do?

I thought about writing a review of a wonderful book I've just read - 'The Heroes' Welcome', by Louisa Young, a former History Girl; but then I discovered there already is a very excellent one by Mary Hoffman - here.

So I'm going to post a little section from a story I've written. It's based on the experiences of my father as a prisoner of war for five years in Poland. I tried to find a bit that was set in March, to make it a bit more relevant, but unbelievably, I found that I described several Christmases but no early springs. Wouldn't you just know it? So this is a bit from close to the end, where Harry, my hero, has come home. He finds that there's a street party in his honour - but, like many returning soldiers, including those in 'The Heroes' Welcome', he's not exactly in the party mood.

***

This was Fallingbostel, the camp from which my father was liberated after being marched across Europe from Poland. He said an American tank drove straight through the gates. But I don't think he was one of these prisoners - they look pretty well-fed, so probably hadn't been in captivity for long.

From An Ordinary War

After that it was all very quick. Those who had been prisoners longest were taken first: driven to an Allied camp, showered, de-loused, issued with sparkling new uniforms, then taken to an airfield where they were loaded into Dakotas, thirty at a time, and flown back to England.

That was it. It was over.

Some weeks later, after a spell in hospital to sort out some of the damage that near-starvation, not to mention Fleischer’s boots, had done to his insides, Harry was issued with a ticket to Nottingham. He crossed the city to reach the bus station and was mildly surprised to find that there were still buses running; he’d thought he might have to walk the eight miles to Ilkeston. He felt a little bewildered as he gazed from the window of the bus: how was it that so little had changed here? He’d expected bomb damage – London had been almost flattened – but here there was none. He got off at

Nottingham Road

and walked up

Cavendish Road

, past the school, past rows of houses. Then he halted, confused. There was some sort of party going on outside his house – tables, bunting, banners. He didn’t want to interrupt anything. He looked round uncertainly. A man was leaning against a gate, smoking.

“What’s going on here?” said Harry, jerking his thumb towards the festivities.

“Oh, it’s all in aid of some bloke who’s coming home from the war,” said the man. “Been a prisoner for five years. Bit of a hero, so they say.”

“Really?” said Harry faintly.

Then he saw a small woman coming out of his house. Her grey hair was pinned up in a bun, and her dark eyes, so like his own, met his. He began to walk towards her. Then he started to run.

After five long years, he was home.

That night, as he bent down to kiss his mother goodnight, she reached out, put her hands on his shoulders, and gazed at him searchingly.

“Harry,” she said. “What was it really like? Was it very bad?”

He thought for a moment. Where to start? What to tell her? But he already knew it wasn’t possible. He couldn’t put it into words, didn’t even want to.

And so he began the long lie. “No,” he said, with a little smile that tried, unsuccessfully, to draw attention away from the bleakness in his eyes. “It wasn’t too bad at all, not really.”

As he turned away to climb the stairs, he sneezed, and he realised he had the beginnings of a sore throat. And it struck him that in all those long five years, he hadn’t caught a single cold. Not one.

When visiting friends and family come to see us, we can take them to several local places: Fountains Abbey, Brimham Rocks, Bolton Abbey or Sutton Bank and the North York moors, and so on and so on.Yet I rarely take visitors to what was – or is – one of the treasures of Harrogate town: the famous Turkish Baths.

As you can imagine, one must know one’s guests rather well before suggesting a session in such steamy surroundings.

However, as a good long-time friend was staying, it seemed the right moment to try a trip to the Baths. It was a while since I’d been there and that was when nudity was the expected dress code. However, following what were referred to as “improper incidents” during some sessions - none that I attended - the baths were discreetly rehabilitated and redecorated rather than being demolished or re-purposed.

Now, over the phone, staff gently suggested that swimsuits are optional and as there were several available in the back of my wardrobe, this eased matters. And swimsuits definitely were the chosen style all round that day, although on other occasions, one could certainly try for authenticity.

The Turkish Baths were created in 1897, as one part of the huge and imposing complex of treatment rooms known as the Royal Baths. This Victorian edifice was created by a consortium of local hoteliers and business men, keen to attract a better class of visitor to their new Borough.

I can’t help feeling a little grieved that over the last decades, the Council has sold off several sections of this distinctive building. The Winter Gardens are now occupied by Wetherspoons – though that is still graced by a grand staircase – while the magnificent assembly rooms have become a grand Chinese restaurant, and are therefore no longer available to general sightseers searching for past history.

When the Baths were the Baths, guests – or patients - entered the grand foyer with its octagonal mahogany “serving” counter, and the black marble columns supporting the magnificent domed roof overhead. Then, after disrobing in either the Parliament or Montpelier rooms, the patients were could take the famed waters. (Though one sees bottled Harrogate Water everywhere now, the original well, before it was sealed, had a horridly sulphurous quality and a particularly strong effect.)

Pump Room Museum

Back then, the waters were drunk, or bathed in or used for a great variety of other hydropathic health treatments, of which – if one studies the photographs in the Pump Room Museum - the Turkish Baths certainly seems the most relaxing.

The setting of the baths is still quite lovely, full of Islamic arches, screens and alcoves, all decorated with the original richly patterned tiles.

After showering, one progresses between the three heated chambers – the warm Tepidarium, the intermediate Calidarium, and the hottest room, the Laconium.

The plunge Pool, courtesy of TripAdvisor

The dry air grows hotter and hotter and the tiled floor is soon almost too hot to bear. One can dream in the swirling mists of the steam room, take a warm or cool shower or take a dip in the cold plunge pool - an experience which may be authentic and traditional, but is not one I’d suggest at all: I consider it an option, not an obligation.

While I lay there toasting - and hoping my guest wasstill resting on one of the white couches in the relaxation room - I could not help thinking of and admiring the bolder travels and expeditions of other History Girls, those who are off seeking sites of distant caravansera, hammams and bathhouses. all far more ancient than this Victorian re- creation.

I must add that my guest and I were so rested we were barely able to stagger uphill to Betty's for afternoon tea and toasted tea-cakes.

Penny Dolan

Past Imperfect? Selling children's historical fiction to a modern audience

Roman Nine Muses frieze, Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons

This was the title of a very successful meeting at the Society of Authors in London on 16th March. It was organised by Sue Reid of Histeria, a group of writers of historical fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults.

The panel of professionals, ably chaired by Kevin Crossley-Holland, consisted of Sarah Odedina (formerly Children's Publisher at Bloomsbury and Hot Key and now with Pushkin Children's Books); Ruth Logan (ex-Bloomsbury and now Rights Director at Hot Key) and Dawn Finch (Librarian and President of CILIP)

This is my account of the meeting. Sadly, Marketing was not represented, as the result of a last minute cancellation but the experience and skills of this panel were considerable. Kevin, currently the Honorary President of the School Library Association, is a poet, novelist, opera librettist and translator, who has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Book Award with historical fiction for children.

Photo credit: Mjosefsson Creative Commons

In his opening remarks on the importance of history and story, Kevin quoted Hilary Mantel: "To live in the present without engaging with the past is like being a dog or a cat, bobbing along on a sea of egotism and ignorance."

He also read us, complete with cold, W H Auden's Roman Wall Blues, which begins

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

to remind us of the importance of vesting story in individual people - a theme which was frequently returned to in the course of the evening.

He then asked each panellist for a short overview of whether historical fiction for children is in crisis.

Dawn Finch (DF) began by saying that it was a common belief that it went in and out of fashion in children's publishing but she believed that the kind of child who reads historical fiction is a wider reader anyway. She felt that the teaching of history in schools was focussed on differences whereas fiction took the opposite approach.

Sarah Odedina (SO) was reluctant to consider historical fiction as separate from any other form of great storytelling. She cited Celia Rees's Witch Child, which was successful primarily because of a compelling central character.

Ruth Logan (RL), who has to sell translation rights, frequently speaks to scouts and has found the popular periods to be the Holocaust, Ancient Greece and Rome, the Slave Trade, the two World Wars, maybe the French Revolution. "But nothing works without a wonderful story."

Kevin Crossley-Holland (K C-H) said we needed to "step into the heads and hearts" of our characters. He wanted to know if we were doing enough ruthlessly to expose children to today's realities. Or were just concentrating on SF and fantasy.

RL: Fantasy is "Future Historical."

DF thought that in times or Recession and Depression readers want SF and nostalgia.

SO believes that Historical Fiction can allow the author to present a mirror to the world and show political realities in an apparently safe and distant past. It has a role in mediating the present through the past.

RL thought it wasn't just a matter of period: there is a market for the mix of history with a magical or fantastic element.

Martin Reid of the Society of Authors asked a question on behalf of a member who could not attend, Ilona Aronovsky. This was about who are the heroes and villains of history, since history is contentious.

K C-H said that recent literature had taken a Marxist view of telling stories "from the bottom up." It began with Bows against the Barons by Geoffrey Trease.

SO thought there was still a problem with telling the stories of certain people and not others. What is "our point of view"?We could do with more experimentation in form.

RL thought it was an exciting time with all kinds of different voices but SO thought there was still a white male bias although it was being challenged. And SO thought the publishing industry was really trying.

DF thought that historians might fear we were diluting history by giving alternative versions but history is not a science. When she grew up everyone "knew" that Tutankhamun was murdered and that Shakespeare invented Richard the Third's curved spine.

RL says it must open the imagination of the child and SO said it must humanise history.

Rus Madon asked about which historical writing was more accessible for which age range of readers. But SO repeated that historical fiction was no more difficult than any other literature. It all came back to compelling stories.

DF referenced the National Curriculum and said that 7-11 year-olds were studying Greeks, Romans and Egyptians and wanted immediacy and glamour - big themes. By eleven they will have studied the 1930s. And RL talked about the importance of the book's jacket. DF agreed and said it was the whole package - after all "who goes into a restaurant without reading the menu first?"

K C-H asked how much publishing was curriculum driven and SO said she never thinks about that and didn't even know what was on the curriculum! This was widely welcomed.

DF asked the publishers if fiction set in the Victorian period sold well, mentioning that it hadn't been on the curriculum for many years. And RL said they would mention to Sales Reps if the subject was on the curriculum.

Candy Gourlay mentioned cultural appropriation and asked if it meant she should write only about Philipino characters and situations. SO could sympathise with the position when she received submissions where the author hadn't close experience of the group he was writing about.

RL said it was about opening doors.

This was the night that the Carnegie and Greenaway Medal shortlists were announced and K C-H asked when a historical novel was last shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal but was reminded that Tanya Landman's Buffalo Soldier wasx a recent winner.

Catherine Johnson, author of Princess Carabou, Sawbones etc. said the problem wasn't prizes but sales. It's harder to sell "alternative voices" overseas, where publishers often wanted a Downton Abbey or Quality Street view of British history.

Battle of the Somme, Downton Abbey Series 2

RL said we must look at books which transcend the period.Not having an Elizabethan on the cover is a good idea. SO agreed that sales were hard but ALL sales were hard. Far too much is published - fantasy, contemporary and dystopian fiction were all equally hard.

There was a question about when "history" begins - something we have discussed a lot on the History Girls. The usual definition is that historical fiction must be set at least a generation ago.

SO added that to a ten year old anything that happened twenty years ago is unimaginable.

Lydia Syson asked about the role of school librarians as the greatest champions of historical fiction. DF was the obvious panellist to talk about this and said that no-one read more than a school librarian. She had read forty books this year already. Parents were difficult to persuade to part with £7.99 for a book.

Linda Edwardes-Evans said that unfortunately many teachers did not read themselves and the books they were using with children were not recent. DF gave a shout out to Barrington Stoke's list with a lot of historical fiction in it. Their catalogue would reach teachers. She believed every school needed a "book expert" even if not a librarian.

There was a question about comedy in historical fiction and all the panel agreed we needed more funny books - full stop!

K C-H mentioned we hadn't touched on the influence of TV and series like A Game of Thrones. And RL added films like The Pirates of the Caribbean.

After a brief discussion about poetry, which might be adding another difficult dimension to presenting titles to the Sales teams, K C-H asked us all to nominate favourite recent historical novels.

This followed on from SO's rallying cry that you should publish only the books you felt passionate about.

My choice was Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. Someone chose Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve. Following Ophelia by Sophia Bennett was Catherine Johnson's choice and someone else called out Morris Gleitzman's books and Eve Ibbotson's Journey to the River Sea.

The panel's choices were Catherine Johnson's own Princess Carabou, Celia Rees's Witch Child and Sally Gardner's Maggot Moon.

Kevin talking to Margaret Pemberton before the panel

Thanks to Celia Rees for swapping posting days with me; Celia will post on 1st April

And thanks to Jo McCrum and the team at the Society of Authors for hosting the Histeria event.

Back in 2009, I wrote my second novel, The Unseen. It was set in Berkshire during the long, hot summer of 1911, when England was poised on the brink of the huge social changes the First World War would bring. The fight for women's suffrage was already well underway, and my central character, Cat, is an intelligent young woman from London who is forced, by her low birth, to work in service - and to take a job in a rural backwater when her political activism makes her all but unemployable. Her struggle to make life better for herself and her fellows draws her, reluctantly, into the sphere of a charismatic spiritualist, and into a series of strange misadventures that lead, ultimately, to murder...

The story, which also deals with the influence of spiritualism and new eastern philosophies like Theosophy on established religious thought forms - these latter embodied by a very naive young vicar - was partly inspired by the case of the Cottingley Fairies. In 1917, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two schoolgirls living in Cottingley, West Yorkshire, took a series of photographs of what they claimed were real fairies. These famous pictures had always fascinated me – when I was younger because I liked to think that the fairies were real, and as I grew up because the hoax (or alleged hoax!) lasted as long as it did, and managed to convince several prominent and well-respected figures of the age, including the leading theosophist Edward Gardner and, most famously of all, the author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Elsie Wright, pictured in 1917 with one of the 'fairies' at Cottingley

So why were these rational, intelligent men so prepared to accept that the pictures were genuine? To sceptical, modern eyes, the photos look very staged indeed. Rather than appearing to be wild, elemental creatures, the fairies have neat, fashionable hair styles and slip dresses; they appear two dimensional, perfect, and doll-like. Photography experts at the time confirmed that the pictures had not been taken as double exposures, and that nothing had been painted or printed onto the negatives after exposure. One even testified that in one picture of the fairies dancing, they seemed to have moved during the exposure – proof positive that they were real, and animated. Or perhaps, that a light and flimsy paper figure had shifted slightly in a breeze…

Leading theosophist, Edward L. Gardner

The answer to why the photos convinced these men becomes evident when you read the letters that passed between Edward Gardner and Conan Doyle, the articles about the case which Conan Doyle wrote for Strand Magazine, and his later book The Coming of the Fairies. They believed because they so desperately wanted to believe. For Gardner and Conan Doyle, fairies were part of a hierarchy of nature spirits and ethereal beings, in turn a part of the ‘universal soul’ that lies at the centre of theosophy. Only the truly enlightened, or the naturally clairvoyant, would be able to see these pure beings. As such, their existence proved the tenants of theosophy, or the ‘Divine Truth’, to be true.

But sightings of fairies didn’t always fit the theosophical model so neatly, and in The Coming of the Fairies, Conan Doyle clearly wrestles with the details of some reported cases. One Mrs Hardy, living in New Zealand, described seeing fairies riding around her garden on little fairy horses. This was not the only account of fairy horses that Conan Doyle had come across, but he admitted that such descriptions made things “more complicated and harder to understand.” If they had miniature horses, then, as Conan Doyle writes, “why not dogs?” At this point, the fairies stopped being the essence of nature made visible in bodies less dense than air, and became the ‘little people’ of childhood stories. So perhaps what made the Cottingley fairies so attractive, from a theosophical point of view, was that they had been seen by virginal young girls, often thought to possess a natural clairvoyance; that they were seen in an area of unspoilt natural beauty; and that they showed no complicated behaviour or equipment that interfered with the idea that they were indeed manifestations of pure natural energy.

The number of ghost and fairy sightings, and the popularity of theosophy and spiritualism from the late Victorian era right the way through the Edwardian, shows that people at the time were very keen to believe in an ‘other world’ of some kind – either the world of the spirits of the dead, with which a medium could communicate; or on a grander scale, in a whole pantheon of spirits of various types and powers. Perhaps, as some writers believe, these beliefs came to fill a void that was left behind at a time when new discoveries were encroaching on religious faith. Darwin’s theory of evolution was gaining ground, and undermining the traditional Christian explanation of the origins of mankind. Science, medicine and rationalism had left some people with serious doubts about the church’s teachings, and yet the world was still full of wonders – from electricity to anaesthesia – that remained beyond most people’s understanding. Spiritualism stepped into this gap. In short, people still wanted to believe in something – in some supernatural driving force; and if that were no longer God, then they would look for alternatives.

The fairy 'sunbath' or 'bower' photo, which Frances insisted, to her dying day, was genuine.

It was this desire to believe that was my starting point as I began to shape the story of The Unseen. I started to wonder why different people might believe, and what their various reactions to the possibility of fairies living at the bottom of the garden might be; and also why somebody might be prepared to assemble a hoax to help convince the sceptics. Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths admitted in later life that their photos had been faked, and taken with the help of paper cut outs. The high-profile attention they received had made it impossible for them to confess at the time. But to her dying day, Frances insisted that there had been fairies at Cottingley, and that the final picture they took, of the fairy bower, was genuine. Using a fake to prove that something is real…a fascinating idea that I carried into my book!

Frances Griffiths with 'the leaping fairy'.

The history of the Chartist movement in England is widely known and well documented. Less well known, perhaps, is the Chartist movement in Scotland, and the trial which took place in Edinburghin November, 1848, of three of its leaders.

1848 Paris

The year, 1848, was one which shook the foundations of society throughout Europe, and came to be known as ‘the year of revolutions’. Starting in France, a series of uprisings spread through more than fifty countries, sparked off by a sustained period of agricultural failures and unemployment. Generally started by a loose and unsustainable alliance of the middle and working classes, they sought to overthrow the long established power of the old European aristocracies and promote more widespread democracy.

1848 Poland - slaughter of aristocrats

Tens of thousands died. Although the wider aims of the movements were not achieved, there were some victories, such as the abolition of serfdom in Hungaryand Austria, and the establishment of more democratic forms of government in some countries.

1848 Serbia

The roots of Chartism in Britain, however, lay ten years earlier. The Reform Act of 1832 not having satisfied widespread demands for reform to the rights to vote and to stand for election, in 1837 six working men and six members of Parliament formed a committee which in 1838 produced the People’s Charter, a document which set out the six fundamental principles of Chartism. These were:

A vote for every man twenty-one years of age, of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for a crime.
A secret ballot to protect the elector in the exercise of his vote.
No property qualification for Members of Parliament in order to allow the constituencies to return the man of their choice.
Payment of Members of Parliament, enabling tradesmen, working men, or other persons of modest means to leave or interrupt their livelihood to attend to the interests of the Nation.
Equal constituencies, securing the same amount of representation for the same number of electors, instead of allowing less populous constituencies to have as much or more weight than larger ones.
Annual Parliamentary elections, thus presenting the most effectual check to bribery and intimidation, since no purse could buy a constituency under a system of universal manhood suffrage in each twelve-month period.

The movement was thus intended to achieve its aims by constitutional means, and not by means of the violence employed during the 1848 uprisings in continental Europe, when many aristocrats were ruthlessly slaughtered, and the rebellions were put down with equal ruthlessness.

In Britain, following the publication of the Charter, enormous mass rallies were held, particularly in the north of England, in the industrial Midlands, in the south Walesmining valleys, and in Glasgow. Millions of people signed petitions in support of the Chartist aims.

Presenting the 1842 petition to Parliament

Popular support was further increased by a flood of Chartist newspapers and pamphlets, and by many of its early leaders the Charter was seen as a means to improve the living conditions of the working classes. Chartism was a ‘knife and fork, a bread and cheese question’, according to one of them, Joseph Rayner Stephens. However, there were others who advocated more extreme methods of achieving political reform, and their activities caused serious alarm amongst the authorities, who were not unmindful of matters in the rest of Europe. Stephens himself was arrested and imprisoned for taking part in an unlawful assembly.

Chartist activity and the attempts of the authorities to suppress it continued throughout the late 1830s and early 1840s, then with the rise of revolutionary movements in continental Europe there was a resurgence of support for Chartism in Britain during 1848. The violence of extreme Chartists escalated, as did the legislation passed to curb their activities and the punishments meted out to those found guilty.

High Court of Justiciary

It was against this background that the trial took place at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh of the three Scottish Chartist leaders – John Grant, Henry Ranken, and Robert Hamilton. The charges against the accused stated that they ‘did…wickedly and feloniously, combine and conspire…with other persons to the prosecutor unknown, calling themselves Chartists, to effect an alteration of the laws and constitution of the realm…not peaceably and lawfully, and loyally, but by force and violence, or by armed resistance to lawful authority.’ In addition they were charged that they did ‘wickedly and feloniously, and seditiously, resolve and agree to form a body, to be called the National Guard, and to be provided with arms, to be used for the illegal and seditious purpose of effecting, by force and violence, or by armed resistance to lawful authority, the said alterations of the laws and constitution of the realm.’

In the current climate of apprehension and fear, all of this was pretty damning.

Support for the Chartist movement had been strong in Scotland during the earlier part of 1848, particularly in the large cities, and this support was also extended to the formation of an armed National Guard, whose purpose, by means of armed insurrection, would be to tie up English forces, enabling the Irish to attack and overwhelm the English garrisons in Ireland. Moreover, Robert Hamilton was reported in the Scottish press to have declared, at a mass meeting at Bruntsfield Links, that he did not see why a revolution could not take place here as well as in France, and that, while at one time he would have been satisfied with the Charter, now he would not be satisfied with anything less than a Republic.

Therefore, these men appeared to be advocating the creation of an illegal armed force, followed by the destruction of the constitution and the overthrow of the monarchy. Earlier Henry Ranken had not spoken, on the whole, in so inflammatory a fashion, until he began to make threats about the kind of armed force that was proposed, including the use of such deadly weapons as ‘Warner’s long range’. This was a recently invented long range missile, intended to blow up ships at a distance of up to five miles. In the event, it was a failure, but at the time it may have seemed alarming. Ranken also began to advocate that young men should provide themselves with arms, should go to Ireland and assist the Irish revolutionaries, and should accept nothing less than a Republic. John Grant’s role had been primarily to act as chairman of the mass meeting at Bruntsfield Links in June, and to declare that the resolution to form a National Guard had been adopted.

It was as a result of this meeting and others, and the inflammatory speeches made, that the three men were arrested in August and went on trial in November 1848. Ironically, support for Chartism had already begun to fall away in June, so that a number of planned mass meetings were poorly attended. Perhaps the extreme measures proposed – armed insurrection and creation of a Republic – were too much to stomach for those who supported the more reasonable original six articles of the Chartist movement. Events on the Continent must also have alarmed many, who wanted no part in such violence.

James Crauford, counsel for the prosecution

Up to early 1848, the treatment of the Chartists in Scotlandhad been restrained. As long as their meetings and rallies were orderly and held primarily for the purpose of political discussion, the authorities were willing for them to go ahead, while keeping a wary eye on them. It was when the talk turned to an armed National Guard and the goal of Republican government that the patience of the authorities snapped. Yet even the trial of the three leaders was conducted with courtesy, the men being judged ‘all respectable men, and, except as politicians, sensible’. James Crauford, counsel for the prosecution, was praised for his ‘highly temperate address’, in a trial which might well have called forth a good deal of impassioned and inflammatory rhetoric.

The three Chartists retained, as counsel for the defence, James Wellwood Moncreiff. Moncreiff was willing to undertake the role of defence counsel not because he was a supporter of Chartism, but because he had great sympathy for working men and a personal regard for the three accused. Moncreiff was a skilled and shrewd lawyer, and managed to have a number of points raised by the prosecution ruled inadmissible. He was also able to bring forward a witness who swore that Ranken was opposed to the formation of the National Guard, and had called for a public meeting in the hope of putting a stop to the proposal. Ranken was, he said, ‘what was called a moral force Chartist’. On the basis of this and other evidence, Moncreiff argued that there was nothing criminal in holding Chartist opinions. Chartism was ‘a code of politics quite as respectable in itself as any held by any other body of men. A man was as much entitled to uphold the six points of the Charter, as any other individual was entitled to hold his opinions, whatever they might be.’

James Wellwood Moncreiff counsel for the defence

The whole of Moncreiff’s address drew applause. When the jury withdrew – for a mere half hour – they returned a verdict of not proven on the charge of conspiracy against the three men. John Grant was found not guilty of the charge of sedition. There remained the charge against Ranken and Hamiltonof being ‘guilty of using language intended and calculated to excite popular disaffection and resistance to lawful authority’. The jury found the two men guilty of the charge, with the words ‘intended and’ omitted.

This threw the court into some confusion. The judge pressed the foreman on whether the word ‘intended’ had been deliberately omitted. It had. Moncreiff then seized the opportunity to argue that the jury’s verdict meant that the men had not intended to produce that result. Intention was the essence of the crime. Their actions had not amounted to sedition.

The ensuing confusion was debated by three judges, who could not come to a unanimous decision on what the jury had actually meant. If they had meant the men were not guilty, would they not have said so? Should the men be sentenced to long periods of imprisonment, or set free? In the end, leniency prevailed. All three were sentenced to just four months in prison. Compared with some of the sentences handed out to English Chartists, this was lenient indeed. In fact one leader of (non-Chartist) riots in Glasgow earlier that year, George Smith, was condemned to eighteen years' transportation. To add to the conflicting opinions, Lord Campbell, a member of the Cabinet, was to say that he thought the verdict should have been one of acquittal.

There is an amusing postscript, as Moncreiff revealed in his memoirs. Twelve or fourteen years later, at a ‘somewhat stormy’ meeting, a man jumped up and made ‘an admirable speech’ in support of Moncreiff and his colleague. It was one of the three accused Chartists (he does not say which).

I thanked him afterwards, and expressed my surprise at the moderation of his sentiments. ‘Ah,’ he replied, ‘it makes all the difference when a man has to heed for his children.’ I found afterwards that he had been prosperous in his trade and was a master manufacturer.

Ann Swinfen

http://www.annswinfen.com

I am a reading machine at the moment. I volunteered to be a judge on the inaugural HWA Endeavour Ink Crown for Historical Fiction and am the proud possessor of just under a hundred new novels to read and a nervous twitch, but I’m glad to say just before I descended into the whirlpool of fiction, I read Carol Dyhouse’s new book Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire. I recommend it to you all, readers, writers, historians, men and women alike.

Publicity portrait of Rudolph Valentino as Julio Desnoyers
in the 1921 Metro Pictures production
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The book is an examination of the heartthrob in popular culture from Lord Nelson and Mr Darcy through to George Clooney and Christian Grey, examining the female, rather than male gaze and looking at female desire rather than desirability. It feels, which seems astonishing in 2017, like a very fresh perspective. The book looks at these fictional or constructed male paradigms and asks what is it women want from them. Is romance literature a drug, an escape? If so what are we escaping from? What do these men offer women beyond an escape? What can these fantasy male figures tell us about how women have understood their own desires at various points in modern history? I think these men can often be a great deal more informative than the contemporary cultural criticism.

For some reason I’m now imagining male literary critic, eating offal off a breadboard in Shoreditch and sneering at the cupcake shop across the road. Apologies to all the feminist un-snobbish men out there, you are of course my heartthrobs, but all our woke baes will know such offal chomping disdain towards women, romance literature and cupcakes certainly exists.

Dyhouse explores these question and quandaries with relish. She is a curious and informed guide to the popular culture of the long twentieth century, and clear-eyed without being judgemental. The book offers a fascinating set of questions and an enthusiastic examination of tough issues: it is serious with being preachy, and entertaining without being glib. She also knows how to write a damn fine sentence, such as her description of Twitter: ‘The network itself, now immense, with its constant refigurings, and evanescent patterns of fragmentary thoughts, communications, and ‘trending topics’ brings to mind the murmurations of bees or starlings.’

I should mention that Carol is a friend of mine, and of course, while I say that purely in the interests of full disclosure, it also gives me the chance to boast. I told a professor about something and she put it in a book! I developed a bit of an obsession about Charles Garvice some years ago and managed to pass it on to Carol and she discusses this forgotten colossus in her first chapter. This makes me feel very grand. There, ok, I’m done, but do read the book. It’s a handsomely produced volume, and both charming and clever - a proper heartthrob indeed.

www.imogenrobertson.com

Follow @robertsonimogen

Forget Park Run, Tough Mutha, Iron Man and triathlons. A few weeks ago we embarked on an endurance feat far more favourable to writers on the research trail: 4 monasteries in 24 hours or, as we fondly christened it, The Tough Monk Challenge.

Medieval monasteries and abbeys are an integral part of Scotland's historic landscape and many of them are rightly famous landmarks including Iona, Dunfermline, Sweetheart and Inchcolm. The Scottish monastic movement has its roots in the Celtic period and was a great influence in the way Christianity spread after the seventh century with abbots remaining far more powerful than bishops. The early monasteries themselves, however, bore little relation to what we now understand from the term and were often little more than isolated collections of wooden huts inhabited by hermits. It is not until the Normans begin to really impact on society after 1100 that we see a great wave of Scottish monastic building, promoted particularly by King David I (1124-1153).

Plan of St Gall

Life in medieval monasteries was strictly organised and strictly run and, whatever order the monks espoused, the principles were broadly in line with (or reacting to) the rules written by St Benedict in c.530 AD. Not only was the internal life rigidly structured, the external fabric (the buildings) also followed a set of ideals, known as the Plan of St Gall. The plan, named after the Abbey in which it is still held, is the oldest preserved visualisation of a medieval building complex. Five pieces of annotated and sewn together parchment contain the plans for forty structures as well as boundaries and roads and an orchard. Each building and its use is identified in 333 inscriptions and include bake and brew houses, an abbot's residence and a dormitory and refectory for the monks. It appears to have been designed for Gozbert, the Abbot of St Gall from 816-837, and it is an idealization of a monastery - no complex was ever built to its exact specifications and scholars have described it as a meditation on monasticism. Most of us, however, who are familiar with monastery layouts, would easily find our way round the plan and its influence on the complexes that were built is clear.

Jedburgh Abbey - it doesn't actually lean

The four we visited, Melrose, Dryburgh, Jedburgh and Kelso, are all in the Scottish Borders. They were founded between 1113-1150 and all have close links to David I. They are in varying states of preservation, with Kelso being little more now than a massive gateway, but they are all visually stunning - especially if you see them as we did in snowdrop season. With the exception of Kelso, each of the four has its own claim to fame. Jedburgh, an Augustinian monastery founded in 1147 is an extraordinary marriage of Romanesque and early Gothic architecture and is the best preserved in terms of its scale and its beautiful rows of arches. Melrose, Cistercian dating from 1136, is most famous for reputedly having the heart of Robert the Bruce buried in its graveyard. That may or may not be true: the Abbey words its claim that the casket, discovered first in 1921 and reburied in 1998, is Bruce very carefully and the position of its discovery, under the Chapter House rather than close to the high altar, makes the idea questionable. It is, however, a nice story and Bruce was known to have had great affection for the Abbey. What I loved most about Melrose, however, are the wonderful carvings which cover the outside and include saints, gargoyles and, for no reason anyone knows, a pig playing the bagpipes.

Dryburgh Abbey

My favourite was Dryburgh. The setting is impossibly romantic, nestled in a bend of the River Tweed and surrounded by trees which act like curtains to the first view. It is hardly surprising that Walter Scott, the great exponent of romantic Scotland, is buried in the ruin's north wing. Accounts of his funeral read not unlike passages from his novels (of which I am a massive fan): the day was dark and lowering and the wind high and when the coffin was taken from the hearse, and again laid on the shoulders of the afflicted serving-men, one deep sob burst from a thousand lips (Lockhart, Life of Walter Scott). I tried not to let the fact that he is buried next to General Haig spoil the moment.

Headstone Dryburgh

The Abbey also has a Chapter House with traces of medieval wall paintings and a collection of rather wonderful headstones embossed with figures including a number who are reading. Oh and it is haunted by a ghost called Fat Lips - a woman who lost her lover in the 1745 Rebellion, moved into the ruins and maintained that a little booted man named Fat Lips used to do her housework. Could anything be more perfect?

Maintaining a medieval monastery was tough in Scotland even before the Reformation's bite desecrated what was left. If your community was in the Highlands, internecine strife could reduce you to rubble; if you were in the Borders, the ongoing battles with the English were your main concern. Melrose Abbey was destroyed in the early 1300s by Edward II, rebuild and then, in 1385, Richard II burnt it down. The poor monks of Kelso, which was regularly attacked, were reduced to begging food and clothing from the surrounding locals on frequent occasions. It's quite remarkable so much has survived for us to gaze in awe upon.

I've got Sweetheart Abbey in my sights next where the heart of John Balliol, the King of the Scots who annoyed his people so much they signed the first treaty with Europe, may well be buried. As a second referendum looms, I'm wondering how many more of these rather significant caskets might suddenly turn up...

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